The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa

by Fernando Pessoa

  There are authors who write plays and novels, and they often endow the characters of their plays and novels with feelings and ideas that they insist are not their own. Here the substance is the same, though the form is different.

  Each of the more enduring personalities, lived by the author within himself, was given an expressive nature and made the author of one or more books whose ideas, emotions, and literary art have no relationship to the real author (or perhaps only apparent author, since we don’t know what reality is) except insofar as he served, when he wrote them, as the medium of the characters he created.

  Neither this work nor those to follow have anything to do with the man who writes them. He doesn’t agree or disagree with what’s in them. He writes as if he were being dictated to. And as if the person dictating were a friend (and for that reason could freely ask him to write down what he dictates), the writer finds the dictation interesting, perhaps just out of friendship.

  The human author of these books has no personality of his own. Whenever he feels a personality well up inside, he quickly realizes that this new being, though similar, is distinct from him—an intellectual son, perhaps, with inherited characteristics, but also with differences that make him someone else.

  That this quality in the writer is a manifestation of hysteria, or of the so-called split personality, is neither denied nor affirmed by the author of these books. As the helpless slave of his multiplied self, it would be useless for him to agree with one or the other theory about the written results of that multiplication.

  It’s not surprising that this way of making art seems strange; what’s surprising is that there are things that don’t seem strange.

  Some of the author’s current theories were inspired by one or another of these personalities that consubstantially passed—for a moment, for a day, or for a longer period—through his own personality, assuming he has one.

  The author of these books cannot affirm that all these different and well-defined personalities who have incorporeally passed through his soul don’t exist, for he does not know what it means to exist, nor whether Hamlet or Shakespeare is more real, or truly real.

  So far the projected books include: this first volume, The Book of Disquiet, written by a man who called himself Vicente Guedes;* then The Keeper of Sheep, along with other poems and fragments by Alberto Caeiro (deceased, like Guedes, and from the same cause),* who was born near Lisbon in 1889 and died where he was born in 1915. If you tell me it’s absurd to speak that way about someone who never existed, I’ll answer that I also have no proof that Lisbon ever existed, or I who am writing, or anything at all.

  This Alberto Caeiro had two disciples and a philosophical follower. The two disciples, Ricardo Reis and Alvaro de Campos, took different paths: the former intensified the paganism discovered by Caeiro and made it artistically orthodox; the latter, basing himself on another part of Caeiro’s work, developed an entirely different system, founded exclusively on sensations. The philosophical follower, António Mora (the names are as inevitable and as independent from me as the personalities), has one or two books to write in which he will conclusively prove the metaphysical and practical truth of paganism. A second philosopher of this pagan school, whose name has still not appeared to my inner sight or hearing, will write an apology for paganism based on entirely different arguments.

  Perhaps other individuals with this same, genuine kind of reality will appear in the future, or perhaps not, but they will always be welcome to my inner life, where they live better with me than I’m able to live with outer reality. Needless to say, I agree with certain parts of their theories, and disagree with other parts. But that’s quite beside the point. If they write beautiful things, those things are beautiful, regardless of any and all metaphysical speculations about who “really” wrote them. If in their philosophies they say true things—supposing there can be truth in a world where nothing exists—those things are true regardless of the intention or “reality” of whoever said them.

  Having made myself into what I am—at worst a lunatic with grandiose dreams, at best not just a writer but an entire literature—I may be contributing not only to my own amusement (which would already be good enough for me) but to the enrichment of the universe, for when someone dies and leaves behind one beautiful verse, he leaves the earth and heavens that much richer, and the reason for stars and people that much more emotionally mysterious.

  In view of the current dearth of literature, what can a man of genius do but convert himself into a literature? Given the dearth of people he can get along with, what can a man of sensibility do but invent his own friends, or at least his intellectual companions?

  I thought at first of publishing these works anonymously, with no mention of myself, and to establish something like a Portuguese neopaganism in which various authors—all of them different—would collaborate and make the movement grow. But to keep up the pretense (even if no one divulged the secret) would be virtually impossible in Portugal’s small intellectual milieu, and it wouldn’t be worth the mental effort to try.

  In the vision that I call inner merely because I call the “real world” outer, I clearly and distinctly see the familiar, well-defined facial features, personality traits, life stories, ancestries, and in some cases even the death, of these various characters. Some of them have met each other; others have not. None of them ever met me except Álvaro de Campos. But if tomorrow, traveling in America, I were to run into the physical person of Ricardo Reis, who in my opinion lives there, my soul wouldn’t relay to my body the slightest flinch of surprise; all would be as it should be, exactly as it was before the encounter. What is life?

  You should approach these books* as if you hadn’t read this explanation but had simply read the books, buying them one by one at a bookstore, where you saw them on display. You shouldn’t read them in any other spirit. When you read Hamlet, you don’t begin by reminding yourself that the story never happened. By doing so you would spoil the very pleasure you hope to get from reading it. When we read, we stop living. Let that be your attitude. Stop living, and read. What’s life?

  But here, more intensely than in the case of a poet’s dramatic work, you must deal with the active presence of the alleged author. That doesn’t mean you have the right to believe in my explanation. As soon as you read it, you should suppose that I’ve lied—that you’re going to read books by different poets, or different writers, and that through those books you’ll receive emotions and learn lessons from those writers, with whom I have nothing to do except as their publisher. How do you know that this attitude is not, after all, the one most in keeping with the inscrutable reality of things?

  ...

  THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN AND HETERONYM

  Fernando Pessoa’s adventures in heteronymy began in his early childhood, according to his own account, which he might well have fabricated, but we know that self-multiplication was the main generator of his writing life by the time he reached puberty. Pessoa’s archives contain a number of make-believe newspapers that he began to create when he was thirteen. These are elaborate, three-column productions containing real and invented news, poems, short stories, historical features, riddles, and jokes, signed by a gallery of writers with distinct interests and literary styles. The papers were written in Portuguese, mostly in 1902, when the family had gone to Portugal for a year to visit relatives, but Pessoa penned at least one newspaper back in Durban, in 1903, and there’s even one that dates from September of 1905, right after he had returned to Portugal for the second and last time. A biographical sketch for one of the pseudo-journalists, Eduardo Lança, reports that he was born in Brazil in 1875 and immigrated as a young man to Portugal, basing himself in Lisbon but traveling all over the country. And several of Lança’s colleagues—Dr. Pancrácio, Gaudéncio Nabos—weren’t limited to their newspaper collaborations but signed poems and prose pieces as well.

  Far more prolific and psychologically complex, Charles Robert Anon and Alexander Search
may be considered the first veritable heteronyms. Anon came first, when Pessoa was still in South Africa, and then Search, who may not have been conceived until Pessoa returned to Lisbon in 1905. Pessoa even had calling cards printed for Alexander Search, whose output includes over 150 English poems (some dating as late as 1910), essays, commentaries, and a short story titled “A Very Original Dinner,” in which human flesh was served to the unsuspecting guests. Search, who was born in Lisbon on the same day as Pessoa, had an older brother, Charles James Search, who was a translator of Portuguese and Spanish literature into English. The two brothers had a French-language colleague, Jean Seul, who was a poet and a writer of moral satires, including “France in 1950,” found further on in this volume. Curiously enough, Alexander Search, in the passage from this section dated October 30, 1908, refers to his “Jean Seul projects.” This would suggest, though it seems rather unlikely, that Pessoa intended Jean Seul to be a French heteronym of his English heteronym. Pessoa did not leave us any biographical information about C. R. Anon, whose last name perhaps indicates that this anonymity was deliberate.

  Search and Anon incarnated the anxieties and existential concerns of a young intellectual entering adulthood, but the two heteronyms were more stridently outspoken than Pessoa himself, and more virulently anti-Catholic. Their styles are not easy to distinguish, and Pessoa may have meant for Search to replace Anon. A number of poems originally signed by the latter were subsequently attributed to the former, and there’s even a poem (revised and recopied) signed “C. R. Anon, id est Alexander Search.”

  The transition from his South African childhood to life as a young adult in Lisbon, separated from his mother for the first time, brought Pessoa new kinds of stress and insecurity that came to a head in the year 1907. The usual pressure felt by a nineteen year old to define or discover himself was magnified by his sense of geographical and linguistic displacement and by the lack of structure in his daily life, especially after he dropped out of the University of Lisbon. His paternal grandmother, who had been in and out of mental hospitals during the last twelve years of her life, died in a state of advanced dementia in the summer ofigoy, and Pessoa seemed to be quite sincerely afraid of going mad himself. Living under the same roof with her (along with two great-aunts) and reading, during the same period, Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892) set him to thinking and writing almost obsessively about the relationship between genius and madness (his archives contain over a hundred texts on the topic, nearly all of them unpublished). Perhaps his main problem was that very obsessiveness. At the end of the above-mentioned passage signed by Alexander Search in 1908, we read: “One of my mental complications—horrible beyond words—is a fear of insanity, which itself is insanity.”

  Pessoa remarked, in The Book of Disquiet and elsewhere, that a madman is not liable to see the madness of his own ideas, which may explain his keen interest in learning how other people saw him. Knowing that he would probably never return to South Africa, he decided to go for broke, writing several of his former teachers under a false name, as a psychiatrist requesting information about his mentally deranged patient, namely Pessoa. In a letter of inquiry to Clifford Geerdts, a former classmate, the phony shrink was to announce that Pessoa had, apparently, committed suicide. Pessoa did not strictly follow his plan, but we know that in 1907 Mr. Belcher, who was Pessoa’s English teacher in Durban, did receive a letter from a “Dr. Faustino Antunes” asking for information about his former student, and Geerdts was also sent a letter—not the rough draft published on pp. 12–13, but a letter like the one to Belcher, stating that Pessoa was suffering from a mental disorder. Both men duly replied, and Geerdts’s letter—which was the more forthcoming—included the following observations about Pessoa:

  • “He was pale and thin and appeared physically to be very imperfectly developed. He had a narrow and contracted chest and was inclined to stoop.”

  • “... he was inclined to be morbid.”

  • “[He was] regarded as a brilliantly clever boy.”

  • “... he had learned [English] so rapidly and so well that he had a splendid style in that language.”

  • “[He was] meek and inoffensive and inclined to avoid association with his schoolfellows.”

  • “He took no part in athletic sports of any kind and I think his spare time was spent in reading. We generally considered that he worked far too much and that he would ruin his health by so doing.”

  In fact Pessoa, with incredible sangfroid, first wrote to Mr. Belcher in South Africa, waited for his reply, then wrote Geerdts at Oxford (where he had gone to study), relaying some of Belcher’s comments and asking if Geerdts agreed. All of this in the name of Dr. Faustino Antunes, who turns out to be more than just a clinical psychiatrist, for he was also the signing author of an “Essay on Intuition.”

  From the schoolboy script in which it was written, we know that the opening passage in this section probably dates from when Pessoa was still in his teens, but he posed as an old man looking back: “I was a poet animated by philosophy,” and, in the penultimate paragraph, “There is for me—there was—a wealth of meaning (...)”. Whether writing under his own or an invented name, Pessoa already revealed what he called—in a passage signed by Alexander Search—“an inborn tendency to mystification, to artistic lying.”

  “I was a poet animated by philosophy”

  I was a poet animated by philosophy, not a philosopher with poetic faculties. I loved to admire the beauty of things, to trace in the imperceptible and through the minute the poetic soul of the universe.

  ...

  Poetry is in everything—in land and in sea, in lake and in riverside. It is in the city too—deny it not—it is evident to me here as I sit: there is poetry in this table, in this paper, in this inkstand; there is poetry in the rattling of the cars on the streets, in each minute, common, ridiculous motion of a workman who [on] the other side of the street is painting the signboard of a butcher’s shop.

  Mine inner sense predominates in such a way over my five senses that I see things in this life—I do believe it—in a way different from other men. There is for me—there was—a wealth of meaning in a thing so ridiculous as a door key, a nail on a wall, a cat’s whiskers. There is to me a fullness of spiritual suggestion in a fowl with its chickens strutting across the road. There is to me a meaning deeper than human fears in the smell of sandalwood, in the old tins on a dirt heap, in a matchbox lying in the gutter, in two dirty papers which, on a windy day, will roll and chase each other down the street.

  For poetry is astonishment, admiration, as of a being fallen from the skies taking full consciousness of his fall, astonished at things. As of one who knew things in their soul, striving to remember this knowledge, remembering that it was not thus he knew them, not under these forms and these conditions, but remembering nothing more.

  “The artist must be born beautiful”

  The artist must be born beautiful and elegant; for he that worships beauty must not himself be unfair. And it is assuredly a terrible pain for an artist to find not at all in himself that which he strives for. Who, looking at the portraits of Shelley, of Keats, of Byron, of Milton, and of Poe, can wonder that these were poets? All were beautiful, all were beloved and admired, all had in love warmth of life and heavenly joy, as far as any poet, or indeed any man, can have.

  “I have always had in consideration”

  I have always had in consideration a case which is extremely interesting and which brings up* a problem not the less interesting. I considered the case of a man becoming immortal under a pseudonym, his real name hidden and unknown. Such a man would, thinking upon it, not consider himself really immortal but an unknown, [destined] to be immortal in deed. “And yet what is the name?” he would consider. Nothing at all. “What then,” I said to myself, “is immortality in art, in poesy, in anything whatsoever?”

  Three Prose Fragments

  Charles Robert Anon

  1.

  Ten thousand times my he
art broke within me. I cannot count the sobs that shook me, the pains that ate into my heart.

  Yet I have seen other things also which have brought tears into mine eyes and have shaken me like a stirred leaf. I have seen men and women giving life, hopes, all for others. I have seen such acts of high devotedness that I have wept tears of gladness. These things, I have thought, are beautiful, although they are powerless to redeem. They are the pure rays of the sun on the vast dung-heap of the world.

  * * *

  2.

  I saw the little children ...

  A hatred of institutions, of conventions, kindled my soul with its fire. A hatred of priests and kings rose in me like a flooded stream. I had been a Christian, warm, fervent, sincere; my emotional, sensitive nature demanded food for its hunger, fuel for its fire. But when I looked upon these men and women, suffering and wicked, I saw how little they deserved the curse of a further hell. What greater hell than this life? What greater curse than living? “This free will,” I cried to myself, “this also is a convention and a falsehood invented by men that they might punish and slay and torture with the word ‘justice,’ which is a nickname of crime. ‘Judge not,’ the Bible has it—the Bible; ‘judge not, that ye may not be judged!’”

  When I had been a Christian I had thought men responsible for the ill they did—I hated tyrants, I cursed kings and priests. When I had shaken off the immoral, the false influence of the philosophy of Christ, I hated tyranny, kinghood, priestdom—evil in itself. Kings and priests I pitied because they were men.