Waiting for

clarice

I just haven’t found anyone to report back to. Or have I? Since I’m reporting back to you right here.

—Clarice Lispector, Água Viva, 1973

I’m no expert on Clarice Lispector. I wish I could read her in the original Portuguese, though as far as I can tell the English-language New Directions translations of all her texts are comprehensive. But no, I despise expertise. May I always be an amateur, like the painter in Água Viva who writes, “This is the word of someone who cannot.”¹ I write this as a humble someone, an “It”-being who fell inevitably into the orbit of Clarice.² Friends have seen me tote around a tome of her collected columns, but this means nothing, for the more I read Clarice, the less I know her. Her gist escapes me. Maybe this is the secret: we start in the fallen state of apple-derived Knowing, then gradually shed ourselves of the nasty need to pin down and nail. We connect, ultimately, to the power of unknowing. Silence. Gaps. The desire for knowledge, stripped down, is simply the desire to be barred from the act of performing knowing. For to perform is to know, and those who know are performing. This is the Clarice lesson par excellence: “I write out of my inability to understand except through the process of writing.”³

In her alienness, she is familiar. Even after reading a biography of her (Benjamin Moser’s Why This World, 2009), “knowing” that she was born in Ukraine in 1920, that her family fled in the aftermath of war, that they resettled in Brazil when she was two, that she published her first fiery novel, Near to the Wild Heart, in 1943 at the age of twenty-three and was overnight dubbed “Hurricane Clarice” by the Rio literary jet set, that she kept writing short stories and novels and newspaper columns and children’s books until her death, from ovarian cancer, in 1977, at the age of fifty-six—“knowing” all that, to me she remains removed. As right she should. She has been a Brazilian national treasure for three generations now, but she has only recently started to make a bigger impression in the United States thanks to Moser’s vast project of translating her work into English for the publishing house New Directions. Now, through a newly reintroduced Clarice, we know how much we don’t know.

Even through the poise that she maintained, she had about her a lurching/knowing aura of the senselessness of existence. From 1944 to 1959 she was married to a Brazilian diplomat, Maury Gurgel Valente, and lived in Bern, Switzerland and Washington, DC; she said of that life that she “wasn’t much at ease in that milieu. . . . I hated it, but I did what I had to do. . . . I gave dinner parties, I did everything you’re supposed to do, but with a disgust.”⁴ She maintained a lifeline to the rawness of life through friendships with some of the great creative luminaries of the twentieth century, including the writer Lúcio Cardoso and the composer Antônio Carlos Jobim. She was translated into English by the poet Elizabeth Bishop, her neighbor when both lived in Rio; in a letter to the poet Robert Lowell, Bishop said that Clarice was “the most non-literary woman 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.”⁵ Yet she loved Katherine Mansfield (“[‘Bliss’] is me!”),⁶ Spinoza, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust. She felt a particular affinity for the poetry of Emily Brontë: “How well she understands me. . . . It’s been so long since I read poetry, I felt I had ascended to the sky, to the open air. I even felt like crying but luckily I didn’t because when I cry it soothes me, and I don’t want to be soothed, neither for her sake, nor for mine.”⁷ Perhaps, though, as Moser points out, Bishop was making not a literal but a poetic point: Clarice sought a knowledge beyond knowledge, a wisdom that left wisdom behind.⁸ As she wrote in a 1945 letter regarding her traipse as a diplomat’s wife, “At the end of it all you end up ‘educated.’ But that’s not my style. I never minded being ignorant.”⁹

As I amble through Clarice’s words, especially near sleep, I dream up variations on her unsettling scenes: a girl sucking and lapping up the blood of a cooked chicken while she remembers how much she loved its uncooked form, a boy wondering for eternity how a rabbit escaped its cage, two bookish want-to-be-in-lovers not meaning what they say or saying what they mean.¹⁰ The situations are strangely familiar to me. Emphasis on “familiar”: when Clarice writes that her desire is to “photograph perfume,” that’s, I realize, the goal of my “I” as well: to access what was passed down to me, secretly, by the women who formed me (my mother, my grandmother, my sisters and aunts and cousins), by the movies that shaped my unconscious, by the works I wish I’d written by now. To photograph the perfume of my mothers. Yes: confronted by all Clarice represents, I am unfit to write of her, to conjure even part of her image up. I would rather hear what you, her readers, have to say.

I first heard Clarice’s name in a class on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. A friend, Sofia, had mentioned something about a story concerning a chicken and a hen and an egg. I read “A Hen.” Interesting. Then I took a class on Bishop, who was an advocate of Clarice’s stories (though not of her novels, interestingly) and had translated her story “The Smallest Woman in the World.” I still remember the shock of reading certain rushes of paragraphs in that story of what happens when a white explorer discovers the smallest woman in the world in the jungles of the eastern Congo. I was particularly taken by the narrator’s description of the small woman’s laughter as she soaks in not only the alienness of a white man gazing at her, not only the explorer’s boots, but also the state-of-not-being-devoured:

There is an old misunderstanding about the word love, and, if many children are born from this misunderstanding, many others have lost the unique chance of being born, only because of a susceptibility that it be me! me! that is loved, and not my money. But in the humidity of the forest, these cruel refinements do not exist, and love is not to be eaten, love is to find a boot pretty, love is to like the strange color of a man who isn’t black, is to laugh for love of a shiny ring. Little Flower blinked with love, and laughed warmly, small, gravid, warm.¹¹

The love of the unknown is humanity’s sole redemption—and the doom of the most hearted of us. I’d never encountered language that conveyed this fundamental truth so starkly and complexly, yet with cool serenity. As if it were all a mere afterthought. Now I was entranced. Of course I love Bishop to this day, but I was doubly curious as to the woman she translated: Well, who is this “Lispector” when she’s at home?

I’ve never written about Clarice before and it frightens me. So I will focus on the three books I treasure the most: two novels, An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures (1967) and Água Viva (1973), and a collection of her newspaper columns, Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas (1967–77). What are the fundamental questions of existence? How to love (Apprenticeship), how to work (Água Viva), and how to live (Crônicas). The Clarice I unconsciously admire the most, it seems, is the Clarice of a period of great political and personal turmoil—the late 1960s, a time of civil unrest, student uprisings, and right-wing dictatorship in Brazil, but also a time when Clarice was recovering from the greatest physical catastrophe of her life: in September 1966, she had nearly died after she fell asleep holding a lit cigarette. The resulting fire left her with third-degree burns all over her body and badly burned her writing hand. The material that finds its way into both An Apprenticeship and Água Viva stems from the newspaper columns that Clarice published each Saturday in the Jornal do Brasil, Rio’s leading paper, between 1967 and 1973. Through these texts emerges the struggle of life: how to live each day, what the painful process of loving is, why one should pick up a pen and respond to indignity in the first place.

Perhaps I’m most attached to An Apprenticeship because it teaches me how to love. And how love lies in spaces. In waiting. The fright of staying still is what my nervous “I” aspires to; too often, the “I” is mired in the agony and energy of capricious Passion. Not for nothing are the two could-be lovers in An Apprenticeship teachers: the woman, Lóri, teaches the fundamentals of math and letters to primary school kids while the man, Ulisses (named after, not James Joyce or Homer, but an ex-psychoanalyst of Clarice’s who had fallen in love with her), philosophizes to university students.¹² Is it Lóri who is being taught, or is it Ulisses? In the book as in love, the lines blur. For though language can feel solid after a given period of time, inevitably it must give in to the flux-blur, those in-between states that refuse the coherent, adoring instead the asymptotic, the never-quite-here. To be finished is to be on the side of death. And though Clarice no longer “lives,” more than when she was present (for that is love’s linger), what she is “writing to you goes on. Which is good, very good. The best is not yet written. The best is between the lines.”¹³

Yet we craven humans demand the lines. We want a plot, a straightforward path (the hubristic “I know where I’m going”), or else prepackaged and glossily labeled sentiments that signify, weakly, Existence: a hot selfie, a confession watered down by the cold blue heart emoji, a public story. In our faith in the image, we daily kill the mystery of the nothing and the God. If those strange words “the God” make your skin crawl, well, same: I’m not particularly religious. And though Clarice came from a faith-based Jewish family, the traditions and rituals of religious institutions appear only fleetingly in her texts. You could say that she and “the God” had a secret affair. What that “the God” signifies, to me, is the limit of language and the visible: mystery, the mystical, the eruptive force of the contingent. And in that I surely believe.

What do we do after we’ve made our way through desire’s fragments? Love can feel, in retrospect, like a fever dream, an invention of the mind. Is there no way to collect evidence that what has happened has truly happened? And inform others of what the other side is like? Yes, we have the final crystallization of being: art. And a text like Água Viva is a shining result of such posttraumatic crystallization. Plot: a painter. What else do you need?

The painter wants to say something. To go somewhere with her canvases. But she doesn’t know how to start. Nor how to achieve clarity of expression. So, briefly retiring hues and curves, she says an “m,” and then an “e”: she writes. The ending: she writes an “I,” and then a “t”: she sees herself in everything. From the process of clearing her throat emerges a bewitching, jewellike eighty-eight pages unlike anything in modern literature. Água Viva baffles and inspires me as much as the 3,000 pages of Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (1913–27). The Brazilian singer Cazuza read Água Viva 111 times. Each word of the book lands with the sweet force of a blade: “May the God help me: I am lost. I need you terribly. We must be two. So that the wheat can grow tall. I am so earnest that I’m going to stop.”¹⁴

But the texts I return to most regularly are without a doubt the Crônicas. They were only published in their entirety in English, as a 733-page set, in October 2022, yet I have already treasured them for what feels like a lifetime. Clarice thought of her columns, or so she publicly claimed, as afterthoughts to her writing, which already hum in a profoundly afterthoughtish zone. But no: they are the hierophantic chronicle of a life being daily lived.

Clarice had only barely survived the fire that nearly killed her in 1966. She badly needed money to support herself. In 1967, Rio’s Jornal do Brasil approached her to start a column for its Saturday-morning newspaper. She could write about anything. The lengths of the columns could be variable. Sometimes she serialized short stories over a period of weeks; sometimes she wrote as short as a sentence. (Here’s the full text of her column for July 13, 1968, published under the title “My Own Mystery”: “I am so mysterious that I cannot understand myself.”)¹⁵ She often seemingly wrote from the top of her head. Too Much of Life is an extraordinary collection of fragmented, essayistic, fictive thoughts, as vast, playful, and volcanic as Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet (1982). Fragments from the columns make appearances in both Água Viva and An Apprenticeship. What draws me to them is their nearness to the raw material that powered Clarice’s gift of seeing and being. Certain columns I have scored in pen to hell and back, returning to them again and again.¹⁶ One paragraph from “The Cry” could stand in for all of them:

I know that what I write here cannot really be called a crônica or a column or even an article. But today I know it is a cry. A cry of exhaustion. I am so tired! It’s obvious that my love for the world has never stopped wars or deaths. Loving has never prevented me from weeping tears of blood inside. Neither has it prevented fatal partings. Children bring a lot of happiness. Yet I suffer birth pangs every day. The world has failed me and I have failed the world. Therefore, I no longer wish to love. But what then is left for me? Living on autopilot until my natural death arrives. But I know I cannot live on autopilot: I need a refuge, and love is that refuge.¹⁷

From a refusal to do the very task she had been assigned, to accepting the void of the task, to swiftly rejecting the void, to finishing the task, then starting all over again in the next paragraph: Clarice lived for this ebb and flow.

There is something in Clarice’s voice that I have never encountered before: the hyperelegance of being unable to speak. I was reared to write clearly, neatly, with the express purpose of being understood; here is someone who knew this was a lie. Attention, though: one must be careful not to gorge on Clarice all at once. I made that wretched mistake. Don’t—or you, too, will feel the acrid bitter when faced with oak-solid truth as she describes it in The Chandelier: “actually what she was feeling was just a difficult taste, a hard and persistent sensation like that of insoluble tears too quickly swallowed.”¹⁸ Avoid the quick. We are fed enough of that. Clarice is best picked up at an interval of desert thirst and weakness. Then she should be forgotten, until suddenly she rematerializes like a ghost, her vicious, untidy, yet crystalline words coursing through the veins once more: “I who come from the pain of living. And I no longer want it. I want the vibration of happiness, I want the impartiality of Mozart. But I also want inconsistency.”¹⁹ Her novels generally begin with a strong narrative thread but quickly devolve into the viscous, milky-silvery matter that defines her unstylish style. We may begin with a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown (The Passion According to G.H., 1964), or a painter struggling to spill something on her canvas (Água Viva), or a man struggling to tell the socially conscious story of a poor woman who survives on hot dogs (The Hour of the Star, 1977)—but we don’t stay in this territory for long. For Clarician sentences are like the sun. They cannot be stared at for too long. One loses sight itself.