PEARL K. BELL
41
some movies, we hope.... "
But Elizabeth was still too deeply absorbed in the translation of
Minha Vida
to spend much time brooding about the Pulitzer. In April
she flew in a tiny plane to Diamantina, and was delighted to find that it
had changed remarkably little since Helena's girlhood. It moved her
greatly, actually to behold the place, as she wrote in her introduction,
where the events in the diary
"really happened;
everything did take place,
day by day, minute by minute, once and only once, just the way Helena
says it did," and, back in Samambaia, she wrote her account of the visit
to Diamantina and her discovery of the book with unusual dispatch.
When
The Diary oj Helena Morley
was finally published toward the
end of 1957, the reviews were everything Elizabeth had hoped for, and
she was particularly pleased by Marianne Moore's succinct praise in the
magazine
Poetry.
But the sales and royalties (which she of course had to
share with Bernice Baumgarten, the Brant family, the publisher, and the
Internal Revenue Service) were a bitter disappointment. (In the long run,
though, Elizabeth's three years of hard labor and exhausting negotiations
were
rewarded; the little book remained in print for years, and there were
several paperback editions.) When the book came out in England in
1959, Elizabeth was elated by V. S. Pritchett's praise in
The New States–
man,
and hoped that the sales would be substantial. At the end of the
year she received a royalty check from Gollancz for the equivalent of
four dollars and ninety cents - as she ruefully commented in a letter,
"That's even worse than poetry." She and Lota once again had to aban–
don their plans for a trip to Italy in the spring, and Elizabeth, desperate
as ever for cash, began writing a detective story which, unsurprisingly, she
tossed ou.t after a chapter or two.
What proved a nagging frustration throughout Elizabeth's years in
Brazil was the difficulty of importing things from the United States
which couldn't be obtained in that backward country for love nor
money. Lota was determined to have the furnishings in her house be of
high order:
bom desenho,
well designed like the household objects dis–
played at the Museum of Modern Art.
Bom desenho
was less important to
Elizabeth, who wrote, "I am urging Lota to read the Life of Gandhi to
see if I can't gradually wean her away from the idea of worldly posses–
sions, but so far no luck." But Elizabeth did find herself needing or
craving things unknown in Brazil, and they couldn't just be ordered by
mail from Bloomingdale's for one maddening reason - the Brazilian
al–
fandega,
or customs, a peculiar and capricious institution. Packages were
routinely held at the customs house for months, and when they ran out
