Lispector, Clarice, 1920-1977

In 1921, Clarice Lispector emigrated from Ukraine to northeast Brazil when she was two months old. Her debut novel, Near to the Wild Heart (1943), received national acclaim. While living abroad, Lispector wrote and published two novels, The Candelabrum (1946) and The Besieged City (1949). In Washington, D.C., she worked on her short story collection Family Ties (1960) and completed her long existential novel, The Apple in the Dark (1961). From the 1960s until her death in 1977, she wrote six novels, seven story collections, four children’s books, and many chronicles and became the outstanding Brazilian and Latin American woman writer of her generation. Lispector’s works have been widely translated and internationally lauded, placing her writings with the likes of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. “I can’t sum myself up because it’s impossible to add up a chair and two apples. I’m a chair and two apples. And I don’t add up,” states the female narrator of Clarice Lispector’s novel Agua Viva (The Stream of Life) as she pursues a narrative quest of self-discovery only to realize that her identity is compound and words cannot always convey what she actually feels. If the apple symbolizes knowledge and the chair an aspect of domesticity, this voice is affirming that she is greater than her gender. Despite an intense struggle with words, Lispector’s female protagonists nevertheless burst forth, sparked by unexpected epiphanies that lead them to probe their existential condition with a self-conscious awareness of the limitations of language and of their beleaguered situations. These narrator/protagonists also manifest experiences of displacement and otherness that, rather than inducing alienation, expand the knowledge of self, as exemplified by the words of another female narrator, GH: “He who lives totally is living for others.” Lispector’s prose also transmits the evocative and spiritual sense of the ineffable, an openness to a form of mystical and linguistic reception that transcends the concreteness of the written word to enable her characters and readers to experience a lyrical sense of the sublime, the “unsayable,” which scholar and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, in Man Is Not Alone (1951), recognized as “the root of man’s creative activities in art, thought and noble living.”

Early Life and Immigration to Brazil
Clarice Lispector was born on December 10, 1920, in Tchetchelnik, Ukraine (Russia) to Jewish emigrants, Marieta (1889–1930) and Pedro (Pinkhas) Lispector (1885–1940), who were fleeing from the pogroms with their two daughters, Elisa and Tânia. Traveling by ship, they arrived in Brazil’s underdeveloped northeast in 1921, when Clarice was just two months old. Later in life, Lispector often spoke of being born in “flight” and how that affected her sense of not quite belonging, especially to herself. In 1925 the family moved to the major northeastern coastal city of Recife. Marieta, mother and homemaker, a sickly woman, died in 1930 when Clarice was nine years old. In 1933 Pedro and his three daughters moved to Rio de Janeiro, where the second daughter, Tânia Lispector Kaufmann (b. 1915), settled. The eldest, Elisa Lispector (1911–1989), became a nationally known writer of psychological fiction and a semi-autobiographical novel In Exile (1948) about a Jewish family not unlike the Lispectors. Although Yiddish was the language spoken at home, Clarice, as the youngest, supposedly spoke only Brazilian Portuguese, her first language, despite her Russian nationality that she abandoned when she became a naturalized Brazilian in 1943.

From 1930–1931 Lispector attended the Hebrew-Yiddish-Brazilian school in Recife where she performed well, as she did at all the schools she attended. Clarice’s father, an intelligent man who read the Bible regularly and loved books and music, was first a peddler (clientelchick) and then a merchant who had to support his family instead of pursuing his own love of study. According to his daughter Tânia Kaufman, Pedro Lispector was a very progressive man who possessed much biblical culture, knew Yiddish very well, and regularly read the New York Yiddish newspaper Der Tog. Consequently the Lispectors led a “Yiddishkeit” family lifestyle during Clarice’s childhood, until the death of her mother. Pedro, who died in 1940, encouraged his daughters’ motivation to succeed but did not live to see their accomplishments: all three became writers, two of fiction and one of technical books. Recalling the family’s first years of economic hardships in the northeast, Lispector frequently expressed her empathy with Brazil’s impoverished masses.

Literary Criticism and Acclaim
See Also:
Yara Bernette (Bernette Epstein)
Encyclopedia: Brazil, Contemporary
Much criticism of Lispector’s reticence about her Jewish heritage stemmed from her rapid assimilation into Brazilian culture and the absence of Jewish references in most of her work. While Brazil’s intense nationalist spirit in the 1930s and 1940s and the climate of sporadic antisemitism, fascism, and xenophobia may have contributed to her not publicly displaying her roots, recent scholarship reveals that there is indeed a strong Jewish impulse in her work, though it contrasts with the overt ethnically driven narratives written by immigrant voices. Her fiction was neither ethnic nor naturalistically bound. She resisted categorization and even rejected the feminist label, despite the predominance of female characters in her fiction. The outstanding Brazilian and Latin American female writer of her generation, Clarice Lispector wrote lyrically inspirational works, employing an original use of language and revealing an intense search for understanding the enigmas of existence, the problems of self and subjectivity as well as identity difference, and the condition of psychological and spiritual exile. She also experimented with different forms of the novel, extensive interior monologues, and narrative techniques such as stream-of-consciousness that led to comparisons with modernists Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.

Education and Early Career
Lispector began writing stories as a young teenager. She studied penal law at the National School of Law in Rio de Janeiro from 1940 to 1943, while working as a copy editor and then journalist for various Carioca newspapers as well as for the student university newspaper, in which she published some stories. Lispector graduated, but never practiced law. During a ten-month period beginning in 1942 she feverishly wrote her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart, which was published in 1943, the year she married one of her fellow law classmates, Maury Gurgel Valente, who became a Brazilian diplomat in 1944. In that year the couple left Rio for a six-month assignment in the north of Brazil, followed by a series of international posts that took them away from Brazil between 1944 and 1959, except for short annual visits.

Awarded the prestigious Graça Aranha national prize for fiction in 1944, Lispector’s first novel, seemingly autobiographical in part, was heralded by the renowned Brazilian critic Antonio Candido as “an impressive attempt at taking our awkward language style to realms barely explored, forcing it to adapt to a way of thinking filled with mystery.” That way of thinking was later labeled by the critic Olga de Sá as “ontological questioning,” already evident in the identity quest of her first female protagonist, Joana, whose character and search merge with the narrative process itself, thereby questioning the relationship between reality and fiction/language or being and consciousness, as exemplified by these words of the narrator, GH: “Living isn’t courage, knowing that you’re living, that’s courage.”

Life Abroad and Later Writings
During her period abroad in Italy, Switzerland, and England, with trips to France and Spain, Lispector fulfilled the duties of a diplomat’s wife but was unhappy in this role; as one of her friends stated at the time of her death: “She was anti-diplomatic. This was funny because she married a diplomat…No false refinement. She didn’t put on airs. She was incapable of being conventional.” Her first son, Pedro, was born in Berne in 1948 and her second son, Paulo, in 1953 in Washington, D.C., where the family resided from 1952 to 1959. As a result of her burgeoning career, problems in the marriage led Lispector to return to Rio with her two sons in 1959 and this move resulted in the couple’s legal separation in 1968. While in Europe Lispector wrote and published two novels, The Candelabrum (1946) and The Besieged City (1949), which deal respectively with a young woman’s “self-enlightenment” and a woman’s consciousness and drive. These novels display neither overt Jewish references nor her reaction to the Holocaust. While one wonders what it must have been like to be a Jewish woman living in Europe at the end of World War II, only The Besieged City contains an allegorically disguised narrative about a strongly chauvinistic climate that could evoke the Nazi terror.

Later, during her stay in Washington, Lispector worked on her famous short story collection Family Ties, which portrayed the social and familial ties that often bind and stifle women, especially middle-class wives and mothers. She also completed many drafts of her long existential novel, The Apple in the Dark. Both of these works, published respectively in 1960 and 1961, won prestigious literary awards. The 1960s and 1970s were productive periods for Lispector—six novels, seven collections of stories, and four children’s books. Obliged by economic need to work regularly as a journalist, she wrote a weekly column for the national daily newspaper, O Jornal do Brasil, between August 1967 and December 1973. Known as crônicas (chronicles), these anecdotal pieces sometimes included bits and pieces of her novels and stories. These “Saturday conversations,” as she called them, were later compiled into a 781-page volume, Discovering the World, published in 1984 and, in an abridged version, Selected Crônicas, in 1996. Except for a number of short tourist trips and a return visit to her childhood city in the Northeast a year before she died, Lispector made Rio de Janeiro her home until her death of cancer on December 9, 1977.

Literary Legacy
Lispector’s discursive universe stems in part from her Jewish sensibility, which subtly interweaves metaphors and motifs reflective of Jewish biblical and diasporic experiences. In The Passion According to GH, Lispector has her narrator suffer cultural and ontological otherness by drawing upon the desert as a figurative space of displacement to evoke the non-religious struggle for redemption or spiritual passion. The following passage from this novel demonstrates the struggle of metaphorically marching through the desert and ironically without a star to guide her until she finds the strongbox: “And in the strongbox, the sparkle of glory, the hidden secret. (…) I hadn’t found a human answer to the enigma. But much more, oh much more: I had found the enigma itself.” GH thus embarks on a “voyage within” that will dismantle her single/same constructed, ego-centered identity of limited subjectivity and lead her to the deep structural and expansive levels of life. Moreover, GH’s eating of an “impure” cockroach suggests that Lispector is challenging Talmudic taboos and in part is also adapting Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, since the protagonist undergoes a significant “change” of awareness, albeit momentary. Here Lispector is “literally eating” Kafka to dramatize the metamorphosis of perspective on human existence via writing.

Her less lyrical but incisive story collection, The Stations of the Body, shocked critics and many readers due to its overtly sexual and erotic references to the body, which directly question the duties of motherhood and the sexual repression of all women, both young and old. Lispector’s last book, The Hour of the Star, a novella published one month before her death, introduced the public to a “new” side, dealing with sociological themes of economic and social oppression via a poor, ill-educated and unheroic female character, Macabéa, named after the heroic Maccabees. By inversion, Lispector creates a complex narrative voice that is ironically male but sympathetically female to dramatize not only patriarchal and socio-economic oppression, but also how the unheroic resistance of Macabéa against all odds, even death, represents the “spark” of life that is so frequently ignored and violated by the privileged of the world. It is this spark that characterizes Clarice Lispector as an author and woman of spirit.

Clarice Lispector (born Chaya Pinkhasivna Lispector (Ukrainian: Хая Пінкасівна Ліспектор; Yiddish: חיה פּינקאַסיװנאַ ליספּעקטאָר) December 10, 1920 – December 9, 1977) was a Ukrainian-born Brazilian novelist and short story writer. Her innovative, idiosyncratic works explore a variety of narrative styles with themes of intimacy and introspection, and have subsequently been internationally acclaimed. Born to a Jewish family in Podolia in Western Ukraine, as an infant she moved to Brazil with her family, amidst the disasters engulfing her native land following the First World War.

She grew up in Recife, the capital of the northeastern state of Pernambuco, where her mother died when she was nine. The family moved to Rio de Janeiro when she was in her teens. While in law school in Rio, she began publishing her first journalistic work and short stories, catapulting to fame at the age of 23 with the publication of her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart (Perto do Coração Selvagem), written as an interior monologue in a style and language that was considered revolutionary in Brazil.

She left Brazil in 1944 following her marriage to a Brazilian diplomat, and spent the next decade and a half in Europe and the United States. After returning to Rio de Janeiro in 1959, she published the stories of Family Ties (Laços de Família) and the novel The Passion According to G.H. (A Paixão Segundo G.H.). Injured in an accident in 1966, she spent the last decade of her life in frequent pain, steadily writing and publishing novels and stories, including Água Viva, until her premature death in 1977.

She has been the subject of numerous books, and references to her and her work are common in Brazilian literature and music. Several of her works have been turned into films. In 2009, the American writer Benjamin Moser published Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector. Since that publication, her works have been the object of an extensive project of retranslation, published by New Directions Publishing and Penguin Modern Classics, the first Brazilian to enter that prestigious series. Moser, who is also the editor of her anthology The Complete Stories (2015), describes Lispector as the most important Jewish writer in the world since Kafka.[1]

Early life, emigration and Recife
Clarice Lispector was born Chaya Lispector in Chechelnyk, Podolia, a shtetl in what is today Ukraine. She was the youngest of three daughters of Pinkhas Lispector and Mania Krimgold Lispector. Her family suffered terribly in the pogroms during the Russian Civil War that followed the dissolution of the Russian Empire, circumstances later dramatized in her older sister Elisa Lispector's autobiographical novel No exílio (In Exile, 1948). They eventually managed to flee to Romania, from where they emigrated to Brazil, where her mother Mania had relatives. They sailed from Hamburg and arrived in Brazil in the early months of 1922, when Chaya (Clarice) was little more than one year old.

The Lispectors changed their names upon arrival. Pinkhas became Pedro; Mania became Marieta; Leah became Elisa, and Chaya became Clarice. Only the middle daughter, Tania (April 19, 1915 – November 15, 2007), kept her name. They first settled in the northeastern city of Maceió, Alagoas. After three years, during which Marieta's health deteriorated rapidly, they moved to the city of Recife, Pernambuco, settling in the neighbourhood of Boa Vista, where they lived at number 367 in the Praça Maciel Pinheiro and later in the Rua da Imperatriz.[2]

In Recife, where her father continued to struggle economically, her mother – who was paralysed (although some speculate she had been raped in the Ukraine pogroms,[2] there is no confirmation on this by relatives and close friends [3]) – finally died on September 21, 1930, aged 42, when Clarice was nine. Clarice attended the Colégio Hebreo-Idisch-Brasileiro, which taught Hebrew and Yiddish in addition to the usual subjects. In 1932, she gained admission to the Ginásio Pernambucano, then the most prestigious secondary school in the state. A year later, strongly influenced by Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf, she "consciously claimed the desire to write".[4]

In 1935, Pedro Lispector decided to move with his daughters to the then-capital, Rio de Janeiro, where he hoped to find more economic opportunity and also to find Jewish husbands for his daughters.[2] The family lived in the neighborhood of São Cristóvão, north of downtown Rio, before moving to Tijuca. In 1937, she entered the Law School of the University of Brazil, then one of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the country. Her first known story, "Triunfo", was published in the magazine Pan on May 25, 1940.[5] Soon afterwards, on August 26, 1940, as a result of a botched gallbladder operation, her beloved father died, aged 55.

While still in law school, Clarice began working as a journalist, first at the official government press service the Agência Nacional and then at the important newspaper A Noite. Lispector would come into contact with the younger generation of Brazilian writers, including Lúcio Cardoso, with whom she fell in love. Cardoso was gay, however, and she soon began seeing a law school colleague named Maury Gurgel Valente, who had entered the Brazilian Foreign Service, known as Itamaraty. In order to marry a diplomat, she had to be naturalized, which she did as soon as she came of age. On January 12, 1943, she was granted Brazilian citizenship. Eleven days later she married Gurgel. In December 1943, she published her first novel, Perto do coração selvagem (Near to the Wild Heart). On July 29, 1944, Clarice left Brazil for the first time since she had arrived as a child, destined for Naples, where Maury was posted to the Brazilian Consulate.[10] Naples was the staging post for the Brazilian troops of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force whose soldiers were fighting on the Allied side against the Nazis. She worked at the military hospital in Naples taking care of wounded Brazilian troops[11] In Rome, she met the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, who translated parts of Near to the Wild Heart, and had her portrait painted by Giorgio de Chirico. In Naples she completed her second novel, O Lustre (The Chandelier, 1946), which like the first focused on the interior life of a girl, this time one named Virgínia. This longer and more difficult book also met with an enthusiastic critical reception, though its impact was less sensational than Near to the Wild Heart. "Possessed of an enormous talent and a rare personality, she will have to suffer, fatally, the disadvantages of both, since she so amply enjoys their benefits", wrote Gilda de Melo e Sousa [pt].[12] After a short visit to Brazil in 1946, Clarice and Maury returned to Europe in April 1946, where Maury was posted to the embassy in Bern, Switzerland. This was a time of considerable boredom and frustration for Lispector, who was often depressed. "This Switzerland," she wrote her sister Tania, "is a cemetery of sensations."[13] Her son Pedro Gurgel Valente was born in Bern on September 10, 1948, and in the city she wrote her third novel, A cidade sitiada (The Besieged City, 1946).

In Switzerland, in Bern, I lived on the Gerechtigkeitsgasse, that is, Justice Street. In front of my house, in the street, was the colored statue, holding the scales. Around, crushed kings begging perhaps for a pardon. In the winter, the little lake in the middle of which the statue stood, in the winter the freezing water, sometimes brittle with a thin layer of ice. In the spring red geraniums … And the still-medieval street: I lived in the old part of the city. What saved me from the monotony of Bern was living in the Middle Ages, it was waiting for the snow to pass and for the red geraniums to be reflected once again in the water, it was having a son born there, it was writing one of my least liked books, The Besieged City, which, however, people come to like when they read it a second time; my gratitude to that book is enormous: the effort of writing it kept me busy, saved me from the appalling silence of Bern, and when I finished the last chapter I went to the hospital to give birth to the boy.[14]

The book Lispector wrote in Bern, The Besieged City, tells the story of Lucrécia Neves, and the growth of her town, São Geraldo, from a little settlement to a large city. The book, which is full of metaphors of vision and seeing, met with a tepid reception and was "perhaps the least loved of Clarice Lispector's novels", according to a close friend of Lispector's.[15] Sérgio Milliet concluded that "the author succumbs beneath the weight of her own richness."[16] And the Portuguese critic João Gaspar Simões wrote: "Its hermeticism has the texture of the hermeticism of dreams. May someone find the key."[17]

After leaving Switzerland in 1949 and spending almost a year in Rio, Clarice and Maury Gurgel Valente traveled to Torquay, Devon, where Maury was a delegate to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). They remained in England from September 1950 until March 1951. Lispector liked England, though she suffered a miscarriage on a visit to London.[18]

In 1952, back in Rio, where the family would stay about a year, Lispector published a short volume of six stories called Alguns contos (Some Stories) in a small edition sponsored by the Ministry of Education and Health. These stories formed the core of the later Laços de família (Family Ties), 1961. She also worked under the pseudonym Teresa Quadros as a women's columnist at the short-lived newspaper Comício.

In September 1952, the family moved to Washington, D.C., where they would live until June 1959. They bought a house at 4421 Ridge Street in the suburb of Chevy Chase, Maryland. On February 10, 1953, her second son Paulo was born. She grew close to the Brazilian writer Érico Veríssimo, then working for the Organization of American States, and his wife Mafalda, as well as to the wife of the ambassador, Alzira Vargas [pt], daughter of the former Brazilian dictator Getúlio Vargas. She also began publishing her stories in the new magazine Senhor, back in Rio. But she was increasingly discontented with the diplomatic milieu. "I hated it, but I did what I had to […] I gave dinner parties, I did everything you're supposed to do, but with a disgust…"[19] She increasingly missed her sisters and Brazil, and in June 1959, she left her husband and returned with her sons to Rio de Janeiro, where she would spend the rest of her life. Shortly after The Hour of the Star was published, Lispector was admitted to the hospital. She had inoperable ovarian cancer, though she was not told the diagnosis. She died on the eve of her 57th birthday and was buried on December 11, 1977, at the Jewish Cemetery of Caju, Rio de Janeiro.[30]