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Books: Rich Little Poor Girl

4 minute read
TIME

THE DIARY OF “HELENA MORLEY” (281 pp.)—Translated and edited by Elizabeth Bishop—Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($4.75).

Little girls are a joy and grown girls can exercise intolerable charms, but the girl just moving into her teens is often a hidden mystery to all but her peers. What makes “Helena Morley” a very special girl is the fact that she told not only all, or nearly all. to her diary, but published the diary in full. Following the day-by-day account, the reader will make a friend and also cross a threshold toward a special kind of understanding.

Her name was not really Helena but Alice. She was Portuguese, living with her parents in the Brazilian diamond-mining town of Diamantina, and she began to keep her record of everyday happenings in 1893, when she was twelve. In 1942, as Senhora Augusto Mario Caldeira Brant of Rio de Janeiro (her husband twice served as president of the Bank of Brazil), she published her diary in a small edition for friends and family. Famed French Novelist Georges Bernanos saw it and proclaimed it a work of genius. By the time—1952—that U.S. Pulitzer-Prizewinning Poet Elizabeth Bishop went to live in Brazil, it had become famous there. Now handsomely translated for the first time into English by Poet Bishop, the book proves appealing, though it is scarcely the work of a genius.

Diamond Fever. Helena’s father was the son of an English doctor named Dayrell who had settled in Brazil because he had a “weak chest.” Her mother was one of ten daughters of a Brazilian who married off his girls without their leave by the simple process of interviewing the proposing swains. Helena records family stories of how the girls “used to peek through the keyhole and tell each other, ‘I think that so-and-so’s mine.’ ” Helena’s mother was one of only two who married for love, and it was—as charmingly seen through a child’s eyes—a beautiful marriage. But daddy was hooked by the diamond fever, and no amount of hard work helped because he never found enough diamonds. Helena spent long hours at housework when she should have been doing her schoolwork, and mamma tried all sorts of ways of making money (selling pastries, vegetables, etc.), always with disastrous luck.

Helena was brilliant but pretty much a failure in school. She was skinny, freckled, and given to uncontrollable giggling even in the presence of sorrow. Her special love was her maternal grandmother, a lady so old and fat and on such good terms with the bishop that she was permitted “to hear Mass from her bedroom window.” In a devoutly Catholic town (“If grandma would give me the money she spends on Masses, I’d be rich. I don’t know if what I’m writing is a sin”) Helena went through all the religious forms. Yet she could steal a brooch from her mother and convince herself that the idea “was given to me by Our Lady.”

Girlish Sins. The Diary is full of the fun, the beauty, and some of the pain of growing up in a primitive town where recently freed slaves were still living with their old masters by choice. Helena is by turns gay and sad, willful and full of remorse for her girlish sins. But one thing she is from beginning to end—a fine little writer, with a gift for precise observation that many an adult writer develops only after years of practice. She is now 77, wrote nothing else that got into print. But to the small shelf of notable writing by children she added a record of open-eyed youth that is a pleasure to read.

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