Part of the Process: Clarice Lispector

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Part of the Process is a series in which we chronicle the often turbulent, usually absurd and always interesting lives of authors we admire. It’s not easy to be a writer in the 21st century, but in a strange way, reading about the trials and tribulations of those who seem to have ‘made it’ can be a reminder that it has always been a difficult process. 

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Chaya Lispector was born in December 1920 in Chechelnyk, a shtetl in what is today Ukraine. She was the youngest of three daughters, and her family suffered terribly in the pogroms that followed the dissolution of the Russian Empire, circumstances later dramatized in her older sister’s autobiographical novel. Facing persecution, they eventually managed to flee to Romania, from where they emigrated to Brazil, where her mother had relatives. The Lispectors changed their names upon arrival and Chaya became Clarice before her age had reached double digits.

They first settled in the northeastern city of Maceió, but after three years relocated to the city of Recife, Pernambuco. Clarice’s mother had rapidly deteriorating health and her father struggled economically to make ends meet. In Recife, her mother – who was partially paralysed – passed in her early forties when Clarice was just nine years old. Clarice gained admission to the Ginásio Pernambucano, 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’.

In 1935, her father decided to move the family to Rio de Janeiro, where he hoped to find more economic opportunity as well as suitable Jewish husbands for his daughters. Aged seventeen, Clarice entered the Law School of the University of Brazil, then one of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the nation. While still in law school, Clarice began working as a journalist, first at the official government press service, and then at the noted newspaper A Noite.

Her work while in law school led to Lispector meeting many young Brazilian writers, including Lúcio Cardoso, with whom she fell in love before he revealed to her that he was homosexual. Lispector began seeing a law school colleague named Maury Valente, who had entered the Brazilian Foreign Service. Her first known story was published in the magazine Pan on May 25, 1940.

In August 1940, after a botched gallbladder operation, her father died at 55, leaving Lispector an orphan at the age of nineteen. She continued to work in journalism, and then decided to marry Maury, for which she had to be naturalized first since he was a diplomat. In January 1943, she was granted Brazilian citizenship and she was married to him just a few days after.

In December 1943, she published her first novel, Near to the Wild Heart. The novel, which tells of the inner life of a young woman named Joana, caused a sensation. In October 1944, the book won the prestigious Graça Aranha Prize for the best debut novel. It received great critical acclaim, with one poet going to the extent of saying it was ‘the greatest novel a woman has ever written in Portuguese’.

A year after her first novel, Clarice left Brazil for the first time since arriving as a child. She moved to Naples, where her husband was serving the Consulate. Naples was the base for Brazilian troops fighting for the Allies against the Nazis. She worked at the military hospital in Naples taking care of wounded Brazilian troops. Later, in Rome, she met the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, who translated parts of Near to the Wild Heart. In Naples she completed her second novel, a longer and more difficult book which also received an enthusiastic response upon publication. 

After a brief return to Brazil, Clarice 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 in this new environment despite the birth of her first son. After leaving Switzerland in 1949 and spending almost a year in Rio, Clarice and Maury traveled to Torquay, Devon, where Maury was a delegate to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. They remained in England for almost a year, and during this time Lispector suffered a miscarriage on a visit to London.

In 1952, the family moved to Washington DC, where her second son was born. Lispector published two more books during her time in Switzerland but they met with dwindling acclaim. Moreover, she was increasingly discontented with the diplomatic milieu, missing her sisters and Brazil. In 1959, after nearly seven years in America, she left her husband and returned with her sons to Rio de Janeiro, where she would spend the rest of her life.

In Brazil, Lispector struggled financially and attempted to find a publisher for the novel she had completed in Washington several years before, as well as for her book of stories. Around this time she began a relationship with the poet Paulo Mendes Campos, an old friend who was married. The relationship did not endure. In 1964, she published two new books which received mixed responses. At a conference in Texas, the American translator Gregory Rabassa said he was ‘flabbergasted to meet the rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf’. 

In September 1966, Lispector suffered a terrible accident in her apartment. After taking a sleeping pill, she fell asleep in her bed with a lit cigarette. She was badly injured and her right hand almost had to be amputated. She continued to write at a prodigious rate and published two books in 1968 while also vocally participating in political demonstrations against Brazil's hardening military dictatorship.

Around the same time, she wrote for a large Brazilian paper, Jornal Do Brasil, and also published two books for children. In 1973 she published The Stream of Life, often considered her crowning achievement. She also became close to Olga Borelli, a former nun who entered her life and became a faithful assistant and friend. She published two more books of stories the following year, including one that was written in three days after a challenge from her publisher to write three stories about themes related to sex. 

Part of the reason she wrote so much may have had to do with her having been unexpectedly fired from the Jornal do Brasil at the end of 1973, which put her under increasing financial strain. This also led to her working often as a translator, publishing translations of Oscar Wilde, Edgar Allan Poe and Agatha Christie. In 1975 she was invited to read a story at the First World Congress of Sorcery in Colombia, an event which garnered wide press coverage and increased her notoriety. 

Her final and perhaps most famous novel, The Hour of the Star, was published in 1977, and followed a fragmentary, almost meta-fictional form to tell the story of a starving typist from a small town who is lost in metropolitan Rio de Janeiro. She is said to have pieced together the story from notes scrawled on loose scraps of paper with the assistance of Olga Borelli. 

Shortly after its publication, Lispector was hospitalised with an ailment. She had inoperable ovarian cancer, though she was not told the diagnosis. She died on the eve of her 57th birthday and was buried at the Jewish Cemetery of Caju, Rio de Janeiro. But in the years following her death, she has gone from being a Brazilian critical favourite to being widely translated and celebrated. Today, she is undoubtedly considered one of the pioneering female writers of the past century.