Nom de Plume (15 page)

Because he never had children of his own, Pessoa was father to his heteronyms, and they were quite a handful. There was the suicidal Baron of Teive, who produced just one manuscript,
The Education of the Stoic
, having allegedly destroyed everything else he had written. Raphael Baldaya was an astrologer. Maria José was a nineteen-year-old hunchback consumptive suffering madly from unrequited love. And Thomas Crosse was an ardent advocate of Alberto Caeiro's work. Yes, Pessoa's heteronyms actually critiqued—sometimes savagely, sometimes kindly—one another's writings. They also collaborated on projects (Crosse worked with his brother, I. I. Crosse) and translated one another's work. These diverse personae—or, Pessoae, you might say—wrote thousands and thousands of pages, and most of those texts were left behind as fragments to be transcribed and translated after Pessoa's death. It's a vast archive, much of it untouched even to this day.

Aside from Pessoa's almost spiritual devotion to his work, his life in Lisbon was uneventful and his routine predictable. He was a strange and lonely man. He smoked eighty cigarettes daily and drank a lot. He hated having his photograph taken. He never arrived on time for an appointment, always showing up too early or too late. He had terrible posture. He was very interested in the occult. He dressed formally, with a bow tie and homburg hat. Obsessed with horoscopes, he considered making his living as an astrologer. He produced horoscopes for himself, his acquaintances, and even his heteronyms. He lost some of the few friends he had to suicide.

He is known to have had only one significant love affair—with a young woman named Ofélia de Queirós. (She eventually married, and died in 1991.) When they met, the aptly named Ofélia was nineteen and working as a secretary at the same firm where the thirty-one-year-old Pessoa worked. He declared his love for her one day with lines taken from
Hamlet
, and then kissed her, she recalled, “like a madman.”

After the failure of the relationship, Pessoa decided that love was a false notion, anyway. “It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love,” he wrote, arguing that “the repression of love sheds much more light on its nature than does the actual experience of it.” Yet Ofélia claimed that Pessoa was entirely to blame for their breakup. “Little by little, he withdrew until we stopped seeing each other altogether,” she recalled. “And this was done without any concrete reason whatsoever. He did not appear or write for several days because, as he said, there was something wrong with his head and he wanted to go to the insane asylum.” He had written her more than fifty letters—some affectionate, drunk with love, others bitter and accusatory: “Why can't you be frank with me?” he demanded in March 1920. “Why must you torment a man who never did any harm to you (or to anybody else) and whose sad and solitary life is already a heavy enough burden to bear, without someone adding to it by giving him false hopes and declaring feigned affections? What do you get out of it besides the dubious pleasure of making fun of me?”

Elsewhere, he expressed moments of insecurity and alienation: “I'm all alone—I really am. . . . I'm going crazy from this sense of isolation and have no one to soothe me, just by being near, as I try to go to sleep.” Yet he was just as quick to assume control and withdraw. “By the way,” he wrote a few weeks later, “although I'm writing you,
I'm not thinking about you.
I'm thinking about how much I miss the days
when I used to hunt pigeons.
” Pessoa also had Alvaro de Campos (“Naval Engineer”) write to Ofélia on his behalf, explaining that his friend's “mental state prevents him from communicating anything, even to a split pea.”

Some scholars contend that Pessoa was a latent homosexual who sublimated his sexual impulses.

Ultimately, the author remains, like his work, “vastly unfinished, hopelessly unstructured, and practically unknown,” as the Pessoa scholar and translator Richard Zenith has written. It is no accident that one volume of verse Zenith translated is titled
Pessoa & Co.
The Portuguese writer formed a Corporation of One, of which he was CEO and every employee from the top of the ladder to the bottom rung. Pessoa's dozens of constructed alternate selves, Zenith noted, “were instruments of exorcism and redemption. They were born to save him from this life that he felt ill-equipped to live, or that offended his aesthetic and moral sensibilities, or that simply bored him.” Although alter egos had become fashionable accessories for European writers in the early twentieth century, no one took the device as far as Pessoa did—and certainly no one has done so since. As the scholar Jorge de Sena said in 1977, at the first international symposium on Pessoa's work (held at Brown University), Pessoa was hardly the first to eradicate any trace of autobiography from his writing. Yet de Sena noted that even though the alter egos of modernists such as Gide, Joyce, and Eliot produced masterpieces, they never went to the extremes that Pessoa did. He annihilated himself in the name of artistic creation. “Unceasingly I feel that I was an other, that I felt other, that I thought other,” Pessoa wrote. “I am a spectator of myself. . . . I created myself, crevasse and echo, by thinking. I multiplied myself, by introspection. . . . I am other even in my way of being.”

“Poets don't have biographies,” Octavio Paz wrote in his introduction to
A Centenary Pessoa.
“Their work is their biography.” Who could make a stronger claim to this than Pessoa? “I am, in large measure, the selfsame prose I write,” he confessed. “I unroll myself in periods and paragraphs, I make myself punctuation marks. . . . I've made myself into the character of a book, a life one reads.”

George Steiner called Pessoa “one of the evident giants in modern literature.” John Hollander declared that if Pessoa had never existed, Jorge Luis Borges would have had to invent him. C. K. Williams praised Pessoa's “amazing audacities, his brilliance and his shyness.” Harold Bloom included Pessoa on a list of twenty-six writers he considered essential to the Western canon, including Dante, Shakespeare, and Proust, and argued that Pessoa was not a madman but a reborn Walt Whitman, “who gives separate names to ‘my self,' ‘the real me,' or ‘me myself,' and ‘my soul,' and writes wonderful books of poetry for all of them.”

Pessoa was the loving ringmaster, director, and traffic cop of his literary crew. He tended to each of their biographies with meticulous specificity, and attentively varied their styles, idioms, techniques, genres, ideologies, and interests. He killed some off and let others live. Whereas the work of poets is typically fed by outside stimuli, Pessoa's creativity seems to have fed off itself—like one of the contemporary artist Dana Schutz's famous “Self-Eater” paintings. One persona stirred another and another, and perhaps that apparently arbitrary transmission of energy explains why so much of the work by Pessoa & Co. took shape in unfinished fragments. The ideas born of this collective were too much for one man to set down on paper. “My character of mind is such that I hate the beginnings and the ends of things, for they are definite points,” he explained.

What was Pessoa aiming for with his menagerie? What drove him to it? Because “true” biographical information about him is so limited, it is difficult to say. All we have are his written accounts of his motives and the speculations of others. It seems that Pessoa was in pursuit of self-abdication. He wanted to escape both body and mind. “Pessoa sought to expel not only his sexual desires,” Zenith wrote, “but his friendly affections, his religious tendencies, his aggressive feelings, his humanitarian urges, his longing for adventure, his dreams, and his regrets.” Anyone attempting to define Pessoa reductively as a cluster of pathologies should think again. As Zenith noted, “Psychoanalysis is too poor a science to explain the case of Pessoa, who seems to have been simply, mysteriously, possessed by a demon—that of detachment.”

In a 1977 interview, Edwin Honig echoed the notion of Pessoa's essential unknowability: “Being both complex and simple, he is always hovering over some piece of mysterious ground, like moonscapes with mile-deep craters—terribly attractive but also very forbidding.” It's understandable that Pessoa has been compared to T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, both masters of the elusive. “Reading [Pessoa's] best poems,” Honig said, “you never know if you're plumbing the depths or if you're dangling there above without even touching ground. There's always that paradox in his secret, something unanswerable. Though he invites you to share it, he resists your advance the moment you accept the invitation.” (This was not unlike his personal life. In work and in his social dealings, he always preferred a bit of distance.)

By taking leave of himself, becoming invisible to the extent that he could, he was free to roam in contradiction, paradox, and complexity without being labeled as this or that kind of writer. He could hold up mirrors, play with them, and then smash them to bits. As Borges wrote in his “Ultra Manifesto,” the true artist does not reflect himself, but razes himself and creates from there. “Two aesthetics exist: the passive aesthetic of mirrors and the active aesthetic of prisms,” he wrote. “Guided by the former, art turns into a copy of the environment's objectivity or the individual's psychic history. Guided by the latter, art is redeemed, makes the world into its instrument, and forges—beyond spatial and temporal prisons—a personal vision.”

In private life, Pessoa was a demure and awkward man. But his “personal vision” as a writer was startling and brave, anything but ordinary.

Much more than mere pseudonyms, Pessoa's heteronyms were so wildly different from one another that they allowed him to explore his imagination endlessly, without paying any price. Well, up to a point: that very messiness, the refusal to be defined as just one man, explains why he is not more widely known today. (Pessoa once described his oeuvre as “a drama divided into people instead of into acts.”)

Certainly to literary types he is a significant figure (the blessing of Harold Bloom is no small thing), but his books are not easily found. It's true that more of his work has been translated into English over the past decade, but Pessoa hardly helped the matter of his legacy: he left behind a trunk full of journalism, cultural criticism, philosophy, plays, poems, political essays, and horoscopes, much of the work illegible and unfinished. The trunk was discovered, after his death, in his rented room in Lisbon.

The material—nearly thirty thousand manuscript pages—is daunting for even the most intrepid scholar to sift through. Some have begun, then abandoned, their Pessoa projects. The task of deciphering, organizing, and translating his work is still in progress, and perhaps will never be finished. Pessoa wrote haphazardly in different languages, on loose scraps of paper, in journals and notebooks, on the backs of envelopes, and on the official stationery of the firms for which he worked. As Richard Zenith has written, the work stands “like variously sized building blocks—some rough, others exquisitely fashioned—of an impossible but marvelous monument.” Pessoa didn't care for cohesiveness in any area of his life. Yet the quality of much of these thousands of texts, however fragmented or arbitrary, is generally exceptional; these are much more than the ramblings of a crazy person.

In his lifetime, he wasn't quite the Emily Dickinson of Lisbon—except for having apparently died a virgin. Mostly he kept to himself, to be sure, but he also published hundreds of poems, journalistic pieces, and essays. He became a respected intellectual figure, if not quite a celebrity, yet his literary genius was not widely recognized until after he died. In his home country he is now considered the greatest Portuguese poet since Luís de Camões, the sixteenth-century author of the epic
Os Lusíadas
(which Pessoa is said not to have cared much about). He is also regarded as one of the greatest modernists in any language and is one of the most fascinating figures in the history of literature.

O
n November 29, 1935, the forty-seven-year-old Pessoa suffered from abdominal pain and developed a high fever. He was taken to the Hospital de São Luís in Lisbon, where he wrote, in English, his last words: “I know not what tomorrow will bring.” The next day he died from cirrhosis of the liver.

A statue of Pessoa now stands near one of the coffeehouses he used to frequent. At the time of his death, those who knew his work understood that the country had lost an important man. “Fernando Pessoa is dead,” a young doctor (later to become a distinguished literary figure) named Miguel Torga wrote in his journal. “As soon as I heard the news in the paper, I closed my surgery and plunged into the mountains. There, with the pines and the rocks, I wept for the death of the greatest poet of our times, whom Portugal watched pass by in his coffin, on his way to immortality, without even asking who he was.”

In the opening lines of what is perhaps his best-known poem, “The Tobacco Shop,” Pessoa declares:

I'm nothing.

I'll always be nothing.

I can't want to be something.

But I have in me all the dreams of the world.

He was someone who felt like “nothing” to such an extent that he strove for self-expulsion, yet like Whitman, he contained everything that he needed, desiring nothing from the universe beyond his imagination. His statement presents the speaker as both meek and grandiose:
I have nothing, I am nothing, but don't you wish you had what I have? Don't you wish to be what I am?
Pessoa's self-abnegation is the source of his power and vitality. In his free-floating way, he implicates us, his readers, in the telling and interpretation of his story. As he wrote in his posthumously published masterpiece,
The Book of Disquiet:

I am the suburb of a non-existent town, the prolix commentary on a book never written. I am nobody, nobody. I am a character in a novel which remains to be written, and I float, aerial, scattered without ever having been, among the dreams of a creature who did not know how to finish me off.