Last grandee
STUART HOOD
The illustrious House of Ramires Egli de Queiroz (Bodley Head 30s) It is an extraordinary fact that Portugal at the end of the nineteenth century, when it had settled into its role of a small, backward country with a certain nostalgia for empire and a curious pervading melancholy expressed popu- larly in the music of the fado, should have produced a novelist of European stature. Eca de Queiroz belonged to a group of liberal intellectuals who, when still at the University of Coimbra in the early 1860s—they were to become known as the generation of 1865— decided to challenge the deep complacency and conservatism of their time. Their aim, as one of them said later when they had formed a literary and political group in Lisbon, was to set up an intellectual agitation in society by tossing an idea or two each week into the sleeping mass of the public. Eca de Queiroz made two contributions to the movement. One was to develop a style of writing: he was the first Portuguese author to produce realistic narrative. The second was to experiment with language and transgress the canons of 'good taste' by using a vocabulary drawn from all social levels.
These literary techniques he used to draw a witty and detached picture of his native land and, in particular, of its small town life as he saw and studied it when working as a provincial administrator. The bulk of his work was written, however, when he was in the Portuguese diplo- matic service, acting as consul in Bristol and Newcastle, for instance, where two of his best novels, Cousin Basilio and The Sin of Father Amaro, were written. He spent his last years in Paris where he died in 1900. It was perhaps his long absence from his native country that gave him the detached irony that pervades his work and makes facile comparisons with Zola and Flaubert inadequate.
The Illustrious House of Ramires is the story of a young nobleman, Goncalo Mendes Ramires, the last descendant of a great house whose origins go back to the times when Portu- gal was not yet even a concept. Living in the lazy comfort of his house in the provinces, he is torn between a number of ambitions that he is almost too indolent to pursue. On the one hand, he has aspirations as a writer and dreams of producing a romantic novel, inspired by Scott, on the history of his illustrious house; on the other, he feels the attractions of politics and yearns fitfully for a place in the clubs and cafes of Lisbon. The writing of his historical romance, 'The Tower of Don Ramires,' which he actually completes and pub- lishes, takes up a great deal of his energies and time. It is an exercise in narcissism. Into it he pours his day-dreams, his fantasies of action and power, his nostalgia for the past greatness of his family. It reads like Rafael Sabatini.
To describe an artistic or literary process in fiction with any approach to credibility is notoriously difficult. Ega de Queiroz not only succeeds in doing so—he reproduces large parts of the novel and leaves one with the impression of having read the whole of it—but does it in such a way that the novel within the novel is an integral part of the structure, a contribution to the process of the plot, an instrument for the display of the hero's character. Fantasy sup- ports and engenders action, as when Gongalo whips a young man in feudal style with the true brutality of those ancestors around whose feuds and vendettas his imagination has played so long. He is, as it were, a modern Don Quixote, confusing fact and reality, seeking the motives for his actions in the romance of an imaginary and—as he knows in his more sober moments— unreal past.
He succeeds in politics as well as literature, thanks to the help of the Civil Governor, a childhood friend who had at one time been on the point of marrying his sister but jilted her in favour of political power. The sister then married and settled down with her good-natured, simpleton husband. Gongslo, who stands for parliament and is duly returned by a corrupt electorate, discovers that the Governor is using the situation to have an affair with the sister. He shuts his eyes to the situation, realising that his seat in parliament has been bought at the price of complaisant toleration of adultery.
It is typical of Ega de Queiroz's writing that he treats the whole episode with such urbanity. The novel remains to the end a com- passionate study of provincial life of which the author knew all the petty sins—the dreary roistering, the backbiting and scandalmonger- ing, the trivial adulteries. But he passes no judgments on his characters. His sense of the ambiguity of human nature and of its velleities and contradictions is too acute. This moral detachment is one of his chief attractions as a writer and one of the reasons why, in his native country, his fame is acknowledged with a hint of embarrassment.
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