With My Dog Eyes: A Novel Read online

  PRAISE FOR HILDA HILST

  AND THE OBSCENE MADAME D

  “Like her friend and admirer Clarice Lispector, Hilda Hilst was a passionate explorer of the sacred and the profane, the pure and the obscene.”

  —BENJAMIN MOSER

  “This brief, lyrical and scalding account of a mind unhinged recalls the passionate urgency of Artaud and de Sade’s waking dreams in which sex and death are forever conjoined and love’s ‘vivid time’ irretrievably lost.”

  —RIKKI DUCORNET

  “May just be the literary miracle of 2012 … The Obscene Madame D stands at only 57 pages and yet manages to offer the reader a truly immersive experience unlike any of the classic tomes that brim with words.”

  —ALEX ESTES, FULL STOP

  “In the sense that language is a cultural and political construct, Hilst breaks that construct and, in doing so, asks us to hear life’s eventual silence.”

  —SARAH GERARD, LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

  HILDA HILST was born in 1930 in Jaú, Brazil. She was a prolific author whose works span many different genres, including poetry, drama, fiction, and newspaper columns. Born the heiress to a coffee fortune, she abandoned São Paulo and a law career in the 1950s to devote herself to literature, moved to the countryside, and built herself a house, Casa do Sol, where she lived until the end of her life with a rotating cast of friends, lovers, aspiring artists, bohemian poets, and dozens of dogs. She received numerous major literary prizes over the course of her career, including Brazil’s highest honor, the Prêmio Jabuti. She died in 2004, at the age of seventy-three.

  ADAM MORRIS is a PhD candidate in Latin American literature at Stanford University. An excerpt from his translation of With My Dog-Eyes won the 2012 Susan Sontag Foundation Prize for Literary Translation.

  WITH MY DOG-EYES

  Originally published in 1986 as Com meus olhos de cão

  Copyright © 2014 by Daniel Fuentes

  Translation copyright © 2014 by Adam Morris

  Introduction copyright © 2014 by Adam Morris

  First Melville House printing: April 2014

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  and

  8 Blackstock Mews

  Islington

  London N4 2BT

  mhpbooks.com facebook.com/mhpbooks @melvillehouse

  ISBN: 978-1-61219-346-5

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-61219-346-5

  Design by Christopher King

  A catalog record for this title is available from the Library of Congress.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Translator’s Introduction

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  First Page

  Notes

  Translator’s Introduction

  For many years toward the end of her life, Hilda Hilst spent every evening getting drunk on cheap whiskey, drunk to the point of not remembering the things she said or the fights she provoked. “I drink because it’s the only way I can tolerate reality,” she told a close friend and longtime resident of the Casa do Sol (The House of the Sun), the secluded estate where she lived and wrote for nearly forty years. There, surrounded by a rotating cast of friends, bohemian artists and poets, and a pack of dogs sometimes numbering more than one hundred, Hilda Hilst produced one of the most ambitious and original bodies of work in Latin American literary history.

  Hilst had been born into one of the oldest and wealthiest families in Brazil, an heiress to the lands, if not the fortunes, of a São Paulo coffee dynasty. Her father, Apolônio de Almeida Prado Hilst, was a writer as well as a coffee baron. Hilst revered her father, and throughout her life attributed her prodigious literary talent to him. Unfortunately, mental illness also ran in the family for generations, and Hilst’s father was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia shortly after her parents separated, when she was only two years old. Her mother also later suffered from dementia, and ended up confined in the same sanatorium to which her father had been committed years before. The specter of madness would loom over Hilst’s entire career as a writer, inflecting her work with themes of insanity and contributing to her formidable reputation as an eccentric recluse.

  After primary schooling in São Paulo province and secondary education in the city, Hilst studied law at the distinguished University of São Paulo. Class privileges allowed her to circulate among the elite, where she was acknowledged as one of the most beautiful women of her generation in 1950s Paulista high society. Though her suitors courted her with jewels and furs, Hilst chafed at the constraints of bourgeois values, choosing instead to smoke and drink in the company of writers and artists at a time when such behavior was considered worthy of prostitutes. Hilst had little patience for the sexual mores of her caste, and her sexual freedom became as well-known as her glamour and irreverent intellect.

  By her early thirties, Hilst had abandoned a prestigious law career and promising marriage prospects, published a few books of poetry to critical praise, and traveled Europe. While in Paris, she stalked the filming of a Marlon Brando movie, determined to seduce the American actor. Though the affair was ultimately frustrated, she went so far as to bribe Brando’s doorman and date his friend Dean Martin in an effort to get closer to the star. Upon her return, Hilst settled in São Paulo’s bohemian district, having decided to be a writer. It was only after reading Nikos Kazantzakis’s Report to Greco that she resolved to devote the rest of her life—every hour of it—to literature, and that to do so meant renouncing even the salons of bohemia. She constructed the Casa do Sol on inherited coffee fields near the regional city of Campinas as a home for her literary work. Once established on the estate in 1965, Hilst seldom left it, detesting even short journeys into Campinas. The coiffed and manicured former debutante let her hair grow long and cast aside couture and jewelry in favor of simple robes. She had gone to the Casa do Sol, she said, “to make myself ugly.”

  The tenacity with which Hilst maintained this retreat earned her a reputation as a hermit madwoman in the São Paulo circles she had forsaken, but she was seldom alone. Though methodic about her work and defensive of the solitude in which she wrote, Hilst also took pride in her role as matriarch of what she called the “elective family” of artists and writers that came to live in the Casa do Sol: it was her lifelong repudiation of traditional family values. Even Hilst’s marriage, to the sculptor Dante Casarini, was unconventional. During many of the years of their marriage, Dante lived in a house nearby, Hilst having jilted him for a younger man. The couple had also discovered that cohabitation was incompatible with Hilst’s rigorous devotion to her craft. Highly knowledgeable in matters of astrology, Hilst attributed her stringent work ethic to the zodiac. She believed that writing caused an intensification of her Taurine traits, though this was perhaps an excuse for the imperious and gruff severity with which she dismissed anything or anyone standing in the way of her creation. Hilst and Casarini eventually divorced in 1985, and though Hilst had taken other lovers, Dante remained a close friend and presence at the Casa do Sol throughout her life.

  Members of Hilst’s elective family also included aspiring young poets who admired her ferocious dedication to her art. They turned up in Campinas hoping to be apprenticed to Hilst and offering to serve as personal secretaries—or as one of them put it to her over the telephone when he called to seek her mentorship, offering to be the Beckett to her Joyce. The habit of sheltering beautiful young men, many of them gay, only contributed to Hilst’s notoriety. But she set her poet-apprentices to work, summoning them to read
her poems aloud to her: it was her preferred method of editing her verses. For Hilst, poetry existed primarily as sound.

  Among these young assistants was Caio Fernando Abreu, who would go on to become one of Brazil’s most renowned poets. Appearing on Hilst’s books, Abreu’s accolades helped generate a devoted following for her work. “For her love of the human condition, Hilda writes,” Abreu wrote on the jacket flap of the original edition of Hilst’s first novel, The Obscene Madame D (1982). “One eye on the divine, the other on Astaroth. No one escapes her unharmed. As no one escapes unharmed, at its end, from life itself.” For those uninitiated in demonology, Astaroth is a crown prince of hell. While this might seem an overly dramatic introduction to a writer, Abreu’s description gets to the core of Hilst’s project: it is the dark heart of the human experience that compels her. Nor is demonology far afield from Hilst’s literary excursions into Gnostic philosophy and theology; writers such as the famed British occultist and magician Aleister Crowley undoubtedly influenced her writing.

  Hilst read copiously and ecumenically, seldom without a pen in hand. Many of the books in the personal library she left behind at the Casa do Sol, now yellowing with age from the tropical humidity, are annotated and underlined, leaving clues to Hilst’s scattered studies over the course of four decades. Her library reveals deep interest in Bertrand Russell’s writings on mysticism and the irrational, fascination with Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power, and a long-standing predilection for Jungian psychology. Hilst also nourished an obsession for Allan Kardec, the nom de plume of French polymath and spiritist Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail. Kardec commanded immense celebrity in nineteenth-century Brazil, and his books remain popular there today. Hilst also read Freud, but her taste in psychoanalytic theory was for Otto Rank, whose 1926 book on pre-Oedipal separation anxiety, The Trauma of Birth, spoke profoundly to a woman whose literary and private writings were forever marked by the absence of her father. Rank was also the preferred analyst of several bohemian writers whom Hilst admired, having analyzed Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin—two of Hilst’s most cherished inspirations in both literature and life—at his practice in Paris. Jewish American anthropologist Ernest Becker, to whom With My Dog-Eyes is dedicated in memoriam, was also a powerful force in shaping Hilst’s unusual understanding of the human psyche.

  Over a career that spanned nearly fifty years, Hilst’s literary work grew to more than twenty volumes of poetry, theater, and narrative prose. Although she enjoyed the esteem of a cadre of São Paulo poets and writers, and quietly amassed all of the country’s most prestigious literary awards, Hilst’s work was little-read in Brazil and remained, until recently, mostly untranslated. This was partly due to the author’s own inflexible editorial decisions: Hilst scorned mainstream publishing houses as “bourgeois” and instead published small artisanal editions featuring her artwork and that of her friends. She would later claim, however, that literary publishers had turned her down. This is not hard to imagine, given that the frank sexuality of her work brazenly transgressed the patriarchal order that held sway in Brazilian letters through most of Hilst’s lifetime. In any case, her books were difficult to find, and not as widely distributed as those of her contemporaries. Even more challenging are the texts themselves, whose prolific allusions and dense stylistics require a degree of literary cultishness that Brazil—a country whose inequality and illiteracy rates were until recently some of the worst in the world—did not afford.

  Until she began publishing experimental prose fiction in the 1970s, Hilst was almost exclusively a poet. She was also a playwright, and the plays she wrote during the first years of Brazil’s military dictatorship, along with theatrical adaptations of her prose texts, have experienced a revival in recent years, with numerous productions staged in São Paulo and Campinas. Her turn to prose fiction in 1970 marked a significant development in her style and themes: though her poetry was always well-regarded, it was through fiction that Hilst established herself as an avant-garde stylist. Her prose incorporates poetic, dramatic, and epic registers, revealing her far-ranging study of literature, science, philosophy, and religion. Erudite appropriations from these literary forms create what critic Alcir Pécora has called her “anarchy of genres.” Frequent and irregular shifts in perspective also create a strange and elusive diction in her prose, often mystical in timbre.

  Hilst’s first novel-length works, The Obscene Madame D (A obscena senhora D) and With My Dog-Eyes (Com meus olhos de cão), were written during a period of anguish in her personal life. The years in which she was writing Madame D (1980–1981) correspond to a tumultuous relationship with a cousin twenty years her junior, whom she refers to as “Hilst” in her journals. Her passion for Wilson Hilst was one in a series of bitterly disappointing love affairs in the author’s life. Allegedly schizophrenic, but certainly unbalanced, Wilson had learned that his cousin was a writer with an estate near Campinas. He turned up to meet her at some point in the late 1970s and initiated a period of comings-and-goings that caused some distance between Hilda and her friends at the Casa do Sol in 1980–1981. Hilda and “Hilst” were often alone together at the house, and his unpredictable and occasionally cruel and psychotic behavior caused her significant emotional and financial distress. Friends described a sordid affair between them—mostly one-sided—and Hilda’s journal entries from the period, separated by long silences, record a volatile amorous obsession punctuated with exasperation, intense depression, and candid acknowledgment of emotional crisis. After he imprisoned Hilda in a room at the Casa do Sol and threatened her with violence, her cousin’s behavior finally merited admittance to a sanatorium. His departure deeply grieved Hilst: her beloved had suffered the same fate as her father. This affair consumed her life during the time she was writing Madame D; in her journals it displaced nearly all other concerns except for the occasional mention of the birth or death of one of her dogs. But when she does mention Madame D, it is with a sense of excitement: she knew she had written a work of genius. Today The Obscene Madame D is one of Hilst’s most well-known books. Together with her Ficções (1977), a collection of her short-form fiction, it is often called her masterpiece.

  If Madame D is Hilst’s confrontation of death, loss, and oblivion, With My Dog-Eyes more directly addresses the nexus she believed existed between genius and madness, poetry and mathematics. Her notes on the novel (dated c. 1983) suggest it was heavily influenced by simultaneous readings of Bertrand Russell and the Argentine writer Ernesto Sábato. Although it bears her trademark impurity of genre, it is perhaps the most novel-like prose work that Hilst ever produced. With its slowly unraveling genius protagonist, With My Dog-Eyes is also Hilst’s self-induction into the circle of heretics, antiphilosophers, and marginalized visionaries that she so admired, from Galileo to Nietzsche and Genet.

  With My Dog-Eyes also bears the imprint of new acquaintances Hilst made in the early 1980s. These were a group of physicists and mathematicians she met at Unicamp, the nearby university where she had begun lecturing in the attempt to stave off financial hardship and the inevitable sales of her land. Though she disliked taking hours away from her Olivetti, Hilst’s time at Unicamp was productive, as friendships with university scientists led to deepened study of theoretical physics and mathematics. Amós Kéres, the mathematician who narrates With My Dog-Eyes, was born of these encounters. Professor Kéres’s initials also correspond to those of Allan Kardec, signaling Hilst’s sustained interest in the Russellian fusion of mysticism and logic though literature.

  Though there was mutual respect between Hilst and her scientist friends—she dedicates With My Dog-Eyes to some of them—their friendships were also strained by Hilst’s attempts to secure their collaboration in her experiments with the paranormal. Since the early 1970s, when she claimed to have captured her dead mother’s voice by tape-recording radio waves between functioning stations, Hilst had been devoted to the practice of “transcommunication” described by the Swedish painter and filmmaker Friedrich Jürgenson, who had
discovered the voice of his dead father on recordings he’d made of bird songs. In her writing studio, Hilst used a reeled tape recorder to capture unused frequencies. The voices she discerned on the tapes were, for Hilst, evidence of spiritual existence beyond that which can be scientifically explained. She even appeared on a novelty television program to share her findings and discuss her practice.

  Hilst received numerous literary awards in the 1980s, but the lack of commercial success was slowly taking its toll. She managed to finance her bohemian retreat and literary production by selling off, little by little, the lands she had inherited from her family: today, her once-solitary estate is surrounded by a gated community called Shangri-La Park, where in her final years Hilst’s reputation as a reclusive occultist had matured, among neighbors who did not know her or her work, into “the woman who levitated.” Her nouveau riche neighbors bemoaned the Casa do Sol, which was falling slowly into ruin, and even dared to throw rocks, glass, and poisoned meat over the walls of her property in an effort to thin the ranks of her dogs.

  Commercial success always proved elusive, but Hilst never doubted her genius, often remarking on it to her friends and comparing herself to Joyce and Beckett. “If I wrote in English,” she once told a resident at the Casa do Sol, “I would be Joyce.” Critics will be tempted to liken her to Virginia Woolf, as they have mistakenly done with Hilst’s contemporary Clarice Lispector. Comparisons of Hilst to Lispector have also already arisen, though these too miss the mark: Hilst truly scorned the cultural establishment in Brazil, including the bourgeois tastemakers who had elevated Lispector to the status of high priestess of Brazilian modernism.

  Hilst understood her own work as partaking in a far more radical tradition of avant-garde expression. Beyond her worship of Beckett and Joyce, she regarded herself as the literary heir to D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Pierre Louÿs, and Georges Bataille: all practitioners, in her view, of the obscene as a literary aesthetic. In Hilst’s formulation, the obscene is differentiated from the erotic and the pornographic by its philosophical and spiritual elements, and also through its act of social provocation. When, some years after completing With My Dog-Eyes, she launched her obscene tetralogy, the quartet of works in which she undertook her own development of the aesthetic (O caderno rosa de Lori Lamby, 1990; Contos d’escárnio, textos grotescos, 1990; Cartas de um sedutor, 1991; Bufólicas, 1992), Hilst lamented to interviewers that Brazil was a country where serious literature was not appreciated, that her forty years of writing had accomplished nothing, and that it was time to “wake people up.” As she grew older, Hilst was increasingly saddened by the widespread prevalence of hunger, misery, and cruelty in the world. Her obscene works unleash a damning satire of the traditional values and generalized apathy that underwrite the commonplace poverty and violence of modern life.