Clarice Lispector - Europe and The United States

Europe and The United States

On July 29, 1944, Clarice left Brazil for the first time since she had arrived as a child, destined for Naples, where Maury was posted to the Brazilian Consulate. Naples was the staging ground for the Brazilian troops of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force whose soldiers were fighting on the Allied side against the Nazis. She worked at the military hospital in Naples taking care of wounded Brazilian troops In Rome, she met the Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti, who translated parts of Near to the Wild Heart, and had her portrait painted by Giorgio de Chirico. In Naples she completed her second novel, O Lustre (The Chandelier, 1946), which like the first focused on the interior life of a girl, this time one named Virgínia. This longer and more difficult book also met with an enthusiastic critical reception, though its impact was less sensational than Near to the Wild Heart. “Possessed of an enormous talent and a rare personality, she will have to suffer, fatally, the disadvantages of both, since she so amply enjoys their benefits”, wrote Gilda de Souza e Mello. After a short visit to Brazil in 1946, Clarice and Maury 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. “This Switzerland,” she wrote her sister Tania, “is a cemetery of sensations.” Her son Pedro Gurgel Valente was born in Bern on September 10, 1948, and in the city she wrote her third novel, A cidade sitiada (The Besieged City, 1946).

In Switzerland, in Bern, I lived on the Gerechtigkeitsgasse, that is, Justice Street. In front of my house, in the street, was the colored statue, holding the scales. Around, crushed kings begging perhaps for a pardon. In the winter, the little lake in the middle of which the statue stood, in the winter the freezing water, sometimes brittle with a thin layer of ice. In the spring red geraniums … And the still-medieval street: I lived in the old part of the city. What saved me from the monotony of Bern was living in the Middle Ages, it was waiting for the snow to pass and for the red geraniums to be reflected once again in the water, it was having a son born there, it was writing one of my least liked books, The Besieged City, which, however, people come to like when they read it a second time; my gratitude to that book is enormous: the effort of writing it kept me busy, saved me from the appalling silence of Bern, and when I finished the last chapter I went to the hospital to give birth to the boy.

The book Lispector wrote in Bern, The Besieged City, tells the story of Lucrécia Neves, and the growth of her town, São Geraldo, from a little settlement to a large city. The book, which is full of metaphors of vision and seeing, met with a tepid reception and was “perhaps the least loved of Clarice Lispector’s novels”, according to a close friend of Lispector's. Sérgio Milliet concluded that “the author succumbs beneath the weight of her own richness.” And the Portuguese critic João Gaspar Simões wrote: “Its hermeticism has the texture of the hermeticism of dreams. May someone find the key.” After leaving Switzerland in 1949 and spending almost a year in Rio, Clarice and Maury Gurgel Valente traveled to Torquay, Devon, where Maury was a delegate to the on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). They remained in England from September, 1950, until March, 1951. Lispector liked England, though she suffered a miscarriage on a visit to London.

In 1952, back in Rio, where the family would stay about a year, Lispector published a short volume of six stories called Alguns contos (Some Stories) in a small edition sponsored by the Ministry of Education and Health. These stories formed the core of the later Laços de família (Family Ties), 1961. She also worked under the pseudonym Teresa Quadros as a women's columnist at the short-lived newspaper Comício.

In September, 1952, the family moved to Washington, D.C., where they would live until June 1959. They bought a house at 4421 Ridge Street in the suburb of Chevy Chase, Maryland. On February 10, 1953, her second son Paulo was born. She grew close to the Brazilian writer Érico Veríssimo, then working for the Organization of American States, and his wife Mafalda, as well as to the wife of the ambassador, Alzira Vargas do Amaral Peixoto, daughter of the former Brazilian dictator Getúlio Vargas. She also began publishing her stories in the new magazine Senhor, back in Rio. But she was increasingly discontented with the diplomatic milieu. “I hated it, but I did what I had to I gave dinner parties, I did everything you’re supposed to do, but with a disgust …” She increasingly missed her sisters and Brazil, and in June 1959, she left her husband and returned with her sons to Rio de Janeiro, where she would spend the rest of her life.