The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (39 page)

One other thing ... It might happen in the future that for some study of yours or some other such purpose you will need to quote a passage from this letter. You are hereby authorized to do so,
but with one reservation
, and I beg leave to underscore it. The paragraph
about the occult, on page 7 of my letter, should not be reproduced in published form. In my desire to answer your question as clearly as possible, I knowingly overstepped the bounds that this subject naturally imposes. I had no qualms about doing so, since this is a private letter. You may read the paragraph in question to whomever you like, provided they also agree not to reproduce its contents in published form. I can count on you, I trust, to respect this negative wish.

I still owe you a long-overdue letter about your latest books. I reiterate what I believe I wrote in my last letter: when I go to spend a few days in Estoril (I think it will be in February), I’ll catch up on that part of my correspondence, writing not only you but similar letters to various other people.

Oh, and let me ask you again something you still haven’t answered: did you get my chapbooks of poems in English, which I sent you some time ago?

And would you, “for my records” (to use business jargon), confirm for me as soon as possible that you’ve received this letter? Many thanks.

Fernando Pessoa

Ever since I was a child, I’ve felt the need to enlarge the world with fictitious personalities—dreams of mine that were carefully crafted, envisaged with photographic clarity, and fathomed to the depths of their souls. When I was but five years old, an isolated child and quite content to be so, I already enjoyed the company of certain characters from my dreams, including a Captain Thibeaut, the Chevalier de Pas, and various others whom I’ve forgotten, and whose forgetting—like my imperfect memory of the two I just named—is one of my life’s great regrets.

This may seem merely like a child’s imagination that gives life to dolls. But it was more than that. I intensely conceived those characters
with no need of dolls. Distinctly visible in my ongoing dream, they were utterly human realities for me, which any doll—because unreal—would have spoiled. They were people.

And instead of ending with my childhood, this tendency expanded in my adolescence, taking firmer root with each passing year, until it became my natural way of being. Today I have no personality: I’ve divided all my humanness among the various authors whom I’ve served as literary executor. Today I’m the meeting-place of a small humanity that belongs only to me.

...

This is simply the result of a dramatic temperament taken to the extreme. My dramas, instead of being divided into acts full of action, are divided into souls. That’s what this apparently baffling phenomenon comes down to.

I don’t reject—in fact I’m all for—psychiatric explanations, but it should be understood that
all
higher mental activity, because it’s abnormal, is equally subject to psychiatric interpretation. I don’t mind admitting that I’m crazy, but I want it to be understood that my craziness is no different from Shakespeare’s, whatever may be the comparative value of the products that issue from the saner side of our crazed minds.

I subsist as a kind of medium of myself, but I’m less real than the others, less substantial, less personal, and easily influenced by them all. I too am a disciple of Caeiro, and I still remember the day—March 13th, 1914—when I “heard for the first time” (when I wrote, that is, in a single burst of inspiration) a good many of the early poems of
The Keeper of Sheep
and then went on to write, without once stopping, the six Intersectionist poems that make up “Slanting Rain” (
Orpheu
2), the visible and logical result of Caeiro’s influence on the temperament of Fernando Pessoa.

Lisbon, 20 January 1935

My dear friend and colleague,

Many thanks for your letter. I’m glad I managed to say something of genuine interest. I had my doubts, given the hasty and
impulsive way I wrote, caught up in the mental conversation I was having with you.

...

You are quite right about the absence in me of any kind of evolution in the true sense. There are poems I wrote when I was twenty that are just as good—so far as I can judge—as the ones I write today. I write no better than I did, except in terms of my knowledge of Portuguese, which is a cultural rather than poetic particular. I write differently. This can perhaps be explained by the following ...

What I am essentially—behind the involuntary masks of poet, logical reasoner and so forth—is a dramatist. My spontaneous tendency to depersonalization, which I mentioned in my last letter to explain the existence of my heteronyms, naturally leads to this definition. And so I do not evolve, I simply JOURNEY. (This word is typed in capital letters because I mistakenly hit the shift key, but it’s correct, so I’ll let it stand.) I continuously change personality, I keep enlarging (and here there is a kind of evolution) my capacity to create new characters, new forms of pretending that I understand the world or, more accurately, that the world can be understood. That is why I’ve likened my path to a journey rather than to an evolution. I haven’t risen from one floor to another; I’ve moved, on a level plane, from one place to another. I’ve naturally lost a certain simplicity and naiveté present in my adolescent poems, but that’s not evolution, it’s just me getting older.

These hastily written words should give you some inkling into the quite definite way in which I concur with your view that in me there has been no true evolution.

As to the forthcoming publication of my books, there are no obstacles to worry about. When I decide I want to publish Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and Álvaro de Campos, I can do so immediately. But I’m afraid that books of this sort won’t sell. That’s my only hesitation. The publication of the large book of poems [of Fernando Pessoa] is likewise guaranteed, and if I’m more inclined to publish it rather than some other, it’s because it has a certain intellectual advantage,
as well as a better chance of success. I think, for different reasons, that it will also not be especially hard to publish “The Anarchist Banker” in English.

...

Warm regards from your friend and admirer

Fernando Pessoa

Bernardo Soares

Inspiration works in unpredictable ways. An image one sees, a phrase one hears, a smell that jogs a memory, a conversation, news of a crime, a sudden and novel idea—all can be the starting point of a poem, a painting, or a symphony, or even of an entire philosophical system. Fernando Pessoa’s largest and most stunning work of prose, which will endure as one of the twentieth century’s literary emblems, was born from just a word:
disquiet.
It lit up in Pessoa in
1913,
on the 20th of January. The surviving manuscript of a poem written that day contains, in the margin, a notation penned in large letters—“The title
Disquiet”—
and underlined with a confident flourish. That’s not quite true, because Pessoa was writing in Portuguese, not English. The magic word for his title was actually
desassossego,
one of those words that in translation-disquiet, disquietude, restlessness—never has the same force, or mystery, as the original. Not even the Spanish
desasosiego
rings with the same enchantment, and the French translator, not happy with
inquietude,
invented the word
intranquillité,
which, curiously enough, has since entered the French vocabulary
.

In August of
1913
Pessoa published his first piece of creative prose, “In the Forest of Estrangement,” signed by his own name and identified as “from
The Book of Disquiet,
in preparation.” During the next sixteen years he published no more of the book, but the nervous germ of its key word kept working, and text kept spinning out ofPessoa. In September of 1914 he wrote a friend in the Azores that his “pathological production” was going “complexly and tortuously forward. “And in a letter to the same friend sent two months later, he clarified the nature of the pathology: “My
state of mind compels me to work hard, against my will, on
The Book of Disquiet.
But it’s all fragments, fragments, fragments.”

In fact the early texts of
The Book of Disquiet
are mostly unfinished. They are full of beautiful writing, but also full of blank spaces for words and phrases that were needed to complete an idea, round out a picture, or prolong a certain verbal rhythm. Sometimes, on the contrary, Pessoa left various alternate wordings for a phrase he wasn’t quite happy with. Some texts are really just notes for a text; others are sets of related but disconnected, disordered ideas. When he went back to revise his
Book,
Pessoa would find words for the blank spaces, choose between alternate versions, fill out the sketchy passages, put order where it was needed, and make the whole work cohere. But he hardly ever went back; he kept churning out text. Pessoa was untidy in nearly all of his written world, but in
The Book of Disquiet
that untidiness became a kind of premise, without which the book couldn’t be true to its restless, agitated heart
.

The early texts glow with a post-Symbolist aesthetic, as suggested by some of their titles: “Imperial Legend,” “Our Lady of Silence,” and “Symphony of the Restless Night.” The disquiet has less to do with the narrator’s psychological state than with the hesitant, fluttering, almost weightless world of symbols that the likewise diaphanous prose describes. “Peristyle,” one of the oldest and most fragmentary texts, is typical, and Pessoa considered making it the gateway to his
Book.
It begins: “It was in the silence of my disquiet, at the hour of day when the landscape is a halo of Life and dreaming is mere dreaming, my love, that I raised up this strange book like the open doors of an abandoned house.” Further on the narrator addresses his abstractly female, forever virgin “love” with these words: “Swan of rhythmic disquiet, lyre of immortal hours, faint harp of mythic sorrows—you are both the Awaited and the Departed, the one who soothes and also wounds, who gilds joys with sadness and crowns griefs with roses.” In “Our Lady of Silence,” the narrator asks another (or is it the same?) idealized, sexless woman to be “the Invisible Twilight, with my disquiet and my yearnings as the shades of your indecision, the colors of your uncertainty.” And in “Sentimental Education” he rather enjoys his “exquisite exhaustion tinged with disquiet and melancholy.” Disquiet, in these ethereal atmospheres, has a strangely material quality
.

But by the time the
Disquiet
text titled “Random Diary” was written, probably around
1918,
the locus of disquiet had definitely shifted from the landscape to within the narrator: “O magnificent hills at twilight, O narrowish streets in the moonlight, if only I had your...... unconsciousness, your spirituality that’s nothing but Matter, with no inner dimension, no sensibility, and no place for feelings, thoughts, or disquiet of the spirit!” It was during this same period that Pessoa, tired of mental encounters with sexless women, sought to cure his virginity with the help of astral spirits (see R
IDDLE OF THE
S
TARS
).

The Book of Disquiet
also contains a “Lucid Diary,” which seems to be contemporaneous with the “Random Diary,” but each so-called diary has only one entry. Perhaps Pessoa planned to expand them, or to bring other, untitled texts under their umbrella. The earliest
Disquiet
texts all had titles, but by
1915
most did not, and they were increasingly diary-like, increasingly taken up by the intellectual and emotional troubles of a man in his late twenties whose custom it was “to think with the emotions and feel with the mind” (Text
131).
And since it was also Pessoa’s custom to hide his true self behind masks, he called this man in his late twenties Vicente Guedes and made him an assistant bookkeeper who wrote in his spare time. Guedes, like his creator, was solitary, mild mannered, and lucid in the extreme. In “Fragments of an Autobiography” and various texts without titles he recounted his anguished, vain attempts to discover truth through metaphysics, science, and sociology. Elsewhere he described the generalized disquiet of his generation, whose free-thinking forefathers, “drunk with a hazy notion they called ‘positivism,’” had “blithely wreaked destruction” on the moral, religious, and social edifice of European society, leaving nothing solid for their children to hold on to. This nutshell analysis is from Text 175, which also specifically mentions “political disquiet,” a concept that was painfully meaningful to Europeans living in the second decade of the last century
.

Portugal’s political instability went from bad to tragic in the
1920s.
The first two years of that decade saw the formation and dissolution of a dozen governments, and in
1921
various Republican leaders were assassinated on just one bloody night, October
19.
The Republic, never strong, slowly fell apart, a short-term dictator seized power in 1926, and then—several
years later—it was Salazar’s turn. Perhaps it was Portugal’s political turmoil and social unrest that distracted Pessoa from his
Book of Disquiet,
which he more or less laid aside in the
1920s.
He worked on other projects, such as his essays that delineate the “mystical nationalist” theories presented in the section P
ORTUGAL AND THE
F
IFTH
E
MPIRE
, and he became—or tried to become—an entrepreneur. In
1921
he founded Olisipo, which was meant to be a wide-ranging business concern but finally just published a few books, including two volumes of his own English poetry
(1921)
and an enlarged edition of poems
(1922)
by his friend Antonio Botto
(1897–1959),
whose work was openly homosexual. Presumably in an effort to promote this latter book, Pessoa published a magazine article defending Botto’s sexual preference as a natural expression of his Greek-inspired aesthetic ideal. This set off a journalistic and pamphlet war in which Pessoa was a leading general, doing battle not only with his literary peers but with a powerful right-wing student group. In 1924, after Olisipo had shut its doors, Pessoa cofounded the magazine
Athena,
where he published much of his own work in the five issues of its brief life, and in 1926 he and his brother-in-law founded a business and accounting magazine, which lasted for six issues
.