Why This World

by Benjamin Moser

  The writer Affonso Romano de Sant’Anna and his wife, Marina Colasanti, Clarice’s editor at the Jornal do Brasil, also got desperate calls from Clarice. “I still remember,” Sant’Anna wrote, “that one day she called to say that she was completely lost. She no longer knew how to write. … Perplexed, unsure what to say, I made an excuse: ‘Who am I, Clarice, to give you advice?’ ” Sant’Anna later learned that she asked the same question of Renaud, Rio’s swankiest hairdresser, whose salon was in the Copacabana Palace.18

  Clarice’s further attempts at finding a life for herself were just as awkward as her ringing people up in the middle of the night. In Rio de Janeiro to this day, anecdotes of Clarice’s social eccentricities abound. Once, Affonso and Marina were giving a dinner party and learned that Clarice wanted to be invited. Marina was thrilled, since she very rarely went out. At the appointed hour, Affonso went to pick up the famous writer and bring her to their house. She arrived, looking “imperial,” walked into the living room and chatted awkwardly for a few minutes with the other guests. In the kitchen, she told Marina that she had a headache and had to leave immediately. Affonso drove her home.

  It was not easier when she did stay. One host at a dinner party made borscht as a salute to her “Slavic origins.” She took a spoonful and exclaimed that it was delicious. She didn’t eat any more, though everyone pretended not to notice. She then proceeded to turn down drinks (she took sleeping pills), dessert (she was on a diet), coffee (she suffered from chronic insomnia). When she left at ten-thirty, the host wrote, “I felt I had survived once again.”19

  Even those who loved her best found her exhausting. She evoked a sense of protection in others, an urge to help her through her great suffering, though her friends make it clear she never asked for anything. “It was more a feeling she aroused in you,” Rosa Cass said. And Clarice’s neediness was draining. Tati de Moraes, the first of Vinicius de Moraes’s nine wives, once asked Rosa, “How long have you been friends with Clarice? Because nobody can stand it for long.”20

  If she was radically independent artistically and intellectually, emotionally she was as dependent as a child. In Clarice’s private notebooks she recorded her difficulty in connecting with other people: “I wondered if I didn’t avoid getting close to people out of fear of later coming to hate them. I get along badly with everyone. I have no tolerance. She told me … that I am someone to whom it is difficult to give affection. I answered: well, I’m not the type who inspires affection. She: you almost push away the hand people stretch out to help you. Sometimes, you need help, but you don’t ask for it.”21 Clarice does not name the woman with whom she was having this conversation, but the tone of the conversation suggests a therapist, either Inês Besouchet or the woman she began seeing at the beginning of 1968, Anna Kattrin Kemper, known as Catarina. Kemper was a German friend of both Inês Besouchet and Hélio Pellegrino and had come to Rio de Janeiro after the war.

  Clarice was ashamed of, or felt awkward about, her analysis and did not want it to become public knowledge. In June 1968, in a letter to Marly de Oliveira —a fellow diplomatic spouse who had become close to Clarice when, in the early 1960s, she published a long series of articles examining and attacking some critics’ readings of Clarice’s work, and who in 1968 also published a long poem in Clarice’s honor, The Gentle Panther22—she asked her friend not to mention that she was seeing Kemper. At the same time, the letter also suggests that she never told Marly about the years she had spent with Inês Besouchet:

  I’m having a lot of difficulty with my novel: it’s the first one I’ve talked to other people about, and it’s the first whose ending I know in advance. There’s still the shadow of The Passion According to G. H.: after that book I have the unpleasant impression that people expect something better from me. But I’m struggling against this nascent depression trying to find a better way to work and also leaning on Catarina (never tell anyone about my analysis: I wrote all my books before Catarina, except The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit, which had been written since I was six anyway; so it’s easy to explain me by saying that I write this way because of analysis. Eliane Zagury was one of the people who asked me if I am or have been in analysis, I denied it, and she said it was because my books have the profundity that is only attained in analysis).23

  As Clarice was trying, however painfully and incompletely, to reach out to the world, her first love, the hero of her adolescence, Lúcio Cardoso, was dying, six years after his paralyzing stroke. After her accident, Clarice had met her friend in the hospital, where both of them were receiving therapy. “We fell into each others’ arms.”24

  Nursed by his sister Maria Helena, Lúcio had become a talented painter, using only his left hand, though he never regained his ability to write. In the eloquent memoir Maria Helena published at Clarice’s suggestion, she records his painful, fitful, exhausting progress, until, near the end, he finally managed to start writing again. Even his shortest notes gave them great hope.

  “Can be 100 years—I have in the spirit young—life, happiness, everything!” he scrawled. “I, writer by fate.” “I looked at him with great affection and admiration. God had tried him in the cruelest way yet he had more happiness and love in his heart than sadness and bitterness. The dark days passed quickly, followed by light, much light.” After saying it for years in order to keep up his spirits, Maria Helena could finally exclaim, this time with conviction, “Darling, the day is not far off when you will be able to write novels again.”25

  The end soon followed, on September 22, 1968. When he was already in a coma, Clarice visited him. “I didn’t go to the wake, nor to the funeral, nor to the mass because there was too much silence within me. In those days I was alone, I couldn’t see people: I had seen death.”26

  34

  “I Humanized Myself”

  Despite her physical handicaps, political disappointments, and personal bereavements, Clarice intensified her attempts to engage in the world, to rediscover “the knack of being a person,” throughout 1968. Part of that process was An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures, written in 1968 and published in the middle of the next year. She sometimes claimed to be unsatisfied with the result. “If the book is any good?” she wrote her son Paulo. “I think it’s detestable and badly done, but the people who read it thought it was good.”1

  Though a best-seller when it was published, An Apprenticeship is now something of an orphan. Even some of her most sympathetic critics have gone so far as to accuse it of superficiality and flippancy, words that ought to give pause when used in connection with Clarice Lispector.2 Perhaps some of this distaste is chronological: the book appeared between the summits of The Passion According to G. H. and the subsequent Água viva.

  There is no question that An Apprenticeship requires a different kind of reading than Clarice’s metaphysical works. She knew that The Passion According to G. H. would be a hard act to follow, as she noted in her letter to Marly de Oliveira. Indeed, artistically, that thunderous work would be difficult for any writer to surpass. But Clarice’s project had never been primarily aesthetic. It was, as Martin said in The Apple in the Dark, “the reconstruction of the world.”

  So if An Apprenticeship lacks the titanic monumentality that readers of The Apple in the Dark and The Passion According to G. H. had come to associate with Clarice Lispector, its accessible language and its apparently banal love story mask a battle as fierce as any Clarice had ever waged. It records, quite literally, a struggle between life and death, between lucidity and madness, giving a rich and ambiguous answer to the question that G. H. begs.

  Clarice’s quest to identify with the inhuman world of “the God” reached a climax when G. H. placed the roach in her mouth. The moment was not only the climax of that great novel. It was the climax of a spiritual and artistic search that Clarice had been tracing for at least two decades, since Near to the Wild Heart. When the roach touches G. H.’s tongue, Clarice’s original artistic project has finally been exhausted.

&nbs
p; The book is so shocking and extreme that the reader almost fears for its author. Where could a person possibly go from there? The experience left only two possibilities. She could continue down that radical mystical path, which would mean madness, “in human terms, the infernal,” “passing over definitively to the other side of life.” In her newspaper column, Clarice wrote about the “great sacrifice of not being mad,” a temptation she felt but nonetheless rejected. “I am not mad out of solidarity with the thousands of us who, in order to construct the possible, also sacrificed the truth which would be a madness.”3

  The other possibility was a return to the human world. After eating the roach, G. H., too, knows she has to reject the truth she found within it. At the end of the book, she announces plans to ring up her friends, put on a nice dress, and go out dancing. It is an explicit choice for the human over the divine, and it is the same choice Clarice made when composing An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures. When it came out, an interviewer said, “I thought The Book of Pleasures was much easier to read than any of your other seven books. Do you think there’s any basis for that?” Clarice answered, “There is. I humanized myself, the book reflects that.”4

  Coming from anybody else, this statement might seem enigmatic, or even incomprehensible. For Clarice Lispector, however, the desire to humanize herself represented a complete revolution, philosophically and spiritually. “A being’s most pressing need was to become a human being,” she wrote at the beginning of An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures.5

  This is such an explicit repudiation of so much of her previous work that it comes as a great surprise. It is the morality, “the effort to elevate human life, to give it a human value,” that Clarice had so often, and so eloquently, rejected.6 After so many years of searching for the impersonal, inhuman, divine life, the effort to “become a human being” could only be excruciating. In an important sense, it meant the negation of most of her oeuvre.

  So it is not surprising that, upon the publication of An Apprenticeship, Clarice announced that she would not write again. “Why?” the interviewer asked. “What a question!” Clarice exclaimed. “Because it hurts so much.”7

  “she was tired of the effort of the liberated animal,” Clarice wrote at the beginning of An Apprenticeship, with the unorthodox capitalization and punctuation that characterizes it in parts.8 It was one thing for an animal, or for Joana, to mate and then move on, but for a person to place freedom above all else was another matter. A person simply cannot survive without giving up a bit of freedom and accepting the necessary ties that bind her to others. For Clarice, that meant human love.

  Love—her filial love for her parents; her maternal love for her ill son, Pedro; her erotic love for Lúcio and Maury and Paulinho—had so often brought her heartbreak, and she was wary of new ties. When her friend Sérgio Porto died within days of Lúcio Cardoso, she wrote, “No, I don’t want to love anyone else because it hurts. I can’t stand one more death of a person dear to me. My world is made of people who are mine—and I cannot lose them without losing myself.”9

  Maury understood her fear, if only once it was too late. In his letter attempting reconciliation, he wrote, “I wasn’t mature enough to understand that, in Joana or in Clarice, ‘hate can transform itself into love’; not being more than ‘a search for love.’ I didn’t know how to free you from the ‘fear of not loving.’ ”

  An Apprenticeship is an attempt at another kind of freedom. Clarice had to escape the fear of not loving, as well as her fear that love was futile. “It’s obvious that my love for the world never prevented wars and deaths,” she wrote on March 9, 1968, perhaps thinking of her mother. “Love never kept me from crying tears of blood inside me. Nor did it prevent mortal separations.”10 But if she feared new wounds, she also knew that eating roaches in the maid’s room would not help an actual person in an actual world overcome an immediate and desperate solitude.

  For that, there was only human love, however imperfect and potentially disappointing. An Apprenticeship is accordingly a love story. It tells of a woman, Lori, gradually and meticulously shedding her isolation in order to learn how to love a man. Clarice explicitly links Lori’s struggle to the political struggles of 1968. “Everyone was fighting for liberty—that was what she saw in the newspapers, and she rejoiced that finally they were no longer standing for injustice,” she writes, before quoting a long song of freedom from Czechoslovakia.11 There, as in Brazil, popular hopes of liberation would soon be crushed.

  Lori’s idea of freedom is not Joana’s. In Near to the Wild Heart, which Clarice wrote shortly before embarking on her own failed marriage, as in stories such as “Obsession,” in which she mocks Cristina’s desire to “marry, have children, and, finally, be happy,” Clarice is radically skeptical about the possibility of union between two people. So often in her work the isolation of the individual is absolute, the gap between people unbridgeable.

  An Apprenticeship is Clarice’s attempt to discover just how two people might be joined. Lori’s is not an easy journey, and consequently the book is roughly written, lurching, sometimes giving the impression of an incomplete first draft. The formal perfection of G. H. has been swept away, though not its emotional charge: it contains some of the most moving and beautiful passages Clarice ever wrote.

  It is the only one of Clarice’s books that employs avant-garde devices in punctuation; it famously begins with a comma and ends with a colon. Words are not properly capitalized. One page reads “Luminescence …” and nothing else. The book advertises its own incompleteness, reflecting, on the page, the hesitations and doubts of the search it describes. As she had in Near to the Wild Heart, Clarice achieves, in An Apprenticeship, “the precious and precise harmony between expression and substance.”

  Like all of Clarice’s works, An Apprenticeship has a strong autobiographical element, though unlike G. H. it is not written in the first person. But the “I” is hiding just below the surface. Clarice transformed long passages published in the Jornal do Brasil into this fiction, often doing little more than switching the “I” for “she.” On May 18, 1968, for example, she wrote in the newspaper, “Tomorrow I will probably have some happiness, also without great ecstasies, and that isn’t bad either. But I’m not really enjoying this pact with the mediocrity of living.” In An Apprenticeship, this became “The next day she would probably have some happiness, also without great ecstasies, just a bit of happiness, and that wouldn’t be bad either. That was how she tried to make peace with the mediocrity of living.”12

  The word “Clarice” hid within “Lucrécia,” and the first and the last two letters of “Lispector” lurk inside the odd and improbable name of the protagonist, Lori, short for Loreley, who hints at a hidden name: “Pretend that she was lying in the transparent palm of the hand of God, not Lori but the secret name that for the time being she still could not enjoy.”13

  Lori is a childless schoolteacher who lives alone, but other than that she and Clarice have much in common. Like Clarice, Lori has spent long periods abroad, particularly in Paris and Bern. Her face is compared to the Sphinx: “Decipher me or I shall devour you.” Her makeup is a bit too much. She suffers from paralyzing social anxiety: “It seemed to her that the tortures of a timid person had never been completely described—in the moving taxi she was dying a bit.”14 She takes pills to sleep; she consults fortunetellers; her mother is dead.

  Her potential lover is Ulisses, a professor of philosophy. Though some critics supposed the name referred to Homer or Joyce, Clarice stated that Ulisses was “a philosophy teacher I met in Switzerland.”15 This is the reappearance of the mysterious Ulysses Girsoler, who was so in love with the young Clarice that he had to move to a different city. Could An Apprenticeship mask Clarice’s regret at not having seized that chance at love? Did she wonder if it might have turned out more happily than her loves for Lúcio Cardoso, Maury Gurgel Valente, or Paulo Mendes Campos? In Switzerland she was, of course, married, but Ulysses was always on her mind
, even decades after she left Bern. She gave his name to this character, and a few years later she named her dog Ulisses, too.

  This figure has annoyed some readers. Even Fernando Sabino, who confessed himself “stunned” by the book—“I no longer deserve to be your reader. You have gone too far for me”—was puzzled by him. “Who is that man? What is he saying? Why is he so pedantic and professorial? What’s his problem?”16

  Ulisses has taken upon himself the task of educating Lori for love. He does have a rather finicky tone, like Girsoler’s in the Rorschach he wrote up for Clarice. He speaks in parables and essays with an air of all-knowingness and superiority, which, together with Lori’s often meek girlishness, have disconcerted Clarice’s feminist readers: “This didactic sense of mine, which is a desire to transmit, I also have it with you, Lori, even though you are my worst student.”17

  Yet Clarice must have felt understood by Girsoler, whose description of her character is very accurate, even premonitory, notwithstanding its wooden language. Lori, too, feels that Ulisses, despite his “pedantic and professorial” tone, understands her. They meet on a street corner, where she is waiting for a taxi, and he desires her physically. But her notion of love is pure and absolute, different from his humanity. “Through her serious defects—which one day she might be able to mention without boasting—she had now arrived at being able to love. Even that glorification: she loved the Nothing. The awareness of her permanent human fall had led her to the love of Nothing.”18