Why This World

by Benjamin Moser

  By the end of the year, Clarice was seeing a therapist, Ulysses Girsoler, who provided her a lengthy Rorschach.37 It is unclear whether he was a psychoanalyst and how he met Clarice. “He was a student, I think of painting,” Clarice’s friend Olga Borelli said. “And this Ulysses had such a violent passion for her that he had to move to another city, he left” (for Basel, and then Geneva). “Because Clarice was extremely beautiful, people fell in love with her. He left, and she always remembered him. He was blond, with light eyes, named Ulysses. So in homage, she used the name Ulysses in An Apprenticeship.”38

  Little is known about this Ulysses. He was not Swiss, and the few references to him in Clarice’s correspondence suggest others that have not been published or made available. The longest is in a letter to Tania from October 1947 that probably refers to Ulysses:

  That boy, who is in Geneva, is completely neurasthenic. It seems he even gets up in the middle of the night to cry. … Don’t tell anyone, of course. It seems he’s even been going to a health clinic. Part of it has to do with his being sick, and that depressed him. But I think that a lot of it comes from the uprooting of this life abroad. Not everyone is strong enough to stand not having their own surroundings, or friends. More and more, I admire Papa and others who, like him, managed to have a “new life”; you need a lot of courage to have a new life. In this career you’re completely outside reality, you don’t belong to anything—and the diplomatic environment is made up of shadows and shadows. It’s even considered bad taste to have any personal tastes or to speak of oneself or even to speak of others. Nobody has a relationship with a diplomat—with a diplomat, you have lunch.39

  Girsoler was the first in a long line of psychotherapists (if that is what he was) who either fell in love with Clarice or became too attached to her to be able to function with proper analytic distance. His prophetic Rorschach describes with uncanny precision the same drama Clarice had set out in Near to the Wild Heart: the struggle between impetuous Joana and placid Lídia.

  “It is not necessary, after all, to say that the intelligence of Cl. V. is far above average. She knows it herself, though she has her doubts for the moment. She has a breadth of intellectual capacities that is almost too great to be completely employed,” the diagnosis opens. “In Cl. V. the affectivity that actively touches the course of her associations [i.e., as the Rorschach drawings were shown] is of a disquieting power. … A great fantasy and a strong intuition are united. … The creative urge breaks through vehemently.” Yet he warns against the danger:

  [She has a] tendency to delve into a genial, undisciplined chaos. Affectivity occupies a much larger space than average and possesses a clearly egocentric character.— This affectivity directly requires a great intellectual effort from most of those affected by it.— The impulsive affectivity (which requires no accommodation) can in Cl. V., to the shock of those affected by it, become entirely explosive, and at such moments she can be whisked away without any control. During such outbursts she can perform entirely thoughtless actions and behave in a foolhardy fashion. For the time being this impulsive side is strongly repressed. We see that all her sentimental life is stretched between one extreme (impulsivity) all the way across the whole range to the other extreme (subtlety, sensibility, ability to feel all the possible emotions that other humans feel). —It will be very difficult for such a character to find balance.—a conscious domestication of these elementary impulses by intellectual participation. —The result is a more or less melancholy character. That is the reason for the possibility of a tendency to flee the world despite the great vitality. —There is a perseverance of a great number of thoughts, and especially when those thoughts are affectively related to conflicts. Cl. V. begins to think around the conflicts and a great amount of her originality and her creative strength is absorbed by this way of thinking in circles. The result of this manner of thinking [is] original symbols and partially thoughts that contain designs in a mystical form. —This depressive state often slides into a melancholy expression, but never for long since the reaction soon manifests itself once again on the side of vitality.

  She is able to perform regular tasks, but “a great skepticism appears against the world, a doubt about people that reaches an outspoken opposition,” including, “with the same energy, against herself.”40

  In her novel An Apprenticeship or the Book of Pleasures, Ulisses would be a rather pedantic teacher and philosopher; and her last, beloved dog would be called Ulisses, too. In a letter the real “Ulisses” sent to “Clarissa. Clarissima,” he tells her, “It is an even harder thing to support [i.e., stand] real freedom.”41

  “My drama: is that I am free,” she later wrote;42 this was, in fact, much of the drama she experienced in Switzerland. From an artistic perspective, she had what so many writers dream of: unlimited hours in which to work unperturbed. But her days were amorphous and she stared out the window. “The solitude I always needed is at the same time entirely unbearable,” she wrote Fernando.43 She told Tania, “I would like to have a mathematical device to measure precisely every millimeter I move ahead, and every millimeter I fall behind.”44

  The months wore on; at the beginning of January 1947, she wrote Tania a long letter. For her substitute mother, who thought of herself as “more than a sister,” it must have been even more painful to read than it was for Clarice to write.45 It is hard to believe that its author is the same beautiful and alluring young woman who, less than a year earlier, had departed Rio de Janeiro, where she was fêted by many of her country’s leading artists, and who took time out of her journey back to Europe to go eyeball-to-eyeball with the Sphinx. In her place appears a woman so despondent and helpless that her letter reads almost like a suicide note.

  Don’t think that a person has the strength to lead any kind of life and stay the same. … I don’t know how to explain my soul to you. But what I mean is that we are very precious, and that there’s only so much you can give up of yourself for the sake of other people and circumstances. … All I planned to do was tell you about my new character, or lack of character. … Darling, almost four years have greatly transformed me. From the moment I resigned myself, I lost all my vivacity and all my interest in things. Have you seen the way a castrated bull turns into an ox? That is what happened to me … despite the hard comparison. … To adapt to something I can’t adapt to, to get over my dislikes and my dreams, I had to cut off my fetters—I cut off inside me the way I could hurt others and myself. And at the same time I cut off my strength. I hope you never see me resigned like this, because it’s almost repugnant. … One day, a friend filled herself with courage, as she said, and asked me: “You were really different, weren’t you?” She said she thought I had been passionate and lively, and that when she met me here she thought: either this excessive calm is a pose or she’s changed so much that she’s almost unrecognizable. Someone else told me that I move with the lassitude of a fifty-year-old woman … which can happen with someone who has made a pact with everyone, and who forgot that the vital center of a person has to be respected. Listen: respect even the bad parts of yourself—respect above all the bad parts of yourself—for the love of God, don’t try to make yourself perfect—don’t copy an ideal, copy yourself—that is the only way to live.

  19

  The Public Statue

  In Switzerland, in Bern, I lived on the Gerechtigkeitsgasse, that is, Justice Street. In front of my house, in the street, was the colored statue, holding the scales. Around, crushed kings begging perhaps for a pardon. In the winter, the little lake in the middle of which the statue stood, in the winter the freezing water, sometimes brittle with a thin layer of ice. In the spring red geraniums. … And the still-medieval street: I lived in the old part of the city. What saved me from the monotony of Bern was living in the Middle Ages, it was waiting for the snow to pass and for the red geraniums to be reflected once again in the water, it was having a son born there, it was writing one of my least liked books, The Besieged City, which, however, p
eople come to like when they read it a second time; my gratitude to that book is enormous: the effort of writing it kept me busy, saved me from the appalling silence of Bern, and when I finished the last chapter I went to the hospital to give birth to the boy.1

  For Virginia, in The Chandelier, the only reality was internal; the outside world was fuzzy and incomprehensible and finally did her in. Lucrécia Neves, heroine of The Besieged City, is the opposite. Her own intimate life is “barely useable,” and so, “unintelligent,” she looks outward, to the new city growing up around her. “Which was so important for a person in a certain way stupid; Lucrécia who did not possess the futilities of the imagination, but only the narrow existence of whatever she saw.”2 As a book about the external world, it is a singular instance in Clarice Lispector’s work. Perhaps the book represented a final attempt for Clarice to get outside herself, to flee the “shipwreck of introspection,”3 to escape the melancholy that threatened to do her in. “Breath deep the spring air,” Bluma Wainer wrote Clarice after a visit to Bern in March 1947. “Think as little as possible and analyze even less.”4

  The name Lucrécia hides Clarice’s own name, and unlike so many of Clarice’s characters, who are extensions or enunciations of herself, Lucrécia is a true alter ego, a person who thinks as little as possible and analyzes even less. Unlike the vitally, painfully alive Clarice, Lucrécia achieves the ultimate in muteness and unreflection. In a chapter titled “The Public Statue,” Clarice writes, “In the position she was in, Lucrécia Neves could even be transported to a public square. All she was missing were the sun and the rain. So that, covered with lime, she could finally be unnoticed by the inhabitants and finally seen daily without being noticed. Because that was the way a statue belonged to a city.” It is hard not to think of the image of Justice outside her window in the Gerechtigkeitsgasse. Later, the metaphor reappears: “Slowly, as the man spoke, Lucrécia Neves grew larger, enigmatic, a statue at whose feet, during civic holidays, flowers were deposited.”5

  Lucrécia exists to satisfy her small, easily identifiable needs. Her story has an alluring simplicity: she grows up, gets married, is widowed, and marries again. It is impossible to escape the conclusion that Lucrécia is someone Clarice would have liked to be, or at least someone whose easier life part of her envied: happily superficial, content with tea parties and “best-seller” people. So many of Clarice’s books end with car wrecks, submissions, and defeat; it is not by chance that The Besieged City has a happy ending.

  Much of what brought Clarice misery and exile meant fulfillment and peace for Lucrécia. After spurning her dreamy adolescent boyfriend Perseu, whose name associates him with Pegasus, the flying horse of Greek antiquity, Lucrécia marries Mateus, a rich man from another city. Mateus offers Lucrécia much of what Maury could give Clarice. An outsider to her community, cultivated and worldly, Mateus promised financial security and the hope of seeing the world. “Every man seems to promise a woman a bigger city,” Clarice writes. “Ah, Mateus is from another world, mama! he’s from another city, he’s cultured, he knows what’s going on, he reads the paper, he knows other people,” the ditzy Lucrécia tells her mother when she wants to get married. This is a perfect match. Lucrécia “wanted to be rich, possess things, and move up in the world.”6 But just as Clarice complained that “Bern is a tomb, even for the Swiss. And a Brazilian is nothing in Europe,” Lucrécia finds, once she leaves her native São Geraldo, that she is out of place: “Once she left the town, her kind of beauty had disappeared, and her importance was diminished.”7 In her new place, she is “the most inexperienced member of the city,”8 though she soon discovers a kind of satisfaction there.

  Indeed, the catty remarks sprinkled through the book, so untypical of Clarice’s writing, seem to reflect her unhappiness, not Lucrécia’s. When she writes of Mateus, for example, that he had the “look of a lawyer or an engineer—such was his air of mystery,”9 she probably was thinking of the lawyers and diplomats, the “best-sellers,” that surrounded her in her exile. Lucrécia, by contrast, is usually in a good mood.

  In the new place, the empty woman devotes herself to social climbing: “Lucrécia hoped to go two or three more times to the theater, looking forward to reaching a number that was difficult to count, like seven or nine, when she could add: ‘I used to go to the theater all the time.’ ” She learns the customs of the new city, and she fits in perfectly. At first, at the theater, she is struck by the beauty of the performance, but this, too, passes, and the “best-seller” expression becomes second nature: “Because later she learned to say: I liked it a lot, the theater was nice, I had such a good time. … This is the most beautiful square I’ve ever seen, she would say, and then she could securely walk across the most beautiful square she had ever seen.” A favorite saying is that something “works in theory, but not in practice.”10

  Lucrécia Neves, taking in the sights in the big city, shopping and visiting the theater, sounds rather like Clarice Lispector in Paris, where she spent a month at the beginning of 1947. “I don’t know if I’m crazy about Paris,” she wrote her sisters. “It’s hard to say. With life the way it is, it seems that I’m ‘a different person’ in Paris. It’s a dizziness that isn’t pleasant at all. I’ve seen too many people, talked too much, told lies, been very nice. The person who’s enjoying herself is a woman I don’t know, a woman I detest, a woman who isn’t your sister. She’s just anybody.”

  She is Lucrécia, in other words. But Clarice, unfortunately for her peace of mind, could not turn herself into just anybody. “I was truly fatigued in Paris by all those intelligent people. You can’t go to a theater without having to say if you liked it or not, and why you liked it and why you didn’t. I learned to say ‘I don’t know,’ which I was proud of, as a defense and a bad habit, because I end up really not wanting to think, besides just not wanting to say what I think.”11

  During Lucrécia’s lifetime, the small settlement of São Geraldo becomes a full-fledged city. When she is a child, São Geraldo, rather like Chechelnik, is a little place, populated by wild horses. The history of the town’s growth is the story of the expulsion of these horses; as it takes on ever more civilized airs, finally acquiring a viaduct and an embankment, the horses progressively emigrate, “delivering the metropolis to the Glory of its mechanism.”12

  As the city grows and the horses are expelled, the town’s language evolves. São Geraldo’s first citizens had no need of words. Lucrécia’s ancient neighbor Efigênia, who by dint of long residence has become a kind of municipal totem, is almost as silent as the horses. “The spiritual life they vaguely attributed to Efigênia finally seemed to be summed up by the fact that she neither agreed nor disagreed, that she didn’t participate even with herself, so austere she had become. To be as silent and hard as people who had never had to think. Whereas in São Geraldo people were starting to talk a lot.”13

  The symbol of São Geraldo’s linguistic adolescence is Perseu, Lucrécia’s first boyfriend, who experiences the same linguistic ecstasy that marked Joana and Virginia. Like the young Clarice Lispector, Perseu takes delight in a language that is still as sonorous and nonsensical as music.

  “Marine beings, when not affixed to the sea floor, adapt to a fluctuating or pelagic life,” Perseu studied on the afternoon of May 15, 192. …

  Heroic and empty, the citizen kept standing beside the open window. But in fact he could never transmit to anyone the extent to which he was harmonious, and even if he spoke, no word could convey the graciousness of his appearance: his extreme harmony was simply evident.

  “Pelagic animals reproduce with profusion,” he said with hollow luminosity. Blind and glorious—that was all that could be known of him. …

  “They feed on basic microvegetation, infusorials, etc.”

  “Etc.!” he repeated brilliant, unconquerable. …

  “This discoidal animal is formed according to the symmetry based on the number 4.”

  That’s what it said! And the sun beat down on t
he dusty page: a cockroach was even climbing up the house across the street. … Then the boy said something as lustrous as a scarab:

  “Pelagic beings reproduce with extraordinary profusion,” he finally exclaimed from memory.14

  In choosing the outsider Mateus over the native Perseu, Lucrécia also elects a sophisticated language, one still foreign to the little town of her birth. But São Geraldo is catching up, and slick linguistic accretions are as much a part of its progress as the viaduct and the embankment. “The more São Geraldo grew, the more difficult it became for [Lucrécia] to speak clearly, so dissimulated had she become.” Nothing, now, is wild; everything, even Mateus’s last moments, are smothered by Lucrécia’s syrupy words. “Even his death, she had tried to destroy. She tried to console him, the only way to reduce the event to something recognizable: at least you’re not dying away from home. … Foolish, as if dying didn’t always take place away from home.”15

  Clarice’s discontent with her own forcible domestication comes across rather loudly in her descriptions of the city’s increasing pretensions. It is obvious enough that she hated for the horses to abandon São Geraldo. But The Besieged City is not a denunciation of bourgeois affectations. It is part of her lifelong quest for an authentic language.

  Perhaps the initial impulse came from the hours she spent staring out of her window in Switzerland, contemplating the inflexible figure of Justice. The language of The Besieged City is the language of vision, and metaphors of seeing are sprinkled insistently throughout the book. At certain moments, vision even replaces spoken language, as when people “look” or “see” words rather than speaking or thinking them: “This city is mine, the woman looked.”16

  The gazes of its inhabitants, not bricks and asphalt, build the new city of São Geraldo. “The city was taking the form her gaze revealed.” “Oh, but things were never seen: it was people who saw them.” “She opened her eyelashes, staring blindly. After a time the things in the room recovered their own positions, recuperating the way they could be seen by her.” “In truth it was a very crude function—she indicated the intimate name of things, she, the horses, and a few others; and later things would be seen by this name. Reality required the girl in order to take a form.”17