Antonio Ferro, Orpheu and Beyond – George Monteiro

In 2015, a cool one hundred years
  
after the publication of the first issue
  
of Orpheu, a journal which, in its 2

issues, scandalized pretty much all

of Portugal, there are conferences

lined up in Portugal and Brazil, as
  
well as exhibitions mounted in the

same cities. There is even one at

the Library of Congress in the U. S.

of A. ( though nothing is planned,

as far as I know, for London or, for
  
that matter, for Durban. Time has

long since confined itself to singling

out for our attention figures such as

Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Almada

Negreiros, and, of course, Pessoa.

Seldom acknowledged, though (and

then only grudgingly), is the role of

Ferro (money, yes, but no literary

contributions from this baby in the

putsch. Undoubtedly, his years

afterwards as a risk-taking news-

man (conducting sympathetic

interviews with fascist heads-of-

state) or as the eager-beaver, self-

promoting publicist of Salazar’s

thumb-screws rule. But forgot

is his unflagging loyalty to a

Modernist agenda, promoting the

literature, architecture, and lore

of his country. It’s time to re-open

the cold, cold case of Antonio Ferro.

Mar. 8, 2015

George Monteiro is a lifelong student and teacher of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, contributing to the scholarship on numerous writers, including Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Adams, Henry James, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot and Bob Dylan. His latest book is Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil and After: A Poetic Career Transformed (McFarland, 2012).