The death of Ricardo Donoso in May 1985, at the age of 89, deprives Chile of the last survivor of a notable group of scholars, a group which prolonged that country’s splendid ninenteenth-century tradition of historiography until well into the twentieth century. Donoso was always conscious that his own generation of historians stood in the shadow of the greatest generation of all—that of the “great triumvirate” of Barros Arana, Amunátegui, and Vicuña Mackenna. (Had Ramón Sotomayor Valdés been more productive, it would have been a quadrumvirate.) No historical school can retain its preeminence indefinitely. Increasingly after the 1940s, at which point Donoso was indisputably the doyen of his country’s historians, new approaches and interests began to predominate; the tradition so admirably embodied in Donoso's own career came to seem, to many, a little old-fashioned. It is fair to say that he was neglected by younger Chilean historians (with certain honorable exceptions) during the last phase of his life. The loss was entirely theirs: for not only did his record of scholarly achievement deserve respect, but Don Ricardo himself was an unusually stimulating and agreeable companion.
Ricardo Donoso was born in Talca (into an old and distinguished family long associated with that Central Valley city) on January 1, 1896. He was the younger brother of the writer Armando Donoso, who predeceased him by several decades and whose Recuerdos de cincuenta años he helped get published. Educated at the Liceo de Talca and at the Instituto Pedagógico in Santiago, he entered the National Archive in 1925, becoming its director from 1927 to 1954, after which he retired. In addition to his work at the Archive, Donoso held teaching positions at the Instituto Nacional and Instituto Pedagógico; in the 1950s he was a visiting professor at Miami and Harvard. It is likely that he will be especially well remembered for his lengthy connection (perhaps longer than anyone else’s) with the Sociedad Chilena de Historia y Geografía. He was its president from 1941 to 1954, and again in the 1970s, and he edited its journal, the Revista Chilena de Historia y Geografía, for more than 30 years. (In 1970 he received the society’s rarely conferred Gold Medal.) A corresponding member of a number of learned societies abroad (including the Hispanic Society of America), he was awarded his own country’s National Sciences Prize in 1972.
Donoso’s fluent pen was singularly prolific. A proper bibliography would run to many pages. His works (only a few of which can be singled out here) fairly often assumed a biographical form; his studies of Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna (1925), Antonio José de Irisarri (1934), and Ambrosio O’Higgins (1941) being perhaps his most noteworthy achievements in this particular line. A theme which especially appealed to him was that of the nineteenth-century struggle for the liberal freedoms in Chile; Las ideas políticas en Chile (1946) is probably his single best-known book. Donoso’s fiercely polemical (not to say combative) bent—never very far from the surface—was also mobilized on several famous occasions. Most memorable was his remarkable and devastating dissection, in two volumes, of the career of the first President Alessandri, in Alessandri: Agitador y demoledor (1952), still an indispensable work for anyone studying the period, and in his equally monumental and savage assault (also a two-volume effort) on the bestselling (and in Donoso’s view, terribly overrated) historian Francisco Antonio Encina. Francisco A. Encina, simulador, an extraordinary tour de force, appeared in 1969-70; needless to say, it went largely unnoticed in Chile at that time. Donoso’s writings, it should be stressed, covered a very wide range: the growth of political satire, the tangled history of property laws in the southern provinces, the authorship of the Noticias secretas de América, and numerous other specific topics, were all grist to his mill. He was indeed a tireless worker, in the great tradition of his nineteenth-century heroes, and an assiduous frequenter of the National Library (not least its ornate Sala Medina) until well into his 80s.
Encounters with Don Ricardo (my own were during the last 20 or so years of his life) always brought to mind Ezra Pound’s line about the “old men with beautiful manners.” Whatever his pen might do, Don Ricardo’s personal demeanor, in old age, was stamped with all the courtesy, amiability, and candor of his class and generation. Foreign scholars visiting Chile found him to be unfailingly generous with his time, always willing to indulge in lengthy afternoon pláticas in the pleasant premises of the Sociedad Chilena de Historia y Geografía, or, latterly, in the apartment he and Doña Teresa (a worthy companion for so spirited a man) occupied in Calle Lastarria. It was easy enough on such occasions to observe that he was a man of fierce intellectual and, indeed, political passions. The brand of anticlerical liberalism he favored was more common in his earlier years than it has been more recently, but he preserved his lifelong beliefs with an intense integrity. His view of the Catholic Church softened a bit (so I, at least, sensed) after 1973, when the church was seen to be opposing the regime of the generals, a regime he regarded (with withering patrician contempt) as grossly out of key with the essential traditions of the republic—or, to use the ultimate Chilean insult, deplorably “tropical.” He regularly predicted its downfall “within the next six months”; it is sad indeed that on this score his optimism was disappointed.
Talking to him was always a fascinating experience. His recollections of Chilean history spanned the whole period from the Parliamentary Republic to the dictatorship of Pinochet. He could provide precious glimpses, vivid and precise, of an older Chile—a Chile which has certainly vanished for good. Yet he was also admirably up-to-date in his grasp of world affairs, and extremely inquisitive (as foreign friends visiting him invariably discovered) about the state of international politics. “What terrible times we live in,” he once said to me (this was in 1975), “but what interesting times they are, aren’t they?” The remark aptly conveys something of the essential Ricardo Donoso. He was truly a memorable character as well as a fine, zealous scholar of the old school. Chile will seem an emptier place without him.