Benjamin Moser

 

Featured Author

Benjamin Moser is the New Books columnist of Harper’s Magazine. He was born in Houston in 1976 and currently lives in the Netherlands. He is a contributor to the The New York Review of Books, and he has written for Condé Nast Traveler and Newsweek, as well as many other publications.

Why this World

A Biography of Clarice Lispector
By Benjamin Moser

“A biography worthy of its great subject ... One of the twentieth century’s most mysterious writers is finally revealed in all her vibrant colors.”
Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Prize in Literature 2006

Introduction
The Sphinx

Introduction
The Sphinx

In 1946, the young Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector was returning from Rio de Janeiro to Italy, where her husband was vice-consul in Naples. She had traveled home as a diplomatic courier, carrying dispatches to the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Relations; but with the usual routes between Europe and South America disrupted by the war, her journey to rejoin her husband followed an unconventional itinerary. From Rio she flew to Natal, on the northeastern tip of Brazil; then onward to the British base at Ascension Island, in the South Atlantic; to the American air station in Liberia; to the French bases in Rabat and Casablanca; and
then via Cairo and Athens to Rome.
Before each leg of the trip, she had a few hours, or days, to look around. In Cairo, the Brazilian consul and his wife invited her to a cabaret, where they were amazed to see the exotic belly dance performed to the familiar strains of a hit of Rio’s 1937 Carnival, Carmen Miranda’s “I Want Mommy.”
Egypt itself failed to impress her, she wrote a friend back in Rio de Janeiro. “I saw the pyramids, the Sphinx—a Mohammedan read my palm in the ‘desert sands’ and said I had a pure heart … Speaking of sphinxes, pyramids, piasters, it’s all in horribly bad taste. It’s almost immodest to live in Cairo. The problem is trying to feel anything that hasn’t been accounted for by a guide.”
Clarice Lispector never returned to Egypt. But many years later she recalled her brief sightseeing tour, when, in the ‘desert sands,’ she stared down no one less than the Sphinx herself.
“I did not decipher her,” wrote the proud, beautiful Clarice. “But neither did she decipher me.”

*

By the time she died in 1977, Clarice Lispector was one of the mythical figures of Brazil, the Sphinx of Rio de Janeiro, a woman who had fascinated her countrymen virtually from adolescence. “The sight of her was a shock,” the poet Ferreira Gullar remembered of their first meeting. “Her green almond eyes, her high cheekbones, she looked like a she-wolf, a fascinating wolf … I thought that if I saw her again I would fall hopelessly in love with her.” “There were men who couldn’t forget me for ten years,” she admitted. “There was an American poet who threatened to commit suicide because I wasn’t interested.” The translator Gregory Rabassa recalled being “flabbergasted to meet that rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf.”
In Brazil today, her arresting face adorns postage stamps. Her name lends class to luxury condominiums. Her works, often dismissed during her lifetime as hermetic or incomprehensible, are sold in vending machines in subway stations. The internet is alight with hundreds of thousands of her fans, and a month rarely goes by without the appearance of a book examining one side or another of her life and work. Her first name is enough to identify her to any educated Brazilian, who, a Spanish publisher noticed, “all knew her, had been to her house, and have some anecdote to tell about her, as the Argentines do with Borges. Or at the very least they went to her funeral.”
The French writer Hélène Cixous declared that Clarice Lispector was what Kafka would have been, had he been a woman, or “if Rilke had been a Jewish Brazilian born in the Ukraine. If Rimbaud had been a mother, if he had reached the age of fifty. If Heidegger could have ceased being German ...” The attempts to describe this indescribable woman often go on in this vein, grasping at superlatives, though those who knew her, either in person or from her books, also insist that the most striking aspect of her personality, her aura of mystery, evades description. “Clarice,” the poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade wrote when she died, “came from one
mystery/and departed for another.”
Her undecipherable air fascinated and disquieted all who encountered her. After her death, a friend wrote that “Clarice was a foreigner on earth, going through the world as if she’d arrived in the dead of night in an unknown city amidst a general transport strike.”

*

“Maybe her closest friends and the friends of those friends know something about her life,” an interviewer wrote in 1961. “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.’” She gave very little away. A decade later, another frustrated journalist summed up her responses to an interview: “I don’t know, I’m not familiar with it, I’ve never heard of it, I’m not aware, That’s not my area, It’s hard to explain, I don’t know, I don’t consider, I’ve never heard, I’m not familiar with, There isn’t, I don’t think.” The year before her death, a reporter who had come all the way from Argentina tried to draw her out. “They say you’re evasive, difficult, that you don’t talk. It doesn’t seem that way to me.” Clarice answered: “Obviously they were right.”
After extracting monosyllabic replies, the reporter filled the silence with a story about another writer.

But she said nothing. I don’t even know if she looked at me. She stood up and said:
“I might go to Buenos Aires this winter. Don’t forget to take the book I gave you. There you’ll find material for your article.”
Very tall, with auburn hair and skin, I remember her wearing a long brown silk dress. But I could be wrong. As we were leaving I paused in front of an oil portrait of her face.
“De Chirico,” she said before I could ask. And then, at the elevator: “Sorry, I don’t like to talk.”

In this void of information, a whole mythology sprung up. Reading accounts of her at different points in her life, one can hardly believe they concern the same person. The points of disagreement were not trivial. “Clarice Lispector” was once thought to be a pseudonym; and her original name was not known until after her death. Where exactly she was born and how old she was were also unclear. Her nationality was questioned and the identity of her native language was obscure. One authority will testify that she was right-wing and another will hint that she was a Communist. One will insist that she was a pious Catholic, though she was actually a Jew. Rumor will sometimes have it that she was a lesbian—though at one point rumor also had it that she was, in fact, a man.
What makes this tangle of contradictions so odd is that Clarice Lispector is not a hazy figure known from shreds of antique papyrus. She has been dead hardly thirty years. Many people survive who knew her well. She was prominent virtually from adolescence; her life was extensively documented in the press; and she left behind an extensive archive of correspondence. Still, few great modern artists are quite as fundamentally unfamiliar. How can a person who lived in a large Western city in the middle of the twentieth century, who gave interviews, lived in high-rise apartments, and traveled by air, remain so enigmatic?
She herself once wrote: “I am so mysterious that I don’t even understand myself.”