The Book of Disquiet (78 page)

Appendix II: Two Letters

AP- 4 [7/48, typed] The typescript carries the heading:
(Copy of a letter to Pretoria)
. In 1896 Pessoa’s mother, widowed and remarried, had moved with young Fernando to Durban, South Africa, where her new husband served as the Portuguese consul. Pessoa returned to Lisbon in 1905, his mother (with the children from her second marriage) in 1920, once more a widow.

my best and closest friend
: Mário de Sá-Carneiro. See note below.

AP- 5
Má rio de Sá -Carneiro
: A close friend (1890–1916) and collaborator of Pessoa, was one of Portugal’s most important Modernist poets as well as a notable writer of fiction. The theme of all but his earliest work was the torment he felt for not living up – in his flesh, in his writing, and even in his imagination – to an ideal of beauty he could only intuit, not define, though it was clearly informed by a Decadent, post-Symbolist aesthetic. Pessoa posted this letter to Paris, where one month later Sá-Carneiro committed suicide in his room at the Hô tel de Nice.

The Mariner
: Pessoa’s only complete play (
O Marinheiro
), which he classified as a ‘static drama’. It was published in 1915, in the first issue of
Orpheu
(see note to Pessoa’s ‘Preface’ at the beginning of this volume).

Appendix III: Reflections on
The Book of Disquiet
from Pessoa’s Writings

B. E
XCERPTS FROM LETTERS

Joã o de Lebre e Lima
: A little-known poet (1889–1959).

Armando Cortes-Rodrigues
: Azorean poet (1891–1971) who actively collaborated with Pessoa and other Portuguese Modernists in the 1910s.

João Gaspar Simões
: A major critic (1903–87) of twentieth-century Portuguese literature and a co-founder of
Presença
(published from 1927 to 1940), the Coimbra-based literary magazine that recognized Pessoa’s extreme originality and actively promoted his work when it was still not well known. Gaspar Simõ es published, in 1950, the first biography of Pessoa.

Portugal
: This long work in progress was finally published in 1934 under a different title,
Mensagem
(
Message
), and with forty-four poems instead of forty-one. It was the only volume of Pessoa’s Portuguese poetry to see print in his lifetime.

Adolfo Casais Monteiro
: Poet and critic (1908–72) who was an editor of
Presença
(see note on João Gaspar Simões) and an important advocate of Pessoa’s work.

C. F
ROM THE
U
NFINISHED
P
REFACE TO
F
ICTIONS OF THE
I
NTERLUDE
These are just two of various passages written by Pessoa for his Preface-in-progress to the
Fictions
, which would have brought together the work of his major poetic heteronyms. (See note for Text
325
.)

‘The Anarchist Banker’
: A lengthy short story (
‘O Banqueiro Anarquista’
) that really amounts to a Socratic dialogue, published by Pessoa in 1922.

Pessoa referred to the many names under which he wrote prose and poetry as ‘heteronyms’ rather than pseudonyms, since they were not merely false names but belonged to invented others, to fictional writers with points of view and literary styles that were different from Pessoa’s. The three main poetic heteronyms – Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos – came into existence in 1914, but Pessoa wrote under some seventy-five names, the first of which go back to his childhood. Some, such as Maria José, were shooting stars who authored a single work; others, such as Vicente Guedes, shifted position and shone now brightly, now dimly, before eventually fading from view; and a very few, such as Campos, were permanent (though never static) bodies in Pessoa’s cosmography. The following is a list of the most significant names, along with some curious, lesser lights. They are presented in their approximate, sometimes conjectural order of appearance in Pessoa’s writing.

Chevalier de Pas
Identified by Pessoa as ‘my first heteronym, or rather, my first non-existent acquaintance’, this friendly knight reportedly wrote letters to and through Pessoa when he was just six years old, perhaps in French, a language that both his parents spoke fluently.

Charles Robert Anon
First full-fledged heteronym, created by Pessoa when still a teenager in South Africa, probably in 1903. His poetry and prose, written in English, are concerned with philosophical problems such as being vs. non-being and free will vs. determinism, and with the personal anxieties of a young man (himself? Pessoa?) on the threshold of becoming an adult. C. R. Anon, as he often signed himself, was basically anti-Christian and sometimes quite violently so, as in his ‘Epitaph of the Catholic Church’ and his prose piece that decreed a ‘sentence of excommunication on all priests and all sectarians of all religions in the world’.

Alexander Search
Pessoa even had calling cards printed up for this English heteronym, who was born in Lisbon on the same day as his maker: 13 June
1888. Most of his close to two hundred poems were written in the three years immediately following Pessoa’s return to Lisbon in 1905, though a few date as late as 1910, while others go back to 1903– 4(at least some of these earlier poems were only credited to Search retroactively, however). His poems cannot compare, as literary creations, to the Portuguese verses written in the names of Caeiro, Campos and Reis, but they contain all the major themes subsequently developed by the illustrious trio. Search also wrote prose, including a macabre story titled ‘A Very Original Dinner’, in which the unsuspecting diners feast on human flesh.

Charles James Search
Born on 18 April 1886, Alexander’s brother was a full-time translator of (mostly) Portuguese literature into English. The majority of his projects, such as a translation of Eça de Queiroz’s
The Mandarin
, never got off the ground, but he did produce many English versions of sonnets by the philosophically inclined Antero de Quental (1842–91). He also left a partial translation of a long Spanish verse play,
The Student of Salamanca
, by José de Espronceda (1808–42).

Jean Seul de Méluret
Pessoa’s French heteronym, born on 1 August 1885, seems to have dawned on Pessoa’s imagination some time around 1907. Besides writing poetry, Jean Seul left two unfinished essays: ‘Des cas d’exhibitionnisme’, concerned with the phenomenon of young women who perform half naked in Paris music halls, and a moral satire titled ‘La France en 1950’ (or, alternatively, ‘La France à l’an 2000’), in which the futuristic narrator observes such oddities as a certain ‘Monsieur Sleeps-in-the-bed-of-fourwomen Giraud’ being hauled off to prison for ‘the crime of refusing to commit incest’.

Vicente Guedes
The first large-scale heteronym to write in Portuguese probably came into existence in 1907 or 1908. Besides poetry, stories, translations and diaristic writings, Guedes was for a time in charge of
The Book of Disquiet
(see the Introduction). His biographical details – assistant bookkeeper and solitary bachelor living in a rented fourth-floor room in Lisbon – exactly match those of Bernardo Soares, who seems to have been his reincarnation.

Alberto Caeiro
Recognized as their master by Álvaro de Campos, by Ricardo Reis and by Pessoa himself, Alberto Caeiro da Silva was born in Lisbon on 16 April 1889, lived most of his life with an old aunt in the country, and died in Lisbon in 1915, the victim of tuberculosis. He continued, however, to write poems through Pessoa until at least 1930. Billed as ‘Nature’s poet’, this supposed shepherd admitted in his very first poem that ‘I’ve never kept sheep,/But it’s as if I did.’ Conceived in 1914, Caeiro was originally destined to be a highly eclectic vanguardist, responsible not only for the apparently naïve, anti-metaphysical poems of
The Keeper of Sheep
but also for the long Futurist
odes that came to be written by Campos and for some Cubist-inspired poems that were ultimately attributed to Pessoa himself. Divested of these more self-consciously literary modes, Caeiro retreated to the country with no other ambition than to see things as things, without philosophy.

Álvaro de Campos
Pessoa’s most vociferous heteronym was born in Tavira, the Algarve, on 15 October 1890, studied naval engineering in Glasgow, interrupted his studies to make a voyage to the Orient, lived for a time in London, and eventually settled in Lisbon. A dandy who used an in-those-days stylish monocle, smoked opium, drank absinthe, and was as readily attracted to young men as to young women, Campos the writer initially produced loud and long ‘Sensationist’ odes reminiscent of Walt Whitman, but as the years wore on his poems became shorter and more melancholy. He never stopped being mischievous, however, meddling at frequent intervals in his creator’s real-world life. To the ire and chagrin of Pessoa’s friends, the naval engineer sometimes showed up in his stead at appointments, and in 1929 Campos took it upon himself to write to Ophelia Queiroz, Pessoa’s one sweetheart, exhorting her to flush all thought of her beloved ‘down the toilet’.

Ricardo Reis
Born 19 September 1887 in Oporto, this classicist and trained physician was hazily revealed to Pessoa in 1912 but did not heteronymically affirm himself until two years later. A monarchist sympathizer (Portugal’s last king abdicated in 1910, whereupon a republic was formed), he supposedly moved to Brazil in 1919, though Pessoa elsewhere reports that he was a ‘Latin teacher in an important American high school’, and the archives contain an address for a Dr Ricardo Sequeira Reis in Peru. Characterized by Pessoa as ‘a Greek Horace who writes in Portuguese’, Reis composed short odes that advocated a stoic acceptance of life with its small and fleeting pleasures, its inevitable sorrow, and its lack of any discoverable meaning.

Frederico Reis
Ricardo’s brother, of whom we know only that he lived abroad, wrote a pamphlet about the so-called Lisbon School of poetry (whose key practitioners were Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis), defending it as Portugal’s only truly cosmopolitan literary movement. He was also a sympathetic critic of his brother’s ‘profoundly sad’ poetry, which he described as ‘a lucid and disciplined attempt to obtain a measure of calm’.

Thomas Crosse
Responsible for taking Portuguese culture to the English-speaking world, this essayist and translator was especially committed to promoting the work of Alberto Caeiro. ‘Strange and terribly, appallingly new’ is how he characterized Caeiro in an Introduction he wrote for an edition of the pseudo-shepherd’s
Complete Poems
, which he was supposed to translate into English. But this worthy project, like so many plans announced by Pessoa
and his fictional collaborators, never amounted to more than a good intention.

I. I. Crosse
This probable brother of Thomas Crosse wrote critical pieces in praise of Caeiro (for his ‘mysticism of objectivity’) and Campos (‘the greatest rhythmist that there has ever been’).

A. A. Crosse
This third Mr Crosse competed for cash prizes in the puzzle and word games published in the pages of English newspapers.

António Mora
As the chief theoretician of Neopaganism, a movement designed to replace an ailing and decadent Christianity, Mora passionately elucidated the genius of Caeiro and Reis, whom he regarded as direct poetic expressions of paganism. He also left dozens and dozens of typed and handwritten passages belonging to ambitious works-in-progress with titles such as
Return of the Gods
(co-authored by Ricardo Reis),
Prolegomena to a Reformation of Paganism
and
The Foundations of Paganism
(billed as a ‘rebuttal of Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason
, and an attempt to reconstruct pagan Objectivism’).

Raphael Baldaya
Identified in a letter by Pessoa as an astrologer with a long beard, Baldaya was conceived in late 1915. In addition to horoscopes and his writings on the stars, he produced several philosophical texts, including a ‘Treatise on Negation’, in which he affirmed that being is ‘essentially Illusion and Falsehood. God is the Supreme Lie’.

Bernardo Soares
The ultimate fictional author of
The Book of Disquiet
seems to have taken on this job in 1928, presumably the same year he moved to the Rua dos Douradores, but he was originally cast in the role of a short-story writer. Pessoa’s strong kinship with Soares – whom he called a semiheteronym, since his was not a different personality but a mutilated version of Fernando’s – is reflected in their names, ‘Bernardo’ and ‘Soares’ containing almost the same letters as ‘Fernando’ and ‘Pessoa’.

Maria José
Pessoa’s only known female persona was the author of a single, long and pathetic love letter to Senhor António, a handsome metalworker who passed by her window on his way to and from work each day. Hunchbacked, virtually crippled, and dying of TB, Maria José had no intention of ever sending her desperate letter. ‘My days are numbered,’ she explained in one of its last paragraphs, ‘and I’m only writing this letter to hold it against my chest as if you’d written it to me instead of me to you.’

Baron of Teive
Conceived in 1928, the Baron may have been Pessoa’s last invented author. Similar in many respects to Bernardo Soares (Pessoa compares the two in his Preface to
Fictions of the Interlude
– in Appendix III), Teive may likewise be classified as a semi-heteronym, as a mutilated or distorted copy of Pessoa. Endowed with Pessoa’s ultra-rationalist bent, he also incarnated his creator’s aristocratic pretensions (Pessoa was rather proud
of the vaguely blue blood that trickled on his father’s side). Haunted, like Pessoa, by a helpless inability to finish any of his writing projects, the Baron finally took the rational, logical step of committing suicide. His creator, perhaps with a giggle, kept on writing.