The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (31 page)

A god, in the pagan—that is, true—sense of the word, is no more than a being’s intellectual self-awareness, this intelligence constituting the impersonal, and hence ideal, form of that being. When we form an intellectual concept of ourselves, we form our own god. But very few of us ever form an intellectual concept of ourselves, because intelligence is fundamentally objective. Few, even among the world’s great geniuses, have existed for themselves with complete objectivity.

To live is to belong to someone else. To die is to belong to someone else. To live and to die are the same thing. But to live is to belong to someone else
on the outside
, and to die is to belong to someone else
on the inside
. The two things are similar, but life is the outside of death, which is why life is life and death is death. The outside is always truer than the inside, for it is, after all, the side we see.

Every true emotion is a lie in our intelligence, where emotion doesn’t exist. The expression of every true emotion is therefore false. To express ourselves is to tell what we don’t feel.

The cavalry’s horses are what make it a cavalry. Without horses, the cavalry would be infantry. A place is what it is because of its location. Where we are is who we are.

To pretend is to know ourselves.

I can define myself without any trouble: I’m female by temperament, with a male intelligence. My sensibility and the actions that derive from it—my temperament and its expression, in other words—are those of a woman. My associative faculties—intelligence and the will, which is the intelligence of our impulses—are those of a man.

As far as my sensibility goes, when I say that I’ve always wanted to be loved but never to love, I’ve said it all. To feel obliged to return affection—out of a banal duty to reciprocate, to be loyal in spirit—always made me suffer. I liked being passive. I wanted to be active only insofar as it was necessary to stimulate and keep alive the love activity of the person who loved me.

I have no illusions about the nature of this phenomenon. It’s a latent sexual inversion. It stops in my spirit. But whenever I’ve paused and thought about myself, I’ve felt uneasy, for I’ve never been sure, and I’m still not sure, that this inclination in my temperament might not one day descend to my body. I’m not saying I would practice the sexuality that corresponds to that impulse; but the desire would be enough to humiliate me. There have been many of us in this category down through history, and through artistic history in particular. Shakespeare and Rousseau are two of the most illustrious examples, or exemplars. My fear that this spiritual inversion could descend to my body comes, in fact, from thinking about how it descended in them—completely in Shakespeare, as homosexuality; indefinitely in Rousseau, as a vague form of masochism.

“The only noble destiny for a writer who publishes is to be denied a celebrity he deserves. But the truly noble destiny belongs to the writer who doesn’t publish.” These words, appropriately enough, are from
The Book of Disquiet
(Text
209),
which wasn’t published until almost half a century after its author’s death. Not that the author didn’t want to publish it, didn’t plan to publish it, and didn’t announce—toward the end of his life—that it was “forthcoming.” But he died without publishing it, or much of anything else, and part of the reason no doubt was his avowed disdain for the act of publishing, since this implies participation in a system, acceptance of the rules of a game, and submission of one’s work to the judgment of others—intolerable implications for a man convinced of his superiority. “But what if I’m not really superior?” a man thus convinced, if he’s a thinking man, is bound to wonder: “What if it’s just my own delusion?” Pessoa, who left dozens and dozens of passages for a projected essay titled “Genius and Madness,” was frightfully aware of the fine line separating the two conditions, having drawn it most memorably in Álvaro de Campos’s “The Tobacco Shop”:

Genius? At this moment

A hundred thousand brains are dreaming they’re geniuses like me, And it may be that history won’t remember even one
...

...

Insane asylums are full of lunatics with certainties!

As if to guard against becoming part of this latter group (and madness, as indicated earlier, ran in his family), Pessoa locked himself up in his
own, literary asylum. But while he managed to invent dozens of literary personalities, he wasn’t capable of creating cheering multitudes
.

Pessoa lusted for fame, recognition, acclamation. If he also regarded fame with contempt, that was partly because he felt it was contemptible, partly because he was frustrated for not having it. It’s hard to know which came first—the contempt or the frustration—but it’s clear that the latter sentiment weighed more as he got older
.

As a young man Pessoa was convinced that fame was just around the corner. At the age of twenty-four, even before publishing any poems, he had already announced—in a critical piece published in
1912—
the coming of a poet who would dethrone Luis de Camoes (1524?–80) from his post as Portugal’s Greatest Writer. Pessoa was clearly laying down his own red carpet, which he soon cut wider to accommodate the heteronyms. Can Álvaro de Campos’s vision, in the
Ultimatum,
of a literary age being represented, not by thirty or forty poets, but by “just two poets endowed with fifteen or twenty personalities,” be anything but a self-referring prophecy? (The prophecy is echoed in the final passage from
Erostratus
published here.) More explicit was Pessoa’s letter to his mother dated June
5, 1914,
in which he boasted that within five or ten years he would, according to his friends, “be one of the greatest contemporary poets.” It was a heady year for Pessoa, whose first poems had been published in a magazine in February and whose Big Bang of Caeiro-Reis-Campos had occurred in March, and certain of his friends (Mário de Sá-Carneiro in particular) did indeed predict his imminent celebrity, so there was a basis for the young writer’s boast
.

But fifteen years passed, and Pessoa—a respected poet and intellectual in Lisbon—was far from famous. Although he had contributed work to magazines throughout the twenties, and self-published some chap-books of poetry in English, he reached
1930
without having published a real book, perhaps afraid of what the reaction, or nonreaction, might be. Even after he finally published, in
1934,
his book
Mensagem
with some success, he expressed his doubts to Adolfo Casais Monteiro that the poetry ofCaeiro, Reis, and Campos would be able to sell (see the letter of January 20
, 1935).

Toward the end of his life, Pessoa began to realize that fame was not liable to visit him on this side of the grave. And so, good student of
philosophy that he was, he drew a distinction between fame and immortality, making them almost mutually exclusive categories. True genius, he contended, can never be recognized in its own lifetime. In his day Shakespeare was famous for his wit, but only future generations recognized his genius
. Erostratus,
written around
1930,
is a restless disquisition on what makes for immortality, particularly the literary kind. Even without reading between the lines, it’s evident that Pessoa set out to prove, at least to himself, that his future celebrity was a foregone conclusion. Having proved it to his satisfaction, he could keep writing his unpublished works to the posthumous glory of his enduring name
.

The provocative title of
Erostratus
refers to the obscure Greek who in
356
B.C.
, so as to make his name immortal, set fire to the Temple of Diana in Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. By alluding to the deed of this “crasher into fame” (an epithet used in his essay), Pessoa seems, on the one hand, to be mocking his own meticulously constructed argument, since Erostratus achieved posthumous renown on the flimsy basis of a gratuitous act of destruction. The allusion suggests, on the other hand, that there’s no way to know, until all the chips are in, whose name will go down in history. Pessoa, whose book
Mensagem
took only second prize in a poetry competition, came out the undisputed winner in the history of modern Portuguese literature, which isn’t so strange. What is strange is that he won his celebrity for the very reasons set out in
Erostratus.
His writings had to wait for future readers, because his own age could not fully appreciate the genius of his self-multiplied art. Not even Pessoa could fully appreciate it. The other side of multiplication is division, fragmentation, and that occurred not only in the splintering of this writer into heteronyms but in the writings themselves
. Erostratus,
like so many of Pessoa’s works, was left as a set of disconnected passages—some polished, some rough—that don’t add up to a viable whole. Pessoa complained bitterly, in
The Book of Disquiet
(Texts
85, 289–291)
and elsewhere, of his inability to produce rounded, finished works. Surely he never imagined that the imperfect works he left would, in a future marked by intellectual chaos, be appreciated
precisely because of their fragmentary nature,
which confers on them
the distinction of being absolutely faithful to the reality of the world as it was described by Alberto Caeiro—“parts without a whole”—and as we
feel
it today
.

Except when it is the product of chance, or of such purely external circumstances as may be put under the name of chance, celebrity is the result of the application of some sort of special skill, or of intelligence, and of the recognition by others of the special skill or the intelligence which is applied. By special skill anything is here meant which distinguishes the individual from his natural peers: great daring, great violence, great subtlety are special skills in this particular sense, and there is no more essential honor in being a hero than in being a genius, the act or acts which prove the hero or the genius being equally a product of temperament, which is inborn, of education and environment, which no man gives himself, of opportunity and occasion, which very few men can choose or create, if indeed any man does choose or create as an efficient cause.

Men may be divided into three portions or lots, and the division may fitly follow the traditional division of the mind—intellect, emotion or feeling, and will. There are men of pure intellect, and these are philosophers and scientists; there are men of pure feeling, and these are mystics and prophets, the passive founders of religions or the mediums of received religious systems; there are men of pure will, and these are statesmen and warriors, leaders of industry as such or of commerce as nothing but commerce. There are three mixed types: men of intellect and feeling, and these are the artists of all kinds; men of intellect and will, and these are the higher statesmen and empire and nation builders; men of feeling and will, and these are the active founders and disseminators of religions (spiritual or material), the believers in the Woman Clothed with the Sun* and the believers in democracy.

Intelligence presents three high forms, which we can conveniently call genius, talent, and wit, taking the last word in the broader sense of
bright and active intelligence, of the kind though not of the degree of common intelligence, and not in the particular sense of the capacity for making jokes.

These three types of intelligence are not continuous with one another; they are not grades or degrees of one single faculty or function. Genius is abstract intelligence individualized—the concrete embodiment ...... of an abstract faculty. Talent is concrete intelligence made abstract; it is not bound, like genius, to the individual, except insofar as everything that happens in the individual is bound to him because his. Wit is concrete intelligence individualized, and, except in the value of the thing individualized, has the show and the gestures of genius. That is why it is so easy to mistake great wit for positive genius. Talent, on the other hand, is between both and opposed by nature to both.

It may be admitted that genius is unappreciated in its age because it is opposed to that age; but it may be asked why it is appreciated by the times that come after. The universal is opposed to any age, because the characteristics of that age are necessarily particular; why therefore should genius, which deals in universal and permanent values, be more kindly received by one age than by another?

The reason is simple. Each age results from a criticism of the age that preceded it and of the principles which underlie the civilizational life of that age. Whereas one principle underlies each age, or seems to underlie it, criticism of that one principle is varied, and has in common only the fact that it is a criticism of the same thing. In opposing his age, the man of genius implicitly criticizes it, and so implicitly belongs to one or another of the critical currents of the next age. He may himself produce one or another of those currents, like Wordsworth; he may produce none, like Blake, yet live by a parallel attitude to his, risen in that age by no discipleship properly speaking.*

The more universal the genius, the more easily he will be taken up by the very next age, because the deeper will be his implicit criticism of his own. The less universal, within his substantial universality,
the more difficult will his way be, unless he happens to hit the sense of one of the main critical currents of the age come after.

...

Painting will sink. Photography has deprived it of many of its attractions. Futility or silliness has deprived it of almost all the rest. What was left has been spoiled by American collectors. A great painting means a thing which a rich American wants to buy because other people would like to buy it if they could. Thus paintings are set on a parallel, not with poems or novels, but with the first editions of certain poems and novels. The museum becomes a thing parallel, not to the library, but to the bibliophile’s library. The appreciation of painting becomes a parallel, not to the appreciation of literature, but to the appreciation of editions. Art criticism falls gradually into the hands of dealers in antiques.