The Book of Disquiet (4 page)

Pessoa, forever indecisive, just like his semi-heteronym, had gone back to his original plan: a book of prose, in elegant and even poetic Portuguese, but still and always prose. What had ever given him the idea of bringing poetry into it?

The Book of Disquiet
had become one of Pessoa’s pet projects, and he desperately, if somewhat ineptly, tried to make its disparate parts cohere. The prose that had made its way into
The Book
was so heterogeneous that its new agent of cohesion, Bernardo Soares, would have to be much more than a diarist. To make Soares a believable author of such a multifaceted work, Pessoa decided to widen his literary horizons in a big way, making him even a poet. If Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis, fundamentally poets, also wrote prose, why shouldn’t Bernardo Soares write verses? But no: this would have only complicated matters. Pessoa realized this and backed down, repossessing the poems he had passed on to Soares, as we can deduce from a letter, written in 1935, which cites ‘Slanting Rain’ as an ‘orthonymic’ work (attributed to Pessoa himself). Soares retained possession of the poetic prose he had inherited, however, and he legitimated that inheritance by his own practice, admirably demonstrated
in the excerpt (Text 386) he wrote on 28 November 1932, an obvious sequel to ‘In the Forest of Estrangement’. And in another text (420), Soares ingeniously brings the ‘Funeral March of Ludwig II, King of Bavaria’ to the Rua dos Douradores. Fighting his incurable tendency to creative and intellectual entropy, Pessoa sought at least a relative unity for his
Book of Disquiet
, ‘without giving up the dreaminess and logical disjointedness of its intimate expression’ (from the cited ‘note’ in Appendix III).

In Bernardo Soares – a prose writer who poetizes, a dreamer who thinks, a mystic who doesn’t believe, a decadent who doesn’t indulge – Pessoa invented the best author possible (and who was just a mutilated copy of himself) to provide unity to a book which, by nature, couldn’t have one. The semi-fiction called Soares, more than a justification or handy solution for this scattered
Book
, is an implied model for whoever has difficulty adapting to real, normal, everyday life. The only way to survive in this world is by keeping alive our dream, without ever fulfilling it, since the fulfilment never measures up to what we imagine – this was the closest thing to a message that Pessoa left, and he gave us Bernardo Soares to show us how it’s done.

How is it done? By not doing. By dreaming insistently. By performing our daily duties but
living
, simultaneously, in the imagination. Travelling far and wide, in the geography of our minds. Conquering like Caesar, amid the blaring trumpets of our reverie. Experiencing intense sexual pleasure, in the privacy of our fantasy. Feeling everything in every way, not in the flesh, which always tires, but in the imagination.

To dream, for example, that I’m simultaneously, separately, severally the man and the woman on a stroll that a man and woman are taking along the river. To see myself – at the same time, in the same way, with equal precision and without overlap, being equally but separately integrated into both things – as a conscious ship in a South Sea and a printed page from an old book. How absurd this seems! But everything is absurd, and dreaming least of all. (Text 157)

To dream one’s life and to live one’s dreams, feeling what’s dreamed and what’s lived with an intensity so extreme it makes the distinction between the two meaningless – this credo echoed in nearly every reach
of Pessoa’s universe, but Soares was its most practical example. While the other heteronymic stars
talk
about dreaming and feeling everything, Bernardo Soares actually has vivid, splendorous dreams and feels each tiny circumstance of his workaday life on the Rua dos Douradores. The post-Symbolist texts with misty forests, lakes, kings and palaces are crucial, for they are the imaginary substance, the very dreams of Soares, put into words. And the various ‘Rainy Landscapes’, with their excruciating descriptions of storms and winds, are illustrations of how to really
feel
the weather and, by extension, all of nature and the life that surrounds us.

Pessoa was keenly aware that ‘Nature is parts without a whole’ (from Caeiro’s
The Keeper of Sheep
, XLVII) and that the notion of unity is always an illusion. Well, not quite. A relative, provisional, fleeting unity, a unity which doesn’t pretend to be smooth and absolute or even unambiguously singular, which is built around an imagination, a fiction, a writing instrument – this was the unity that Fernando Pessoa, in Bernardo Soares, was betting on. And he won his bet.
The Book of Disquiet
, whose ultimate ambition was to reflect the jagged thoughts and fractured emotions that can inhabit one man, achieved this modest but genuine unity. There was perhaps, in the twentieth century, no other book as honest as this
Book
, which can hardly claim to be one.

Honesty. It went unmentioned until now, and it’s what most distinguishes
The Book of Disquiet
. It is probably fair to call honesty the pre-eminent virtue of great writers, for whom the most personal things become, through the alchemy of truth, universal. Strangely or not, it was precisely in his faking, in his self-othering – a profoundly personal process – that Pessoa was astonishingly true and honest to himself. By being so who he was, and so very Portuguese, he succeeded in being the most foreign and universal of writers. ‘My nation is the Portuguese language,’ he declared through Bernardo Soares (Text 259), but he also said: ‘I don’t write in Portuguese. I write my own self.’ And immediately before these words he exclaims: ‘What Hells and Purgatories and Heavens I have inside me! But who sees me do anything that disagrees with life – me, so calm and peaceful?’ (Text 443).

In the lucidly felt prose of Bernardo Soares, Pessoa wrote himself, wrote his century, and wrote us – down to the hells and heavens we
harbour, even if we’re unbelievers, like Pessoa. Soares called this implausible book his ‘confessions’, but they have nothing to do with the religious or literary variety. In these pages there is no hope or even desire for remission or salvation. There is also no self-pity, and no attempt to aestheticize the narrator’s irremediably human condition. Bernardo Soares doesn’t confess except in the sense of ‘recognize’, and the object of that recognition is of no great consequence. He describes his own self, because it is the landscape that is closest and most real, the one he can describe best. And what was flesh became word. Here is the assistant bookkeeper’s confession:

I am, in large measure, the selfsame prose I write… I’ve made myself into the character of a book, a life one reads. Whatever I feel is felt (against my will) so that I can write that I felt it. Whatever I think is promptly put into words, mixed with images that undo it, cast into rhythms that are something else altogether. From so much self-revising, I’ve destroyed myself. From so much self-thinking, I’m now my thoughts and not I. I plumbed myself and dropped the plumb; I spend my life wondering if I’m deep or not, with no remaining plumb except my gaze that shows me – blackly vivid in the mirror at the bottom of the well – my own face that observes me observing it.

(Text 193, dated 2 September 1931)

No other writer ever achieved such a direct transference of self to paper.
The Book of Disquiet
is the world’s strangest photograph, made out of words, the only material capable of capturing the recesses of the soul it exposes.

Richard Zenith, 2001

NOTES

It is in his
Notes for the Memory of my Master Caeiro
that Álvaro de Campos apprises us of Pessoa’s non-existence. Reis was described as ‘a Greek Horace who writes in Portuguese’ in a letter Pessoa wrote to an Englishman on 31 October 1924. The fragmentary passage titled ‘Diary of Vicente Guedes’ was transcribed by Teresa Rita Lopes for her
Pessoa por Conhecer
(Lisbon: Estampa, 1990), where a list specifying Guedes’s translating duties was also
published. Guedes’s unpublished ‘O Asceta’ (‘The Ascetic’) is catalogued in the Pessoa Archives under the number 2720
V
³
/1. The translated excerpt of the Campos poem dated 9 August 1934 is taken from
Fernando Pessoa & Co. – Selected Poems
(New York: Grove Press, 1998). The list of ten short stories attributed to Bernardo Soares is catalogued under 144 G/29, the publication programme that identifies Soares as a short-story writer under 144 G/38. The typed inventory of Soares’s literary production, on the Rua dos Douradores, is reproduced in my Introduction to the
Livro do Desassossego
. The Afterword to my edition of Teive’s
A Educação do Estóico
(
The Education of the Stoic
) (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1999) undertakes a thorough comparison of the Baron and Bernardo Soares.

Notes on the Text and Translation

Had Pessoa prepared his
Livro do Desassossego
(
The Book of Disquiet
) for publication, it would have been a smaller book. He planned to make a ‘rigorous’ selection from among all the texts he had written, to adapt the older ones to the ‘true psychology’ of Bernardo Soares, and to undertake ‘an overall revision of the style’ (see the ‘note’ in Appendix III). This operation would have resulted in a smooth, polished book with perhaps half as many pages, and perhaps half as much genius. Purged of whatever was fragmentary and incomplete, the book would have gained novelistic virtues such as plot and dramatic tension, but it would have run the risk of becoming just another book, instead of what it remains: a monument as wondrous as it is impossible.

Pessoa published twelve excerpts from
The Book of Disquiet
in literary magazines and left, in the famous trunk that contained his extravagant written life, about 450 additional texts marked
L. do D.
and/or included in a large envelope labelled
Livro do Desassossego
. Most of this material was incorporated in the first edition of the work, published only in 1982, forty-seven years after Pessoa’s death. It was a heroic effort, since Pessoa’s archives are notoriously labyrinthine and his handwriting often virtually illegible, and it was doomed – for these very reasons – to be seriously flawed. A new edition, published in 1990–91 (the first volume of which was republished, with extensive revisions, in 1997), presented improved readings and over one hundred previously unpublished texts, most of which were not explicitly identified with
The Book of Disquiet
, although the majority of them could have been penned or typed with Bernardo Soares in mind.

My own edition of the
Livro do Desassossego
(Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 1998) – which is the source text for this translation – makes further improvements in the readings, filling in most of the remaining
lacunas and correcting several hundred errors in previous transcriptions. I was more cautious about embracing material not specifically marked or set aside by Pessoa for inclusion. The borders of this work are fuzzy, but they exist. They exclude, for instance, the reams of political theory written by Pessoa. Nor is there a place for his writings in pure philosophy and literary criticism. But there are a number of stray and unidentified texts – my edition includes about fifty – that do seem to belong here. Seem to me, that is. It is impossible to avoid subjectivity when editing and publishing such a fragmentary
œuvre
as Pessoa’s.

This subjectivity tends to sheer arbitrariness when it comes to organizing this book, whose passages were scattered across the years and pages of Pessoa’s adult life. Chronological order? About a hundred passages written between 1929 and 1934 are dated, but only five during the first sixteen years of
Disquiet
’s existence. To attempt a chronology for the undated texts on the basis of stylistic or thematic affinities is treacherous or even foolhardy, as we can understand by looking at several dated texts, such as the aforementioned ‘sequel’ to ‘In the Forest of Estrangement’, which we would confidently situate in 1913 or 1914, if we didn’t know it was written on 28 November 1932. Text 429, conversely, is dated 18 September 1917 but reads exactly like Soares from the 1930s. An exhaustive analysis of paper and ink types and of Pessoa’s handwriting would probably yield a reasonably chronological order, but would that be a good way to publish the material? Pessoa had a few ideas on how to organize
The Book
, but chronological order wasn’t one he ever mentioned. It is true that many passages from the final phase were dated, but even then not the majority, and Pessoa never suggested that these be published as a group apart, separately from the older material.

What Pessoa did suggest shows only what a loss he was at to organize his
Book
. ‘Alternate passages like this with the long ones?’ he asked himself at the top of a passage (Text 201) that isn’t particularly short. Another passage (Text 124) carries the heading (written in English)
Chapter on Indifference or something like that
, suggesting a thematic organization. In the ‘note’ already cited, Pessoa mulled over whether it was better to publish ‘Funeral March for Ludwig II’ in a separate book, with other ‘Large Texts’ that had titles, or to leave it ‘as it is’.
And how was it? Mixed up with hundreds of other texts, large and small, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle without a discernible picture or pattern. Perhaps this would be the best way to go: an edition of loose pieces, orderable according to each reader’s fancy, or according to how they happen to fall.

Since a loose-leaf edition is impractical, and since every established order is the wrong order, the mere circumstance of publication entails a kind of original sin. Every editor of this
Book
, automatically guilty, should (and I hereby do) (1) apologize for tampering with the original non-order, (2) emphasize that the order presented can claim no special validity, and (3) recommend that readers invent their own order or, better yet, read the work’s many parts in absolutely random order.