São Paulo: Perspectives on the City and Cultural Production

3. Appendix: Patrícia Galvão: The Private Autobiography of a Brazilian Feminist Writer

45 3 Appendix: Patrícia Galvão The Private Autobiography of a Brazilian Feminist Writer porque não poderei contar as gargalhadas que já estou ensaiando. • Patrícia Galvão, Paixão Pagu (128) Only two women’s names have routinely been attached to the momentous Semana de Arte Moderna. Both of the women mentioned were painters: Anita Malfati (1889–1963), who saw the equally important Armory Show New York in 1913 and was inspired to spearhead a similar show in São Paulo; and Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973), whose impressive canvases have gone on to become, in the visual arts, veritable monuments of the Semana. However, there was a third woman, Patrícia Galvão. Galvão is mentioned on the margins of the subsequent cultural flourishing in the 1930s that flowed from the Semana.1 It was not until Norma Bengell ’s film Eternamente Pagu (1987), however, that Galvão began to enjoy something like a general cultural recognition. I wish I could say that the efforts of feminist literary scholarship in Brazil (whose existence is somewhat São Paulo: Perspectives on the City and Cultural Production 46 debatable, certainly at least on institutional academic terms) have served to confirm Galvão’s importance in the bibliography of research on the Semana and, as a consequence, in Brazilian cultural history, but just look under the entry “Pagu” in the Dicionário de mulheres do Brasil.2 However, this work of documenting Galvão’s importance has been taken on by the Brazilian poet Augusto de Campos, whose biography and anthology of Galvão constituted the first major bibliographic entry. In addition, we have the editorial work of Geraldo Galvão Ferraz, Galvão’s second son, the criticism of the American David K. Jackson, as well as the translation, along with his wife, Elizabeth, of Galvão’s novel, Parque industrial; as such there is now a growing second-wave bibliography on Galvão, but as yet little of it has been published in Brazil, where the writer remains absent from major historiographic works.3 Yet, when Ferraz published in 2005 a document of his mother’s that he titled Paixão Pagu; a autobiografia precoce de Patrícia Galvão (Pagu’s Passion : The Precocious Autobiography of Patrícia Galvão), it was something of a best seller, promptly becoming difficult to obtain even at major booksellers in São Paulo such as the FNAC, a vast cultural supermarket with various outlets in the city and, now, in other places in the country. If Galvão remains uninteresting for Brazilian scholarship, which is not known for its comprehensive dedication to modern writers anyways, she now seems to at least have some cachet in the general Brazilian cultural imaginary. Paixão Pagu was written in 1940 as a private letter to Geraldo Ferraz, with whom Galvão was entering into the long relationship that would last until her death in 1962. Ferraz was a writer and journalist, and they collaborated well together, though Galvão was unsuccessful in her bid for political office in 1950. Galvão had been involved first in a sham marriage (to the poet Waldemar Belisário) in order to escape the rather stultifying paternal abode in Santos. Her real matrimonial goal was the poet and major spokesperson for the Semana de Arte Moderna, Oswald de Andrade. Since he was already involved with Tarsila do Amaral, Galvão knew her parents would never approve ; hence the sham marriage.4 Galvão’s marriage to Oswald de Andrade was a stormy one: she both had a son with him (Rudá, who has cooperated with Ferraz in providing material about their shared mother) and engaged fully in the radical politics that made her the first female political prisoner in Brazilian history during the infamous fascist-like Estado Novo (New State) of Getúlio Vargas in the late 1930s and 1940s. Not only was Galvão imprisoned, but she published Parque industrial, became directly involved 47 with the Brazilian Communist Party (which insisted on the pseudonym for the novel, considering it a serious personalist breach on Galvão’s part to publish it under her own name), and, for a period in 1932, lived and worked in the area of the fabric mills east of the central core of São Paulo. This experience gave her some of the practical information contained in her...