Joan tolerated the situation for a time. Eventually, however, enough was enough, and she threatened to take their children and return to England. Choosing his wife and family, Paulinho broke off the affair with Clarice. With it went their friendship. Clarice repeatedly asked the novelist Autran Dourado to try to patch things up, but he understood it was over and preferred not to get involved. The end of the relationship isolated Clarice still further from the literary milieu, from the adult world to which she had such fragile ties.
“She loved him until the day she died,” her friend Rosa Cass remembered. And she seems to have taken a kind of revenge on the other woman when, more than a decade later, she wrote a short story about an Englishwoman, “Miss Algrave.” In London, Miss Algrave knows she can seduce her boss. “She was sure he would accept. He was married to a pale and insignificant woman, Joan.” On a more lyrical note, Clarice may have been thinking of Paulinho when she wrote, “Sometimes all the purity of body and soul is in illicit love, not blessed by a priest, but blessed by the love itself.”21
Toward the middle of 1962, Clarice met the American poet Elizabeth Bishop. Bishop had been living in Brazil since 1951, when, on a cruise around South America, she disembarked at Santos for a two-week visit. She ended up staying for fifteen years. The reason was her relationship with the heiress Lota de Macedo Soares, with whom she lived in considerable splendor in their modernist mansion, Samambaia, in the mountains north of Rio. Lota was brilliant, one of the most important landscape architects in Brazilian history, having renovated a large section of Rio de Janeiro, but she was also tempestuous and depressive; she eventually committed suicide in Bishop’s apartment in New York.
By the early 1960s, the relationship had taken a turn for the worse. Bishop was drinking heavily, and as her despair increased so did her view of Lota’s country. Once a tropical paradise of waterfalls and Baroque churches, it was now a cesspool of ignorance and provincialism. Dismissive comments about Brazil and Brazilians began to fill her letters. She did, however, reserve one grudging exception:
I have found one contemporary I like, however—living right down the street from us in Rio—I put off reading her because I thought I wouldn’t like her, and now I find I not only like her stories very much but like her, too. She has a wonderful name—Clarice Lispector (Russian). Her 2 or 3 novels I don’t think are so good but her short stories are almost like the stories I’ve always thought should be written about Brazil—Tchekovian, slightly sinister and fantastic—I am sending some to ENCOUNTER soon—She has a N.Y. publisher who wants them and maybe I’ll do the whole book for her—I swore I’d never do any more translating—but I don’t mind very short things and feel I should, really—She is rather large-boned fair and completely Oriental Russian-looking—“Khergis,” I think is the race, something like that—like the girl in “The Magic Mountain,” I imagine—but otherwise very Brazilian, and very shy. I know or care for so few of the “intellectuals” here that it is nice to find someone new—and Lota likes her, too, as much as I do, and even went to the length of reading a couple of the stories & agreeing with me they are good. (Lota won’t read anything in Portuguese except the papers, and government reports now) Actually I think she is better than J. L. Borges—who is good, but not all that good!22
Bishop was working on translations of Clarice’s stories, but by the end of the year this romance, too, had soured. Her hopes for a productive literary collaboration were dashed when Clarice inexplicably vanished. In January 1963, she wrote to Robert Lowell:
I have translated five of Clarice’s stories—all the very short ones & one longer one. The New Yorker is interested—I think she needs money, so that would be good, the $ being what it is (almost twice as much already as when you were here)—then if they don’t know them, Encounter, PR, etc. Alfred Knopf is also interested in seeing the whole book. But at the moment—just when I was ready to send off the batch, except for one, she has vanished on me—completely—and for about six weeks! Lota met her—she isn’t cross or anything—and she seemed delighted with the translations, letters of interest, etc. I am mystified; L is fed up. … It is “temperament,” maybe, or more likely just the usual “massive inertia” that one runs [into] at every turn—and that is driving Lota mad on her job. It makes one despair, really. Her novels are NOT good; the “essays” she does for Senhor are very bad—but in the stories she has awfully good things and they do sound pretty good in English and I was quite pleased with them. Oh dear.
Despite her annoyance, Bishop was not entirely ready—not yet, at least—to write off Clarice as yet another indolent Brazilian. “Clarice suffers from the same kind of dated-ness, provincialism, etc.—but she really has talent—and I have hopes,—(or had, until she disappeared).”23
Clarice’s disappearance may have had something to do with yet another personal crisis. On December 7, 1962, a lifetime of heavy drinking and drug abuse finally caught up with her friend, mentor, and first love, Lúcio Cardoso.
Earlier that year, in May, he had had a warning. Arriving at his home in Ipanema, his sister Maria Helena “saw the muscles in his face ceaselessly trembling, while he, in the greatest affliction, tried to calm them with his hand.” The crisis passed, but the doctor was clear. “Look, Lúcio, what you had was just a spasm, leaving your mouth a bit crooked and that drawling way of speaking. Thank God, because it could have been much worse. With time, if you keep doing your exercises in front of the mirror, everything will return to normal. But from now on don’t overdo it, don’t drink, don’t wear yourself out partying, try to lead a calmer life, since if you go on like before something worse can happen.” Despite his sister’s desperate attempts to help him, he refused to heed the doctor’s warning. “I’m not a child for you to be taking care of me,” he told Maria Helena. “Don’t touch those bottles! If I want to drink, neither you nor anybody else is going to stop me.”24
Lúcio had never enjoyed the fame to which his volcanic creativity seemed to entitle him. His theatrical ventures had come to nothing, and his writing was met with incomprehension. In 1959, he published his masterpiece, Chronicle of the Murdered House, a long Faulknerian novel of his native Minas Gerais, an attack on “Minas, in its flesh and spirit,”25 a meditation on good and evil and God complete with incest, homosexuality, and bestiality.
The novel predictably scandalized the more predictably scandalizable critics. His champion Octávio de Faria answered them, in words that hint at Lúcio’s affinity with Clarice Lispector. “Are we going to abandon our attempts to reconstruct the world, this tremendous responsibility, on which our salvation may depend, in order to obey a half-dozen prejudices?”26
Even this notoriety did not bring him the wider audience he longed for. He struggled, increasingly worn down by alcohol, until December 7, 1962.
I’ll never forget that date: December 7, 1962 [his sister wrote]. It was a calm day, completely normal, until the afternoon. Between six-thirty and seven the phone rang.
“Lelena, I’m at Lazzarini’s house, helping out with a dinner for his friends.”
I recognized the voice of Nonô, whom I hadn’t seen in more than two days. He sometimes vanished like that for a week, which worried me after his spasm.
“Be careful, don’t drink, don’t take any pills.”
“Relax, I’m being a saint.”27
Later that night, not having heard from him, she went to his apartment, directly behind hers. She found the door unlocked, which she thought was strange. She went in and discovered her brother gravely ill. Terrified, she called an ambulance; that night he fell into a coma. He emerged from the coma, but a massive stroke had paralyzed him forever. He would never again be able to speak normally, and his writing career was over.
Maria Helena cared for him for years, always hoping that their attempts at rehabilitation would pay off and allow him to resume his career. It was a painful struggle, days of hope punctuated by weeks and months of despair. In a moment of frustration, trying to get him to do his exerc
ises, Maria Helena told him:
“You’re very stubborn, that’s why so much has happened to you. Remember when you had your first sickness, just a spasm? I begged you, but you kept on drinking and popping pills. Did it work, your stubbornness?”
He got even more irritated and to my surprise said:
“It did. I died.”28
“Clarice was finally heard from yesterday,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote Robert Lowell around six weeks after Lúcio’s stroke, “—apologies and tears, even, I think!—I couldn’t even sound annoyed, of course—she has been sick, I think—and is having some sort of minor operation the end of this month—well—I think we’ll be able to get off the batch of stories next week—Knopf is coming back in Feb. and it would be a good chance for her, too—I suppose the combination of Russian massive inertia and Brazilian does pile up. I do like her, too.—But I have been minding my loneliness here more lately, I’m afraid—HOWEVER—dear Clarice might have telephoned, in seven weeks—or had her maid telephone!”29
Bishop’s attempts, however grudging, to promote Clarice in English would eventually pay off. In 1964, the Kenyon Review published “Three Stories by Clarice Lispector” in Bishop’s translation.30 And her efforts to interest Alfred Knopf resulted, in 1967, in the first book-length English translation of one of Clarice’s works, The Apple in the Dark. Knopf reputedly said that he didn’t understand a word of it. The translator was not Bishop, who found translating a work of that length “too boring & time-wasting,”31 but Gregory Rabassa, the dean of translators of Latin American fiction.
He met Clarice a few months after Lúcio’s stroke, when she was invited to the United States. “Clarice has been asked to another literary congress, at the University of Texas,” Bishop wrote Lowell at the beginning of July, “and is being very coy & complicated—but I think is secretly very proud—and is going, of course. I’ll help her with her speech. I suppose we are getting to be ‘friends.’ ”32 On August 26, the day Clarice left, Bishop, with her usual grudging, told Lowell that “she is off this morning to Texas for a Literary Conference—came & read me her lecture Saturday. But she’s hopeless, really.”
It was Clarice’s first visit to the United States since she had left Washington in 1959, and it would be her last. During her few days in Austin, she made an amazing impression. Gregory Rabassa said that he was “astonished to meet that rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf.”33 A newspaper reporter wrote, “Mrs. Lispector is a stunning blonde with the charisma of a movie star, who lights up any room she enters.”34
She was hardly treated like a movie star by the Brazilian consul, who “thought he had to invite [her] to dinner”: “He took me, this representative of our country, to a third-rate restaurant, one of those with red-and-black-checked tablecloths. In the United States meat is expensive, fish is cheap. Before I could decide what I wanted, he said to the waiter: ‘Fish for the lady.’ I was surprised: it wasn’t a fish restaurant. And he added, I swear: ‘And for me a thick steak, very rare.’ As he cut his steak, which I envied, he told me all about his misfortunes since his divorce. The fish, of course, was terrible. To help him economize and to get rid of him, I didn’t order dessert.”35
Though she began her talk by claiming that she was not a critic, and therefore not qualified to comment alongside the professors, Rabassa noted that “Clarice the novelist gave a much more cogent talk on literature than any of the many professional scholars and critics who shared the podium.”36 The speech reads like a mature version of the analytic journalistic voice from the beginning of her career.
The subject is avant-garde literature. In it, she addresses the issue of Brazil’s insularity, the national self-obsession that characterized its literature. “We are hungry to know about ourselves, and urgently, because we still need ourselves more than we need others.” All real art, she says, is avant-garde, since “all real life is experimentation,” and any work that is not is simple imitation: “And there are some young writers who are a bit overintellectualized. It seems to me that they are not inspired by, shall we say, ‘the thing itself,’ but by other literature, ‘the thing already literalized.’ ”37
She added a despairing appendix: “As for my own writing, I tell you—if anybody cares—that I am disillusioned. It’s that writing didn’t bring me what I wanted, which was peace. My literature is in no sense a catharsis that would do me good and is useless as a form of liberation. From here on out I may not write again, and only deepen the life within me. Or that deepening might lead me to write again. I can’t say.”38
28
The Cockroach
Back home in Brazil, Clarice’s largely forgotten earlier work was getting a new lease on life. In 1963, Francisco Alves released an inexpensive paperback version of her once famous debut. “Published around twenty years ago, in a small printing, this Near to the Wild Heart, which many claim is Clarice Lispector’s masterpiece, is completely unknown to today’s readers,” the introduction claimed.1 In the same year, another publisher, José Álvaro, revived The Chandelier. The Besieged City followed in 1964.
This attention to her past production was flattering, but it was also a reminder of her difficulty looking toward the future. It had been so long since she had worked on a novel, seven years since she finished The Apple in the Dark. As her speech in Texas shows, she was profoundly anxious about being able to write. During such a “hiatus,” she later said, “life becomes intolerable.”2
No sooner did she give voice to this fear, however, than she produced, in a quick outburst at the end of 1963, one of the great novels of the twentieth century. “It’s strange,” she remembered of this time, “because I was in the worst of situations, sentimentally as well as in my family, everything complicated, and I wrote The Passion, which has nothing to do with that.”3
In its ambition and eccentricity, in its sweeping redefinition of what a novel can be, The Passion According to G. H. recalls peculiar masterpieces such as Moby-Dick and Tristram Shandy. Yet it is not, at least not in the first place, literature. That, Clarice said in Texas, “is what other people call what we writers do.”4 She later wrote that “I am well aware of what the so-called true novel is. Yet when I read it, with its webs of facts and descriptions, I am simply bored. And when I write it is not the classical novel. But it is a novel.”5
G. H., with its quick, sketchy plot, is instead the climax of a long personal quest. For the first time, Clarice writes in the first person. And for the first time she captures the full violence, the physical disgust, of her encounter with God.
Warning “possible readers” of the novel’s shocking contents, Clarice opens with a brief and cryptic caveat in the preface. The book should be read only by “people who know that the approach, to anything at all, comes about gradually and agonizingly—and includes crossing through the opposite of the thing being approached.” The reader who proceeds beyond this solemn admonition will see that Clarice is “gradually and agonizingly” approaching God. She, too, has passed through “the opposite of the thing being approached”: one has only to recall her statement, made at age twenty-one, that “beyond mankind there is nothing else at all.”
She does not disavow that apparently clear declaration of atheism, not even when she at last discovers God. Instead, and even more fundamentally than in The Apple in the Dark, she redefines its terms: “beyond mankind” and “nothing else at all.” The result, which might be called mystical Spinozism or religious atheism, is her richest paradox yet.
The first section of The Apple in the Dark is called “How a Man Is Made.” The Passion According to G. H. tells how a woman is unmade. G. H.’s crime, however, is far more repulsive and inhumane than Martin’s supposed murder of his wife. Through it, she will not, like Martin, invent God. She will find God.
As she begins her monologue, G. H., a comfortable inhabitant of a Rio penthouse, tries to describe the life that had so unexpectedly ended the day before. The day started conventionally enough. Her
maid having quit, G. H. resolved to tidy up the woman’s room.
“Before I entered the room, what was I?” G. H. asks. “I was what others had always seen me be, and that was the way I knew myself.” She had the occasional hint of something beyond that secondhand image: “Sometimes, looking at a snapshot taken on the beach or at a party, I noted with a light ironic apprehension something the smiling and darkened face revealed to me: a silence. A silence and a destiny that escaped me, I, hieroglyphic fragment of an empire dead or alive. When I looked at the portrait I saw the mystery. No. I am going to lose the rest of my fear of bad taste, I am going to begin my exercise in courage, being alive is not courage, knowing that one is alive is the courage—and I am going to say that in my photograph I saw The Mystery.”6
These intuitions pass. G. H. is a presentable surface, not herself but a quote of herself, Clarice writes. “The rest was the way I had gradually become the person who has my name. And I ended up being my name. All you have to do is look on the leather of my luggage and see the initials G. H.—and there I am. … Around me I exude the tranquility that comes from reaching the point of being G. H. even on one’s suitcases.” In a short sentence that captures all the disjointed perfection of her style, Clarice emphasizes that G. H., even on her suitcases, no longer exists. “I finally got up from the breakfast table, that woman.”7
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