An Interview With Sérgio Buarque de Holanda

Richard Graham: The editor of the Hispanic American Historical Review has asked me to interview you for a series to be run in the Review on distinguished historians of the Americas.

sérgio buarque de holanda: Yes, I know the journal well. I used to be a member of its international advisory board along with members from various other Latin American countries. But they seem to have given that up and with it went my subscription to the journal, alas!

RG: We’re interested in exploring your formation as a historian, your education, family background, and professional development.

SBH: I was shaped by so many people at so many times and in so many places, not only by educational institutions and formal encounters, but by friendships—so important to us Brazilians. My father was born in Pernambuco, but as a young man came south to study medicine; he never finished the course, but became an administrator of a public health agency in São Paulo. There he married in 1901, and I was born the next year. We lived in Higienópolis, a modern residential district. My kindergarten was run by an American lady, a Mrs. Bagby; and then, after attending a model primary school, I studied at the São Bento ginásio [secondary school] run by German fathers. My favorite subject was history, taught there by Afonso d’Escragnolle Taunay. I would read the fifteenth-century Portuguese chroniclers such as Fernão Lopes. I would skip pages at a time, but I copied down whole sections in a school notebook, which I still have. Yet I see from my notes that there was no historian-in-embryo there. I was more interested in the style of the chroniclers. I was struck by their quaint way of putting things and by their occasionally indecorous words, so much in contrast to my school textbooks. And, of course, in ginásio I remember the unpleasant encounters with the disciplinarians, one of whom was called Vassourinha [little broom] because of his haircut. In those days we learned French and German starting in the first year [approximately fifth grade]; only in the third year did we study English.

With the help of Taunay, I published my first article in the Correio Paulistano when I was eighteen. I then began to write frequently in its literary columns, and got to know many of the leaders of the emerging modernista movement, such as Mário de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, Sérgio Milliet, Menotti del Picchia, and Rubens Borba de Morais. In those days I also met Monteiro Lobato and Yan [J.F.] de Almeida Prado.

RG: I thought that your modernista activities were centered in Rio de Janeiro.

SBH; We moved to Rio when my father retired in 1921. I entered law school there, but studied little. I led a bohemian life, full of lively conversations at sidewalk cafés, in bars, bookstores, and newspaper offices. We talked of politics, art, literature, international events, and our private lives. I was the Rio representative for Klaxon, the São Paulo modernist magazine and, in 1924, along with Prudente de Morais Neto, I founded a short-lived successor to it named Estética. That’s when I got to know Graça Aranha and Manuel Bandeira.

I supported myself with regular contributions to the daily press: interviews of all sorts, political and literary commentaries, book reviews. I worked especially for O Jornal, the first paper of Assis Chateaubriand [the soon-to-be newspaper magnate], and also with the wire services: Havas, United Press, and, later, Associated Press. For O Jornal do Brasil I covered the Senate meetings.

RG: How long did you stay in Rio?

SBH: Until 1929, except for one wild six-month experiment as a newspaper editor in a small town in Espírito Santo. My best memory of those months was when I substituted for the district attorney in a still smaller town, which I reached by a six-hour stint on a mule. They needed someone with a law school background and I was the only one available. I arrived dead tired, but still managed to go to a dance. Needless to say, my case was so weakly presented the next day the jury let the accused go free.

RG: What happened in 1929?

SBH: That’s when Chateaubriand proposed I should go to Germany for O Jornal. The plan was that I was to go on to Poland and Russia, but I found the cold in Poland bad enough and decided to stay in Berlin. There I was later hired to work on a bilingual magazine on German-Brazilian commercial relations. I also translated many filmscripts, including Marlene Dietrich’s Blue Angel.

RG: Was it during that period that you became influenced by German historiography?

SBH: Was I influenced by German historiography?

RG: So I’ve heard.

SBH: It’s all conjecture and accidental juxtaposition. I lived in Germany, but that’s not enough to say I was influenced by German historians; I’ve also lived in Italy, in France, in the United States. Here’s a recent example of such accidents: Florestan Fernandes, the editor of a series of anthologies, knew I could read German and asked me to pick a German historian, any one I wished, from whose work I would choose some texts. I decided to tackle Leopold von Ranke. Burkhardt was another possibility, but he worked primarily on art, on the history of the Renaissance, and on Greek culture. So I chose Ranke, did some reading, selected the texts, and wrote a fifty-five-page introduction for it.

RG: But you were not influenced in your work by Banke.

SBH: Of course, we have all been influenced by him. By his seminar method. By his leadership in historical research among the documents. But no direct influence.

RG: Is there no German influence in your work, then?

SBH: In Berlin I attended, very unsystematically, lectures by Friedrich Meinecke. They suggested new paths. I read Ernst Kantorowicz on Frederick III and then Sombart and, through Sombart, I came to Weber. I still have, here on my shelf, works of Weber that I bought at that time.

RG: Did these readings leave a mark on your work?

SBH: Yes, they did; I may have been the first Brazilian to cite Weber in print. But the principal immediate effect I soon shrugged off: mystic philosophy and irrationalism. My best memories are still of the worldly bohemian euphoria of those last days of the Weimar Republic. I also remember interviews with Thomas Mann, as well as with some avant- garde literary figures.

RG: So when did you become a historian?

SBH: For the bilingual magazine I wrote articles attempting to explain Brazil to the Germans. It is only when you get far away that you begin to see your own country whole. You get a different perspective. And Brazil is not easy to understand; it’s hard. When they stopped publishing the magazine and I returned to Brazil at the end of 1930, I brought with me an old notebook of some 400 pages for a book I intended should be called Teoria da América. I never published it, but two chapters of what eventually (in 1936) became Raízes do Brasil were drawn almost intact from those messy pages.

RG: When did you first teach history?

SBH; In 1936 I became assistant to Henri Hauser at the recently created municipal Universidade do Distrito Federal, in Rio. Hauser was among the levy of French professors brought to Brazil by Anísio Teixeira, first rector of that ephemeral university.

RG: How did Hauser come to choose you for his assistant?

SBH: He didn’t choose me; I chose him. He did not know me. The director [dean] of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters was my old friend Prudente de Morais Neto. He thought the French professors would all need assistants and [Prudente] asked me with whom I would like to work. The chair was in Modern and Economic History. Along with Pirenne, Hauser was one of the great historians then. He had a white beard. He was already at the end of his career, which did not stop him from riding on the outside step of an open streetcar, hanging on with one hand. From Hauser I learned much and began to apply the criteria he used to my knowledge of Brazilian studies to which, in fact, I had always been devoted even if with a dispersive and badly focused curiosity.

RG: How long did he stay?

SBH: About a year and a half. When he left I became professor of History of the Americas, but the university itself was closed in 1939 and I did not teach again for several years.

RG: What else did you do?

SBH: During this period I kept up my journalistic activities and became local editor-in-chief for Associated Press from 1937 to 1939. I wrote for several magazines and newspapers. You might say I settled down: I married in 1936 and moved into a house on Leme Beach with a verandah on both floors facing the sea. From 1939 to 1943 I supervised the publications section of the Instituto Nacional do Livio. A number of energetic intellectuals, such as Mário de Andrade, Chico [Francisco de Assis] Barbosa, Eneida [de Morais], and José Honório Rodrigues, worked at the Instituto. At this time I became a still closer friend than before of the historian Octávio Tarquínio de Sousa.

RG: How do you recall those last years of Vargas?

SBH: After 1943 I worked at the Biblioteca Nacional in Rio along with Rubens Borba de Morais. Rumors circulated constantly at the nearby cafés or during lunch in the next block at the building of the Brazilian Press Association. I signed the “Declaration of Principles” drawn up in early 1945 at the Congress of Writers held in São Paulo (I then became president of the Rio section), and joined, as a founding member, the Esquerda Democrática, which later became the Socialist party.

RG: When did you leave Rio?

SBH: Leaving Rio was hard because of all the friends there and the memories of friends who died while I lived there. During those twentyfive years I had become close to Rodrigo M. F. de Andrade, Prudente de Morais Neto, Affonso Arinos de Melo Franco, Chico Barbosa, Manuel Bandeira, Vinícius de Moraes, Cândido Portinari, Octávio Tarquínio de Sousa, Otto Maria Carpeaux, Raquel de Queiroz, and so many others. But in 1946 I was invited to head the Museu Paulista, a post I held for ten years. Perhaps my publication of Monções the previous year aided my spiritual, as well as physical, return to São Paulo.

RG: Is that when you began teaching as well at the Universidade de São Paulo?

SBH: Not quite. I did indeed soon begin teaching again, but at the Escola de Sociologia e Política. Only in 1957 did I leave the Museu Paulista to take over the chair in History of Brazilian Civilization at the Universidade de São Paulo. I taught there a short time as a contracted professor when Alfredo Ellis suffered a stroke and retired, painfully, from his duties. When they opened a concurso for the chair, I presented Visão do Paraíso as my thesis. The examiners were Eurípides Simões de Paula, Eduardo d’Oliveira França, Hélio Vianna, Alfonso Arinos de Melo Franco, and Wanderley Pinho.

RG: What do you consider your major contribution to the university?

SBH: Well, for one thing, I founded the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros in the early 1960s. It gathered professors from various departments— from the Faculties of Economic Sciences, of Architecture, and of Philosophy and Letters—and had at its center a major library, formed from the private library of Almeida Prado. Have you seen it?

RG: Yes, I have.

SBH: He had the best private library on Brazil. The best there was. North Americans wanted to buy it, but I struggled here to secure the needed funds. Then I contracted an excellent librarian to care for it and help acquire additional materials.

RG: What do you consider to have been your greatest single satisfaction as a historian?

SBH: My satisfaction was to have succeeded in forming a group of real historians. Last year five of my former assistants gathered here at one time. I formed a group, but each one follows his own path.

RG: What was your major influence on your students?

SBH: I don’t know if I would speak of influence. But I was always close to them. In Chile, for instance, where I taught for one semester in 1963, I asked my students, “Where is there a good restaurant we can all go to?” They looked at me startled: “What’s this, Professor? Together? That’s impossible.” I had a lot of personal contact with my students.

RG: If you were to single out your most important book, which would it be?

SBH: The one I’m writing now.

RG: What’s that?

SBH: I already have about 450 pages of typescript finished. It will be in two volumes.

RG: What is it about?

SBH: The second volume is about the authoritarian-military tradition in Brazil. The work as a whole is a reelaboration of the book I did on the end of the empire. That was another accident.

RG: What do you mean?

SBH: When I became a professor at the Universidade de São Paulo, Jean Paul Monteil, a Frenchman who ran a publishing house called Difusão Européia do Livro, approached me. He had been publishing books translated from the French and addressed especially to a university audience. Among these was the Histoire générale des civilisations edited by Maurice Crouzet. But now he wished to publish a História Geral da Civilização Brasileira and asked me if I would edit it. Perhaps because the chair I held was in the History of Brazilian Civilization, the idea appealed to me. There was no adequate university-level text that would summarize our knowledge about the history of the country.

The collection consists, as you know, of short chapters by various authors on specific topics, usually without footnotes, designed to orient the students to the problem. There were originally to be three volumes, but it took two just on the colonial period. As finally planned, there would be four more on the period to the end of the empire in 1889. Since I had already called on almost everyone I knew to contribute, especially in political history, I decided to undertake the last chapter on the fall of the empire myself.

RG: That was your first work on the nineteenth century, is that correct?

SBH: No, I had written the lengthy introduction to my translation of Thomas Davatz’s Memórias de um Colono no Brasil, one of the few accounts we have of the period from a worker’s point of view. And, anyway, as I foresaw it, this was going to be only a short chapter on the fall of the empire. But it grew and grew. I got excited by it and I found many topics that needed further development. I began to research in primary documents; almost all the correspondence of the political actors. I traveled in Europe and found more material. Finally, I went to see Monteil and told him that I was going to have to start over again on the chapter, because what I had earlier begun was now a book. He replied, “No! No! Make it volume 7 of the series”; and so it was. Except for a general bibliography, all of that volume is taken up with my “chapter.”

RG: And now you are adding to it?

SBH: Completely rewriting it and doubling its length. It’s a fascinating period. The first volume is to be called O Pássaro e a Sombra. That’s a reference to the remark of one Conservative politician, then in power, who, stung by attacks from the opposition, said they should aim at the bird and not at the shadow, that is, at Pedro II and not at the ministry that did his bidding.

RG: And the other volume?

SBH: It will be called A Fronda Praetoriana, and will deal with the rise of the military and its consequence to today. It will deal also with the power of the central government; the control the government exercised. It’s all one work, though, because Pedro II exercised much more control than he let on. Not directly, hut indirectly. He was not a particularly intelligent man. He himself said that “in matters of intelligence, I am below others whom I admire, but cannot imitate.” He concerned himself with all the details; he was a man of minutiae.

But the style of government based on the firm control over all citizens did not begin with him, of course. It was true in the colony; it was true under Pedro I. And it continued after Pedro II. The Republic’s slogan demonstrates it: “Order and Progress,” but the Republicans took away “Love.”

I am now working on the section on the Paraguayan War. A book has recently come out about it, criticizing Brazil’s role in that war.

RG: And what do you think?

SBH: The work is a bit too journalistic. But the author has a point. López, I continue to think, was something of an adventurer; thought he could be another Napoleon. But Brazil erred, no doubt. It erred most of all by unjustly intervening in Uruguay.

RG: So that’s your most important book? The one you are writing?

SBH: Yes. I don’t know if others will so consider it, though. Raízes do Brasil has had the biggest international repercussion. Here is the Japanese edition: I haven’t checked its accuracy! There are also Italian and Spanish editions. It was merely a collection of essays, as was Caminhos e Fronteiras, although the latter had more unity.

And I have a Spanish edition of Visão do Paraíso in the works. Angel Rama, the Uruguayan in exile, wanted to publish an anthology of my work in Venezuela; but Darcy Ribeiro, another exile there—he had been my student at the Escola de Sociologia e Política—persuaded Rama to publish Visão do Paraíso instead. Whether it will actually come out, I don’t know.

There are three editions of it in Portuguese. The first and second are quite different from each other, but the third one merely adds as an appendix a section of a manuscript by the seventeenth-century Jesuit Simão de Vasconcellos. The section was removed by the Inquisition from the original edition of his book because he had said Eden was located here in Brazil. But I found a reference to this manuscript in an article by Serafim Leite and wrote to the Victorio Emanuelle National Library in Rome. They sent me the wrong thing; but when my son Chico was there, he went and found it. The call number I had used referred to a codex and the manuscript I was looking for was buried in the midst of others. I could not use it in the text of the third edition because it was to be a photographic reproduction of the second edition, and changing the text would have been very expensive. So I added it as an appendix. But I used the manuscript—along with other new materials—in the Spanish edition. I also refer to the paintings by European masters portraying Eden with Brazilian parrots. So the Venezuelan edition will be better than the Brazilian one; better, or at least more complete.

RG: It seems to me that there is a sharp difference between Visão do Paraíso and Raízes do Brasil.

SBH: Visão do Paraíso was to be an introduction to a study of the baroque in Luso-Brazilian thought. But the introduction became bigger than the main theme. And then I had to present a thesis at the university. So I scurried to supply it with the scholarly apparatus, searching for where I had read this or that reference to the Edenic theme.

RG: And what do you consider the principal historical problems that need to be tackled next?

SBH: In what sense?

RG: In a Braudelian one.

SBH: What?

RG: As Fernand Braudel would put it.

SBH: Oh, Braudel. Met him several times. Here in São Paulo where he taught for a while and in Paris. In fact, it was thanks to a letter from him and one from Lucien Febvre that I succeeded in getting a leave of absence here. He is very simpático.

RG: Well, Braudel speaks of histoire problème.

SBH: Yes, and of longue durée. But his disciples work more on problems than he does. He is a great historian. Especially his book on the Mediterranean in the Age of Philip II.

RG: We haven’t talked yet about Monções. What was the origin of this hook?

SBH: I needed to submit a work for an international prize. It could be poetry, fiction, whatever. I decided to do something on history. I had already begun to write some essays for a kind of Casa Grande e Senzala, but upside down. That book makes Brazil seem static; sugar-dominated; looking toward the Atlantic; stopped. I wanted something more dynamic, pointing to the mines, to the interior. Brazil in movement. The book won favorable mention, but the winner of the prize that year was a Peruvian named Giro Alegría.

I planned to develop the theme further. In the Anais of the Museu Paulista I published two other companion pieces, one on the Paulista expansion in general and one on “Índios e Mamelucos.” I still hope to do something more with this. I have a lot of material gathered. I went several times to Cuiabá, Mato Grosso, to use the archive there. Unce I ran into David Davidson—never could escape the North Americans.

Then I went to Paraguay, to Asunción. The archive was being moved, but the archivist really knew what was there. They had done the classification this way: manuscripts that were the same size got bound together; sixteenth-century materials were often next to nineteenth-century ones. You have to spend your life there to know what they have.

RG: If you were advising a young historian on a topic, what would you urge him to take up?

SBH: The military is still an important and unstudied topic. That’s what I’m working on, but there are many aspects that remain to be investigated. People talk about the estamento militar. Estamento is not a word I like. Besides being pedantic, it is misleading. Those who use it took it from a Spanish translation of Weber, estamiento for Stand. But Stand, like the Portuguese estado, has many meanings, from “state” to “estate” as in the three estates, or orders, of European society before the French Revolution. There is really no mystery about what Weber meant. I don’t think we needed a new word for it.

Anyway, the military needs to be studied. At the end of the empire, the officers of the Brazilian army were indeed badly paid. They had a legitimate complaint. But a lot has happened since then, ending up with the events such as those last year when Dalmo Dalari was kidnapped and beaten up. Dalari has been a leader in the effort to protect the rights of political prisoners. And there are a number of developments like that.

RG: What do you see as the connection between the work of the historian and the evolution of his or her country?

SBH: As Croce said, all history is contemporary history. The historian always writes from within his own time. The historian is within history. But the past is not the present and the good historian knows that. The past, of course, leads to the present and helps explain the present. The function of the historian, however, is to make us forget the past, to free us from it. In Brazil’s case, our past is so sad that it is best forgotten.

There’s a man here—General Golbery do Couto e Silva—who has more influence than his colleagues, even more than the president. He’s a Machiavellian and much influenced by his reading of [Francisco José de] Oliveira Vianna. Oliveira Vianna argued that Brazil lacked any democratic heritage, had no democratic roots. The Brazilian people wanted to be led, to be dominated, to be ruled. And he claimed that, in contrast, the United States, England, France, and Germany had democratic roots going back a thousand years. He did not know his European or North American history, and he misinterpreted much of what he knew about Brazil. His racist ideas—especially interesting since his physiognomy revealed African ancestors—further clouded his understanding. Golbery now talks about abertura [liberalization], but it is an abertura in his own image. How do you say abertura in English?

RG: Opening. But it doesn’t have the same meaning.

SBH: No, because you don’t have a closing. But we’ve had successive openings and closings. When Pedro II was crowned [in 1840], that move resulted from a kind of popular demand. But autocratic control was quickly reestablished. There was not another demonstration of the people’s will until the vintém riot of 1880. But to say the people were dominated is not the same thing as to say that is what they wanted.

RG: Did the 1964 coup d’etat have an effect on historical writing in Brazil?

SBH: A negative one. And it is still having that effect. In 1969 some of our best professors were summarily dismissed from their posts. If they had been kept, the expansion of graduate studies in the 1970s could well have been much more productive than it has been. I resigned in protest the next day. Not that that cost me anything; it was not a heroic act. But I wanted the departmental minutes to bear witness to the arbitrary acts that were being practiced, since there was no free press in which to do it. So I made a point of specifying my protest there.

RG: What was the connection between modernismo and your historical works?

SBH: Modernism meant, most of all, breaking with the formalism of older traditions. In studies of folklore, the modernistas turned their attention to the interior of Brazil, away from its Europeanized cities. By making Blacks the subject of their art, they declared that not just whites were Brazilian. I carried these concerns into my historical works as into others. Raizes do Brasil was an attempt to do something new, to break with the patriotic glorification of past heroes, to be critical. Against Oliveira Vianna’s suggestion that our past and our future were Aryan, I placed the inheritance from the Indian and the mameluco. Rather than glorifying the bandeirantes, I described them as slavers engaged in day-to-day moneymaking: facing hardships, to be sure, but buying, selling, trading. They were not intending to found an empire. In an article on population movements from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries (published in the Revista do Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros), I noted the importance of the Indian in determining the routes of settlement, in discovering natural resources, and even in colonial practices of medicine. Jaime Cortesão and I engaged in a long polemic (later gathered in Tentativas de Mitologia) in which he argued that the Portuguese had prefigured the boundaries of modern Brazil, filled it in, seen it as a huge island; I pointed out that even Frei Vicente do Salvador, the seventeenth-century historian, described the Portuguese as crabs along Brazil’s coast, while other writers called them “beach sweepers.” Brazilians were not just the Portuguese settlers. Brazil was filled in by others.

I was not the only member of the modernist generation to be interested in history. Take, for instance, Paulo Prado’s Paulística or Antonio Alcantara Machado’s collected letters of Father Anchieta.

RG: What do you see as the best way to foster cooperation between North American and Brazilian historians, if you think it should be fostered?

SBH: I’ve been in contact with North American historians for a long time. In 1941, at the invitation of the State Department, I visited the United States. At that time Lewis Hanke asked me, “Are you going to write a book about this country?” I replied that I only planned to be there for three months. Hanke retorted, That’s just right. If you are going to write a book about a country, three months is the right period. Either that, or you have to live in it for ten years. If you are here for six months, you won’t be able to.” And he was right. There is the shock of novelty, and then one loses it.

RG: Where did you go in the United States?

SBH: Hanke had arranged for me to speak at an intensive summer course in Portuguese being held in Laramie, Wyoming. Then I went to Chicago in August. I was uneasy because I didn’t speak much English, but I was met at the railway station by a lady who said. “Doctor de Holanda?” I was startled: “How did you know me?” I asked. “Because, she said, “you are carrying an umbrella.”

There they scheduled me for a round-table discussion at the University of Chicago on the economics of Latin America. They had a Chilean, a Mexican, and I don’t know who else. I told them I knew nothing about modern economics, but they said, “That’s all right; we just need to have a Brazilian to round out the Latin American sector.” Then one of the participants in the morning session, speaking about the possible role of Latin America in the coming war effort, turned to the subject of rubber, which, as he said, Brazil had once exported in large quantities but no longer did. And he added that since there would be a Brazilian on the panel that afternoon, he would wait until then to return to that subject. Beside me sat Franklin Frazier, a Black American sociologist, and I asked him what the speaker had said about Brazil—I knew he had referred to my presence on the panel. Frazier replied, “Rubber.” So at lunchtime I scurried to the Brazilian consulate and scribbled down everything they had on Brazil’s production of rubber. And that afternoon, with some difficulty, I filled their ears with these data. Thus I had to answer no question on this subject.

At a barbecue party I began to sing an African ditty from Bahia. [Buarque de Holanda sings it. It has no Portuguese words.] At that point someone turned to me and cried out, “Are you Brazilian?” It was Melvin Herskovits. Thus did Xangô identify me as Brazilian.

RG: And what was the main effect on you of this visit?

SBH: The main result from my first visit to the United States was to bring back to Brazil works on the social sciences, especially of the “Chicago School” of sociology, and on the so-called New Criticism. I was then able to give myself a quick course and to surprise my friends by what I knew. All this was thanks to the relative ease with which I caught up. I say relative because I worked hard, into the night, frantically reading and rereading; but part of the challenge was to let no one know how I had got there. So I avoided loading up what I wrote with names and citations of little known authors, knowing that they mostly serve only to fortify the insecure and the impressionable.

RG: What advice would you give to younger historians?

SBH: What I succeeded in doing—badly or well—did not come to me as a miraculous gift. It came as a gradual conquest over a weakness of mine, I know not whether acquired or congenital: I spoke or wrote as if only for myself, unaware of the person I addressed or the eventual reader. From this came those frequent obscurities on which I still stumble today when I look over something I wrote some time ago, obscurities that I did not notice earlier, despite the warnings of my friends. Only slowly did I come to the realization of the need to mold and shape carefully my language. I tried to make it more precise and expressive, rather than beautiful. I sought the right word, not a florid—or “leafy”—one, but an exact and incisive one. This sometimes took a long and careful search, and I had to be vigilant and attentive. Attentive in eliminating useless decoration, redundance. You must be concise if for no other reason than that the reader may otherwise tire of you. Some writers, well endowed, can dispense with such an exercise and still write well, but they are exceptions. By writing well I do not necessarily mean in a grammatically correct fashion. Works may be impeccable in their syntax, but difficult to read and understand; and viceversa. I believe it was Lucien Febvre who said that “the perfect historian must be a great writer.” No sensible historian can claim to have succeeded, but no historian can avoid trying.

São Paulo

May 17, 1981

Author notes