Marcelo's Reading and Thinking Log

"In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo - Leonardo Da Vinci, and the Renaissance...In Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce?...The cuckoo clock."

  For anyone who hasn't immediately recognized the above quote, it's from the film The Third Man. At first I thought the line was in the novella which Graham Greene wrote as a basis for the film, but it isn't. As it turns out, it isn't even in the script that Greene wrote. At least, this is what Wikipedia says; according to it, the line was added by Orson Welles, who played the character who spoke that line. And Welles apparently claimed that he took it from "an old Hungarian play".
While reading a collection of early writing by Brazilian essayist Gilberto Freyre, entitled Tempo de Aprendiz (Apprentice Time), I came by the following passage in the third essay of the collection, dated May 6, 1923, in which he argues against universal literacy:

"What are, in Europe, the most glorious beacons of literacy? Switzerland and Finland. Of Switzerland there are those who say, exaggeratedly, that the world owes it only clocks, canned condensed milk, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Haller and cheese -- all perfectly replaceable, if not altogether unnecessary, items."

In the twenty-first essay, of September 9, 1923, he comes back to that theme:

"From universal instruction result the Switzerlands, the Finlands, and much of the "bon enfant" quality that the United States have. Democracies of washed, shaven, and well-combed citizens, annoyingly alike to one another, average in everything. Democracies where there are no first-class wagons, and tastes and ideas travel together: hotel owners' hand in hand with pedagogues'. Democracies possessing an art in which one feels neither the strong taste of rum of rustic energy, nor the exquisite taste of vespetro of high emotion or subtle analysis."

And further ahead, quoting an intellectual ally:

"To Mr. (Agripino) Grieco universal instruction is a "twin sister of universal suffrage" and "another chimera, no less dangerous than the former". And so it goes.

Whether Orson Welles picked some of these ideas up when he was in Brazil in 1942 (roughly seven years before the shooting of The Third Man) is a matter for speculation. I have not found any information regarding his having met Freyre in person, though. But there are certainly odd coincidences here. And to wrap it up, let's read some more of what Wikipedia says about the line in question and its possible ancestry:

 "(...) the painter Whistler, in a lecture on art from 1885 (published in Mr Whistler's 'Ten O'Clock' [1888]), had said, "The Swiss in their mountains ... What more worthy people! ... yet, the perverse and scornful [goddess, Art] will have none of it, and the sons of patriots are left with the clock that turns the mill, and the sudden cuckoo, with difficulty restrained in its box! For this was Tell a hero! For this did Gessler die!" In This is Orson Welles (1993), Welles is quoted as saying "When the picture came out, the Swiss very nicely pointed out to me that they've never made any cuckoo clocks",^[18] as the clocks are in fact German, native to the Black Forest. Writer John McPhee also points out that during the period of time the Borgia flourished in Italy, Switzerland was "the most powerful and feared military force in Europe", and not the peacefully neutral country it is currently."