Review: Machado de Assis, the ‘writer’s Catholic writer’
iStockStop me if you’ve heard this before: What do Susan Sontag, Philip Roth, Allen Ginsberg, Harold Bloom, Salman Rushdie and a 19th-century Catholic priest from Brazil have in common? They all rate highly the talents of Machado de Assis.
Born in 1839, the grandchild of freed slaves, Machado learned Latin as a boy from Silveira Sarmento, the priest whose Mass he served at an estate outside Rio de Janeiro. He lived there with his family until losing both his little sister and mother to untimely deaths. He and his father moved elsewhere, his father remarried, and Machado eventually found good and secure work with Brazil’s Ministry of Agriculture, Commerce and Public Works, where he was employed for three decades. He was happily married for 35 years and died in 1908, receiving a state funeral.
That honor was not in recognition of superior bureaucratic accomplishments. Instead, it was for the lifelong bibliophile’s seven short story collections and nine novels, alongside poetry, plays, journalism and librettos. He also co-founded the Brazilian Academy of Letters and served as its first president.
The arrival of this 900-page tome offers a chance for readers unfamiliar with Machado to figure out why a writer so little-read outside his native Brazil seems such a big deal to elite Anglophone literati.
This biographical information comes from the introduction to The Collected Stories of Machado de Assis, which was published earlier this year in a new English-language translation by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson. The arrival of this 900-page tome offers a chance for readers unfamiliar with Machado to figure out why a writer so little-read outside his native Brazil seems such a big deal to elite Anglophone literati. Machado enjoys a longstanding high status among major writers. Ginsberg praised him as “another Kafka”; Sontag declared he was nothing less than “the greatest writer ever produced in Latin America”; Rushdie contends his “fantasticating imagination” is so fertile, profound and original as to suggest he might have been a descendant of otherworldly literary gods who set him into “the South American literary wilderness of that period.”
The easy way to explain the phenomenon of an apparently great and generally unknown author is to praise that person as a “writer’s writer.” This is a diplomatic way of excusing general readers from engaging with the works of a difficult or idiosyncratic artist whose efforts are assumed to appeal only to fellow practitioners. That could easily explain (away) Machado’s work, but an immersion in his world suggests he is actually more of a “writer’s Catholic writer.” Regardless of his personally held beliefs or religious practice, and tellingly not cited in the praise Machado’s work has received from writers and reviewers alike, his cerebral, playful and mystical-mysterious stories consistently reveal, affirm and depend upon a fundamentally religious sense of things.
“I’m of the view that anything is possible in this world and the next,” observes the narrator in “The Tale of the Cabriolet” (1906), a late story about a tragic failed romance whose shocking details come into focus through the discoveries of a sacristan assisting a parish priest giving last rites to a dying man and woman. And while almost any fabulist writer depends on and opens up views of worlds beyond the immediate that are not necessarily religiously-shaped—the stories of both Edgar Allan Poe and Jorge Luis Borges come immediately to mind—Machado’s efforts in this respect prove consistently so, and particularly Catholic, in their most striking features.
“The Devil’s Church” (1884), for instance, is a wry and slanted update of Milton’s Paradise Lost. In this story the Devil decides to open a church of his own. First, he goes to heaven and parlays with God about this plan while the Angels Gabriel and Michael listen in, as bored as children stuck at a grown-up dinner party. Initially amused, God soon grows tired of the Devil’s talk about his grand and puritanically evil ambitions and sends him away to try his best. Back on earth, the Devil disguises himself as a Benedictine monk—“a habit of good repute”—and begins proclaiming a new, counter-Biblical message. He gains many followers only to learn, eventually, that his most outwardly devout followers prove the least genuinely faithful to his teachings. Because of the way Machado has arranged the story’s dynamics, you can almost hear God calling down “I told you so” from on high.
The cerebral, playful and mystical-mysterious stories of Machado de Assis consistently reveal, affirm and depend upon a fundamentally religious sense of things.
Deep and even didactic irony appears across Machado’s stories, usually in their denouement. Others prove more bookishly playful, as is the case with “The Sacristan’s Manuscript” (1884). The manuscript, discovered by the narrator, recounts the story of a lonely, austere priest and his lonely, generous, unmarried cousin. Their coming together, surprisingly and intensely, ends badly but also, in a way, nobly, for both. Machado declines to resolve matters more clearly than that; instead, his narrator, a self-described “philosophical sacristan” and friend and confidant to both people, concludes a heated tale of the heart with an intellectual’s cool, ethereal irony: “If it is true, as Schiller would have it, that love and hunger rule the world, then I am of the firm opinion that something, either love or dinner, must still exist somewhere or other.”
Other stories are more explicitly moralizing in their conclusions but usually not to great effect, because their pointed endings collapse all of the meaningful ambiguity and implication of the stories themselves. This is the case, for instance, with “Brother Simão” (1870), a brisk reworking of the story of Abélard and Héloïse, whose many intriguing turns and shocking revelations lose their purchase, by story’s end, to the too obvious poetic justice visited upon the man responsible for separating the lovers.
Elsewhere, Machado comes across as more provocatively experimental, as with “In the Ark” (1882), which he subtitles “Three Unpublished Chapters from the Book of Genesis,” which explores sibling rivalry among the sons of Noah that Machado unexpectedly extends from the atemporal realm of the mythic-Biblical into late 19th-century geopolitics, by way of a leap from Shem and Japheth arguing over territory to a suddenly related citation of the war between Russia and the Ottoman Empire in the late 1870s.
The size of this collection discloses unevenness and repetition—particularly the premise of failed romances between devout women and seminarians or priests. That said, two stories stand out: “Midnight Mass” (1899) is a work of veiled meaning and temptation involving a young man (who narrates) and an older woman. It is brilliantly taut in its telling of why and how the young man’s “soul grew indolent” over the course of his conversation with a beguiling older woman. That tautness depends on Machado’s reminding us of the chronological and ethical stakes of the narrator’s ambivalent chatting, either just before going to church, or for so long that he misses Mass and does something else instead.
More mischievous in its study of our too-human spirits, “Among Saints” (1896) is a feverishly told tale of a sacristan who hears men talking in his parish church in the middle of the night. He approaches quietly and fearfully and discovers the statuary saints of the church have come to life and stepped down from their prayer niches. They are standing around, talking sacred shop. The sacristan recounts their banter: “Me? Smile?” scoffs John the Baptist at Francis de Sales promising to tell a story of a recent petition that will entertain him, while from off to the side St. Joseph meekly insists he has a better one to tell. The sacristan listens in, overcome with the recognition of how we open ourselves more than we realize to higher concern and scrutiny when we ask for a saint’s intercession. What he learns of one particularly desperate man’s situation and prayers proves too much, and he faints while the saints laugh “not the great guffaws of Homer’s gods when they saw lame Vulcan serving at the table, but a polite, pious, very Catholic laugh.”
Machado doesn’t assign a ratio of value to the entertainment value of intercessory prayer because it’s enough only to have us thinking about that possibility. His imagination is so boldly literary and religious that at his best he does what every great writer tries to do. His stories let us imagine our way into familiar perspectives and situations from unexpected vantages that enlarge and transform our sense of what is and what can be in this life, and the next.
This article also appeared in print, under the headline “The Writer's Catholic Writer?,” in the November 26, 2018, issue.
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