Rekindling Disquiet
Brian Castro on Fernando Pessoa
The recent appearance of Richard Zenith’s massive one-thousand page biography of Fernando Pessoa, Pessoa: An Experimental Life (2021), has been widely acclaimed in the literary world. Zenith covers everything from Pessoa’s alcoholism to his virginity (though the latter seems somewhat minor in the context of his work in comparison to the former). A quiet sipper of brandy during office hours, Pessoa failed to rise out of the nadir of his unnoticed career as a poet and essayist. Zenith’s monumental work rightly elevates one of the greatest Portuguese writers to the highest posthumous pedestal, a little more than a decade shy of the centennial of his death.
It was not Pessoa’s poetry that first struck me in my reading of his works. It was his prose in The Book of Disquiet, purportedly composed by ‘Bernardo Soares, Assistant Bookkeeper In The City Of Lisbon’. These pieces comprise over five hundred pages of fragments, aphoristic prose-poetry and meditations, and are often selected and arranged differently by translators and editors. Thus they are something of a moveable feast and can be dipped into and out of, for a quick hit of despair. The selections and pieces are numbered at variance in every translation. Alfred Mac Adam’s arrangement is very dissimilar to Richard Zenith’s, and they differ again in Margaret Jull Costa’s renditions. So I shall dispense with the dusty pedagogy of making page references to Pessoa’s ‘meditations’, which read like Zen notes appended to a non-existent original of the ‘Book’ of Disquiet. As Zenith makes clear:
To say that this is a book for which no definitive edition is possible would be a flagrant understatement were it not a conceptually erroneous statement, since there is no ur-book begging for definition. What the author actually produced is a quintessential non-book: a large but uncertain quantity of discrete, mostly undated texts left in no sequential order, such that every published edition—inevitably depending on massive editorial intervention—is necessarily untrue to the nonexistent ‘original.’
One could have called The Book of Disquiet ‘Disarray’, were it not for editors and translators who could systematise the more than 26,000 scrap pieces. (This is the sort of sleuthing in which the English writer B.S. Johnson would have delighted had he not committed suicide. Like Pessoa, he received little or no notice in his lifetime and harboured a yearning for such posthumous, post-modern puzzles of re-arrangement-cum-creative-reading. Unknown to him, Georges Perec shared a similar pre-occupation and contemporaneity across the Channel.)
Fragments fired Pessoa. They formed an over-active multiplication of ideas and selves straining to break out into a master-work that would never be written. Perhaps the idea of incompletion and failure perversely drove him into a paradox—he would be read only after he was dead. Perhaps. Besides, being a nobody spurred him into a tonal feeling: he see-sawed between euphoria and melancholia and then put everything through the wringer of the intellect which kept all sentimentality at bay. ‘I’m doomed always to feel, like the world’s great damned men, that it’s better to think than to live,’ he wrote, careful never to fall into the affective fallacy. Thinking with the emotions and feeling with the mind, he saw writing as ‘carrying out a punishment’ for perfection, especially if it were futile and frivolous. (Fútil in Portuguese bears this double meaning.) At times he attacked homophobia, the Catholic church and anarchic republicanism. At others, he goofed off writing ads for Coca-Cola, making its addiction sound so much like cocaine that the Portuguese dictatorship banned the soft drink.
And who was he anyway? The word ‘Pessoa’ means ‘person’ or ‘being’ in Portuguese. It can also mean ‘persona’, which aptly describes Pessoa’s ‘heteronyms’. These were not pseudonyms, but invented authors, over a hundred of them, whose lives Pessoa vicariously lived, each one an accomplished poet or writer whom he published in various journals and newspapers as the godfather of a wunderkammer of curious collections, disruptive silences and inexplicable existences. He was the perfect heteroclite, abnormal and invisible, assembling juxtapositions of thoughts, ideas and feelings that led nowhere except back towards their own compulsion. In old Portuguese, his name was spelt persõa, the tilde standing in for a missing letter or a contraction, as well as nasalising the pronunciation so that it sounds similar to the French word personne, which can mean ‘nobody’. In his adolescence he nicknamed himself ‘Ferdinand Sumwan’ in English, playing upon his self-multiplication in different languages. If he understood the Cantonese phrase ‘Sum Wan’—and he may have—it would have meant ‘vertiginous heart’, an apt phrase for his frequent and masterful receptions of weather. During a thunderstorm in Soares’ office, ‘[t]he almost human sound of the sad rain was happy. Hearts pounded hard, and thinking made one dizzy.’ For once, his practice of head over heart seems to have crumpled in this group circumstance. Such sticky affects can be a communal sentiment, but his retreat to an abnormal pathology of individual failure and suffering rapidly returns him to a hard indifference:
I feel this because I feel nothing. I think this because this is nothing. Nothing, nothing, part of the night and the silence and what I share with them of vacancy, of negativity, of in-betweenness, a gap between me and myself, something forgotten by some god or other...
This disquiet runs deep in Portuguese history and culture. Portugal has a history of failures, mismanagement and corrupt dictatorships. All this, Zenith comments, produced the underlying experience of saudade, ‘a word that signifies intense longing, yearning, nostalgia [...] as an existential condition.’ Indeed, the industrious Chinese of my Macanese childhood used to say that anything Portuguese was ‘not so good’. My father, on the other hand, often romanticised Portuguese bravery, especially in geographic exploration. In truth, there was a listlessness about Portuguese trade and culture by the twentieth century which was underpinned by its reminiscences of a past imperial splendour, creating an overwhelming unwillingness to put ideas into action. Pessoa’s disquiet stems from this same unwillingness to act:
I’ve always felt that to perform a gesture implied a disturbance, a repercussion in the outer universe; I’ve always had the impression that any movement I might make would unsettle the stars and rock the skies. [...] The man who wants will never achieve, because he loses himself in wanting.
One of the most commonly used words in The Book of Disquiet is ‘tedium’. It is everywhere, this tedium, though its mention is never tedious. On the 12th January 1931 (as well as fictional authors he also used fictional dates ... indeed, ‘feigning’ or fingimento in Portuguese, was his favourite method of composition: figments, pretences, re-fashionings), Pessoa wrote a whole meditation on this subject, beginning each paragraph with the word ‘tedium’. Again and again, he contradicts Aristotle by demonstrating that narrative was not subjected to plot, that what he writes was ‘not literature but history...’. He documents the rain, the street, the horse-fly and the teapot. He invents dialogues for those he sees: on the street, through windows, those at their dinner. As Colm Tóibín points out in the London Review of Books, this was not a listless lack of exercise:
Reading The Book of Disquiet after reading Zenith’s biography allows us to see that the chaos and lassitude of Pessoa’s life had an undercurrent of discipline and rigour. He had no idea how to make a living; he talked too much, drank too much and wrote too much; his political ideas were often mad; but all the time The Book of Disquiet was emerging, holding a tight space between banality and comedy.
Pessoa was fluent in English (he learned it during his school years in Durban, where his stepfather was the Portuguese Consul), and French (most middle-class Portuguese were required to learn French as a second language.) He lived for a tidy syntax and a grammar of impeccable virtuosity in three languages. In the same way, he was always neat and well-dressed, often sporting a fedora, bow tie and very shiny shoes. (‘Were I asked to discuss the social causes responsible for my soul’s condition, I would speechlessly point to a mirror, a clothes hanger, and a pen.’ It should not be forgotten that Soares worked as an assistant bookkeeper in a fabric firm. Pessoa called this semiheteronym a ‘mutilation’ of himself, thus situating him closer to the author than the other heteronyms in the cast of characters.)
At times his prose could soar poetically in all weathers; at others, it would nail down existence with feelings forged into granular thought—something in which polyglots are particularly adept, since translation transmits distance. Critics have compared him to Kafka, Sassoon and Rilke, but through his amanuensis Soares in The Book of Disquiet, he may be more advantageously compared not to another author, but to Bartleby the scrivener, Melville’s heteronym, who does little scrivening because he ‘chooses not to’. Pessoa scrivens a huge amount (there is no book in his own name during his lifetime except for the regrettable Mensagem—though it reads better in Portuguese than in English—a nationalistic paean to Portugal’s past empires written just before his death): on the backs of discarded calling cards, envelopes, table napkins and office stationery, which he deposited in a wooden trunk in his rented room. Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis et al (one cannot make these theatrical heteronyms into a team of doppelgängers as they are a phenomenon, a series of lived projections and a crowd of screen-memories), reject fame and publication not because it is offered them, but because the tedium of achieving after having been so completely overlooked (as misfits, like Melville), extinguishes the hope for an impending fame in favour of contemplation, which is far more important, bred from a vastly superior interior. For Pessoa, unthinking existence was insufferable, since life existed only in words and dreams. This is perhaps why Zenith subtitled his biography An Experimental Life. There are some beautifully astonishing passages of dreamt voyages at the end of The Book Of Disquiet (Zenith’s version.)
The wooden trunk of course, has been successively delved into as a museum of afterlives— Pessoa’s jottings of everyday wonders that are read now as re-enchantments of the disenchantments of the tedium of modernity. Indeed, written feelings scattered in this trunk bear the flavours of an associative pre-history, a far-from-romantic modulation of experiences into instinctual thought. They transmit the same anxiety felt in Kafka’s work, the neurasthenia of Musil and the eccentric digressions of Walser, all of whom are linked in that myriad of personalities without qualities which require a distance and a discipline needed to inhabit them. (Peter Handke may also have drawn from this chest of dreams.) It is not easy to sustain and maintain differing ‘selves’ under the pressure of thought and intellect. They do not expand independently into characters and voices, especially in narratives without plot. In a lesser writer they can soon become tediously uniform and similar. But in poems or in poetic prose, a heteronym has a singular existence as a momentary sensibility. In such writing, heteronyms can live different lives within different contexts and can sustain the reader’s sensitivities with a reciprocal awareness. In Pessoa, the fragment is his refuge from the prosaic tenets of plot, performance and character. That temporary tinsel in the shop window becomes an after-image sought by the imagination and worked over by thought to re-enchant everyday life. Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, which sometimes seems like a collage of mirrors and parentheses, footnotes and asides, comes to mind here.
But Pessoa, though a pioneer of Portuguese Modernism, was no flâneur of modernity. He was a historicist of lost emotions ... not exactly what the French would call a passéiste ... but a post-romanticist, a collector of objects which bore the lethal destiny of their being de-romanticised, broken and abandoned. He brought a kind of restorative nostalgia to literature, one that never existed because it is a literature of continuous loss set alongside a parallel dreaming steeped in mystical origins. One could well describe this state as a nostalgic lamentation for antiquity as well as a protest against the shallow kitsch of the modern. It is feeling with separation and distance; a creative estrangement as well as a literary renaissance. Flaubert manifested it in Madame Bovary. Pessoa, similarly infected with such romantic irony, was always a guest in his own house: he was half orphan and half familiar, half inside his work and half outside: ‘I was a foreigner in their midst, but no one realised it. I lived among them as a spy and no one, not even I, suspected it.’ (Foreigners, migrants and refugees know this state well.) Working in over twenty firms during his lifetime, Pessoa was the ultimate, anonymous translator and journalist, an observer and commentator, a palely loitering porcelain figure like the ones featured on his Japanese teapot, pencilling poems in stolen moments and metamorphosing into these exiles who lose their existences in the mists of time in order to dream him.
One can regard him as a European Zhuangzi, whose famous anecdote about Zhuang Zhou—they sound similar enough to be heteronymous—dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zhou, captures with fluid language the transformations of human states. Here is Pessoa on waking from sleep:
I realise that the privileges of darkness are vanishing, and with them the slow rivers under the bowing trees of my glimpsed eyelashes, and the murmur of the cascades lost between the soft flowing of blood in my ears and the faint, steady rain. I’m losing myself to become alive.
To get up, to go outside, to get to work, to become alive, is to lean his neck out to life ‘as to an enormous yoke’. But to dream every side of the argument is to employ the Chinese rhetorical device of ‘goblet words’, a wine-vessel which rights itself when words are drunk, and which maintains its equilibrium through shifting points of view. As Pessoa notes: ‘I harbour within me, like unwanted souls, the very philosophies I criticise.’
Pessoa was an alcoholic ... one reason why he never finished any grand project. More pertinently though, he was involved in Lisbon’s lively literary café societies, where semi-intoxicated, he would have established friendships and connections, though he never initiated any of them. This gives the lie to his so-called notoriously hermetic existence and casts doubt on his auto-fictional Soares, the author of The Book of Disquiet, who serenely references tedium and isolation at the expense of a more fantastical life led in the haze of alcohol and the racy conversations of others. It may also explain the poetic soaring and then the swift descent into the dark smithy of the workplace—Pessoa couldn’t wait to get back to the office or to his room, where he could write down these voices. (He vanished once you turned your back, an acquaintance reported.) What the drinking certainly does explain is the pickled fantasia and proliferation of invented lives which began to populate his playbook—the honest emotional register of the poetry produced from them—and then the depression that accompanied the later years. To write in such a set of circumstances is a downward spiral. Sustainability needs change and travel, health and experiences, a different environment, all of which Pessoa declined as a poète maudit:
The idea of travelling nauseates me.
I’ve already seen what I’ve never seen.
I’ve already seen what I’ve yet to see.
...
The idea of travelling seduces me vicariously, as if it were the perfect idea for seducing someone I’m not.
...
Travel is for those who cannot feel.
One of his principal heteronyms, the Whitmanesque Álvaro de Campos, is a world traveller of the imagination. (The Book of Disquiet is perfect reading in Covid times.) At one stage in the book there is an interlocutor, a woman: ‘Every good conversation should be a two-way monologue...’ (Philip Roth would have appreciated this quote when conceiving his book Deception. Perhaps these days an imitator would have transformed it into a series of tweets.) Zenith informs us that Pessoa had a brief, though quite insane, romance with Ophelia Queiroz, a secretary at one of the firms in which he worked. As he was incapable of action because of a pathological shyness, it was initiated by her writing a letter to him which she tore up upon revision. He pieced it together, secretly fishing the snippets from her wastebasket. This epistolary introduction would have appealed to his sublime ‘floating sensuality’, as André Gide would have noted. Tragi-comically, his heteronym Álvaro de Campos, the man of the world, intervened. Sometimes Pessoa would turn up on a date as Campos, and at other times Campos would be tagging along behind chatting, reminding him that his life had to be a total dedication to writing and to the imagination and not to the distractions of women. Like all of Pessoa’s incompletions, the romance withered in almost the same way as it had begun: through an epistolary revision, this time by a heteronym.
Pessoa displayed all the attributes of a Woody Allen screen persona, if that is not too sweeping a statement: neurasthenia; paranoia; disdain for unreflective existence and aversion to crude physicality. Jewish on his mother’s side, he spent his life denying it, claiming he came from a long line of conversos or Jews converted to Christianity since the Inquisition, though he never practised Catholicism. Yet he acknowledges that Judaism represents the universal human condition: ‘Heine said that after great tragedies we always merely blow our noses. As a Jew and therefore universal, he understood the universal nature of humanity.’ Like Allen’s Zelig, Pessoan identities can morph into absurdity: ‘Reductio ad absurdum is one of my favourite drinks,’ Soares wrote. One of my favourite passages in The Book of Disquiet is this one:
The mere thought of having to enter into contact with someone else makes me nervous. A simple invitation to have dinner with a friend produces an anguish in me that’s hard to define. The idea of any social obligation whatsoever [...] disturbs my thoughts for an entire day, and sometimes I even start worrying the night before, so that I sleep badly. When it takes place, the dreadful encounter is utterly insignificant, justifying none of my anxiety, but the next time is no different: I never learn to learn.
He once wrote to a Paris institute for a course of treatment through mesmerism, describing himself as a ‘hysterical neurasthenic’. He said that his emotions upset his will, the latter charging off in three or four directions at once. Typically, he neither finishes nor posts the letter. It becomes another fragment in his great unfinished symphony: ‘I’m always astonished whenever I finish anything. Astonished and depressed. My desire for perfection should prevent me from ever finishing anything; it should prevent me even from starting.’
This is what Edward Said would come to call ‘late style’. In an essay on Beethoven, he notes that it is impossible to name a unity that holds the composer’s late works, because doing so would ‘reduce its catastrophic force.’
... the power of Beethoven’s late style is negative, or rather it is negativity [...] [his] late works remain unreconciled, uncoopted by a higher synthesis: they do not fit any scheme, and they cannot be reconciled or resolved, since their irresolution and unsynthesized fragmentariness are constitutive, neither ornamental nor symbolic of something else. [...] [They] are in fact about “lost totality,” and are therefore catastrophic.
Since childhood, Pessoa had always been the ‘late’ Fernando. Wise beyond his years (photos of his adolescence depict a serious youth already reflecting on a damaged life), he realised early that any totality like a completed book was always going to be aesthetically imperfect, subject to variation, and that ultimately the author would have to abdicate in favour of death. The Book of Disquiet displays this fragmented late style, unleashing the forces of apocalypse and protest. It is an exilic work, a work in a refractive key, rebelliously unproductively productive. The writing presents neither a performative ‘voice’ nor ‘pose’, though at times it partakes of both. What is edifying though, is its brutal anatomy of the self’s hidden cadences, the deaths of selves that we refuse to encounter, selves that have no literary moment or success to hanker after, except to realise that ‘what we think or feel is always a translation’— and like all translations, it carries a delayed but muffled affect. Life, in effect, is full of vague nothings unless one either writes the nothing from a distance to see into the true nature of being, or one loses oneself to ignorance in order to come to life. Jeanette Winterson’s ironic and iconic title Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? may sum up the writerly life: except for a few nano-seconds of euphoria, it’s a lose/lose situation when you actually have to think about it in the context of the national ‘normal’. The disquietude generated by this effort at thinking is literature’s tragic joy: its enchantment, its play, and ultimately, its agitation and its protest.
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Works Cited
✷ Colm Tóibín, ‘I haven’t been I’, London Review of Books 43:16, 12 August 2021.
✷ Edward Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain, (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006).
✷ Richard Zenith, Pessoa: An Experimental Life (2021).
✷ The Book of Disquiet, trans. Richard Zenith, (Penguin Books, 2001).
✷ The Book of Disquiet, trans. Alfred Mac Adam, (Boston: Exact Change, 1998).
Brian Castro is the author of eleven novels, a volume of essays and a poetic memoir and cookbook His novels include the multi award-winning Double-Wolf, Shanghai Dancing and Blindness and Rage. He was the 2014 winner of the Patrick White Award for Literature and the 2018 Prime Minister’s Prize for Poetry.