Free With My Dog Eyes: A Novel by Hilda Hilst Page A

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 herpreferred 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 studiesover 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.