The Book of the Dead (32 page)

At school in Durban he excelled, winning poetry prizes and creating his own “newspaper” in which he wrote all the stories and drew all the illustrations under the name Alexander Search. By the time he was fourteen he was sending riddles to a newspaper in Lisbon under the pseudonym Dr. Pancrácio (Dr. Simpleton). When his mother took the family back to Portugal in 1902, he sent newspaper articles in the opposite direction—to a
Durban newspaper—written under the name Tagus or signed with the initials J. G. H.C. or as Charles Robert Anon.

When Pessoa’s grandmother died in 1907 she left him some money. He used this to set up a small printing company called Ibis, but it soon failed. Few anecdotes survive about him, but his half brother João said that Fernando used to embarrass the family by staggering along the street, swinging on lampposts pretending to be drunk. Standing on one leg he would shout out “I am an ibis.” It’s fairly tame behavior for a twentieth-century poet, but in the staid confines of Lisbon society it probably seemed extreme. Later on, Pessoa didn’t need to pretend to be drunk, as alcohol increasingly took over his life.

Pessoa’s rejection of self is fascinating, especially as, of all ironies,
pessóa
means “person” in Portuguese. (His name should properly be spelled Pessóa but he removed the accent over the
o
because it felt more cosmopolitan.) Outside his immediate family Pessoa seems to have had no close friendships. He eked out a living as a translator, working for businesses that needed to conduct relationships with English speakers, and kept himself to himself in a set of small, furnished rooms in the old city of Lisbon. “Bernardo Soares” explained:

The idea of any social obligation—going to a funeral, discussing an office matter with someone, going to the station to wait for someone I know or don’t know—the mere idea disturbs a whole day’s thoughts.

When he was thirty-two he formed an attachment with a young woman of nineteen named Ophelia Queiroz. There was probably no physical side to the relationship; he just wrote to her under different heteronyms for nine months and then broke it off.
Almost a decade later, he made contact with Ophelia again but once more stopped communicating suddenly and refused to answer her letters. He also wrote to the English occultist Aleister Crowley, helping him to fake his own suicide when he visited Lisbon in 1930. Crowley must have found him beguiling. Pessoa would be gripped by what he called automatic writing, during which he transcribed communications from the Other Side. He also received messages from his dead uncle, from the English philosopher Henry More (1614–87), from an inscrutable entity called Wardor, and occasionally from Count Alessandro di Cagliostro. Some of these spirits rather sensibly urged Pessoa to stop masturbating and encouraged him to lose his virginity. He ignored their advice. Pessoa himself ridiculed the idea that actual spirits were getting in touch with him, but said he liked the fact that he could ask them for advice. They provided him with the social contact he couldn’t get from real people. For Pessoa, the only true reality was the one he (or, in this case, Soares again) created for himself:

The experience of life teaches nothing, just as history teaches nothing. True experience consists in restricting our contact with reality and increasing our analysis of that contact. In that way our sensibility extends and deepens itself, because everything is within us; all we have to do is look for it and know how to look for it.

Pessoa was twenty-six when he was first seriously “possessed” by one of his heteronyms. He was standing beside a chest of drawers when he was overcome by the urge to write poetry. Standing upright at the chest he pumped out thirty poems in quick succession, titling the collection “The Keeper of Sheep” and
signing it “Albert Caeiro.” He compared the experience to being in a trance, saying “my master had appeared inside me.”

The literary critic Cyril Connolly once said that Pessoa “hived off separate personalities like swarms of bees,” but these were only apparent on the page: They were never shared with anyone else. Pessoa was a loner. He dined in the same restaurant every day for thirty years.

If after I die, they want to write my biography,
There is nothing more simple.
There are only two dates: my day of birth, day of death.
Between one and the other all the days are mine.

Eerily, it was Alvaro de Campos (the monocle-wearing existentialist) who said, “Fernando Pessoa, strictly speaking, didn’t exist.” The man called “person,” with over a hundred different personalities, spent almost his entire life denying his own existence.

Like so many bright children denied proper affection from their parents, Pessoa read his way out of the lonely realities that surrounded him. The bustling pages of Dickens were a particular favorite:

There are children who really suffer because they weren’t able to live in real life with Mister Pickwick and could not shake hands with Mister Wardle. I am one of them. I have wept real tears over that novel, for not having lived in that time, with those people, real people.

Again this is not Fernando Pessoa but “Bernardo Soares.” Pessoa read the novels but Soares wrote about them. When reading any of Pessoa’s authors, the constant danger is to mistake
the mask for the man. Though Soares wrote “I will never write a page that will reveal me or reveal anything else,” Pessoa actually revealed a great deal. He is a unique writer—one who can be uniquely described as “multiply unique”—because he delivers so many different styles, so many ideas, such a rich mix of insights and possibilities. It’s almost as if he created his own self-referential literary tradition as both inspiration and company. His own life might have been sad, short, and tragic, but every bit as much as Florence Nightingale or Daniel Lambert, he—or rather his team—turned his misfortune into something of lasting value:

If a man only writes well when drunk, I would tell him: Get drunk. And if he said to me that his liver suffers because of that, I would answer: What is your liver? It’s a dead thing that lives as long as you do, while the poems you write live forever.

If Fernando Pessoa had more selves than he could handle, the English writer
Dawn Langley Simmons
(1937–2000) had only one, but she had two different bodies. Her life veered wildly between vaudeville and Greek tragedy, beginning as Gordon Langley Hall, the illegitimate son of Vita Sackville-West’s chauffeur. Later she was adopted by the English character actress Margaret Rutherford and had one of the first sex-change operations performed in America. In 1969 she broke another taboo by marrying her black butler in Charleston, South Carolina, the first legal mixed-race marriage in the state. As one of her obituaries commented: “It is a measure of the ascending scale of prejudice that, of all her transgressions, it was her crossing of the racial divide that most shocked her Southern neighbors.”

Dawn Simmons was born either with both male and female genitalia, or—as she always insisted—with female genitalia that an adrenal abnormality had caused to look male. In any event, although she always felt female, her family brought her up to be a boy called Gordon. “He” was raised by his grandmother Nelly Hall Ticehurst and spent the holidays at Sissinghurst, home of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson. As a small boy, their son, the writer and publisher Nigel Nicolson, played with Gordon, known to everyone as Dinky. Sackville-West was famously the inspiration for Virginia Woolf’s novel
Orlando
(1928), in which a boy is transformed into a beautiful woman. Simmons would later write in her autobiography: “Had she lived a little longer, Vita would have been intrigued to know that the child ‘Dinky,’ as she called me, would become a real-life Orlando.”

Gordon started writing early, having his first poem published at the age of four and his first interview—conducted sitting in Mae West’s lap—appearing in the
Sussex Express
when he was nine. In 1953, his grandmother died and he emigrated to Canada, becoming a teacher on an Ojibwa native reservation. Despite having had periods through “her” teens and “his” voice not having broken, Gordon still at this stage appeared male, and he wore a crew cut. He turned his experiences with the Ojibwa into a bestseller,
Me Papoose Sitter
, published in 1955, and soon after moved to New York, where he worked as a journalist and society biographer, writing critically acclaimed lives of Mary Todd Lincoln, Princess Margaret, and Jackie Kennedy. Witty, eccentric, and ostentatious, Gordon made friends across a very broad swath of New York society, from fellow writers like Carson McCullers to actresses like Joan Crawford and sportsmen like the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson. A distant relative, the wealthy painter Isabel
Whitney, took to him at once and invited him to live with her in her West Tenth Street mansion. Here Gordon met Margaret Rutherford, the matronly actress still best remembered as Madame Arcati, the medium in the 1945 film of Noël Coward’s
Blithe Spirit.
Rutherford had come hoping to be cast in the role of the grandmother in the proposed film of
Me Papoose Sitter
, but was immediately smitten by the person of Gordon himself. She described him as “a child … with large brown eyes inherited from some long dead Andalusian ancestor … a large green and red Amazon parrot named Marilyn on his shoulder.” When Isabel Whitney died of leukemia in 1962, Margaret Rutherford and her husband legally adopted Gordon. He was twenty-five.

Whitney left Gordon her house and $2 million estate. He used the proceeds to buy a faded 1840s pink stucco mansion in the gay neighborhood of Charleston, South Carolina. Gordon displayed impeccable interior design sense, filling the house with Chippendale and early American furniture and transforming the garden with designs sent over by Vita Sackville-West. He was regarded as a fixture in Charleston high society: an eligible, if undeniably camp, bachelor. He once threw a coming-out party for two of his dogs, where the pooches were displayed on velvet cushions, dressed in chenille, long gloves, and pearls.

Then, in 1968, it all changed. Gordon checked himself into the brand-new Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and underwent corrective genital surgery and a course of counseling. One of the psychiatric reports noted with a hint of foreboding that despite her high intelligence, as far as men were concerned, the newly female Dawn had “the mind of a fourteen-year-old girl.” So it was to prove. She returned to Charleston as Dawn Pepita Hall, sporting “a Dippity-Do
hairstyle—a dowdy doppelganger of Jackie Kennedy” according to one neighbor—and within a very few months announced her engagement to a black motor mechanic, butler, and aspiring sculptor, John-Paul Simmons. “His black hand touched my white one; it was as simple as that,” she wrote in her autobiography.

Charleston was outraged. Bomb threats meant the ceremony had to take place in their front parlor, and
Newsweek
claimed the event had “shaken the Confederacy.” It certainly didn’t shock Margaret Rutherford. She told
Time
magazine, “I am delighted that Gordon has become a woman, and I am delighted that Dawn is to marry a man of another race, and I am delighted that Dawn is to marry a man of a lower station, but I understand the man is a Baptist!” She offered practical support, too, leaning on the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher (with the help of her friend Tony Benn), to organize a second, English, ceremony in Hastings.

In Charleston, things went from bad to worse. The crate containing the couple’s wedding presents, sent over from England, was deliberately set on fire in the street. The local police chief arrived personally to serve Simmons a ticket, claiming that the smoldering remains of the blaze (which his own men had swept into the street) were obstructing the highway. The couple’s dogs were poisoned; they were shot at on the street for walking hand in hand; there were rumors of a Mafia contract taken out on Dawn’s life. The birth of her daughter, Natasha, in 1972 was the final straw. Charleston denounced it as a stunt, but Margaret Rutherford was able to produce a Harley Street surgeon to confirm that Dawn Langley Simmons had a fully functioning womb. Shortly afterward, the baby was attacked by an intruder
who proceeded to rape Dawn and left her with a broken nose and severely injured arm. The Simmonses decided enough was enough and moved to Catskill, New York.

By then, however, their marriage had turned sour. John-Paul was drinking heavily. She claimed he was also beating her and selling her possessions to buy whiskey. In 1974 he left her for another woman “who had shot and killed her first husband,” but soon afterward he was committed to a mental institution, suffering from schizophrenia. Dawn divorced him, but continued to look after him until her death in 2000.

In 1981, when Dawn was still living as Gordon in Hudson, New York, working as a teacher in a Catholic school, he/she was commissioned to write a biography of his/her adoptive mother, Margaret Rutherford. Her own autobiography,
Dawn: A Charleston Legend
, followed in 1995. Both were well received and widely reviewed. Dawn’s final years were spent back in Charleston with Natasha and her three granddaughters, to whom she was a proud and devoted granny. The city that had once tried to ruin her now happily accommodated her as a much loved, if slightly wacky, local celebrity.