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THE TEAM
CONTACT
His meeting in 1917 with Manoel de Oliveira Lima (1853-1928), the historian and diplomat from Pernambuco, and the deep and influential friendship that was born from this encounter also dates from the period of his first intellectual movements. This friendship began in Recife and intensified in the following years in another setting, the United States of America. This was where Oliveira Lima had already settled both personally and professionally, donating his huge library to the Catholic University of America in Washington, and the country where Gilberto Freyre went in 1918 to pursue his higher education - first at the University of Baylor in Waco (Texas), then at the University of Columbia in New York. He remained at Baylor, a destination chosen as much for the academic and religious links between the University and the College in Recife as for the fact that his brother was already studying there, until 1920 when he obtained his Bachelor of Arts degree; the following year, he enrolled in the Faculty of Political Sciences at Columbia as he was interested in working towards a doctorate, but various personal reasons (ranging from financial problems to solitude) meant that he submitted in 1922 only a Masters dissertation entitled Social life in Brazil in the middle of the 19th Century, published in the same year in the Hispanic American Historical Review (v. 5, n. 4, Nov. 1922). In this period, Oliveira Lima became his intellectual mentor and, more than this, a type of "second father", providing him with personal support and a precious network of relations, which also ensured he got the History Professor, William Shepherd, as his supervisor at Columbia.
After finishing his education in North America, Gilberto Freyre travelled around Europe for a few months between August 1922 and March 1923, passing through France, Germany, England and Portugal. Here he spent a bit longer and made "contact at the University of Coimbra with students who were romantically bohemian, but also with Eugênio de Castro, Joaquim de Carvalho, the philosopher, the Count of Sabugosa - the last of the 'Vencidos da Vida' [Life's Losers] group in whom he found something of Eça - Fidelino de Figueiredo, the literary critic, Paulo Merêa, the jurist" ("Menos especialista que generalista" [Less specialist than generalist], 1981, p. 142-143). It is the experience of the trip itself, however, as much as the contacts he made, if not even more than them, that marks the beginning of Freyre's mature life. This experience was something that would not stop there, but would unfold in a decisive way in his work, as Fernando Nicolazzi and Maria Lucia Garcia Pallares-Burke, each in their own way, have already shrewdly pointed out. On his return to his native Recife, but not without some hesitation, he began to collaborate with the Diário de Pernambuco and the Revista do Brasil. He became part of local and regional literary circles, little by little widening these in the direction of Rio de Janeiro, at that time the capital of the country and the centre of its cultural life.
