Ends of Europe (III): Forgotten Emissaries
23. Lispector
The natives had fled to the mountains, leaving their fields. […] They told us our countrymen had burned all the villages, taking with them half the men and all the women and children. […] Your Majesty will remember my indignation in my first narrative that Christians should be so wicked. […] What, your Majesty, is so melancholy as to confront one’s former unthinking and unfeeling self? […] At first I did not notice other ways in which our ancient civilisation was affecting me. Yet soon I observed a certain reluctance in me to do good to others. I would say to myself, ‘Need I exert what is left of me, I who have undergone tortures in an open boat and every privation and humiliation among the Indians, when there are strong and healthy men about us, fresh from Holy Church and from school, who know their Christian duty?’ We Europeans all talk this way to ourselves. […] Where plenty abounds, we surrender our generosity, believing that our country replaces us each and several. This is not so, and indeed a delusion. On the contrary the power of maintaining life in others lies in each of us, and from each of us does it recede when unused.
Haniel Long, ‘Cabeza de Vega’s Relation of His Journey from Florida to the Pacific, 1528-1536’)
Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) is scarcely forgotten; thanks not least to the work of her English translator, biographer and biggest fan Benjamin Moser, she is perhaps the most remembered Brazilian author in the world. But she has been neglected, until now, by me; only one of her short Crônicas (‘Literatura e justiça’) had ever really penetrated the shield of my attention:
For as long as I’ve known myself, the social question has been more important to me than any other: in Recife, the mocambos were the first truth for me. Long before I sensed the meaning of ‘art’, I felt the profound beauty of the struggle [for political freedom]. […] But what I can’t seem to do, much as it pains and shames me, is to use my writing for the purposes of furthering justice. It’s as if the feelings involved are so obvious and primary that I can’t surprise myself with them - and if I can’t surprise myself, I can’t write anything. […] It’s not a question of not wanting to, but rather of not being able. What I am ashamed of is of not doing more, not contributing with actions, […] and I hope to stay that way. But I won’t let myself be ashamed of what I do write: it would be sinfully proud of me to do so.[1]
All attempts to confront Lispector the self-confessed ‘fabulist’, however, have met with a brick wall in my mind; Elizabeth Bishop’s bold and famous claim, beloved of publishers, that Lispector is ‘better than Borges’ is more memorable to me for its apparent absurdity than anything in any of the half-dozen or so Contos I have started and failed to finish. Something in Moser’s enthusiasm for his subject, however, encountered in the Paris Review a decade ago[2], nagged at me all the while and eventually persuaded me to go back and take a second look, not at Lispector’s short stories, novels or children’s literature, but at her Encontros, a collection of interviews with his reputedly evasive heroine. In his introduction to the Portuguese volume, Moser admits he would not have been interested in interviewing Lispector if she were alive,
not out of fear, but perhaps because an interview requires two people, and I can’t imagine Clarice as external to myself. It might sound strange, but many readers of Clarice have the same impression, namely that reading her is like having the most intimate of conversations with oneself. […] But I would like to hear her [speak in her own voice], and the best way to do that is to read this book.[3]
Since the voices of her narrators and characters failed so spectacularly to speak to me in this way, I thought that going to the source might be the best point of entry for me, and so it proved. I knew I couldn’t write 50 chapters on the ‘ends of Europe’ without mentioning Brazil, perhaps the biggest ‘end’ of them all, and to which Lispector emphatically belonged despite having been born in Ukraine to Russian-Jewish parents; but lo and behold, here she is fitting uncontrivedly into our story as an emissary from a realm beyond all nations.
Just as she had a social conscience before becoming an artist, so too was Lispector a creator before becoming a reader. Again and again in these Encontros, she emphasises that she is not an ‘intellectual’, not an erudite scholar, and certainly not an ‘intellectualiser’ capable of feats of heartless abstraction[4]; her reading, often driven by interest in titles and pursued according to her ‘state of spirit’, was an eclectic concatenation of serendipities: ‘I go through periods where one book or other leaves an impression on me. Then I forget it and another one takes its place.’ Asked to choose ‘the greatest works of world literature’, she lists ‘Dostoyevsky’s Humiliated and Insulted and Crime and Punishment, [Aldous] Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza, Panait Istrati’s Méditerranée, and anything by Anatole France. But this is only from what I’ve read.’ Critics are free to speculate on the influence of (for example) James Joyce in Lispector’s work, but her writing is driven by something which predated her ability to read. Even this impulse to produce ‘fiction’, however, stronger than her will to consume it, is ultimately less primary than her maternal instincts:
The children who appear in my books are only children; they are not my sons. They have lives of their own and are no fiction. Children are something wholly separate from writing. They have nothing to do with art; I treat them the way any other mother would, not as a writer. I don’t order them around like the characters in my books; they wouldn’t let me for a start.
[… As my son Pedro put it], ‘I wouldn’t want to be known as a book character no matter who the author was.’
This clear hierarchy – mother first, writer second, reader third – is reinforced in the following terms: ‘Reading can stimulate someone to write, but it is not the main thing. In my opinion, wanting to write is more important. I regard myself as a culturally limited author who writes with honesty.’ Not even writing, however, provided a justification for Clarice to leave her children devoid of her attention; she preferred to be interrupted at her typewriter than to shut herself away from them.[5] This image of the mother-writer fits well with Lispector’s cosmology: ‘The world outside us also has its own inside, […] its own intimacy. Those who keep it at a ceremonial distance and refuse to mix with it, don’t live it. Moist ‘authenticity’, the ‘living water’ or Agua viva of Lispector’s most famous work, transcends all attempts at definition:
The word ‘dichotomy’ is one of the driest in the entire dictionary. […] Our grandchildren will look back at us in horror, thank God. […] Is authenticity self-imitation? But this is a mere phrase, and it would define tedium just as well. Do we say that [authenticity] is the ability to seek the real as well as the ideal in oneself? This is just another sentence. The most authentic response I could give to almost all your questions would be: I don’t know.
For all her graphomanic passion, Lispector is more interested in her children than in writing (this is as it should be), but she has not yet found the ‘ideal formula’ for her life; she would enjoy being a different person (‘even in the same epoch’), but the present is nevertheless characterised by a brutal mixture of scarcity and inequality: ‘Of course money is an important constituent of happiness! Look how many people are dying of hunger right now.’ In the space of a very short interview, Lispector has covered seemingly the entire gambit of her human concern: family, art, starving strangers. A full humanism, however, includes contact with the animal kingdom, an important part of any healthy child’s life (and Lispector ‘never lies to children’); one interviewer, Leo Gilson Ribeiro, describes her as ‘a woman who likes children, cats, dogs, chickens and insects’. When her son Pedro’s pet fish starve to death on account of her negligence, Lispector is plunged into an inferno of remorse: ‘The incident shook me for a long time. I was often asked when I would write my next children’s book, and I swore: Never again. But then I realised that I might have been able to relieve some of my guilt if I wrote a series of stories using these poor fish as my starting-point.’
The arc of Lispector’s life – birth in Ukraine in 1920, childhood in Recife, adolescence in Rio, law school completed only to prove a point, sixteen years abroad as a diplomat’s wife, divorce and a return to Copacabana with her children (together with corresponding financial struggles), injury in a housefire, and premature death from cancer in 1977 – is well enough known (thanks again to Moser’s biography), but it is worth stressing the fact that even Clarice Lispector was unable to make a living in Brazil from fiction alone and was ‘forced into journalism’ as an income supplement. Even more important, however, is the fact that her writing itself was a kind of refuge from a void of loneliness that not even reading could fill:
I never liked staying home [when we were in Recife]. Whenever I could, I would go out onto the footpath in search of a playmate. Although I’m not much of an extrovert, I desperately need affection and tenderness. That’s why, whenever a boy or girl roughly my age passed in front of our house, I would ask if they wanted to play with me. I got many nos and only a few yeses. […] Understanding, requited love, and friendship are the essential [ingredients of happiness], even if bread to eat is also essential in its own way. […] We almost always find something good to read, […] but still, I prefer writing to reading; I feel less empty [when I do it].
Lispector’s transformation into a ‘myth’ – or ‘celebrity’ as we might say now - is hence a real problem in her life: ‘It prevents the very intimacy with people that could fill the hole in my life.’ Perhaps the reason I struggled to penetrate Lispector’s fiction is because I sensed it was a poor substitute for something else, undertaken in ever so slightly the wrong spirit, a junky compensation for something real, which the best fiction isn’t. When she talks about herself, however, Lispector is immediately engaging:
I thank you for not raising the obvious subject of my burns. As you can see, the fire damaged my right hand permanently, and my legs will be scarred forever. It was horrible, and I don’t care to remember it. All I can say is that I spent three days in hell, which they say waits for us after death. I don’t consider myself a terrible person, but I experienced it while I was alive.
Let us not, however, dismiss Lispector’s literary production entirely; as she reminds us, there is no wall between life and art: ‘When I was a child, I didn’t realise that books were written by people; I thought they sprouted like trees. When I discovered that there were authors behind them, I wanted to have a go. […] Human company spurs my literary production, but when I’m writing, it’s not as if I’m stealing minutes from my life. After all, writing is living too.’
Writing is a mode of existence, to be sure, but it is not quite life itself, or even the highest goal of life; Lispector refuses to tell one of her interviewers towards what, beyond literature, she aspires (‘Ah, that’s a secret!’). The act of writing, nevertheless, is necessary even if it is not sufficient: ‘It’s always hard [as a writer] to talk about what one is doing. If people could talk about it, they wouldn’t need to write.’ Lispector will talk in more detail about how her novels were discoveries rather than prefabrications, but before she does so, she emphasises another ‘necessary’ dimension of herself, namely that she is ‘entirely Brazilian’; the fact of having been born elsewhere and having lived more than a decade abroad ‘doesn’t mean anything’:
I have lived in various countries, it is true. I experienced life in Rome and Washington, and each made its impression on me, Rome for being Rome, and Washington because, well, I was very productive while I was there. I have seen Greece and Egypt too. But I have no desire to travel anymore. Rio is the place for me. Of all the cities I know, Rio is still the one that gets me the most.
Despite her apparent world-weariness in middle age, Lispector’s ‘opaque mask’ continues, in Antonio Hohlfeldt’s words, to ‘hide an enormous humanism’); even in her early fifties, Lispector feels as if her creative journey is ‘very much still beginning, with many projects unrealised, despite the eleven works I have written so far’. Literary creativity requires a certain ‘surrender’, and the longer the work, the deeper the act of faith (‘I give myself over to my crônicas - quite sincerely – but it is a much more profound commitment with a novel’). There is no point trying to separate form from content or consciously endeavouring to achieve anything specific in advance (on behalf of oneself or others): ‘It is a matter of creating something.’ Anxiety of influence is hence just as useless (‘Europe [and/or the Jewish heritage] may have influenced me, but not consciously’); what preoccupies Lispector much more is the tale of the centipede who forgot how to walk after being asked to explain the whole process. Analogously, and for all the injustice of not being able to make a living from writing, Lispector is glad she remains an ‘amateur’ author: ‘I am not a professional, and I make a point of not becoming one, thereby avoiding the obligation to write when I don’t feel like it. I write when I want to, and if not, I don’t. The professional does not enjoy such liberty. […] The true artist is always seen as strange and marginal.’ Lispector nevertheless admits that she began writing in earnest only once she got married: ‘What I am saying is that an artist, in order to dedicate himself to his work, needs a certain status which offers him relative economic tranquillity.’
The economics of literature aside, Lispector insists that fiction writing will survive all future media revolutions (including, we might add today, those spurred by artificial intelligence): ‘Literature is not going to come to an end. […] Some things have to be said, not merely seen.’ Visitors to Lispector’s apartment in Leme are struck by the fact that the walls are ‘carpeted in paintings’ (‘all good’, in Germana de Lamare’s estimation), but visual art is just another facet of life, not a substitute for writing: ‘I asked Robbe-Grillet myself [why he wrote]. He said he wrote to understand why he wrote. My answer is different. I write in order to sense the world better. I think those who write go further in this direction than those who don’t. But it’s a nebulous lucidity; people aren’t directly conscious of it.’ This also helps to explain Lispector’s aforementioned preference for writing over reading: ‘I’m too ignorant to be an intellectual, and I’m no kind of literary groupie. I don’t live swamped in books (even if I’m not a complete hippie fruitcake, as they sometimes accuse me of being). I’m just intuitive, which means that I feel more than I think. […] And I enjoy sharing my emotions, everything good, with other human beings.’ Not all emotions, however, are good: ‘There is one thing I’m really afraid of: the future. In reality, I always have been.’ The divvying of negative emotion (via literature and/or love and friendship), one concludes from all this, is just as important as celebrating the good times with others. Writing alone may not unleash these intersubjective energies – what could be a more private or privatised act? – but the hope of being read and appreciated is an extra carrot beyond the promise of ‘sensing’ or ‘understanding’ the world better (entender in Lispector’s Portuguese). If literary celebrity is a mere distortion of the forcefield of human intersubjectivity and a general obstacle to humanism, heartfelt letters from children and adult readers are a part of the ‘writing’ process that feed back into the author’s craft and allow her to deepen her connection with the cosmos.[6]
Lispector is not an anti-feminist, but she is interested in the universal freedom of the individual human personality, not the relative emancipation of groups: ‘Even if the Brazilian Academy of Letters admitted women and invited me to join, I would refuse the invitation. I prefer freedom of creation. I don’t mean any disrespect, but if they have their principles, worthy as they may be, I also have my own, which I will not abandon, and which go completely against this type of group membership.’[7] A work like Água viva defies bureaucratic or academic definition; Bruno Paraíso calls it ‘intimist fiction’: ‘Everything is narrated in the first person without plot or characters. Instead of facts, there are the sensations provoked by them.’ Lispector was also mystified by the book’s genesis, the very opposite of a planned career move: ‘This book existed in me for years, vague and confused. Then, all of a sudden, I felt the labour pains. That was when I began to understand what I was trying to say. But it was a book that required a tremendous amount of introspection.’ The result of this determined independence is a unique style which Alceu Amoroso Lima defines in the following terms:
No one writes like [Clarice], and she doesn’t write like anyone else. Her style alone deserves a separate essay. There is a unique verbal key to which the reader must grow accustomed. The first pages must be read very, very slowly if the reader hopes to ascend to this lofty stylistic plane full of mystery and suggestion. Once in these clouds, the reader, we believe, will sense the same sombre charm as we do and accord [Clarice] the honour of tragic solitude [she warrants] in our modern literature.
Lispector’s stated goal in Água viva may be recognisably ‘Joycean’ (‘my almost impossible ambition was to capture the fleeting present moment’), but the influence of Joyce (or indeed of anyone else) on Lispector’s writing is minimal. The cost of such independence is to be falsely labelled ‘alienated’ and ‘reactionary’:
I am not against the idea of politically engaged literature. If I don’t do it, that is only because it doesn’t fit my temperament. People can only do things well that they really feel. My books are not concerned with facts as such, but with the reverberations of these facts in individuals. This is what I do, and it’s very important to me. In this sense, I think I write engaged books too. Reality is not a purely external phenomenon.
[…] What is reality? I have always respected the reality of what I have felt. I am interested in transmitting this reality to others, but I don’t know the most efficient way of doing it in advance. Literary creation is an incomprehensible mystery to me. […] I can only write under the spell of inspiration, not by following my own orders. Nothing in me is premeditated. If there were, I wouldn’t bother fleshing it out. When I first think of a story, I see only a vague and fleeting outline of the whole. The hard part is trying to recompose this [image] when I start writing.
[…] Once the book is published, I am very happy when people approach me and say they understood me, even if it is a comprehension that can only be expressed, not in words, but through a kind of skin-to-skin osmosis. […] I have never assumed the airs of a super-intellectual. I am a common woman who suffers the same pains and anxieties as everyone in the world, and I need enormous patience to wait for my inspiration. [… In between] I lead a very ordinary life: I raise my children, maintain my home, and enjoy seeing my friends. The rest is myth. I need other people desperately, regular people who see me as a regular person and not as a sacred monster.
Lispector accepts her place in the pantheon of Brazilian letters, accorded by others, with corresponding humility: ‘I don’t know how to classify my work. I am reborn in every book and feel every book as something new. I was never aware that I was responsible for the renewal of Brazilian literature in general or the Brazilian short story in particular. If this is what happened, then it happened involuntarily, without any programming on my part.’ The same is true of children’s literature, which Lispector found herself writing by chance, and not in any way according to the established canon: ‘I don’t lie to children and I don’t pretend to give them moral lessons of any kind. I only try to show them certain mistakes that adults insist on committing. Children’s literature here has almost always had something corny and condescending about it. I hate this. Anyone who writes for children should write for adults as well.’ The result of treating children as equals is that they will reply in kind, as one young reader of A mulher que matou os peixes did in a letter accompanied by pictures of her own pets: ‘It's not your fault [that the fish died]. You were busy with other important things and forgot to feed them, that’s all.’
Although a useful shortcut in getting to know her, the interview form is uncomfortable for Lispector because it encourages the very ‘mythification’ she fears: ‘I am a simple woman. There is nothing particularly sophisticated about me. The interviews I give serve only to explain to people that I am not a myth. I am a normal human being like everyone else.’ This means that, of course, reading her old work ‘is like discovering someone else’, and that other authors did indeed influence her (‘I went through a mad Hesse phase when I was fifteen’) even if there was no ideal teacher to ‘guide’ her into the world of literature:
I had no mentor whatsoever. I belonged to a library and picked out books whose covers I liked. […] With my first salary I walked into a bookshop, proud as punch with myself, and flicked through a few shelves. I quickly recognised that one book was different from the others. I didn’t know at the time who ‘Katharine Mansfield’ was. I bought it on the spot for 10 cruzeiros.
The ‘work’ of creation, however, is more important than the aping of past masters; just because such labour requires inspiration does not mean it is easy (Lispector copied out A maçã no escuro eleven times, adding and subtracting bits as she went along). The dance of literature, instinct of the masses, nevertheless requires a sublime disdain for public opinion: ‘I don’t want to be popular, because it gives me the sense that my work is too easy, too accessible, that I must be making concessions. […] When I am writing I don’t think about the reader or myself. It is only once the book is published that I become aware of readers’ reactions. […] I have received eulogies that I prize very much.’ Lispector insists that there is ‘nothing incoherent’ about these simultaneous desires for authenticity and recognition; they come together in a certain patriotism which ties her to ‘Brazilian reality’ (‘I’m a Brazilian writer, and I don’t let anyone think otherwise’). She is happy when her cook understands her writing, or when she helps illiterate Brazilian schoolchildren enjoy learning to read, or when the great national poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902-1987) sends her a nice letter; reception abroad is an added bonus to which she gives little thought.[8] Lispector enjoys Brazilian telenovelas; even the name of her dog Ulysses, bought for company once the children left home, is as much a reference to her intimate reality as a Brazilian (even a Brazilian abroad) as it is to Homer or Joyce.[9] This preference for all things Brazil, however, is not blind: foreign authors like Georges Simenon can still be wildly enjoyed, while Brazilian cinema is ‘full of filth’ (and Brazil’s famed ‘eroticism’ a symbol of ‘despair’).
Again and again, Lispector returns to the importance of the ‘work’, which is not, in the final analysis, an attempt to glorify or therapise oneself, but rather to give life to novelty in the world. If Lispector’s human children are her main priority, her books, she says, are her ‘cubs’:
What I feel is that a book, once completed, begins a life of its own. […] The creation of a book – a short story, a novel or whatever – is always full of pain and anguish. When this suffering is over, however, […] I want the book to stand on its own two feet.
[…] I loathe the superficial ‘literary scene’. I am a human being, a friend to other human beings. […] Writing for me is something natural, anguish-inducing and necessary for survival, like breathing. Perhaps this is why I don’t like talking about my books. Everything I want to say is in them, and they were a lot of hard work.
Unlike a philosophical argument, which seeks to convince everyone on the same terms, Lispector’s art is offered is offered in a more generous spirit:
Many people tell me: ‘What a great book, but so complicated! What exactly did you mean with this phrase or that image?’ And I always reply with a question: ‘And what did you think it meant?’ I don’t believe in solutions or absolute explanations. What I do believe in is the interpretation of each reader. No book – or painting, melody or film – can [survive if it] go[es] unnoticed. I wish for every individual human being to enter into the story, the conflict, and from there, to face in a personal manner what I have written in my own way. Do you understand?
Celebrity, Lispector repeats in fresh terms, is ‘pernicious’ to such humanistic exchange; literary production requires total abstraction from market considerations:
The editors are constantly badgering me to publish, but as I have no desire to submit to the corresponding public relations carnival, […] I’m a bit tired of books and writing at the moment. I don’t want pressure, deadlines or any of that. […] Literature is important, but not the ‘literature scene’; it is the passionate amateurs that matter. […] My novels and stories come in bits, notes on individual characters, a theme that begins to take shape as a plot, but which is always born from an inner reality, lived or imagined, and deeply personal. I never worry about what the structure looks like.
The genesis of Lispector’s work, however, as she stresses again, predates her contact with culture: ‘I was making up stories before I could read and write. I even invented a neverending story with a friend of mine who was quiet but not imaginary; I was a mini-tyrant, and she obeyed. That was the ideal: a neverending story.’ Lispector’s childhood in Recife, however, did not seem ideal for such endless creation; as well as ‘nearly’ suffering hunger (‘there was a guy on the beach who sold orange juice well past its best; this and a piece of bread were our lunch’), Lispector suffered from the guilt of not being able to cure her mother, who had been raped by Russian soldiers during a pogrom and suffered symptoms of advanced syphilis: ‘My mother was already ill, and according to a widespread superstition, having a baby was believed to be a cure. I was deliberately created in a spirit of love and hope. The only problem was that I failed to cure my mother. I still feel this guilt today: I had one job and I failed.’[10]
Broader instincts for social justice characterise Lispector’s early career choices: ‘When I was small, I was a loud defender of people’s rights, so people would say I was destined to be a lawyer when I grew up. This idea stayed with me, and as I had no idea or guidance regarding what to study, I ended up doing Law.’ She only made it to the end, however, because her friend had told her that she never finished anything:
In my third year I realised I would never cope with all the paperwork and that my idea – witness the absurdity of adolescence – was to study Law in order to reform the penitentiary system. San Tiago Dantas used to say that those who viewed the law through the lens of the Penal Code were not real lawyers, but intellectuals. I realised I wasn’t interested [in law as a career] and got myself a job at a newspaper.
Lispector’s money worries come and go – her marriage provides a mixture of security and tedium as a diplomat’s wife, healthy doses of serving and being served – but even after her divorce and precarious return to Rio, she is able to afford an empregada and feel the full weight of corresponding middle-class guilt: ‘It got worse after I went and saw [Genet’s] Les bonnes, directed by the brilliant Martim Gonçalves. In fact, I was permanently changed by it. I saw how the servants we employ feel inside, and I understood that the devotion we sometimes receive from them is full of mortal hatred.’[11] If Lispector understood it, however, it was only because she had lived it, at least to some extent, as a child in Recife and as a provincial teenage arrival in the cultural capital Rio de Janeiro; the novel A Hora da Estrela (1977) was driven by the protagonist Macabéa, a Northeastern immigrant like the author (‘a real person who orders me around a lot’): ‘There was something in the Northeast I had lived that I still had to get out of me,’ Lispector explains as she laments how long and difficult the ‘birth’ of the book is proving to be. What looks like a convenient compartmentalisation which allows her to continue enjoying her life with an empregada in Leme – comfortable without being extravagant – is not, however, a ‘catharsis’ as such: ‘That’s what friends are for. When I write, I want the thing itself.’ Literature, Lispector stresses yet again, is hard-earned discovery, not cheap therapy:
A cidade sitiada (1949), for example, was one of my most difficult books to write, because it required exegesis of which I wasn’t capable. It’s a dense, hermetic book. I was chasing after something but didn’t have anyone to tell me what it was. […] It was the formation of a city, or of a human being within a city. […] I worked half-blindly, very unconsciously. Sometimes it looks like I’m not doing anything; even I don’t know that I’m working as I sit there. But then a phrase comes.
This mode of creation requires a long and deep cohabitation with conscience, not the ‘sorcery’ of which certain critics accused her: ‘One Latin American critic in particular said I used words like a witch, not a [human] writer. Maybe this is where my invitation to the International Witchcraft Conference in Colombia came from. […] They said they wanted a text from me, but I didn’t know what to give them because I’m not a witch, right?’ Explaining her ‘bewitching’ effect on artists (de Chirico most famously), Lispector attributes her appeal merely to her ‘exotic’ face, not to sorcerous designs of any kind: ‘I never know in advance what I am going to write. There are writers who start writing when they have the whole book in their heads. I just follow along beside myself and see where we end up. It’s only afterwards that I see what I was after.’ A similar philosophy also informed Lispector’s work as a translator: ‘I try never to read a book properly before I translate it. I take it sentence by sentence and ride my desire to know what comes next. And guess what: the time flies. If you’ve already read the whole thing, it’s a duty. It terrifies me to see 300 familiar pages sitting there in front of me.’
Lispector risks charges of false modesty when she says ‘I strive to cultivate humility’ (and admits elsewhere to being as vain as the average woman), but her worries about the distorting effects of criticism on her work appear utterly genuine: ‘I read very little; it’s a crime, but it’s true. […] When I’m not working, I read [more], and I read my critics too. But when I’m working, criticism interferes in my own sphere of intimacy with myself: I’ll stop writing to process whatever the opinion is. Even the positive reviews […] can make me feel as though I’ve been attacked.’ Literary prizes should likewise be enjoyed very carefully: ‘I don’t know how to explain it, but prizes are external to literature, and even the word ‘literature’ is a wretched word, foreign to the act of writing. Winning a literary prize should be like receiving a hug from a friend.’ The economic injustices of the literary scene are an obvious frustration for Lispector, but writing itself cannot properly be undertaken for commercial – or even merely social - ends: ‘Look, I have friends, but writing is a solitary act. Outside of writing, I give myself to my relationships with people.’ The question of proper payment for literary ‘work’ is one that Lispector does not directly address, perhaps because she is too busy with the work itself: ‘Writing is a burden! […] Don’t think the supernatural is far away; the natural is already a mystery. […] I feel a very strong identification with the forces of nature.’ Lispector’s determination not to let her children feel ‘that they have a writer for a mother’ can be explained in these terms: writing is such an all-consuming and individual business that no parent could undertake it in good conscience while their children need them.
Lispector’s saddest conviction lies in her inability to believe that her work, or indeed her very existence, can ‘change the order of the cosmos’; her conscience is destined to suffer because the world is too big. After finally receiving a literary prize with some real money attached to it from the Fundação Cultural do Distrito Federal (70 million cruzeiros, around $5000 in 1976 or $27000 today), Lispector was ‘super-happy’, but then
I was hit by a wave of depression. I won all this money [from our Federal Government] when there are so many kids out there who need it… [… But I didn’t make any donations because] adults would have ended up with the money. I tried to reform the world once. That was why I studied Law. […] But since I heard about the prize, I can’t stop thinking of children dying of hunger, or dead from hunger. But who am I, my God, to change things?’
Lispector’s interviewer here, Edilberto Coutinho, cruelly cuts to her answering a phonecall from the prize ceremony organisers in Brasilia; she asks for a hotel room with two beds and checks to see that the entertainment program will be to her liking (‘Flamenco? Great.’). Coutinho twists the knife even further, but Lispector responds with an artist’s dignity:
‘The writer has just come back from Buenos Aires.’
‘Shopping, loads and loads of shopping. But almost all of it was presents for friends. The trip to Argentina was wonderful. I didn’t expect to be so celebrated; there were cocktails, interviews, a million sweet little things. I told my friend that I felt like a movie star. She said sweetly that I’m a literary star, even in Buenos Aires. […] Translation has been an important source of income for me. Of course I respect the authors I translate, but I try to connect to the meaning rather than the words. The words I use in my translations are mine; I am the one who chooses them. I don’t like being pushed into a corner by people demanding things. I was relieved when I got fired from a newspaper recently. Now I only write when I want.’
Is it fair to make money from an act as pure and self-driven as art? The effect on an audience of our truest work to ourselves is utterly random, as is any financial success we might derive from the fact that others are willing to pay for our work. To conceive of art as ‘service’ to the audience, Lispector argues in the most explicit terms, is antithetical to the very idea of art, which is always a space of freedom within the individual. This space is not more important than childcare or comparable with other forms of social service and political engagement, but it is ‘as necessary as breathing’ – and (in a post-tribal, post-feudal, post-fascist world) riddled with inevitable guilt. ‘I make a point of not being a professional in order to maintain my liberty,’ Lispector repeats in her most famous interview, televised just months before her premature death from cancer in 1977. It is easier for her to talk to children than adults, not only because she is ‘very maternal’, but also because adults are a mirror of her own guilt: ‘When I communicate with an adult, in reality I am communicating with the most secret dimension of myself, which is hard, right?’ Writing allows her to do this ‘work’ free from the lethal judgmental gaze of others:
‘Are adults always solitary?’
‘Adults are sad and solitary.’
‘And children?’
‘Children have limitless imaginations.’
‘And when does this transformation [between childhood and adulthood] take place?’
‘That’s a secret. Sorry, I’m not going to answer that. … But any moment in life is enough; an unexpected shock can precipitate it. I’m not solitary – I have friends – [… but] I feel that when I’m not writing, I’m dead. […] The period between one work and the next is very difficult, but at the same time, it’s necessary, because you have to clear your head in order for something else to be born, if it comes. Everything is so uncertain. [… But] I write with the certainty that nothing I write will change anything. [… Why do I keep writing?] Because at bottom, people don’t want to change things, but to blossom as things are.’
The ‘trampled innocence’ and ‘anonymous misery’ of Macabéa in A hora da estrela elicits the same concern in Lispector as the student fans who, at the end of her life, now bring their troubles to her: ‘The surprising thing about these kids is that I end up worrying about them.’
[1] I cite this self-translation as an epigraph to my chapter on Sergey Dovlatov in The House That Fromm Built.
[2] See Scott Esposito, ‘Passionate Acolytes: An Interview with Benjamin Moser’, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/08/17/passionate-acolytes-an-interview-with-benjamin-moser/, 17/8/2015.
[3] Benjamin Moser, in Clarice Lispector, Encontros, (Rio de Janeiro: Azougue, 2011).
[4] See Norman Finkelstein, ‘Israel/Palestine: Asking The Questions No One Else Will’,
, 13/5/2024 (accessed 17/5/2024), 9:10-15:30.
[5] See Lispector, Encontros, p. 117: ‘I never wanted my children to have an image of me as an inaccessible artist. I would write next to them instead of shutting myself away. You can imagine what this meant: constant interruptions, requests for stories, mad questions about the universe, typical kid stuff. […] There are no ideal conditions for writing, or rather, we find them inside ourselves.’
[6] See, for instance, Lispector’s description of the many letters she received from children following the publication of O mistério do coelho pensante, Encontros, p. 41.
[7] Lispector, Encontros, p. 74. On p. 113, Lispector summarises her feminism in the following terms: ‘A woman has to be a woman and has to have the same rights as everyone else. She is a human being.’
[8] Lispector, Encontros, pp. 105-106, 120. See also Lispector, Encontros, p. 153: ‘I was away for sixteen years. Whenever the saudade got too much, I would come back for a visit. People here told me I should send my books to foreign editors for translation, but I always said: ‘Now is not the time to translate; now is the time to work. I wasn’t interested; I’ve never asked anyone to publish me outside Brazil.’
[9] See Marshall Shord, ‘Portrait of a Creep’, https://southwestreview.com/portrait-of-a-creep/, 15/4/2021 (accessed 24/5/2024). Lispector admits to reading a lot before she wrote Perto do Coração Selvagem, but this reading had ‘nothing directly to do’ with what she ended up writing (see Lispector, Encontros, p. 131). Even the reference to Joyce in her title was the result of a chance encounter with a phrase she liked, not a result of having read Portrait of the Artist from beginning to end. It is nevertheless worthwhile to quote the relevant Joyce passage in its entirety: ‘He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.’
[10] Lispector, in Wilker Sousa, ‘A paixão de Clarice Lispector’, https://revistacult.uol.com.br/home/a-paixao-de-clarice-lispector/ (accessed 24/5/2024).
[11] See Lispector, in Cristiane Felipe Ribeiro de Araujo Côrtes, ‘Alteridade e subalternidade em Clarice Lispector e Conceição Evaristo’, http://www.letras.ufmg.br/literafro/29-critica-de-autores-feminios/196-alteridade-e-subalternidade-em-clarice-lispector-e-conceicao-evaristo-critica (accessed 24/5/2024).