Olavo Correia Leite d’Eça Leal was born in a family with conflicting hereditary traditions. This certainly accounted for the complexity of his personality and the wide range of his talents. And problems… A humble warning and a confession to the reader:
These notes are only a vague attempt at a biographic sketch of my father as the artis persona who chose to call himself just by the name of Olavo.
I am his 5th child, from his 3rd marriage. He was 47 when I was born and I was 21 when he died. All I know about him was absorbed first hand. As life unwinded, I came across the odd opportunities for learning more facts and stories in a non systematic biographical kind of way, such as literary prizes, salons/exhibitions, films, magazines, newspapers, travels, anecdotes regarding friends or acquaintances.
We – myself, my mother and my sons - hope to continue to expand these notes as a wikipedian anchor, absorbing all contributions, reviews, critiques, additional notes, new entries, links, inviting comments, news, relevant and (apparently…) irrelevant cross references of all sorts, photographs of Olavo, family, friends, images of his and his generation’s drawings and paintings and sculptures, a sprawling weedlike web that may begin to inspire in our visitors (to either the Museum House or simply the Site or the Blog) a vision of his visionary neo-renaissance eclecticism as a poet, a prize winning novelist, a publicist and a journalist, a II World War correspondent in Berlin!, a prolific playwright for the theater (more than 12 plays written for the National Theater) and the radio (over 5,000 one-act sketches/radio plays!…) and television (more than 67 plays written, produced and directed from 58 to 73) – in both media he was a pioneer as a writer-producer and the most amazing speaker and diseur with a famous and immediately recognizable soul and gut grasping voice which, for a few years, was on an exclusive contract with an advertising agency – owner and provocative creative guru of various advertising agencies, a painter, a draughtsman, an illustrator of books, literary magazines, newspapers, a graphic artist, a marchand and collector of art and antiques, an actor in films and theater, a diabetic gourmet, a scandalous dandy, a provocative wit, a shocking bohemian with an unlimited intellectual curiosity and the flamboyant lifestyle of an aristocratic artist.
For general stuff before my birth, I relied on the account in the Enciclopédia Portuguesa e Brasileira by his friend the poet Carlos Queiroz (brother of Ofelia, the platonic love of the great poet Fernando Pessoa), who also wrote the Encyclopedia bios on his father, grand father and eldest son, all of whom were recordable personalities in their own time and right.
I am hoping that my aunt Helena, his younger sister, who worked so close to him for a long time, her daughters, my sister Barbara and, most of all, my brother Paulo-Guilherme Tomaz and his children, will find these notes to be an incentive for their own contributions to a biography of Olavo and to a genre of memorabilia and photo gallery that we are trying to collect (check the site page on The House; all of its furniture and fittings are directly or indirectly traceable back to him and his wife Emilia, most of the pieces were either from this house or their Lisbon apartment or from their antique shop in Sintra or from my own house, bought under his unorthodox esthetical and spiritual taste supervision from Beyond…), to the history of his curious and eccentric family and his circle of friends and compagnons de route, a generation of Portuguese intellectuals, artists, writers, poets from 1910 to 1960 - most of whom were, like him, contributors to the literary magazine Presença and to the Salão dos Independentes - which has been so poorly recorded and studied (contributions to a data bank on Portuguese artistic and literary circles of that period can be made through the Casa da Pinheira Blog).
We hope to create 2 associate platforms/blogs/links. One specifically for the Eça Family circle of writers and another for the Presença/Independentes intellectual generation.
I loved my father and the She Pine Tree Museum House is a tribute to our mutual love.
But let there be no misunderstanding on the essential level of our relationship and the intellectual honesty between us since my childhood. For Olavo, love was to like and accept others as they were. This meant that his paternal rhetoric was never paternalistic, never overfilled with encomiastic praises of his children, nor did he expect daddy’s ego rubbing in return. Nor did he want to change others or be changed by them. He took life and people as they came. Varied and unique. An opportunity for his curiosity.
Father thrilled with a straightforward sharp critique of anything and everything. Irony and sarcasm were intellectual tools that he wittily enjoyed. The deal was that he would give me his honest opinion about all I did (or how I looked!), as he always did with everybody else, much to their surprise (and, sometimes, shock…). And as his payback, he delighted in my methodical, surgical even, analysis of his poems, his theater and radio plays, his drawings, his novels, his newspaper columns (to some of which I started contributing with my illustrations from the age of 10, on his constant instigation), his political opinions or choice of antiques (since I could walk, he would regularly take me as his pet for his evening tours of Lisbon antique shops and art galleries and museums).
This was his extraordinary notion of education and paternal love. Experience, confrontation, dialog and, above all else, a caustic and pitiless sense of humor. A sweet and sour heart, abundant in tenderness and capable of such Franciscan generosity that he was totally deprived of the boundaries of property while incapable of holding back one last humorous remark that would twist your soul as you left the room, hiding your raging humiliated tears with your uncontrollable laughter. Confusing? Yes. Totally.
His last words to me as he was passing away in a hospital bed in Oxford were kind of whispered with a painful mimic of a smile through his transparent oxygen mask and I could hear him in my mental headphones saying in his loud snobbish slightly nasalized voice, remember me with a smile. And I imagined his head dropping back and him laughing his heart out. Next time I saw him, he was lying naked on a white marble block in the Radcliff Hospital mortuary, the rigor mortis had recasted the perfect athlete body of his youth, carved in the same marble of the plinth, the senatorial head resting in tranquility, the classic Mediterranean nose pointing to the vaulted ceilings of that magnificent hall. The immaculate setting for his funerary ceremony. Adieu, he would have said, typically overstating it…,
Hence, these notes are simple statements. And not an eulogy.
(End of Part I)
