Why This World

by Benjamin Moser

  The book’s “strange voice,” the “foreign climate” of its unusual language, made the deepest impression on its early readers. It did have certain points of resemblance with earlier Brazilian writing. “Clarice Lispector’s work appears in our literary world as the most serious attempt at the introspective novel,” wrote the dean of São Paulo critics, Sérgio Milliet. “For the first time, a Brazilian author goes beyond simple approximation in this almost virgin field of our literature; for the first time, an author penetrates the depths of the psychological complexity of the modern soul.” But the affinity with other “introspective” writers, even those as close to her as Lúcio Cardoso, was superficial, as another prominent critic realized when writing that Clarice Lispector had “shifted the center of gravity around which the Brazilian novel had been revolving for about twenty years.”25

  It is remarkable how rarely critics compared the work to that of any other Brazilian writer. Instead, they mentioned Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Dostoevsky, Proust, Gide, and Charles Morgan. This was not simply because the entire question of Brazil, that “certain instinct of nationality” Machado de Assis considered to be the heart of Brazilian literature, is absent from Near to the Wild Heart. It was that its language did not sound Brazilian. Lêdo Ivo, remembering Clarice’s “strange voice” and “guttural diction,” writes, “Clarice Lispector was a foreigner. … The foreignness of her prose is one of the most overwhelming facts of our literary history, and even of the history of our language.”26

  Later this language would be naturalized as that of a great Brazilian writer. But for the time being it sounded exotic. “In Brazil we see a certain stylistic conformity,” wrote Antonio Candido, criticizing those writers who, whatever their other merits, think “that the generous impulse that inspires them is more important than the roughness of their material.”27 And Sérgio Milliet noted that the wonder of the book was the author’s achievement of “the precious and precise harmony between expression and substance.”28

  This is the core of the fascination of Near to the Wild Heart, and of Clarice Lispector. It was not a matter of style versus substance, nor a simple question of emphasis, that separated her from those writers for whom “the generous impulse that inspires them is more important than the roughness of their material.” It was a fundamentally different conception of art. In that first book, she summed up the impulse Candido and Milliet sensed when she wrote, “Vision consists of capturing the symbol of the thing in the thing itself.” The remark was important enough for her to repeat it a hundred pages later—“the symbol of the thing in the thing itself”—and was the heart of her entire artistic project.29

  But as the phrase suggests, that project was less artistic than spiritual. The possibility of uniting a thing and its symbol, of reconnecting language to reality, and vice versa, is not an intellectual or artistic endeavor. It is instead intimately connected to the sacred realms of sexuality and creation. A word that does not describe a preexisting thing but actually is that thing, or a word that creates the thing it describes: the search for that mystic word, the “word that has its own light,” is the search of a lifetime. That search was an urgent preoccupation of centuries of Jewish mystics. Just as God, in Clarice’s writing, is utterly devoid of any moral meaning, so does language signify nothing beyond what it expresses: “the symbol of the thing in the thing itself.”

  The unprecedented ovation that greeted Clarice Lispector’s debut was also the beginning of the legend of Clarice Lispector, a tissue of rumors, mysteries, conjectures, and lies that in the public mind became inseparable from the woman herself. In 1961, a magazine reporter wrote, “There is a great curiosity surrounding the person of Clarice. She seldom appears in literary circles, avoids television programs and autograph sessions, and only a few rare people have been lucky enough to talk to her. ‘Clarice Lispector doesn’t exist,’ some say. ‘It’s the pseudonym of someone who lives in Europe.’ ‘She’s a beautiful woman,’ claim others. ‘I don’t know her,’ says a third. ‘But I think she’s a man. I’ve heard he’s a diplomat.’ ”30

  The beginning of this legend can be dated to Sérgio Milliet’s influential essay of January 1944, when he noted the oddness of the author’s “strange and even unpleasant name, likely a pseudonym.”31 When she read the article, Clarice wrote Milliet to thank him for his warm review, and to clear up the matter of her name. “I was prepared, I don’t know why especially, for an acid beginning and a solitary end. Your words disarmed me. I suddenly even felt uneasy at being so well received. I who didn’t expect to be received at all. Besides, the repulsion of others—I thought—would make me harder, more bound to the path of the work I had chosen. PS. The name is really my own.”32

  The legend of Clarice Lispector could henceforth be freely embroidered, in part because she was not around to give it the lie. Less than a month after Near to the Wild Heart was published, she left Rio de Janeiro. She would not return for any length of time for almost two decades. The letter she sent Milliet came from Belém do Pará, at the mouth of the Amazon. It was an unusual destination for a diplomat, but Maury was posted there because sleepy Belém, like much of northern Brazil, had suddenly become an essential theater in the war that was consuming the world.

  14

  Trampoline to Victory

  In 1942, while Clarice Lispector had been applying for Brazilian citizenship, dating Maury, and writing her first novel, Brazilian foreign policy was undergoing a revolution. In some respects, Brazil might have been a logical partner of the Axis. It had a dictatorship inspired by and sympathetic to continental Fascism. It hosted enormous concentrations of German, Italian, and Japanese immigrants. Its leader, Getúlio Vargas, had given every indication that he wished to maintain friendly relations with the Axis, going so far as to send warm birthday greetings to Adolf Hitler. As late as August 1940 he gave a speech aboard the navy ship Minas Gerais that contained the ominous line “New forces are rising in the West.”1

  As ever, of course, the “father of the poor” and the “mother of the rich” was playing both sides. A man who had survived so long atop Brazil’s byzantine politics was not, at the end of the day, fool enough to bet on the Axis, especially once he noted the immense benefits a closer alliance with the United States would bring. Vargas saw that the country could use U.S. help to solidify its industrial base and to consolidate its political preeminence in South America; with Argentina more or less openly siding with Hitler, an Allied victory would place Brazil in a position of unquestioned dominance. He could use the war to refurbish his military, upgrade his domestic infrastructure, and extend his diplomatic influence.

  Brazil had always needed the United States, but now the United States needed Brazil. The Americans would pay handsomely for Brazilian cooperation; Brazil’s vast natural resources were critical to the war effort. But its trump card was its location, the “Brazilian bulge” of its northeastern flank, the easternmost part of the Americas. The bulge was a vital link in the chain of communications that ran from Miami through the Caribbean and the Guianas to French West Africa. It was the only secure route across the Atlantic, known in the corny parlance of the day as the “trampoline to victory.” Without Brazilian cooperation, it would have been useless.

  The air routes were so essential that, while Vargas flirted with the Axis, there was even talk in Washington of forcibly occupying northeastern Brazil, which one American report described as one of the four most strategically valuable places in the world, along with the Suez Canal, Gibraltar, and the Bosporous.2 That chatter was rendered moot by mid-1941. When both Brazil and the United States were still officially neutral, Vargas allowed Pan-American Airways to begin constructing a giant air base at Natal, just north of Recife, which became the largest air base outside U.S. territory. “Without Natal serving as the ‘trampoline to victory,’ ” one historian has noted, “the Allied supply problems of 1942 and 1943 might have been insurmountable.”3

  In January 1942, just after Pearl Harbo
r, the American nations gathered for a critical conference in Rio de Janeiro. The scene of the meeting was Tiradentes Palace, where until recently Lourival Fontes, one of the three non-Italians who “really understood” Fascism, had lorded over the Brazilian press. The conference concluded with a diplomatic triumph for Sumner Welles, leader of the U.S. delegation, when every nation in the hemisphere, with the exception of Argentina and Chile, broke off relations with the Axis. The announcement was greeted with jubilation in the streets of Rio de Janeiro.

  It was not a Brazilian declaration of war, however, though the Axis treated it as such. This was a mistake, for there were many elements in the army, especially Integralist alumni, who were sympathetic to the Fascists. These included such influential individuals as the minister of war, Pedro Aurélio de Gois Monteiro, and the virulently anti-Semitic chief of the Rio police, Filinto Müller, who was answerable only to Vargas himself. There were also large numbers of Axis nationals in the country, as well as politicians and journalists with Fascist leanings.

  All were silenced once Hitler and Mussolini began torpedoing Brazilian ships, killing hundreds. The Baependi went down with 250 soldiers and seven officers, along with two artillery batteries and other equipment. Another ship, packed with pilgrims en route to a Eucharistic Congress in São Paulo, was also sunk.4 In response to the predictably widespread popular revulsion, the government issued a decree on March 11, 1942, enabling the government to make good the damage by seizing the property of Axis nationals.

  Pogrom-like scenes, aimed especially at the most visible Axis citizens, the Japanese, soon followed. Where Italians and Germans could often pass as Brazilians, the Japanese could not; and as in the United States, where Japanese Americans were interned though no such collective punishment was meted out to German or Italian Americans, the Japanese were singled out, even though Japan, unlike Italy and Germany, had not attacked Brazil. And there were lots of Japanese: the Brazilian colony, hundreds of thousands strong, was the largest Japanese community outside Japan. Their businesses were impounded and they were hounded out of coastal areas, where they were suspected of holding secret communication with Axis submarines.5

  The accusations recall in uncanny detail those leveled against the Jews during World War I: flashing mirrors, mysterious radio signals, unaccounted-for bumps in the night. The Axis languages were banned, an especially devastating handicap for the Japanese. Relatively recent arrivals who often spoke no Portuguese, they found themselves isolated in an environment in which all foreigners were suspect.

  Clarice Lispector’s old neighborhood in Recife witnessed an odd inversion of the situation in Germany a few years before. As they watched the rise of Vargas and his erstwhile Integralist allies, and as they saw the disaster unfolding in Europe, the Brazilian Jews feared for their safety. Suddenly, however, being Jewish was an advantage; large signs reading FIRMA JUDAICA sprouted in the shop windows along the Rua Nova, where João Pessoa had been shot.

  “Who was Axis, who wasn’t,” one Jewish woman said, recalling those times. “Everyone was a foreigner. They needed to know who was Jewish, who was German, who wasn’t a Nazi.” A friendly Japanese man who owned a nearby ice-cream parlor had his establishment sacked. “They destroyed everything, even though they liked him, his delicious ice cream. It was a beautiful ice cream parlor, it even had an orchestra.”6

  “The Jews were terrified because they remembered the pogroms in Europe,” a witness recalled. “They put themselves in those people’s places. It was a kind of empathy. They weren’t happy about it, because they knew their families were in Europe.”7 Jewish enterprises that left any doubt about their allegiance were not safe. Messrs. Stillman and Dimenstein, proprietors of a Recife garment manufactory called Fábrica de capas Argentina, learned this in the nick of time. When local toughs approached, they quickly scotched the suspicious suggestion of Argentina in the name of their business.

  After a single German submarine torpedoed six Brazilian ships between August 15 and August 19, the pressure to enter the war became irresistible. Getúlio Vargas declared war on August 22, 1942, soon going further than any other Latin American nation (read: Argentina) and volunteering troops, the twenty-five-thousand-man strong Força Expedicionária Brasileira, or FEB, which was to be placed fully under U.S. command.

  There was some doubt that Brazil could pull off such a major operation. The nation had not been involved in an international conflict since the Paraguayan War ended seventy-two years before. A wit quipped, “A cobra will smoke before Brazilian troops enter the war.” When the FEB disembarked in Italy in 1944, their symbol was a snake with a pipe in its mouth.

  Clarice and Maury Gurgel Valente arrived in Belém do Pará on January 20, 1944. The mildewed, languid city at the mouth of the great river is a sensual place, the capital of the state of Pará, as big as Western Europe. Every afternoon, with clocklike regularity, and never for more than an hour, a torrential downpour drenches the city, washing the air of the putrid smells of rotting fish that drift from its enormous riverside market. Belém is isolated from the rest of Brazil geographically and culturally, its population marked more strongly by the Indian than the African.

  “One cannot imagine the city of Belém in the rest of Brazil,” the great journalist Euclides da Cunha wrote at the beginning of the century.8 At the time, Belém was in the midst of its fabulous rubber boom, which left it with an imposing collection of fin de siècle buildings, and which had also, for a time, made Maury’s grandfather rich, an important rubber grower and proprietor of his own bank. Maury’s mother grew up in the city, and he and his brothers had spent part of their own childhood there.

  It was a happy time for Clarice and Maury. In the name of the Foreign Ministry, Maury was charged with meeting and greeting the many foreign dignitaries who were passing through on their way to Europe, Africa, and Asia. By January 1944, the “trampoline to victory” was not as essential as it had been before the Allies retook North Africa, but it was still important enough to host a visitor of the caliber of Eleanor Roosevelt, who put in an appearance on March 14. Clarice was on hand to welcome her. “I wore my black dress,” she reported to her sisters. “She is extremely nice, very simple, dresses modestly, and much prettier in person than in pictures or films. The next day, she gave a collective interview to the press. I went, sending the report over the phone to A Noite, even though I’m not officially employed, because I didn’t want to lose the opportunity.”9

  And she got drunk for the first time, at the house of the U.S. consul. “Wow! How nauseating,” she wrote Tania. “A hangover just like in the movies. It’s good that I drank so I could get rid of anything tempting there might have been in the idea, so praised and sung by the poets. … It was the first time and the last, no doubt about it.”10

  Despite such flashes of excitement, she had little to do for the first time in her life. She was no longer in school and did not have a job. “I’m a bit lost here,” she wrote Lúcio Cardoso a couple of weeks after she arrived. “I do almost nothing. I started to look for work and start to torture myself until I decide not to go out: and then the freedom goes nowhere and then I go out again and then I get even more revolted. I’ve read everything that’s fallen into my hands. Madame Bovary fell straight into my hands and I reread it. I took advantage of the death scene to cry all the sorrows I’ve ever had along with those I haven’t.—I never had exactly what’s known as ‘a group’ but I’ve always had a few friends.”11

  The unaccustomed freedom was par for the course for many foreign service wives, whose ranks Clarice now joined. The Foreign Ministry, known as Itamaraty for the neoclassical Itamaraty Palace that housed it, was, and remains, the snootiest club in Brazil. In a country where connections mattered far more than talent, Itamaraty’s reputation for strict meritocracy attracted many of Brazil’s best minds. And its diplomats’ talent in ensuring the nation’s security without resort to war gave them a nearly mythical aura of competence in a country that generally had little confidence
in its governors.

  Needless to say, the foreign service tended to be populated by people with a background more like Maury’s than Clarice’s. The diplomatic wives were for the most part pretty, well-bred, upper-class women, whose function, in a world of embassies and servants, was largely decorative.12 Few women had Clarice’s advanced education, and even fewer her humble origins. There were no Jews in the foreign service—when Clarice married Maury, there was only one other Jewish spouse in Itamaraty13—and dark-skinned Brazilians, the large majority of the country’s population, were equally absent. The Foreign Service was meritocratic, but the criteria for admission, an excellent education including knowledge of French and English, ensured that it would be heavily staffed by the old elite families who, as anywhere else, tended to be conservative, religious, and nationalistic.

  Indeed, as Hitler marched across Europe, Itamaraty played a leading role in keeping Jews out of Brazil. The racist ideology many diplomats had absorbed at the National Law School in Rio de Janeiro made the Foreign Ministry a bastion of anti-Semitism; during the war Brazilian diplomats charged with shaping immigration policy frequently, and fiercely, argued against admitting Jews. In the memos sent back to Rio they commonly made, for example, the connection, which on the surface ought to have been absurd, between Communism and “international Jewish finance.”14

  There were some exceptions. The most highly placed was Luiz Martins de Souza Dantas, ambassador to France until 1942, when he was removed from his post for issuing large numbers of fraudulent visas to desperate Jews, at least several hundred of whom managed to make their way to Brazil.15 Paulo Carneiro, later Brazil’s ambassador to UNESCO, worked for the Brazilian commercial office in Paris during the war, when he took passports home and doctored them on his kitchen table.16