Nom de Plume (14 page)

At around midnight on June 5, Porter told a hospital nurse: “Turn up the lights. I don't want to go home in the dark.” He was dead before seven o'clock in the morning.

His career had been brief—just under a decade—but in that time he'd won international acclaim and his work was translated into a dozen languages. Two years after he died, Doubleday published a deluxe, limited edition of his collected stories, which included an original manuscript page with each copy. Only twelve were printed. Priced at $125, they sold out right away.

In the obituary that ran in the
New York Times
, Porter was called “one of the best short story writers in America.” The article also noted that a year before his death, “O. Henry did something he was not in the habit of doing. He gave to the
New York Times
a story of his life, and it was the real story and not the invented narrative that went the rounds.” (He died having fooled the
Times
.)

The “real” story came out only in 1916, in the first biography of O. Henry, which fully exposed the imprisonment of William Porter and the launching of O. Henry's writing career. Additional volumes of O. Henry's short stories were released posthumously, and continued to sell millions of copies. In 1918, the O. Henry Memorial Award Prizes were established, given each year to the best short stories published in the United States and Canada, and intended to “strengthen the art of the short story and to stimulate younger authors.” Doubleday published the first collection of prizewinning stories in 1919. Today, Porter is best known for this award, rather than his own work, but at the time it proved that his name, above all others, was synonymous with the short story.

O. Henry was buried in Riverside Cemetery in Asheville, North Carolina. In honor of those famous first six words of “The Gift of the Magi,” visitors have made a tradition of leaving $1.87 at his grave—money he would no doubt have spent if he could.

He died a virgin

Chapter 7

Fernando Pessoa &
HIS HETERONYMS

Y
ou will never get to the bottom of Fernando Pessoa. There are too many of him.

“After looking for him in the poems, we look for him in the prose,” wrote the scholar and translator Edwin Honig. Yet we find him nowhere. This was, after all, a poet whose maxim was, “To pretend is to know oneself.” Cyril Connolly noted that Pessoa “hived off separate personalities like swarms of bees.” He pretended relentlessly, employing more than seventy personae in his self-searching circus. They were not so much disguises as extensions and iterations of himself. “How idyllic life would be,” he once wrote, “if it were lived by another person.” When he looked in the mirror, he saw a crowd.

For some authors, the task of writing is a descent into the self. Pessoa ventured in the opposite direction, using his heteronyms as a means of departure and claiming that within his mini-populace, he was the least “real” and compelling of the bunch. The others were constellations swirling around him. In the context of psychoanalysis, a split identity is seen as a wound that needs healing. But in Pessoa's mind(s), there was nothing disorienting about it. “I've divided all my humanness among the various authors whom I've served as literary executor,” he explained. “I subsist as a kind of medium of myself, but I'm less real than the others, less substantial, less personal, and easily influenced by them all.”

Although the basic facts of his life are now known, attempting to create a “biography” of Pessoa is a slippery task indeed. “There never was a good biography of a good novelist,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his journals. “There couldn't be. He is too many people, if he's any good.”

Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was very, very good.

Some things about him can be said for sure. He was born on June 13, 1888, in Lisbon, Portugal, and spent his first seven years there. His surname, ironically, means “person” in Portuguese. He was five when his father, the music critic Joaquim de Seabra Pessoa, died of tuberculosis. Six months later, Fernando's infant brother, Jorge, died. His paternal grandmother suffered from episodes of insanity and was in and out of mental hospitals for the last twelve years of her life. After his father died, his mother, Maria Madalena Nogueria Pessoa, remarried, and the family moved to South Africa, where the boy's stepfather, João Miguel Rosa, served as the Portuguese consul of Durban, a British-governed town. By that time, the precocious Pessoa could read and write, thanks partly to his cultured, nurturing mother. He produced what is believed to be his first poem in the summer of 1895, when he was seven years old, in response to learning that the family would be moving to South Africa. The poem was called “To My Dear Mother”:

Here I am in Portugal,

In the lands where I was born.

However much I love them,

I love you even more.

He attended a primary school run by French and Irish nuns and became fluent in French and English. Later, at Durban High School, he was a brilliant student. He won awards and shunned sports. A former classmate, Clifford Geerdts, recalled a boy who was morbid, as well as “meek and inoffensive and inclined to avoid association with his schoolfellows.”

Pessoa gained three younger half siblings from his mother's second marriage: Henriqueta (with whom he was closest), Luís, and João. He read and loved Keats, Shelley, Shakespeare, Dickens, Poe, and Byron. He began using false names to write: Charles Robert Anon, also known as C. R. Anon, and Alexander Search, for whom he printed calling cards. (Search once wrote a short story called “A Very Original Dinner,” in which the guests feast on human flesh.) Then there was Jean Seul, who wrote only in French. The shy boy created poems and stories, and even “edited” fake newspapers—not unlike an early-twentieth-century version of
The Onion
—with news, spoofs, editorials, riddles, and poems, all written by a staff of “journalists” who'd sprung from his imagination and whose biographies he'd made up. Later, in recalling his childhood, Pessoa wrote that “[a]ny nostalgia I feel is literary. I remember my childhood with tears, but they're rhythmic tears, in which prose is already being formed.” Nothing really mattered to him apart from his writing. Real life was beside the point. “I've always belonged to what isn't where I am and to what I could never be,” he once wrote, conceding his fixation on dreaming and escape. “All I asked of life is that it go on by without my feeling it.”

In 1905, at the age of seventeen, Pessoa returned to Lisbon to attend university. (He would never again leave the city.) Though he dropped out after two years, he got a fine education on his own by sequestering himself in the National Library to read literature, history, religion, and philosophy. He began writing short stories, some of them under the name “David Merrick,” as well as poems and essays, occasionally in Portuguese but more often in French and English.

Pessoa, who had very poor vision and wore glasses, lived with relatives or in rented rooms, chain-smoking, reading, writing, and earning a modest salary as a translator for companies that conducted business abroad. Later he worked as a bookkeeper. He had few friends. “Since childhood I had the tendency to create around me a fictitious world, surrounding myself with friends and acquaintances that never existed,” he wrote later. (As a boy, he'd invented the Chevalier de Pas, a faithful “playmate” who sent letters to him.) In 1910, the twenty-two-year-old admitted that “[t]he whole constitution of my spirit is one of hesitancy and doubt. Nothing is or can be positive to me; all things oscillate round me, and I with them, an uncertainty unto myself.” That his identity seemed so unstable was both distressing and consoling: “Am I happy or sad?” he asked in one poem. “My sadness consists in not knowing much about myself. But then my happiness consists in that too.”

His heteronyms, too, were filled with contradictions. “In each of us there is a differingness and a manyness and a profusion of ourselves,” wrote one of his mental offspring. This notion of endless expansiveness offered tremendous freedom. “I suffer the delicacy of my feelings with disdainful attention,” Pessoa explained, “but the essential thing about my life, as about my soul, is never to be a protagonist. I've no idea of myself, not even one that consists of a nonidea of myself. I am a nomadic wanderer through my consciousness.” Put it like that, and you can't help but envy him.

It is crucial to make the distinction that Pessoa's “others” were heteronyms rather than pseudonyms. He insisted that they were separate from him. “I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays,” he once wrote. In Pessoa country, unification was not possible or even desired. He was a breeder of beings, and always in pursuit of another. “I break my soul into pieces,” he wrote, “and into different persons.” He explained:

A pseudonymic work is, except for the name with which it is signed, the work of an author writing as himself; a heteronymic work is by an author writing outside his own personality: it is the work of a complete individuality made up by him, just as the utterances of some character in a drama of his would be.

Although Pessoa was timid and introspective and lived accordingly, he was no hermit. Nor did he attempt to hide his heteronyms—he was quite transparent about the fact of their existence. Unlike many pseudonymous authors, Pessoa was not secretive but the opposite: utterly guileless, psychologically honest, earnest rather than serving up ironic posturing. His heteronymic conceit didn't spring from a desire to fool anyone or attract attention. This was a private matter.

In his writings, Pessoa went so far as to explain the genesis of his heteronyms; he understood that readers would be curious. Suggesting that the identities derived from “an aspect of hysteria that exists within me,” he diagnosed himself as either “simply a hysteric” or a “neurasthenic hysteric,” but leaned toward the latter. Also, he noted, “The self-division of the I is a common phenomenon in cases of masturbation.”

He claimed that the various people he had “procreated” often sent him greetings, and that he could hear and see them, even if no one else could. (“Imaginary figures have more depth and truth than real ones,” he once wrote.) Was this the result of talent or sickness? He stopped short of calling himself crazy. Throughout his life Pessoa grappled with the possibility of his insanity—an anxiety undoubtedly fueled by his grandmother's illness—but he was never able to draw conclusions about himself one way or the other. Perhaps he recognized that what mattered was being sound enough to produce his work. That he was so obsessively drawn to Shakespeare's Hamlet was more telling than he may have realized.

He argued that just as a novelist becomes annoyed when readers assume that a character's feelings and experiences are mere stand-ins for the author's own, so too should people accept that Pessoa's heteronyms were utterly separate from him. If the heteronyms occasionally happened to express his ideas, so be it; but this was not by calculation on his part, only chance. Although he acknowledged the strangeness of all this, he felt it was not for him to judge whether the heteronyms actually did or did not exist. Besides, he noted, he wasn't even sure which one, Hamlet or Shakespeare, was more real—or “real in truth.” (He added that he had no proof that Lisbon existed, either.) Further, he said that he agreed with some of the theories expressed by his heteronyms but disagreed with others. All their work was dictated to him, yet they weren't seeking his advice or consent. He was not artist but amanuensis, nothing more.

Pessoa kept tight control over his social interactions, meeting acquaintances in coffeehouses and restaurants. One scholar noted that people who knew Pessoa described him as cordial, if inscrutable: “He could be a delightful man, full of charm and good humor, a humor that was very British, though with none of the traditional grossness in it. But this role was also that of a heteronym, which saved him from intimacy with anyone while allowing him to take a modest part in the normal feast of daily life.” A man who knew Pessoa in later years recalled, “Never, when I bade him goodbye, did I dare to turn back and look at him; I was afraid I would see him vanish, dissolved in air.”

There is no evidence that Pessoa yearned for more than his “modest part” in daily life, or that, in any case, he was willing to exert much effort. He once wrote that he wanted to be loved, but never to love: “Passivity pleased me. I was only content with activity just enough to stimulate me, not to let myself be forgotten.”

He was a lifelong outsider, but in 1910 he founded the magazine
A Águia
, and eventually he became part of the nascent Portuguese avant-garde, a group of intellectuals in Lisbon who founded a journal,
Orpheu
, introducing modernist literature to the country. Initially, it was ridiculed, but soon the publication won respect, and the criticism that appeared in
Orpheu
became highly influential. Only a few issues were released before it folded—but within this group of intellectuals, Pessoa found a strong sense of kinship. He went on to work with other literary journals (both as editor and writer), publish chapbooks, issue a political manifesto called
O Interregno
, and start a press called Olisipo, which failed. For a London editor, he translated into English three hundred Portuguese proverbs. The years leading up to 1920 were most productive for this young bohemian.

Literary activity constituted his “real” life, but Pessoa paid the bills with his dreary day job, working as a clerk. (He had this dull occupation in common with fellow toiling authors Herman Melville, Franz Kafka, and Constantine Cavafy.)

He wrote and wrote—in the daytime when he could, or else at night, and usually while standing up. On March 18, 1914, he had a kind of breakthrough: “I wrote some thirty-odd poems, one after another, in a sort of ecstasy, the nature of which I am unable to define,” he recalled. “It was the triumphant day of my life. . . . What followed was the appearance of someone in me to whom I immediately gave the name Alberto Caeiro. Forgive the absurdity of the sentence: In me there appeared my master.”

Caeiro, the first of Pessoa's major heteronyms, had been “born” in 1889, lived with an elderly aunt in the country, and would die in 1915. He had “no profession or any sort of education,” was of medium height, pale, with blue eyes, and died consumptive. Once, Caeiro spoke in an “interview” of his humble accomplishments: “I don't pretend to be anything more than the greatest poet in the world,” he said. “I noticed the Universe. The Greeks, with all their visual acuity, didn't do as much.” He was joined by another heteronym, Álvaro de Campos, born in Tavira on October 15, 1890 (“at 1:30 pm”). Campos was a bisexual, unemployed naval engineer who'd studied in Glasgow and was now living in Lisbon. He was tall, Pessoa noted—“1.75 meters tall, two centimeters taller than I”—and “slender with a slight tendency to stoop.” He was “fair and swarthy, a vaguely Jewish-Portuguese type, hair therefore smooth and normally parted on the side, monocled.” And he was a dandy who smoked opium and drank absinthe. In him, Pessoa invested “all the emotion that I allow neither in myself nor in my living.” Ricardo Reis was a classicist and physician born in 1887 (“not that I remember the day and the month, though I have them somewhere,” Pessoa wrote) and living in Brazil. Pessoa explained that Reis “is a Latinist by virtue of school training and a semi-Hellenist by virtue of his own efforts.”

Then there was the “semi-heteronym” Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper living in downtown Lisbon who “seems always to be tired or sleepy.” He was the closest to Pessoa's own voice, experience, and sensibility, and therefore the closest identity to a pseudonym. These men formed Pessoa's “dramatic ensemble,” and Campos even claimed that Pessoa did not exist.