My Formative Years ed. by Leslie Bethell (review)

Unique in Brazilian letters, Nabuco’s Minha formação came out in 1900 and has been published and republished in Brazil over the years. It now makes its first appearance in English, in a graceful and deft translation by Christopher Peterson. The reasons for its initial success have doubtless to do with the personal fascination Nabuco exercised over his contemporaries. After all, most of this account of his background was thought interesting enough to run as a newspaper serial in the mid 1890s, despite a series of difficult decisions by Nabuco that led to his complete political marginalization within a few years after the Monarchy’s fall (1889). It marks, in a phrase, a vivid claim to presence among those whom Nabuco had chosen to leave. In many ways, he had simply taken up a different spot in the Brazilian elite’s world. After all, the completed work was picked up greedily by Garnier, most fashionable of Brazil’s editors, which had just published Nabuco’s massive biography of his father, José Tomás Nabuco de Araújo (Um estadista do Império, 3 vols., 1897–1899), and seen it enjoy unexpected success. More to the point, Um estadista do Império was a success even among readers whose politics could not be more different than Nabuco’s (or his father’s)—former Conservatives and ruling Republicans both privately conveyed their respects, suggesting the author’s particular esteem. How does one account for this? A man of unique, refined taste and appearance; an orator of uncommon charismatic skill; the great champion of the Abolitionist movement; and a founding member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, Nabuco commanded the attention of the political and cultural elite as no other did. Small wonder, then, that this autobiographical essay awakened curiosity—despite a literary culture which generally eschewed autobiography.

Subsequent Brazilian republication is doubtless due to Nabuco’s fame as Abolitionism’s paladin, for there is a great deal about the movement and Nabuco’s sense of it in this work. There is a very good deal more, though. Of the twenty-six short chapters, five bear directly on Abolitionism; the others, broadly speaking, concern Nabuco’s literary and political influences, his early diplomatic career, his experience of great men, the impact of his early European travels (particularly his absorption of the English elite’s society, politics, and style), his impressions of the United States, and the reasons for his resignation from national politics with the fall of the Monarchy. Of this material, it is the candid explanation for his Eurocentricism which has doubtless attracted most attention over the years, for he ventured to explain how his abiding patriotism and national nostalgia could be yoked to a complete absorption within the Francophile high culture of the epoch. It was an internal division others of the time could recognize in themselves and which their heirs might often treat with discomfort.

Today, in the Anglophone world, there are several compelling reasons to read My Formative Years. First, the traditional one: it provides a graceful and candid explanation for, and account of, an unusual and critical political career, from the electric popular demonstrations of the street to the stately halls of parliament and palace. Nabuco, son of one of the several most important statesmen of the Monarchy, took on the seemingly impossible role of Abolitionist and was critical to the movement’s success as its chief parliamentary spokesman, radical spokesman in the street, and formidable propagandist, in the face of a ruling class and parliamentary monarchy wedded to slavery since its origins. Second, it provides a charming intellectual memoir that speaks to the values and perspective of generations of Brazilian (indeed, Latin American) literati and statesmen, in an era of Eurocentric polymaths, conversant in French and often well-traveled in Europe. If one wants to understand the direction and assumptions of those who commanded the political...