The Book of Disquiet (3 page)

We can leaf through
The Book of Disquiet
as through a lifelong sketchbook revealing the artist in all his heteronymic variety. Or we may read it as a travel journal, a ‘book of random impressions’ (Text 442), Pessoa’s faithful companion throughout his literary odyssey that never left Lisbon. Or we may see it as the ‘factless autobiography’ (Text 12) of a man who dedicated his life to not living, who cultivated ‘hatred of action like a greenhouse flower’ (Text 103).

The Book of Disquiet
, which took different forms, also knew different authors. As long as
The Book
was just one book, consisting of post-Symbolist texts with titles, the announced author was Fernando Pessoa, but when it mutated to accommodate diaristic passages, inevitably more intimate and revealing, Pessoa followed his usual custom of hiding behind other names, the first of which was Vicente Guedes. In fact Guedes was initially responsible only for the diary (or diaries) that pushed its (or their) way into
The Book of Disquiet
. The ‘autobiography of a man who never existed’ is how Pessoa, in a passage
intended for a Preface, described Guedes’s ‘gentle book’, which is referred to in another passage as the
Diary
, as if this were its actual title. Pessoa, in his publication plans, began to cite Vicente Guedes as the fictional author of
The Book of Disquiet
, which suggests that it and the ‘gentle’
Diary
were one and the same book. On the other hand, the archives contain a fragmentary passage from a ‘Diary of Vicente Guedes’, dated 22 August 1914, which pokes fun at a second-rate Portuguese writer and surely does not belong in
Disquiet
. Diaries usually have dates, but almost no dated material entered
The Book of Disquiet
until 1929, when Vicente Guedes had already been given his walking papers. Whatever intentions Pessoa may have one day had, the early
Book of Disquiet
never boiled down to a diary, though it did encompassa ‘Random Diary’ and a ‘Lucid Diary’ – or single entries from projected diaries with these names – as well as the a forecited ‘Fragments of an Autobiography’, all of which date (according to manuscript and stylistic evidence) from 1915 to 1920, when Guedes was active.

Vicente Guedes was one of Pessoa’s busiest and most versatile collaborators in the 1910 s. Besides his diary writings, Guedes translated, or was supposed to translate, plays and poems by the likes of Aeschylus, Shelley and Byron, as well as ‘A Very Original Dinner’, a mystery story penned by Alexander Search, the most prolific of the English-language heteronyms. Though he shirked his duties as a translator, Guedes ‘really’ wrote a few poems, a number of short stories and several mystical tales. In one of these tales, ‘The Ascetic’, the title character tells his interlocutor that paradises and nirvanas are ‘illusions inside other illusions. If you dream you’re dreaming, is the dream you dream less real than the dream you dream you’re dreaming?’ This sort of musing is vaguely reminiscent of
Disquiet
in its formative phase, which may be why Pessoa decided to entrust it to Guedes, whose wide-ranging literary talents made him a potentially excellent author-administrator of such a capacious work.

The manuscript identifying Vicente Guedes as the author of a
Diary
that was supposed to be part (or perhaps all) of the early
Book of Disquiet
also includes a passage titled ‘Games of Solitaire’ (Text 351), which evokes the evenings that the narrator spent as a child with his elderly aunts in a country house. The passage is preceded by this notation:

B.
of
D.

A section entitled:
Games of Solitaire
(include
In the Forest of Estrangement
?)

In its language and tone, ‘Forest of Estrangement’ has absolutely nothing in common with the passage about old aunts playing solitaire while their sleepy maid brews tea. Perhaps this was conceived as a mere port of entry to the section that would have the same name and whose ‘games of solitaire’ would be exercises in daydreamy prose such as ‘Estrangement’, written by Pessoa for the same reason we play cards: to pass the time. Whatever the case,
The Book
was in trouble. Pessoa didn’t know what to do with the early texts that wafted in the misty atmosphere of the strange forest, and perhaps he considered excluding them altogether. What place could they have in a diary? Or even next to a diary?

More than ten years later, Bernardo Soares would reformulate the games of solitaire (Text 12):

I make landscapes out of what I feel. I make holidays of my sensations… My elderly aunt would play solitaire throughout the endless evening. These confessions of what I feel are my solitaire. I don’t interpret them like those who read cards to tell the future. I don’t probe them, because in solitaire the cards don’t have any special significance.

In the same passage, Soares compares his mental and literary activity to another domestic pastime, crochet, as Álvaro de Campos also does in a poem dated 9 August 1934:

I also have my crochet.
It dates from when I began to think.
Stitch on stitch forming a whole without a whole…
A cloth, and I don’t know if it’s for a garment or for nothing.
A soul, and I don’t know if it’s for feeling or living.

What’s highly significant about the assistant bookkeeper’s crochet is that ‘between one and another plunge’ of the hooked needle, ‘all enchanted princes can stroll in their parks’. This observation would seem odd or just plain weird, were it not for the royal dreams and reveries that filled up many pages of
Disquiet
in its early days. In
Soares, as we shall see, Pessoa managed to conciliate (though never to his full satisfaction) the sumptuous, imperial dreams of
The Book
’s first phase with the concerns of a modest, twentieth-century office clerk. Vicente Guedes, who was also an assistant bookkeeper, seems to have been groomed for the same conciliatory role, but in spite of his several mystical tales, Guedes was too coldly rational in his diary entries to be believable as a writer of wispy post-Symbolist texts, and Pessoa never directly named him as their author. But Guedes held the title of general author of
The Book of Disquiet
for at least five years and perhaps as long as ten, for whatever it’s worth, since the manuscript evidence suggests that most of the 1920s was (as indicated earlier) a fallow period for
The Book
.

It was probably in 1928 that Pessoa, now wearing the mask of Bernardo Soares, returned to
The Book of Disquiet
, which became a resolutely confirmed diary, as acutely personal as it was objective – as if the world around and inside the diarist were all the same film that he stared at intently, sometimes listened to, but never touched. Many of the passages were dated, though this practice was never systematic and seems to have been only gradually adopted. It’s curious that the first passage from this period with a date, 22 March 1929 (Text 19), is post-Symbolist in flavour, with drums, bugles and ‘princesses from other people’s dreams’ but with no mention of the assistant bookkeeper, whose fiction was perhaps still hazy and needed to be fleshed out. It was only in 1930 that Pessoa began to date a large number of the passages destined for
The Book of Disquiet
, which had finally found its street: the Rua dos Douradores, where Soares worked in an office and where he also lived, in a humble rented room, writing in his spare time. And so Art, notes Soares, resides ‘on the very same street as Life, but in a different place… Yes, for me the Rua dos Douradores contains the meaning of everything and the answer to all riddles, except for the riddle of why riddles exist, which can never be answered’ (Text 9).

We know almost nothing about Bernardo Soares before he moved to the Rua dos Douradores. His name heads a list of ten stories in one of Pessoa’s notebooks, where we also find a rather extensive publication programme for Pessoa’s
œuvre
, with Soares identified only
as a short-story writer.
The Book of Disquiet
, listed in the same programme, isn’t attributed to any author. Had Vicente Guedes already been sacked? Perhaps not yet. But once Soares assumed
The Book
’s authorship, he also assumed, more or less, the old author’s biography. More accurately, Vicente Guedes, who died young (it was Pessoa who was to publish and present his manuscript to the public), was apparently reincarnated in Bernardo Soares, who had the very same profession, who also lived in a fourth-floor room in Lisbon’s Baixa district (only the name of the street changed), and who was also a highly motivated diarist. To judge by his elderly aunt who spent long evenings playing solitaire, Soares even inherited Guedes’s childhood.

Though not identical to Guedes, Soares came to replace him, and since Pessoa could move his pawns forwards and backwards, this replacement was able to have retroactive effect. The eleven excerpts from
Disquiet
published in magazines between 1929 and 1934 were naturally attributed to Bernardo Soares, but Pessoa also credited him (in a typed inventory of Soares’s literary production) with the only previously published excerpt, namely ‘Forest of Estrangement’, dating from long before Soares was ever conceived. In Pessoa’s notes and extensive correspondence from the 1930s, in which he discussed in detail the heteronymic enterprise, Guedes never merits the slightest reference, and the three
Disquiet
passages from the teens that mention him by name were left out of the large envelope in which Pessoa, some time before his death, gathered material for the book. That same envelope includes a typed ‘note’ (in Appendix III) explaining that the earlier passages would have to be revised to conform with the ‘true psychology’ of Bernardo Soares. It may be argued that since Pessoa never actually brought off this revision, the early passages retain Vicente Guedes’s style and tone – more analytical, less emotionally impressionable than Soares – and therefore his authorship. But this is to take the game even further than Pessoa did. What is actually happening? The narrator – whether his name is Guedes or Soares – ages as the creating and informing spirit of Pessoa ages, and so the voice naturally changes, but not as strikingly as the voice of Álvaro de Campos, whose short and melancholy poems of the 1930 s were vastly different from the loud ‘Sensationist’ odes of the 1910s.

Yet another disquieted persona, the Baron of Teive, was vaguely or
potentially connected to
The Book of Disquiet
, not as its author but as a contributor. Pessoa gave birth to aristocratic Teive in 1928, probably the same year that Bernardo Soares went from being a minor short-story writer to the author of Pessoa’s major prose work. Like Soares, Teive also suffered from tedium (one of the most oft-occurring words in
The Book
), also found life stupidly meaningless, and was also sceptical to the point of no return, no salvation. His ‘only manuscript’, written on the eve of his suicide and titled
The Education of the Stoic
, was found in the drawer of a hotel room, presumably by Pessoa, who compared the Baron with the bookkeeper in a fragmentary Preface (see
Appendix III
). Their Portuguese, wrote Pessoa, is the same, but whereas the aristocrat ‘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’. Pessoa himself was not always certain of this subtle distinction, for he labelled one passage (Text 207)
B. of D. (or Teive?)
, and there were a handful of other passages clearly labelled
Teive
that he subsequently placed in the large envelope with
Disquiet
material. Was he thinking of pillaging parts of the Baron’s ‘only manuscript’ for the benefit of Bernardo Soares? Quite possibly so, since Teive’s opus, contrary to what its ‘only’ designation suggests, was a hodgepodge of unassembled and fragmentary pieces that Pessoa had perhaps despaired of ever pulling together and cleaning up.
The Book of Disquiet
, much vaster, was that much more unorganized, but Pessoa loved it too dearly to ever dream of giving up on it.

Besides threatening the Baron’s intellectual property, the ostensibly unassuming bookkeeper almost took over a large chunk of poetry signed by Pessoa himself. The above-mentioned inventory of Bernardo Soares’s literary output includes not only the poetic prose texts of
The Book
’s inaugural period but also ‘Slanting Rain’ (written in 1914, published in 1915), ‘Stations of the Cross’ (written in 1914–15, published in 1916) and other poems by Pessoa founded on ‘ultra-Sensationist experiences’. These poems are nearly contemporaneous with ‘Forest of Estrangement’ and drink from the same post-Symbolist waters, so Pessoa thought – for a moment – that they might as well live under the same roof, on the Rua dos Douradores, which is cited at the top of the inventory. In fact the inventory is probably both a
c.v. for Soares
and
a Table of Contents for
The Book of Disquiet
. And at the bottom of the page we find this strange observation: ‘Soares is not a poet. In his poetry he falls short; it isn’t sustained like his prose. His poems are the refuse of his prose, the sawdust of his first-rate work.’

Pessoa, in the late 1920s, felt ambivalent about the Intersectionist and ultra-Sensationist poems he had written under his own name almost fifteen years previous. Reassigning them to
The Book of Disquiet
would not only save Pessoa’s name from the momentary embarrassment he may have felt for being their author; it could also help redeem them, by providing an enhancing context. But it was a short lived idea. In a follow-up note (see
Appendix III
) written on the same typewriter as the inventory, we read:

Collect later on, in a separate book, the various poems I had mistakenly thought to include in
The Book of Disquiet
; this book of poems should have a title indicating that it contains something like refuse or marginalia – something suggestive of detachment.

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?