“I Shall Answer Every Time Someone Says: Me”
Chronology of Clarice Lispector – by Bruno Cosentino
1920
Clarice is born, named Haia, on December 10, in Chechelnyk , a small village in Ukraine. Her birth name is of Hebrew origin and means “life,” “animal.” She is the third daughter of Pinkouss and Mania Lispector, who already had two girls: Leia, the eldest, and Tania. The birth occurs during the family’s emigration trip to Brazil. The parents, Jewish fugitives, had left Ukraine during the violent persecution of their people as a result of the political instability that had begun in the region after the Russian Revolution of 1917.
1922
The Lispector family arrives in Maceió in March. In Brazil, they adopt new names: Pinkouss comes to be called Pedro; Mania, Marieta; Leia, Elisa; and Tania, whose name had a correspondent in Portuguese, remains the same. The name Clarice was chosen because it sounded similar to Haia.
1925
She moves with her family to Recife. They live in a two-story house at Maciel Pinheiro Square, in the Boa Vista neighborhood, inhabited by the Jewish community, where Clarice’s relatives on her mother’s side already resided.
1930
Her mother dies on September 21, aged 41. She suffered from a degenerative disease; over the years, she had experienced a progressive loss of body movement and, at the end of her life, she moved around in a wheelchair.
“I was prepared to be given birth in such a beautiful way. My mother was already sick, and due to a widely held superstition, it was believed that having a child cured a woman of a disease. So I was deliberately created: with love and hope. Only I did not cure my mother. And I feel this burden of guilt until today: they made me for a certain mission and I failed. As if they counted on me in the trenches of a war and I had deserted. I know that my parents forgave me for having been born in vain and betrayed their great hopes. But I, I do not forgive myself. I would have simply liked for a miracle to have been performed: my being born and curing my mother. So, yes: I would have belonged to my father and my mother. I could not even confide to anyone this kind of loneliness from not belonging because, as a deserter, I had the secret of my escape that out of shame could not be known.”
[“Pertencer” (To Belong), Todas as crônicas, pp. 116-117][1]
1932
She starts her first year of high school at the traditional Ginásio Pernambucano. It is at this time, still a child, that she takes a liking to writing: she passionately reads Reinações de Narizinho [The Shenanigans of Little Miss Snub-Nose], by Monteiro Lobato, and sends short stories (never published) to the “O ‘Diário’ das Crianças” [The Children’s Daily] section of the Diário de Pernambuco newspaper.
1935
She moves with her family to Rio de Janeiro; she was 14 years old.
1939
She begins higher education at the National Law School, in Rio de Janeiro.
1940
She works as an editor and reporter for the National News Agency. With fellow journalists and writers, she frequents Recreio bar, in the Cinelândia neighborhood, a meeting point for authors such as Vinicius de Moraes, Cornélio Penna, and Rachel de Queiroz. At that time she met Lúcio Cardoso, with whom she fell in love, which was unrequited. On the occasion of his death, in 1968, Clarice writes about her friend:
“Lúcio and I would always admit to each other: he with his mysterious and secret life, me with what he called an ‘impassioned life.’ In some many things we were so fantastic that, if it were not for the impossibility, who knows, we would have gotten married.”
[“Lúcio Cardoso”, Todas as crônicas, p. 190][2]
She publishes her first short story, “Triumph,” in the weekly Pan. The story concerns a recurring theme in her fiction: romantic relationships described from a feminine perspective and from the position occupied by women in society.
Her father dies, on August 26, at the age of 55, as a result of an unsuccessful gallbladder surgery. Pedro Lispector had a vocation for mathematics and, according to Clarice, was given to “spiritual things,” but as an immigrant, he had a difficult life. He took care of his sick wife until his death and raised three teenage daughters on his own. A few years after his death, in a letter to her friend Fernando Sabino, the youngest daughter remembers her father:
“Once he said: if I wrote, I would write a book about a man who saw that he had gotten lost. I cannot think of this without feeling an unbearable physical pain.”
[Cartas perto do coração [Letters Near to the Heart]][3]
1943
She marries her college classmate Maury Gurgel Valente, her boyfriend since the previous year, in a civil ceremony, on January 23rd.
She publishes Near to the Wild Heart, her first book, for which she received the Graça Aranha Award. The novel was an immediate success with critics. According to Antonio Candido, who at the time wrote for the Folha da Manhã, the book is “a performance of the greatest quality. The author — who seems to be a young novice — seriously explored the problem of style and expression. Especially the latter.”[4]
1944
She moves to Belém with her husband, then third-class consul. They remain there for six months – from January to July.
On July 19, they depart for Naples, where Maury will serve as vice-consul. The trip takes approximately one month and, departing from Rio de Janeiro, includes passages through Natal, Lake Piso, Bolama, Dakar, Lisbon, Casablanca, Algiers, and Taranto. Part of the journey was documented by Clarice in her “Caderno de bordo” [Logbook], in which one can also find a portrait of her done in pencil by the poet Ribeiro Couto, who had received her in Portugal.
1945
She poses for Giorgio de Chirico in Rome. It is the first in a series of portraits of her done by painters. From the studio, located at the Piazza di Spagna, she hears from a traveling newsboy about the end of the war:
“I shouted, the painter stopped, one noted the strange lack of joy and continued.”
[Carta às irmãs (Letter to her sisters), Rome, May 1945, in Correspondências (Correspondences), p. 72]
She publishes her second book, the novel The Chandelier.
1946
In April, she moves to Bern, Switzerland, where she will remain with Maury for three years. She finds the city boring:
“It’s a shame I don’t have the patience to like such a calm life as that of Bern. It’s a farm. […] It makes you want to be a dairy cow and eat strands of grass all afternoon until nighttime. The fact is that one is not such a cow, and one keeps looking off into the distance as if the ship that could save the shipwrecked could come.
[Carta a Elisa Lispector e Tania Kaufmann (A Letter to Elisa Lispector and Tania Kaufmann), May 5, 1946, in Correspondências (Correspondences) / Clarice Lispector][5]
1947
Passing through Paris, where she had gone to celebrate the New Year with Maury and the couple Samuel and Bluma Wainer, she meets the Brazilian sculptor Alfredo Ceschiatti, then a scholarship student in the French city. He does a portrait of her.
1948
Her first son Pedro is born in Bern, Switzerland.
1949
She publishes her third novel, The Besieged City, which she had written during her years of residence in Bern.
1950
She moves to Torquay, England, in September, accompanying her husband. They remain in the city for six months. She writes short stories and takes the first notes for a new novel, The Apple in the Dark (then called A veia no pulso, [The Vein in the Wrist]).
1952
She publishes the book Alguns contos [Some Short Stories], in the collection Os Cadernos de Cultura” [The Culture Notebooks], edited by the Ministry of Education and Health. The six stories – “Mystery in São Cristóvão,” “Family Ties,” “Beginnings of a Fortune,” “Love,” “A Chicken,” “The Dinner” – would be included, in addition to others, in the future book Family Ties.
She moves to Washington D.C., in the United States, where she would remain for seven years, with brief returns to Rio, on vacation. She resumes the notes for The Apple in the Dark, which she started in Torquay.
1953
Her second child, Paulo, is born in Washington D.C., United States, on February 10th.
1959
She starts publishing short stories in Senhor magazine: “The Smallest Woman in the World,” “Happy Birthday,” “Mineirinho,” and “A Chicken” are a few of them. The collaboration will continue until 1964. Until then, the stories were awaiting publication by the editor Simeão Leal.
“For four years, the original versions of the short stories have been in your hands, waiting to be published. […] I received Cr$2000 or Cr$3000 in advance payment. With the delay in publication, and with the lack of a reply to my letters, I considered myself free of any obligations to you. […] The proposal remains the same: I am ready to return the Cr$2000 or Cr$3000, in exchange for the right to use my originals. I need money, and wish to sell the short stories separately, to newspapers or magazines.”
[Carta a José Simeão Leal (A Letter to José Simeão Leal), March 10, 1959, in Correspondências (Correspondences)][6]
She separates from her husband and returns to Brazil with her two children.
1960
After years of negotiation, she finally publishes the book of short stories Family Ties. The cover and illustrations are by the set designer Cyro del Nero. According to the critic Carlos Mendes de Sousa, Clarice would have asked the artist “for the idea of the images not to be so close to the text, for them not to intervene in their secrecy.”[7] Before the final layout, after a meeting between the two, some illustrations would have been changed at the writer’s suggestion. The book launch event in São Paulo was accompanied by an exhibition of the artist’s work.
1961
She publishes her fourth novel, The Apple in the Dark.
1964
She publishes the novel The Passion According to G.H., considered by critics to be her masterpiece.
She publishes the volume of short stories The Foreign Legion (with it, according to José Miguel Wisnik, a trilogy is concluded: the centrality of the father figure and the family relationships of Family Ties lose ground in the book The Foreign Legion until reaching the solitary experience of the woman in touch with the extreme of matter – the “white mass” of the cockroach – in The Passion According to G.H.).
1965
She moves into Rua Gustavo Sampaio, 88, in the Leme neighborhood, where she would live until the end of her life.
1966
She falls asleep with a lit cigarette, causing a fire in her home. She suffers severe burns on her body and spends two months hospitalized at the Pio XII Clinic, where she leaves with sequelae, mainly on her right hand.
1967
She publishes her first children’s book, The Mystery of the Thinking Rabbit, which she wrote for her son, Paulo, when they lived in Washington D.C., in the United States.
At the invitation of Alberto Dines, she begins writing chronicles for the Jornal do Brasil. At first, she feels insecure about the genre, which she had never practiced. But over the course of seven years of collaboration, she gets used to her new role and achieves popularity with the general public.
“I wrote nine books that made many people love me from a distance. But being a chronicler has a mystery that I don’t understand: it’s that chroniclers, at least those from Rio, are much loved. And writing the kind of chronicle on Saturdays has brought me even more love. I feel so close to whoever reads me.”
[“Adeus, vou-me embora!” (Farewell, I’m Leaving), Todas as crônicas, p. 98][8]
1968
She starts to collaborate with Manchete magazine, in the “Diálogos possíveis com Clarice Lispector” [Possible Dialogues with Clarice Lispector] section, in which she interviewed personalities from the political, sports, and art world. In the conversations, Clarice gets personal, without failing to expound to her interlocutors singular thoughts in relation to art and life, thus painting an unexpected self-portrait.
She participates in the March of the One Hundred Thousand along with artist and intellectual friends.
She releases her second children’s book, The Woman Who Killed the Fish, with illustrations by her painter friend Carlos Scliar.
1969
She publishes the novel An Apprenticeship or The Book of Delights, which she claims to have written in nine days.
1971
She releases Covert Joy, a collection of texts previously published in the press, including the set in which she recalls her childhood in Recife.
1972
She poses for her painter friend Carlos Scliar.
“I spent an unforgettable weekend in Cabo Frio, hosted by Scliar who painted two portraits of me. […] I told him about when I posed for De Chirico. He said that it is apparently easy to paint me: just put protruding cheeks, slightly slanted eyes, and full lips: I am caricaturable. But my expression is difficult to capture. Scliar retorted: every painting is difficult.”
[“Scliar em Cabo Frio” (Scliar in Cabo Frio), Jornal do Brasil, October 28, 1972][9]
1973
She publishes the book Água viva (also translated as The Stream of Life), after three years of preparation. According to the critic José Américo Motta Pessanha, in a letter to the author, it defies categorization, for it seems to collect notes, thoughts, autobiographical excerpts, diary entries, all at the same time. For Clarice, the book is neither a novella nor a novel; she just classifies it as “fiction.”
“My ambition was this almost impossible thing: to capture the passing instant. To do so, I almost never referred to the past or to the future. It had to be a book, so to speak, of the ever present moment.”
[Jornal do Commercio, September 9, 1973][10]
She publishes The Imitation of the Rose, collecting previously edited short stories.
1974
She is portrayed by Dimitri Ismailovitch, an artist who was also born in Ukraine and emigrated to Brazil in 1927, after having passed through countries in Europe and through the United States.
She publishes the book of short stories Where Were You at Night.
She gives an interview to the newspaper Pasquim, at her apartment, in the Leme neighborhood. Ziraldo, who was among the interviewers, observing on the living room wall portraits of Clarice done by famous painters, asks her what it had been like to pose for Di Cavalcanti. She says that there were three attempts, but without success.
“He began to do me with two beautiful green wings. It seems to me that his wife had a fit of rage and ripped the painting.”
[An interview given to Pasquim, June 3-9, 1974][11]
She publishes The Via Crucis of the Body, commissioned by the editor Álvaro Pacheco, who asked her to write stories about sex.
“Someone read my short stories and said that they were not literature, they were trash. I agree. But there is a time for everything. There is also a time for trash. This book is a little sad because I discovered, like a silly child, that this world is dog-eat-dog.”
[“Explicação” (Explanation), Todos os contos, p. 528][12]
She publishes her third children’s novel, Laura’s Intimate Life.
1975
She travels to Colombia, accompanied by Olga Borelli, as a guest at the 1st World Congress of Sorcery, held in Bogotá.
As a hobby, she dedicates herself more assiduously to painting, an activity that will continue in the following year. In total, she would produce 18 paintings in mixed media, 15 in oil on wood and one on canvas. Her almost always abstract paintings seek, however, the materiality of the support, often taking advantage of the wood’s own designs.
“What ‘unwinds’ me, as incredible as it seems, is painting, and not being a painter in any way, and without learning any technique. I paint so badly that it pleases, and I do not show my, quote, “paintings” to anyone. It is relaxing and at the same time exciting to tinker with colors and forms, without any commitment. It is the purest thing that I do.”
[“Literatura de vanguarda no Brasil” (Vanguard Literature in Brazil), Outros escritos, p. 112][13]
She publishes Vision of Splendor, which collects chronicles, and De corpo inteiro [Whole Body], which compiles some of the interviews given by Clarice Lispector.
1976
She receives the Brasília Literature Award, for her lifetime achievement, offered by the Federal District Cultural Foundation in Brasília.
On the occasion of a lecture at the Pernambuco State Bank auditorium, she visited Recife and stayed at the Hotel São Domingos, located at Maciel Pinheiro Square, the same square where she spent her childhood. She revisits the mansion where she lived with her parents, in addition to meeting her cousins and her Aunt Mina.
1977
She gives her last interview, to Júlio Lerner, for Panorama Especial on TV Cultura. The program is her only video recording and would only be broadcast posthumously.
She publishes the novella The Hour of the Star.
“It is the story of a girl who was so poor that she only ate hot dogs. The story is not only that. It is the story of a trampled innocence, an anonymous misery.”
[An interview with Júlio Lerner, tv Cultura][14]
She takes notes for a new novel, entitled A Breath of Life, published posthumously, and edited by her secretary Olga Borelli.
She undergoes surgery, in which an irreversible ovarian cancer is detected. Her friends and family do not reveal the truth about her terminal situation and keep her company at the hospital.
She dies on December 9, the day before her birthday, at 10:30 am, a Friday. In observance of the Sabbath, she cannot be buried on the 10th (Saturday). She is buried on Sunday, the 11th, at the Israeli Communal Cemetery. She was 56 years old.
[1] The original quote in Portuguese reads: “Fui preparada para ser dada à luz de um modo tão bonito. Minha mãe já estava doente, e, por uma superstição bastante espalhada, acreditava-se que ter um filho curava uma mulher de uma doença. Então fui deliberadamente criada: com amor e esperança. Só que não curei minha mãe. E sinto até hoje essa carga de culpa: fizeram-me para uma missão determinada e eu falhei. Como se contassem comigo nas trincheiras de uma guerra e eu tivesse desertado. Sei que meus pais me perdoaram eu ter nascido em vão e tê-los traído na grande esperança. Mas eu, eu não me perdoo. Quereria que simplesmente se tivesse feito um milagre: eu nascer e curar minha mãe. Então, sim: eu teria pertencido a meu pai e a minha mãe. Eu nem podia confiar a alguém essa espécie de solidão de não pertencer porque, como desertor, eu tinha o segredo da fuga que por vergonha não podia ser conhecido.”
[2] The original quote in Portuguese reads: “Lúcio e eu sempre nos admitimos: ele com sua vida misteriosa e secreta, eu com o que ele chamava de ‘vida apaixonante’. Em tantas coisas éramos tão fantásticos que, se não houvesse a impossibilidade, quem sabe teríamos nos casado.”
[3] The original quote in Portuguese reads: “Uma vez ele disse: se eu escrevesse, escreveria um livro sobre um homem que viu que se tinha perdido. Não posso pensar nisso sem que sinta uma dor física insuportável.”
[4] The original quote in Portuguese reads: “É uma performance da melhor qualidade. A autora – ao que parece uma jovem estreante – colocou seriamente o problema do estilo e da expressão. Sobretudo desta.”
[5] The original quote in Portuguese reads: “É uma pena eu não ter paciência de gostar de uma vida tão tranquila como a de Berna. É uma fazenda. […] Dá vontade de ser uma vaca leiteira e comer durante uma tarde inteira até vir a noite um fiapo de capim. O fato é que não se é tal vaca, e fica-se olhando para longe como se pudesse vir o navio que salva os náufragos.”
[6] The original quote in Portuguese reads: “Há quatro anos os originais dos contos estão em suas mãos para serem publicados. […] Recebi dois ou três mil cruzeiros em pagamento prévio. Com a demora de publicação, e com a falta de resposta às minhas cartas, considerei-me desobrigada de meu acordo com Você. […] A proposta continua a mesma: estou pronta a devolver os dois ou três mil cruzeiros, em troca do direito de dispor de meus originais. Estou precisando de dinheiro, e quero vender os contos separadamente, a jornais e revistas.”
[7] The original quote in Portuguese reads: “Não estar com a ideia das imagens tão rentes ao texto, que elas não interviessem no segredo dos mesmos”
[8] The original quote in Portuguese reads: “Escrevi nove livros que fizeram muitas pessoas me amar de longe. Mas ser cronista tem um mistério que não entendo: é que os cronistas, pelo menos os do Rio, são muito amados. E escrever a espécie de crônica aos sábados tem me trazido mais amor ainda. Sinto-me tão perto de quem me lê.”
[9] The original quote in Portuguese reads: “Passei um fim de semana inesquecível em Cabo Frio, hospedada por Scliar que pintou dois retratos meus. […] Contei-lhe de quando posei para De Chirico. Ele disse que aparentemente é fácil me pintar: basta pôr maçãs salientes, olhos um pouco oblíquos e lábios cheios: sou caricaturável. Mas a expressão é difícil de pegar. Scliar retrucou: todo quadro é difícil.”
[10] The original quote in Portuguese reads: “Minha ambição era essa coisa quase impossível: captar o instante que passa. Para isso, quase nunca me referi ao passado ou ao futuro. Tinha que ser um livro, por assim dizer, do momento sempre atual.”
[11] The original quote in Portuguese reads: “Ele começou a me fazer com duas asas verdes, lindas. Me parece que a mulher dele teve uma crise de cólera e rasgou o quadro.”
[12] The original quote in Portuguese reads: “Uma pessoa leu meus contos e disse que aquilo não era literatura, era lixo. Concordo. Mas há hora para tudo. Há também a hora do lixo. Este livro é um pouco triste porque eu descobri, como criança boba, que este é um mundo cão.”
[13] The original quote in Portuguese reads: “O que me ‘descontrai’, por incrível que pareça, é pintar, e não ser pintora de forma alguma, e sem aprender nenhuma técnica. Pinto tão mal que dá gosto e não mostro meus, entre aspas, ‘quadros’ a ninguém. É relaxante e ao mesmo tempo excitante mexer com cores e formas, sem compromisso com coisa alguma. É a coisa mais pura que faço.”
[14] The original quote in Portuguese reads: “É a história de uma moça tão pobre que só comia cachorro-quente. A história não é só isso, não. A história é de uma inocência pisada, uma miséria anônima.”