The Truth of Masks
by Stephen Trousseé
Zbigniew
Kotowicz
Fernando Pessoa: Voices of a Nomadic Soul
Menard, £8.99
ISBN 1 874320 16 0
It is one of the great
enigmatic artefacts of the Twentieth Century: following Fernando
Pessoa's death in 1935 (from hepatitis - he literally dissolved his
identity in alcohol), researchers discovered a vast trunk overflowing
with old envelopes, office stationery, handbills, stray scraps of paper
and hundreds of notebooks. A merzbau of language: in a
meticulous hand or a childish scrawl, with a faulty typewriter or a
fancy fountain pen, Pessoa had thoroughly dispersed his self through
writing. Never entirely classified until the 1960s, when it is
discovered to constitute 27,543 documents, it is a remarkable legacy. In
Don Paterson's phrase, it amounts to "His shredded evidence".
Researchers have now
ascertained that Pessoa wrote under, or between, or through (by happy
serendipity, "pessoa" is the Portuguese for "persona", literally "sounding
through") in excess of seventy names. Of these, a handful cohered into
heteronyms, discrete creative entities, and flourished into four of the
most significant writers of the century: Caeiro, Reis, de Campos,
Soares. Where Borges, Pirandello and Calvino meticulously dissect the
multiplicity and vertigo of modernity, it was Pessoa's genius to embody
these ideas. Like a Greek god, or a Flann O'Brien narrator, characters
spring from his brow, fully-formed, to embark on mundane careers and
marvellous voyages.
If modern art aspires
to the condition of physics, then Rimbaud's prescient declaration of
1871, "je est un autre", may well be its e=mc2. In which
case, Pessoa was the father of literary fission, exploding the coherent
lyrical self into boundless possibilities. The authentic "I" is replaced
with "a sinister well, full of faint echoes, inhabited by ignoble lives,
slimy non-beings, lifeless slugs, the snot of subjectivity". He was to
recount his discovery of the heteronyms with all the sobriety of
Virginia Woolf remarking on the change in human character "on or around
December 1910". For Pessoa the world changed on March 8 1914. It began
in the spirit of playfulness ("I thought of playing a joke... and
inventing a bucolic poet"), before taking a step into the mystic. "I
wrote thirty-odd poems straight off, in a kind of ecstasy whose nature I
cannot define...what followed was an apparition of someone in me, to
whom I immediately gave the name Alberto Caeiro. Forgive me the
absurdity of the phrase: my master had appeared in me". On the heels of
Caeiro, two further poets follow in rapid succession: the melancholy
classicist Ricardo Reis and the acedic futurist Álvaro de Campos.
"I desire to be a
creator of myths", Pessoa wrote later, "which is the highest mystery any
human being can perform". The glorious 8th is now every bit as
mythologised as Bloomsday, yet subsequent manuscript analysis has proved
fairly conclusively that the poems were composed on separate occasions.
Nevertheless, the poetic truth is clear: what began as a ruse evolved
into something authentically mysterious, not least to Pessoa himself.
Pessoa's childhood was
marked by the early death of his father and several siblings, and he
grew up, fluent in both Portuguese and English, in South Africa, before
returning to Lisbon. From an early age he would compose letters to
himself from imaginary correspondents. Harold Bloom, while gratiously
admitting Pessoa to the exclusive club of the Western Canon, at the same
time relegates him to a flounderer in the wake of Whitman, the
heteronyms being a symptom of an agonistic struggle with the American.
Kotowicz, while noting that Pessoa's anxiety of influence was more
likely to have involved the Portuguese poet Camoes, suggests that the
splits in Pessoa are representative of a larger fracture in Modernism,
the competing claims of the artistic revolutionary and the political
reactionary.
But, contra Dawkins,
the explanations obscure the rainbow. As Caeiro himself wrote "Thinking
about the inner sense of things / is even worse than thinking about
health". Irrespective of the motivation, the proliferating personas are
a delight. Caeiro is the father in the Pessoan family romance, the
original vessel, of which Campos, Reis and Pessoa himself are fallen
shards. "Not a pagan, but paganism itself", Caeiro is, strictly speaking,
an impossible writer: a shepherd-poet supposedly living in Lisbon at the
turn of the century. But he writes with the kind of clarity that the
Imagists would appreciate: "Like a great blotch of filthy fire / The
sunken sun stalls among remnant clouds. / From afar a vague whistle
comes through the calmest afternoon. / It must be a train in the
distance".
The other heteronyms
bear the mark of Caiero's paganism, but never attain his unthinking
contentment: Ricardo Reis, exiled in Brazil, composes wistful odes to
fate. De Campos, the most interesting of the group, begins with the
dynamic 'Triumphal Ode': "O factories, O laboratories, O music hall, O
Luna Parks" before souring into a bitter nephew of Des Esseintes,
enduring epic struggles as he packs a suitcase, preferring his opium
dreams to the tawdriness of existence. In 'The Tobacconist' he writes
with a wonderfully downbeat lyricism, which anticipates early Neruda: "Noble
at last in the open-handed way with which I throw / The dirty linen
which is me, without a laundry list, into the course of things, / And
stay at home without a shirt".
Bernado Soares barely
merited the title of heteronym, being so similar to Pessoa (a dismal
office clerk) that he is referred to as a "mutilated self". Nevertheless,
The Book of Disquietude, which he, for the most part, authored,
is formally the most Pessoan of all the works. Like Cioran re-writing
Hopscotch, it is a monumental treatise on dejection, consisting of stray
aphoristic fragments composed over decades, for which no satisfactory
order has ever been deduced. It fulfilled the author's ambition of
writing the saddest book in all Portugal.
Kotowicz's extended
essay provides a useful background to Pessoa's restless invention,
especially on the messianic cult of Sebastianism which inspired the
cryptic historiography of the long poem 'Message'. He also writes nicely
of the artistic tumult in Pessoa's Lisbon. The book could have been
improved by a little proof-reading: there are a number of glaring typos,
including one in the sole poem that is appended. The best introduction
to the writer remains the wonderful Centenary Pessoa, published
by Carcanet in 1997, but Kotowicz has produced an interesting overview.
Today Pessoa maintains
a mysterious currency. Quite literally: like his fellow adept of silence,
exile and cunning, he has wound up on his country's banknotes. Very
generously, he agreed to two posthumous interviews (both collected in
the Carcanet festschrift). And in a weird way, his achievement
was recognised in 1998, with the award of the Nobel prize to the
Portuguese writer José Saramago, author of a book called The Year of
the Death of Ricardo Reis...
THE
POETRY SOCIETY
|