I called my incapacity for living genius,
and I dressed up my cowardice by calling it refinement.
Years ago, while reading José Saramago's The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, I came across a scene in which the ghost of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa comes into the protagonist's room. It was a gloriously solemn scene, one pregnant with meaning, but I was unable to figure out just what kind of meaning. I knew Saramago was trying to tell me something and I was too stupid to get it. I had heard of Pessoa, the great Portuguese poet, but I hadn't read him and didn't know anything about him. What was so important about Reis, whom I had assumed to be a fictional poet, returning to his home world of Portugal to die, and before he did, to get to have this intimate conversation with the ghost of Pessoa?
I reread the scene three times.
Beautiful. Stunning. I'm missing something.
But then, not long after, I found a poem written by Ricardo Reis, and realized that Saramago didn't create Reis. He was in fact one of Portugal's master poets. I had misread the entire novel.
Researching Reis I discovered Alberto Caeiro and Álvaro de Campos. Reis was a doctor and classicist, a royalist who lived in exile in Brazil after the proclamation of the Portuguese Republic. He saw himself as a modern pagan and a fatalist. Caeiro was an unlettered genius who lived in the country, a pale-blond, blue-eyed paesano. He is called "the innocent poet". Campos was a naval engineer, a tall, monocle-wearing, bisexual dandy who travelled the world. He was a blasé, indolent symbolist, a cultured and bored bourgeois, a man dedicated to experience and feeling.
And Fernando Pessoa? Pessoa was a clerk and commercial translator in an import/export office. A loner. With no friends, no love, no family. A nobody whose most intimate relationship was with a leather briefcase he carried under his arms, to and from work. He gave up his life for his poetry, and for the poetry of others. Because, you see, Reis, Caeiro and Campos were all Fernando Pessoa himself. He invented them, along with many other literary alter egos.
Ricardo Reis was a fictional poet, but Saramago didn't create him. The novelist didn't even have to develop the character. Pessoa had already done that, having given Reis a personal biography, psychology, politics, aesthetics, religion, and physique. In essence, Saramago just brought a dying Reis to meet his maker.
Pessoa created distinct writers, each with his own background, his own style, his own interests, his own intent. And each a genius.
He also created Jean Seul, who wrote in French. Another of his alter egos wrote English sonnets that were described by The Times as more Shakespearean than Shakespeare. He not only created poets, he gave them their champions. Pessoa invented a prolific critic, Thomas Crosse, whose writings in English promoted Portuguese literature in general, and Alberto Caeiro's work in particular. Pessoa didn't stop there. His creations critiqued each other. Campos and Reis lauded Caeiro's writings, yet disliked each other's.
Pessoa invented short-story writers, translators, philosophers, an astrologer, a baron who committed suicide, and a hunchbacked, lovelorn woman by the name of Maria José – more than seventy-two creations by some accounts. He wrote, "Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves."
Reading Pessoa & Co., a selection of poems by Caeiro, Campos, Reis, and Pessoa, I was moved to a land where words matter, where metaphor could ease suffering, where a deft touch could make the day-to-day living astonishing and extraordinary. I took a soak in the most luxurious of oils, a bubble bath for the soul.
The poets themselves may have been Pessoa's best creation, but his greatest literary achievement is The Book of Disquiet, one of life's great miracles; its author another heteronym, Bernardo Soares. Disquiet is prose, what Soares called a "factless" autobiography, consisting of observations, aphorisms, ruminations, haphazard musings, dreams, moods, and the keenest revelation of an artist's soul. What makes this book, this fictional diary, transcendent is that it deals with the eternal quests: the meaning of life, of death, the existence of God, good and evil, the questions of love, reality, consciousness, and the disquiet of the soul. It quenches the thirsty mind and floods the arid heart.
The Disquiet manuscript, as well as most of Pessoa's work, was found in a trunk after his death – he hardly published anything while alive. The translator Margaret Jull Costa wrote, "perhaps appropriately, there is no one version, because each edition of the book represents a selection of the papers found in the trunk and put together in a different order or according to different criteria by different people. In English alone, there are four different versions; it is as if Pessoa continued to fragment into further heteronyms beyond death and we, the translators, were those heteronyms."
In an early letter to an acquaintance, Pessoa explained: "Ever since I was a child, I have had the tendency to create a fictitious world around me, to surround myself with friends and acquaintances who never existed. (I don't know, of course, if they didn't really exist or if it is me who doesn't exist. On such matters, as in all others, one shouldn't be dogmatic.) Ever since I became aware of the thing that I call self, I can remember with mental precision, the figures, the movements, the character and the history of several fictitious people who were, to me, as visible as those things which we, perhaps abusively, call real life."
He did exhibit interest in a real-life person once, a romantic liaison – brief, and mostly epistolary – with an Ophelia Queiroz. Its brevity was due to the malicious interference of none other than Álvaro de Campos, who loathed Ophelia and believed her to be a distraction to Pessoa's literary ambition. Pessoa had to end the liaison to maintain Álvaro's friendship.
Pessoa lived most of his life in a single room in Lisbon. He died in relative obscurity, a virgin and a recluse.
