Clarice Lispector; illustration by Harriet Lee-Merrion
In Clarice Lispector’s newspaper columns and crônicas, she seems sensorially overcharged by the quotidian, needing only the tiniest slice of existence to feed her writing.
The cronista hunts big game with a pocketknife. A brief description of the old neighborhood soccer team suggests the unrelenting passage of time; a glimpse of a stranger’s arm during a turbulent flight leads to a reflection on life and death. “There’s a right way to start a crônica by using a triviality,” Machado de Assis, one of the first great writers to champion the form, wrote in 1877.
One says: how hot it is! How unwaveringly hot! One says this while shaking the tips of a handkerchief, snorting like a bull, or simply agitating one’s overcoat. Then one slips from the heat to atmospheric occurrences, drawing a few speculations about the sun and the moon, others about yellow fever, sending a sigh to Petrópolis, and la glace est rompue; the crônica has begun.
As with almost everything he wrote, there’s a subtle irony in Machado’s suggestion that an easy step-by-step will lead to the desired outcome. Shorter and more elliptical than an essay, the Brazilian crônica is in fact a maddeningly elusive genre. The difficulty lies not so much in identifying the form’s attachment to the mundane (simple prose, wry personal anecdotes, an eye for the odd detail or fleeting character), but in the specific magic dust that transforms minor observations into prose that’s brimming with pathos. The underground passage from triviality to transcendence is hard to locate, yet you know a true crônica when you read one.
The ratio of failure to success is
high, but when it works it is indelible.
It is a form that is at once high- risk—
because hard to master—and complacent,
perfect for the talent wasters,
the boozers and sinecure seekers who
can’t always endure enough solitude to
write novels. The genre’s birth, or at
least its first wave of popularity, can
be traced to the expansion of Brazilian
cities, particularly Rio de Janeiro,
and the local press in the nineteenth
century. Once a stylish reprieve from
the urgent news articles it accompanied,
the crônica has seen a severe
decline in influence over the past
decades.*
*One notable exception is Antonio Prata,
whose crônicas for the newspaper Folha
de S. Paulo not only maintain the artistic
principles that first animated the genre but
also are popular among readers.
There are writers working
today who define themselves as cronis
tas, but in the age of furious tweets
and bloated newsletters, such a subtle
form seems unlikely to regain ground.
Much like the flaneur drifting around
Paris, the cro nis ta is often thought of
as both a product and an observer of
Rio’s chaotic growth—a nocturnal, dipsomaniac
figure who sketches the fleeting
scenes and characters of the city.
Unlike the flaneur, though, the cro nis ta
is no loner; he (almost always a he)
feeds on companionship and cliques.
His paths through the city contain longer
pit stops at bars and restaurants;
he is more idler than wanderer.
An aura of thwarted promise hovers
over even the most celebrated practitioners
of the form. Not because they
failed to achieve worldly success, but
because to be a cronista is to celebrate
what is minor, to show a certain indifference
toward literary greatness. It
was Rubem Braga who came closest
to elevating the crônica to canonical
status. Having worked from the 1930s
through the 1970s, he is now probably
the writer most associated with the
form, and the main representative of
its last great generation. Braga and
his group of friends contributed to
Rio’s bohemian landscape as much
as the bossa nova musicians, writing
about one another and creating a mythology
around themselves that made
them seem elegiac from the outset,
as if they knew that their way of expressing
themselves would one day
be outgrown.
Although she often appears in anthologies
of the genre, Clarice
Lispector occupies a peculiar position
in the history of cronismo. She was a
latecomer, writing her first crônicas
in the last decade of her life, but her
presence in the daily papers gave her
the readership that had long eluded
her as a writer of fiction. The critical
and commercial success of her first
novel, Near to the Wild Heart (1943),
published when she was only twentythree,
had been followed by a string
of commercially disappointing novels,
earning her a reputation as an author
who was “hermetic” (an adjective she
hated) and hard to sell. Braga and his
friends, fierce admirers of her fiction,
used their influence to promote her
journalistic career, recommending her
fiction in 1958 to Senhor, an influential
little magazine where she would
become a regular contributor. But it
was her hiring by the Rio daily Jornal
do Brasil in 1967, a few years after she
wrote the book that is now considered
her masterpiece, The Passion According
to G.H. (1964), that brought her to
the attention of a wider public. She
held the job until 1973, four years before
her premature death from cancer.
It was the press that put Lispector on
a first- name basis with the Brazilian
public, like a soccer player, musician,
or politician. “Thanks to the Jornal do
Brasil I’m becoming popular. I get sent
roses,” she wrote in a column in 1967.
Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas,
translated by Margaret Jull Costa
and Robin Patterson, is mostly made
up of her pieces for the daily, though
a sprinkling of writings for other publications
is also included. The second
half of the title is misleading. Only
a few pieces in this collection would
fit even the loosest definition of a
crônica—they vary widely and include,
among other miscellany, reflections
on writing; miniprofiles of friends,
artists, and artist friends; cryptic dialogues;
replies to fan mail; a spiky
riposte to a rumor about the author’s
divorce; and one indignant letter, in
the Moses Herzog vein, to the minister
of education. Also, unclassifiable
sentences and paragraphs. Few writers
have ever taken the expression “This is
an open space” quite so literally. Costa
and Patterson’s translation does a fine
job of capturing Lispector’s syntax and
rhythms, a task that isn’t so straightforward
considering the sheer variety
of forms her pieces take.
Tucked away in these nearly 750
pages, like rare flowers among ordinary
grasses, are more purposeful
attempts at writing what one might
call pure crônicas, some of which are
perfectly rendered, and a handful of
which have the unmistakable touch
of the author. These are the ones that
most often appear in anthologies, and
upon which Lispector’s reputation as
a cronista rests.
“When I was very young,” she writes
on June 6, 1970, in “Fear of Eternity,”
“I’d still never tried chewing gum, and
it wasn’t much talked about even in Recife.
I had no idea what it was.” This is
a typical setup for a crônica: a personal
memory or perception—Machado’s
triviality—clearing only the faintest
path to a theme hinted at in the title.
Her sister warns her not to lose the
never- ending candy (“It lasts a whole
lifetime”), alarming little Clarice:
I picked up that small pink pastille
representing the elixir of eternal
pleasure. I examined it, scarcely
able to believe in that miracle. I,
who, like other children, would
sometimes take a still intact
piece of candy out of my mouth
in order to suck it later on and so
make it last longer. And there I
was with that seemingly innocent
pink thing, making possible the
impossible world I had only just
become aware of.
Lispector here nails the form’s paradoxical
mixture of accessibility and
high artistic ambition by conjoining a
childhood memory with the unbearable
weight of eternity. “Suck it and enjoy
the sweetness,” her sister orders. “And
then you can chew for the rest of your
life. Unless you lose it, that is, and I’ve
already lost quite a few.” As the gum
becomes rubbery and gray and tasteless,
Clarice starts to feel panicked;
eventually she spits it onto the sandy
ground at the school gates, pretending
she has lost it. “I felt shamed by her
kindness, ashamed that I had lied,” she
says. “But relieved too. No longer burdened
down by the weight of eternity.”
In Lispector’s most fully achieved
crônicas, the trivial doesn’t so much
segue into the transcendent as become
inextricable from it. A piece of gum
contains the whole space– time continuum;
a mercury droplet represents the
elusive nature of all material things.
This is the same sense of rapture one
hears from her hypersensitive fictional
narrators, to whom no ordinary thing
fails to carry some extraordinary emanation—
an encounter with a cockroach
evokes the vision of a terrible, boundless,
amoral universe, the liquid oozing
out of it a damning nectar containing
the whole secret of human existence.
Often, though, Lispector just seems
to fret about her new day job. “I
know that what I write here cannot
really be called a crônica or a column or
even an article,” she writes on March 9,
1968. That same year, she asks, “Is the
crônica a story? Is it a conversation? Is
it the summation of a state of mind?”
Dwelling on one’s desire, ability,
or lack thereof to master the form—
metacronismo, say—is not unusual.
But there is something wildly incongruous
about Lispector as cronista—
it’s as if J.M. Coetzee had been invited
to write weekly op- eds for the Times,
or Cormac McCarthy hired as a regular
book critic. Where the form privileges
levity, suppleness, storytelling, and a
certain sense of humor, her writing
is often abstract, weary, and wary of
language’s limits, impatient not merely
with narrative but with events in general,
always seeking a fast track to
metaphysical experience. “As a reader,
I prefer the attractive type of book,
because it’s less tiring, less demanding,
requires little real engagement,”
she wrote on February 14, 1970. “But
as a writer, I want to dispense with
everything I can possibly dispense
with: that is what makes the experience
worthwhile.”
Her primordial world of animals,
rocks, plants, and anthropomorphic
rooms doesn’t really jibe with the secular,
street- smart world of odd characters
and sly observations, the gossipy
tone one finds in writers like Braga.
Often, in her weekly pieces, she slips
into a novelistic voice that, one suspects,
reflects the kind of thing she’d
rather be doing. A column published
on October 10, 1970, begins:
It was very dry that spring, and
the radio crackled, picking up
static, our clothes bristled with
static electricity, our hair clung
to the comb as if magnetized:
it was a hard spring. And very
empty. Wherever you happened
to be, you set off into the distance:
never had there been so
many paths. We spoke little; our
bodies heavy with sleep, our eyes
wide and blank. On the balcony,
along with the fish in the aquarium,
we drank a cool drink, gazing
out at the countryside. The dreams
of the goats wafted in from the
fields on the breeze. At the other
table on the balcony sat a solitary
faun. We stared into our drinks and
dreamed static dreams inside the
glass. “What did yu say?” “I didn’t
say anything.”
It’s heady to picture my grandfather
back in vast, isolated Mato Grosso in
the late 1960s, nursing his ulcer and
stirring his ground guarana leaves
while opening his paper and finding
this sort of writing. But readers were
probably not that fazed. Lispector’s
enigmatic style was certainly unique,
but part of the whole point of crônicas
is their unapologetic lack of utilitarian
value, their beautiful pointlessness.
They are a kind of anti- news.
The journalist Flávio Pinheiro—
who did not cross paths with Lispector
at the Jornal do Brasil but worked
there in the late 1970s and then again
in the 1980s and 1990s as the editor of
the famed CadernoB supplement that
she used to write for—recently told
me that the cronista’s role back then
was to “enhance the paper’s vocabulary.”
According to him, cronistas rarely
ever went into the office, and were a
group apart, largely exempt from the
daily routine.
In a preface to the Brazilian edition
of The Complete Crônicas, released by
the publishing house Rocco in 2019, the
writer and journalist Marina Colasanti,
then the young employee who was put
in charge of dealing with Lispector’s
pieces, recalls seeing her only a handful
of times, right after she began as
a contributor. After that, her pieces
would usually come via emissary, in big
brown envelopes, written in a difficult
scrawl—the result of a home fire that
almost killed her in 1966, leaving her
writing hand severely damaged. Very
little editing went on: “I fixed one typo
or another, not more than that,” Colasanti
writes.
In one sense Lispector was a part of
Braga’s gang. According to Benjamin
Moser, the author of Why This World:
A Biography of Clarice Lispector (2009),
it was Otto Lara Resende, another cronista,
who in 1960 first suggested to
the then editor of Jornal do Brasil, Alberto
Dines, that he hire Lispector as
a regular writer. In 1962, a few years
after divorcing her husband, the diplomat
Maury Gurgel Valente, Lispector
had a brief and intense affair with
Paulo Mendes Campos, a well- known
cronista from Braga’s group who was
married at the time. And it was Braga
and Fernando Sabino who published
The Passion According to G.H., through
their own small publishing house.
But these close relationships belie
Lispector’s separateness. The most
glaring difference, of course, was her
gender. Along with Cecília Meireles
and Rachel de Queiroz, Lispector is
among the very few women associated
with a male- dominated genre. The
ideal occupations for cronismo—boozing
and idling, mostly—demand gargantuan
amounts of time, something
that pretty much only men had in the
heyday of the form. Though the income
she received as a diplomat’s wife (first
in Naples, later in Washington) gave
her a certain amount of freedom to
write, Lispector longed for home. Her
second, third, and fourth novels were
all written abroad with difficulty, between
attending diplomatic functions
and taking care of her two boys, and
the cold reception of publishers back
in Brazil depressed her.
Reeling from her divorce, she returned
to Rio in 1959 with her sons
and hardly seemed to have the appetite
to take part in a literary scene built
on barhopping. Moser’s descriptions
of this period give Lispector the air
of a Ferrante character: the female
artist only half- belonging, unraveling
even while being the center of intellectual
admiration, calling friends
up in the middle of the night, taking
sleeping pills and chain- smoking
(hence the fire), using heavier makeup
to shock herself into a new persona,
consumed by her domestic life while
her male counterparts drink, selfmythologize,
and launch new literary
ventures. Mendes Campos, after their
affair, went back to his English wife
and children; Gurgel Valente sent her
$500 every month, but financial anxiety
became an issue.
Jornal do Brasil was not Lispector’s
first experience in journalism. In
1940, a few years before publishing her
first novel, she convinced a government
official and censor to give her
a job as a reporter and editor for the
Agência Nacional, a press agency controlled
by the Department of Press and
Propaganda of the Estado Novo, a dictatorial
regime installed by then president
Getúlio Vargas. Shortly afterward
she worked at the daily A Noite, also
under Vargas’s watch.
In 1952 Braga gave her a women’s advice
column at Comício, an anti- Vargas
weekly he was running at the time.
Lispector gave cosmetics and relationship
advice under the pseudonym
Tereza Quadros, occasionally smuggling
in material that subtly questioned
female stereotypes. After her
divorce she worked as a ghostwriter
for the model and actress Ilka Soares
and was again hired as an advice columnist
by the newspaper Correio da
Manhã, this time using an anglicized
pseudonym, Helen Palmer. Part of her
job was to lure unwitting readers toward
the benefits of Pond’s face cream,
which was never explicitly mentioned
in the pieces.
None of these early writings are
included in Too Much of Life, but
Lispector’s former selves often reappear
in her Jornal do Brasil columns.
In a piece dated April 24, 1971, she describes
the pleasure she finds translating
an Encyclopedia for Women:
Every woman should have one (it
isn’t ready yet), since it covers culture
(the section I’ve been doing up
till now, and I just hope they’ll also
give me the section on makeup) as
well as things that are strictly feminine
like makeup, lifestyle, handicrafts
(I’ve embroidered numerous
tablecloths, but only in flat stitch
or satin stitch—I don’t know how
to do complicated stitches), etc.
Then she says, “For women, our turn
has finally come: we are considered
important enough to be given an
encyclopedia.”
Lispector often shows this kind of
sardonic awareness about the terrible
deal women get. But she also seems
to be a pragmatist at heart, preferring
to navigate the world as it is rather
than confront it too forcefully. (That
the aforementioned ironic comment
ends the column rather than starting
it sums up this attitude.) Politically,
she declares herself a leftist. “I would
like to see a socialist government in
Brazil,” she writes on December 30,
1967. But other discussions about politics
in the columns are sparse and
generic. Whether this is because of
or despite the fact that in 1968 the
military government clamped down
on civil liberties, leading to the most
repressive period of the regime, is a
question that is hard to answer.
Writing a column under her own
name was not something Lispector
undertook lightly at Jornal do Brasil.
In a column dated June 5, 1971, she
writes, “One day I phoned Rubem
Braga, the creator of the crônica,” reminding
us yet again of his stature.
Worrying that her pieces were becoming
“excessively personal,” she asks for
his advice. “It’s impossible not to be
personal in a crônica,” he tells her. She
writes, “But I don’t want to tell anyone
about my life: my life is rich in experiences
and vivid emotions, but I don’t
ever want to publish an autobiography.”
There is a paradox in Lispector’s
fiction: despite her use of the first
person, her narrators often betray little
background. What comes across
is a sense of self- effacement, or of
self- scattering, self- dispersion—the
narrator is so sensitive to the mood,
atmosphere, and objects surrounding
her, pulling her in different directions
and down rabbit holes of abstract reflection,
that the traits usually associated
with a stable character or persona
(psychological details, biographical
facts) seem beside the point.
To this can be added a certain freedom
from the distraction of careerism.
Lispector was not immune to criticism,
but no other Brazilian novelist of the
twentieth century—no other Brazilian
novelist ever, perhaps—seemed
more unselfconscious about what was
going on elsewhere, or more aloof from
what other people were interested in,
utterly free from the usual inferiority
complexes that weigh on artists from a
huge, peripheral country that worries
about being irrelevant. In the archipelago
of postwar Brazilian fiction—precariously
united by a common language
and the ruins of a modernist project—
hers is the most self- sufficient island.
This aloofness infused her fiction
with a peculiar originality. More surprising
than her astonishing debut at
age twenty- three was the speed with
which she discarded gifts other writers
would kill for, moving quickly from
a modernist style to more mystical
writing. Shifting among the points of
view of three characters, Near to the
Wild Heart is an embarrassment of
riches, hinting at the inventive syntax
she later became known for while
also representing acute psychological
portrayals and a deft use of stream
of consciousness. Whereas the more
realist work of the great modernists
is usually deemed more “accessible,”
in Lispector’s case the early modernist
novel plays the role of the “easier”
book. (She was baffled by comparisons
to Joyce, Woolf, and Proust; she
claimed she hadn’t read any of them
before writing her first novel.)
In hindsight, it is not hard to understand
why critics were initially flummoxed:
the trajectory from almost fully
formed modernist to sui generis mystic
isn’t a usual one. By the time of The
Passion According to G.H.—the religious
allusion isn’t ironic—Lispector
was tuned into the unseen, her narrators
all seemingly overcome by a toolong
stare into the Aleph. For those
who don’t get her half the time (I count
myself among them), Near to the Wild
Heart remains the work to be cherished,
more tethered and in touch with
down- to- earth anxieties, like whether
to get married, have a kid, and so on.
“You pick up a thousand waves I
can’t catch,” Braga wrote to her in
1957, referring to her novels. “I feel
like a cheap radio, only getting the station
around the corner, where you get
radar, television, shortwave.” The compliment
sheds light on her unusual position
as cronista—why seek a glimpse
of transcendence when most of the
time you’re in a full- blown trance? If
Complete Crônicas is a misnomer, the
other half of the collection’s title, Too
Much of Life, is apt. The impression
Lispector gives is not that she is uninterested
in the quotidian, but rather
overwhelmed by it, sensorially overcharged
by the smallest occurrences,
needing only the tiniest slice of existence
to feed her fiction.
An ambivalence toward “chasing
after money, work, love, pleasures,
taxis and buses” can be a disadvantage
for reporting. Lispector’s profiles of
artists are laudatory, showing not the
slightest inclination to find fissures
in their public image. Her book and
art reviews read like press releases.
(Among these is a plug for Braga and
Sabino’s second publishing house.) Her
interviews are whimsical but without
the suggestive depth of her fiction. She
asks Pablo Neruda, who is “extremely
nice,” questions like “What is anxiety?”
and “Who is God?” as well as “Where
would you like to live if you didn’t live
in Chile?” and “What, in your opinion,
makes a pretty woman?” When she
asks him to write a poem on the spot,
he demurs. “What is love, Zagallo?”
she asks, apparently in all seriousness,
of the manager of Brazil’s 1970 World
Cup soccer team.
Sometimes she is saved by her subjects,
who indulge her in a way they
probably wouldn’t someone less famous.
Glória Magadan, a Cuban- born
writer of soap operas, answers her
heroine’s occasionally banal questions
with warm candor. “Given the influence
you have with the general public,
couldn’t you raise your level a little?”
Lispector asks, probably without sensing
her own snobbery. “I would lose
my influence then,” Magadan replies.
Yet these shortcomings never grate.
Perhaps we are as starstruck as her
star interviewees. Or more likely it’s
that her attempt to navigate the discomfort
of weekly exposition actually
produces a pure and mundane portrait,
and complicates her immaculate literary
image. In her column of September
18, 1971, she relays a rumor that
disturbs her:
Someone told me that Rubem
Braga said I am only good in books,
and that I don’t write a good column.
Is that true, Rubem? Rubem, I
do what I can. You do it better, but
you shouldn’t require others to do
the same. I write columns humbly,
Rubem. I don’t have any pretensions.
But I receive letters from
readers and they like my columns.
And I like to receive those letters.
I like to receive those letters: there is
something thrilling in this unguarded
tone, which is heard often in the collection.
To one reader, whose letter mixes
“aggression with flattery,” she says:
“You’re quite right to want me, like
Chekhov, to write amusing things. . . .
Don’t worry, Francisco, my moment to
say amusing things will come, I really
am full of highs and lows.” To another,
who speculates on her divorce:
I reckon you’re the wife of a diplomat.
You adopt an air of false
pity. . . . Madam, please keep your
pity to yourself, I don’t need it. And
if you want to know the truth, something
you weren’t expecting, here it
is: when I separated from my husband,
he waited for me to come back
to him for more than seven years.
When a “rather disheveled young
woman” shows up at her house uninvited,
paper in hand, and mentions
that she knows Lispector is an insomniac
because she can see her light
on every night—also saying that she
witnessed “the fire”—she is invited
in. The woman cooks an octopus for
her. Lispector’s editor is not thrilled
about this sort of engagement with
readers—he eventually asks her to
stop dealing so much with fan mail.
This raw sincerity and artlessness is
one of the most appealing aspects of
Too Much of Life. Even more so than in
her fiction, in her crônicas and other
columns Lispector uses the “I” without
the self- conscious, manipulative
care often employed by more autobiographical
writers (Philip Roth, say),
and the impression given is one of
vulnerability. “Fear of Eternity” and
others deserve their place among the
masterful examples of the crônica,
but it is remarkable how infrequently
Lispector tried to write these perfect
set pieces. Maybe the personal charm
and autobiographical self- presentation
demanded by the crônica—and even
by a regular column—was a little too
much for someone whose fiction always
showed a deep hesitation regarding
the idea of a unified, confident self.
The self remains fragmented, inconsistent,
rather comfortable with its
contradictions. .
Reviewed:
Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas
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