Fernando Pessoa: Voices of a Nomadic Soul
Zbigniew Kotowicz
Shearsman Books. Exeter. 2008.
Portraits of Pessoa with images and text.
A translation of The Tobacconist’s.
References, Notes and Bibliography
I.
Pessoa would reply, like many have before him and many since, that his life is in his work, nowhere else. Writing meant to Pessoa everything.
…
When he could not write he suffered and he also suffered when he wrote.
(p. 12)
Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, Alberto Caeiro and Fernando Pessoa...later Bernardo Soares and many more.
Each time we seem to be reading a distinctly different poet.
…
When Pessoa wrote under his own name he differed just as much.
(p. 14)
Pessoa cultivates this multiplicity and he explained it in different ways. According to one account this was a sign of a psychological anomaly, which went back to childhood. Already when he was six he would write letters to himself under the guise of someone else. From then on he lived with a multitude of voices, discourses, personalities and this at times drove him made. These imaginary people, usually writers, were given names and they wrote on different subjects and in different languages.
But Pessoa was not ‘mad’ in the sense of a mental illness. More a psychological response to a childhood with imaginary friends that never left- grew up, went away?
According to another explanation Pessoa experienced metempsychotic phenomena. He felt within himself, like a medium, the presence of others; ‘it happens, that when looking in the mirror, I see my face disappear and a face of a bearded man emerge, or of another one (there are four in all that appear this way)’, he confided in a letter. His lifelong fascination with the occult, Theosophy, Rosicrucianism seems connected with these. He wrote occult poems, he experimented with automatic writing and the occult theme comes up in many unexpected places in Pessoa’s work.
A creative and over-active imagination, left over from childhood, and sustained by the popular foods of the day? A perfect storm that brewed inside Pessoa’s head, allowing the heteronyms to rain down onto the paper?
Whatever the origins of this multiplicity Pessoa also worked out and published an aesthetic doctrine of a multiple personality. This came from Álvaro de Campos. In 1917, in the review Portugal Futurista, Campos published a lively manifesto ‘Ultimatum’.
…’Science teaches...that each of us is an assembly of subsidiary psyches, a badly-made synthesis of cellular souls. ...An artist should work towards an ‘abolition of the dogma of artistic individuality. The greater the artist, the less definable he is, and he will write in more genres with more contradictions and dissimilarities’.
(p. 15-16)
Was this just Pessoa living his manifesto? Defining his art? Setting the scene?
He was probably the first to subject the notion of ‘I’ to such radical scrutiny. How many am I? Am I the subject or object of speech? Is there a real author? We are multiple, incoherent and contradictory. A unified identity, a definable personality or subjectivity is an illusion.
(p. 16)
And the parts of a disjointed identity, an undefinable personality or subjectivity are equally illusion...Is there only illusion? Contradictions abound, and can be troubling. Postmodern croaching upon modernism. (p. 16)
Pessoa seemed serious in his intention to produce poetry that would surpass Camões. And since he predicted the arrival of several poets that would remove the Bard from the pedestal he also seemed to quite literally take upon himself the creation of several poets whose task it would be.
(p. 21)
He intended to use all three,...because, as he explained in a letter, ‘this break-up into pseudonymic personalities is moreover necessary as, for the moment, there is (almost) no-one numerically.
…
And it is interesting to note that Caeiro, Campos and Reis, put together, have something of Camões’s spread.
(p. 22)
The superiority of imaginary over real travel was a poetic imperative to which Pessoa held on consistently all his life.
(p. 24)
Campos -Whitman. Free verse. Scandal.
‘Everything that I have written under the names...is serious. Through all three of them I let a deep conception pass, different in each but in each the concern about the mysterious importance of the simple fact of existing’.
(p. 25)
Pessoa was naturally drawn to monarchy, had little faith in the democratic system, and often felt in step with dictatorial ideologies. But no state ever pleased him, and it never could, maybe because there was always the other Pessoa around, the poet who needed free air to breathe.
…
Sometimes the poet would desert Pessoa completely.
(p. 33)
And there was one more unusual thing about Pessoa. Many of the artists who held strong political or ideological views tended to keep them separate from their art. … Pessoa was different and more complex. For most of the time his work followed separate paths as thought he was aware that between his political convictions and his artistic leanings there was an irreconcilable conflict, that there was no passage between one and the other. But he also sought to bring them together.
(p. 34)
…, although Pessoa professed to have little intention of publishing them, there is every good reason to think he made sure that they would get maximum posthumous exposure.
(p. 35)
Definitely seems there is (artistic) method to the madness...and no madness.
II.
Beginning with a passage from The Book Of Disquiet:
But if I want to say I exist as an entity that address and acts on itself, exercising the divine function of self-creation, then I’ll make to be into a transitive verb. Triumphantly and anti-grammatically supreme, I’ll speak of ‘amming myself’.
(p. 39)
Changing the rules (of grammar) to extend playing the game.
Soon this strange theatre of fictional poets was recognized as Pessoa’s major achievement. He invented and exhausted it. To do it again, without being accused of plagiarism, would require prodigious poetic inventiveness.
(p. 39)
Pessoa found a tool, a basic tool, and customized it.
How the three plus Fernando Pessoa...the heteronym named for himself, but still a heteronym and not himself, came to be. Portion of a letter to another poet, p. 40-41. Retelling, recording, the ‘creation myth’ to one who would likely carry it forward.
Pessoa was using this letter to shape his posthumous mythology, further contradicting the impression that he wanted Message to be his last word.
…
‘I desire to be a creator of myths, which is the highest mystery that any human can perform.’
(p. 41)
These imaginary personae were not a disguise, an attempt to conceal the author, the way a pseudonym would. At any rate, it was known in literary circles right from the beginning that Pessoa was behind them. ...He called them heteronyms, a word he seems to have coined.
…
Seventy-two names have been found in Pessoas papers.
...
Caeiro, Campos and Reis were different and in the end only they should be referred to as heteronyms. They were the only ones who gained full poetic coherence and independence.
(p. 42)
Tools.
Any attempt to reconstruct the true genesis of the heteronyms is doomed to failure. Pessoa covered his tracks. But it does not matter. Any ‘truth; about it would be far more prosaic than the myth that he left behind.
(p. 44)
Thomas Crosse - an English heteronym.
Caeiro- the sensualist and muse/guide/Zen master to the others.
Caeiro does not seem credible. Why would he write? How can he write and live by the senses? This is incongruous. But somehow Caeiro is believable.
…
Caeiro develops a philosophy of non-philosophy that demands ‘The main thing is knowing how to see/ To know how to see without thinking’ (XXIV- The Keeper of Flocks
(p. 45)
Believable. How are you going to make me believe it is not you?
Alberto Caeiro - The Keeper of Flocks
What may have at first seemed a simple teaching turns out to be quite radical, full of nuance and subtlety. This is why, despite such economy of means, … is so compelling. It is poetry of the surface where only the thing that counts is appearance with nothing hidden.
(p. 46)
Childhood is the divine state; whatever we retain from childhood is what is godly in us.
And it’s because he’s always with me that I’m always a poet,
And my very smallest glimpse
Fills me with feeling,
And the smallest sound, whatever it may be,
Seems to speak to me.
Caeiro blasphemes in search of the innocence of childhood. Many poets have sought to recover this state. To some this is nostalgia for a time that is no longer, to others it may be the lost mother, to others still, the ability to imagine and mythologize without restraint. Caeiro’s child is a being that has only senses and to whom each vision is the wonder of the new.
…
The New Child who stays where I stay
Gives one hand to me
And the other to everything that exists
And so we three go along whatever road there is…
(p. 47)
Thomas Merton translated Caeiro into English; he was the first Pessoa to be translated. Merton was drawn to the Zen sensibility expressed in the writings of Caeiro. This was read into the work by Merton with no proof that Pessoa/Caeiro intended to reference Buddhism. Pessoa did prepare philosophically for Caeiro’s writing, evidence for this is in Pessoa’s philosophical notes. (p.48)
Pessoa said in the letter that the emergence of Alberto Caeiro meant the non-existence of Fernando Pessoa. This makes perfect sense. Caeiro, the sensationist poet, is the antithesis of Pessoa, the Sebastianist with mystical leanings. There is an unbridgeable gap between the doctrine of sensationism and the occult, which seeks meaning beyond the visible.
(p. 49)
‘Intersectionism’ - a form of poetic cubism; Pessoa’s response to the poems of Caeiro.
March 8, 1914 -the birthday. Order of birth: Caiero, Pessoa, Reis and Campos.
Pessoa was ‘born again’ and considered, just like the others, Caeiro his ‘master’; learning from him the wisdom of the senses. (p. 50)
If there is any influence of Caeiro it is that they usually begin with an image, something quite tactile, though not by any means always. Throughout this varied output the feelings that are most frequent are melancholy and sadness.
(p. 52)
The Mariner, an early work by Pessoa pre-Caeiro, a ‘static-drama’ think Beckett/Godot but much earlier.
It is here that Pessoa for the first time expounded his doctrine of the superiority of imaginary over real life.
(p. 53)
Ricardo Reis -described as the least visible and having published little (p.54); nevertheless he lived on long after Pessoa and the others [my note -exiting through the pen of Jose Saramago in The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1991).]
Later it was discovered that his output was considerable.
…
Throughout these twenty years (1914-1935) the style remained the same and their subject rarely changed. Life is not worth living and there is nothing to look for beyond it. Our knowledge is limited and unequal to that of the gods. We must learn to appreciate the little that comes our way. If we expect much we will face disappointment, ‘but to one who hopes for nothing/All that comes is grateful.’
(p. 54)
Ricardo Reis is the Classicist; the monarchist. With the Classical POV that there are gods, but they can not be bothered by the trivialities of humans.
Pessoa referred to Reis as a sad Epicurean, but he is so sad that there is not much of Epicurus left.
…
It seems that this spiritual suffering, dressed in a classical idiom was for Pessoa an exercise in form.
…
At any rate, Reis kept at it, perfecting his craft, all his life.
(p. 55)
Reis wrote Odes.
…-we are multiple. It follows that as multiple we cannot accept a universe in which there is only one god. In his very last poem Reis speaks of this multiplicity in a striking form:
Legion live in us;
I think or feel and don’t know
Who is it thinking, feeling.
I am merely the place
Where thinking or feeling is.
I have more souls than one.
There are more ‘I’s’ than myself.
And still, I exist
Indifferent to all.
I silence them: I speak.
The crisscross thrusts
Of what I feel or don’t feel
Dispute in the I I am.
Unknown. They dictate nothing
To the I I know. I write.
(p. 56-57)
A summary of what/who each I is: Caeiro - the pastoral/sensualist, naive; Pessoa -the feigner/Sebastianist, inventor; Reis -the Classicist/monarchist; and Campos -the steadiest and most volatile companion; a modernist who wants to experience everything; exuberant (p. 58), modern.
Álvaro de Campos authored ‘Ultimatum’ and ‘The Tobacco Shop’; he wrote a lot. (p. 57)
I’m nothing.
I’ll never be anything.
I can’t wish to be anything.
Even so, I have in me all the dreams of the world.
(p. 59)
The opening lines of ‘The Tobacco Shop’.
Campos’ range is impressive. He is introvert and extrovert, exuberant and depressed, he laughs and he moans; a sort of manic-depressive. Fever, boredom, anguish are all sputtered out with abandon. Campos may declare in a moment of exasperation ‘shit to all humanity’ but he is the most human of the many poets that Pessoa was.
(p.60)
The poetry of each of them is very accessible. The experiences, thoughts and feelings -imaginary or real- are of a kind we easily sense.
(p. 60)
Pessoa was in the technical sense a restrained poet and always remained within the canon.
...
The poems are always coherent, logical, written in stanzas, and they do not require any effort to disentangle their meaning.
…
…, the Caeiro-Pessoa-Reis-Campos quartet are outside history, outside tradition, and belong to no particular place. Their poetic universe is what they have created themselves. The images are of their own bar one or two exceptions,... these lines from Wordsworth….which Campos points out express the same sentiment as Caeiro’s poems, although Caeiro could not have known them as he did not read English.
(p. 61)
Right from the beginning Pessoa saw Caeiro, Campos and Reis as a group of real personalities. … He supplies them with biographies, told us what they looked like.
See letter to Casais Monteiro (p. 61- 62)
On the whole these biographies are no more than rough sketches. What is their purpose? They certainly do not elucidate anything about the poems, they do not make Caeiro & Co. any more believable - their verisimilitude is in their poetry. If the purpose of these biographies is not immediately clear than at least they are quite logical.
…
One apparent reason for creating the biographies, apart from giving the poets substance, was to dramatise the heteronymic strategy. Caeiro, Reis, Campos and Pessoa himself were meant as a group and not just as a collection of individuals. They knew each other, though their biographies made their direct contact limited.
(p. 63)
Pessoa planned to develop the dramatics of his theater further. He prepared accounts of how they first met and of some of the conversations that they were meant to have had. What exactly Pessoa hoped to create is not entirely clear, but whatever his projects were, they did not go very far.
Pessoa lacked an ear for dialogue.
(p. 64)
Caeiro the Master of all the others.
Caeiro is also the only one who does not feel split into several personalities, quite the opposite, in the the ninth poem of The Keeper of Flocks he declares, ‘I feel my whole body lying on reality’. Caeiro affirms because he can still discover himself in what he sees, he is the innocent who has not experienced the schism that separates him from his sensations. He knows the state of real peace.
(p. 65)
Pessoa was not always consistent in his attitude to the heteronyms. At times, probably when he was most immersed in the game, he thought of dramatising the heteronyms to the extreme, to the point where he would efface his own presence.
…
But there were also times when Pessoa seemed to lose his nerve. He would then feel personally responsible for the writings of the other poets. In one of the many ‘introductions’ to his heteronymic poetry he wrote:
For some temperamental reason, which I do not propose to analyse, and which would
not be important to analyse, I have constructed inside me various personae distinct from each other and from myself, personae to whom I have attributed various poems which are not like me, nor my sentiments and ideas, but which I have written.
… There is no point in searching for ideas and sentiments that are mine since many of them express ideas, which I don’t accept and sentiments which I have never experienced. They should be simply read as they are, which is how one should read anyway.
…
(p. 65)
Why Pessoa should write this we do not know, nor do we know when he wrote it, as the text is undated. One could venture a guess that it comes from a time when Pessoa was most removed from his heteronyms, …
…
It is quite possible that there were people who believed that these poets were real. In the end Pessoa decided to own up, so to speak. Still, he wanted the heteronyms to retain their independence. … The heteronyms were independent but their work was finally Pessoa’s responsibility; this is how he wished it to be.
(p. 66)
We admire Pessoa because he acted out the ‘death of the Author’, decades before the idea was articulated. How he experienced all this himself we can only speculate. It seems quite certain that this many-faceted inner life and obliteration of the central ‘I’ were not always easy to live with. ...we would do well to bear in mind an observation that he makes in The Book of Disquiet: ‘we must remember that tragedies, for the aesthete, are interesting to observe but disconcerting to experience.’
(p. 67)
III.
The Book of Disquiet
Fragments
…
What no one knows is what it would have looked like had Pessoa completed it.
…
...in 1914 he mentions it in a letter, ‘it’s all fragments, fragments, fragments.’ And so it remained - a hopelessly unfinished book of fragments. Shortly before his death Pessoa marked in envelope L.do.D. (...) and shoved into it various fragments of prose which he had been composing all his literary life. Those were the preparatory stages to hone the work into a publishable form and that was all that Pessoa had time to do; … nor did he leave any precise indications as to how he would arrange the material. Some of the fragments were finished and polished; many others were still in manuscript, sometimes barely legible, sometimes no more than loose notes. To aggravate the situation further Pessoa’s own selection turned out to be unreliable. … All this renders a definitive edition impossible, … Who knows, maybe Pessoa, ever amused by variability would like it this way.
(p. 71-72)
It became something like an existential diary, a place where Pessoa, the spectator watching the world pass by, would jot down observations, thoughts, meditate on the human condition, and most of all, on himself.
…
The project was never systematic and went in different directions. The authorship changed.
(p. 72)
Bernardo Soares- the assistant bookkeeper and eventual author/main voice, emerged approx. 15 years after Pessoa began writing the book. His life is minimal; many ways he resembles Pessoa and because of this Pessoa only considered Soares a semi-heteronym...his mutilated self.
Soares’s voice is sometimes what one imagines Pessoa would sound like in a confessional mood.
(p. 73-74)
He suffers from self-consciousness. Holding in front of himself a merciless mirror, without hope or nostalgia, he is afflicted by the disease that comes from being able to see oneself.
…
Soares destroys himself. He has no inner self and thus he has to conjure up a space where he can create various other personalities. He is multiple, ‘the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them, In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways’ (396). This multiplicity is a familiar theme of all of Pessoa’s thoughts; the self is a stage on which a multi-character drama is acted out. The true self is a multiple self, a self that changes, splinters, a self that is everywhere and nowhere.
…
Yes, Soares is very lucid. He does not spare himself. Truth is horror.
(p. 77)
Soares arrives as a self-definition -he is a vacant interlude between two negatives. ‘I’m the bridge between what I don’t have and what I don’t want.’ (232), his consciousness is a ‘confused series of intervals between non-existent things’ (442). An absolute emptiness, a desert on which nothing grows, envelopes him. ‘No feeling in the world can lift my head from the pillow where I’ve let it sink in desperation, unable to deal with my body or with the idea that I’m alive, or even with the abstract idea of life’. (‘Apocalyptic Feeling’, p. 398)
…
All that Soares can do is write. Perhaps he should not. After all, what can writing bring to someone so tormented? He himself wonders about this: ‘why do I keep writing? Because I still haven’t learned to practise completely the renunciation that I preach. I haven’t been able to give up my inclination to poetry and prose. I have to write as if I were fulfilling a punishment’ (231). He writes to cure his desolation (144). And also: ‘For me, to write is self-deprecating, and yet I can’t quit doing it. Writing is like the drug I abhor and keep taking, the addiction I despise and depend on’ (152). Soares cannot not write.
…
And so, at one point he declares: ‘I chose the wrong method of escape’ (462), and in the same fragment, ‘I killed my will by analysing it. If only I could return to my childhood before analysis, even if it would have to be before I had a will!’
…
The Book of Disquiet gives the strongest glimpse into Pessoa’s sense of lost childhood.
(p. 78-79)
The Book of Disquiet reads like a companion to the heteronyms. All the themes are present.
…
The themes are there but with a difference. The heteronyms have their verses, they can act out their dreams, create new worlds. Soares cannot and does not. The prose has become his mirror, and ‘the inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart’ (466).
…
Soares is also a philosopher.
…
Mostly he adopts a stoic position. Often he simply amuses himself, constructing little hypotheses, which he does not necessarily believe in -they are just games. But his most penetrating insights deal with the nature of reality and language. … Soares really understands language. He knows it can shape ideologies and religions and the one remark that encapsulates his views best states that ‘there is no enduring emotion without syntax. Immortality depends on the grammarians’ (228).
…
The Book of Disquiet is one of the most moving literary testimonies of a tortured twentieth-century soul. … Soares discovers that, like everyone else, he is an insignificant human being lost in a huge modern crowd. The crowd cannot agree on anything so there is no point in trying to agree with it. But still, the streets are real and are filled with real people,...
(p. 80-81)
IV.
The Book of Disquiet
The picture [portrait of Pessoa that is The Book of Disquiet] is complex and full of contradictions.
…
Pessoa means ‘person’ in Portugueses but it also derives from ‘persona’, the mask. Like a trickster Pessoa would pull out one mask after another. He changed them incessantly. Some he put on many times, some only once. Some of them stuck, others were discarded. The audience, ever enchanted, has been left watching the spectacle, trying to fathom who Pessoa really was.
…
While many have been guessing, the ‘real’ Pessoa ‘who does not exist, properly speaking’ has been effacing his presence leaving behind masks. There is an Oriental proverb that says that the number of masks it takes to picture an empty face is infinite.
(p. 85)
No other poet exists as much through the work of others as Pessoa does. He is a creation of those who arrange his manuscripts, prepare definitive versions of his works and publish unknown material, of those who write critical studies, and of the translators. They decipher the masks and they create the vast readership. To read Pessoa is to enter the labor of others. The timid Pessoa has drawn many people into his world.
(p. 86)
The Tobacco Shop
I have made myself what I did not know,
And what I could have made myself I did not.
The domino I put on was the wrong one.
They knew me at once for someone else and I didn’t deny this and was lost.
When I wanted to remove the mask,
It was stuck to my face.
When I took it off and saw myself in the mirror,
I had grown old.
I was drunk, and I could not wear the domino I hadn’t taken off.
I threw away the mask and fell asleep in the cloakroom
Like a dog that’s tolerated by the management
Because it’s harmless
And I shall write this story to prove that I’m sublime.
(p. 100)