December 9, 1977

Benjamin Moser's biography of Clarice Lispector Why This World (2009) aims to capture an artist, who Moser contends has been forgotten undeservedly. Lispector (December 10, 1920 to December 9, 1977) wrote novels and poetry. Here is a snippet of her verse; I am not sure how the original was formatted:

I like myself a little because I'm astringent. And emollient. And sucupira. And dizzy, crackling, Not to mention rather estrogenic. I threw the stick at the cat-cat-cat but the cat-cat-cat...My god I'm unhappy. Farewell Day, it's almost dusk.

An annotation says the repetitive use of the word cat references a nursey rhyme, with this line: “I threw the stick at the cat-cat-cat but the cat-cat-cat didn't die-die-die."

Our source for the information below is a review of the biography, Batya Ungar-Sargon, published in Tablet.

So we learn of Lispector:

She was always on the margins, even though she looked like she wasn’t because she was pretty and blonde and had Chanel suits. But she was very much a marginal person...

In Why This World, Moser paints Lispector as fascinating, beautiful, and tragedy-ridden. Lispector’s family originated in Chechelnik, in the western Ukrainian province of Podolia. There Clarice’s mother was raped during a pogrom and contracted syphilis. Due to the mistaken belief that pregnancy could cure genital chancres, Clarice was conceived to cure her mother, and the family emigrated to Brazil in 1921, when Clarice, then Chaya, was a baby. But Clarice was to fail in her impossible mission—her mother died before her 10th birthday, and Clarice lived in the shadow of this failure for the rest of her life...

In Why This World, Moser is especially moving on the subject of Clarice’s father, a brilliant but unrealized mathematician who became a failed peddler in Brazil. “I think that’s the reality of most people’s lives,” said Moser. “So much of American literature is about failure. ‘Here I am in the golden land, and I fucked it up. I’m not Rockefeller, I’m just struggling to get by, like most people.’ That’s the American Dream and the reality of American literature—it’s Melville, it’s Joan Didion, you know? Joan Didion’s books are all about people who come to California or Hollywood with a dream and they completely fail, they get murdered. That’s most American literature...

Moser is scathing on the subject of the indignities visited upon female writers. He recalled with disgust a literary critic, “a very respectable, illustrious, Harold Bloom type, in São Paulo,” who told him, “You know, people say she was really pretty, but they never point out that she actually had a really fat butt.” Moser shook his head. “Boy, when you write biographies of women, you realize,” he said, that “women are always second-class citizens. Always. So if you have the, like, big shlong, dude, that guy is always going to get—“ he cut himself off. “Who do people in America think are great Jewish writers? Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, or Bernard Malamud. You can keep adding to the list.” He shook his head. “I don’t think they hold a candle to her, for the range of what she did. It’s a huge range of work, a huge range. I think once people get that, they’re going to get a sense of the panorama of this mind. The mystical power of it. Has anybody in America written a book like The Passion According to G.H.? [1964] I can’t think of anything.”