Why This World

by Benjamin Moser

  Her parents were dead, and in Rio de Janeiro there was no body concerned, as in Spinoza’s Amsterdam, with enforcing orthodoxy. She did not have to break with any traditional strictures, as Spinoza had. Yet they shared certain important biographical similarities. Spinoza’s parents were Jewish exiles from Portugal who had arrived in Amsterdam ten years before he was born. He lost his mother when he was six and would spend his whole life mourning her. (Arnold Zweig attributed Spinoza’s famous formula “Deus sive natura”—God: that is to say, nature—to this early loss. The idea “magically and mystically elevates to a principle of the world this alliance and this marriage, whose destruction had been the dark star of his childhood.”)10 They both lost their fathers when they were twenty, and both left organized Judaism after their father’s death. They were both thwarted in their first love, Clarice for Lúcio and Spinoza for his teacher’s daughter. And both impressed others as being “aristocratic” and, tellingly, “foreign.”

  Perhaps these similarities drew Clarice close to the great philosopher, in whom she found a confirmation of her own rejection of “the humanized God of the religions,” that conscious God who actively meddles in human affairs. It must have come as a relief to her, whose life had made her well aware of the absurdity of relying on miracles, or any other interventions. “The idea of a conscious God is horribly unsatisfying,” she wrote.11

  What was real was the divine eminence that manifested itself in the amoral animal nature, the “wild heart” that animated the universe. For Spinoza as for Clarice Lispector, fidelity to this divine inner nature was the noblest goal of all.

  “I meant to cry on the journey, because I always get nostalgic for myself. But luckily I’m a good healthy animal and slept very well, thanks. ‘God’ calls me to him, when required,” Clarice wrote Lúcio Cardoso in July 1941. She was in Belo Horizonte, where Lúcio had spent part of his childhood, and her impressions of the place were not flattering. “The women here are almost all dark and short, with straight hair and listless expressions. Anyway, you almost only see men on the streets. Apparently the women betake themselves to their homes to do their duty, giving the world a dozen kids a year. The people here look at me as if I had come straight from the Zoological Gardens. I agree entirely.”12

  In 1941, her reporting job brought her there and to several other destinations, including to the old hill station of Petrópolis in the mountains above Rio de Janeiro, where Stefan Zweig had arrived in September and would kill himself in February. The city was the resort of the nineteenth-century emperor Dom Pedro II. He escaped the awful heat of the seaside capital in a large pink palace that Getúlio Vargas was busily restoring as the Imperial Museum, sprucing up the temples of previous dynasties having been a hobby of dictators since at least Egyptian times. Clarice was one of the museum’s first visitors—the public wouldn’t be admitted until 1943—and on May 1, 1941, covering the Labor Day celebrations for the Agência Nacional, she got to meet Getúlio Vargas himself.

  Throughout the year, she published her writing, not only in the provincial organs that ran the Agência Nacional’s stories but also in the capital’s literary magazines, where her stories, and at least one poem, appeared.13 “There was a paper, Dom Casmurro,” she remembered. “I took some … some things over there. Just like that, without knowing anyone. … They loved it, they thought I was gorgeous! They said I had the prettiest voice in the world! And they published it. And they didn’t pay. Of course! Of course!”14

  The pages of Dom Casmurro give an idea of the interests of Rio de Janeiro’s lettered classes at that time. The paper was serious but playful—the women’s pages carried articles about how to whiten one’s teeth—and reflects the very serious position literature still enjoyed in Brazilian society. There are articles on the origins of Nietzsche, the death of Christ, the animal in painting, Peruvian popular poetry, “Our Mother, Greece,” and “Let’s talk about Freud.” There are articles of local interest, about the sermons of Padre Antônio Vieira, the novels of Eça de Queiroz, the baroque churches of Minas Gerais, and “The Academy and the Brazilian Language.”

  It is a wide range, but despite its catholicity of interest, there is no mention of politics, and the only cause the paper espoused, amid a world war, was a campaign, week after week, to raise money to provide the poet Castro Alves with a properly glorious tomb. In an atmosphere of censorship and Brazilian neutrality, the paper expressed its political orientation obliquely, with a heavy emphasis on French culture (“Vigée Le Brun,” “Recalling Pierre Loti”), including articles published in French. This was the culture Brazilians had traditionally admired and, as such, would have raised few eyebrows among the censors. With Getúlio Vargas still flirting with both sides, that was the best the editors of Dom Casmurro could do.

  By July 1941, when she wrote Lúcio Cardoso from Belo Horizonte, Clarice had abandoned her attempt to “save” him from his homosexuality. “PS,” she wrote at the end, hinting at a more compromising earlier communication, “you don’t have to ‘tear up’ this letter.” The twin disasters of disappointment in love and losing her father, combined with the pressures of school and her demanding job, had taken a toll. For the first time in her life she was hospitalized for depression, prescribed “sleep therapy,” in which drugs induced her to sleep for most of a week.15 The practice was thought to help the body recover from stresses both physical and psychological. By the end of the year, she picked up enough to begin a new romance with a law school colleague, Maury Gurgel Valente.

  Maury’s past was as colorful, if not as terrible, as hers. His mother, Maria José Ferreira de Souza, known as Zuza, was the daughter of a rubber baron from the Amazonian state of Pará. Like many others, and indeed like the entire Amazonian economy, he was ruined when Brazil lost its monopoly on rubber, unable to compete with slave labor in the Belgian Congo and the plantations the British began with seeds smuggled out of Brazil. After the dramatic theft of the seeds, and the even more dramatic attempts of botanists at Kew Gardens in London to discover how they could be transplanted, Britain’s tropical colonies, especially Malaya, began growing rubber in great quantities. By World War I, the economy of northern Brazil was a shambles, leaving such famous monuments as the sumptuous opera house, the Teatro Amazonas, in the ephemeral boomtown of Manaus.

  Once the seeds started sprouting in Malaya, Zuza had to earn a living. The daughter of a rich businessman, she had lived in France for five years and in England for another five, and the skills she learned there could be parlayed into a decent living as a language teacher back in Brazil. These early travels seem to have instilled a diplomatic vocation in the family: her brother, Glauco Ferreira de Souza, died as Brazilian ambassador to La Paz, and all three of her sons—Mozart Jr., born in 1917; Maury, born in 1921; and Murillo, born in 1925—became ambassadors.

  Zuza’s husband, Mozart Gurgel Valente, was a dentist from a family of provincial gentry in Aracati, in the northeastern state of Ceará. Their sons were born in Rio de Janeiro, but the boys grew up in a place remote and exotic even by Amazonian standards: the territory (now state) of Acre, on the Bolivian border. Dr. Mozart went there to try to rescue one of Zuza’s father’s last remaining rubber plantations, spending years laboring in vain. Eventually, they returned to Zuza’s hometown of Belém do Pará, an important city at the mouth of the Amazon.

  Maury started law school in 1938, and by the end of 1941 he and Clarice were a couple. She departed for a couple of weeks’ sojourn at a secluded resort in the state of Rio de Janeiro in January 1942, and they wrote each other almost every day. His letters to her reveal a combination of timidity and admiration in a sensitive young man fascinated by literature even as he prepared for a life in the bureaucracy. “I end letters like this,” he wrote her, “ ‘I have the honor to repeat to Your Excellency the protests of my highest esteem and most distinct consideration.’ What a crock,” he lamented. “Only one thing would do me good right now. To fall asleep with my head on your lap, while you whispered sweet tasty
nothings to help me forget the rottenness of the world.”16

  His love for his fellow law student is tempered by the insecurity her superior intelligence provokes. He is unsure about his writing: “Warning to readers: Mortal danger—This letter is full of bad literature,” he writes in one letter.17 A few days later he adds, “I request ‘Teach’ to underline all the childish expressions in my letters, so I can correct them.”18

  She, in return, writes tenderly: “How are you, sweetheart? How are your hands?”19 And again: “Curious little rat, your hands in mine are always a nice dose of humanity, don’t you think?”20 At the same time, she inevitably engages in philosophical speculations of the kind that intimidate her adoring young boyfriend: “Why not give oneself over to the world, even without understanding it? It is absurd to seek an individual solution. That is spread out among the centuries, all mankind, all nature. And even your greatest idol in literature or science did nothing more than blindly add another element to the problem. Another thing: what would you, you individually, do if not for the evil in the world? Its absence would be the ideal for all mankind, as a whole. For a single person, it wouldn’t be enough.”21

  He tries to bring her back down to earth, back down to his humble level. “I have to confess,” he writes her after reading her last letter, “that as I read it, I got smaller and smaller. … That letter wasn’t for me, it was a pamphlet directed to all HUMANITY. … I’m much simper than that. My wretched little worrying has nothing to do with the great problems. Oh! Goddess Clarice! … Don’t terrorize me with your anti-aircraft guns—I fly too close to the ground—all you have to do is reach out your hand to grab me.”22

  “I laughed a lot when I read your letter,” she responded. “I could have expected an answer like that. But the truth is: I wasn’t trying to make myself huge or intelligent.” She alluded to a particularly negative description of herself: “When I told you I was egocentric, I wasn’t just saying so. I really am. And lots of other, even worse, things. … I was never very open or sweet. I’m not sure if certain circumstances in my life made me that way, clumsy when it comes to confessions. And proud (why, my God? … I’m laughing, don’t be scared—it’s nothing tragic).”23

  She recalled the source of her annoyance to Tania: “There was a fight between us because he interpreted a letter I sent him as literary. You know that’s the thing that can offend me the most. I want a regular life and that’s why I try to separate it from literature.” Her letter seemed spontaneous and natural to her, and when Maury acted overwhelmed, she even went so far as to write breaking off their relationship.24

  But after the disappointment with Lúcio, who was older, sexually unattainable, and an established writer, she must have welcomed the frantic attentions of Maury, younger, less intellectual, and madly in love with her. Yet she also seems to have kept him at a certain distance. “You don’t have any other objections to me, besides the ones that just arrived all typed up?” the besotted boy asked anxiously a few days later. “I don’t think you do, because if you did you would tell me, right? … Can I still call you my girlfriend?”25

  She must have given him the green light, because the romance continued. Another obstacle did not depend on either of them. In August 1940, Maury passed the foreign service examination and entered the diplomatic corps, his official inauguration pending his graduation from university. At the time, Brazilian diplomats were not allowed to marry foreigners, and Clarice Lispector was still a foreigner. She could not request Brazilian nationality until her twenty-first birthday, December 10, 1941.

  Soon thereafter, with the help of her old family friend Samuel Malamud, a native of Podolia who was now a lawyer, she started preparing the paperwork. Because of the war and her desire to marry, there was some urgency to her request, as her surviving letters to Getúlio Vargas demonstrate. She wrote the president, and then waited almost half a year before addressing him again. This step was necessary because Vargas––in a fashion reminiscent of Nicholas II, who, as his enormous empire crumbled, busily devoted his personal attention to each and every individual who petitioned to change his name––wondered in writing why it had taken the applicant so long to apply for naturalization. “As soon as I reached my majority and, with it, acquired the right to apply [for Brazilian nationality] I hastened to do so immediately, and it took me only three months to finalize a process that almost always requires a year of effort,” she wrote the “Chief of the Nation,” of whose “proverbial magnanimity” she professed herself a “sincere admirer.”26

  In her first letter to him she described herself as

  a twenty-one-year-old Russian who has been in Brazil for twenty one years minus a few months. Who does not know a single word of Russian but who thinks, speaks, writes, and acts in Portuguese, making of this language her profession, and basing upon it all her plans for the near and distant future. Who has neither father nor mother—the former, like the sisters of the undersigned, a naturalized Brazilian—and who for that reason feels in no way connected to the country she came from, not even through the stories she has heard about it. Who, if she was forced to return to Russia, would feel irredeemably foreign there, without a friend, without a profession, without a hope.27

  She does not linger on “the stories she has heard about it,” which presumably would not have fortified her desire to return; and when Malamud suggested she would not be granted naturalization, his client burst into tears, before he assured her he was joking.28 In her letter to the president, she regretted that her youth had prevented her from having lent any great services to the nation, but she pointed out that through her work in the official press she had aided “in the distribution and propaganda of Your Excellency’s government.”29

  Her petition was supported by the man who was now her boss, André Carrazzoni, director of the newspaper A Noite. “Clarice Lispector is a smart girl, an excellent reporter, and, in contrast to almost all women, actually knows how to write,” he assured a friend in the Ministry of Justice.30

  These appeals had their desired effect, and on January 12, 1943, Clarice Lispector was naturalized. Eleven days later, she married Maury Gurgel Valente.

  In a notebook recording conversations with her young son Pedro, Clarice remembered him asking, “The first time you saw my father (he corrected himself and said) the first time you saw Maury, was he a stranger to you?” Clarice answered, “He was.” Pedro persisted: “But you wanted to marry that stranger?” She said she did. Her son retorted, “Did you marry the person you wanted?”31

  She left the question unanswered, at least in the version she recorded, which begs the question of how she felt about the marriage. There was her love for Lúcio Cardoso, which would last the rest of their lives, but she knew a sexual relationship with him was not in the cards. Her letters from early 1941 make it clear that she felt very affectionately toward Maury, and he was certainly in love with her.

  But not everyone thought the marriage was a good idea. “Elisa was dead-set against it, because he was a goy,” said Tania, who used legalistic arguments to bring her older sister around. “I said that Father was the only one who could forbid it, and he was no longer with us. Besides, Clarice was now an adult and could decide for herself.” Her father, Tania thought, would have opposed the match, at least at first. But if he had been convinced that marrying Maury was what Clarice really wanted, he would have come around. Still, other family members were also uncomfortable about the match. Bertha Lispector Cohen asked how her cousin felt about marrying a Catholic. “I don’t see a solution for the Jewish question,” Clarice replied, ambiguously as usual. Bertha’s brother Samuel said the resistance to her marrying a non-Jew came more from fear than from ethnic or religious pride.32 The Jews did not trust the goyim, and in 1943, they had good reason.

  At the time, it was extremely rare, indeed almost unheard of, for a Jewish girl in Brazil to marry outside the faith. Far more than lengthy citations from Spinoza, the marriage was a declaration of her independence from the
community that raised her. Perhaps the sisters feared the family’s disapproval, which is why few family members were present at the civil ceremony. Maury’s parents came, but the Wainstok family, then living in Niterói, across the bay from Rio de Janeiro, learned about the wedding only when Elisa and Tania made a trip across to tell them. The witnesses were not relatives but the bride and groom’s bosses: André Carrazzoni, the director of A Noite, who had helped Clarice with her naturalization, and Dora Alencar de Vasconcellos, one of the earliest women to enter the foreign service, whom Clarice would reencounter in the United States many years later.

  But the main skepticism about the marriage was Clarice’s own. The doubts that nagged her had little or nothing to do with questions about Maury or about marrying outside of her own community. They were about marriage itself. It is, in fact, remarkable how many of her early stories, many written before she met Maury, express this skepticism. In “Obsession” there is the dismissive description of the unimaginative Cristina’s future plans (“Marry, have children, and, finally, be happy”), in “Jimmy and I” the fear of how marriage limited women (“Mother [had] her own ideas about the freedom and equality of women. But along came Daddy, very serious and tall, who also had his own ideas, about … the freedom and equality of women”).33 In “The Escape,” a story from 1940, a housewife flees her home: “She had been married for twelve years and three hours of freedom had almost entirely restored her to herself.”34 But it is impossible to pry oneself free of the marriage trap. Like Cristina in “Obsession,” who after her thrilling experiences with Daniel finally returns to her dullard husband, Jaime, the woman in “The Escape,” without the money to support an independent life, returns home, defeated, as well.

  In “Gertrude Asks for Advice,” a teenage girl seeks a doctor’s help with her screaming existential doubts: “I came to ask what to do with myself,” as she puts it. More than anything else—already with a sense, her author’s as well, that she had a genial vocation and destiny—she wants the world to “finally see that she was someone, someone extraordinary, someone misunderstood!” Faced with this explosion of vitality, the doctor simply says, “You’ll get over it. You don’t need to work or do anything extraordinary. If you want—he was going to use his old ruse and he smiled—if you want, you should find a boyfriend.”35