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Ferreira de Castro’s work, translated into a score of languages, is still not well known in its entirety. In England, it’s scarcely known at all. Out of over twenty volumes published, he retained, when his Complete Works appeared a few years ago, only eight titles, twelve volumes in all. From modesty, or perhaps from pride, Ferreira suppressed whatever he did not consider absolutely successful; his first novels, many stories and nouvelles, his plays and his journalistic work, all far from being devoid of interest. His friends and his publisher argued in vain, he refused to give way. The fate of Complete Works is to be incomplete. And Ferreira’s are not the only example of this. At least, in his case, the discarding was done voluntarily.

     Meanwhile we must rest content with what he has seen fit to offer us: five travel books, Pequenos Mundos (two volumes) and A Volta do Mundo (three large volumes), and seven novels, Emigrantes, A Selva, Eternidade, Terra Fria, A là e a Nève, A Curva de Estrada, La Mission. Not an inconsiderable contribution, after all. And any one of these books is enough to put its author in the first rank: A Selva, for example, must rank with Hardy’s Jude the Obscure or possibly even with Dostoyevsky’s From the House of the Dead. A là e a Nève is even more flawless and without parallel in any language.

     But about the author:

     Born poor, having lost his father very young, Ferreira de Castro can scarcely be said to have had any real childhood at all; when he was twelve his mother, misled by fallacious promises, allowed him to embark from Portugal on an emigrant ship bound for Brazil, where a so-called protector awaited him.

     The boy made the journey in the ship’s hold amidst a crowd of emigrants; a difficult and painful journey that seemed interminable. And when at last he stood before his protector, the latter sent him to work in a gang tapping for rubber in the virgin forest of the Amazon.

     For four years, from twelve to sixteen, de Castro had to live in the damp, reptilean forest, with its tangled apocalyptic scenery. He was exposed to the worst kinds of cynicism, promiscuity and violence, utterly alone, mentally, a child in the midst of adults, a lost child among a crowd of lost men. Somehow he made his solitude habitable; by some miracle he held out.

     He held out because he wanted to live; he read every printed paper he could lay hands on, in whatever state it might be. This, alone, he has recalled, enabled him to bear those appalling, helpless and uncomprehendingly condemned years.

     These scraps of newspaper, these books were, moreover, not all bad, just as the men who surrounded hum were not all human derelicts. There were amongst them certain freedom-loving spirits who had been misled by the mirage of adventure, impelled by the illusions of their imagination. They had been tricked but, unwilling to give up, they reacted by sending for works on social philosophy from their own countries, and thus remained in contact with the old world they had left and with the ideas and hopes of a better world to which they clung.

     It was, of course, to these experiences that we owe two of his masterpieces, A Selva and Emigrantes.

     After a spell of office work, recovering from a chronic liver disease contracted on the Amazon, Ferreira managed to escape. Prematurely adult, he became a hungry, homeless wanderer through the vast tropical forests of Brazil.

     There was a brief period on a cargo boat, but for the most part his life was spent in exhausting treks towards freedom, upheld solely by the hope of one day going home.

     All this time, his one ambition was to be a writer. His first break came when he was taken on by a young writers’ journal at Belem; the next step was the creating of his own periodical, Portugal, in which he published his first stories. These were years of impatient waiting, relieved by occasional brief moments of happiness. Nostalgia for his native soil haunted him. At last, overcome by saudade — an untranslatable obsessive hope — he decided to return home. He had no illusions as to the struggle he would have to earn his living there. Anything, even the dreary round of regular reporting, was better than being a seringuero. But writing, for Ferreira de Castro, did not mean ‘living by one’s pen’, it meant expressing oneself.

     Journalism brought him only the means of living, not a reason for living. And the young de Castro was conscious of having something to say that nobody had said, or could possibly have said, before him.

     He launched a small review with the modest title The Hour, but failed to interest any publisher. Page by page he got it printed, paying for the work as he saved up the money. Then he published his first book, But . . . , which went completely unnoticed. A little later he produced Eager Flesh, which attracted some attention. People slowly began to take notice of this young writer with his unconventional views, and the works that followed, Easy Success, Black Blood, The Mouth of the Sphinx, The Metatmorphosis, won him, year by year, an increasing circle of readers. By 1924 he had become one of the best-known writers in Portugal. He next published Death Redeemed, some stories, Paths of Lyricism and Love, The Pilgrim of the New World, The Flight in Darkness, The House with Gilt Furniture, each one disconcertingly different from its predecessor. Then, in 1928, the publication of Emigrants carried his name beyond the frontiers of his own country. With this novel there began the series of great works which were to win him world recognition, The Storm, Eternity, Cold Earth, and Virgin Forest, which was translated into fifteen languages simultaneously.

     Besides his fiction, Ferreira de Castro had published travel books under the title Little Worlds. These were vivid impressions of Andorra, Rhodes, Malta, Majorca, Monaco, Corsica, Egypt, Palestine, Carthage, Pompei, Madeira and the Azores, and Ireland. The royalties from these books enabled him and his wife to travel round the world.

     They visited Africa, Europe, Oceania and Asia. It was in Japan, in 1939, that the threat of war decided de Castro to return to Portugal so as not to be condemned to a possibly indefinite exile. He brought back from his travels over several years a multitude of notes and documents, thousands of photographs and packets of soil from every continent.

     Home again, Ferreira set to work on his great book, A Volta do Mundo, which appeared at first in illustrated instalments. Its success was so great that a new, bound edition of this monumental work was undertaken. This sold so well that expenses and borrowings were easily covered, though financial crises and devaluation soon followed.

     So much for the mere facts. If Nietzsche’s phrase ‘to write with one’s blood’ is true of anyone, it is of Ferreira de Castro. Each of his novels is evidence of this.

     Virgin Forest, for example, the testimony of a man escaped from hell, is one of the most moving frescoes in contemporary literature. Yet it is utterly lacking in fine phrases, in the romanticism which the subject might seem to invite. Its simplicity is astonishing. Blaise Cendrars, who translated it into French, wrote in his preface:

     ‘It is its profound humanity, its truthfulness in the reporting of details of experience, its observation, its acute and unvarnished account of the life of the poor seringueros (rubber extractors); a total absence of commentary which lets the facts affect the reader directly, and an authenticity of speech so scrupulous that the least scrap of dialogue between these simple and primitive coloured people lost in the depths of the forest is touching and convincing.’

     These lines of Cendrars’ can be applied to all Ferreira’s books. Whether Ferreira is describing a rural drama in the curious setting of a remote hamlet (Cold Earth) or the odyssey of an emigrant who has made a mess of his life (Emigrants), or the life of shepherds and the painful existence of workmen in Portugal (A là e a Nève) or crises of conscience, whether in a politician (The Turn of the Road) or a religious community (The Mission), his novels are all taken direct from life, and being the bitter (though not sour) fruits of personal experience, they have an unmistakable authenticity. In his Portuguese and Brazilian novels his aim is to interpret the psychology of simple people, which he is supremely well qualified to do, knowing from close contact and from his own experience the whole range of human poverty and distress.

     In The Turn of the Road, in Eternity, in The Mission, he displays almost terrifying psychological power; and whether he is describing the luxuriance of the tropical forest, work on a plantation or the daily routine of humble heroes oppressed by the burden of fate and superstition, or the exile’s haunting dream of home, or the excitement of street scenes, the promiscuous herd of human cattle in a ship’s hold or toilers in a spinning-mill, the lonely life of shepherds or the anguish of men preyed upon by doubts, he allows the facts to speak for themselves. De Castro never embroiders. He goes straight ahead.

     Few writers have a more sober art. In Virgin Forest, darkest of epics yet shot through with quivering light, he concentrates all he has to say about the extraordinary fauna inhabiting the jungle in a couple of pages.

     There are no purple patches, no tirades. Statements of fact, glimpses, and the whole life of this colony of banished men is exposed in its most cruel truthfulness. Here is the forest vibrating with its millions of cries and its sinister noises, the Amazon and its tributaries with their dangerous risings and fallings, the whole fantastic setting where the wretched dwellers in that nightmare country are doomed to die from their physical hardships if they escape the stings of poisonous reptiles or plants or the attacks of raiding Indians. For them there is no possibility of leaving their hell; they are bound there by the debts they have incurred — the expenses of their journey, equipment, food and clothing. The fifteen chapters of this novel describe the cycle of this green inferno. A different inferno from Dante’s, for the doomed souls are not sent here to expiate their crimes but through the sheer misfortune of being poor, from which they had hoped to free themselves by a few years of forced labour.

     Emigrants shows how these convicts are brought towards the mirage. Ferreira describes one of these humble peasants, Manoel de Bouca, who, obsessed by the dream of a happier future, leaves his home and family. He hopes to return to them soon, a rich man, and he goes off with hundreds like him towards Brazil, in a boat where they are herded together like cattle.

     Disappointments await them as soon as they arrive. After various misfortunes, Manoel gets work on a coffee plantation in the State of Sao Paolo, from which, many years later, during General Isidoro’s revolution, he manages to escape after robbing a victim. When he gets home again he finds himself worse off than before, since the man who had enticed him away had stolen his house. With Ferreira we do not follow the story like a film, we take part with Manoel and his comrades of all nations and languages in the drama of their distress.

     In a straightforward style, based on rigorously accurate observation and on situations obviously lived through by the narrator, de Castro presents a triple picture of the life of emigrants, a study of the problem of emigration, and an analysis of the causes of emigration.

     He indicts not so much the American countries that receive these unfortunates as the countries of Europe that reduce them to a situation from which exile seems the only way out. He is not propounding a thesis but stating incontestable facts when he says: ‘These men go off to try their luck because they are starving, or because they have reached the conviction that in the world where they live only the rich man is entitled to happiness. In these particular circumstances they are moreover deceived by other men who take advantage of them in their own countries, by making them believe that such as they are, rough and illiterate, they will find fabulous wealth in exile. So they go off fascinated by the mirage.’

     Certain books are like actions; Emigrants is one of these.

     Cold Earth, an atmospheric, unsentimental novel about Portugal, describes the humble life of a mountain village in the arid region where the author was born. In A là e a Nève, again set in modern Portugal, de Castro depicts the complex psychology of the Lusitanian peasant, dreamy and imaginative, patient and, in the long run, resigned, though retaining a hidden spark of hope under the ashes. Through the romantic story of Horacio and Idalina the soul of the people is displayed in two complementary parts, pastoral and industrial, like the two leaves of a diptych. The one, with its shepherds at work in mountain meadows, is romantic and dramatic; the other, a world of spinning-mills, poverty and early death, is harsh and realistic. No one since Zola has described these things with such detail or with so haunting a poetic intensity.

     The Turn of the Road is an altogether different study in social psychology. Investigating the conflict in the mind of a political militant on the point of betraying his past, de Castro makes concrete the psychology of the renegade. The novel happens to take place in Spain, but this is merely incidental.

     Don Alvaro Soriano, a great Madrid lawyer, one of the leaders of the Socialist Party, has grown old amid political struggle and has seen ideas and events develop differently from what he had foreseen. The crisis is still latent, but an insidious Press report announcing Soriano’s desire to leave his party brings it to a head. This piece of news, put out as a feeler, in itself comes to suggest that Soriano is no longer the accepted leader. Some of his colleagues are outstanding men who have attracted attention by their initiative. One of these, Zornoza, had supplanted Soriano as leader of the left-wing of the movement, and the place Soriano thought his due has been taken by his rival. From a discussion of social action and ideas, the emphasis shifts to the simply personal: is he to go or to stay?

     Having let himself be outwitted, Soriano is now subjected to criticisms and accused of being lukewarm in his convictions. He himself deplores and disapproves of certain methods, and sees in them a violation of Socialist doctrine. He is not a tired man, and does not want to renounce action. He has sometimes won the approval of his opponents rather than that of his own side, and has unwillingly felt flattered by this. His former adversaries seem to welcome him, and he might start a fresh, brilliant career if he went over to them. .

     The Press cutting has set off the drama, and Ferreira de Castro enables us to experience it in swift, classically-conceived sequences. (The novel had started life as a play, whence perhaps the rapidity of its action.)

     As soon as the news is known, the interest of the whole country is aroused. Is Soriano going to deny the rumour, or will he accept the indiscreet insinuation and announce his adherence to the National Party? In his immediate circle, his sister and one of his sons are active supporters of the Nationalists; they want him to abandon the revolutionary ideas which they detest. But all Don Alvaro’s past is bound up with socialism. Memories of his militant life flood into his mind and he cannot brush them aside as he would like. Yet will these images be strong enough to counterbalance the temptation, to this disappointed man, of securing once again a front-rank position? Soriano is meanwhile afraid that he may only be accepted as an outsider in the party he thinks of joining.

     Soriano cannot make up his mind to deny the Press report, though he is subjected to pressure on every side. The Socialists begin to show irritation and to criticize the future deserter. His sister and his young son try to press him to a decision. An old militant, Pepe Martinez, comes to dissuade him from making what he thinks to be a mistake, then his other son, who has heard the news from the other side of the country and who does not take the kindly view of Soriano’s old comrade, upbraids him angrily, reproaching him with treachery. Soriano listens and argues but does not give way to his antagonists’ reasons. Messages come from the leader of the National Party, but Soriano keeps a cool head and does not commit himself to joining it. Discussions begin again between the elder son, the father and the old friend. These pages show such concentrated power and such sweep that the reader feels himself with the three protagonists in the very heart of the drama. And de Castro keeps him in suspense until the end when, after a scandal in which Soriano’s second son is involved, so that his father has to repudiate him, the old Socialist, deeply embittered, unable to bring himself to choose the National Party, evades the issue by giving up both his profession and his deputy’s seat.

     In The Mission, a shorter book, the author studies the moral problem of a monk who, at a council meeting of his community, is forced to disturb a dozen calm and pious men and fling them into a tragic conflict which they can only resolve by dishonouring their vows.

     It happens during the war, at a time when the invader, hoping for a speedy victory, has been intensifying air raids. There is a factory in the town which seems a likely target. To escape the danger of a possible mistake, the Superior has decided to have the word Mission painted on the roof of the building. This is quite permissible and in conformity with the laws of war, and it would provide protection and guarantee the lives of the monks. A wise precaution . . . But just as the workman is about to start painting, one of these monks, Father Mounier, troubled with a sudden scruple, orders him to wait confirmation of the order, which had been given without preliminary discussion. He visits the Superior and points out to him that such an inscription on their house will draw the attention of the raiders to the factory standing a short way off. And this factory employs 400 workmen. Surely it is wrong to save a dozen lives consecrated to God by inviting attack on the factory, a building which resembles it, and in which hundreds of men, all of them with families, are working?

     Father Mounier unconsciously puts the question from a strictly human point of view, as if he had forgotten his monks’ habit; and his moral arguments meet with opposition which shifts the controversy to the religious plane. Father Brissac calls a brother to order: their duty is to save souls, not lives. The discussion is fierce and the Superior is distressed to see that each of these monks has his personal motives and that each of them is right according to his conception of the Mission. Father Mounier holds his own and rejects the subtle arguments of his opponents, who are in the majority.

     The Superior inclines to Mounier’s opinion, knowing the latter’s courage. He asks for time to think things over, and that evening he goes to visit the neighbourhood of the factory, with which he is unfamiliar, a district swarming with children. Now he understands Mounier’s point of view. A bomb dropped here would mean the destruction of the crowded population around the factory. From that moment the debate attains true tragic grandeur.

     If Ferreira’s work is exceptional, the man himself is no less so. At Lisbon, where I spent a month with him, sharing his daily life, it amused me to watch him open his paper every morning. He would go straight to the page announcing the movements of liners, and in spite of constant anxiety due to his ill-health he still dreams of travelling.

     A strange and various man, this Ferreira de Castro. For the past twenty months he has been working on a history of art, As Maravilhas Artisticas do Mundo, which is appearing in instalments. What a task this is: an attempted synthesis of universal history and aesthetic criticism. The first instalments, admirably produced by their Portuguese publishers, have been an immediate success. When it is finished, in a few months, it will be the most remarkable History of Art to appear since Elie Faure’s.

     Have I sufficiently stressed what one can only call his essential goodness? This is his dominant quality. There is something of the early Christian about him. He lives in a simply furnished apartment, with books in every room. He rents his home; he has not the least sense of property. He would rather live in a hotel, and his wife had to argue insistently in order to have a home and furniture.

     ‘What’s the use?’ he says, ‘you can’t take it about with you.’

     ‘But living means having a home, after all, not being at the mercy of other people.’

     ‘Do you think so?’ he says. For him, life means going off, stopping, going off again. It means seeing and not possessing.