2 - Early Writings: The Liberal Newspaper Child and the Marks of a Catholic Upbringing (1881–94)

Summary

Rodó's biographers have commented on the remarkable photographs that we have of him as a child. In one, aged eighteen months, he looks serious and thoughtful, and the same expression appears in a second portrait at four and in a third at eleven. Petit Muñoz says of Rodó's earliest portrait that it is “un pasmoso anuncio del pensador” (an astonishing announcement of the thinker) (79), and Mario Benedetti notes “el mismo gesto severo” (the same severe countenance) in all of the childhood photographs, also echoing a French critic's comment about the general absence of smiles in his images (13). Such graveness of outlook found an outlet in Rodó's early writings.

We have reports of Rodó learning to read at home at an early age, taught at first by his elder sister Isabel. According to Salvá, his first writing exercise for school was on the topic of “Charity” (14); Petit Muñoz, who interviewed Rodó's class teacher Ángela Anselmi in old age, was told that this composition, by her best student ever, was “la más extraordinaria, quizás” (perhaps the most extraordinary) (104). Salvá also reports that this piece was followed by another, on Brazil, commissioned by his teachers for the occasion of a visit to the school by Quintino Bocayúva (a journalist and politician who was to play an important role in the republican process of his country); the dignitary was highly impressed (14). It is significant to note, therefore, that already in some of his earliest reflections Rodó expressed concerns that were to occupy him later: the theme of charity, which was to recur in much of his mature work and is central to Liberalismo y jacobinismo (1906); and that of Latin America as a set of interrelated identities. Rodó's writing in fact began even before he went to Elbio Fernández, although the school environment helped to consolidate it. We shall consider this early material in the following order: child journalism; an important private letter to the president; a notebook containing poems on metaphysics and religion; other intimate writings where religion mingles with guilt about sexuality.