Argonaut of Modernity: Impersonating Pessoa

“You are what you contemplate, so choose wisely.”

--Machado de Assis

Reaktion Books/University of Chicago Press.

This new entry into the modernist archive by CultureLab member Bartholomew Ryan, Critical Lives: Fernando Pessoa, sheds fresh and welcome light on one of the most mysterious and elusive figures in the annals of contemporary literary culture. He was, in fact, not only a prototypical modernist, but also a stylistic harbinger of the amorphous postmodern ethos long before it even existed. The French writer Jules Michelet once declaimed, “Each epoch dreams the era to follow it.” Pessoa seems to have been the brilliant dreamer who imagined the relativistic and quantum-drenched psychological environment in which we currently dwell. Assis certainly knew whereof he spoke, for both he and his younger countryman Pessoa may have bravely contemplated the very shaky future we all live in now as a wobbly present.

The writings of Machado de Assis, the one who partially envisioned the dim outlines of Pessoa’s later arrival, also counsel us in a wise redux-like way today. Such a contemplative observation as that of Assis places Pessoa directly next to writers whose style would not yet arrive for some seventy years later, authors such as Yankee experimentalists such as Pynchon, or Barth, or Barthelme, or Wallace. And of course it was the quizzical and alluring Fernando Pessoa who most accurately picked up the literary torch that Machado flung so bravely into the darkness of the future, into the anxiously dark and waiting arms of Pessoa and his equally mystifying army of literary alter-egos. With Pessoa, pictured here in the 1920s, we’re practically dealing with de Assis’s adoptive son, at least in literary terms, and one who most fully embraced the romantic solipsism only hinted at by his paternal precursor.

Getty Archives.

The dimly lit literary texts of Beckett, Kafka, Bruno Schulz and Robert Walser are often hilarious compared to the amplified internal distresses that bubble to the surface in the eclectic Pessoa, an author who entertained himself with at least a hundred other literary pseudonyms (but which he quirkily preferred to call "heteronymns," suggesting actual alternating identities): “I created various personalities within myself. In order to create, I destroyed myself. I have externalized so much of my inner life that even inside I now exist only externally.” This writer, who often celebrated complete and utter inertia, also remarked in The Book of Disquiet, “To act is to exile oneself.” Benjamin Kunkel, writing in The Believer, characterized Pessoa perfectly: “A favourite book: in its determined melancholy, its gentle audacity and its insistence on renunciation, frustration and solitude as the nectars of life, it is almost scarily whole. The Book of Disquiet is a diary, but one of a self that is always more potential than actual. Its floating boundaries expand and contract, lazily animated by ‘the horror of making our soul a fact.’”

The Book of Disquiet.

Fernando Pessoa himself, or himselves, always the best guide in the end, called it quite rightly the “saddest book in Portugal.” I would go further and call it the saddest book in the world. But it is a sadness which also conceals a profound and indescribable joy. The book itself, which he worked on for thirty years and never finished, was left in a trunk which might never have been opened. Our good fortune is that it was discovered, assembled and released and captures the inventions of a severely modest but gigantic-minded man who wrote it in near total obscurity, never imagining that anyone would ever actually read it. George Steiner called it “an extraordinary haunting mosaic of dreams, one of life’s great miracles and a meandering melancholic series of reveries and meditations.” In the end, the most accurate descriptions of his strange set of observations and poetic maxims is one made by Nicholas Lezard in The Guardian: “There is no one quite like him, apart from all of us.”

Ryan’s exotic interpretation of this uniquely tender being, I firmly persist in believing, is accurate in the extreme and partially alchemical. (If you open The Book of Disquiet at random to any page and read it at night alone, you’ll doubtless discover what I mean.) Fernando Pessoa dreamed sadly of being Fernando Pessoa. He was, in a very real sense, the king of intellectual lap dances, a cheeky but reverential term I would use for the same majestic company he shared space with in the imagination, Robert Musil, author of the incomplete, and perhaps totally unfinishable, novel The Man without Qualities, and Elias Canetti, equally hermetic author of Auto-da-Fé, both of whom were a rare brand of elegant solipsism along the lines of poetic groundbreakers such as Lautremont, Jarry and Rimbaud. As a result, what stays with the reader who encounters his “stories” is the magnetism he transmits to those recipients who are susceptible to his strange magic. “Be careful,” one close reader told a friend newly discovering his work, “it’s not literature, it’s sorcery.”

His ruminations do indeed seem to involve the casting of spells, the kind we readily submit to as supplicants who desire his absolution for living in this weird world of multiple meanings, or else of no meaning at all. Such was the powerful and spooky Portuguese alchemy of Pessoa and his army on alternate Pessoas. It is an alarmingly intoxicating elixir prepared for us by an author who clearly had no intention of actually being read, almost as if he somehow knew that we wouldn’t be able to fully fall prey to his charms until we surrendered to his prescient warning: reality is not at all that it appears to be. This new book by Ryan, which he accurately describes as a philosophical biography, helps us to understand what Pessoa may have meant by that cryptic insight. The bare facts of his life are utterly misleading, in most cases nothing happened at all, likely because he lived almost all of it as an unknown entity, below the surface of any cultural radar that could ever detect his melancholy presence.

Ryan’s insightful chronicle launches fervently in a prologue appropriately titled “To Be As Radical As Reality Itself” by focusing our attention on the dramatic changes in science and art wrought by the 20thcentury, of which Pessoa often feels like a mystical emblem. He was born in Lisbon in 1888 and his mysterious and inexplicable masterpiece was not published in Portugal until 1982(!) He wrote his first stories, in the form of fictional letters, under an invented pseudonym (the Chevalier de Pas) at the age of six, later explaining that the persona (roughly translated as the Knight of Not) was a “not entirely hazy figure who still has a claim on my affections that borders on nostalgia.” His first published poem entered the world unnoticed in 1914. He then proceeded to accumulate writings at a dizzying rate, especially under his three most famous, or infamous heteronyms, Alberto Caeiro, Alvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis.

But he didn’t just use different pen names, the total number of which is unknown; each name had its own style, history and even personality. Oddly, some of them are even considered to be better writers than the person who actually created them and did their writing. One of them, de Campos, observed wryly, “The strange case is that of Fernando Pessoa, who doesn’t exist, strictly speaking.” Meanwhile the non-existent Pessoa kept himself busy, and yet quite invisible, founding the literary magazine Orpheu in 1915, with his first book Antinous appearing in 1918. While secretly working on The Book of Disquiet (in a manner similar to the way Marcel Duchamp privately worked on a late and visionary installation masterpiece for thirty years after publically “retiring” from art making) he also published English Poems in 1921. The only book of his in Portuguese printed during his lifetime, Mensagem, was released in 1933. Pessoa died in 1935 at only 47, from a liver ailment.

After his untimely death, publishers discovered that he had nearly 25,000 pages of typed manuscripts that he had written but never published. Literary critic Harold Bloom, famous for his designation the Western Canon, described Pessoa as one of the 26 key writers who firmly established western literature’s creative parameters. Indeed, Pessoa seems to have been an actual living embodiment of the indeterminate and discontinuously hazy character of Ulrich, the celebrated but slippery fictional hero of Musil’s vast German novel The Man Without Qualities. In his Critical Lives study of Pessoa (who once claimed to not be a philosopher interested in poetry but rather a poet animated by philosophy), Ryan utilizes the most charming and revealing techniques for exploring so misty a being, frequently quoting from his other concocted writers to speak on behalf of their creator, as per: “A poet called Alvaro des Campos, who never really existed and yet is very much real today wrote: ‘We all have two lives. The true one, which is the one we dreamed of in childhood, and that we go on dreaming as adults in a substratum of fog. The false one, which is the one we live in coexistence with others, and is the one that ends up putting us in a coffin.’ ” Essentially, Pessoa stubbornly refused to ever relinquish his hold on what he considered his own true life, just as he refused to ever share it with other people, except posthumously in poetic writings that still charm and seduce us with their deceptively simple brilliance.

The immobile flâneur Pessoa sipping at a bar, 1930.

The opening and closing passages of The Book of Disquiet still speak to us today in a cool clear voice:

“1913: My soul is a hidden orchestra. I do not know what instruments sound and clash inside of me. I know myself only as a symphony. This book is the autobiography of someone who never existed.”

“1935: Only a powerful intuition can serve as a compass in the wide wastes of the soul. Only with an intuition filtered through our intelligence can we distinguish the reality of dreams.”

But in between those two entries there is an entire universe, throbbing and writhing on every single page. Bartholomew Ryan’s appreciative book on this unique author artfully manages to capture the languid breathing of his furtive and fretful sentences. He also skillfully shows us that Pessoa is still, in fact, a fugitive from the future.

– Donald Brackett is a Vancouver-based popular culture journalist and curator who writes about music, art and films. He has been the Executive Director of both the Professional Art Dealers Association of Canada and The Ontario Association of Art Galleries. He is the author of the recent book Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece (Backbeat Books, 2016). In addition to numerous essays, articles and radio broadcasts, he is also the author of two books on creative collaboration in pop music: Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos, 2007, and Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter, 2008, as well as the biographies Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, 2018, and Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner, 2020, and a book on the life and art of the enigmatic Yoko Ono, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life, released in April 2022. His latest work is a book on family relative Charles Brackett's films made with his partner Billy Wilder, Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, published in January 2024.