Henrique de Vasconcelos

A personality marked by the triple facet of literary creation, journalism, and political-diplomatic action, he graduated in Law from Coimbra, passed through the judicial magistracy, and then, with the advent of the republican regime, became a deputy for the Democratic Party and a close collaborator of Afonso Costa; he carried out important missions at international conferences and headed a general directorate of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In the press, having risen to editorial secretary of Novidades, he then contributed regularly to Mundo, by França Borges, and Pátria, by Estêvão de Vasconcelos. In his literary life, Henrique de Vasconcelos first manifested himself in poetry and programmatic criticism, then in short stories and impressionistic chronicles. He entered the Coimbra scene after the fundamental works establishing Decadentism and Symbolism had already been published, but he did so in a way that immediately, though sometimes controversially, gained prominence. Indeed, in 1893, he directed the fleeting Revista Nova (where he doctrinally wavered but made himself noticed with the sado-satanic poem «A missa negra») and, subsequently, Os Novos, a brief but extreme organ of the fin-de-siècle aesthetic movement, where he published the extensive poem «Confiteo», never republished; from that year until 1895, he edited two books and two verse pamphlets, where even the faltering inventiveness is an expression of alignment with an aesthetic-ideological orientation; and in scattered articles, particularly in the text «Dois poetas», published in 1894 in the Porto magazine O Ideal, he always took care to delimit periodizations and elucidate the valuations derived from his integration into Decadentism. He had already illustrated this Decadentism in Flores Cinzentas (1893) and Os Esotéricos (1894); soon after, he confirmed it in A Harpa de Vanádio (1895), but the excessive debt to French readings and the mimicry of Eugénio de Castro – a kind of «literary Brummelism of Coimbra» that he would one day attribute to a character in one of his short stories – is also evident in these books and confirmed in the inconsequential turn towards the classicizing revivalism of the meager Amor Perfeito (1895). In this phase, at least, H. do Vasconcelos corresponded with prominent figures of European literature and cultivated his projection in the Franco-Belgian world. In 1896, he still published one or another poem (v. g. «A voz do mar», in Instituto, Coimbra). But in 1897, he published his first prose collection, A Mentira Vital, predominantly consisting of brief narratives, prose poem essays, and impressionistic digressions. Although framed by critical and programmatic texts that sought to support the efforts he had been making (in Novidades) since the mid-decade to lead a Lusitanian and vernacular replica of Moréas' Romanism, these narratives continued to subserviently reflect the Byzantinism of fin-de-siècle artistic temperament. In 1899-1900, he collaborated in the last important fin-de-siècle aesthetic magazine (Ave Azul, published in Viseu) with his best decadentist narratives («Vida e morte de Santa Afra», «O terror da Morte», «A Torre»). In our century, he presents himself as one of the agents of the post-Queirosian transition of Portuguese literary prose, assiduous in the press during the first decade with short stories that he later collected in books and with worldly fantasies related to that skeptical and hedonistic «Juízo do ano» (Judgment of the Year), with which in 1904, under the pseudonym Abúndio Gomes, he collaborated in a Livro Proibido of «Profecias, farsas e sandices» (Prophecies, Farces, and Follies), co-authored by Fialho and Manuel Penteado. Contos Novos (1903), Flirts (1905), and Circe (1908) immediately share an aestheticism illustrated by the atmosphere, protagonists, and action of the stories themselves (cf., especially, in the last book, «Irene» – Art supersedes life – and «Circe» – Art transmutes life), but sometimes evolving into a decadentist and worldly reception of Nietzsche's vitalism. With a predominant technique of 'racontage' (storytelling), Vasconcelos' narrative fiction resembles a Portuguese version of Jean Lorrain (often taken as a reference for «modernity»). Cosmopolitanism, «ashaverism» (as he says in Contos Novos), blasé humor, seek to respond to passionate failure, neurotic narcissism, and horror vacui characteristic of «subtle and complicated,» «delicately perverse,» «artificialmente rectificadas» personalities in a supposed, and pretentious, end of civilization.