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Abstract
William C. Atkinson (1902–1992), Stevenson Professor of Hispanic Studies at Glasgow University for forty years, records his experiences during his final lecture tour in Latin America in 1971, when, among other countries, he visited Peru, Chile, Argentina, Venezuela and Brazil. Atkinson makes illuminating comparisons between social and political conditions in these countries in 1971 and how he had found them to be on his earlier visits to Latin America, usually sponsored by the British Council, in 1947, 1960 etc. Besides editing his account, Ann L. Mackenzie provides notes to elucidate Atkinson’s references to places, people and events.
Notes
* First published in the Glasgow University Gazette, 67 (December 1971), 1–3, this article, in its content, follows logically from where Chapter 5 of Atkinson’s Fragments of University Reminiscence breaks off. Like ‘1962–: Brave New World’, ‘A Rolling Stone Bows Out’ recalls Atkinson’s experiences and opinions of Latin America down the decades; but it focuses particularly on his final lecture tour in 1971. ‘A Rolling Stone Bows Out’ serves well, therefore, as a sixth ‘Fragment of Reminiscence’ with which neatly to round off Atkinson’s memoirs, at the point where retirement overtakes him.
1 A reference to Atkinson’s first tour of Latin America in 1946, supported by the British Council. This visit, which he also describes revealingly in ‘1962–72: Brave New World’ (see Atkinson, Fragments of University Reminiscence, Chapter 5), had ‘a long trail of consequences’ because it fired his enthusiastic determination not only to promote the study and teaching of Latin-American literature, history and thought, but in due course to turn Latin-American Studies within his Department at Glasgow University into an Honours Degree Programme in its own right. Moreover, he was eager to encourage Heads of Departments of Spanish in other UK universities to do the same. Within a year of that first visit to Latin America, Atkinson had published his ‘Programme for a School of Latin-American Studies’, in International Hispanic Number, BSS, XXIV:94 (1947), 139–46.
2 Most of the lectures delivered on that first tour of Latin America, some of whose topics he lists here, have not survived; but several were published (see, e.g., ‘The University and Society’, The Fortnightly [January 1949], 1–7; and ‘What Are Universities For? Some Comments’, The Fortnightly [March 1952], 170–78). Several others can be consulted in typescript in Glasgow University’s Archives (see, e.g., ‘The Social Function of Literature’ [dated 8 April 1946]; and a lecture he gave throughout Latin America in 1946, ‘El carácter inglés a través de la historia social inglesa’, evidently published in the Revista de América [September 1946]).
3 A reference to the honorary professorship he received from the National University of Colombia, Bogotá, in 1946. He also refers to this honour in ‘1962–: Brave New World’, in which he reveals that he found, when visiting Bogotá on a later tour of Latin America (?1966), with the university situation throughout Latin America becoming, in his word ‘explosive’, that his honorary professorship was in abeyance.
4 This unexpected reaction to Atkinson’s talk on Spain’s Conquest of the New World (possibly an earlier version of the paper he published on ‘Conquista, conquistador’, Folio (Jan.–March 1961), probably happened in Bogotá on his third tour of Latin America in 1960. On his fourth tour, later in that decade (1966) (as he tells us in ‘1962–: Brave New World’), by request he delivered no lectures there. On that occasion, the upheaval in Bogotá was such that there were ‘tanks on the campus and burning buses in the streets’ (these words in ‘1962–: Brave New World’ are repeated here almost verbatim, in the next paragraph).
5 It seems likely that of the ‘two from Glasgow among the talkers’, one was James Higgins, a graduate of Atkinson’s Department of Hispanic Studies at Glasgow University (MA Honours French and Hispanic Studies, 1961). In a letter to Ann Mackenzie, dated 28 June 1971, Atkinson wrote: ‘I am off beginning of August on a valedictory lecture tour of Latin America (look to see Mr Higgins in Lima).’ Higgins had opted to specialize in the literature of Peru (‘César Vallejo’s Vision of Man and Life in His Final Poetic Works’, PhD [University of Liverpool, 1968]), and had been appointed, in 1964, to a lectureship in Latin-American Studies in the School of Hispanic Studies, University of Liverpool, headed at the time by Geoffrey Ribbans.
6 Despite being a meticulously organized, highly professional person himself, Atkinson was not without a sense of humour when faced with disorganization created by others, as this account of the conference in Lima reveals.
7 The President of Bolivia who was ‘strung from a lamp-post’ on 21 July 1946 was Lt. Col. Gualberto Villarroel. The victor on this later occasion (1971) was General Hugo Banzer Suárez.
8 The President of Paraguay whom Atkinson describes so favourably here was General Alfredo Stroessner (1912–2006), who governed from 1954–1989.
9 Copies of both lectures, which Atkinson mentions here by their English titles, are lodged among Atkinson’s papers in Glasgow University’s Archives. One lecture had possibly first been delivered during his tour of Latin America in 1960, for it was revised and published in 1960 as ‘Las humanidades y la era técnica’, Mercurio Peruano (Lima) (December 1960), 525–49. The other lecture, ‘La Universidad—¿puede sobrevivir?’ (apparently unpublished) was perhaps more recently written; for the date on the typescript in Glasgow University’s Archives is 3 August 1969.
10 Atkinson was sufficiently interested in this sort of topic to write two lectures (both preserved unpublished in Glasgow University’s Archives), titled respectively ‘The “University Reform” of Córdoba (Argentina), 1918’ (dated 19 October 1968) and ‘Fifty Years of “University Reform” in Latin America’ (dated 2 December 1968).
11 The ‘doyen of Latin-American academic statesmen’ referred to here is Dr Alberto Sánchez, whom Atkinson names in ‘1962–: Brave New World’, and praises for being the ‘patriarch of Latin-American university administrators’. Dr Alberto Sánchez had presented him, in Lima in 1946, with a copy of the Constitution of the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos (of which Sánchez was then the Rector), which was based on the principle that students should make up a third of the total membership of all university governing bodies (the ‘tercio estudiantil’). For more on Alberto Sánchez, see Atkinson’s ‘1962–: Brave New World’, and its note 10.
12 Atkinson is here referring back to his visit to Paraguay (described in the preceding paragraph), where ‘one in authority’ who attended his lecture on ‘Can the University Survive?’ had warned him he would be lynched if he gave that lecture in Argentina. It appears that he safely repeated that same lecture, but this time in English, at the British Institute in Buenos Aires. As he tells us in the next paragraph, he did, in the end, deliver at least a version of the same lecture in Spanish in Argentina—in Bahía Blanca.
13 The ‘aged dictator’ Atkinson alludes to here has to be Juan Domingo Perón (1895–1974). He did return to become briefly President of Argentina once more, in 1973. Atkinson comments with distaste on Perón, and on his wife Eva [‘Evita’], in ‘1962–: Brave New World’ (see this chapter above, and its note 6).
14 Chile’s ‘first Marxist regime’ was led by Salvador Allende (1908–1973) who carried out the nationalization of the banks referred to here. O’Higgins, after whom the former Bank of London and South America was named, was General Bernardo O’Higgins (1778–1842), protagonist of Chile’s independence in 1818. A military coup in 1973 led to the presidency of General Augusto Pinochet (1915–2006) from 1974.
15 In ‘1962–: Brave New World’, Atkinson recalls the same banner headlines in the newspapers, and makes the same point—namely, ‘[i]n any country of the twenty, one could obviously study its culture as nowhere else [in Latin America]: in none could one study that of any of the others’. In Glasgow, on the other hand, a student in Atkinson’s Department could learn a lot about most, if not all of the countries in Latin America, including, naturally, Brazil.
16 It appears, from what he says here, that in Brazil Atkinson delivered, as he had in Argentina (in Bahía Blanca), his lecture on ‘Latin America As Seen from Great Britain’. For the typescript of this lecture, evidently never published, consult the Atkinson Papers in Glasgow University’s Archives.
17 Atkinson had major scholarly interests in Camoens (see, for instance, his prose translation of The Lusiads, first published by Penguin Books, Harmondsworth. in 1952). It is possible that the lecture he gave on this occasion in 1971 was based on the lecture ‘The Epic Genius of Camoens’, first delivered in October 1953 to the Anglo-Portuguese Society, London, and published in the Anglo-Portuguese Society Bulletin, 22 (1953), 18–25. Or, the lecture could have been a first version of Atkinson’s ‘Camoens and the Sons of Lusus’, the lecture which he was to deliver in London on 28 November 1972, by invitation of The Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Council, to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the first publication of Camões’ Os Lusíadas. This lecture was published by The Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Society, London, in 1973.
18 Not necessarily by the same graduate for many years. Atkinson may mean here that the British Institute, in São Paulo, founded by a Glasgow University graduate, was then headed in turn by different graduates from his Department of Hispanic Studies.
19 Brazil gained its independence from Portugal in 1822. Atkinson did a paper on ‘The Independence of Brazil, 1822’, for the Central Office of Information in London (a copy, dated 23 April 1972, is preserved in the Atkinson Papers in Glasgow University’s Archives).
20 Atkinson’s particular admiration and affection for Brazil is also obvious in ‘1962–: Brave New World’, in which he calls Brazil ‘the land of the future’.
21 There is a mention in Atkinson’s ‘1962–: Brave New World’ of this same graduate and his launch of a ‘British Institute’ in Brasilia. That graduate could have been Giovanni Pontiero; the dates certainly fit: 1960–1962. Giovanni Pontiero spent these two years in Brazil after he graduated, teaching at a university, founding and directing a British Institute, and doing research for his doctorate on the poetry of Manuel Bandeira (see above, ‘1962–: Brave New World’, and its note 8).
22 Atkinson has more to say about President Kennedy’s Alliance of Progress of 1961, and details its failures, in ‘1962–: Brave New World’ (see above, and its note 12).
23 Atkinson insists once more on the success and stability of Brazil as opposed to the other countries—once colonies of Spain—in Latin America. His mention of Stefan Zweig’s Brazil, Land of the Future, trans. Andrew St James (London: Cassell, 1942) (1st ed., Brasilien, ein Land der Zukunft [Stockholm: Bermann-Fischer Verlag, 1941]), is not, therefore, surprising. Ironically, Zweig committed suicide in Brazil in 1942.
24 It appears that Atkinson had intended to deliver his lecture in Caracas on ‘La Universidad—¿puede sobrevivir?’, but was prevented from doing so because he found the ‘[u]niversity with its impressive campus in chaos and closed’, and, as he puts it, ‘university survival seemed doubtfully worth a lynching’.
25 This mention of his memoirs, referred to here as ‘Reminiscences of a Septuagenarian’, provides proof that Atkinson indeed wrote, or was already engaged in writing, around the time of his retirement, in 1971–1972, the five chapters about his career 1922–1972, which he finally titled Fragments of University Reminiscence. ‘A Rolling Stone Bows Out’ was first published in 1971.
26 Simón Bolívar (1783–1830) was the inspirational Venezuelan general and statesman responsible for the emancipation of much of Spanish America, including Venezuela. In 1825 the Republic of Bolivia was created in honour of Bolívar, praised by many in that country and beyond as ‘El Libertador’. The quote from Bolívar on his death-bed (reflecting his sadness that the colonies he had sought to unite had separated into distinct republics) was previously used by Atkinson in his A History of Spain and Portugal. The Peninsula and Its Peoples: The Pattern of Their Society and Civilization (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1960). In that book, as here, Atkinson regretted the fact that, unlike Portuguese America (Brazil), Spanish America, when it achieved independence from Spain, had ‘disintegrated over many years of bitter and sanguinary conflict into a cluster of new republics, […] condemned to carry into independence a legacy of disruptive misgovernment and civic irresponsibility that left them a prey for the rest of the century to civil war, tyranny, and dictatorship’ (275–76).
27 A final allusion to the ‘University Reform’ of Córdoba (Argentina) in 1918, and to the principle (adopted by Dr Alberto Sánchez for the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima of which he was Rector) that students should make up one-third of the total membership of the governing bodies of all universities (see above, and notes 10 and 11). In ‘1962–: A Brave New World’, Atkinson recalls meeting up with Alberto Sánchez, still a university rector, at a conference in Toronto, who admitted to him that perhaps it would have been better had the ‘student third’ (‘tercio estudiantil’) been changed to ‘the student fourth’. At the end of this essay, and of his career as university professor, speaking as someone who had been, in his time, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, and who had observed, in several countries, the student disturbances of 1968, Atkinson wonders whether the student representatives on the governing bodies of universities, rather than making up one-third or one-fourth, should never have been allowed to exceed one-fifth of the total membership.
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the editor.