The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (2 page)
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Authors: Fernando Pessoa
Introduction
Introduction
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Fernando Pessoa has the advantage of living more in ideas than in himself
.
Álvaro de Campos
When he died on November 30, 1935, the Lisbon newspapers paid tribute, without fanfare, to the “great Portuguese poet” Fernando Pessoa, who was born in Lisbon in 1888. He was remembered for
Mensagem
(Message), a book of forty-four poems published in 1934, and for some 160 additional poems published in magazines and journals, several of which he helped to found and run. The author, a single man survived by a half sister and two half brothers, had the peculiarity of publishing his poetry under three different names besides his own—Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Alvaro de Campos—which he claimed were not mere pseudonyms, since it wasn’t just their names that were false. They were false personalities, with biographies, points of view, and literary styles that differed from Pessoa’s. They were names that belonged to invented
others
, whom their inventor called “heteronyms.” Pessoa also published over a hundred pieces of criticism, social commentary, and creative prose, including passages from
The Book of Disquiet
, whose authorship he credited to “Bernardo Soares, assistant bookkeeper in the city of Lisbon.” Another peculiarity about this author—mentioned by the literary compeer who delivered the brief funeral address—was that he
wrote poems in English, some of which he published in chapbooks, for the benefit (according to the compeer) of “the literary
cercles
of serene Albion.” In fact, scarcely anyone in Portugal had read them. French was the second language of those who had one.
Still another peculiarity—this one a complete secret—was that Pessoa’s death marked the birth of a far larger writer than anyone had imagined. It was a slow birth that began only in the 1940s, when Pessoa’s posthumous editors opened up the now legendary trunk in which the author had deposited his legacy to the world: twenty-nine notebooks and thousands upon thousands of manuscript sheets containing unpublished poems, unfinished plays and short stories, translations, linguistic analyses, horoscopes, and nonfiction on a dizzying array of topics—from alchemy and the Kabbala to American millionaires, from “Five Dialogues on Tyranny” to “A Defense of Indiscipline,” from Julian the Apostate to Mahatma Gandhi. The pages were written in English and French as well as in Portuguese, and very often in an almost illegible script. The most surprising discovery was that Pessoa wrote not under four or five names but under forty or fifty. The editors timidly stuck to poetry by the names they knew—Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos, and Pessoa himself—and further limited their selection to manuscripts that were easy to transcribe. It wasn’t until the 1980s that reliable, relatively complete editions of poetry by the main heteronyms began to appear, and no such edition has yet appeared for the poetry signed by Pessoa himself, much of which still needs to be “lifted” from the manuscripts. Pessoa’s English heteronyms and his one French heteronym remained virtually unpublished until the 1990s, when many of the minor Portuguese heteronyms also began to make their way into print.
It’s impossible to know how much psychological and emotional space the heteronyms occupied, or opened up, in their creator. In the real world Pessoa was a loner, by choice and by natural inclination. He was in love once, if at all, and his intimacy with friends was restricted to literary matters. As a young man he moved from one neighborhood to another, staying sometimes with relatives, sometimes in rented rooms, but from 1920 on he lived at the same address—with his mother until
her death in 1925, and then with his half sister, her husband, and their two children. Family members have reported that the mature Pessoa was affectionate and good-humored but resolutely private.
Pessoa the child was the same way, according to people who knew him at school in Durban, South Africa, where he lived from age seven to seventeen. His father had died when he was five, and his mother remarried Portugal’s newly appointed consul to Durban, a boom town in what was then the British colony of Natal. Shy foreigner though he was, Fernando Pessoa quickly stood out among his classmates, none of whom could surpass him in English composition. English writers—including Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Carlyle—were the formative influence on his literary sensibility, and English was the language in which he began to write poetry. Pessoa returned to Lisbon to attend university but soon dropped out, and it was his knowledge of English that enabled him to make a living as a freelance, doing occasional translations and drafting letters in English (he also wrote some in French) for Portuguese firms that did business abroad.
In 1920 Pessoa’s mother, once more a widow, also returned from South Africa to Lisbon, accompanied by three grown children from her second marriage. Pessoa’s half brothers soon emigrated to England, and Pessoa thought to do the same toward the end of his life, though probably not very seriously. Since stepping off the
Herzog
, the ship that had brought him back to Lisbon in 1905, Pessoa had never strayed far from his native city, which became a more frequent reference in his writing as he got older, especially in
The Book of Disquiet.
In a passage dating from the 1930s (Text 130) Bernardo Soares, the book’s fictional author, called Lisbon the “crucial address” of “the main literary influences on my intellectual development,” which were none other than the common, everyday people whom the bookkeeper worked with. Had Pessoa written those words in his own name, they would have been an exaggeration, but the people who were part of the scenery in the Lisbon he inhabited—shopkeepers, restaurant waiters, streetcar operators, sellers of lottery tickets, fruit vendors, delivery boys, office workers, schoolchildren—are a striking presence in his literary work, partly because of the absence of more intimate kinds of social contact: romance, close friendships,
family life. It seems, for the same reason, that a few of those almost anonymous people were a strong, if quiet, presence in Pessoa’s sentimental life. It was the case, probably, of the tobacco shop owner who inspired poems signed by Campos and by Pessoa himself. And it was surely the case of the barber who made cameo appearances in
The Book of Disquiet
and elsewhere. Among the family members and the literary people at the funeral on December 2, he was spotted—the barber—paying, or repaying, a kind of respect.
“I prefer prose to poetry as an art form for two reasons, the first of which is purely personal: I have no choice, because I’m incapable of writing in verse.” To be able to make such a statement, Fernando Pessoa—the greatest Portuguese poet of the last four centuries—lent his typewriter to Bernardo Soares, a literary alter ego who wrote only prose. But what was the point of having Soares write, not just a simple statement of personal preference (or competence), but a five-paragraph eulogy for
The Book of Disquiet
(Text 227) that defended prose as the highest art form, greater than music or poetry? No point at all. It probably just reflected how Pessoa felt, in the persona of Bernardo Soares and even in his own person, on the 18th of October, 1931, the day he wrote it. Pessoa made his fame as a poet, but he embarked on literally hundreds of prose projects large and small: dozens of short stories, twenty or more plays, detective novels, philosophical treatises, sociological and psychological studies, books on Portuguese culture and history, a tour guide of Lisbon, pamphlets about sundry political and economic issues, astrological works, essays on religion, literary criticism, and more. Few of these ever arrived at or near completion, but as the years went by and Pessoa launched new projects, he did not abandon the old ones.
The Book of Disquiet
, which he worked on furiously from 1913 to 1919, yawed in the doldrums in the 1920s, to return in its fullest splendor in the thirties, though it proceeded, as it always had, without firm direction, never finding nor even seeking a port of arrival.
“What’s necessary is to sail, it’s not necessary to live!” shouted Pompey the Great to his frightened sailors after ordering them to weigh anchor in a heavy storm. Those words, reported by Plutarch, became Pessoa’s motto, which he expressed—like his own self—in multiple versions, including “It’s not necessary to live, only to feel”
(The Book of Disquiet
, Text 124) and “Living isn’t necessary; what’s necessary is to create” (in a random note). Pessoa’s world was almost all ocean, dotted by occasional islands of truth and its corollary, beauty, though he realized that those might after all be illusions, the reward of much sailing. There was also, as if it were a motive for the voyage, a not too insistent hope, or belief, in unknown lands that were perhaps worth discovering. But it was essentially a voyage of self-discovery, or self-invention (“To pretend is to know oneself”)—an existential circumnavigation that would not end until Pessoa did. In the last years of his life, that self-exploration became less “inventive” and more investigative, more urgently expository, as if Pessoa sensed that time was running out. He tried to get to the heart of the matter he called the soul, and prose—in his letters, in
The Education of the Stoic
, and especially in
The Book of Disquiet—
became a privileged vehicle. Which brings us to the second and real reason Bernardo Soares preferred prose to poetry:
In prose we speak freely. We can incorporate musical rhythms, and still think. We can incorporate poetic rhythms, and yet remain outside them. An occasional poetic rhythm won’t disturb prose, but an occasional prose rhythm makes poetry fall down.
Prose encompasses all art, in part because words contain the whole world, and in part because the untrammeled word contains every possibility for saying and thinking.
In Pessoa the untrammeled word did not necessarily probe more deeply than poetry, but it drew a closer, more naked picture of its subject. This was particularly true in the 1930s when, with no more youthful striving after literary effects, that word became truly, completely free.
Pessoa’s prose was even more fragmentary than his poetry, or more conspicuously so. His failure (except in
Message
and 35
Sonnets
) to
organize his poetry into neat and orderly books hardly affects our appreciation of the individual poems that would have gone into them, and the same holds true for many of the finished and even unfinished passages from
The Book of Disquiet
But the page of perfectly gauged dialogue, the exact explanation of a protagonist’s motives, or the paragraph that lays down an astonishingly clear argument, necessarily suffers without the rest of the play, the short story, or the essay for which it was written. Suffers, that is, in its ability to make an impact on the reader. Pessoa wanted to make such an impact, even if the only reader would be him, but he couldn’t stand to put the final period to a work that was less than perfect. Most writers put it there anyway, because life is short, but Pessoa’s destiny—or so he wrote in a letter breaking off with Ophelia Queiroz, his only paramour—belonged to “another Law” and served “Masters who do not relent.” He patiently endured under the weight of his written fragments, as if waiting for the Architect to reveal the plan.
