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| BRAZIL THE MAKING OF A NOVEL
©2007-2009 Errol Lincoln Uys
The Outline | The Research | The Journey I, II, III |The Writing
The Writing
In his review of Brazil, Professor Wilson Martins compares my novel with the works of major Brazilian authors including Jorge Amado, João Ubaldo Ribeiro, José de Alencar, and asks what “mysterious and complex circumstances” allowed a foreigner to overcome obstacles Brazilian writers had barely managed to confront: “Uys is the first with the talent and sympathy to understand Brazil as an imaginary creation, coherent in its apparent incoherencies, organic in its historic development, complimentary in its contradictions and antagonisms, unitary in its differences and obscurely answering to the 'will of being a nation.'”
After a year on the move in Portugal and Brazil, I returned to the United States to begin writing. In November 1981, I made a dismal entry in the back of my Brazil travel journal:
Another entry, two weeks later:
Then, a third and final entry:
In early March, my outline and three chapters with the story of Aruanã, the Tupiniquin, went to John Cushman, my New York agent. The following month, Herman Gollob of Simon and Schuster bought Brazil with an advance of $45,000, a respectable sum for a first-time novelist. Herman edited the works of James Clavell (Shogun, Tai-Pan) and was editorial director of the Literary Guild book-club which bought The Covenant eighteen months earlier. No stranger to the epic novel, even Herman couldn't have imagined the stupendous voyage we would take together on the river sea and across the sertão of Brazil!
I made this note when I finished the final typed draft of Brazil: 2454 manuscript pages with 736,200 words!
Five years after beginning work on the novel, Herman and I sat down to make the deep cuts needed to trim the book to the one thousand pages published in the First Edition. (In 2000, I made further edits for the New Revised Edition, while adding an Afterword bringing the story up to April 2000 when Brazil held its quincentennial celebrations.)
The road to the three-quarter of a million words was as challenging as the indomitable path that carried my bandeirante Amador Flôres da Silva and his artist companion, Segge Proot, pupil of Rembrandt van Rijn, on their mighty journey through the Brazilian wilderness in quest of El Dorado.
I followed one simple routine from my days with James Michener. I was at my desk and working by eight-thirty every morning and kept at it until six in the evenings, nine hours a day, six days a week. My office was ten feet from the Atlantic in the small Massachusetts harbor town of Scituate.
I had few visitors who didn't remark on how inspiring I must find the ocean view, but in reality my desk faced away from the sea. Sometimes though, the scene burst upon my imagination as when Hurricane Gloria slammed the New England coast and tore away at the house sending a wall of water cascading past the windows. Definitely, an inspiration:
From the outset, I was conscious of a presumptuousness in seeking the past of a people to whom I was a stranger. I wanted to do justice to Brazil's epic history in a novel that was neither simplistic nor intellectually dishonest in catering to outsiders' fantasies about Brazil. So, although I had my outline and research from my trip and had read widely, with each new section of the book I looked at the subject with totally fresh eyes and in much more depth.
Three examples of this preliminary work follow, all done in a day before personal computers simplified such note-taking, sorting and filing:
Example 1
Nicolau Cavalcanti, captain of the São Gabriel, navigator and trader in Portuguese India, first of Cavalcanti line to settle in Pernambuco, Brazil, covering period 1510-1545.
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Example 2
Inácio Cavalcanti, padre, Society of Jesus, with Nobrega to Salvador, Bahia, then to uncle Nicolau, Olinda, with degredado Affonso Ribeira, Indian village of Tiberica, the aldeia, the expulsion, 1541-1575
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Example 3
Amador Flôres da Silva, bandeirante, raids against Jesuits of Paraguay, Pernambuco, Guarapes, quilombo, Ganga Zumba, Joanna Cavalcanti, Segge Proot, Madeira-Mamore, Amazon, Emerald Mountain, 1628-1678
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Alongside my expanded plotting, I focused on specific reading for each character's background, settings and action. With Nicolau, for instance, these areas included Brazil prior to formal settlement, Portugal, Goa and Africa. One of the backgrounders for Amador Flôres da Silva dealt with the “sixty years captivity” of Portugal by Spain, which had a profound affect on the thinking of the bandeirantes and their territorial drives. The following are typical of the notes I kept as I read my way into these subjects.
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The upshot of this prodigious work was that when I sat down to write a section, I'd looked at my subject from every angle. Much of what I needed was locked into memory. With little call to go back to my reference works, I could concentrate on telling the story, which after all was the essence of the novel.
I wrote the original manuscript in long-hand. “Hieroglyphics,” people have called the pages I turned out, for good reason as these examples show. I fell into the habit of this microscopic penmanship with a particular brand of roller pen (BIC, black-ink, medium.) Not only this but I kept track of the pens I used over four years! 154! A trivial amusement as I wrote my way through twenty-two huge blocks of narrative, the smallest fifty one manuscript pages, the largest almost three hundred pages. The latter covered the Paraguayan War and took six months to write, a totally draining experience for the horror I encountered in this forgotten tragedy that saw nine of every ten Paraguayan males, adult and child, slain on the battlefield, the greatest war between nations in the Americas.
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Written on tablet-size blocks of newsprint, I wrote two to three of these pages each day. Another daily habit was to begin each day's writing period by numbering my pages 1, 2, rarely 3, making a potential nightmare for anyone seeking to collate the manuscript.
I would finish around five in the afternoon,then type up these handwritten pages. Soon after beginning to write, I bought a sturdy 1930s Royal typewriter on a yard sale for $1, a formidable machine heavy as iron and loud as a cannon. Every afternoon, I typed my second draft on this beloved monster pounding the keys so that the entire house shook.
I re-typed my edited second draft for submission to Herman Gollob at Simon and Schuster. This draft was sent in eight stages comprising the Six Books, Prologue and Epilogue that make up Brazil.
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The indefatigable Gollob armed himself with black and blue pencil and cut deeply to produce the fourth draft. When the final deadline approached, we still needed to drop four hundred or so pages. We did these final cuts together over a two week period at Scituate. At last, the fifth and final draft went to the printer for proofing:
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Maps, family trees, covers, interior design, all had to be done before that magical moment when I held the first copy of Brazil in my hands and my monumental journey was complete. Two decades later I still pick up my epic and open any page with a sense of wonder and joy at the road traveled with Brazil and its people.
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