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Hurricane Clarice. Slightly Foxed magazine archives: Clarice Lispector

Hurricane Clarice

The sleeper lounge is old-fashioned British Rail, all tartan carpet, smeared tables and microwave cuisine. Tonight it contains a gathering of solitaries, all of us making separate journeys to London. The man beside me is still working, though it’s nearly ten o’clock.

By chance we order the same whisky. We raise our plastic glasses, embarrassed in a very British way. I want to encourage him. He is at war with a pile of papers. But he is wishing me good luck as well. He has been glancing at the author’s face on the back cover of my novel. She does rather stare.

Her name is Clarice Lispector, one of the most original and fascinating writers of the twentieth century. She is the author of nine novels and several collections of short stories, all written in Portuguese. She was born in 1920, not as Clarice but as Chaya, the daughter of Ukrainian Jewish parents. From this beginning she was to become, improbably, the doyenne of Brazilian literature.

Ukraine to Brazil – who makes that journey? In 1921, young Chaya did, her family fleeing the pogroms that erupted in the region after the First World War. Brazil took them in. Once there, the family adapted their first names to their new home. Thus Chaya became Clarice. ‘I am a Brazilian,’ she wrote, ‘and that is that.’

Despite her confidence, she didn’t immediately fit in. ‘People here look at me as if I come straight from the zoo,’ she wrote in 1941, to which she added, ‘I entirely agree.’ From the back of my book, she stares with wide eyes from a pale face, ‘that rare person’, it has been said, ‘who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf ’. Indeed her writing style proved to be as alluring as her appearance. The refugees’ daughter was to create a new national literature.

She was a clever, even impish child, though her youth was overshadowed by her mother’s paralysis. Little Clarice wrote magical stories, wanting to heal her. They did not work, and

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The sleeper lounge is old-fashioned British Rail, all tartan carpet, smeared tables and microwave cuisine. Tonight it contains a gathering of solitaries, all of us making separate journeys to London. The man beside me is still working, though it’s nearly ten o’clock.

By chance we order the same whisky. We raise our plastic glasses, embarrassed in a very British way. I want to encourage him. He is at war with a pile of papers. But he is wishing me good luck as well. He has been glancing at the author’s face on the back cover of my novel. She does rather stare. Her name is Clarice Lispector, one of the most original and fascinating writers of the twentieth century. She is the author of nine novels and several collections of short stories, all written in Portuguese. She was born in 1920, not as Clarice but as Chaya, the daughter of Ukrainian Jewish parents. From this beginning she was to become, improbably, the doyenne of Brazilian literature. Ukraine to Brazil – who makes that journey? In 1921, young Chaya did, her family fleeing the pogroms that erupted in the region after the First World War. Brazil took them in. Once there, the family adapted their first names to their new home. Thus Chaya became Clarice. ‘I am a Brazilian,’ she wrote, ‘and that is that.’ Despite her confidence, she didn’t immediately fit in. ‘People here look at me as if I come straight from the zoo,’ she wrote in 1941, to which she added, ‘I entirely agree.’ From the back of my book, she stares with wide eyes from a pale face, ‘that rare person’, it has been said, ‘who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf ’. Indeed her writing style proved to be as alluring as her appearance. The refugees’ daughter was to create a new national literature. She was a clever, even impish child, though her youth was overshadowed by her mother’s paralysis. Little Clarice wrote magical stories, wanting to heal her. They did not work, and her mother died when Clarice was 10. But still, just three years later, Clarice wrote that she knew she would have to be a writer, although she later toyed with the idea of becoming a prison lawyer. In 1943 she married Maury Gurgel Valente, an unlikely choice not least because Maury was Catholic. He was also a diplomat, and so the 23-year-old Clarice embarked on a life of travel and cocktail parties. She would move with him from post to post, variously Naples, Berne, even Torquay. She did not much care for Switzerland, calling it ‘a cemetery of sensations’, and she found Torquay boring, but she did like England: ‘The lack of sun. The lack of beauty. It all moves me.’ This emphasis on absence – the lack of sun and lack of beauty – finds its way into Clarice’s books. A sense of place and a straightforward plot are often missing, but the woman who once dreamt of reforming prisons writes with rare beauty of confined women breaking free, and nowhere with more power than in her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, published in 1943, the year in which she married. It caused a storm; indeed one critic wrote of ‘Hurricane Clarice’. Everyone wanted to know who this woman was who wrote so differently from anything that had been known in Brazil before. Near to the Wild Heart takes its title from James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, part of a passage where Joyce describes his hero Stephen Dedalus’s freedom. ‘Where was his boyhood now?’ Joyce writes. ‘He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life.’ Near to the Wild Heart opens with Joana, a little girl much like Clarice had been, intent on knowing everything. She hears her father’s typewriter and notices the silences in between the clacking of the keys. She looks out of the window at ‘the great world of the chickens-that-did-not-know-they-were-about-to-die’. (Clarice remained worried about chickens throughout her writing life and ‘The Hen’ is among the best of her short stories.) Joana wants to catch the moment and the next moment and the meaning of it all. Her father wonders, what will become of her? The chapters on Joana’s childhood are interlaced with Joana as an older woman, married by this time to a man called Otávio. He is suitable, and boring. The child of freedom has become an adult caught behind the bars of respectability, and it is tempting here to find autobiographical parallels. Did Clarice see that her own marriage to Maury would end unhappily? It feels as if Clarice explores not only her own future through Joana, but something much larger. ‘Adults are sad and solitary,’ Clarice said in her last broadcast. ‘Children have their imagination. They are free.’ Clarice’s characters, especially her women, are searching for freedom. Plot and place slip away; she is an author intent upon the story of the mind. As we come to know Joana in Near to the Wild Heart, the comparisons between her youth and married years grow painful. Joana’s life shrinks until she is absolutely stuck. Perhaps this is what happened to Clarice herself. After fifteen years of diplomatic life she separated from Maury and returned to Rio with her two children. Then her son Pedro was diagnosed with schizophrenia. For a time, she scraped a living writing make-up tips. An editor described Clarice in the late 1950s as bringing ‘an anguished silence’ with her into his office. No one was reading her books. She was as stuck as her first heroine had been. In the second half of Near to the Wild Heart, it turns out that Joana’s husband Otávio is not quite as respectable as he had seemed. He has a lover called Lídia and she is everything that Joana is not. ‘Why is she so powerful?’ Joana asks. ‘I can’t imagine that because I haven’t spent my afternoons sewing, this makes me inferior to her. Or does it? It does, it doesn’t, it does, it doesn’t.’ Eventually, Joana tells Lídia to keep Otávio. Why? A bitter reason: ‘I do not bring peace to anyone.’ Thereafter Joana enters a space deep inside herself, moving from the ordinary world into what Clarice describes as ‘a fluid region, quiescent and unfathomable’. It is in this inner life that her heroines often find meaning, not a retreat into childhood but an advance into experiencing the world anew. Take Ana for example. She is the heroine of Clarice’s fine short story ‘Love’. Ana, like Joana and like Clarice herself, has a house and children and a safe, ordinary life, or, as Clarice puts it, ‘She had gradually emerged to discover that life could be lived without happiness.’ In place of joy, Ana is needed, with things to do. She manages for all but one hour in each day. In this space she rides the trams, going nowhere. On one such trip, she sees a blind man. ‘Like some strange music, the world started up again.’ What world? The world as Clarice Lispector wants us to see it – nightmarish and lawless, but exciting for being crammed with secrets. ‘The world was so rich that it was rotting,’ she writes. ‘The very crust of the days she had forged had broken.’ This is not just about seeing pretty things. Ana feels deep nausea when she experiences as if for the first time the hunger of the poor. ‘The murder was deep.’ The wild heart of life contains beauty and also pain. This is what I love in Clarice Lispector’s writing, this wild heart. Hers are novels about seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. She is a tutor of the strangeness and the wonder of things. In terms of plot, I cannot tell you much more. Clarice is not bothered with this-then-that. ‘To see her as a novelist is like calling Plato a playwright,’ Lorrie Moore has written of Lispector’s work. In time, Clarice met with success and adulation. She is still held in high regard in Brazil and among academics. There is a lot written about her, much of it very complicated. She can be perplexing and is a nightmare to translate. But Clarice Lispector is a writer who keeps life alive. She just does not believe that anyone has limits. It is morning. The sleeper feels like an intruder, moving jarringly through north London, giving way to commuter trains. My friend with the whisky is back at his papers, now armed with coffee. I have spent the night with a strange and wonderful woman. ‘If I had to give a title to my life,’ Clarice once wrote, ‘it would be this: I am in search of the thing itself.’ She is a chronicler of freedom like no other writer I know.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 37 © Michael Marett-Crosby 2013


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