Why This World

by Benjamin Moser

  Clarice had been pursuing these themes since the beginning. (The relationship between crime and creation is a further example.) Yet though The Apple in the Dark represents the unfolding of familiar ideas, it is nonetheless different from her earlier work. The difference lies in her willingness, for the first time, to say one word. “Oh God, Martin then said in calm despair. Oh God, he said.”28

  It is an excruciating moment. Clarice, with Martin, is going out to meet the God that had abandoned her in childhood. But what God is this? Clarice hints that the book is a Jewish parable. This is not indicated by the setting, an anonymous farm in the Brazilian interior, or from anything explicitly stated in the book. Clarice would never write, as did Elisa, “Latest news: Jewish state proclaimed! Read all about it!” Still, the clues are there, starting on the first page, where Martin’s shadowy persecutor is identified as a German who owns a Ford. Feared but never actually seen, the only figure in the book who is not Brazilian finally brings about Martin’s arrest.

  There is no reason of plot or character for Clarice to assign this vague figure German nationality, especially in a book in which few characters have so much as a name: “the mulatto woman,” “the professor.” In a book by a Jewish writer of the 1950s, “German” was not a neutral description, especially when applied to a symbol of harassment and oppression. And “Ford,” the only brand named in the whole book, recalls the notorious anti-Semite Henry Ford, whose venomous writings were widely distributed in Brazil.

  Both names hint that the German’s victim must be Jewish. The impression is strengthened by the goal of Martin’s long confrontation with the blank page. He is searching for a specific, impossible word, “as if there were a word that if a man said it … That absent word that however sustained him. That however was him. That however was that thing that only died because the man died. That however was his own energy and the way he breathed.”29

  This unutterable word meant salvation. “And if this was the word—would that then be the way it happened? So he had had to live everything he had lived in order to experience something that could be said in a single word? if that word could be said, and he still hadn’t said it. He had crossed the entire world, only because it was more difficult to take a single step? but if that step could never be taken!”30

  The step that cannot be taken, the absent word that sustains him, is the hidden name, the “single word” that Clarice finally, elliptically, says. The name is a symbol of God and it is God, “the symbol of the thing in the thing itself.” As Gershom Scholem has written, “This is the real and, if I may say so, the peculiarly Jewish object of mystical contemplation: The Name of God, which is something absolute, because it reflects the hidden meaning and totality of existence; the Name through which everything else acquires its meaning and which yet to the human mind has no concrete, particular meaning of its own.”31 Clarice’s reluctant rediscovery of this God of the hidden name apparently signals a rejection of her declaration, in her early essay devoted to crime and punishment, that “beyond mankind there is nothing else at all.”32

  In light of her evolving thought, however, the phrase acquires a fascinating nuance. In Jewish tradition, nothing can be changed without coming into contact with the region of absolute being that the mystics call Nothing. Only when the soul has stripped itself of all limitation and, in mystical language, has descended into the depths of nothing, does it encounter the divine.33 Martin is reborn when he descends into the empty desert, where human meaning ceases.

  Reworked, disguised, but undeniably present, the Jewish motifs in Clarice Lispector’s writings beg the question of the extent to which their inclusion was deliberate. She was not traditionally observant. Her presence in the synagogue ceased with her father’s death, when she was twenty, and unlike the classical Jewish mystics she did not venerate, or even seem to notice, the religion’s sacred texts.

  Her personal experience was instead a microcosm of the broader Jewish historical experience. Persecution and exile—and the despair, and yearning for salvation, that went with them—gave her a psychological makeup similar to Jews of all ages. When these experiences were combined with an expressive genius, the results, naturally enough, bore certain similarities to the work of her predecessors.34

  Despite her frequent descriptions of herself as nonintellectual, Clarice’s relationship with Jewish mystical thought was probably more than a simple coincidence of biographical circumstances, however. Her sister Tania confirmed that at one point Clarice’s reading included a great deal of cabbalistic literature. But this reading, for Clarice, was never the point, and she disowned it. “It is not only that I lack culture and erudition,” she told an interviewer in the early 1960s, “it’s that those subjects don’t interest me. I used to regret it, but now I don’t try to document myself; because I think that literature is not literature, it’s life, living.”35

  The presentation of herself as “lacking culture and erudition” met with remarkable success. None less than Elizabeth Bishop, her neighbor in Rio, wrote Robert Lowell that “[Clarice is] the most non-literary writer I’ve ever known, and ‘never cracks a book’ as we used to say—She’s never read anything, that I can discover—I think she’s a ‘self-taught’ writer, like a primitive painter.”36

  In one sense, Bishop was spectacularly off the mark. Clarice’s higher education, her work as a journalist, her experience in the foreign service, her knowledge of languages, and her practice in living on three continents made her, apart from her own artistic achievement, one of the most sophisticated women of her generation, and not only in Brazil. She was widely and deeply read, as the numerous allusions in her writing and correspondence prove. Autran Dourado, one of Brazil’s leading novelists and intellectuals, recalls long Sundays spent with Clarice in complicated philosophical discussions ranging from Spinoza to Nietzsche.

  In another sense, however, being a “primitive painter,” “the most non-literary writer I’ve ever known,” was a goal of Clarice’s. She placed no value on learnedness or sophistication. From Naples she had written Natércia Freire of her impatience with the diplomatic life: “At the end of it all you end up ‘educated.’ But that’s not my style. I never minded being ignorant.”37 She was interested in a different kind of knowledge, one that had nothing to do with advanced reading or philosophy. Suspecting that the answers to the “mute and intense question” that had troubled her as an adolescent—“what is the world like? and why this world?”—could not be discovered intellectually, she sought a higher kind of understanding. “You ought to know,” a Spanish cabbalist muttered at the end of the thirteenth century, “that these philosophers whose wisdom you are praising, end where we begin.”38

  If The Apple in the Dark is a creation allegory, it differs in an important way from the traditional narratives. It is the story of the creation of a man, but it is also the story of how that man creates God. “Then in his colicky flesh he invented God. … A man in the dark was a creator. In the dark the great bargains are struck. When he said ‘Oh God’ Martin felt the first weight of relief in his chest.”39 This is Martin’s essential, heroic, invention, and it comes through the word.

  The story of Martin is the opposite of the biblical creation story. The man is himself created through sin, and the sinning man creates God; that invention, a further paradox, redeems the man. Clarice has at last said the word “God,” but she will have Him only on her terms. “He knew that he would have to reduce himself when faced with the thing he had created until he could fit inside the world, and reduce himself until he became the son of the God that he had created because only that way would he receive any compassion. ‘I am nothing,’ and that way he fit inside the mystery.”40

  Even an invented God gives Martin a place in the world, along with that most human of sentiments, compassion. It is an element of the false morality from which Martin’s crime freed him. But a man cannot live forever in a state of unforgiven sin, any more than he can linger too long in the state of grace. The moment
Martin invents God is the moment he can finally come to terms with his crime: “I killed, I killed, he finally confessed.”41 Without God, even an artificial God, there can be no sin.

  In these particulars, especially in the way Clarice reverses the creation story, Martin is related to that most famous figure of Jewish folklore, one Clarice surely knew from childhood: the Frankenstein-like Golem. The creation of the Golem, whose name comes from a Hebrew word meaning “unformed” or “amorphous,” was the mystical reversion of the creation of Adam. The great folklorist Jacob Grimm, writing in 1808 in the Journal for Hermits, describes the Golem thus:

  The Polish Jews, after having spoken certain prayers and observed certain Feastdays, make the figure of a man out of clay or lime which, after they have pronounced the wonderworking Shem hameforash over it, comes to life. It is true this figure cannot speak, but it can understand what one says and commands it to do to a certain extent. They call it Golem and use it as a servant to do all sorts of house-work; he may never go out alone. On his forehead the word Emet (Truth; God) is written, but he increases from day to day and can easily become larger and stronger than his house-comrades, however small he may have been in the beginning. Being then afraid of him, they rub out the first letters so that nothing remains but Met (he is dead) whereupon he sinks together and becomes clay again.42

  The similarities between Martin and the Golem are striking. Like the clay figurines Virginia creates in The Chandelier, golems are sculpted from mud, especially river mud: in the blazing desert Clarice stresses Martin’s identity with the rocky earth. Like the Golem, Martin cannot originally speak and is used by Victoria as a house servant. He cannot leave the farm. As he masters human language he grows to a position of power over the original inhabitants of the house. Fearing him, Victoria has him taken away.

  The Shem hameforash, the spoken form of God’s unspeakable name, “that absent word that however sustained him,” gives the Golem life. In the story of the Golem as in the story of Martin, man summons God into the world by using His name. With the discovery of the hidden name, man acquires the divine power over life and death.

  25

  The Worst Temptation

  Clarice completed The Apple in the Dark in March 1956. “It was a fascinating book to write,” she wrote Fernando Sabino in September. “I learned a lot doing it, I was shocked by the surprises it gave me—but it was also a great suffering.”1 But if she thought her suffering was through when she put the finishing touches on the last of the book’s eleven drafts, she was mistaken. The Apple in the Dark met the fate of many works later acclaimed as masterpieces: it was nearly not published at all.

  When she finished it, she sent copies to Erico Verissimo and to Fernando Sabino, once again acting as her literary agent. She wanted “a publisher who can publish it without delay, as quickly as possible—not a promise for whenever they have time.” “Waiting isn’t good for me,” she added, “it trips me up, it makes me impatient.”2 At first, it seemed she would get her way. In June, to her delight, Fernando wrote her that Ênio Silveira from Civilização Brasileira would publish the book in October or November.3

  Earlier that year, Silveira had scored a notable success with Fernando Sabino’s own A Time to Meet, a kind of Brazilian Catcher in the Rye based on Fernando’s teenage experiences in Minas Gerais. It became a best-seller, spawned dramatic adaptations, and was widely translated. Ênio himself, a leftist and later a prominent opponent of the military dictatorship, had studied at Columbia and even worked for a time at Alfred A. Knopf. What’s more, he was completely “crushed by the impact of Clarice Lispector,” “absolutely dazzled”: “No book in Brazil and few abroad are at her level, it is something absolutely new, it makes a tremendous impact, etc.”4 Alas, by January 1957, when Fernando reported this news to Clarice, the dazzled and crushed Silveira was already backtracking. October and November, the original publication dates, had come and gone. The reasons for the delay were obscure, Fernando wrote: “These days the publishing business is doing well in Brazil.”5

  This was true: the glamorous new president, Juscelino Kubitschek, had eliminated certain taxes, on paper, for example, that had a negative impact on the industry, and the publishing business exploded. In 1945 Brazil had produced an average of twenty million books a year; by 1962 this had more than tripled, to sixty-six million.6 Still, Silveira was starting to fall back on time-honored excuses; he was still interested in it, Fernando assured Clarice, “even though it won’t be so easy to sell,” but he would do it by June 1957 at the latest, “for the prestige of the house.”7

  Clarice was growing nervous. Through Rubem Braga, who came to Washington in November, the book made its way to José Olympio, perhaps Rio’s most prestigious publisher, who said that he would do it “immediately.”8 In the absence of a concrete commitment, Clarice’s mood was souring, and she was losing her confidence in the book. She wrote Fernando that she was sure that José Olympio’s enthusiasm could not withstand a reading of the book. Even if it did, she added, the book couldn’t come out until 1958, which would not interest her. “When I write something, I stop liking it, little by little. … I feel like a girl putting together her trousseau and storing it in a chest. A bad marriage is better than no marriage; it’s horrible to see a yellowing trousseau.”9

  At this point, she was even considering paying to publish it, and asked Fernando to help her get in touch with printers. She was especially discouraged because, as luck would have it, The Apple in the Dark was not the only book she was having trouble publishing. On her visit to Rio in 1954, Fernando’s friend José Simeão Leal, who had published Some Stories, commissioned a full collection of stories. He even, for the first time in Clarice’s career, paid her an advance. As she was writing The Apple in the Dark, she was also working on the collection that would become Family Ties.

  The stories were completed in March 1955. They would eventually be recognized as a high point in Brazilian literature, as two of that literature’s most famous writers saw immediately. Fernando Sabino wrote, “You’ve made eight stories like nobody has come even close to making in Brazil,” adding that the book would be “exactly, sincerely, indisputably, and even humbly, the best book of stories ever published in Brazil.”10 Erico Verissimo told her, “I haven’t written about your book of stories out of sheer embarrassment to tell you what I think of it. Here goes: the most important story collection published in this country since Machado de Assis,” Brazil’s classic novelist.11

  Broader recognition, however, would have to wait. In June 1956, Simeão Leal told Clarice’s agent that the book was in proofs.12 In July, Clarice wrote Fernando, “My desire to get rid of things is almost a sickness; for example, I feel that I’ll be constrained by Simeão Leal’s book of stories forever.”13 Almost a year later, in March 1957, Rubem Braga was trying to wrest the stories free in order to publish them in the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo.14 Sabino tried to place them with Agir, publisher of The Chandelier.

  Another humiliating year and a half went by, and Erico Verissimo found a publisher for both: Henrique Bertaso, of Globo, in the Verissimos’ hometown of Porto Alegre. But, Erico added, Simeão Leal would “in no circumstances” return the originals of the stories, which were “already at the printer’s.” And just as Globo had agreed to publish The Apple in the Dark, the book appeared in the catalogue of Ênio Silveira’s Civilização Brasileira.15 Needless to say, it was not published at the appointed time. It is hard to understand why not. Civilização Brasileira was one of the most prolific publishers in Brazil; between 1961 and 1964, the house published a new title every working day of the year.16 Why was it so hard to find a place for Clarice?

  The exhausting seesaw of disappointed hopes and the depressing spectacle of being forced, in middle age and in midcareer, to beg for a publisher did not improve Clarice’s mind-set. “Ever since you left I’ve lost the stimulus for everything, nothing is fun for me,” she wrote Erico and Mafalda.17 Her friends tried to cheer her up. “I know so wel
l how you must be feeling,” Fernando wrote her, “without news, without anything. But you can always count on me, I won’t leave your book a single minute—I just regret that in Brazil the conditions of publishing it as it deserves don’t exist.”18

  “You know perfectly well that you write the only prose of a Brazilian author that I would like to write myself,” João Cabral de Melo Neto wrote, adding later, from Marseilles, where he was seeking treatment for depression, “What a thing, writing literature in Brazil. I think the best thing to do is nothing at all. In Brazil, all they understand is writing for newspapers. That’s why we’ve got this superficial, improvised, fragmentary thing passing for a national literature.”19

  “The strangest thing is happening to me,” Clarice wrote to Fernando in 1956. “As time goes by, I feel that I live nowhere, and that no place ‘wants me.’ ”20 The sad truth was that Clarice was partly right. Outside the core of artists and intellectuals who had been fascinated by her since the appearance of Near to the Wild Heart over a decade before, Clarice was by now almost entirely forgotten. Her subsequent novels had not burnished the celebrity she had earned with her first; moreover, she had been living abroad for many years. She was no longer a name, and, as the letters she was receiving from Fernando were making increasingly obvious, no publisher was eager to take on a difficult four-hundred-page cabbalistic allegory by an obscure writer, no matter what her reputation among certain intellectuals.

  But that reputation, and the sincere dedication of her friends, was about to bear fruit. In November 1958, she received a letter from a young journalist named Nahum Sirotzky, a cousin of Samuel Wainer, who was launching a new magazine called Senhor, “Gentleman.” Finally a place did want her, and on her terms. Sirotzky wrote, “We would like to read your stories which we never considered intelligible.”21