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Clarice Lispector in the U.S.

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The Jewish-Ukrainian-Brazilian Clarice Lispector (1920-1977)

If Clarice Lispector were alive today, she would be celebrating her 104th birthday. The strikingly beautiful author with the high cheekbones and wild Scythian eyes was one of the greatest women writers of the 20th century, joining such titans as Virginia Woolf, Joan Didion, Ursula LeGuin, Patricia Highsmith, and Wislawa Szymborska.

In my e-mail today was a message from New Directions Publishing, which publishes some twenty titles by Lispector in English translation. It contained a link to a video entitled “Dias de Clarice em Washington.” It is 29 minutes long in Brazilian Portuguese with English subtitles.

During the 1950s, Clarice was married to a Brazilian diplomat named Maury Gurgel Valente who was posted to the embassy in Washington. From her house in Bethesda, Maryland, she took part in diplomatic social functions and raised a family, as well as writing a number of books and short stories … until it all became too much for her, and she filed for divorce, after which she returned to Brazil.

I urge you to see this video and see what a great writer must do when she is pulled between her marriage and her art:

Clarice Lispector (R) and Sons

Crônicas: Part of the Game

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Brazilian Writer Hélio Pellegrino

Yes, I am still reading Clarice Lispector’s Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas, which runs to almost 800 pages. Tody, I am quoting a writer that Lispector in turn quotes in her Jornal do Brasil column for September 4, 1971, namely Hélio Pellegrino:

Living—ah, that difficult delight. Living is a game, a risk. Whoever plays can win or lose. The beginning of wisdom consists in accepting that losing is also part of the game. When that happens, we gain something extremely precious: we gain the possibility of winning. If I know how to lose, then I know how to win. If I don’t know how to lose, I win nothing, and I will always go away empty-handed. The eyes of someone who doesn’t know how to lose eventually grow rusty and blind, blind with resentment. When we come to accept with true and deep humility the rules of the existential game, living becomes more than good: it becomes fascinating. To live well is to consume oneself; it is to burn the coals of time from which we are made. We are made up of time, and this means we are a passing thing, movement without respite, finitude. The quota of eternity allotted to us is embedded in time. We need to search it out with ceaseless courage so that the taste of gold may shine upon our lips. If this happens, then we are joyful and good, and our life has meaning.

Crônicas: The Terror

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I am continuing my reading of Clarice Lispector’s Cronicas: Too Much of Life. The following piece was published on October 5, 1968. It is an amazing description of the birth of a newborn.

THE TERROR

There was too much light for his eyes. There was a sudden push; they were maneuvering him, but he didn’t know that: there was only the terror of those faces bent over his. He didn’t know anything. And he couldn’t move freely. The voices sounded to him like thunder, only one voice sang to him: he basked in it. Immediately afterward, he was put down again, and then came the terror, and he was screaming from behind the bars and saw colors, which, only later, he understood were blue. The blue bothered him, and he cried. And then there was the terror of colic. They opened his mouth and put horrible things in it, which he swallowed. When the voice that sang put horrible things in his mouth, he could bear it more easily. But he was immediately placed behind the bars again. Gigantic shadows surrounded him. And then he would scream. The one glimmer of light in all this was that he had just been born. He was five days old.

When he was older, he heard someone say, although without understanding what they meant: “He’s easy enough now, but when he was first born he kept crying and screaming. Now, fortunately, he’s much easier to manage.” No, it wasn’t easy, it never would be. Birth was the death of a single being splitting into two solitary beings It seemed easy now because he had learned to cope with the secret terror he had felt, a terror that would last until he died. A terror of being on the Earth, like a nostalgia for the sky.

Crônicas: How To Deal With What One Has

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Clarice Lispector (1920-1977)

Clarice. I love her name. I love her high cheekbones and penetrating gaze. And most of all, I love the beauty of her thoughts and writings. She wrote in Portuguese, but she was born Chaya Pinkhasivna Lispector in Chechelnyk, Ukraine. To escape the horrors of the Civil War between the Red and White Russians, her Jewish parents fled with their infant daughter to Recife in northeastern Brazil. At an early age, it was discovered that she could write well enough to be published. And she became one of the great women novelists and short story writers of the 20th century.

I am reading short pieces she wrote for Brazilian publications. They are called Crônicas and were recently published in a volume called Too Much of Life, which I am slowly reading with great pleasure.

This is the first of several posts in which I will present one of her Crônicas. I hope you enjoy them.

HOW TO DEAL WITH WHAT ONE HAS

A being lives inside me as if he were entirely at home, and he is. He is a glossy black horse who, despite being entirely wild—for he has never lived inside anyone else and no one has ever put reins or a saddle on him—despite being entirely wild, he has, for that very reason, the primitive gentleness of one who knows no fear: he sometimes eats from my hand. His muzzle is moist and cool. I kiss his muzzle. When I die, the black horse will be left homeless and will suffer greatly. Unless he chooses another house that is not afraid of him being simultaneously both wild and gentle. I should say that he has no name: you just have to call him and that is his name. Or perhaps not, but summon him in a gently authoritative voice, and he will come. If he senses and feels that a body is vacant, he will trot silently in. I should also warn you not to be afraid of his neighing: we mistakenly think that we are the ones neighing with pleasure or rage.

A Thin Slice of Watermelon

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A Great Writer? The Jewish-Ukrainian-Brazilian Clarice Lispector (1920-1977)

As my month of reading only women authors comes to an end, I find I have made a number of discoveries, especially Clarice Lispector, who was born Chaya Pinkhasivna Lispector in Chechelnyk, Ukrainian SSR in 1920. As a child, she emigrated with her family to the Northeast of Brazil, moving eventually to Rio de Janeiro. I am currently reading her last work before she died of ovarian cancer at the age of 57, a novelette entitled The Hour of the Star, from which the following is taken:

That girl didn’t know she was what she was, just as a dog doesn’t know it’s a dog. So she didn’t feel unhappy. The only thing she wanted was to live. She didn’t know for what, she didn’t ask questions. Maybe she thought there was a little bitty glory in living. She thought people had to be happy. So she was. Before her birth was she an idea? Before her birth was she dead? And after her birth she would die? What a thin slice of watermelon.

Also:

She thought she’d incur serious punishment and even risk dying if she took too much pleasure in life. So she protected herself from death by living less, consuming so little of her life that she’d never run out. This savings gave her a little security since you can’t fall farther than the ground.

The portraits of Lispector haunt me, with her high cheekbones. And her writing haunts me. I can see myself reading everything I can find by her.