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We published in the Spiritist Journal of the Spiritist Federation of the State of Sao Paulo, in May 1997, an interview we did with the late Humberto de Campos Filho, born in Niteroi (RJ) on August 25, 1923 and disembodied in Sao Paulo, in March 10, 1998.
In the interview, the son of the remarkable writer, who in the Spiritual world adopted the pseudonym Brother X, talked to us with emotion about his father.
We hereby copy the interview title, recalling that the writer Humberto de Campos was originally born in Miritiba, which is presently the renamed municipality Humberto de Campos, in the state of Maranhao, on October 25, 1886, and disincarnated in Rio de Janeiro on December 5, 1934.
The interview - Humberto de Campos Filho says in this interview that his father was a profound connoisseur of mythology. “Mythology was small potatoes for him,” he explains, adding that Humberto de Campos read French authors in the original, which he considers it spectacular. “How did he manage it on his own?!” he wonders. He also knew Spanish well.
Self-taught, he didn't go much further in school. According to Humberto de Campos Filho, his educational level did not exceed, in current terms at the time of the interview, the third or fourth grade. "It was rote”. The teacher said: Do you want to read the book by looking at the ceiling? I want you to read it". - "It's just that my father already knew it by heart in advance”, explained his son.
Humberto says that at that time he thinks that there was nothing left that his father did not read. "He loved books, he loved to write".
Speaking of friends, Humberto recalls Coelho Neto - Henrique Maximiano Coelho Neto, a Brazilian writer -, godfather of his brother Henrique and a close family friend, almost a brother, who opened the doors to his father for newspapers, presentations, etc. "The literary career of the “old man” was all based on the boldness of Coelho Neto," he explains.
Coelho Neto, whom Humberto de Campos Filho met personally, was, he says, very sympathetic, of tremendous patience with his children. Remember that the writer had six children. "There was Paulo, and Mano, who was a famous soccer player, playing at Fluminense. There was also Violeta, who sang opera".
The encounter with God - Difficulties and pain contributed in such a way so that in his path he “encountered” God. He had no perfect notion, but believed that God existed. Humberto de Campos recounts the moment of this meeting in his “Secret Diary”. One morning his father entered a church that was open for Sunday Mass. He sees a coffin with four candles around it, choir, organ, and repented people, praying. "Only I did not pray! Only I had no faith! Only I had no God! ... I got out of there, and ran, running away from that scenario, running away from myself. I sat on a door jamb of stone. I held my head with my hands. People who were going to Mass looked at me and continued. They were not aware of what was being decided there: the fate of a God was being decided in the heart of a man".
As a writer, Humberto de Campos has published 44 books. His first book, “Dust”, is a book of poetry. The second part of “Dust” emerged, later combined (the first and second part) into one book, entitled “Complete Poetry”. At this point in the interview, Humberto de Campos Filho said that these books were no longer found in bookstores, only in used books stores.
Country without memory - Humberto de Campos’ son regretted: Brazil, a country without memory, has forgotten all its great writers. "Nobody knows, for example, who was Coelho Neto. In Rio de Janeiro, Coelho Neto today is the name of a suburban railway station, Coelho Neto station, in a suburb. It has a street named Humberto de Campos, there are several schools, but nobody knows who he was. In spite of all this, Humberto de Campos was, at one point in his career, the most widely read writer. He adopted a pseudonym, Councilor XX, when he already had a name, and he was well known. He had a magazine called “The Apple”', with a fine sense of humor. It had a lot of drawings by famous illustrators of the time. “The Apple” circulated for two years. It had a staff of several collaborators and was sold in newsstands".
Humberto de Campos left a vast library that was sold after his disincarnating. "Wherever we moved to we had to have two rooms to put his books, about four to eight thousand volumes".
The so-called Humberto de Campos Lawsuit - "At the time when the old man disincarnated - said Humberto de Campos Filho - there was a permanent sale of his books, edited by Editora Jose Olimpio. At that time, books - psychographics by the medium Francisco Candido Xavier - appeared, written by Humberto de Campos. That sounded like a competition. That's how the story began".
He goes on: "The widow of Humberto de Campos, my mother, Catharina de Paiva Vergulino, (Dona Paquita), thought that the lawyer Milton Barbosa was a wonderful professional, a very intelligent guy, besides being a teacher at the D. Pedro II College. So she headed a family lawsuit through this lawyer to stop these publications. That was the intention: to stop the publication because it looked like a misappropriation of a famous name. It turns out that the lawyer wanted to become known and decided for a civil action that began by sending a letter rogatory to the Beyond, to summon the Spirit of Humberto de Campos to give testimony".
To summarize the case: In 1944, the widow Catharina de Paiva Vergolino and the sons Henrique and Humberto de Campos Filho, copyright holders of the work of Humberto de Campos, filed a declaratory action against Chico Xavier and the Brazilian Spiritist Federation. The daughter Maria de Lourdes did not want to be involved in the matter. According to the lawsuit, the court should declare whether the books launched by Chico and the Brazilian Spiritist Federation (which was defended, in this case, by the lawyer Miguel Timponi) were works really dictated by the Spirit of Humberto de Campos. Through their lawyers, the family demanded all possible scientific evidence and requested statements from the Federation, Chico Xavier and even from the Spirit of Humberto de Campos.
The Judge Joao Frederico Mourao Russell was to decide this case and he considered the action inept, based on consistent arguments.
Humberto de Campos's heirs appealed unsuccessfully regarding Mourao Russell's decision. The court dismissed the case on November 3, 1944.
Humberto de Campos’ Family - At the time of the interview, Humberto de Campos Filho was the only one left in the family, because his mother and the other brothers, Henrique and Maria de Lourdes, had already disincarnated. Of the children, Humberto was the one who most identified with his father's work. However, he kept nothing from him, for he commissioned his brother to do so. “It was the entire collection of the 'Secret Diary', all the notebooks, his robes of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, as well as the respective, and many other things.”
Of the 44 books left by Humberto de Campos, Editora Opus, from Sao Paulo, edited ten books, a collection organized by Humberto de Campos’ son.
The thousands of letters left by the writer were burned by "Dona Paquita" after he disincarnated. She thought that, since most of the letters reported dramatic cases, they were not worth keeping. "I remember with pity the fire burning everything", said his son.
He had no religion, but he believed in immortality - Those who complain about life will see that their life is a bed of roses. As for Humberto de Campos, he suffered from his childhood until his disembodiment. But he was a fighter, and never lost confidence in himself, in the Divine Providence and in the future.
In addition to the sufferings of his childhood and the poor life in which he lived, even when he became famous, he had health issues regarding his prostate, his pituitary, and kidneys as well and in the last years of his life he became almost blind. He underwent two surgeries to remove kidney stones. During the second surgery, he disincarnated on the surgery table.
In the books “The Lives of Chico Xavier” by Marcel Souto Maior and “Our Friend Chico Xavier” by Luciano da Costa e Silva, Humberto de Campos Filho highlighted texts that talk about his father and Chico.
Three months after his disembodiment, Chico Xavier had a dream. In the dream, a person introduced him to Humberto de Campos, in a place with a very blue and bright sky. On the ground there was a kind of vegetation that would not let the Earth be seen.
Humberto de Campos in the Beyond - In April 1935, the writer sends through Chico a letter addressed "To my children", saying: "My children! ... My children! ... I am living. .. Don't you see me? But, look, look at my heart still beating for you!"
Humberto de Campos (Spirit) said that he would return to talk to them in a fatherly way, as he did when he consumed brain phosphate in order to get fuel for his stomach. And he reported that in the True Homeland he had not been asked about his triumphs on Earth, but in compensation he had been asked about the causes of the humble and the unfortunate, for which he had fought.
When incarnated, Humberto de Campos had no religion and never induced any of the three children to follow this or that path, regarding religion. But due to his great culture, he knew the foundations of all religions well. On one of the pages of his book “Notes from a Diarist”, there is the following comment:
"Spiritism is currently – among all the permitted religions or abuses - the only one, perhaps, that still works miracles. Struck down by suffering, carried along by hope, the person who uses it already carries, in its wounded heart, half of the miracle".
Interesting to record these notes of his authorship:
"Blessed art thou, my God, who hath bestowed upon me the grace of the high pleasures of the Spirit, this comfort of living the life of my thought. That it would be of me, indeed, without this blessing of Heaven, to feel on the threshold of old age, poor, sick, ugly and, above all, without love and friends? Men and women left me naked, like a beggar. But God, in His mercy, clothed me with stars..."
About his illness and whether he should operate in Argentina, he heard the opinion of several Brazilian physicians, including the one who was considered the greatest Brazilian homeopath, Murtinho Nobre. Among the thousands of letters he received, one of them, with a message sent by a Spirit, said:
"If the science of men, the science of the Earth, gives no remedy to your illness, why forget the science of Heaven? No one asks for their adherence. No one imposes faith on you. Stay materialistic and wait. But don't forget that there is a source from which so many prodigious healings have been emanating"...
And as to reaffirm that, although he did not profess any religion, he had faith in God and Jesus, this record, in which he speaks about a Franciscan, when he tells him that he will not be converted to any religion by the hand of man:
"I thank you” and he goes on. He carries a copy of the “Outcasts” and shows me the final page of the chronicle entitled “Letter to Jesus my Lord”, in which I offer my heart to Christ. I sense in the visitor, the idea ofcatechesis, but I shortcut the kind approach.
“Brother,” I tell him, “I feel that a great invisible hand has been leading me in the most irreverent disbelief into the possible realms of faith. But I do not want to rush into man's hand what is, perhaps, reserved to the hand of God. If I have to be a believer, I will be it spontaneously. I do not want to go to God for violence, because of embarrassment, or to satisfy someone else. I feel that I march towards clarity as a result of suffering and daily contemplation of life. But if that's where I march, I want to walk on my own feet".
His belief in the immortality of the Spirit is recorded in a text written about the departure to the Spiritual Plan of his great friend and like a brother, Coelho Neto:
"I say goodbye. And let the tears run down my cheeks, and the sobs take my breath away, deeply moved. But I react because Coelho Neto was already dead for many weeks, many months. The Spirit that used his name had already left him. And the matter, handful of earth, will be now in the heart of the earth".
In a chronicle in Diario Carioca, published the day after his friend's death:
"This one is alive, and continues to be my master and friend. And that is why, at this moment, I do not cry.
That is why, as everyone writes and announces that the glorious novelist has died, I, as in the funeral greetings of fascism, raise my voice and call:
- Henrique Coelho Neto!
And I hear the answer that comes from my heart:
- Present" !
It was his last chronicle. Five days later, he disincarnated.
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