Paulo Francis

Paulo Francis (Rio de Janeiro, September 2, 1930 – New York City, February 4, 1997) was a Brazilian journalist, political pundit, novelist and critic.

Francis became prominent in modern Brazilian journalism through his controversial critiques and essays with a trademark writing style, which mixed erudition and vulgarity.

Like many other Brazilian intellectuals of his time, Francis was exposed to Americanization during his teens.

In his early career, Francis tried to blend Brazilian left-wing nationalist ideas in culture and politics with the ideal of modernity embodied by the United States.

During his time in the United States, Francis joined a host of Brazilian intellectuals who, during the 1940s and the 1950s, forswore any abstract and aristocratic European concept of "civilization", meaning mostly French Belle Époque culture, in favor of an American model, which equated modernization with cutting-edge technological development (Fordism) and mass democracy, understood as the necessary material basis for social change, which Francis expressed through a personal mix of pro-Americanism and Left radicalism.

His embrace of what he saw as American pragmatism led Francis into a lifelong militant empiricism and scorn for theory.

According to Kucinski, Francis was always open about his boredom with the academic method of intellectual analysis, describing it as conventional and unimaginative.

He always preferred his role as a journalist to that of a scholar.

As a scholar, he was prone to what many saw as excessive intellectual pretensions: in the words of one of his critics, psychoanalyst and writer Maria Rita Kehl, Francis never doubted, as he had supposedly understood everything even before realizing what actually happened.

This process had begun after the 1945 fall of the Getúlio Vargas dictatorship, and lasted until the 1964 military coup.

He attended the National School of Philosophy (at the time a general humanities course) of the University of Brazil in the 1950s, but dropped out before graduating.

In college, he was admitted into the student troupe (Teatro do Estudante) managed by the critic Paschoal Carlos Magno, with whom he toured northeastern Brazil.

On the trip, he was shocked and disgusted by what he described as poverty, backwardness, [and an] unawareness of welfare and civil society."

Inspired towards a stage career after that trip, Francis tried to become an actor in Rio de Janeiro during the early 1950s.

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, Francis worked mostly as a culture and literary critic.

Although he received an award as a rising star in 1952, he did not pursue the career: according to Kucisnki, because he lacked talent; according to his former mentor Paschoal Carlos Magno, because his interests were directed firstly towards political activism.

From the start of his career, Francis saw himself not as an entertainer, but as a public intellectual intent on social change.

In his own words, he had returned from his Northeastern Brazil tour "sure of the need for a social revolution".

Deciding on a stage management career, Francis went to Columbia University, where he studied Dramatic Literature, mostly attending the classes of the Brecht scholar Eric Bentley.

He also became acquainted with the work of the critic George Jean Nathan.

Eventually, he dropped out of Columbia.

After a time as a director between 1954 and 1956 during which he staged five plays, with moderate success, in 1957 Francis started to write as a theater critic for the newspaper Diário Carioca.

He was soon praised for his defense of a modern approach to staging.

The Brazilian stage had been characterised by provincial bickering between rival troupes, as well as a strict attachment to Classic European conventions.

With various other critics, such as the theater scholar Sabato Magaldi and the Shakespeare translator and expert Barbara Heliodora, Francis strove for social and psychological realism on the Brazilian stage, expressed in his association of Brecht's work to George Bernard Shaw's and Seán O'Casey's (ignoring, in the process, the anti-realist stance of Brechtian theater and submitting it to method acting conventions).

In his own words, what he proposed was to approach staging as above all, an intellectual task: "to strive, on the stage, to find an equivalent for the feeling of unity and total expression one finds while reading a text".

At the same time, he sponsored, with editor Jorge Zahar, the publication of a collection of translation of foreign plays that would form a canon on which a future Brazilian modernist dramaturgy would develop.

Within this intellectual framework, Francis acted as a cultural nationalist, supporting contemporary rising Brazilian playwrights such as Nelson Rodrigues and Gianfrancesco Guarnieri and actors such as Fernanda Montenegro and was generally respected for doing so.

However, he remained noted for his compulsion towards unconsidered behavior and personal attack, as in a quarrel with an actress in 1958, in which he reacted to what he supposed to be a hint about his (supposed) homosexuality by writing so demeaning a piece of libel he was slapped in public by the actress' husband.

He acted mostly as an advocate of modernism in cultural matters, later becoming embroiled in Brazil's 1960s political struggles as a Trotskyist sympathizer and a left-wing nationalist, while at the same time keeping a distance from both Stalinism and Latin American populism.

He was also repelled by what he saw as the rhetorical obscurity of 1960s Structuralism, striving instead for "a simple, learned prose, with a clear language".

In a late interview, he would proudly describe himself as "not [being] a scholar who pens treatises. I'm a journalist who discusses on the facts of the day, political and cultural happenings".

This mode of work, according to critics such as Kehl and Kucinski, would shape his writing throughout his life.

These same critics saw in it a signal of an inability to perform sustained intellectual work and a tendency to rely on flashes of wit and borrowed erudition (the use of incessant quotes and bon mots) something that would make him prone to mistakes and imprecision.

According to Kucinski, his "absence of careful research, established facts, precise information [...] became eventually – through excessive generalization and lack of patience [...] – downright bigotry".

His acquaintance with contemporary American criticism had prepared him for the important role he played in Brazilian theater, which at the time was in a feverish process of cultural modernization, mostly in the sense of a thorough Americanization of cultural values.

After spending the 1970s as an exile and expatriate in the US, in the 1980s he forsook his leftist views for Americanism's sake, performing a sharp political turn into aggressive conservatism, defending the free-market economics and political liberalism, and became an uncompromising anti-leftist.

In this capacity, he estranged himself from the Brazilian intelligentsia and became mostly a media figure, a role that entangled him in a legal suit until his death in 1997.

Critical evaluations of his work have been made by media scholar Bernardo Kucinski and historian Isabel Lustosa.

Born as Franz Paul Trannin da Matta Heilborn into a middle-class family of German descent, Francis received his early education in various traditional Catholic schools in Rio de Janeiro.