THE GENIUS OF FRIENDSHIP

Clarice Lispector's Too Much of Life

My introduction to the Ukrainian-born Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector was through her novel The Besieged City. Though parsing the person from their prose is rarely my aim when reading fiction, the voice of that novel suggested a mind that was spinning itself in mystery like a caterpillar building its cocoon. The magnetic force that pulled me along through every page was inscrutable, but undeniable. It is a novel that revels in the prismatic obfuscation of language, in a way that has been compared to James Joyce and Virginia Woolf (especially The Waves). It is a novel that will likely not be finished by readers to whom it says very little, but which can be read again and again by readers to whom it says seemingly everything. Her novels The Chandelier, Agua Viva, The Hour of the Star and The Passion According to G.H. are similar in this regard.

The recently translated Too Much of Life, however, is not a novel. It is Lispector’s collected crônicas: her columns written for the Jornal de Brasil between 1967 and 1977. To read them is to have the mystifying drapes removed from this perplexing author’s world, and to see instead our world – the same one after all – reflected back at us with piercing and singular honesty, and often disarming simplicity. It turns out that – fabulously gifted with words though she is – she doesn’t have to resort to linguistic gymnastics to dazzle; she only needs to candidly share with us the experience of her day-to-day life, and our own experience can only be enriched by coming into contact with such a lucid register of living.

Lispector’s intoxicating flushes of language aren’t entirely absent here though; she shows many sides of her kaleidoscopic soul in these crônicas, and it is a soul as prone to flashes of poetry as the clouds of a tropical climate are to lightning. The poet’s burden – the desire to use language to burst its own dam – is something she openly wrestles with:

‘Writing is trying to understand, it’s trying to reproduce the unreproducible, it’s feeling to the deepest depths an emotion that would otherwise remain vague and suffocating. Writing is also bestowing a blessing on a life that was not blessed.’ Pg.156.

She is capable of thoughts unthinkable to most people, and feelings of indescribable acuity, and yet the need to describe – to express – is unavoidable to a person so richly language-laden. Her struggle mirrors Henry David Thoreau’s attitude to language, which he expresses in the ecstatic conclusion of Walden:

‘The volatile truth of our words should continually betray the inadequacy of the residual statement… The words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures.’ Pg.301

Clarice Lispector is a superior nature. And in allowing us such candid insight into her musings, she invites us to become superior natures too. This is an act of friendship on her part; more than most other writers, she makes us feel complicit in her view of things – she confides in us, and confesses, she challenges and comforts us. The act of writing the crônicas is Lispector giving the world to herself; the publishing of the crônicas is Lispector giving her world to us.

‘In the first instance you have, if you like, to remove your own skin in order to graft it onto the spot where it’s needed. The giving-to-others part can only occur once that graft is in place.’ Pg.346

She gives to others because she has to – as we all do – in order to live on good terms with life. The archetypal solitude of writers is the inverse face of their insatiable desire to give everything. Everything, in this case, being a vision of the world so fascinating that a writer feels its expression to be their calling. And yet the fallibility of language means that we can never be sure that our communication has done enough to bridge the gap between ourselves and everyone else. When Lispector is pondering how she would feel if she were the first astronaut, she says:

‘Until another human being had seen it too, there would be a great silence in me, even if I spoke out.’ Pg.7.

She is one of those writers for whom the desire to be seen is not so much localised in herself, but manifests instead in the desire to show and to share the world as it appears to her (or we could say that she understands that there is no essential distinction to be made there). There are moments in Too Much of Life where, implicitly and explicitly, she broaches the subject of unity, or oneness, and reveals a sort of paganistic Buddhism that appears to flow quite naturally through the train of her thoughts. And so she writes with the heart of someone who feels the presence of all other hearts within her own, and with the assurance that all expression is self-expression. It is not necessary, then, for the crônicas to remain strictly diaristic, for a musing on the silence of doorways or a prose-poem about Saturdays can be just as ‘personal’ as an account of Lispector attending a dinner or a discussion of her favourite white dress. She was raised under the influence of both Judaism and Catholicism, but it is not for us to know how far their influence spreads over her – what is evident though is that she seems to lead herself to certain transcendental conclusions with apparent ease:

‘The innermost self of every human being goes back so far that his or her final steps merge with the first steps taken by what we call God.’ Pg.83.

One of the best things about reading Too Much of Life is being able to read about Clarice Lispector’s friends, of which she seemed to have many. How close she was with all of them it is difficult to know, but she presents each of them to us with a fierce pride. We get the impression that to be befriended by her must have been like being subjected to a kind of embalming light. To be described by her must be an even more uncanny experience. When she is fond of someone she always finds a brief sentence with which to gift that person to the reader, as if dressing them in the garment of her words and pushing them out on stage to meet our applause. Of the Brazilian painter Djanira she says:

‘I saw – really saw – that she was going to be my friend. There’s something in her eyes that gives you the sense that the mystery is a simple matter.’ Pg.622.

When she says that she ‘really saw’ it is difficult to doubt her; though the claims she makes about herself and about the world can sometimes feel like the responses of a precocious child who when asked about their future makes the most outrageous predictions, she is very much not a child, and she writes with such blazing intuition that you dare not doubt what she says. And so when she writes about her friends we do not doubt the good that she finds in them. She writes about them as an act of love.

It is as fun as it is rewarding to see the novel ways that Lispector manages to endear her friends to us. As a writer she is a great teacher of character introduction, as a human being she is an exemplary guide on how to be a friend. Of one man she says:

‘He’s usually rather serious, but he has a smile – no I’m not going to say it lights up his whole face. But it does.’ and: ‘when he says “see you tomorrow” you know that tomorrow will come.’ Pg.323.

 Of Hélio Pellegrino she says:

‘It’s really good to be with Hélio: you feel understood, happy because he is capable of happiness, profound because he is a profound human being; and laughing with him is just wonderful, and, I imagine, crying in his presence must help make things better.’ Pg.484.

About her friend Azaleia she says she ‘simply enjoys living. Living with no need for adjectives.’ Pg.331 and then proceeds to reprint in full Azaleia’s list of the ‘seven wonders of her world’ (including ‘her capacity for love’, ‘her five senses’, ‘having been born’ and ‘death’).

Speaking about her sculptor friend Maria Bonomi she says:

‘My friend, there exists between Maria Bonomi and me an extremely comforting and well-oiled connection. She is me and I am her and then again she is me.’ Pg.499

– this in a relatively lengthy crônica apologising to Maria for not going to her exhibition because:

‘I couldn’t stop writing. I gave, gave and gave again like blood bursting from a severed vein. I was bruised and battered and my eagle’s beak was breaking.’ Pg.498.

More cynical readers might object that she shows off her friends to us as a deceptively modest means of showing off herself, or as a sort of status-flex (some of her friends are very famous). But showing off her friends or showing off herself; what does that distinction matter to someone like Lispector? Of course her friends are a part of her. The way that she talks about them, she seems to feel them as the most beautiful part of her – because only over herself can she really impose her own standards, to everyone else she extends the grace of indulgence. Others appear to her not only as persons but as phenomena; a part of her, yes, but ultimately outside of her control – and she loves them by listening, witnessing, repeating, sharing… all of these she does when she chooses to put her friends in the crônicas.

Many of the crônicas in which she details a meeting with a friend resemble an interview. We have the image of her sitting across the table or holding the telephone to her ear listening not necessarily without challenge (just because she is willing to indulge her friends doesn’t mean that she does not want them to be good), but with full receptiveness. And those of their words that she decides to relay to us are given a kind of blessing, the blessing of the joy that she took from them. The genius of Lispector is the genius she sees in others. She lives illuminated by herself, and so everyone else can be illuminated as far as she is concerned. She almost nonchalantly throws her light over people, like a drapery; bestows it on them, consecrates them by means of her attention.

A whole crônica is given over to a single observation made by one of her young sons:

‘Mom, I just saw a baby hurricane, but it was so small, so tiny; that all it did was make three little leaves on the street corner whirl about.’ Pg.330.

This is the entire crônica, entitled ‘Boy’. She offers him the courtesy of not sharing his name, but still wants her readers to know about this thing he has said. And in the context of her crônicas, it’s a beautiful thing – because she says so. In another crônica she tells how her son, on the day before his tenth birthday, says:

‘But, Mom, my soul isn’t ten.’ Pg.358.

She asks him how old it is and he says its about eight. And when he says he doesn't feel like he’s made good use of his ten years of life because he hasn’t been happy enough we can presume that she has started to cry by the way that he asks her:

‘What’s wrong? Are you sad?’ ‘No, but come over here so I can give you a kiss,’ she says. ‘See, you said you weren’t sad, but look how many times you’ve kissed me! When a person kisses another person that many times it’s because she’s sad.’ Pg.359.

Clarice Lispector’s sadness is the sadness of being alive. The sadness of someone who does not fear death, who even sometimes wonders what it might be like, but who can’t help but love with a deathless love. Hers is the sadness of someone equally as unable to escape the abundance of life as she is the knowledge of its finitude. And so sadness might not be quite the right word. Tenderness, perhaps – the tenderness of a bruise. This gentle sorrow is captured again and again in the crônicas, simply in the things she chooses to relay to us. There are things so pure and tender that she allows us access to, and these parts usually in the plainest language, that we can’t help but feel a wounding from them. Because to read Lispector properly is to also bear in mind, as she does, the finitude of all things. This is the light by which we read her, under which her words flower. And so a simple scene such as this one, in a crônica about the daughters of a friend, is cast in a light as melancholic as it is joyful:

‘One of them has my name and it’s always fun to speak to her. It feels like I’m having the perfect conversation. She gave me two drawings and on one of them had written: “To Clarice from Clarice.”’ Pg.481.

Her readers are her friends too, and not only in a superficial sense; the crônicas are full of her responses to the letters she receives, and sometimes she will reprint an entire letter if she thinks it worthy of our attention. And when receiving contact from young or aspiring artists she will often mention them by name, give a brief example of their work, and even plead to her readers to offer help where they can. She might also offer them critique.

Several times in Too Much of Life she mentions how people perceive her as frightening, or at least expect her to be. Though she is clearly a very loving person, the honesty and integrity of her love must have been intimidating to those not used to a person so intelligent and so kind. She speaks with ‘the emotional tone of someone who could lie, but doesn’t.’ Pg.263. When she criticises she does so unflinchingly – but this too she does out of love. She does not meter out and spoon-feed others based on how much of her she thinks they can handle; they will be capable of receiving her or they won’t. This is exemplified perfectly by a sentence she says came to her in a dream:

‘I wanted to give you bread for your hunger, but you wanted gold. And yet your hunger is as large as your soul, which you have shrunk down to the size of your hunger.’ Pg.118.

There is an artistry to the friendship she offers to others which comes from a combination of extraordinary perceptive powers and absolute honesty. Or, as she herself says when she is describing her vision of the perfect artist, innocence:

‘He would say things with the purity of someone who immediately spotted that the king was naked. We would consult him like someone blind or deaf eager to see and hear. We would have a prophet, not of the future, but of the present. We would not have an artist. We would have an innocent.’ Pg.261.

And for those readers and personal friends of hers who were capable of receiving her, the benefits must have been palpable. She dedicates a crônica to a letter received by a H.M., and after discussing her displeasure with some of his word choices, she confesses:

‘But H.M., you made me feel really useful when you spoke of your own intense capacity for love being strengthened still further. Did I really do that? Thank you so much.’ Pg.82.

To love as naturally and as widely as Clarice Lispector seems to have loved must be its own kind of ordeal – she is not blind or immune to the harshness of the world, and she does not allow herself to be. But ultimately it is her love for others that fuels her definitive refusal to yield to the anger that she also feels for the world. In one of the most soul-baring crônicas of the entire collection, she imagines herself as a male knight beaten down by life:

‘One by one, with each blow I received, I have sealed off the sweetness of my nature, and those rejected sweetnesses have grown black like simple clouds closing over into darkness and I bow my head against the storm. What must divine wrath be like if my own wrath leaves me blinded by its sheer force – what if this anger destroyed only me? But I have to protect the others – the others have been the source of my hope.’ Pg.493.

This is a dark vision of what might have been – but for love. Lispector is no stranger to her shadow (someone who casts so radiant a light could hardly avoid coming face-to-face with it), but she is protected by the knowledge that we are her and she is us and then again we are her.

Any sceptic of the human soul – whether it be defined literally, spiritually or figuratively – should turn to this book, where Clarice Lispector takes our hand and says anew on every page: ‘Here: This is a soul.’

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Bibliography

David Thoreau, Henry. Walden. (1854). Penguin Random House, 2016.

Lispector, Clarice. Too Much of Life. Trans. Jull Costa, Margaret & Patterson, Robin. Penguin Random House, 2022.