“I only achieve simplicity with enormous effort”
In the course of an average week, as part of what it takes to operate a church in the 21st century, I will meet with financiers, actors, musicians, contractors, reporters, secretaries, bookkeepers, insurance agents, photocopier repairmen, stay-at-home moms and dads, professors, bureaucrats, and those from many other corners in our society.
So I found myself the other evening sitting with a poet who was about to, rather enviously, embark on a road trip with her husband that would stretch over the next six months. We were speaking of the importance of writing as one travels and experiences new sights and stimuli. As do many contemporary writers, both professional and amateur, she was both going to post things on a dedicated weblog but also keep a record of the poems she composed. She was thinking of having them published "backwards", that is, from the most recent to the first. As she is dealing with some medical issues, she thought that her unfolding sense about living with her disease might be rendered with greater perspicacity if viewed from the present into the past.
This reminded me of a style of much of Latin American literature, where narrative disarrangement, time tilting, and altering points-of-view are common and evocative in the service of the plot and characterization. [No surprise, really, how popular William Faulkner has been for Latin American writers.] While we were speaking, I was trying to summon the name of the writer whom I recalled being the most influential in creating, refining, and encouraging this style, but I was daunted by my aging memory. It wasn't until I got home later that night and was able to dig through some ancient tomes in my library, that I remembered her name and her art. [Using a search engine seems like cheating, sometimes.]
Although she is inevitably associated with the South American arts world, specifically the style and nature of Brazilian story-telling, Clarice Lispector was born in 1920 in The Ukraine, in infancy moving to Brazil to a Jewish neighborhood in Recife. Her mother, having been brutally serviced during the pogroms in Ukraine and left with lasting physical damage, died while Lispector was still a child, but not without leaving her daughter with a memory of Ukrainian folk tales that dealt with the more liminal aspects of human consciousness and behavior. These, combined with remarkably similar themes from the Brazilian folk tradition, inflamed Lispector's imagination and creativity. All it took was exposure to the works of Herman Hesse while a teenager to focus Lispector's desire to be a writer.
She was bright, creative, driven, and responsible, and, as she lived in a culture that tended to support female achievement with fewer constraints than much of the rest of the contemporary western world, she became academically accomplished. So much so that she entered law school in Rio de Janeiro at the age of seventeen. It was here that she encountered those who would provide the opposing poles of her life. The first was her relationship with a classmate who would eventually become her husband. As he would enter Brazil's foreign service, Lispector would spend much of her adult life traveling the world as a diplomat's dutiful wife.
The second was realized in her relationships with members of Rio's tight artistic community, those who encouraged and inspired her to continue to write. She would hone her technique as a fashion reporter, an experience that ensured both an economy and simplicity in her language and, even more rare in a writer, an impeccable and stylish personal appearance.
In 1943, Lispector would publish her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart. Using surreal imagery and indifferent to a linear narrative, the novel was a sensation. Lispector was favorably compared to Virginia Woolf, a writer whom she had never read, James Joyce, Andre Gide, and other members of the Europe-based literati. Ironically, some critics were taken with the novel as it didn't seem as if it were written by a Brazilian. In fact, a few critics thought that it had secretly been written by a man using a feminine pseudonym.
As summarized in a recent review, written a few years ago upon publication of what is considered the first worthy English translation of the novel, the critic notes:
So I found myself the other evening sitting with a poet who was about to, rather enviously, embark on a road trip with her husband that would stretch over the next six months. We were speaking of the importance of writing as one travels and experiences new sights and stimuli. As do many contemporary writers, both professional and amateur, she was both going to post things on a dedicated weblog but also keep a record of the poems she composed. She was thinking of having them published "backwards", that is, from the most recent to the first. As she is dealing with some medical issues, she thought that her unfolding sense about living with her disease might be rendered with greater perspicacity if viewed from the present into the past.
This reminded me of a style of much of Latin American literature, where narrative disarrangement, time tilting, and altering points-of-view are common and evocative in the service of the plot and characterization. [No surprise, really, how popular William Faulkner has been for Latin American writers.] While we were speaking, I was trying to summon the name of the writer whom I recalled being the most influential in creating, refining, and encouraging this style, but I was daunted by my aging memory. It wasn't until I got home later that night and was able to dig through some ancient tomes in my library, that I remembered her name and her art. [Using a search engine seems like cheating, sometimes.]
Although she is inevitably associated with the South American arts world, specifically the style and nature of Brazilian story-telling, Clarice Lispector was born in 1920 in The Ukraine, in infancy moving to Brazil to a Jewish neighborhood in Recife. Her mother, having been brutally serviced during the pogroms in Ukraine and left with lasting physical damage, died while Lispector was still a child, but not without leaving her daughter with a memory of Ukrainian folk tales that dealt with the more liminal aspects of human consciousness and behavior. These, combined with remarkably similar themes from the Brazilian folk tradition, inflamed Lispector's imagination and creativity. All it took was exposure to the works of Herman Hesse while a teenager to focus Lispector's desire to be a writer.
She was bright, creative, driven, and responsible, and, as she lived in a culture that tended to support female achievement with fewer constraints than much of the rest of the contemporary western world, she became academically accomplished. So much so that she entered law school in Rio de Janeiro at the age of seventeen. It was here that she encountered those who would provide the opposing poles of her life. The first was her relationship with a classmate who would eventually become her husband. As he would enter Brazil's foreign service, Lispector would spend much of her adult life traveling the world as a diplomat's dutiful wife.
The second was realized in her relationships with members of Rio's tight artistic community, those who encouraged and inspired her to continue to write. She would hone her technique as a fashion reporter, an experience that ensured both an economy and simplicity in her language and, even more rare in a writer, an impeccable and stylish personal appearance.
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| Artists loved to attempt to capture her in their medium, to greater or lesser success. |
As summarized in a recent review, written a few years ago upon publication of what is considered the first worthy English translation of the novel, the critic notes:
The novel is made up of a series of stream-of-consciousness passages, centering on the thoughts and actions of the young Joana. After the death of her father, Joana drifts through her days, living only in the present but oblivious to daily circumstance. Not a lot happens: she is sent to live with an uncle; marries a man she loves, in her own strange way; gets bored; has an affair; leaves her husband. The unworldly and callous Joana – described by her aunt as "a strange creature … with neither friends nor God" – unsettles everyone she meets with excessive sincerity and lack of remorse. The originality of Near to the Wild Heart lies in its technique and language: self-conscious, bleakly humorous, but poetic – "The sun burst through the clouds and the little sparkles scintillating on the waters were tiny fires flaring up and dying out." [1]She became the toast of Rio's art world and, due to her husband's series of promotions, a grand hostess in the world's diplomatic circles, too.
Beginning in 1944, for fifteen years Lispector lived in Italy, Switzerland, England, and, eventually, Washington D.C. Not only would she welcome guests to a variety of diplomatic receptions and balls at the Brazilian embassies around the world, but she would raise a couple of boys and continue to write novels that would solidify her reputation as Brazil's premier 20th century author and muse.
However, and despite her Ukrainian birth, Lispector was a Brazilian who was increasingly homesick for the music, art, food, vividity, sensuality, and quality of life of her adopted homeland. So much so that, in 1959, she left her husband and, with her children, moved back to Rio to settle. This was not an easy move as she was without much money and had no real prospects outside of the literary world. However, she had a novel and collection of short stories completed so, once a publisher was secured, she returned to full prominence in the literary life of Amazonia, proving to be prolific enough to satisfy the public's demand for her work. Over the remainder of her life, she would publish:
Family Ties [1960]
The Apple in the Dark [1961]
The Passion According to G.H. and The Foreign Legion [1964]
The Woman Who Killed the Fish and An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures [1968]
Covert Joy and The Stream of Life [1971]
Água Viva [1973]
Where Were You at Night and The Via Crucis of the Body [1974]
A Breath of Life and The Hour of the Star [1977]
She became a sometimes accessible, sometimes mysterious woman of influence. Lispector would invite young writers into her salon and either listen to their poetry and prose, making erudite commentary on their style, or defy them to amuse her, staring at them while chain smoking until they finally left in some discomfort.
In recent years, she has become even more appreciated outside of Brazil and South America as her artistic authority has increased. As young writers of Lispector's generation would look to their compatriots in Europe and the U.S. for inspiration, by the 21st century, European and American writers would look to Clarice Lispector to give energy to their imagination.
Lispector would suffer from health issues in later life, mostly due to her smoking. [Note: It's not easy to find a photo of her that doesn't include a cigarette elegantly held aloft.] In 1966, she fell asleep with a lit cigarette and managed to all-but-destroy her right hand, her legs, and her salon. She survived, but was in pain for the remainder of her days, eventually succumbing to cancer in 1977.
As was noted in a recent re-appreciation of her gift to world literature and her Brazilian sense of the mystic,
The legendarily beautiful Clarice Lispector, tall and blonde, clad in the outspoken sunglasses and chunky jewelry of a grande dame of midcentury Rio de Janeiro, met our current definition of glamour. She spent years as a fashion journalist and knew how to look the part. But it is as much in the older sense of the word that Clarice Lispector is glamorous: as a caster of spells, literally enchanting, her nervous ghost haunting every branch of the Brazilian arts.
Her spell has grown unceasingly since her death. Then, in 1977, it would have seemed exaggerated to say she was her country’s preeminent modern writer. Today, when it no longer does, questions of artistic importance are, to a certain extent, irrelevant. What matters is the magnetic love she inspires in those susceptible to her. For them, reading Clarice Lispector is one of the great emotional experiences of their lives. But her glamour is dangerous. “Be careful with Clarice,” a friend told a reader decades ago, using the single name by which she is universally known. “It’s not literature. It’s witchcraft.” [2]Her novels and short story collections are still in print with most available in English translations, although with varying degrees of success in converting her lilting, lyrical prose from Portuguese.
Just this past month, on the 40th anniversary of her death, Oxford University held a gathering of scholars to observe her legacy and its contribution to world literature.[3]
In a quiet park in Recife, Brazil, one may still sit in attendance with the woman of letters as the city has honored her with a statue. Near its base reads a quotation, "Tudo no mundo começou com um sim. Uma molécula disse sim a outra molécula e a vida nasceu ". Or, in English, "Everything in the world started with a yes. One molecule said yes to another molecule and life was born."
So, the child born in poverty in a Jewish ghetto in Ukraine, who came to prominence in the exotica of Brazil, and represented her country as a proper hostess and, eventually, literary beacon, said "yes" to all of the rich variety that was presented to her, regardless of its source, its difficulty, or its pain.