The Book of Disquiet (74 page)

To Adolfo Casais Monteiro
*
– 13 January 1935

How do I write in the name of these three? Caeiro, through sheer and unexpected inspiration, without knowing or even suspecting that I’m going to write in his name. Ricardo Reis, after an abstract meditation which suddenly takes concrete shape in an ode. Campos, when I feel a sudden impulse to write and don’t know what. (My semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, who in many ways resembles Álvaro de Campos, always appears when I’m sleepy or drowsy, so that my qualities of inhibition and rational thought are suspended; his prose is an endless reverie. He’s a semi-heteronym because his personality, although not my own, doesn’t differ from my own but is a mere mutilation of it. He’s me without my rationalism and emotions. His prose is the same as mine, except for a certain formal restraint that reason imposes on my own writing, and his Portuguese is exactly the same – whereas Caeiro writes bad Portuguese, Campos writes it reasonably well but with mistakes such as ‘me myself’ instead of ‘I myself’, etc., and Reis writes better than I, but with a purism I find excessive…)

C. FROM THE UNFINISHED PREFACE TO

FICTIONS OF THE INTERLUDE

I place certain of my literary characters in stories, or in the subtitles of books, signing my name to what they say; others I project totally, with
my only signature being the acknowledgement that I created them. The two types of characters may be distinguished as follows: in those that stand absolutely apart, the very style in which they write is different from my own and, when the case warrants, even contrary to it; in the characters whose works I sign my name to, the style differs from mine only in those inevitable details that serve to distinguish them from each other.

I will compare some of these characters to show, through example, what these differences involve. The assistant bookkeeper Bernardo Soares and the Baron of Teive – both are me-ishly extraneous characters – write with the same basic style, the same grammar, and the same careful diction. In other words, they both write with the style that, good or bad, is my own. I compare them because they are two instances of the very same phenomenon – an inability to adapt to real life – motivated by the very same causes. But although the Portuguese is the same in the Baron of Teive and in Bernardo Soares, their styles differ. That of the aristocrat is intellectual, without images, a bit – how shall I put it? – stiff and constrained, while that of his middle-class counterpart is fluid, participating in music and painting but not very architectural. The nobleman thinks clearly, writes clearly, and controls his emotions, though not his feelings; the bookkeeper controls neither emotions nor feelings, and what he thinks depends on what he feels.

There are also notable similarities between Bernardo Soares and Álvaro de Campos. But in Álvaro de Campos we are immediately struck by the carelessness of his Portuguese and by his exaggerated use of images, more instinctive and less purposeful than in Soares.

In my efforts to distinguish one from another, there are lapses that weigh on my sense of psychological discernment. When I try to distinguish, for example, between a musical passage of Bernardo Soares and a similar passage of my own…

Sometimes I can do it automatically, with a perfection that astonishes me; and there’s no vanity in my astonishment, since, not believing in even a smidgen of human freedom, I’m no more astonished by what happens in me than I would be by what happens in someone else – both are perfect strangers.

Only a formidable intuition can serve as a compass on the vast expanses of the soul. Only with a sensibility that freely uses the
intelligence without being contaminated by it, although the two function together as one, is it possible to distinguish the separate realities of these imaginary characters.

♦

These derivative personalities or, rather, these different inventions of personalities, fall into two categories or degrees, which the attentive reader will easily be able to identify by their distinctive characteristics. In the first category, the personality is distinguished by feelings and ideas which I don’t share. At the lower level within this category, the personality is distinguished only by ideas, which are placed in rational exposition or argument and are clearly not my own, at least not so far as I know. ‘The Anarchist Banker’* is an example of this lower level;
The Book of Disquiet
, and the character Bernardo Soares, represent the higher level.

The reader will note that, although I’m publishing
The Book of Disquiet
under the name of a certain Bernardo Soares, assistant bookkeeper in the city of Lisbon, I have not included it in these
Fictions of the Interlude
. This is because Bernardo Soares, while differing from me in his ideas, his feelings, and his way of seeing and understanding, expresses himself in the same way I do. His is a different personality, but expressed through my natural style, with the only distinguishing feature being the particular tone that inevitably results from the particularity of his emotions.

In the authors of
Fictions of the Interlude
, it’s not only their ideas and feelings that differ from mine; their technique of composition, their very style, is also different from mine. Each of these authors is not just conceived differently but created as a wholly different entity. That’s why poetry predominates here. In prose it is harder to other oneself.

Notes

Before his death Pessoa gathered together several hundred texts into a large envelope labelled
Livro do Desassossego
(
Book of Disquiet
), and these take up the first five envelopes of the Pessoa Archives, housed at the National Library in Lisbon, but there are several hundred additional texts – scattered throughout the rest of the author’s papers – that are specifically labelled
L. do D.
In the notes that follow, the manuscripts for the Portuguese texts are designated, in square brackets, by their official archival reference numbers (with the envelope number appearing before the slash) and identified as typed, handwritten (‘ms.’), or partly typed, partly handwritten (‘mixed’). Those texts that were not actually identified by Pessoa as belonging to
The Book of Disquiet
(and whose inclusion in
The Book
is therefore conjectural) are marked by a
†.
The manuscripts contain over 600 alternate wordings in the margins and between the lines, but only the most significant ones are cited in these notes, where the main concern has been to elucidate literary, historical and geographical references.

Preface

[6/1–2, typed; 7/21, ms.] Pessoa wrote various prefatory texts for
The Book of Disquiet
, two of which appear here. Both were no doubt written in the 1910s, but the second text describes a fictional author who lived in two rented rooms, not one, and who seemed rather more prosperous than the assistant bookkeeper described elsewhere. Perhaps the author/narrator, who in
The Book
’s early days was called Vicente Guedes (see
Introduction
), was still not clearly delineated in Pessoa’s mind, though there is a first-person text (AP-3) in which Guedes refers to his fourth-floor rented room (singular) and to his profession as an assistant bookkeeper. Two other prefatory passages that mention Guedes by name appear in Appendix I (AP- 1and AP-2), while several others – written from the narrator’s point of view, not from Pessoa’s
– have been incorporated into the section titled ‘A Factless Autobiography’.
Orpheu
was founded by Fernando Pessoa, Mário de Sá-Carneiro and Luís de Montalvor in 1915. Although only two issues were published, the review was pivotal for the development of twentieth-century Portuguese literature.

A Factless Autobiography

1
[4/38–9, typed] Dated 29 March 1930. Marked
beginning passage
.
Vigny
: Alfred de Vigny (1797–1863), French author of poems, essays, plays and a novel. Disillusioned in love, unsuccessful in politics, and unenthusiastically received by the French Academy, he withdrew from society and became increasingly pessimistic in his writings, which recommended stoical resignation as the only noble response to the suffering life condemns us to.

2
[5/29, ms.] Marked
B. of D. (Preface?).

3
[1/88, mixed] The first three paragraphs were published in
Solução Editora
, no. 2, 1929. The last two paragraphs were handwritten on the original typescript.

Cesário Verde
(1855–86) may be considered the father of modern Portuguese poetry. The vivid images and exuberance of his verses, often set in the streets of downtown Lisbon, find echoes in the poetry of Pessoa’s heteronym Álvaro de Campos.

4
[1/59, ms.]

5
[2/7, typed] Published in
Solução Editora
, no. 4, 1929.

6
[1/79, ms.]

7
[2/12–13, typed]

8
[1/73, typed]

9
[2/4, typed]

fourth-floor room
: The original reads ‘second-floor’, presumably a slip, since all other references situate Soares’s rented room on the fourth floor.

10
[1/58, typed]

11
[9/34, ms.]

12
[3/17, typed]

13
[2/90, ms.]

14
[1/22, typed]

15
†[28/21, ms.] Marked
Preface
, but with no explicit indication that it pertains to
The Book of Disquiet
.

16
[2/53, typed]

Cascais
and
Estoril
: Beach towns south-west of Lisbon.
Cais do Sodré
: One of Lisbon’s wharfs and the site of the railway station that serves the Cascais line.

17
†[9/52, ms.]

18
[2/39–41, ms.]

delivery boy
: In Pessoa’s time these were a regular presence on many downtown Lisbon street corners. Self-employed, they would deliver or fetch objects large and small as well as run errands.

19
[1/76, typed] Dated 22 March 1929.

Moorish ladies of folklore
: Since the Moorish occupation of Iberia, legends of enchanted Moorish ladies have abounded in Portuguese and Spanish folklore. The typical lady is a ravishing beauty, good-hearted, often a princess, and an inhabitant of nature, sometimes haunting a cave or a well.

20
†[28/7, typed] Marked
Preface
, but with no explicit indication that it pertains to
The Book of Disquiet
.

21
†[15B
³
/86] Dated 24 March 1929.

22
†[94/75, ms.]

23
[7/44, ms.]

24
[1/64, ms.]

25
[1/15, typed]

26
[4/44, ms.]

27
[2/70, typed]

28
[2/66, ms.]

29
[3/18, typed] Dated 25 December 1929.

30
[4/29, ms.]

Vieira
: Father António Vieira (1608–97), a Jesuit who spent much of his life in Brazil, is one of the great Portuguese prose stylists. His enormous output includes about 200 sermons and over 500 letters.

31
[3/21, typed]

32
[3/6, ms.] The manuscript evidence indicates that this passage was written during
The Book
’s last phase. The section titled ‘A Disquiet Anthology’ contains a ‘Symphony of the Restless Night’, written during the first phase.
tomb of God
: ‘tomb of the world’/‘tomb of everything’ (alternate versions)

33
[3/22, typed]

34
[2/67–8, ms.]

35
[7/4, ms.]

36
[3/26, typed] Dated 5 February 1930.

Vieira
: See note for Text
30
.

Sousa
: Frei Luís de Sousa (1555–1632), a Portuguese Dominican whose biographies of religious figures are admired for the limpid elegance of their prose.
dignity of my soul
: ‘divinity of my soul’/‘detachment of my soul’ (alternate versions)

37
[9/24, ms.]

38
[5/79, ms.]

39
[2/74, mixed] Dated 21 February 1930.

40
[3/67, typed]

41
[3/15, typed] Dated 14 March 1930.

42
[1/81–2, mixed]

on the surface of never changing
: ‘on its surface, which is all it consists of’ (alternate version)

43
[3/13, ms.] Dated 23 March 1930.

44
[1/77, typed]

45
[9/9, typed]

46
[4/34, typed] Dated 24 March 1930.

Caeiro
: Alberto Caeiro, one of Pessoa’s poetic heteronyms, supposedly lived in the country. The cited verses are from the seventh poem of
The Keeper of Sheep
.

47
[1/24, typed]

48
[1/32, ms.]

49
[1/34, typed]

50
[2/45, mixed]

Graça or São Pedro de Alcântara
: Two look-out points on either side of downtown Lisbon.