‘Stop Living and Read’

The ironic nature of solitude is to confirm that we are social beings: Witness the life of Fernando Pessoa. Even if we adopt Pessoa’s youthful maxim--”Stop living and read”--it’s not likely that we will learn of a more solitary yet inwardly populous individual than he was. The Lisbon avant-garde of the teens and ‘20s was small enough that fellow writers knew that he also wrote under the names of Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis and lvaro de Campos, all of them very different from him and from one another. Pessoa freely explained to an editor that he had “created a nonexistent coterie” and “ascertained the influences at work and the friendships between them.” But no one knew what an extensive society Pessoa had made of his heteronyms, as he called these alter egos, until he died in 1935, leaving behind a trove of manuscripts, signed by at least 72 names.

“Timidity,” writes E.M. Cioran, “is the direct, even the unique source of all inner wealth”--and here was the sunken treasure of modernism, coins stamped with many faces but all instruments of a single, glittering currency.

Most of the heteronyms are equipped with biographies hardly more rudimentary than Pessoa’s own. He lived alone and worked, no more than he had to, as a translator of business letters into English and French. He rarely left Lisbon; his hobby was to chain-smoke; he almost certainly died a virgin; and his life’s work was the filling of a wooden trunk with papers. His heteronyms are aristocrats, doctors and clerks; they include a wicked Frenchman and an obtuse Englishman, writing in their native languages; they are frequently brothers, a trait which becomes more poignant when Richard Zenith, editor and translator of the “Selected Prose,” notes that Pessoa’s brother died in infancy; and finally there is a sole woman heteronym, whose unsent love letter concludes Zenith’s roughly chronological selection.

“At this point,” so Pessoa wrote to the inquiring editor, “you’re no doubt wondering what bad luck has caused you to fall, just by reading, into the midst of an insane asylum.” But his was not a case of multiple-personality disorder. It would be much more accurate to diagnose him as suffering from a lifelong spell of lucidity, and the sudden coldness we sometimes feel in reading him comes from being in the presence of a man who knows himself to be almost fatally well. Very matter-of-factly, doctor more than patient, he will describe himself as a “hysterical neurasthenic” and propose that “the mental origin of my heteronyms lies in my relentless, organic tendency to depersonalization and simulation.”

Likewise, he has a neat literary rationale for smashing himself to bits. As he--or his heteronym lvaro de Campos--explains in a manifesto as logical as it is delirious, the development of new stimuli in the modern world has so outpaced the growth of any single mastering sensibility that now “the greatest man is the one who is most incoherent” and the expression of the age will require, “say, just two poets endowed with fifteen or twenty personalities.”

The genius of such a theory is to be proven above all by those who doubt it. One heteronym suspects he is writing only to “forget that at heart I’m just timid, with no aptitude for life.” But this is only one personality, and Campos had already proposed “the abolition of any condition that lasts longer than a mood.”

The ironies, paradoxes and qualifications of Pessoa’s work are increased when we consider the single-mindedness of his life. Any number of books could have been made from the ruined album of his papers, but Zenith’s selection is beautifully translated, compact while appropriately diverse, and another of its virtues is that it gives an account of a life that makes up in fascination what it lacks in outward event.

Over the last two decades, since Portuguese scholars imposed an order on it, Pessoa’s writing has been emerging in its true abundance. In English we have several versions of his poems (here, too, Zenith is a good guide) and of his prose masterpiece, “The Book of Disquiet” (Margaret Jull Costa’s translation is the most stunning). Anyone in the lucky position of not having read Pessoa yet should probably get his hands on these books before reading “Selected Prose.” They consist of the shards “of a fallen sentient mirror, reflecting the world’s diversity,” and any modern person will find his own face scattered and winking throughout.

Although these books beg the same question that they render absurd--”Who was Fernando Pessoa?”--”Selected Prose” furnishes answers and new absurdity in almost the same measure. Because there is no biography of Pessoa in English, Zenith’s confessedly “heavy editorial intervention”--a chronological arrangement and lavish contextualization of these selected notes, fragments, letters and pieces of planned books--serves as the next best thing.

Fernando Antonio Nogeuira Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888. When he was 5, his father died, and after his mother remarried, he accompanied her to Durban, South Africa, where his stepfather was Portuguese consul. Education in South Africa meant that he learned English, and did so well enough that Walt Whitman became his single greatest influence. He returned alone to Lisbon in 1905, at 17, and never dropped what his Portuguese acquaintances considered his “very British” formality, dry humor and way of dressing.

It was in English that, as a young man, he drew up a set of 10 commandments for himself. No. 1: “Make as few confidences as possible. Better make none, but, if you make any, make false or indistinct ones.” No. 9: “Organize your life like a literary work, putting as much unity into it as possible.” Pessoa adhered to this regime with remarkable strictness over 25 years. He enjoined himself to be aloof, charming and courteous--commandments 4, 7 and 8--which is exactly how his acquaintances described him after his death. The Mosaic Decalogue prohibits the worshiping of false gods, and so, in a way, does Pessoa’s. “Shamelessly replace God with yourself,” he wrote, then added: “Replace yourself continuously.”

Love tempted Pessoa away from his solitary religion, but just once. Experimenting briefly with automatic writing at age 28, he was contacted by several spirits from the beyond who urged him to lose his virginity as quickly as possible. A few years later, Pessoa met a young woman named Ophelia Queiroz. She was cultured and pretty and more than 10 years his junior. Ophelia should have guessed the hopelessness of their passion when Pessoa declared his love with words from “Hamlet.” Nevertheless, she fell for her prince of indecision, who, in letters included in “Selected Prose,” is by turns affectionate and mockingly evasive.

When he has disappointed her in something, he claims not to have been at fault: “I got switched with lvaro de Campos!” And how should a woman respond to the question: “Do you like me because I’m me or because I’m not?” Finally, Pessoa explained that before thinking of marriage he must “organize, without delay ... my literary work,” and that in any case she couldn’t be allowed to marry “a man with a face like a gas meter.” Years later, toward the end of his creator’s life, the Baron of Teive could “still remember--so vividly I can smell the fragrance of the spring air--the afternoon when I decided, after thinking everything over, to abdicate from love as from an insoluble problem.”

But that was to forsake one impossibility for another. Pessoa published during his lifetime only one slim book in Portuguese and seems to have regarded publication much as he did other forms of action: “To act is to exile oneself.” “The Book of Disquiet,” which he announced as forthcoming in 1914, was not published in Lisbon until 1982. He also meant to gather his poems, under all names, into a single volume called “Fictions of the Interlude,” but the interlude he was referring to--the one between birth and death--closed too quickly for him to carry out a plan he would probably have abandoned in any case.

The inventor of Intersectionism (as well as of a heteronym who wrote “Pass by, you milksops who need to be ists of one or another ism!”), Pessoa placed himself at the crossroads of modern sensibility, and to read him is to be helplessly reminded of certain other writers: Whitman, Kafka, Dickinson, Cioran. But these associations only emphasize his peculiarity, one aspect of which is the striking absence of death in his writing. All solitaries are liable to morbidity, Pessoa as much as the others, but his abundant sense of potential fates seems hardly to have included the one certain end. Procrastination was his substitute for immortality; he behaved as if he had no shortage of time.

Yet he had failed to keep just one commandment--”Try to be as sober as possible”--and was admitted to a hospital in November 1935, suffering from cirrhosis of the liver. His last piece of any length is a love letter from a hunchback girl to a metal worker. Without planning to mail her letter, she writes with a damaged virginal consciousness, addressing the muscle and steel of the world: “Goodbye, Senhor Antonio. My days are numbered, 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 .... I love you with all my heart and life. There, I said it, and I’m crying. [signed] Maria Jose.”

Anyone might already have suspected that only as a ventriloquist was Pessoa capable of a cri de coeur. But to hear it at last, in so pure a form, puts a crack in the heart. And yet it would be wrong to pity Pessoa. “Gaiety is for dogs,” he--or the Baron of Teive--wrote. He wanted, instead, to be human, which meant to be self-conscious, which meant to abide in irony, which was then not to be oneself, which finally meant being other people and sympathizing with them. His kindness toward others, to which everyone who knew him testified, seems to have been the result of just this sympathy.

“To live is to be other,” he--or one of him--wrote, and this paradox fences all the others: the lucidity of his confusion, his languorous hysteria, his frigid tenderness, his joyous sadness, and the great and bracing integrity of his disintegrated personality.