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Cadernos de História da Educação

versión On-line ISSN 1982-7806

Cad. Hist. Educ. vol.21  Uberlândia  2022  Epub 13-Sep-2022

https://doi.org/10.14393/che-v21-2022-72 

Dossier 1 - Literature contributions to the History of Education

The writer’s self-learning process outside and against the Portuguese school: Teixeira de Pascoaes and the sublimation of genius, from the Livro de Memórias (1928) to Uma Fábula (1952)1

Ana Luísa Fernandes Paz1 
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4848-8183

1Universidade de Lisboa (Portugal). apaz@ie.ulisboa.pt


Abstract

The discussion that this article seeks to establish around the mythical figure of the poet Teixeira de Pascoaes (1877-1952) - a writer who leads the literary saudosismo movement in Portugal and who is still known today through school textbooks - is related to the cultural theses that successively permeate in his work on the artist’s self-education. Particularly in his autobiographical writings, Livro de memórias [Book of Memoirs] (1928) and Uma fábula [A fable] (1952), the latter only published in 1978, Teixeira de Pascoaes describes a schooling incapable of ensuring a teaching-learning process for literary writing, in particular the Portuguese language discipline. He describes his trajectory as a ‘school ordeal’, which he only managed to fight thanks to the literary life of his home, the Solar de Pascoaes, in a direct confrontation between family culture, school culture and a series of attributes of his artistic genius (destination, prodigious childhood, talent).

Keywords: autobiographical memories; schooling; artist education

Resumo

A discussão que neste artigo se procura instaurar em torno da figura mítica do poeta Teixeira de Pascoaes (1877-1952), escritor que lidera em Portugal o movimento literário do saudosismo e que ainda hoje se conhece por via dos manuais escolares, prende-se com as teses culturais que sucessivamente perpassam na sua obra sobre a autoformação do artista. Muito em particular nos seus escritos autobiográficos, Livro de memórias (1928) e Uma fábula (1952), este último apenas publicado em 1978, Teixeira de Pascoaes descreve uma escolarização incapaz de assegurar um processo de ensino-aprendizagem para a escrita literária, em particular a disciplina de Língua Portuguesa. Descreve a sua trajetória como um ‘calvário escolar’, que apenas conseguiu combater graças à própria vida literária da sua casa, o Solar de Pascoaes, num confronto direto entre cultura familiar, cultura escolar e uma série de atributos do próprio génio artístico (destino, infância prodigiosa, talento).

Palavras-chave: Memórias autobiográficas; Escolarização; Formação de artista

Resumen

La discusión que este artículo busca establecer en torno a la figura mítica del poeta Teixeira de Pascoaes (1877-1952), escritor que lidera el movimiento del saudosismo literario en Portugal y que aún hoy se conoce a través de los libros de texto escolares, se relaciona con las tesis culturales que impregnan sucesivamente en su obra la autoeducación del artista. Particularmente en sus escritos autobiográficos, Livro de memórias [Libro de Memórias] (1928) y Uma fábula [Una fabula] (1952), este último recién publicado en 1978, Teixeira de Pascoaes describe una escolarización incapaz de asegurar un proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje de la escritura literaria, en particular en la disciplina de Lengua Portuguesa. Describe su trayectoria como un ‘calvario escolar’, que solo logró combatir gracias a la vida literaria de su hogar, lo Solar de Pascoaes, en un enfrentamiento directo entre cultura familiar, cultura escolar y una serie de atributos de su genio artístico (destino, infancia prodigiosa, talento).

Palabras-clave: Memorias autobiográficos; Escolarización; Formación de artista

Introduction

Teixeira de Pascoaes, the poet of the Marão, the poet of Saudade2 and other epithets, all refer to the writer Joaquim Pereira Teixeira de Vasconcelos (1877-1952), of national and international renown for heading in Portugal the literary movement 'Saudosismo'. Under such standard, Teixeira de Pascoaes (pseudonym he used since 1896) was a prominent figure - for decades, a mandatory presence in the Portuguese Language syllabus in secondary schools. Students, such as myself, who attended school by the end of the 20th century, were negatively impressed by the vague image of an extremely gloomy poet, who'd sadden the pages of the school books through a couple of nostalgic poems alongside a biographical note mentioning the literary movement the poet was part of. Since the 1920's, Pascoaes was a peer of Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Sá-Carneiro or José Régio. Approximately 100 years after Teixeira de Pascoaes's first literary successes, the Portuguese government ratified the new Essential Learning to the secondary grade, in which the study of the writer's works was no longer mandatory. He was sworn to oblivion on the school walls.

To obscure Teixeira de Pascoaes from the Portuguese Language curricular studies, is a gesture that, in a strange ironic way, gets even with history. There is a sort of inevitability in this conclusion, to those alike myself went beyond the first impression of the school book author and discovered a harsh critique of the school environment, particularly secondary and university studies. In fact, who goes beyond the poet of Saudade from the school book, insisting on the mystification of the obscure, ascetic poet, discovers in his complete works, an author of works of great richness and rarity, also being a rebellious and libertine character. Teixeira de Vasconcelos, renamed Pascoaes, would hardly fit within a normalising, normalised literary registry, always at the expense of his conflicts with school environments and all the school culture represents, including professional future becoming.

In this article, I aim to describe and then discuss the way Teixeira de Pascoaes is presented before the school environment/world, essentially through refusal and repulsion, in order to create his modus faciendi of literary learning, calling towards a self-education and auto-didactism of sorts. Especially in his autobiographical work, marked with emphasis on the publishing of the Livro de Memórias (Book of Memoirs, 1928) and on the writing of Uma Fábula (A Fable, 1952), describes a type of schooling, unable to ensure a learning-teaching process towards literary writing, in particular, the very Portuguese Language subject, in which he actually failed the year. Pascoaes deeply incorporates in his autobiography, a conflict against the school environment, and against the student, which made from his literary life, a victory over that type of formal education.

However, he too inscribed his future becoming as writer, in a technology of genius, namely when he tries, in his two autobiographical pieces, to demonstrate the might of destiny and the inevitability of becoming a writer. As I look forward to discuss, the self-referred biographical prose offers countless elements of contextualisation, of the school and cultural life in the Portugal of his time - becoming a (re)source to History of Education. Besides, an autobiography is also a privileged source to research on the way in which one became a writer, mostly when it presents an (apparently) unfavourable context. We find that Poet of Marão was falsly self-taught, and used to his favour every possibility to become legitimised as a poet by his own will to be legitimised.

Pascoaes is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, one of many writers of beginnings of 20th century, who make from artistic genius and its attributes (destiny, prodigious childhood, talent) the justifying means to be legitimated as writers - noted, as an example, the bureaucratic life of Fernando Pessoa, in contrast with his bustling literary life. The writing of oneself has special relevance in rendering those justifying means operational, and today, many decades on, it can as well be used as a source which exposes its chosen action categories within what was available in the space of possibilities.

How does one learn how to be a poet? Conceptual framework to an autobiography of a writer

“More scenes of my childhood and youth”, starts the final autobiography of Teixeira de Pascoaes, Uma Fábula: O advogado e o poeta (A fable: The lawyer and the poet), signed in October of 1952, two months before his passing:

It's not about confessions, as no one confesses oneself. How can a disgraced confess, one without the faintest idea about oneself? The feeling we get from our own selves is indescribable. And, if we consider it intellectually, is already an artificial product. We're in ourselves, as fish in water. What does a codfish think of the Atlantic? It doesn't distinguish it from its fins (PASCOAES, 1978, p. 7).

This fish who revisits itself, to retake Pascoaes's metaphor, which in return echoes the used metaphor, later, between Paul Veyne and Michel Foucault, to explain the social scientist's work - described as if they are a fish that, without ceasing to be one, may behold itself for moments from outside the fish tank (VEYNE, 2008) -, enunciates the gesture of writing and one's own thought to which Teixeira de Pascoes surrenders to in his last writing. The gesture established by Livro de Memórias published in the year 1928, thus fulfils his last deliberate autobiographical move, albeit only printed about three decades later. To Teixeira de Pascoaes, the autobiographical mode shows traces of a self-formation narrative (NÓVOA & FINGER, 1988), in which the writing's subject enunciates his way of thinking - his professionalism, in this case, as a writer. As Philippe Lejeune (2008) identifies, it's the very text which produces life, not the contrary, and Pascoaes not only reflects considerations upon his future becoming as a skilled writer.

The implicit question about where does the writer learn to become a writer, brings yet another more relevant question: how can a literary work build the writer's own life? Before this question, it matters to resort to an array of autobiographical sources which permits its intelligibility, but in order to peer into that source, presented herein is a framework of sociological analysis of the artistic activities.

Essentially I started from the identification that Anne Lisa Tota (2000) undertakes on the three patterns, typically present in the artistic professions' narratives, particularly the writers'. Firstly, the author defends, the professional choice appears in a pre-initiatory narrative scheme, to which follows, the re-creation of a childhood symbolically re-created as privileged space. Last, verifies the artist's identity built from their repeated differentiation in relation to the rest. All these elements completely fit in the narrative the poet of Marão elaborates about himself, which made me revisit as well the conception of the narrative of life and trajectory which are at the base of the way the author, from Pierre Bourdieu, placed herself critically in relation to the biographic material stemming from the artists. In this way, the concepts patent here are owed to the French sociologist.

Not ignoring the clashes suffered by critical sociology, whether on the subject of studies about school, or on what refers to investigation in arts and literature, but in which, despite the rest, its importance is recognised, and in which the dissidence itself happens to be owing and compromised. Following other disciples of Bourdieu who took different conceptual paths, Nathalie Heinich has tried to develop forms of understanding of artistic activity, namely painting, posing relevant questions to the schooling methods of the student-artist (HEINICH, 1993) which caused her to doubt the bourdesian instrumentality. The author returned to the sociological tradition that Norbert Elias initiated with Mozart, the sociology of a genius, a work where art is considered an activity dominated consciously by the social actors, a position considered more in conformity with a sociology of the arts in a contemporary frame (HEINICH, 2008). This same criticism of the authors of domination, in which Heinich merges Marx, Bourdieu and Foucault, is strongly mobilised by the musical sociologist Tia DeNora, who, at the same time, brings back the vision of Elias and Theodor Adorno to conceive contemporary forms of understanding of the world of arts (DENORA, 2003). However, despite its complex critical display, it hides after all in the same gesture - trying to understand how social actors (the subjects no more) “are trapped in a web of circumstances, including their own understanding about those circumstances” (DENORA, 1995, p. 113). In what matters to this understanding, many social scientists, alike fish yearning for understanding within the complex life of the fish tank they may never leave, still recur to critical sociology, critically. That's also my intent.

Within the scope of History of Education, several analysis from biographies are also presented in the steps of Pierre Bourdieu, even if duly punctuated with recent tendencies from autobiographical studies such as Lejeune (2008), Passeggi and Souza (2008) or Delory-Momberger (2012). Mostly, the consideration of the critical sociologist starts through this very argumentation, finding there the indispensable attributes and concepts, to follow in an “understanding of meanings” that may confront the “biographical illusion” (BOURDIEU, quoted by VERAS; ORLANDO, 2018, p. 801)

In this way, part of this investigation seeks to show exactly what were the social actors' circumstances, revealing the conditions of production marked in the work of Pascoaes, being worthy of notice that, even when not directly referred, they are easily retrieved through contemporary bibliography and the countless studies on Teixeira de Pascoaes (FRANCO, 2000) and on his future (auto)biographical becoming (CARVALHO; RITA; FRANCO, 2017).

I insist, however, in an attempt to overtake the mere state of diagnostic, of what were the socio-economic conditions of writing of the poet of Amarante, towards a search of these conditions' inscription in a symbolic space. We retrieve, for that effect, the concepts of the space of possibilities and cultural capital, trying to analyse how those production conditions were negotiated in relation to the writer's future becoming-artist and his capitalisation into symbolic power, that being the symbolic capital we would refer to as prestige (BOURDIEU, 2013).

May we deem space of possibilities, as the available possibilities in the cultural field (in a determined space/time) which have the tendency to “orientate” the artists' search to define their “universe of problems, references, intellectual brands” (BOURDIEU, 2008, p. 55). These are what the French sociologist tries to resume to a “system of common references and brands” (BOURDIEU, 2008, p. 57), which define a school, a movement, interplaying with each author's idiosyncrasies.

In its turn, may we consider as well that the cultural field may be defined as such, where the cultural capital is more valued, albeit being there patent as well, the relative values of economic capital and social capital. In this aspect, the cultural capital should be sought out, in its aspect of legitimisation and the actions around that legitimisation, which point us necessarily towards the acquisition of a more specific modality in this form of power: the educational capital.

If school education appears as the generator of a cultural capital, it carries simultaneously, the devaluing marks of its constitution, making believe that the school related, means a late socialisation, and in a certain way, substitutive. As Bourdieu and Darbel have noted, those who “didn't receive from family or school, the tools that only familiarity may provide, is condemned to a perception of the work of art, which borrows its categories from the quotidian experience”, and that “ends in the simple recognition of the represented object” (BOURDIEU; DARBEL, 2007, p. 79). It is this devalued form that Joaquim Pereira Teixeira de Vasconcelos, author of his own destiny, when he dominates it using the pen-name of Teixeira de Pascoaes, is actively fighting. So to what exactly is his learning due?

In a reading of all his printed work, with special emphasis on his autobiographical writings, were found three great cores of learning directions: the family, the school (despite anything) and the circles of friends and social acquaintances. Upon these three aspects will be focused this analysis of the conditions of production of the greatest of Pascoaes' works: the creation and legitimisation of the poet.

Family

“The afternoon in which I was born as a hero, a sad aura veiled my childhood, and became ingrained in me forever” (PASCOAES, 2001, p. 54) - this way the poet presents himself in his Livro de Memórias, referring to a first day of life in a time indefinite and outside a concrete space. It is also recalled that he was born on All Souls Day, November 2 in the year 1877, at the great manor house of the Pascoaes, in the village of Gatão, near the town Amarante - here's a possible history, denied by the biographers. It's estimated that Joaquim Pereira Teixeira de Vasconcelos might have been born in Amarante, in a let house nearby the house of his grandparents (VASCONCELOS, 1993, p. 37) on November 8, in accordance with his birth/baptism registry (BORGES, 2006).

The birth narrative inaugurates the great operation of biographical illusion in which “the abandonment of the romance structure as linear” clearly “coincided with the questioning of the vision of life as existence gifted with sense in the double sense of significance and direction” (BOURDIEU, 2008, p.76), that in Pascoaes, was substituted by a sense of legitimisation of the place of writing. As we'll note soon, all the family history of the Teixeira de Vasconcelos is two-faced. When his biographic writings are analysed through the filter of the conditions of production, the often mentioned solitude and melancholy of the poet allows the revelation of the structures which sustain his “conatus”, that is, the “tendency to perpetuate his social being, in possession of all his powers and privileges”, and works as “base of the reproduction strategies” in which are included the strategies “of fecundity”, “of heritage”, “economic” and “educational” (BOURDIEU, 2008, p. 36-7).

Carlota Guedes Monteiro de Carvalho gave birth during her marriage with João Pereira Teixeira de Vasconcelos, to seven children, thus perpetuating a lineage of rural aristocrats, by the following order: António (1876-1878), Joaquim (1877-1952), Miquelina Rosa (?-1977), the second António (1880-1903), Maria da Glória (1881-1980), João (1882-1965) and finally, Álvaro (1884-1964).

Joaquim wasn't the firstborn, but was raised as such, by the Teixeira de Vasconcelos, taking his brother António's place, as he had passed away at two years old, Joaquim being a year younger than him. The couple christens the next son with the same name, but also the second António was gone too soon, committing suicide in the year 1903, in circumstances which the poet plentifully explored in his literary production of memoirs and to which will be taken the due attention later on. In Livro de Memórias, he establishes a journey in search of a portrait, where he may present his childhood and family history:

And my childhood portrait? In vain I seek for it in the memory. Where it exists is in an old family album. There I am, in a group, my head down, serious, sad eyed, scared. […]

There I am in the still, as earth has created me and Lucrecia's tales, also born amidst these mountains... […]

There I am, near my Mother, still so young! And me by her side. And my siblings. There's João and the jungles of Africa calling him! There's António and his child features obscured by the spectre of suicide. There's António, João, Álvaro, Miquelina, Maria and my Mother, still so young! And me by her side - thus tells a chronicle of fabulous times... (PASCOAES, 2001, p. 74-5)

The father, João Pereira Teixeira de Vasconcelos, judge and deputy to the royal courts, is missing in these portraits, but he is a decisive figure in the poet's intellectual destiny. Previously I defended that Pascoaes was son of a desiring parent - who has time and other resources available, such as influence or financial power - invested all in the education of one of his offspring, encouraging him to take forward a design which he had no chance or capability to accomplish. This concept of desiring father was established post my investigation in History of Education on musical artists (PAZ, 2014) resourced from an insight into musical psychology, from which Michael Howe (1999) seeks to understand the relevance of kinship in the education of individuals considered geniuses in the fields of arts, sciences and technologies. As a desiring father, João Teixeira de Vasconcelos developed with his eldest son, a relation of admiration and (in)dependence, actively contributing to the success in school, then to the professional start of Joaquim, first as a lawyer, then as a judge, directly following his steps. Maria da Glória Teixeira de Vasconcelos, the youngest sister, shows how complex this relation between the desiring father and his most promising son was, leaving a note of how, to the patriarch, “each took their own way” where the firstborn distinguished himself as “full of personality and independence” (VASCONCELOS, 1971, p. 28).

The same privileged witness narrates how the father, even without high hopes of the other offspring, was interested in their education, even if “without any patience” (VASCONCELOS, 1971, p. 28-9). It was with the eldest, that he redoubled himself in efforts to obtain the needed resources to physical and intellectual success, as “for long he expected muchly from that son”. To improve his fragile build, he made sure to take ice cold baths, would intake plenty of cod liver oil and practised weight-lifting and the trapeze (p. 23-4). The guarantee of his school success was due to him moving into the house in the (then) town of Amarante, so that Joaquim could resume his studies with greater ease, in the sense of “sparing him from so much cold and many annoyances” (p. 30).

The literary production of memoirs by Teixeira de Pascoaes recovers this transition into the urban perimeter and the school universe as a situation adverse to his nature, and, already in Uma Fábula (A Fable), written in the year 1952, emphasizes the joy of leaving the studies behind, and a return to the rural scenario: “It is the month of September 1896. I've concluded the preparatory [exams] and am in the village with my maternal grandmother, spending the remaining days of the extended holiday. I'd entertain myself reading the Poets; and my grandmother, picking cabbages in the garden, and praying” (PASCOAES, 1978, p. 105).

The latter scenario reminds us of the figure of the mother, with whom Joaquim lived till her death. Carlota Guedes Monteiro de Carvalho was born in the village of São João de Gatão (Casa do Outeiro). Carlota inherited the house in Travanca do Monte, a fundamental property in the biography of Pascoaes' childhood. This is the house, located in the Serra da Abobreira range, a bulwark at the foothills of the Marão range, to which the writer refers constantly when he recalls the happy moments, as he'd spend there the warm month of August (VASCONCELOS, 1993, p. 29).

Last, this family was framed within the lofty manor house of the Pascoaes, a property enclosed in the mountain range, inherited via his father, where the nuclear family lived a great part of their lives. A space where each corner, each object, represents a complex discourse, as firstly dramatised at the start of his Livro de Memórias, showing how different furniture would summon him to write:

My desk became darkened; and in this oil landscape by my sister, could say maybe the pear and cherry trees become yellow too and their leaves fall down. Old enigmatic furniture covered in aching shadows, they animate and talk to each other about ancient people I loved. […] In this ebony chair, my grandmother moves through the beads of a rosary (PASCOAES, 2001, p. 37).

A house with plenty of history and stories that the heir listened as his grandmother and aunts told stories of the French Invasions, the attacks of famous bandit Zé do Telhado and other narratives of hold-ups and fires lived through by his ancestors, which fascinated him up to adult age. Also a house that featured a plentiful library of books and spaces appropriate to study and reflection. Mostly after the restoration works that, in 1916, D. Carlota Monteiro ordered and personally superintended (VASCONCELOS, 1993), the poet could enjoy a privileged environment for his writing, with an open view of the Marão range and the isolated, bucolic belvedere of the property, where he might have written part of the long poem Marânus.

In the Teixeira de Vasconcelos clan we find the “family's pre-disposition to an erudite and literary culture was plentiful, yet remained counter to the dominant school culture” (PAZ, 2017, p. 151) and it's in this direction that we can find the conciliation that Joaquim had to establish, to legitimise this cultural capital he created and consolidated through antagonistic sources and ethos. Even as he wasn't the only writer in the family, albeit only he had taken the activity to full term. In fact, between six brothers, three published works in their lifetimes, and those three manifested a great autobiographic penchant in their writing and literary production of memoirs, this in a time when in Portugal, documents of this nature were somewhat rarely published (PALMA-FERREIRA, 1981).

If Pascoaes had a rival, he'd no doubt be João Teixeira de Vasconcelos. The author of Memórias de um Caçador de Elefantes (Memoirs of an Elephant Hunter), a man physically alike Pascoaes, made a dream come true, a dream of Pascoaes since childhood, that he first knew in the idyllic lyceum holidays): the dream of becoming a hunter (PASCOAES, 1978, p. 26-ss e 136-ss). The middle brother departed to Mozambique at 19, to start an adventurous life, firstly employed at an English company dealing with the rubber trade, then proceeding as a fisherman. Finally in the Belgian Congo, he became a famous wild game hunter and specialist in ivory extraction, a function highly condemnable in our days, but at the time considered an arduous deed carried out in an exotic setting. The recognition of brave João de Vasconcelos also resides in the literary sphere. The Portuguese writer Raul Brandão, a well known guest at the house of Casa de Pascoaes, signs the preface to the first edition (1942). He legitimates the hunter as greatly gifted in writing, and witnesses his tendency to animate the evenings as narrator (and protagonist) of amazing stories. In his turn, the writer and journalist Augusto Casimiro, whose life was no less intense as a Portuguese World War I hero, notes the re-edition, even confessing envy and admiration for João Teixeira de Vasconcelos (CASIMIRO, 1957, p. xii-xiii, xix ). As a matter of fact, João's poor schooling and his dedication, decades long, to professions not intellectually demanding, in no way diminished him in his literary considerations of African peoples and of life in the jungles, the value of his work being recognised easily, beyond whatever prejudices that values of that time may impose on the unsuspecting reader.

In relation to the Teixeira de Vasconcelos, we may then mention a self-formation strategy in which writing becomes a specific capital. And if some members are opposed, albeit lacking the schooling and diploma, that institutionalises and renders objective, the exercise of their liberal professions (BOURDIEU, 1999), the specific capital is managed independently, within the self-formation strategies of the family circle. It is relevant to distinguish between the schooling and the schooling capital acquired through the common means, and an array of principles and procedures kept alive in the family core and in the social circle which guarantee the handling of the writing techniques, and the disposition towards literary taste.

Despite primary schooling being mandatory in Portugal since 1835 (PAIS, 2008), only in 1940 were fulfilled the long decreed possibilities of rendering this schooling effective. Especially in the case of girls, their being completely overlooked by authorities until the second half of the 20th century, leaving thousands of Portuguese women illiterate or with poor education (CANDEIAS, 2007). In the case of the Teixeira de Vasconcelos daughters, the father made sure to guarantee their studies at least to lyceum level, that being the highest grade the female gender aspired to by the end of the nineteenth century3. Maria da Glória Teixeira de Vasconcelos is however, as are her two older brothers, also an author. Emphasising in her works an autobiography camouflaged as a literary production of memoirs of the poet and the family life, that's been widely quoted since its first edition in 1971.

At first glance, her book Olhando Para Trás Vejo Pascoaes (Looking Back I See Pascoaes) barely mentions this younger sister, but, as before, we perceive her - she dares as well to reflect her poetry and journey notes there. She relentlessly elucidates about this speech locus, presenting it almost as an excuse, her poor school performance, only attenuated by being the daughter of one of the founders of the secondary school (lycaeum). Even having attended the secondary level, she declares only there and then that she learned to read and write. And it is through this fragility that she's repositioned as self-taught, residing exactly in the borderline which marks women in the world of culture and permits her integration into that group, which Bourdieu designates as the “dominated amidst the dominant” (1996, p. 185). When she affirms the cultural relevance of her lineage, she stands amidst the dominant, presenting, amidst other examples, the case of the grandfather physician who discovered a cure to typhus (VASCONCELOS, 1971, p. 32-4), a move which makes her and the poet heirs of a long erudite family tradition, with their own strategies for study and self-formation. As a matter of fact, she considers to have greatly overcome the school poverty: “Then, what helped me was my effort; the interest I had on knowledge and the great school in which I lived twenty-seven years”. That great school was precisely the house of Pascoaes and it was here that she consecrated herself as a poet, as she concludes, confessing and clarifying: “Since I was a child I always loved poetry and used to cut verses in the newspapers with my scissors, whether they were good or bad” (VASCONCELOS, 1971, p. 101 and 27). In fact, much before Olhando Para Trás, she published the poem “Horas de Deus” (Hours of God) (1922), later transposed to music by the nationally recognised musician and musicologist, Armando Leça.

It is verified that the Teixeira de Vasconcelos family guaranteed the poet at least three conditions of possibility: a desiring father who treated his life as a project of his own; the economic capital, verified in the means of property and fortune which eased studies and erudition; and belonging to a lineage where the clan ethos already guaranteed the acquisition and transmission of plentiful cultural capital, continually updated, namely with the schooling strategies, however compensated with the self-formation encouraged by the family circle. It might still be viable to find in this family ethos a pre-disposition to a certain form of writing, namely the literary production of memoirs, as it would be a privilege to generations of families of aristocratic roots, diffused amidst various elements of a generation, independently of their professional activity - the poet, the hunter and the caretaker. We may then, considering the three writer siblings, note that the space of the possibilities is created immediately from the conatus and Pascoaes didn't depreciate his vertical and horizontal heritage, rather the contrary, he received it and amplified it towards new stylistic genres.

School

I've seen the shadow before I saw the light. There is an afternoon in November which stayed within me forever. It's against a purple and golden background that my child's silhouette appears, far away, so sad, more a vague sentiment than a defined shape. In the early times, we live, we don't exist. I was then a soul sketching a body; and all was the soul, before my eyes. We were seven years old, me and the world. I hovered over things and people the virginity of the early days, an intimate dawning enchantment which I still find in certain mysterious places today and in certain figures marked in my remembering (PASCOAES, 2001, p. 54-55).

Pascoaes relates here the symbolic moment of his metamorphosis as a child to a student, albeit without yet daring to mention the school, a “presidio-school” that was “able to steal from childhood the diamond of its innocence” (FRANCO, 2001, p. 18). The rupture is tremendous, but he only announces it many pages later, in the third chapter of the Livro de Memórias, after remembering a series of relevant characters of his life and golden childhood, in which he gathers together “games, fears, commotions, a rushing of virgin forces”, all materialised in his “silhouette”, in such a way that they “modelled him, day by day”. And in that magical scenario, like a first death, he announces: “the last scene is me going to school” (PASCOAES, 2001, p. 83; underlined in the original).

The dramatic weight in the narrative about his school journey, to which the poet always refers to how he “continuously died” (PAZ, 2017, p. 153), must however be attenuated, with the evidence that it is an “implacable and creative memory” in an alchemy which “renders not only the present past, but also enhances its reality” (FRANCO, 2001, p. 30). According to António Cândido Franco's perspective, “never, alike in 1928 or 1952, was his childhood as sad” (2001, p. 30). In Maria da Glória Teixeira de Vasconcelos's version, the older brother was no more than an average student who “through his course, studied only to pass the year and not to be distinguished” (1971, p. 31).

Pascoaes didn't leave us a very defined portrait of the primary school, certainly as he studied his first years of schooling whilst residing still in Gatão. Already the different thoughts he leaves us on secondary and university schooling are, as we'll know next, of a disheartening sadness.

As for the secondary grade learning, plenty of testimonies of the passage “from the natural to the artificial” as he refers to his schooling (PASCOAES, 2001, p. 87). He remembers the journey to the town, in 1891, and of feeling “abstract and far away” there. To any student of the time, “Amarante was the Lycaeum” (PASCOAES, 1978, p. 69). From the window of his paternal grandfather's house he'd see how the inhabitants “were different from the peasants of Gatão!”, causing him perplexity and unease (PASCOAES, 2001, p. 86). “But the memory of my village transfigured everything”, he remembered. “There we went, heading towards highschool”, and with this plural, he took the company of his loved ones “Lucrécia, António, the viscountess, Nilo, the water lily, the old threshing floor, the stone pine…” (PASCOAES, 2001, p. 87; underlined in the original). “But they only saw me, in the narrow, stone paved street” in Amarante between classes and, seemingly alone, crosses the square where the racket of “boys and a bell” invaded everything (PASCOAES, 2001, p. 87), shattering any remaining illusions of return to nature:

In this academic, noisy milieu, I was an unlikely being. I didn't know the lessons, or how to cross my cape, neither walk through the town streets. The student took over me, like an intruder. I've never conformed with him, with that cape and cassock tailored to another body (PASCOAES, 2001, p.87).

It is with great grief upon the “end of the golden age” that Joaquim sees himself again entering the “tormented cycle of youth”: “I see at last my portrait. It's me, how sad” (PASCOAES, 2001, p. 30). That misery lived within the “sinister and funereal cape that buries in 1928 the young Pascoaes” (FRANCO, 2001, p. 30), where he lives a “downplayed, limited personality” and for that “easily appropriable” (PASCOAES, 2001, p. 88), it is actioned in a movement towards the contemplation of oneself and listening to others:

There I go on the stone paved street. The cape slides off my shoulders, a hirsute hair covers my forehead, shadowed with atavistic fears or wonders. At my ears sound these disheartening words: - He's very shy and doesn't study...

I lived oppressed and hiding in a shadow. I tore it, singing it in my verses (PASCOAES, 2001, p. 88).

The relation with the school milieu merges, in this way, into a whole that perceives the mutation of the body and transition into adulthood, the change from the rural environment to the urban environment and the transformation of the child into a secondary level student. There where the schooled element gradually merges, the subject becomes rebellious and the poet emerges. The morning routine synthesizes this slow incorporation, never wholly accomplished:

At seven in the morning, in winter, I was already before an open book and a petrol lamp which spread, through my room, a light sadder than the light of a wax candle, by the dead man's bedside. I hid my freezing hands in my pockets and my feet in a mantle. Or I'd nap and mechanically read; and all my being decomposed in boredom: greyish clouds and an empty weight in the head (PASCOAES, 2001, p. 88).

In this context, the poet in future becoming resented himself in his academic performance, obtaining average grades, and as a culmination, a negative score on the subject of Portuguese Language. Only in 1952 does he dare to describe this episode that filled him with grief, pointing out that he wasn't all that indifferent towards school. An episode in the time when he was “young and student at the Amarante Lycaeum”, when he lived still “in the Amarante of yore, in the town, as they say in São João de Gatão, a sympathetic name because it's barked and rhymes with Marão” (PASCOAES, 1978, p. 96). At the time, also the future poet “already rhymed”, “wrapped in the ante-cape of University” where he felt “strange” unto himself, “wondering beyond the clouds, composing bad verses, that a poet starts to ape the Poet he'll be tomorrow”. Remembers his status of “simple secondary level student” when he “lived in a deserted region”, where he'd only “exaggerated” his “Bedouin or camel shadow” and the “enchanted moorish lady” of his “fantasy”. “Enemy of sociability, I was concentrated in my intimacy”, confessing he had started his poetic labour (PASCOAES, 1978, p. 96). And it's in these circumstances that, dramatically, he fails in the subject of Portuguese Language, or as they said at the time in students' jargon, “he caught a fox”. He attributes that failure, essentially, to his inability to socialise, but it's more a case of an echo of the desiring father's voice at the core of what was then socially considered a family disgrace:

That shyness of yours...that shyness of yours, he repeated, grieving, my Father, when I failed the year in Portuguese Language. I was at that moment, my own image in negative. Then, it's when we are ourselves, naked from any dream or of disturbing mists of our reality. We emerge, to sunlight, as a statue in Ladaria stone, that rival of Carrara marble.

Half a century ago, 'catching a fox' was the death of a student. The parents donned rigorous mourning habits morally, as it was a soul death, worse than a physical death, because if the latter kills the body, without reaching the soul, the former kills the soul, and reaches the body.

That way, the mourning included siblings, uncles and cousins to the third degree... Even included the family animals. The cat mewed eerily, the dog howled ominously, the cow mooed, in the courtyard, as if their calf had been stolen. Even, in the shadowy rooms, mysterious, moaning shadows lingered' (PASCOAES, 1978, p. 98-9; underlined on original).

Teixeira de Pascoaes places here manifest destiny, which thus made him become a poet without remission. Before the family ‘tragedy’, “the paternal grandfather, pitiful and weakened by illness” had the merciful gesture of taking him by the hand into the maternal grandparents house, saying “kind words” to him (PASCOAES, 1978, p. 99). It was in the return to nature, in his grandparents company, the young man resuscitated from this second school death. In the first days, he recalled in 1952, he'd still feel he was a “failed student” and with that mark of identity he lived that summer in a sepulchral sadness:

I sat on one of the stone benches, encased in the space in between the two enclosed windows, that side the iron gate of the closed courtyard […]

It was a night in August. The light already obscured in shadows and the toads' song imitating the shine of the first stars, aggravated my grief, that intimate obscurity where, laughing at me, a demon hid, in the symbolic shape of a fox… […] It was the first time I felt true solitude. It was not the one of the mountain, which elevates us, or the one of the sea, which scatters us, neither the one of the desert which burns us into prophetic light: it was the solitude which in us starts and ends, and it is our own being conscious of its insignificance (PASCOAES, 1978, p. 100).

That night, in a silent epiphany, he separated, discreetly, but decisively, from the failed student's cape, to unmasked, embrace the life the village offered him:

I remained a while on that small bench by the enclosed window, immersed in crepuscular twilight, until my failed or reproved student's anguish vanished into mystical sadness, a spectral bride of sorts who still chases me today, her white veil cast in stains...

On the next day, the sun, the trees, the birds, lightened up my spirit. I'd laugh and speak to my peasant folks […] laughed, talked, breathed the pure air, drank the sun, pour down divine light, upon the world, as golden wine into a bronze cup (PASCOAES, 1978, p. 101-2).

According to the sister, only not to sadden his father, he promised to prove the teacher was wrong about him. He repeated the exam in October and obtained a grade with honours (VASCONCELOS, 1971, p. 31), but left no trace of the successful examinations. In Uma Fábula he doesn't hesitate to draw a caricature portrait of all his teachers, being the Portuguese Language teacher above all in that strange gallery:

I'm seeing the Portuguese Language class and very tall Dr. Brochado, awkward, with a traditional cape from Alentejo and huge clogs, during winter. He'd wear them, with his feet, of course, atop his teacher's table; and his long face, of tawny moustache, appeared to the students between two sentinels made of wood and Cordoba leather (PASCOAES, 1978, p. 43).

The description of the “secondary school drama” in which the teacher is omnipotent, follows, classroom after classroom, in the “stage” that was this “Dominican convent” transfigured into a secondary teaching institution, where the teachers were, in fact, liberal professionals who'd also double there as schoolmasters: Mathematics and Natural Sciences were delegated to a medical doctor, History was taught by a lawyer, Latin language by the local priest; in turn, English and French languages were taught by a lively young man “with Italian musician attitudes” and last, the “most flamboyant of all masters” was “the master in Latinity” (PASCOAES, 1978, p. 43-4). In effect, the memoirs of 1952 rather sharply describe the secondary school student's life, and even goes beyond the barriers of a “penal colony”, transforming the “deplorable pitiful student” from the Livro de Memórias into a “hopeless incarcerated, condemned to life sentence and forced labour” (FRANCO, 2001, p. 30). This reconstructs his childhood in the way of a faun: “My hunter's penchant, or wild animal, savage, giving me away in my jaws and ears; one a donkey's and the other fishlike, rebelled against the official and consecrated study. I hated the schoolbooks, but I loved Nature naturally...” (PASCOAES, 1978, p. 54). Joaquim Teixeira de Vasconcelos reacts with sublimation to the surrounding environment, with the writing of the first verses, published in 1895 - at 17 years old, when frequenting the last year of secondary school - in the book Embriões (Embryos). It was the first and last time the poet signed with his civilian name, even if it took more than twenty years to assume his full time conversion to writing, as he dramatizes in O Pobre Tolo (The Poor Fool) (PASCOAES, 1924) and relates in the 1952 memoirs (PASCOAES, 1978, p. 155-ss).

The year of 1896 is crucial in the new change of scenario and in his school trajectory. In Livro de Memórias he vaguely refers that “once the Summer months were gone”, the “canvas” of “deserted dark nights” where sprang a “river, dark, wild, deriving there below, amidst boulders” changed before his eyes to another “canvas” which presented itself “soft and sad”. As in many episodes of his life, he is more detailed in Uma Fábula. There he affirms, as mentioned previously, his secondary school disaster had a happy ending and he concluded, still that year, 'the preparatory studies', merging that episode in the glorious Summer spent in the village, with his maternal grandparents, “reading the Poets” (PASCOAES, 1978, p. 105; underlined on original). In the Autumn, he was in Coimbra as first year student, ‘caloiro’ (freshman) in the students' jargon. The first idea of the “small and praised city” is well described in the first pages of both autobiographies. But it's maybe the aged poet who's remembering in greater detail the merging of the city with the student's experience, from the moment of his arrival to the rail station, in the company of his “friend and cousin” Mário Monterroso, who frequented already as a ‘urso’ (bear, a veteran student) the Faculty of Medicine:

We arrived at the Old Station at midnight, where black capes floated about, as ominous to a freshman, as me, emerged from the pines of São João in the Lusitanian Athens [Coimbra], as Braga is the Lusitanian Rome.

We walked up the narrow and steep Rua do Loureiro, and lodged near the Arco do Bispo, in the house of our fellow citizen António Coimbra, who'd spend the Winters in the city with his surname, as ex-secretary of the University or victim to his Republican ideals […]

On the following day, in the morning, I looked out the window in my room, contemplating, from a third floor, the city's panorama. Impressed me, immediately, the limestone of buildings, smooth and the same colour as bone. I had never seen such stone besides in cemetery mausoleums. The students who walked in the street, in cape and cassock, reminded me of young priests with moustaches (PASCOAES, 1978, p. 118; underlined on original).

He narrates the first day at the university city, journeying to every important place in the school circuit: the Baixa (Downtown), the Santa Clara convent, the Fonte dos Amores. Symbolically, the waters of the river Tâmega flowed into the “poetic Mondego” (PASCOAES, 1978, p. 119), the river which passes through Coimbra. He saw a certain pacification in this landscape, which didn't cause him conflict, as he'd verify the “Tâmega and the Mondego mingled their waters” and in his own “fantasy” (PASCOAES, 1978, p.121).

In Coimbra, the only university in Portugal at the time, the school calvary becomes even more strenuous, yet despite this feeling of death and melancholy, in a way, Joaquim reunited once more with his poetic fate in the monotonousness brought by the university and urban life, to the rhythm of the lighting on and off of the lights and always to the sound of the Cabra ('the goat'), the bell that tops the Faculty of Law and punctuated the academic hours: “I'd isolate back at home to the sound of the Cabra, the most plangent bell in Portugal” (PASCOAES, 1978, p.131) and started his hour of study and contemplation:

Past the classes, I'd get in my room. I read, wrote, or perched myself at the window, above the Rua do Cabido (Cabido Street), narrow and steep, which ends at the Largo da Sé Velha (Se Velha Square), a mire of dead shadows, in the moonlight. Ahead, whitewashed wall, where a miserable lamp sheds pale stains of melancholy, in black hours.

In those nights of King Dinis and my youth, the street lighting agreed with its tenebrous antiquity. There was a spectral pact between the street lamps and the shadows of the dead ages (PASCOAES, 2001, p. 111).

The city's public lighting was, however, not enough to arouse the spirit of Bacchus, which instead moved under the command of lunar light:

When it was moonlight, the souls descended into Purgatory, and the old town dreamed aloud a dream of weeping guitars and flying songs...

But that nocturnal life was concentrated in the Downtown, through a modernised street. The students walked by, bathed in the clarity from the shop windows. High reliefs, in succession along a frieze. In succession, in animated and characteristic groups (PASCOAES, 2001, p. 111; underlined on original).

The routines were the same, not so as for his nights. He sighed no more for the hills, instead he'd chat at the taverns and student circles who were, as him, lovers of poetry (PASCOAES, 2001, p. 114-ss). Often, “after the University” he'd go with his friends to some of the coffee shops in Coimbra, the Lusitano and “Marques Pinto's”, after which they'd go for their meals. The taverns of Julião das Iscas and of ‘Aunt’ Joaquina are noted amidst the well remembered shops (PASCOAES, 1978, p. 150). As he unveils further, describing at the end of his life “I was a companion to Bohemia, some evenings, until the break of dawn, that livid scarecrow, or the Dawn, still defunct but yet moving towards life. Then Bohemia disappeared, gone in a golden veil, towards the Olympus” (PASCOAES, 1978, p. 136).

“Wasn't it the student's life, in Coimbra, a succession of amazing transfigurations?” (PASCOAES, 1978, p. 152) - thus he'd mark the return back home at the break of dawn past one more episode of inebriated life. Despite the animations to which he surely indulged through this “Catholic-Pagan” period to which he allegedly survived, insists in how monotonous the days were, the much needed dedication to study, and the melancholy brought by those. As a result of this melange, the poet again manifests:

At the light of a petrol lamp I'd surrender into sad poetic meditation, evocations of ghosts. I lived amidst them, and I still do. When I die, I won't estrange the Other World... From this fantastic company, resulted my first book of verses, or rather, poetry (PASCOAES, 1978, p. 132).

It's the book Sempre (Forever), personally published by the nowadays mythical publisher França Amado and printed in 1898 (PASCOAES, 1898b). Having sent a copy to Guerra Junqueiro, who he greatly admired both poetically and politically, and soon after receiving his letter of encouragement, Joaquim de Vasconcelos considered himself legitimised. In that missive, unreleased until 1978, and that the poet of Amarante wished it would illustrate his memoirs, Junqueiro is blunt in his evaluation of the poetic genius:

My friend is naturally a poet. He feels the ideal, the love, the grief, the mercy, the enigma of things, the infinite mystery. […] In the essence, the form is chaotic, entangled, embryonic. Besides, my friend is a child; and his verses are yet plenty with smiling childishnesses and puerile tenderness. What sublime flashes, every so often! […] Concluding: your book is an infantile work of art, letting perceive, through lightning strikes, a great predestined poet (JUNQUEIRO quoted by PASCOAES, 1978, p. 132-4).

Naturally, to Pascoaes, the judgement of the author of A Musa em Férias (The Muse on Vacation), a book still successful amidst the Portuguese intellectuals since its publishing in 1879, would be, in the 1952 narrative, the start point to his affirmation as poet. Meanwhile he had also published Belo (Beautiful ) in two parts (PASCOAES, 1896-1897) and in the same year of the verses compilation much appreciated by Guerra Junqueiro, also published À Minha Alma (To My Soul) (PASCOAES, 1898), works he leaves unconsidered in his memoirs. Still in the Coimbra period he published Terra Proibida (Forbidden Land) (PASCOAES, 1899) and integrated the students' compilation Cantigas para o Fado e para as “fogueiras” de São João (GIL; VIEIRA, 1899).

Through his own quill, Teixeira de Pascoaes moves away from the sad student in Amarante, transfiguring into the young heir who, in Coimbra, obtains a degree that legitimates his knowledge and a social status of obvious destiny. Also as an economically comfortable heir, he can afford the luxury to refuse the “strict framing” of the “school learning”. That socio-economic capital merged into an already plentiful cultural capital, permitted to the poet of Amarante, deny any investment that obliged him to give in to nostalgia, living in an “atmosphere of urgency and competition that imposes docility”. He rather kept his interest in the typical disinterest of the elites, in which, to embrace the “student life”, he naturally chose to claim “the tradition of Bohemian life”, which “implies much less discipline and rules, even in the time consecrated to work” (BOURDIEU, 2008, p. 38). The juvenile Pascoaes, in the Coimbra scenes, incarnates no more a survival mode as in the secondary school in Amarante, now he's the protagonist of a form of living.

The very poetic memoirs dilute the weight of the life as a student in the classroom environment. In fact, he tells us only little about that. Uma Fábula only presents the first day of classes, where the first impression is bound to the initiatory rituals - the so-called academical ‘praxe’ ('the praxis') - and the relation with his peers:

The first class! Twenty minutes to go, before the terrible hour, ten in the morning! The earthquake-like racket of the Porta Férra could be heard at Rua do Cabido. I wanted to lunch, but the steak and two fried eggs were stuck in my throat. Oh those Coimbra steaks, made with really tough meat, the ones from Nau Catrineta, between two very big and open eyes, saturated with jaundice! My veteran pals overlooked me ironically, from the side, mocked my freshman's anguish. […]

Mário Monterroso took me over to the entrance amidst that hell, where all the demons in Portugal were gathered. The black winged multitude agitated in a deafening racket, showing a thousand fire-grinning grimaces and screaming fiery blasts at the ears of the newbies who'd pass the Pórtico Tartárico, protected by the […] multi-coloured ribbons. After, in the garden and in the cloisters of the cyclopean science convent, those devilish grimaces only threw at me harmless jokes, devoid of natural grace (PASCOAES, 1978, p.124-5).

Only past this first impact, the teacher comes into perspective: “at the Cátedra: a kind of Superstudent, the student rendered divine, or in major letters, who stood to the other students, as the Apis bull in Egypt, to a bunch of newbies dressed in black” (PASCOAES, 1978, p. 125). Referring then to the first episode in the classroom which stood as the most relevant:

The first bull who challenged, from up there above, in his pulpit, my newbie's shyness, was a tall, weathered scarecrow, almost identical to Pedro Penedo, only lacking the flamboyant, or historical value, yet anatomically curious - a hyperbolic skeleton who'd fall apart, while walking, under the black silk cassock and cape. Of sinister indole, most of the sounds emitted by his scrawny mouth were clumsily uttered… I only perceived he'd often mention Coelho da Rocha and a certain José Júlio, killed in a duel, to whom he'd call that great son of a... Fatherland! Such a phrase, reticently, provoked in the students a tremendous quiet laughter or muffled within, in a truly super-human effort (PASCOAES, 1978, p. 125-126).

The Law course emerges almost as a mere reason for life in Coimbra, in an obvious refusal of its real weight. The juridical formation and the life in Coimbra, however depressing, were fruitful to the writing of verses and the published works which in no way owe to his university formation, or only by contrast, but to the circle of friends who'd share his writing practices. To the poet who emerged in Teixeira de Pascoaes, the university experience was made, as mentioned, essentially through two acculturation devices: the first, more obvious and less important in the author's perspective, the learning process of an erudite culture, paired to the Law course: the second, further developed in all his autobiographical notes, the sociability and intimacy with his peers, with whom he shared the most consequent poetic experiments.

Comparing the notes he left on secondary and university learning, it's easily verified that the transition between the young, maudlin poet and the poet ever more confident in his skills, happens in this transition between learning grades. There's no doubt that Joaquim de Vasconcelos, when moving into the urban and academic environment, arrived to a far more homogeneous space, where he found people less differentiated and ever more socially alike (Ó, 2019). We'd say the space of possibilities opened to this experimentalist, and literary life of Bohemian tendency, always overshadowed by the need to study and obtain a degree in Law. In both cases, literature and jurisprudence, the acquisition of legitimate and legitimised cultural capital was successful, allowing a global reconfiguring of the symbolic capital, which supported the return to his home town as Dr. Joaquim Teixeira de Vasconcelos, a man of law and good costumes, albeit a little eccentric. The heir was accomplishing his destiny, twofold.

Sociability

Teixeira de Pascoaes's autobiographical work renders him a solitary person, who, besides the moments in which he was torn from his mountain range for reasons of study and work, lived almost all his adult life isolated at the Solar de Pascoaes (the Pascoaes family manor house) in São João de Gatão, for a period of four decades, from 1913 until his death in 1952.

In 1901 his Law course concludes in the University, and he starts working in law. He begins by basing himself in Amarante:

Oh, scenes of Coimbra, revived in Amarante! […] But as present, and living, in Amarante, I've opened my account as a lawyer, to justify my Bachelors title... that doctor who grabbed himself, furious, as if he were a nickname, to my name Joaquim, the same as my godfather and maternal grandfather (1978, p. 155).

Uma Fábula contrasts this period, again solitary, with the time of life at the University, in that it was permitted to embrace Bohemia. He had made strong bonds which acquainted him with the Azores archipelago, in a journey taken with a friend from Coimbra, in 1899. Alone again, the landscape took him towards other desires:

The town's panorama is surrounded by knolls and pines, in which from far away, is reflected the sadness of the Marão. And came within, into my soul, Jurisprudence, fighting, in the name of Poetry... A duel between Dias Ferreira of the Code and the Luís de Camões of the Lusíadas. Thus I hesitated between a code and a poem. In favour of the Code was the public opinion, and I was in favour of the Lusíadas, albeit living in a provincial environment, stagnated and monotonous […]. Quotidian life is monotony, blandness, boredom. But it's in that colourless, tasteless, scentless state that we got the sensation of time or of existence. We bear the faked life, but the real life... what a nightmare! Would life have a justification? But our duty is to justify it, that's why we live; and we're the author of our days (PASCOAES, 1978, p. 157-158).

And as his lawyer career moved towards consolidation, his poet career was also gaining depth. He will submit to print the second issue of Sempre (PASCOAES, 1902), and the first of Jesus e Pã (Jesus and Pan) (PASCOAES, 1903). His enthusiasm was, in the meantime, interrupted with the bitter academic experience of his brother António, the following in the family's hierarchy and forever marked the relation of Pascoaes with academia. If the poet claimed the dis-symmetry between “the cultured ethos fostered by the family and the strictly school related” with obvious success in the short and long run (PAZ, 2017, p. 153), yet his younger brother, having failed for the second time in a subject, comitted suicide in a public act in the very entrance hall of the Coimbra University in the year of 1903 (PASCOAES, 2001, p. 137). In the following year, Para a Luz (Towards Light) (PASCOAES, 1904) is issued and in the meantime his political shift occurs, leaving behind his Republican convictions.

Two more years passed until the new poem book, Vida Etérea (Ethereal Life), published by França Amado (PASCOAES, 1906), was brought into circulation. Meanwhile, João de Teixeira de Vasconcelos, still actively working, occupied the role of Judge at the Court of Appeals, and the fruitful carrear of Joaquim de Vasconcelos, is affected by a change of route: the lawyer, now more experienced, sets his business in the city of Porto, to where he transfers his residence. This change which seemed to strengthen jurisprudence, forced the literate to write only in his own time, again in touch with people with similar interests. Sombras (Shadows) (PASCOAES, 1907) is published, a book in the sequence of which, it is reported that Pascoaes was personally visited by Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936).

Still in Porto and in an acute socialisation phase, he meets Leonor Dagge, an Englishwoman who was visiting the country. He relates having seen her first on a street tramway, becoming from then on his muse, inspiring Senhora da Noite (Lady of the Night) (PASCOAES, 1909). Uma Fábula narrates the nearly one month's journey to London, in the company of a friend, and his marriage proposal refused, an issue patent in the poems written in the company of Carlyle and Byron (PASCOAES, 1925). According to the mode in which he describes this episode, again all the happenings concur towards the tragic inevitability of the poetic destiny.

Following love's defeat, he takes the role of substitute Judge and returns to Amarante. He becomes an extremely interventionist voice in Portuguese society, assuming the literary journal A Águia (The Eagle) until 1917 (founded in 1910) and founding the Renascença Portuguesa (Portuguese Renaissance) society, who'd publish the homonymous organ, and from where would emerge the poetic movement of Saudosismo, brand mark of Teixeira de Pascoaes. During this period, the first book of reference is published, Marânus (PASCOAES, 1911). Various other issues from Renascença Portuguesa follow, where the diversity of genres is present, with the poetry of Regresso ao Paraíso (Return to Paradise) (1912) and of Elegias (Elegies) (1912), the drama of O Doido e a Morte (The Mad Man and Death) (1913) and the interventional essay, O Espírito Lusitano e o Saudosismo (The Lusitanian Spirit and Saudosismo) (1912).

How diffuse his literary vein is leaves no margin to doubts, and in 1914, Mr. Dr. Judge Joaquim Teixeira de Vasconcelos abandons the toga and assumes himself as a poet. In the almost forty years following this change of decision, Teixeira de Pascoaes guaranteed unto himself an aura of mystery, with a solitary, ascetic reputation. In this sense, he fully assumes the authorship of his own life, at least in the literary field, reconverting what would be a cultural capital (including from school), social and economic, typical of his social extraction, towards its capitalization into a symbolic power. Joaquim Teixeira de Vasconcelos ceased to represent an elite of roles and functions that, within that group of origin, were common, and started being someone unique and unison in society and in the Portuguese cultural field, Pascoaes the poet.

Uma Fábula is like a complement to Livro de Memórias, and the subtitle reveals very well how meaning is brought to his life by the tension between jurisprudence and poetry, much like the gradual inner conflict since the times in Coimbra. The structure of this second autobiography is even more evident than the former, making from life a complete reason of being towards the literary future becoming and completely excluding all evidence of a literate schooling.

We could say that, while being the author of his own life, Teixeira de Pascoaes inscribed himself in his own self-dramatisation and his capabilities and competences. As it was in his times, he made from his sociability, the degrees and the family heritage, mere ornaments of a destiny's force majeure. With this step forward, he inscribed himself as a genius, a technology being vivified since the ends of the 19th century and further explained the artistic future becoming.

In reality, the decision to leave his career as a judge and start his career as full time writer, was only materially possible due to the sound management of a personal fortune, inherited from his paternal grandparents, as he himself recognised in the end, mentioning his grandfather, the medical doctor António Pereira de Azevedo: “I owe him this economic independence, to which all souls are entitled to, and allows me to write whatever visits my head, I don't know where” (PASCOAES, 1978, p. 69).

Even more important than this social and economic support his family provided him, was the reduced but solid circle of friends. In fact, contrary to what the legend shows, the writer did not live in profound isolation. Firstly, he lived in a manor house, with the constant or intermittent presence of relatives and servants. Besides, even when he had lived in Gatão, Pascoaes broke off the intellectual solitude with journeys throughout the country and abroad. Many people visited him. His sister relates that, along with the death of the father, after 1922, he chose to spend the Winters in Lisbon, lodged at a hotel where he'd exchange impressions with other writers and artists. The partnership with Raul Brandão was the most remarked and relevant in his career (VASCONCELOS, 1971, p. 139). Brandão himself spent long work periods - we'd name them nowadays “creative writing residencies” - at the Casa de Pascoaes. Last, the academics, students and literati who rushed - and still rush, nowadays! - to get to know Pascoaes, Gatão, Amarante, and every scenario where the work of the Poet of Saudade was created, would halt him from being continuously alone. Solitary, maybe within himself, but not objectively.

In conclusion: denial and sublimation in the space of possibilities

In his autobiographical work, Joaquim Pereira Teixeira de Vasconcelos cast away his toga of lawyer then judge, to dress himself with a poet's soul, a social function in which many times he'd present himself dressed as if he was a simple gardener at the Solar de Pascoaes. In the analysis carried through his complete work, with special emphasis on Livro de Memórias of 1928 and Uma Fábula: O Advogado e o Poeta, text signed on the 5th of October 1952, we verify that a fundamental part of his array of argumentations worked to justify himself in life as a writer, insisting in the thesis of a destiny and a massive inevitability, conditions which made him akin to genius. He also identified many support factors of a literary career that, once more, the author downplays: a family of erudite habits, cultural, economic and social cachet; a formal education with some dismay, but successful after all, with which he obtained a socially recognised role, well paid and in which it would be possible, in parallel, to move forwards towards writing; a limited sociability, but intense, where can be counted, since his youth, habits of artistic experimentation.

But it is beyond doubt, the downplaying of the school journey that marks deeper this gesture of denial and sublimation, allowing to reconstruct destiny through the tension between “his poetic self-formation versus the schooling's deformation” (PAZ, 2017, p. 148). Two key moments of his intimate life emerge, in this poetic destiny, the moment when he was rejected in love and, soon after, when he definitively abandoned the courtrooms. Alike any other artist, Pascoaes, surviving the greatest twists of fate, makes a destiny out of choice; it's that destiny (not chosen) that confirms his alikeness to the literary genre. Many references and elements apprehended in school were incorporated, however only inspiration is mentioned. As an example, his mode of writing was profoundly disciplinary and included an obsessive revision of the texts, which he frequently refers in his letters. Even then, in the autobiography he describes writing as inspiration, to the point the author seems to be formed ex nihilo: “I'd read, meditated, strolled through the fields or followed, through the far off road, to the benches at Tardinhade” (PASCOAES, 2001, p. 108).

Teixeira de Pascoaes, in his public apparition, mostly through his autobiography, positions himself as a genius, whose prodigious childhood, exceptional character and tragic destiny could only leave him an open pathway. Thus he crossed the slender field of the possibilities which he too helped to widen, as his decisive positions in favour of writing became more and more consequent. Far from downplaying himself in the literary field, he assumes himself as poet, and accepts to be a sage, confirms himself, in his eccentricity and autonomous journey, as what he designs as universal man: “Who isn't a poet of a sage, or sage and poet, at the same time? Are there not flying fish?” (PASCOAES, 1937, p. 175).

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1English version by Ana Reis. E-mail: a.cord.reis@protonmail.com. This work is funded by FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, within the scope of the UIDEF - Unidade de Investigação e Desenvolvimento em Educação e Formação. Reference UIDB/04107/2020.

2“Saudade” is an untranslatable word about a melancholic feeling of missing someone or something that may or may not exist, with no English equivalent.

3Only women considered exceptional frequented superior and technical studies, such as Domitila de Carvalho, the first Portuguese woman in University, who entered the University of Coimbra in 1891, where she concluded the courses of Mathematics (1894), Philosophy (1895) and Medicine (1904), or Carolina Beatriz Ângelo, who completed her course at the Lisbon Medico-Cirurgical School in 1902 (VAQUINHAS, 2018).

Received: June 23, 2021; Accepted: September 03, 2021

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