Washington, May 1956: On Clarice Lispector’s “The Apple in the Dark”
Clarice Lispector, transl. Benjamin Moser | The Apple in the Dark | New Directions | October 2023 | 382 Pages
Clarice Lispector called Washington a “vague and inorganic city.” Perhaps the contrived glory of America’s capital—with its clean, alphabet labeled streets, towering, marble-white obelisk, and mismatched neoclassical and modern government buildings—just didn’t sit right with her. “It’s beautiful, according to various laws of beauty that are not my own,” she wrote to a friend shortly after she arrived in September 1952. “There’s no mess here, and I don’t understand a city without a bit of confusion.”
Despite what she couldn’t understand, she would spend seven years in that city. And her time there, in its severity and order, would allow her to produce one of the most complex, perplexing novels in her oeuvre.
By the time she had arrived in Washington, the Ukraine-born Brazilian national had been trailing her husband, the diplomat Maury Gurgel Valente, for almost a decade. Her marriage, which began in Rio de Janeiro, took her all around the world: first to the bustling intensity of Naples, Italy, then to the placid loneliness of Bern, Switzerland. This adventure defined her early adulthood and gave her a front row seat to the horrors of wartime Europe, but also brought her burgeoning career as a popular writer in Brazil to a near standstill. She had already published several novels and short stories; her first, Near to The Wild Heart, was called "the greatest novel a woman had ever written in the Portuguese language.” While she continued to write overseas, the time abroad was putting a strain on her work. She, a glamorous woman who had been guided by a sense of disquiet and unconventional thinking as a writer, had also managed to achieve for herself a quite conventional thing: a life rearranged for love of a man, a life as a trailing spouse.
Clarice arrived at a version of America on the precipice of major societal shifts. A few months after her arrival, in January 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower would be sworn in as the 34th President of the United States. A decorated former commander behind two of the most consequential military campaigns of the Second World War, he would address the growing pre-eminence of the United States as a global power. On the east portico of the US Capitol, before his God and the American people, he wondered aloud what lay in store for a country that, over the past few decades, had gone through the heavy “recurring trial” of war and sacrifice:
We bring all our wit and all our will to meet a question: How far have we come in man's long pilgrimage from darkness toward the light? Are we nearing the light—a day of freedom and of peace for all mankind? Or are the shadows of another night closing in upon us?
Eisenhower posed a question that would ultimately animate that decade of American history. For his administration, a pilgrimage toward the light would look like an attempt to forge peacetime, or at very least something resembling it. They would try to get the nation’s house in order—Eisenhower would oversee the beginnings of desegregation in the South, expand domestic programs under the New Deal, and later see to the construction of the interstate highway systems that would define post-War America, sealing the country’s manifest destiny of sprawling, car-dependent suburbanism. For some swaths of American society, that pilgrimage would look like settling into cultural sobriety and domestic conformity. Certain families—for the first time breaking from the restraint and economic sacrifices that came during wartime—were delivered to a promised land of mid-century modern houses and Chevy Corvettes. They remade themselves into a sublime portrait of peacetime, breadwinning husbands alongside immaculately dressed, perfectly coiffed housewives whipping up chicken pot pies and deviled eggs.
Clarice and her husband too would inhabit that subdued domesticity, buying a small house in the tree-lined, pristine Washington suburb of Chevy Chase, Maryland. For the first time in over a decade of living abroad, she found herself within a large, busy community of other Brazilian and Latin American expats. Yet to her chagrin, she had to dutifully execute the role of diplomatic wife. To participate in Social Washington and its tedious protocol was a job in itself: “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.”
For Lispector, bubbling underneath the varnished surface she cultivated was an ever-present disquiet. She found ways to fill empty days with the work of raising her two young sons, learning how to drive, and taking tranquilizers to unwind. Her close friend, Malfada Verissimo, recalled spending long afternoons sitting and talking at local lunch counters, blissed out on sedatives: “We sat around drinking coffee and taking Bellergal, isn’t that crazy? . . . It was a tiny pill and we always had one with us.”
She spent the rest of her time writing. On the living room couch of that tranquil house in Chevy Chase, “typewriter in lap,” Lispector completed The Apple in the Dark, now rendered in a fresh translation by Benjamin Moser with New Directions.
With turns both puzzling and dazzling, The Apple in the Dark might be Clarice Lispector’s most difficult novel. The reader must toil, tackling pages of interiority and existential thinking before finally arriving at a point of plot progression. A Kirkus review of the novel’s first English translation in 1967 chided, “the examination of conscience unwinds into the wee existential hours.” The prose is deeply reflective of Clarice’s aesthetic inclination to confusion: passages are non-linear; images, scenes and symbols melt into each other. To find your way through the use of language and purposefully idiosyncratic syntax—thoughtfully rendered in Moser’s new translation—is a challenge. Clarice herself barely knew where she would end up as she was writing the novel:
Every morning, I would type it. It was five hundred pages long. I copied it out eleven times in order to find out what I was trying to say, because I was trying to say a thing and I’m still not quite sure what. Copying it out, I start understanding myself, and I start. . . .
That said, what makes The Apple in Dark worth tackling is the insight it offers into how juxtaposed the author might have felt in relation to the life she was living.
The novel, comprising three parts, holds a very loose plot. “[On] a March night as dark as night gets while you sleep,” a man named Martim hides out at a hotel in a town called Vila Baixa. He is scared. Two weeks prior, he committed a crime. It is unclear what exactly that crime is—throughout the first act of the novel, it’s referred to by many terms but never defined: a “disobedience,” an “act of rage,” “the great rage.” Fearing that the hotel’s owner, “The German,” will turn him in to the police, Martim climbs out the window and down the balcony of his hotel room, then jumps into a nearby flower bed and begins running through the darkness and silence of the Brazilian jungle. There he falls asleep, awakening in the “stupid and dry light” of a desert. The first chapters deal solely with Martim’s inner dialogue on his journey.
There are “a few rigid trees'' and “the occasional boulder” in this desert. Martim starts to engage with the surrounding flora and fauna, sitting on a rock and letting a black bird settle into the palm of his hand, descending into a kind of madness, “an abyss”:
through the great leap of a crime—two weeks ago he had risked not having any guarantee, and had started not to understand.
Beneath the light of the yellow sun, Martim grapples with his crime for the first time. He grasps for the language to define it, to define the truth, but falters. He veers in and out of consciousness. All of a sudden, looking at “hollow and calm light,” his interior becomes a “resounding void.” He proceeds to deliver a sermon to a bed of rocks that “look like seated men,” with a distanced justification of his crime—his “great rage”—albeit with multiple asides and a non-linear progression:
Just imagine a person who didn’t have the courage to reject himself: and so he needed an act that made others reject him, and that person then could no longer live with himself.
As he continues speaking, he returns to feelings of inferiority and fear. He’s questioning if the crime actually happened, thinking that he might be lying to this inanimate audience. But he brings himself back to the void—a “fogged over” state in which he becomes “a simpleton.” Unraveled, he admits, “With an act of violence the person of whom I speak killed an abstract world and gave it blood.” It is revealed that perhaps Martim killed someone or something, but the reader won’t learn the specifics of this “great rage” until the final act of the novel—and by then, it won’t entirely matter, because this isn’t a crime novel. Martim’s meandering sets the stage for the central concern of the narrative—which Clarice would call “a parable of an individual in search of consciousness, in search of his language.”
At the time, Clarice had been living on a tightrope, preserving what she called an “intimate balance” between diplomatic wifehood, motherhood, and the creative self. In her youth, she told friends that she intended to be “the best diplomatic wife ever” and carried the role well, keeping up with appearances. Her friends remarked of her elegance, excessive politeness and kind deference. But beneath all of that, she was elsewhere: “I lived mentally in Brazil, I lived on borrowed time.” Through Martim’s descent into madness, one can see the author transporting herself back to her home country, an expression of yearning and homesickness. Martim’s soliloquies also seem to reveal the author’s desire to grapple more fully with darker elements, with sin and corruption, with feelings of inferiority that she might not have been able to confide in anyone. Our protagonist’s unraveling becomes a proxy for the author’s own “great rage.” It’s compelling to imagine the housewife Clarice going mad alongside Martim in her perfect suburban home, going in and out of consciousness while on Bellergal, grasping for clarity and vivacity while exiled in a place she found “vague and inorganic.”
Clarice herself would later confirm: “I’m Martim.”
Through Martim’s journey, Clarice also offers the first of the novel’s many subversions of the darkness to light motif. She doesn’t assign light and dark to the conventional binaries of good and evil, peace and war, confusion and order. In the darkness of the jungle, Martim can move around with cover, savoring “the strange music” that is “the delicate friction of silence up against silence.” Meanwhile, the light exposes Martim’s capacity for transgression as he grapples with his perversions and inner demons. In the light, he’s “hollow with thirst” and hungry, not just for food but for something else, something bigger. In this instance, the concept of a “pilgrimage from darkness to light” as an attainment of peace, freedom and order is a false choice, the incorrect construction. While Ike and his contemporaries saw an imperative for society to pull away from the darkness and the encroaching shadows of the night, for Martim—for Clarice—it’s central to an attainment of self-understanding.
Martim emerges from his wandering empty, voided, numb, and still searching. He stumbles upon a quiet ranch run by a stern woman named Vitoria and her cousin Ermelinda, who offer him work in exchange for room and board. While Martim embodies what is hollow and sinful, Vitoria represents severity, order, and power, a “woman as powerful as if she’d one day found a key.” After welcoming him to the ranch, Vitoria begins to regret her act of generosity.
I want silence, I want order, I want firmness—and while she was speaking it was seeming more and more absurd to her to have allowed a complete stranger to work there.
In the ensuing days, Vitoria exercises that power “with a fever for precision,” barking orders at Martim, which he carries out dutifully. Martim ultimately contributes to the beautification of the fields, but Vitoria grows increasingly suspicious, wondering how Martim ended up at the ranch, frequently questioning how long he intends to stay. Their interactions are mostly abrasive. Her suspicions turn into new orders, constant little tasks for Martim. One day she announces that she’s planning to go to Vila Baixa, where Martim’s first hotel hideout is located, to deliver produce. He is deeply attuned to her suspicions, and a wordless exchange between the two establishes that she will ultimately betray him. She is destined to turn him in.
Vitoria resembles a kind of dominant lady of the house, perhaps one that might have been typical of Social Washington in the 1950s. She calls to mind a different version of Clarice, the version doing “everything [she] was supposed to do,” carrying out norms—conforming—in the role of a diplomat’s wife. To Vitoria, Martim is a stranger worthy of suspicion—perhaps alluding not only to Clarice’s perpetual status as a foreigner (in her travels abroad and in her adopted homeland of Brazil) but also to Clarice’s inner disorder and non-conformity. While Vitoria is a foil, she’s not a villain—at least not entirely. In a newspaper column she wrote years later in 1968, Clarice would more directly describe her own practical struggles with order: “People worry a lot about outer order because their inner world is in disorder and they need a counterpoint to reassure them. I need reassurance too.”
Meanwhile, the girlish, nervous, flighty Ermelinda—who takes tranquilizers to ease her nerves—weaves in and out of the narrative. She falls in love with Martim from a distance and wants to submit to him, but he doesn’t seem to care or even to fully comprehend. In another dialogue-light exchange, Ermelinda enters the woodshed where Martim is living on the ranch and offers to mend his clothes with an “obedient and grateful look.” Through her gaze, she means to declare to him “You are my master,” but he doesn’t accept what she’s offering. This catalyzes a series of inner dialogues in which Martim meditates on his understanding of women, carnal desire and love for the world. Ermelinda seems to bother him with her presence throughout the novel.
The interactions between the three main characters are somewhat irresolute, secondary to their interior considerations and epiphanies. To identify the bits of Clarice that end up in these characters is to see The Apple in the Dark as a portrait of dueling selves, fighting with each other in states of domination and submission, all towards the ultimate goal of a higher understanding.
Where does Martim ultimately try to find his higher understanding? In the act of creation. One night, Martim turns on a lamp, takes out a sheet of paper and pencil, and pursues the “sensible idea” of ordering his thoughts. He tries to write but is confronted with a profound case of writer’s block:
He’d reached this point of the great tranquil anguish: that man was his own Prohibition.
The last third of the novel moves toward the breakdown of that Prohibition—dozens of realizations and epiphanies later, Martim reaches his apex of understanding, “[as] if now, holding out his hand in the dark and grabbing an apple.” Ermelinda cools down her crush, Vitoria carries out her betrayal in a series of drawn out interactions with Martim, and readers finally learn the specifics of Martim’s crime. Clarice offers a formidable twist, albeit one diluted by all of the profundity and symbolism. In the last pages, consisting of a sort of final judgment before Vitoria, the mayor of Vila Baixa, and local investigators, Martim descends into one last bit of madness, imagining writing his own story in the “tranquility of prison.” Clarice’s greater creation allegory comes full circle and becomes self-referential:
But with his imagination he’d write in prison the very crooked history of a man who had . . . Had what? Let’s say: a pen and fright? ‘Above all,’ he thought, ‘I swear in my book I will have the courage to leave unexplained whatever is inexplicable.’
Here, the author might be tipping a hat to her audience, acknowledging that not everyone who tackles the novel before them will be able to fully make sense of it. Yet despite this inexplicability, the final pages seem to undulate with a desire for artistic expression—closing with a conversation between Martim and his God, with a declaration of hunger and insatiability: “Because I, my son, all I’ve got is hunger. And that insatiable way of grasping an apple in the dark—without letting it fall.” If nothing else, the novel can be read as the statement of a person with a spiritual desire to create, someone growing increasingly dissatisfied with her circumstances.
The Apple in the Dark would mark a departure from the writer’s previous work, and its publication in Brazil would be the first reveal of Clarice Lispector as the mystical, hermetic artist. Apple would later be considered a bridge to the more popular, shorter, yet equally experimental late work (The Passion According to G.H, The Hour of the Star) that sealed her reputation as one of her country’s greatest writers.
“[In] my books, I profoundly want a profound conversation with myself and with the reader.” So profound was The Apple in the Dark’s conversation that Clarice would call it “the best one.” So profound was this conversation that she felt compelled to sign the work with the time and place of its completion: Washington, May 1956.
The very place that Clarice found vague and inorganic would allow her a moment of reckoning, the mystical Brazilian writer fully realized in Eisenhower’s America. Perhaps, newly attuned to her own insatiable desire to create, she would reach her own form of understanding from the drafts that she would copy out eleven times by hand. Perhaps upon dotting the final period, she knew precisely that all of it—the constant wandering, her life as a diplomat’s housewife—would have a clear end date. Three years later she would pack up, leave her husband, and live out her colorful life in Rio de Janiero, a city rife with the mess and confusion that she could fundamentally understand.
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Biographical information is sourced from Benjamin Moser’s Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector (Oxford University Press, 2009); a 1976 conversation between Lispector, Marina Colasanti, and Affonso Romano de Sant’Anna, translated by Moser and published by the New Yorker in February 2023; and Lispector’s Too Much of Life: The Complete Cronicas (New Directions, 2022).
Quotes from Eisenhower are from his inauguration speeches.