The French Jorge Amado

YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY THE FRENCH JORGE AMADO ALAIN-PHILIPPE DURAND THIS essay deals with Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado (1912-2001). Firstly, it addresses Amado’s many connections between his work and France and French writers. Secondly, it examines more deeply one of these connections by focusing on the opposition between truth and fiction in Amado’s Navegação de cabotagem. Apontamentos para um livro de memórias que jamais escreverei (1992). Spanish and French are the only languages into which the integrality of Amado’s œuvre has been translated into. In addition, Amado is one of the very few foreign writers to have been invited to all the most renowned cultural shows on French television: Apostrophes, Thalassa, Ex Libris, Droits d’auteurs, Le Cercle de Minuit. He was even the guest of honor in three television shows entirely dedicated to him: Le Grand Echiquier, Un Siècle d’écrivains, and Etoile Palace. He was awarded some of the most prestigious honors and awards in France, among which two doctorates honoris causa from the University of Paris-Sorbonne and from the University of Lyon 2 and the Legion of Honor, in 1984. The Amados traveled all around the world but it is in France that they sojourned most often and where they ended up buying an apartment in Paris, quai des Célestins, in the district of the Marais. If Amado wrote several of his novels during prolonged stays in both London and Paris, he never talks about his experiences in the English capital in his memoirs Navegação de cabotagem. He provides no records either of the four months that he spent as writer in residence at Pennsylvania State University in the early 1970s.1 On the other hand, he does write pages and pages on his life in Paris. On many occasions, 1 See Moser for a recount of Amado’s stay at Penn State U. YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY 191 Amado has claimed his love for France and Paris in particular. For example, in a long interview published in 1988, Amado declares to feel very French and to feel at home in only two places: Bahia and Paris (Assis Pacheco, 12, 14). Along with Ralph Schoolcraft, I have addressed the historical mutual attachment and exchanges characterizing Franco-Brazilian relations. We have also discussed the important roles played by several French intellectuals, writers, and politicians such as Louis Aragon, Michel Berveiller, Albert Camus, Pierre Daix, Pierre Hourcade, Frédéric JoliotCurie , and André Malraux in translating and promoting Amado’s works in France, and providing him with a second home (including when Amado was persona non grata in Brazil, exiled in Paris and then expelled in September 1949). During that year in Paris, Amado helped Aragon, Daix, Paul Eluard, André Kedros and Pablo Picasso, prepare the first World Congress for Peace of April 1949. He gave articles and interviews to communist French newspapers like L’Humanité and Les Lettres Françaises. This weekly publication edited by Aragon published during twenty-eight weeks on the entire back cover of each issue the French translation of Amado’s Seara vermelha (1946). It is as well during this first stay in Paris that the Amados met Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir with whom they maintained a long friendship and correspondence. In 1954, Sartre published in his journal Les Temps Modernes Amado’s Cacau (1933) followed by A morte e a morte de Quincas Berro d’Agua (1961), with a preface by Roger Bastide.2 Sartre and Beauvoir even visited Brazil along with the Amados in 1959.3 The announcement of the Amados’ expulsion from France by the Minister of the Interior, Jules Moch, generated a series of articles in the French communist press. In a piece published on the front page of Les Lettres Françaises in September 1949, Claude Morgan speaks in praise of his comrade Amado: “Le monde intellectuel apprend avec stupeur l’arrêté d’expulsion pris par le ministre de l’Intérieur contre ce fidèle ami de notre pays et vaillant combattant de la paix qu’est le romancier brésilien Jorge Amado, l’un des plus grands écrivains de ce temps, dont 192 ROMANCE NOTES 2 In Navega...