At the end of 1970, the household acquired a new member, Olga Borelli, who would become the key figure in the last years of Clarice’s life and whose tireless dedication and intellectual affinity facilitated the creation of Clarice’s great final works. The writer, with her “enormous maternal and paternal deficit,” found in Olga the last of her mother figures, and the childless Olga, who seems to have spent much of her life in search of a charitable mission, found in Clarice a project worthy of her colossal devotion.
Olga was one of the many people who, moved by her writings, sought out Clarice in those years. In one of her newspaper columns, Clarice mentioned her perplexity at the outpourings of affection she received. “I’m going to call Elsie [Lessa], who’s been writing columns for longer than I have, to ask her what to do with the marvelous phone calls I get, with the roses pungent with such beauty that people send me, with the simple and profound letters that people send me.”15
While she was reading The Passion According to G. H., Olga caught a glimpse of the writer on television. She had the strange sensation that she had known her for years, and decided to seek her out. She rang to ask Clarice to participate in a fundraiser for the Fundação Romão Duarte, where Olga was a volunteer. As it so happened, this was the same orphanage Clarice had visited in 1941, at the very beginning of her journalistic career, when she wrote a long piece about the institution’s two-hundredth anniversary.16 Three decades later, she would return to autograph her two children’s books for the residents of the orphanage.
The two women had a chance to talk. “Her bearing,” Olga remembered of this first meeting, “had something of the humility of a peasant mixed with the hauteur of a queen.” Two days later, Olga received a summons to Clarice’s home, where the writer handed her a letter.
11-12-70. Olga, I’m typing this letter because my handwriting is awful.
I have found a new friend. Which is too bad for you. I am an insecure, indecisive, directionless, rudderless person: the truth is I don’t know what to do with myself. I am a very fearful person. I have very serious real problems that I will tell you about later. And other problems, with my personality. Do you want to be my friend despite all that?
If you do, don’t say I didn’t warn you. I don’t have qualities, only fragilities. But sometimes … sometimes I have hope. The passage from life to death frightens me: it’s like passing from hate which has an objective and is limited, to love which is limitless. When I die (as a matter of speaking) I hope you will be near. You seemed to me to be a person of enormous sensitivity, but strong.
You were my best birthday present. Because on Thursday the 10th it was my birthday and you gave me a little baby Jesus who looks like a happy child playing in his rough cradle. Even though, without knowing it, you gave me a birthday present, I still think my birthday present was you yourself appearing, at a difficult time, of great solitude.
We need to talk. It so happens that I thought that nothing was any use any more. Then I saw an ad for a perfume by Coty, called Unexpected. The perfume is cheap. But it helped me remember that good unexpected things happen too. And whenever I’m discouraged, I put on Unexpected. It gives me luck. You, for example, were not expected. And I unexpectedly accepted an afternoon signing books.
Yours, Clarice17
Olga, who, by a magical coincidence, would indeed be nearby when Clarice died, was the daughter of Italian immigrants and she had been a nun. She spent years throwing herself with tremendous energy and enthusiasm into various charitable efforts, working with Peace Corps volunteers, teaching sewing classes in slums, volunteering at the orphanage, giving workshops on communication, and starting various organizations that promoted theater and dance. But her greatest project, one might even say her legacy, was Clarice Lispector, to whom she dedicated herself completely.
Her possessiveness alienated many of Clarice’s oldest friends, but even they recognized that Olga’s unstinting commitment was a godsend for a progressively weakening Clarice. She acted as a kind of ambassadress between the writer and the outside world. “When I met Clarice,” Olga remembered after her friend’s death, “I saw the great solitude in which she lived, as a person and as a writer within Brazilian literature. It was as if I said to the world: Look at this marvelous person that you don’t know about. Because at that time she was absolutely, absolutely dysfunctional socially. Nobody sought out Clarice, there was little discussion of her work.”18
This was the kind of thing that annoyed Clarice’s many friends and admirers, who did not need Olga to remind them of Clarice Lispector “as a person and as a writer.” She was far from forgotten by the public and was surrounded by people who cared a great deal about her. But in a broader sense Borelli was, of course, correct. The same friends attest that Clarice had a harder and harder time functioning normally and badly needed help.
Around this time it became increasingly common to refer to Clarice Lispector as a monstre sacré, a person whose combination of genius and oddity placed her somehow outside normal human society. The epithet pained her terribly. “Suddenly I discover that I am becoming for them [her readers] a sacred monster,” she told an interviewer.19 To another, she expressed her “horror at the monstre sacré.”20 “One of the things that makes me unhappy is this story about the sacred monster: others fear me for no reason, and I end up fearing myself. The truth is that other people created a myth around me, which trips me up a great deal: it scares people off and I end up alone. But you know that I am very easy to get along with, even if my soul is complex.”21
Yet there is no question that this was how many people saw her: weird, mysterious, and difficult, an unknowable mystical genius far above, and outside, the common run of humanity. The reputation isolated her just at the time that she most needed help. “Christ was Christ for others, but who? Who was Christ for Christ?” she had wondered in An Apprenticeship. The ex-nun arrived just as Clarice was desperate for a savior.
36
The Story of Instants That Flee
Unlike Lori, Clarice would not have another sexual relationship. In the final years of her life, her close relationships would be either filial, such as those with Jacob David Azulay and Olga Borelli, or maternal. Like a true youngest child, Clarice took full advantage of Olga’s incredible patience. “It’s not easy to be friends with very self-centered people,” Olga remembered.
Clarice was that type and so she was demanding and consuming of the people she liked. She had great trouble sleeping and called me countless times in the middle of the night to say that she was upset and tense. I don’t think I’ll ever forget the time I went to Salvador to teach a class. One night, arriving back at the hotel, I got an urgent message to call her. On the phone her voice was strange. “Olga, I’m so distressed. An enormous anguish. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. Come back as soon as you possibly can.” I canceled everything and returned to find her the next day at lunchtime, laughing, in a good mood. Do you know what she said to me? That I took her too seriously and had acted hastily by coming back early. Of course I was very annoyed, but I learned a lot from the incident.1
The book of stories Clarice published in 1971, Covert Joy, reflects a growing preoccupation with childhood. Almost all of the book’s twenty-five pieces had appeared elsewhere, mostly in The Foreign Legion, but three exceptions are instructive. The title story recalls the neighbor girl in Recife whose father owned a bookstore and who tortured the young Clarice with the promise of a book. “Remains of Carnival” is the story of the little girl dressed as a rose whose carnival was ruined by a crisis in her mother’s health; in “A Hundred Years of Pardon” Clarice remembers stealing roses from the gardens of Recife’s well-to-do.
So much of her work had been autobiographical, but rarely in the sense of these memories of her childhood in Recife. She had almost never written about herself so literally, preferring to hide behind her characters or inside her allegories. When she did appear, it was in newspaper columns or in little stories like those tha
t make up the second half of The Foreign Legion.
To a reader, it does not much matter whether these stories are “true.” But Clarice was not really satisfied with this kind of autobiographical writing. The inclusion of so many personal anecdotes, so many extracts taken directly from her newspaper columns, may have been one reason she professed to be unsatisfied with An Apprenticeship. Writing, especially about herself, had always been a means of learning about the world beyond the self rather than a merely descriptive, or even memoiristic, end.
“I am not going to be autobiographical. I want to be ‘bio,’ ” Clarice wrote in the book she was working on around the time she met Olga Borelli, Água viva. In a note she spelled out this goal: “I must, Olga, find another way of writing. Very close to the truth (which?), but not personal.”2 This was the problem she had been struggling with since she began An Apprenticeship, when she confessed to her friends, and even to her hairdresser, that she “no longer knew how to write.”
In Água viva, she would discover a means of writing about herself in a way that transformed her individual experience into a universal poetry. In a body of work as emotionally powerful, formally innovative, and philosophically radical as Clarice Lispector’s, Água viva stands out as a particularly magnificent triumph. The reviews reflect the same amazement Clarice had provoked thirty years before, when she published Near to the Wild Heart. “With this fiction,” wrote a critic who had attacked An Apprenticeship, “Clarice Lispector awakens the literature currently being produced in Brazil from a depressing and degrading lethargy and elevates it to a level of universal perennity and perfection.”3 The book has inspired passions. The famous Brazilian singer Cazuza, for example, read it 111 times.4
In the form in which it was eventually published, Água viva is short, less than ninety pages of big print. Its brevity and apparent simplicity mask several years of struggle. A first version, entitled Beyond Thought: Monologue with Life, was already complete by July 12, 1971, when Clarice met Alexandrino Severino, a Portuguese professor at Vanderbilt University. She gave him a copy of the manuscript for translation into English, along with specific procedural instructions. He was not to budge so much as a single comma.5
She was still “drying out the book,” she told Severino, before handing it over to her publisher. This was now Editora Sabiá, which Rubem Braga and Fernando Sabino had founded after quarreling with their partner at the Editôra do Autor, and where they had already published An Apprenticeship and Covert Joy. But a year later, in June 1972, the book had not appeared, and Severino wrote to ask if she still wanted him to proceed.
When she answered, the manuscript had another name. “As for the book—I interrupted it—because I thought it wasn’t achieving what I wanted to achieve,” she wrote. “I can’t publish it as it is. Either I am not going to publish it or I am going to work on it. Maybe in a few months I will work on the Loud Object.”6
The process of “drying out,” Severino noticed when he finally saw the subsequent version, consisted mainly in removing its many explicit biographical references. But Loud Object, weighing in at 185 pages, was even longer than Beyond Thought (151). The manuscript seems to capture an everyday voice utterly unrefined by literary or fictional artifice.
Clarice reminisces about her pets—abandoned Dilermando from Naples makes an appearance—listing almost every animal she ever owned or wrote about. As if she can no longer think of anything else to write about, she goes into great detail about her favorite flowers. One of them remits her to her origins, a reference surprising because so rare: “The sunflower is the great child of the sun. So much that it is born with the instinct to turn its enormous corolla toward its creator. It doesn’t matter if it’s a father or mother. I don’t know. Is the sunflower a masculine or feminine flower? I think masculine. But one thing is for sure: the sunflower is Ukrainian.”7
If at times this manuscript is as brilliant and inspired as the mature work of a great artist, at other times it is as dull and uninspired as a housewife’s neighborly chitchat. Clarice often claimed that she was a simple housewife, and in this formless, plotless conversation, an unfiltered “brainstorm”—she uses the English word—in which she types anything and everything that pops into her mind, that is often exactly how she sounds.
She complains, for example, about money, another constant topic: “I’m back. The day is still very nice. But things are very expensive—I say this because of the price the man asked to fix [the record player]. I have to work hard to get the things I want or need.” She defends herself against her mythology: “I mean to say that my house is not metaphysical. They can hardly forgive bad food. All I do is open and close my purse to hand out money to buy things. … Besides eating we talk a lot about what’s going on in Brazil and in the world. We talk about what clothes are appropriate to different occasions.” And: “I sleep too and how! My readers think I’m always an insomniac. But that’s not true. I sleep too.”8
Loud Object’s direct and confessional tone, the sense it offers of Clarice’s unfiltered conversational voice—she frequently pauses to answer the phone, light a cigarette, or pour herself a drink of water—can distract the reader from the reality that it, too, is a fiction. In Beyond Thought, she bluntly addresses the reader: “Here’s what’s happening. I had been writing this book for years, spread out in newspaper columns, without noticing, ignorant of myself as I am, that I was writing my book. That is the explanation for readers who recognize this: because they have already read it in the paper. I like the truth.”9
She apparently did not like the truth enough to refrain from retouching it in the second draft. The critic Lícia Manzo points out that Loud Object contains a new, and completely contradictory, explanation: “This book, for obvious reasons, was going to be called Beyond Thought. Many pages have already been published. But when I published them I didn’t mention that they had been extracted from Loud Object or Beyond Thought.”10
It does not particularly matter whether Clarice took her newspaper articles and stitched them into a manuscript or whether she plundered a manuscript for material for her journalism. Yet the two conflicting explanations emphasize that in Loud Object she is still wrestling, and somewhat guiltily, with fictionalization.
Perhaps the least satisfying part of An Apprenticeship was the way Clarice extracted large chunks from her newspaper columns and dropped them, often unmodified, into her novel. The process could work flawlessly, but sometimes the pieces felt undigested. In Loud Object she does the same thing. A column about her childhood friend Leopoldo Nachbin appears, for example, modified only by the replacement of his name with the words “a he.” The deliberate anonymity belongs to her project of depersonalizing her personal experience, replacing proper names with less specific pronouns. But the effort is halfhearted. She still names their school and their city, Recife. She must have known that these reminiscences were out of place, since almost none reached the final book. In the drafts, doubts about how to use her personal experience lead to repeated meditations on the creative process itself.
Throughout Loud Object, she is aware that she is doing something completely different, but she does not yet know what or how: “What will my liberty lead to? What is this that I’m writing? As far as I know I never saw anybody write like this.” Such remarks frequently recur in the manuscript. The knowledge of the novelty of her invention is sometimes thrilling, sometimes frightening, and in one case is followed by a surprising interjection: “Who invented the chair? Someone with love for himself. So he invented greater comfort for the body. Then the centuries went by and nobody noticed a chair because using it was a merely automatic question. One needs courage to do a ‘brainstorm’: we never know what might come and frighten us. The sacred monster died. In its place was born a little girl who lost her mother.”11
Of all Clarice Lispector’s works, Água viva gives the strongest impression of having been spontaneously committed to paper. Yet perhaps none was as painstakingly composed. Even the apparently a
rtless exclamation about her mother reappears in at least two other books, including an essay she later published about Brasília. As she writes in Loud Object, “Art is not purity: it is purification. Art is not liberty: it is liberation.”12
For the first time in her career, Clarice had help in the work of “purification.” She had always done this by herself: she typed out a mind-bending eleven versions of the lengthy Apple in the Dark and spent three years revising The Besieged City. Her journalism had occasionally been edited, but nobody had ever touched her literary work. Olga Borelli was the first person, including Lúcio Cardoso and Fernando Sabino, to edit Clarice.
A sensitive, well-educated reader with a refined sense of language, Olga proved ideal for the task. Her posthumous memoir of her friend, Clarice Lispector: Sketch for a Possible Portrait, displays her writerly talents with concision and elegance.13 It stands out in the vast body of reminisces by Clarice’s friends as by far the best, though Olga, unlike so many of them, was not a professional writer.
She would have a hand in all of Clarice’s late works, but the first challenge was helping transform the lumpy and chaotic Loud Object into the classic Água viva. “Structuring” a book was the hardest task in writing, Clarice complained. As she grew older, editing herself had become more and more exhausting and she needed a sympathetic reader.
“She just didn’t have the nerve to structure those manuscripts, all those fragments,” Olga remembered. “One day, seeing all that material, I said Clarice, why aren’t you writing? The book is ready. She said, no, I don’t feel like it, don’t bother with it. So I said, No, I’ll help you. So I started to structure the book. That was when I got to like structuring and worked up the courage, later, to try my hand at the others.”14
Why This World Page 42
