A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe Page 2

  Pessoa’s English was the English of the books he read, and these included contemporary novelists, such as H. G. Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and W. W. Jacobs, but it lacked the brutal naturalness of a mother tongue. His English, though fluent in the literal sense of that word, was his English—a more literary, slightly archaic, and occasionally stilted variety of the language. The poetry he wrote in it is interesting for the ideas and emotions it contains, as well as for its skillful use of poetic devices, but like a piano out of tune or a camera out of focus, Pessoa’s English introduces a slight distortion that mars the overall effect.

  The English language provided a modest but dependable income for Pessoa, who made his living by translating and by drafting letters in French and English for Portuguese firms doing business abroad. He also tried to do business himself, mainly as an agent for Portuguese mining companies in search of investment capital from Britain and elsewhere, but it doesn’t seem that he ever cut any profitable deals.

  Where English best served Pessoa, however, was in the poetry and prose he wrote in Portuguese. If Anglo-American literature influenced what Pessoa wrote, the English language itself influenced how he wrote. English is more apt than the Romance languages to repeat words—for the sake of clarity, for syntactical straightforwardness, or for a rhetorical effect—and Pessoa followed this usage in Portuguese (in The Book of Disquiet, for instance). And whereas Pessoa’s English sonnets employ a convoluted syntax derived from his Elizabethan models, modern English seems to have inspired the directness of expression that characterizes the poetry attributed to Alberto Caeiro and Álvaro de Campos.

  After Pessoa’s first wave of poetic creation in Portuguese, with about a dozen surviving poems dating from when he was thirteen and fourteen, he didn’t go back to writing poetry in his native tongue (except for an odd example here and there) until he was close to twenty, three years after returning to Lisbon. By 1911 he was writing perhaps as much poetry in Portuguese as in English, and a year later he published, in an Oporto-based magazine, two large articles on the state of recent Portuguese poetry from, respectively, a “sociological” and a “psychological” point of view. Fernando Pessoa was coming into his own. In 1913 he published his first piece of creative prose, a passage from The Book of Disquiet, which he would work on for the rest of his life, and in 1914 he published, in Portuguese, his first poems as an adult. That was the year when four of Portugal’s greatest twentieth-century poets were born: Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, and Fernando Pessoa himself.

  Alberto Caeiro, who emerged from Pessoa’s soul in the late winter of 1914, lived in the country, had no formal education, and said he wanted to see things as they are, without any philosophy:

  What matters is to know how to see,

  To know how to see without thinking,

  To know how to see when seeing

  And not think when seeing

  Nor see when thinking.

  Caeiro claimed to be “the only poet of Nature,” but his vision of nature was ideal, his appreciation of it abstract, and his poetry is almost pure philosophy. To talk about seeing things directly is tantamount to no longer seeing them directly. Caeiro was a moment of poetic nirvana, an impossibility embodied in weightless verses of rare, crystalline beauty. Pessoa called him the Master and reported—twenty years later—that Alberto Caeiro “appeared” in him on March 8, 1914, the “triumphal day” of his life, when he wrote all at once, “in a kind of ecstasy,” over thirty of the forty-nine poems that make up The Keeper of Sheep, Caeiro’s (and Pessoa’s) most sublime poetic work. From the manuscripts we know that this account is not quite true, but close to thirty poems were written over the course of two weeks in March of that year, and later poems written in Caeiro’s name rarely attain the astonishing clarity of that initial outpouring.

  “Born” on April 16, 1889, Caeiro was in various ways a tribute to Pessoa’s best friend, the writer Mário de Sá-Carneiro (1890-1916). Caeiro is Carneiro (the Portuguese word for “sheep”) without the carne, or “flesh,” and Alberto Caeiro, by profession, was an idealized shepherd (“I’ve never kept sheep / But it’s as if I did,” he explains at the beginning of The Keeper of Sheep). His zodiac sign, naturally enough, was Aries, the ram. Sá-Carneiro committed suicide in 1916, a few weeks before his twenty-sixth birthday, and Alberto Caeiro, according to his “biography,” also died young, at age twenty-six, from tuberculosis. About one as about the other Pessoa wrote: “Those whom the gods love die young.”

  Caeiro was initially conceived not just as “Nature’s poet” but as a multifaceted modernist, responsible for “intersectionist” poems inspired by cubism and for a planned series of “futurist odes.” But the intersectionist poems were ultimately assigned to Pessoa-himself, and the futurist ambitions were transferred to Álvaro de Campos, who came into being in early June of 1914, an offshoot of Alberto Caeiro. The organic relationship between the two is reflected in their similar-sounding names. Not only that, de campos means “from the fields”: Álvaro came from the fields where Alberto tended his imaginary or metaphorical sheep.

  Campos, according to his script, was born in the Algarve in 1890, studied naval engineering in Glasgow, traveled to the Orient, lived for a few years in England, where he courted both young men and women, and finally returned to Portugal, settling down in Lisbon. Campos’s early poems, such as the “Triumphal Ode,” celebrated machines and the modern age with loud and sustained exuberance. His later poems are shorter and melancholy in tone, but the basic Campos creed remains:

  To feel everything in every way,

  To live everything from all sides,

  To be the same thing in all ways possible at the same time,

  To realize in oneself all humanity at all moments

  In one scattered, extravagant, complete and aloof moment.

  Álvaro de Campos was the most public heteronym, airing his views on political and literary matters in articles and interviews published (apparently with the help of Pessoa) in Lisbon-based magazines. He was fond of contradicting the opinions of his creator, whom he censured for being too rational-minded, with the “mania of believing that things can be proved,” and he also enjoyed meddling in Pessoa’s social life. He would occasionally turn up in lieu of Fernando at appointments, to the chagrin and ire of those who were not amused by such antics.

  Ricardo Reis, the third in the trio of Pessoa’s full-fledged heteronyms, also emerged in June of 1914, probably a few days after Álvaro de Campos. A physician and classicist, whom Pessoa defined as a “Greek Horace writing in Portuguese,” Reis composed metered, nonrhyming odes about the vanity of life and the need to accept our fate:

  Since we do nothing in this confused world

  That lasts or that, lasting, is of any worth,

  And even what’s useful for us we lose

  So soon, with our own lives,

  Let us prefer the pleasure of the moment

  To an absurd concern with the future . . .

  Ricardo Reis, according to his creator, was born in 1887 in Oporto, which became the focal point of the surviving monarchist forces after the founding of the Portuguese Republic, in 1910. In 1919 the monarchists took control of Oporto but were soon defeated, at which point Reis, a royalist sympathizer (his last name means “kings”), fled to Brazil, where he presumably lived out the rest of his days, though there is, among the thousands of papers left by Pessoa at his death, an address for Dr. Reis in Peru.

  All three heteronyms were expressions of “sensationism,” one of the literary movements (like intersectionism, mentioned above) invented by Pessoa and taken up by his modernist writer friends. In a passage signed by Thomas Crosse—a fictional English critic and translator created a year or two after Caeiro, Reis, and Campos—Pessoa neatly differentiated among the three poets and the types of sensationism they represented: “Caeiro has one discipline: things must be felt as they are. Ricardo Reis has another kind of discipline: things must be felt, not only as they are, but al
so so as to fall in with a certain ideal of classic measure and rule. In Álvaro de Campos things must simply be felt.”

  The year 1914 also marked a turning point in the poetry of the “orthonym,” who signed himself Fernando Pessoa but who was not the same person as the flesh-and-blood Pessoa known to be living at this time with his Aunt Anica. Álvaro de Campos reports that Pessoa the orthonym (meaning “true name”), after meeting Caeiro in 1914 and hearing him recite The Keeper of Sheep, experienced a “spiritual shock” that resulted in his most original work to date.

  Beyond all the self-fictionalization, there occurred in fact a profound transformation, or culmination, in Pessoa’s literary art. Caeiro, Campos, and Reis were the most visible result of that transformation, for they represented something totally new, but heteronymy as such was no novelty. Besides the aforementioned heteronyms who wrote in English and French, several of the Portuguese journalists invented in Pessoa’s adolescence—Dr. Pancrácio and Gaudêncio Nabos—wrote outside the pages of the newspapers where their “careers” began, with Mr. Nabos remaining “active” until at least 1913. Vicente Guedes, the first heteronym to write extensively in Portuguese, was invented already in 1908. Heteronymy, in fact, goes all the way back to Pessoa’s infancy, when as a six-year-old he wrote letters to himself signed by a personage called the Chevalier de Pas.

  Pessoa described his artistic enterprise as “a drama divided into people instead of into acts.” He created, in other words, a series of characters but no play for them to act in. What they played out, in a certain way, was the life that their shy, retiring creator chose not to live in the physical world. “I’ve created various personalities within,” he explained in a passage from The Book of Disquiet. “Each of my dreams, as soon as I start dreaming it, is immediately incarnated in another person, who is then the one dreaming it, and not I. To create, I’ve destroyed myself. . . . I’m the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.”

  It is no wonder that Pessoa, who considered himself to be “essentially a dramatist,” admired Shakespeare and Milton (whose Paradise Lost is practically a verse drama) above all other writers. Pessoa published one short, ethereal play, O Marinheiro (The Mariner), which he termed a “static drama,” and he left a score of unfinished plays, in Portuguese and English, but only the “static” ones, where no action is expected, are of much interest. Like Robert Browning, a poet he much read and appreciated, Pessoa put his dramatic instincts to better use in his poetry. But he went further than the English poet, for his dramatis personae were more than poetic subjects; he made them into quasi-autonomous poets.

  All of this becomes fascinating when we delve deeper into the heteronymic system, which includes an astrologer, a friar, a philosopher, various translators, diarists, a nobleman who commits suicide, and a hunchback girl dying of tuberculosis. Yet I still haven’t explained (if it’s possible to explain) what caused the explosion in 1914 that transformed Pessoa into a great writer. I have mentioned the vast range of literature and learning that the writer-in-progress absorbed as a schoolboy and as a young man, during and after his abbreviated university career, and to these ingredients one must add the French symbolists (Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Maeterlinck, a Belgian writing in French), whom he read between 1909 and 1912. It was also in this period that Pessoa steeped himself in Portuguese poetry, from its earliest manifestations in thirteenth-century troubadour songs (some of which he translated into English) to contemporary work by Teixeira de Pascoaes (1877-1952) and other saudosista poets, who promulgated a nationalistic nostalgia as a spiritual value and a creative energy. But what finally seems to have ignited this complex mixture of linguistic and literary acquisitions, provoking a kind of alchemical reaction, was Walt Whitman, arguably the single greatest influence on Pessoa’s poetry and, more generally, on Pessoa the artist.

  It is not, as several critics have supposed, that Pessoa was a “son” of the American poet. The Whitmanian influence is clearly discernible in the poetry of Alberto Caeiro and Álvaro de Campos, but neither heteronym is a mere derivative, for they could not have existed without numerous other inputs from Pessoa’s rich literary background. Whitman, though, seems to have acted as a key to open up Pessoa and the power of his own personality. Song of Myself is a song of the whole cosmos—the cosmos felt and substantiated in the self—and it was this audacity, this chutzpah, that galvanized Pessoa and his heteronymic cosmos, which otherwise might not have been more than a curious psychological phenomenon and stylistic exercise, without real literary consequence. Pessoa indicated as much in a two-part article, “Notes for a Non-Aristotelian Aesthetics,” signed by heteronym Álvaro de Campos and published in 1925. In it the naval engineer advocates an aesthetics based on inner, personal force—the force of personality—rather than on outward beauty and, concomitantly, an art based on sensibility rather than on intelligence. The article ends with the bold affirmation that “up until now . . . there have been only three genuine manifestations of non-Aristotelian art. The first is in the astonishing poems of Walt Whitman; the second is in the even more astonishing poems of my master Caeiro; the third is in the two odes—the ‘Triumphal Ode’ and the ‘Maritime Ode’—that I published in Orpheu.”

  Orpheu was a literary review founded in 1915 by Pessoa, his friend Mário de Sá-Carneiro, and other vanguard writers and artists. In its brief life—only two issues were published—it introduced modernism into Portugal. Several members of the group were in contact with the cubists and futurists in Paris, while Pessoa, through his readings, kept abreast of the latest literary currents in Britain, Spain, France, and elsewhere (he obtained copies, for instance, of Blast, a vorticist review where Ezra Pound published poems in 1914). Orpheu prompted reactions of outrage and ridicule in the press and the literary establishment, but the genius of Pessoa’s work was quietly recognized.

  In 1917 Pessoa published, in the name of Álvaro de Campos, an inflammatory Ultimatum in the one and only issue of Portugal Futurista, which was immediately seized from the newsstands by the police. Portugal supported the Allies in the war, and while Pessoa-Campos’s ranting manifesto was not pro-German, it heaped as much abuse on the British, French, and other Allied leaders as on Wilhelm II and Bismarck. After lambasting the present age for its “incapacity to create anything great,” Campos’s manifesto calls for the “abolition of the dogma of personality” and affirms that “no artist should have just one personality,” since “the greatest artist will be the one who least defines himself and who writes in the most genres with the most contradictions and discrepancies.” The greatest artist, in other words, will have multiple personalities (“fifteen or twenty,” states the manifesto farther on), like Fernando Pessoa.

  This was not the first time that Pessoa predicted, or promoted, his own artistic greatness. In the articles on Portuguese poetry that he published in 1912 he envisioned the imminent emergence of a “Great Poet” who would overshadow even Luís de Camões, universally regarded as Portugal’s premier poet. It is clear, in retrospect, that Pessoa was setting the stage for his own grand entrance (or entrances, thanks to the heteronyms). But personal greatness, in the form of literary immortality, was only part of his dream. In an addendum to those articles, likewise published in 1912, Pessoa also foresaw the dawning, in Portugal, of a “New Renaissance,” which would spread from the nation’s borders to the rest of Europe, as had the Italian Renaissance centuries earlier.

  Pessoa would subsequently recast his vision of a Portuguese Renaissance in the doctrine of the Fifth Empire, a new take on an old prophecy, from the Book of Daniel, chapter 2. The prophet’s interpretation of a dream of Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, had traditionally been understood as a history of the Western world’s great military empires—Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman, with the fifth sometimes being understood as the British Empire. Pessoa, adopting a “spiritual” or cultural point of view, understood the five empires to be those of Greece, Rome, the Christian West, post-Renaissance Europe, and—on
the near horizon—Portugal. The idea was that Portugal, through its language and culture, and most especially through its literature, would dominate the rest of Europe. An “imperialism of poets,” specifies one of the passages Pessoa wrote on the subject.

  Pessoa’s nationalism was as constructive as it was ardent. He had no illusions about Portugal’s relative backwardness vis-à-vis the rest of Europe, and his goal was to make it catch up. He took the British and French cultures as models to emulate, at least in certain respects, and the English-speaking world as the best outlet for promoting Portuguese culture abroad. Already in 1909 he had planned to publish, in a printing office founded with a small inheritance left by his paternal grandmother, a long list of classic and contemporary Portuguese works translated into English, as well as a collection of foreign classics, including Shakespeare’s complete works, in Portuguese. The Empresa Ibis, as the press was called, was also supposed to publish magazines, political treatises, and scientific works, and—last but not least—numerous works by Pessoa and his heteronyms, in English and in Portuguese.

  Pessoa’s personal literary ambitions were, as he saw it, in perfect accord with his concern to make Portugal more cosmopolitan and to promote its culture abroad. His writings aimed, either directly or by example, to educate the Portuguese, to make them more European. For their sheer originality and quality (Pessoa was never modest), his writings would convince foreigners of the worth and cleverness of contemporary Portuguese literature. Pessoa, by promoting his own work, felt that he was promoting Portugal. This rationale was perhaps justified, in view of his considerable literary talents, but his entrepreneurial skills were wanting, and economic difficulties forced the Empresa Ibis to close its doors forthwith.