Why This World

by Benjamin Moser

  And the “Novacap,” the new capital, ultramodern Brasília, was rising in the remote highlands of the Brazilian interior. It may have cost 300 billion cruzeiros,3 but it presented a bold new face to the world, and the world took notice, just as it had in 1958, when Brazil’s soccer players—Garrincha, Didi, Vavá, and seventeen-year-old Pelé—won the World Cup. Brazil’s luck had finally changed. In his small hometown in Bahia, Caetano Veloso was not the only Brazilian “looking for or waiting for something that I could call modern, something I already called modern.”

  Despite the renown she was starting to garner from her appearances in that most modern of Brazilian magazines, Senhor, Clarice’s reentrance into Brazil was not easy. Paulo, her younger son, remembered, “With the separation from my father, she went through very anguished periods, of permanent ‘material’ (emotional?) need, of financial difficulties, of the weight, I imagine, of having to raise two children practically alone. … How much of this neediness was ‘material’?”4

  For the first time in her adult life, Clarice was under “material” pressure, though almost certainly less so than she felt. Maury sent five hundred dollars a month from Washington, a handsome sum, but from the beginning of her life without Maury, Clarice felt poor, perhaps out of fear of the poverty that haunted her childhood, and anxiety about money never left her. Financial worries became a constant complaint in her conversations and correspondence.

  Yet Paulo was surely right to wonder “how much of this neediness was ‘material.’ ” Clarice, after all, lived gracefully enough. After a month camping out at Tania’s, she found an apartment in Leme, a small enclave at the end of Copacabana Beach, where she would spend the rest of her life.

  Today one of the most densely packed areas on the planet—161,000 people crammed on the narrow strip between its legendary beach and the hills behind—Copacabana is a loud, hot victim of real estate speculation and Rio’s half-century of decline. In 1959, however, when Clarice came back to Brazil, Copacabana was swanky. Chic shops and beach going by day, restaurants and casinos and discotheques by night, Copacabana was as much a symbol of the renascent, modern Brazil as Pelé and the bossa nova.

  Not far from the massive white Copacabana Palace, whose opening in 1923 put Rio on the international tourist map, Leme emerged as a separate community, small, quiet, and exclusive. In contrast to chaotic Copacabana, Leme is no more than a couple of streets, lined with flame trees, between the beach and the mountains. Its far end is blocked by another mountain, so there is no through traffic. It boasts a small monastery, but in the 1950s and 1960s it was better known for high-end nightlife and for the calm waters of its beach.

  Still, even in this pleasant spot and with a guaranteed alimony, Clarice did need to adjust to being a single mother. Her first priority was to publish the two books, The Apple in the Dark and Family Ties, that had been languishing in manuscript for almost five years. Her prospects were depressing. At the end of 1958, and despite all the years of promises to the contrary, Ênio Silveira of Civilização Brasileira had finally turned down The Apple in the Dark.

  To Clarice’s great surprise, the news triggered nationwide disgust. She got a hint of what was going on from Fernando Sabino, who wrote her in Washington in February 1959, “It was the straw that broke the camel’s back, the resentment of writers in general with the way they are treated by publishers. It’s a crisis and the thing ended up in the papers, triggering movements pro and con—they ended up, as always, getting the government involved, just to make it even more complicated.”5

  The outraged reaction reflected more than resentment at the shoddy treatment of one of the country’s leading writers. “It wasn’t just the rejection that unleashed the movement,” a journalist wrote. “After all, any publisher can reject any book he chooses. It was the rejection of a manuscript that the publisher had himself requested, four years before.”6

  At first, still in Washington, Clarice heard none of the clatter, and when she did she was a bit embarrassed. “Really,” she told a journalist after her return. “It’s been said that there is a lot of curiosity about the book. I’m afraid that people will be disappointed. After all, I don’t like to take credit for things that I haven’t done. I’d like people to be interested in the book for what it is and not for what it’s provoked.”7

  For an author whose books had languished for so long, however, any attention was useful, and the reaction to Silveira’s dithering created a climate of interest around Clarice. “Result: from a writer whose work was almost exclusively known to a small group, Clarice Lispector became an author known across the whole country, in the face of that wave.”8 The surprising strength of the reaction shamed Silveira into a sort of action. By April 1959, he was writing to Clarice to promise that he would publish The Apple in the Dark before May 1960.9

  Like so many of his previous dates, this one came and went without a whisper; Clarice had presumably heard the same line too many times before. At least both her books were now in her own hands, though. In March 1959, with the help of her sister-in-law Eliane, Clarice had managed to pry the stories of Family Ties free of José Simeão Leal.

  “In 1959,” wrote Paulo Francis, Clarice’s editor at Senhor, “Clarice couldn’t find a publisher in Brazil. She was well-known, yes, among intellectuals and writers. Publishers avoided her like the plague. The motives seemed obvious to me: she wasn’t a disciple of ‘socialist realism’ or preoccupied with the little dramas of the little Brazilian bourgeoisie.”10

  Despite the outpouring of support, Clarice’s bad luck continued. Agir, the Catholic publisher of The Chandelier, went so far as to send a draft contract for Family Ties, but that book never materialized either. “It is not for nothing that I understand those who are seeking their path,” Clarice wrote a few years later. “How arduously I sought my own!”11

  Her books in limbo, needing to find a way to make ends meet, Clarice embarked, almost as soon as she got back to Rio, on a new venture. At the invitation of the newspaper Correio da Manhã, the radical mystical author of The Apple in the Dark stepped aside to make way for a chatty, perky beauty columnist named Helen Palmer, who dispensed advice to her female readers with a wink and a smile. A descendent of Clarice’s earlier alter ego, Teresa Quadros of Comício, Helen, unlike Teresa, had a secret mission: she was a paid agent of Pond’s, purveyor of face creams.

  According to the contract, Helen Palmer was not to name Pond’s specifically. She would instead use more subtle devices to lure women to the beauty counter at their local pharmacy, a method the Pond’s PR team spelled out in prepared pitches. Clarice sometimes used them verbatim. “If your skin is dried out, my friend—a look we all hate because it always adds a few years to our age—find a good special cream and use it daily, around the eyes and wherever wrinkles are appearing, massaging it lightly into your skin. Choose any cream with a base of anhydrous lanolin, for faster and deeper penetration, so it’s more efficient than common lanolin. And nothing’s better than lanolin for dry skin.”12 As it happened, Pond’s included just this kind of “anhydrous lanolin.”

  But there was more to Helen Palmer than sales pitches. Like everything else in Brazil, Helen was modern, and she exhorted her readers to be modern, too. “You, my reader, don’t limit your interests merely to the art of making yourself beautiful, being elegant, attracting masculine eyes. Futility is a weakness that has been overcome by the enlightened woman. And you,” Helen nudged, “are an ‘enlightened woman,’ aren’t you?” Clarice described this enlightened woman: “She studies, she reads, she’s modern and interesting without ceasing to be a woman, a wife, a mother. She doesn’t necessarily have to have a diploma or a title, but she knows something more than her knitting, her casseroles, and her gossip with the neighbors. Above all, she tries to be understanding and humane. She has a heart.”13 Modern was one thing, but Clarice and Helen had no patience for a woman who “smokes like a man, in public, crosses her legs with a shocking casualness, lets loose scandalous guffaws, drinks t
oo much, uses tasteless slang, or demoralizes herself repeating vulgar words.”14 Clarice’s new woman was, first and foremost, a lady.

  If the descriptions now sound painfully dated, Helen Palmer’s values were not foreign to Clarice Lispector, who had spent many years in diplomatic society. She was discreet to the point of being reclusive, and indeed something of a prude; friends recall that she was, for example, slightly ashamed to be separated from her husband. (Divorce would not be legal in Brazil until 1977.) Like Helen Palmer, Clarice was keen not to cause inconvenience. Her sister-in-law Eliane said that Clarice was overly sensitive to the feelings of others: “She felt what they were feeling even before they did.”15 Her friend Olga Borelli wrote that Clarice was “deeply feminine, insisting on good manners from herself as from others.”16 Vain of her feminine beauty, proud of the attraction she exercised over men, she nonetheless chafed at the limits placed on women in an extremely conservative society.

  “I felt it too,” Tania said, “I was very jealous of the men. You can’t imagine what it was like to be a woman back then! We had to be housewives. When Clarice split from Maury and came back to Brazil, she didn’t have a group. Her friends, Fernando, Rubem, Otto [Lara Resende], Hélio [Pellegrino], were married and went out drinking together. It was very hard to break through that.”17

  Clarice was not one to hang out in bars, but even if she had displayed an inclination toward the kind of social life her male friends enjoyed, she had very little time to carouse. Besides raising two children by herself, she was writing for Senhor, she was writing as Helen Palmer, and starting in April 1960 she was writing six columns a week under the name Ilka Soares. Unlike Helen Palmer and Teresa Quadros, Ilka Soares was a real person, and not just anyone: a gorgeous starlet, she was enough of a Rio it girl to have been selected in 1958 to accompany the gay Rock Hudson to the Carnival Ball in the Municipal Theater.18

  Clarice’s new job came thanks to Alberto Dines, a young Jewish journalist who lived in the same building, and on the same floor, as Tania and William Kaufmann. He approached Clarice with some misgiving, worried that a writer of her refinement would scorn such a mundane ghost-writing job, though he knew, through Otto Lara Resende, that Clarice was looking for work. Dines had recently assumed command of the Diário da Noite, the prestigious Rio paper where Clarice had worked before her marriage and which had published Near to the Wild Heart and The Besieged City. The once grand institution had tumbled from its formerly lofty heights. Dines was relaunching it as a tabloid, inspired by the Daily Mirror and Daily Express, and to get the renovated paper off the ground he needed star power.

  Ilka herself lived one building away from Clarice, in Leme. Their contact was minimal: she met Clarice only once, in her apartment, where Clarice was “very reserved, smoked a lot.” In giant Rio de Janeiro, Leme was a fairly intimate community, but even there Clarice was all but invisible. In all the years they lived next door to one another, Ilka never once ran into Clarice on the beach or in the cafés that were so important to the community’s life.

  Yet Clarice managed to create a new voice for Ilka’s column, “Just for Women”: confiding, approachable, and all about “you.” “What you might not know is that even actresses find inspiration in the women they admire,” “Ilka” wrote. “I’ve never moved away from the person that is you. I try to guess what kind of music you like to listen to, what kinds of feelings you’d like me to express, what kinds of looks you’re thinking about for your new dress.” To judge by the kinds of things Clarice thought “you” was interested in, “you” had not been rocked by feminism. “So now, talking about my favorite dishes, I’ll be trying to guess what you like. Speaking of children, I’ll be talking about how we care for our kids. We’ll talk about fashion, with the same excitement that girlfriends talk about clothes. What I think you’d like to know about beauty is what you and I will talk about. And so many other things! Since one thing leads to another. Let’s meet again soon. Till tomorrow.”19

  And Clarice dished out classy makeup tips: “The women of ancient Egypt were two thousand years ahead of the woman of today, as far as eyes were concerned. They, too, concentrated their seduction in their gaze, using a black substance called kohl to lengthen and darken their lashes. Back then they were already using green eye shadow, and we’re not making that up, it’s been proven. And wigs? Well, they used black wigs, for the ‘sensual style of the Nile.’ ”20

  The column was a success, Dines remembers, thanks to the dedication Clarice demonstrated in putting it together and in her access, through her international connections, to the foreign fashion magazines that provided photographs and illustrations.

  Family Ties cemented her reputation. The publisher, at long last, was Francisco Alves, in São Paulo. When Clarice appeared in that city, reporters were keen to meet her. “Since her debut, a mystery has surrounded the admirable writer,” wrote the Diário de S. Paulo, referring to her “hiding behind a pseudonym” and “spending most of her time abroad.”21 A week later, an impressive 150 people, including Alzira Vargas do Amaral Peixoto, attended a similar event in Rio. In photographs Clarice looks delighted, relieved that the book finally was there, gratified by the public’s attention.

  Perhaps the inquiring readers had gathered to see if Clarice actually existed. “There is a great curiosity surrounding the person of Clarice,” one publication claimed at the time. “She seldom appears in literary circles, flees 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.’ ”22

  The presence of the author at least quieted the rumor that she was a man, though Clarice hardly rushed to fill in many details. “Maybe her closest friends and the friends of these friends know something about her life,” wrote one frustrated interviewer. “Where she came from, where she was born, how old she is, how she lives. But she never talks about that, ‘since it’s very personal.’ ”23

  What had changed, to generate this kind of interest? The question perplexed Clarice. One critic suggested “Clarice Lispector was fated to disappear momentarily, not only because she had left the country, but principally because her books had not had any great impact.” Perhaps it was the taste for the “modern” that smoothed the path for her work, he speculated: “Because our artistic climate has changed so radically in the last four years, we are entirely ready to welcome her and acknowledge her as one of the best Brazilian writers of all time.”24

  A more obvious reason for its success is that Family Ties is simply easier to read than either The Chandelier or The Besieged City. Simeão Leal and Ênio Silveira, who had put off Clarice for so many years, could not have been delighted by a headline in the Jornal do Comércio: “Clarice Sells.” “Her publishers describe sales of the story collection Family Ties, with which Clarice Lispector returned to the bookstores, as spectacular. CL, considered a writer for a small audience, is making her debut among the best-sellers.”25 Family Ties became the first of Clarice’s books to earn a second edition, after the original two thousand copies sold out.

  The stage was set, finally, for the appearance of The Apple in the Dark. Francisco Alves published it in July 1961, a year after Family Ties. The book, which had been plagued with problems from the beginning, was so full of errors that Clarice couldn’t even look at it,26 and she was embarrassed by its exorbitant price, 980 cruzeiros. (At the time, it was in fact the most expensive novel ever published in Brazil.)27 In a copy she sent to Erico and Mafalda Verissimo, she stressed that she was dispatching an extremely valuable gift. “Luis Fernando,” she added in a postscript to their son, “consider this book yours as well. Divide 980 by three and you will have your own precious part.”28

  Still, the book had been ready for five years, and, in Clarice’s own words, “a bad m
arriage is better than no marriage.” Twelve years had elapsed since her previous novel, The Besieged City, was published in 1949. Together with Family Ties and her appearances in Senhor, The Apple in the Dark marked the definitive return of a woman who not too long before had been painfully forgotten. Never again would it be thought that she was a man or that she was “hiding behind a pseudonym.”

  It was in the early 1960s that an obscure writer with a difficult reputation became a Brazilian institution, “Clarice,” instantly recognizable from her first name alone. By 1963, a journalist could write, “Clarice Lispector has ceased to be a name and become a phenomenon in our literature. A phenomenon with all the characteristics of an emotional state: Clarice’s admirers enter into [a] trance at the mere mention of her name. … And the great author of Near to the Wild Heart has been transformed into a sacred monster.”29

  After toiling for so long in obscurity, Clarice appreciated the praise for her work. But she hated being thought of as a “sacred monster.” “I happen to write,” she told a Jewish journalist, Rosa Cass, who later became a close friend. “And so it comes through literature. But if I were beautiful, or had money, for example, I wouldn’t like for people to seek me out for that either. It’s good to be accepted as a whole, starting even with one’s defects, with little things, and reaching the bigger things later.”30

  It was not just social climbers who sought her out. She began receiving letters from people all over Brazil who opened their hearts to her, such as a paralyzed journalist in Minas Gerais whose career had been ended by an accident, and a teenage girl who sent her a humble poem and then asked, “Did I manage to say what I am?”31 These letters are very moving to read, and the love they express for her must have been a comfort in difficult times.