Can too much be made of the fact that in Portuguese pessoa means “person ”? What Artaud wrote in 1936, the year after Pessoa’ s death, speaks directly to the question: “For me, the essence of Surrealism was an affirmation of life against all caricatures.” Pessoa’s work, a fraction of it written by “himself,” the rest attributed to, at last count, 136 heteronyms, was in flight from the ultimate caricature, axiomatic now, that the purpose of life is to “be somebody. ” If this tome, not quite a doorstop—which claims to be the first translation of the “complete ” Book of Disquiet—could be said to have a subject, it is this paradox: How to be a “nobody” and leave any trace?
In an earlier selection of Pessoa’s poems in English, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe (Penguin, 2006), the Pessoa scholar and translator Richard Zenith provides a useful chronology.
Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888 and educated in South Africa. Back in Lisbon, Pessoa missed his exams after his first year because of illness and, after reenrolling a second time for the first year, missed them again because a strike by students had shut down the university. He went to work in an office, writing business letters in French and English. He wasted a small inheritance on purchasing a printing press and opening a printing office that closed almost immediately. Then, in 1915, he cofounded the magazine Orpheu, which, Zenith claims, introduced modernism to Portugal. In 1921, he opened another, modestly more successful printing company, and in 1924, started another magazine, Athena. In 1927, the year after Pessoa’ s translation of Hawthorne’ s The Scarlet Letter was serialized in the magazine Illustração, the young editors of the newly founded magazine Presença, notes Zenith, “consider Pessoa, who is not especially well known, to be Portugal’ s most significant living writer, and they regularly publish his work throughout the rest of his life. ”
Zenith’s own edition of The Book of Disquiet is excellent; in his introduction he claims that “Pessoa invented The Book of Disquiet, which never existed, strictly speaking, and never can exist. ” According to Zenith, the first “passage from The Book of Disquiet, signed by his own name, ” was published in 1913. He did not publish more until 1929, and then the writing was “attributed to the ‘semiheteronym’ Bernando Soares. ” Zenith’ s historical observations outline the bibliographic problems confronting the present “complete ” edition of The Book of Disquiet, problems the preface by the translator and the editor’s note of this edition do not answer—because they are unanswerable. The sad clown cover art—graffiti of Pessoa’ s portrait—the hyperbolic subtitle, the chronological sequencing of the texts which can only be hypothetical: everything about this “complete ” edition conspires to create a unified impression that the work itself defeats. Not only does the book not have a single “author, ” it was not published as a “book ” until 1982. It has been, as Zenith puts it, “compiled by scholars. ” To make matters more complicated for readers without Portuguese, there have been four previous selections rendered by three different translators since 1991, including a prior selection translated by Margaret Jull Costa. Jerónimo Pizarro, the editor of this edition, notes that even Pessoa’ s title functions as ironic commentary on the minutiae of feeling and sensation that the “book ” records. In one of the few places where Pessoa/Soares comments on his project, he writes, “Through these deliberately unconnected impressions I am the indifferent narrator of my autobiography without events, of my history without a life. These are my Confessions and if I say nothing in them it’ s because I have nothing to say. ” The Book of Disquiet is a whole lot of “nothing, ” 488 pages in this new edition. Pessoa wishes, I think, to say nothing definitive or final. He refuses the authority that belongs to the sort of figure he has become, which complicates our reading just as it complicated his writing life.
Pessoa described Bernardo Soares as “a semi-heteronym because his personality, although not my own, doesn’ t differ from my own but is a mere mutilation of it. ” Throughout The Book of Disquiet, Soares claims marginality and insignificance as a mantle. Like a cloak of invisibility, his low position allows him to live the fullest possible dream life, and to inhabit the largest number of other persons because he is barely one himself. A mutilation, Soares is cut off from others, a phantom limb in search of an imaginary amputee.
Even our dream selves mature—or so the book proves, assuming it could be said to prove anything. Naturalism has always been achieved by artificial means, and from inside the person who he isn’ t, Pessoa/Soares observes and records more naturally what is outside his self. Much of the material in the much shorter first part—the work of “Vicente Guedes, ” another heteronym—reads like juvenilia—portentous, symbolist, and misty: “What does not flow freely from us is the result of the uneven ground of our own imperfect self. ” Pessoa’ s decision to “become ” someone else allows him to write clearly about “real ” and imagined others. The approach, though, remains remarkably uniform. The book is a series of speculations: almost every passage arises from what is seen or dreamt, dreaming understood as a visual medium. “When I want to think, I see, ” he writes in a passage dated June 4, 1930, and even when he raises philosophical problems, or attempts metaphysics, this still sounds like a creed. There are few references to smell, touch, or taste. Soares keeps his distance from others in order to experience his own feelings more fully, more completely. His procedure, often repeated, is to fill himself with others, dreamt or “real, ” and to record careful measurements of his volume, his limits.
Soares expresses common feelings uncommonly well. He writes beautifully about dreams and daydreams; tedium as distinguished from boredom; views from the office window on Rua de Douradores; views from the window of his fourth-floor walk-up and of Lisbon generally; office politics, as seen from near the bottom of the ladder; the pleasures of sleep, and how keenly he feels the lack of it; sunsets; and the weather, notably thunderstorms. I will never experience the buildup of a storm the same way now that I’ ve read this description of the tense moments before first lightning: “the darkness grew black with silence. ” What he leaves out is more surprising than what he puts in. On the subject of desire he has very little to say; about women or men, or love, or money, almost nothing. And the author’ s name that Pessoa/Soares drops most often? Chateaubriand—not for his connection to Romanticism or his politics but for his style: “I tremble if I hear someone speak well. Certain pages in Fialho or in Chateaubriand make life tingle in my veins, make me quietly, tremulously mad with an unattainable pleasure already mine. ”
It is seductive to think of The Book of Disquiet as the record of a “real ” nobody, since he argues that it is his lack of “personality ” that allows him the freedom to “be ” others. A passage that Pizarro dates to 1931 makes a large claim of what Soares says often, in slightly different form:
I look again, with real terror, at the panorama of those [monotonous, ordinary] lives, and just as I’ m about to feel horror, sorrow and revulsion for them, I discover that the people who feel no horror or sorrow or revulsion are the very people who have the most right to, the people living those lives. That is the central error of the literary imagination: the idea that other people are like us and must therefore feel like us. Fortunately for humanity, each man is only himself and only the genius is given the ability to be others as well.
Resigned to his “genius, ” he concludes his attack on ordinary people by dismissing royalty: the King of England “has lost the ability in his dreams to be any other king than the one he is. His reality does not allow him to exist. ”
Somewhat earlier, in an entry dated 1930, the year from which the most entries come, he records the experience of looking at the group photo of his office colleagues, “real ” nobodies, who exist only because he invented them. (Or did Pessoa “mutilate ” his colleagues too?) His boss Senhor Vasquez appears “exactly as he is in real life… . The energy and intelligence of the man—qualities which are after all utterly banal and to be found in thousands of men all over the world—are stamped on that photograph as if it were a psychological passport. The two traveling salesmen look superb… . And Moreira! My immediate superior Moreira, the embodiment of monotony and routine, looks much more human than I do! ” Even if they are modeled on “real ” people (i.e., Pessoa’ s “actual ” office colleagues), Soares occupies a position so much lower in the office than the actual Pessoa occupied in his. The “real ” Senhor Vasquez, office boy, traveling salesmen, left no records. They are among the deadest dead; “real ” people re-membered in the memoirs of a mutilation.
The Book of Disquiet is an unforgettable reminder that representations of the real are as real as the real—assuming the representations, being more durable, are not more so. It is a book to be read slowly. Long entries are four pages, which make it easy to pick up and put down. So effectively does Pessoa become Soares that this reader at least was prompted to take new soundings of his own depths. One wonders how we will regard Pessoa once all his work is translated into English, a project New Directions is undertaking. What will it mean to have all of the work of a person who never wanted to live up to his name?
April 2018