Glittering Surfaces

A poet mourns Camoens, wronged man

Camoens by Robert W. Cruttwell

The life of Luis de Camoens was hardly a perfect one. Portugal’s great epic poet, he was in exile or in prison — the reasons unknown but conjectured — for much of his life. In prison or away from where he ought to be, Robert Cruttwell writes. An unfair lot. A tragedy, a great crime.

Banished from one place to another place. His criticisms of society — the cause of exile from Goa, for instance — resented and punished and taken against. An exile, a great dissident, a noble heart.

And once he did deliver of his work, The Lusiads, his story of Vasco da Gama in India — the only survivor of a lifetime of pain and suffering — though it was read and acclaimed, what happened? Did Camoens get his laurels, the wealth he was due as payment or recompense for a lifetime’s bitter fruit? Not a word of it. The book sold, but did not make the poet rich. More’s the pity.

And when he died, not long after, Camoens went unmourned in a poor man’s grave. A grave now unvisited, unswept, Cruttwell tells us.

Dishonour the nation, he argues, who can dismiss and fail to gild such a man. A society filled with men who had philosophy, who had judgement, who had wit and taste and greatness, would not fail to honour, would not fail to enrich, the poet. His quiet grave would not be left without memorial.

But does it matter?

Cruttwell thinks it does; it’s his thesis statement. But it does not matter overly — so Cruttwell, who is getting going now, informs us.

For after all, is not poetry greater than the deeds of men? All men end their lives not monumental but mortal. All deeds are forgotten, while golden words, just sometimes, are not. And Camoens is, Cruttwell says, his own land’s Chaucer. His own land’s Spenser; his country’s Virgil, its Dante. And his work is Portugal’s written harking back to a golden Roman past, a fine language of great beauty and revelation. A passport to a better and happier age of creation.

How much of this can we, Cruttwell’s readers, buy? We may take it on trust that Camoens, lauded as he later was, must be a poet of significance. His works must matter; they must still now be read.

But all this that Cruttwell writes about the golden words, the phrases dripping honey, the world depicted being real and true and brilliantly noble. Do we buy it? Us who do not read Portuguese.

Camoen’s world: a world where no one questioned — no one asked why (what Cruttwell seemed to think the greatest pity of his own time).

Do we believe all of this, or even any of it?

Cruttwell has Camoens painting very pretty pictures. Of women as beautiful as sunlight — of men at arms going about with glittering, glimmering steel plate; and pale blades picturesquely painted red by action’s call. Of simple, honest faith. Of a land where none sought their pleasure indiscriminately — another sin of Cruttwell’s time, he tells us.

I, for one, don’t believe any of this.

If we know anything about history, it is that the evil at the core of mankind was always there. All societies harbour wicked men. Are we to believe that an expedition to India centuries back, bent on conquest, proved only virtuous, contained only honest men?

It’s not credible. It’s beyond what could be imagined, unless aided by all the legerdemain of great poetic trickery.

But that, of course, is not what Cruttwell says of Camoens. He claims that the poet spoke only the truth — and the truth was one of nobility, of decency, of right. The world was as he described it; it was not created in this image through the contrivances attendant on the practice of any art.

And that’s not possible. Not possible to believe.

I find Cruttwell’s style good enough, fine enough. It justifies itself. It’s easy to read and simple to understand, yet still poetic, still heightened and a touch flashy. Fit for a spot of propaganda like this.

But I know nothing of Camoens. Nothing. His life remains mysterious. Why was he exiled from place to place? I cannot accept that he was a dissident before his time — a premature case for Amnesty International. He may have been a Socratic figure — an annoyance, a fly more in the ointment than on the wall of his society. It’s possible Camoens was a Giordano Bruno — a man cruelly mistreated, perhaps, but one who was driven by his own lights not only to be just honest but also obstinate. A man we might honour in our own centuries, who might stand testament to the past’s cruelty and iniquities, but who may have proven in his own lifetime autistic, intransigent, irritating, unamenable to compromise.

Camoens may have been a rough, rude man — a cruel one, like Caravaggio, whose savageries and brutality is forgotten as all are awed by and honour his art.

We do not know.

Cruttwell makes the case for the defence. He issues his propaganda well. It must have mattered to him. Mattered a great deal. But what the shade of Camoens honestly resembles cannot be known this side of the tomb. All we have is his work. Words of beauty, of course — honoured for centuries. Though that beauty may be distraction, may be diverting, may show only a world that never existed, never had a jot of truth behind its glittering surfaces.