Benjamin Moser
Haus, £20
Born in a sad corner of Ukraine in 1920, the writer Clarice Lispector’s infancy was haunted by civil war and pogrom. Poverty, flight and swindling by people-traffickers ended in re-plantation on the wild soil of northeastern Brazil. Her father made do in age-old Jewish fashion, as a peddler. Her mother, syphilitic from gang-rape before Clarice’s birth, died when the girl was nine, leaving her with a lifelong sense of absence and guilt.
Dependent on two elder sisters for guidance, Clarice had the advantages of beauty and a verbal talent that would gain her a public image as a cross between Marlene Dietrich and Virginia Woolf. It was not enough. She attached to the world sporadically and left it as she had come in: a “person living unanaesthetised the terror of life”.
The image is harsh, but she would not mean it negatively. Threatened animals and children played central roles in her investigation of what it was to be human. Later, this call of the wild gave way to a longing to be tamed, or at least adjusted. Clarice married a diplomat but chafed under the vapid manners required in postings at Washington and Bern. Leaving her husband and returning to Rio, she brought up two sons on her own, one of them schizophrenic. Supporting a household with servants induced her to write agony-aunt columns for mass-circulation papers. Necessity drove her to a series of analysts.
Her famous beauty vanished overnight when she fell asleep smoking, lulled by the tranquillisers to which she grew addicted. Her reputation warped, so that by the age of 50 she was known as a monstre sacre. Early acclaim for Near to the Wild Heart was not matched by its successors, and through the 1950s she had trouble finding a publisher. In 1961 The Apple in the Dark appeared, “marking the definite return of a woman who not too long before had been painfully forgotten”. Elizabeth Bishop translated her stories; Alfred Knopf published her — though allegedly saying that he “didn’t understand a word” she wrote. In 1964, came The Passion According to G H, whose “ghastly magnificence [its climax involves the heroine eating a cockroach] has placed it among the century’s greatest novels”.
This is the claim of Benjamin Moser in his important new biography. It is a grand one, given how little the world beyond Brazil knows of Lispector. While great attention has been given to the magical realists of the West’s second language, less has to those of its third. Portuguese was Clarice’s instrument. She used it brilliantly, we are told, though always as if with a lisp inherited from her parents’ Ukrainian accent.
Bishop, who lived in Rio, could judge; we must depend on translation, and with a writer so difficult this is perilous. Readers of English versions of her late, major work Aqua Viva may recognise its vast, modernist ambition; but its flow beyond bounds can sometimes evoke the profoundest of mysteries rather less than an organising mentality in breakdown.
“Where there is God, there is nothing,” Kabbalists said. Moser places Lispector in their company: a descendent of Abulafia via Spinoza in pursuit of the Unnameable. This may sit awkwardly with “Helen Palmer” advising middle-class Rio housewives on how to treat their skin while secretly taking stipends from a manufacturer of face cream. But then, why not? If this world is only an arena of snatched joys amid predominant sorrows which we are enjoined to visit for a brief (in Clarice’s case) 57 years, surviving as best we can while speculating with genius about what lies beyond may not be such an ignoble way through it.
