Pessoa’s three major poetic heteronyms – the Zennish shepherd called Alberto Caeiro, the classicist Ricardo Reis, and world traveller Álvaro de Campos – burst on to the stage of Pessoa’s life together, in 1914.
The Book of Disquiet
was born one year before that, with the publication of Pessoa’s first piece of creative writing, called ‘In the Forest of Estrangement’, where the ‘[h]alf awake and half asleep’ narrator, stagnating ‘in a lucid, heavily immaterial torpor, in a dream that is a shadow of dreaming’, reports on his imaginary stroll with his unreal female double:
And what a refreshing and happy horror that there was nobody there! Not even we, who walked there, were there… For we were nobody. We were nothing at all… We had no life for Death to have to kill. We were so tenuous and slight that the wind’s passing left us prostrate, and time’s passage caressed us like a breeze grazing the top of a palm.
Written under his own name, this long and languid prose text was presented in a literary magazine as an excerpt ‘from
The Book of Disquiet
, in preparation’. Pessoa worked on this book for the rest of
his life, but the more he ‘prepared’ it, the more unfinished it became. Unfinished and unfinishable. Without a plot or plan to follow, but as disquiet as a literary work can be, it kept growing even as its borders became ever more indefinite and its existence as a book ever less viable – like the existence of Fernando Pessoa as a citizen in this world.
By the early part of the 1920s the directionless
Book
seems to have drifted into the doldrums, but at the end of that decade – when little more was to be heard from Alberto Caeiro (or from his ghost, since the shepherd supposedly died of TB in 1915) and nothing at all novel from Ricardo Reis (stuck in his role as a ‘Greek Horace who writes in Portuguese’) – Pessoa brought new life to the work in the person of Bernardo Soares, its ultimate fictional author. Over half of
The Book of Disquiet
was written in the last six years of Pessoa’s life, competing for his attention, and we may even say affection, with the irrepressible Álvaro de Campos, the poet-persona who grew old with Pessoa and held a privileged place in his inventor’s heart. Soares the assistant bookkeeper and Campos the naval engineer never met in the pen-and-paper drama of Pessoa’s heteronyms, who were frequently pitted against one another, but the two writer-characters were spiritual brothers, even if their worldly occupations were at odds. Campos wrote prose as well as poetry, and much of it reads as if it came, so to speak, from the hand of Soares. Pessoa was often unsure who was writing when he wrote, and it’s curious that the very first item among the more than 25,000 pieces that make up his archives in the National Library of Lisbon bears the heading
A. de C. (?) or B. of D. (or something else)
.
Bernardo Soares was so close to Pessoa – closer even than Campos – that he couldn’t be considered an autonomous heteronym. ‘He’s a semi-heteronym,’ Pessoa wrote in the last year of his life, ‘because his personality, although not my own, doesn’t differ from my own but is a mere mutilation of it.’ Many of Soares’s aesthetic and existential reflections would no doubt be part of Pessoa’s autobiography, had he written one, but we shouldn’t confound the creature with his creator. Soares was not a replica of Pessoa, not even in miniature, but a mutilated Pessoa, with missing parts. Soares had irony but not much of a sense of humour; Pessoa was endowed with large measures of
both. Though shy and withdrawn, Pessoa wouldn’t say he felt ‘like one of those damp rags used for house-cleaning that are taken to the window to dry but are forgotten, balled up, on the sill where they slowly leave a stain’ (Text 29). Like his semi-heteronym, Pessoa was an office worker in the Baixa, Lisbon’s old commercial district, and for a time he regularly dined at a restaurant on the Rua dos Douradores, the site of Soares’s rented room and of Vasques & Co., the firm where he worked. But whereas Soares was condemned to the drudgery of filling in ledgers with the prices and quantities of fabric sold, Pessoa had a comparatively prestigious job writing business letters in English and French, for firms that did business abroad. He came and went pretty much as he wanted, never being obliged to work set hours.
As for their respective inner lives, Soares takes his progenitor’s as a model: ‘I’ve created various personalities within… I’ve so externalized myself on the inside that I don’t exist there except externally. I’m the empty stage where various actors act out various plays’ (Text 299). Coming from Soares, this is a strange declaration. Are we supposed to believe that the assistant bookkeeper, one of the actors who played on the stage of Pessoa’s life, had his own troupe of heteronyms? If so, should we then suppose that these subheteronyms had sub-subheteronyms? The notion of an endless heteronymic lineage might have amused Pessoa, but the reason for his alter egos was to explain and express himself, and perhaps to provide a bit of reflective company. Soares, in the passage cited, is describing Pessoa’s own dramatic method of survival. And whatever he may be saying about himself, Soares is clearly speaking for Pessoa in the passage that begins ‘Only once was I truly loved’ (Text 235), written in the 1930s, not long after Pessoa broke up with Ophelia Queiroz, his one and only paramour. Surely it is Pessoa who believes, or wants to believe, that ‘Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life’ (Text 116). And isn’t it he, after all, who one day happened to look at his neighbour’s window and identified with a crumpled rag left on the sill?
Soares had no inner life of his own, and the full-fledged heteronyms hardly had more. A novelist’s characters are often based on friends or family members, but all of Pessoa’s characters were carved out of his own soul – of what he really was (in the case of Soares) or of what he
wanted to be (in the case of the early, adventurous Campos) – and they each received only a piece of him. When we read Soares or Campos, we get lost in their universes and forget about their author, but they
are
Pessoa, or parts of Pessoa, who made himself into nothing so that he could become everything, and everyone. Pessoa was the first one to forget Pessoa.
If Bernardo Soares does not measure up to the full Pessoa, neither are his reflections and reveries the sum total of
The Book of Disquiet
, to which he was after all a Johnny-come-lately. The book went through various permutations before the bookkeeper arrived with his well-wrought but emotionally direct style of prose, and even the word ‘disquiet’ changed meaning over time.
In its early days
The Book of Disquiet
, attributed to Pessoa himself, consisted largely of post-Symbolist texts cast in the rarefied register of ‘In the Forest of Estrangement’ but usually without the shimmery finish, and some of them weren’t finished at all. This did not necessarily make them less beautiful, but it was an understandable frustration for their author. ‘Fragments, fragments, fragments,’ Pessoa wrote to his friend Cortes-Rodrigues, because certain texts abounded in blank spaces for words or phrases or whole paragraphs to be inserted later (but they rarely were), while other ‘texts’ were no more than sketches or notations for prose pieces that never materialized.
The Book of Disquiet
always remained – as if this were a condition for its existence – a work that was still waiting to happen, that needed to be written in large part, rewritten in other parts, then articulated and fine-tuned, or was it time to rethink the whole project? Pessoa was never sure.
The initial idea was a book of texts with titles, for which he left various lists. Certain titles, such as ‘Dolorous Interlude’ and ‘Rainy Landscape’, became generic designations, applied to various texts that shared the announced theme or atmosphere but remained autonomous. Other titles, such as ‘Our Lady of Silence’, denoted ambitious works in progress, made up of passages written at different times and varying in length from a few scribbled sentences to several pages crammed with tiny letters. And there are titles for which no texts have been found, perhaps because they were never written. (Pessoa’s archives contain dozens of lists with titles for non-existent poems,
stories, treatises and entire books. Had he even halfway realized all his literary projects, the tomes would fill up a respectable library.
The Book of Disquiet
, a non-book in the non-library, is emblematic of the capricious author’s difficulty.) These early texts attempted to elucidate a psychic state or mood via a deliberately archaic use of gothic and romantic themes. Lush descriptions of court life, of sexless women, of strange weather and unreal landscapes prevail. The underlying psyche belongs to Pessoa but is abstracted. The writing is impersonal and the narrative voice ethereal, with the things and the words that name things all seeming to hover in a yellowish space. The word ‘disquiet’ refers not so much to an existential trouble in man as to the restlessness and uncertainty everywhere present and now distilled in the rhetorical narrator. But other forms of disquiet start to impinge on the work, which takes unexpected turns.
Not so unexpected, perhaps, was the theoretical and pedagogical dimension that emerged here as it did almost everywhere in Pessoa’s
œuvre
. It was only natural, even inevitable, that the oneiric texts of
Disquiet
would lead to expository texts that set forth the why and how of dreams, with the four passages titled ‘The Art of Effective Dreaming’ constituting a veritable manual for dreamers at all levels, from beginner to advanced. ‘Sentimental Education’, in much the same way, serves as a kind of primer to accompany the many ‘Sensationist’ texts.
It was likewise in this didactic spirit, but with a rather bizarre result, that Pessoa wrote his ‘Advice to Unhappily Married Women’, in which he teaches dissatisfied wives how to cheat on their husbands by ‘imagining an orgasm with man A while copulating with man B’, a practice that yields best results ‘in the days immediately preceding menstruation’.
Pessoa’s sexual abstinence (it is probable, though not provable, that he died a virgin) was by his own account a conscious choice, which he apparently sought to justify in
The Book of Disquiet
, with passages insisting on the impossibility of possessing another body, on the superiority of love in two dimensions (enjoyed by couples that inhabit paintings, stained-glass windows and Chinese teacups), and on the virtues of renunciation and asceticism.
The Book
, indeed, is rife with religious vocabulary, although the mysticism preached by Pessoa
hallowed no god, except perhaps himself (‘God is me,’ he concludes in ‘The Art of Effective Dreaming for Metaphysical Minds’).
But more than anything else, it was existential concerns – operating on both a general and personal level – that subverted the initial project of
The Book of Disquiet
. On a general level, since
The Book
’s author belonged ‘to a generation that inherited disbelief in the Christian faith and created in itself a disbelief in all other faiths’. And since ‘we were left, each man to himself, in the desolation of feeling ourselves live’, the generational sense of lostness quickly became a personal struggle for identity and meaning (Text 306). Pessoa’s inner life – registered in ‘Fragments of an Autobiography’, ‘Apocalyptic Feeling’ and similar texts, with and without titles – invaded the pages of what had begun as a very different kind of book. Pessoa realized that the project had slipped out of his hand (if in fact he’d ever firmly grasped it), for in yet another letter to Cortes-Rodrigues he wrote that
The Book of Disquiet
, ‘that pathological production’, was going ‘complexly and tortuously forward’, as if of its own accord.
And so Pessoa let the book go, scribbling
B. of D.
at the head of all sorts of texts, sometimes as an afterthought, or with a question mark indicating doubt.
The Book of Disquiet
– forever tentative, indefinite and in transition – is one of those rare works in which
forme
and
fond
perfectly reflect each other. Always with the intention of revising and assembling the variously handwritten and typed passages, but never with the courage or patience to take up the task, Pessoa kept adding material, and the parameters of the already unwieldy work kept expanding. Besides his post-Symbolist flights and diary-like musings, Pessoa included maxims, sociological observations, aesthetic credos, theological reflections and cultural analyses. He even put the
B. of D.
trademark on the copy of a letter to his mother (in Appendix II).
Though Pessoa hatched dozens of publication plans for his works, he saw only one real book,
Mensagem
(
Message
), make it into print, the year before he died. (He self-published several chap-books of his English poems.) Pessoa was so addicted to writing and scheming – and the schemes included unlikely business ventures as well as the publication of his
œuvre
– that he had no time or energy left over to get that
œuvre
into publishable shape. Or perhaps it was just too
tedious to think about. Nothing better illustrates the problem than
The Book of Disquiet
, a micro-chaos within the larger chaos of Pessoa’s written universe. But that consummate disorder is what gives
The Book
its peculiar greatness. It is like a treasure chest of both polished and uncut gems, which can be arranged and rearranged in infinite combinations, thanks precisely to the lack of a pre-established order.
No other work of Pessoa interacted so intensely with the rest of his universe. If Bernardo Soares says that his heart ‘drains out… like a broken bucket’ (Text 154) or that his mental life is ‘a bucket that got knocked over’ (Text 442), Álvaro de Campos declares ‘My heart is a poured-out bucket’ (in ‘The Tobacco Shop’) and compares his thinking to ‘an overturned bucket’ (in a poem dated 16 August 1934). If Soares thinks that ‘Nothing is more oppressive than the affection of others’ (Text 348), a Ricardo Reis ode (dated 1 November 1930) maintains that ‘The same love by which we’re loved/Oppresses us with its wanting.’ And when the assistant bookkeeper longs to ‘notice everything for the first time… as direct manifestations of Reality’, we can’t help but think of Alberto Caeiro, whose verses are a continual hymn to the direct, unmediated vision of things.