Pessoa: A Biography

 This biography covers many topics, some of which are synopsized here in quotes from the book.

Portugal

Pessoa was born into a world in which ghostly shades of former splendors hovered amid palpable poverty and decay.

What united them, besides the succulent food in the fine restaurants where they met, was not a feeling of failure in their personal careers as writers and artists but the conviction that, despite their best efforts to encourage reform, Portugal had failed and would continue to fail to be organically progressive, original, and self-determining. This larger failure was both the cause and consequence of saudade, a word that signifies intense longing, yearning, nostalgia, both as a temporary mood or state of mind and as an existential condition.

BUT LISBON WAS AND remains, even in the twenty-first century, majestic. Built, like Rome, on seven hills—or six, or eight, depending on what you call a hill—and stretching along the wide estuary of the Tagus River, which is sometimes called the Mar da Palha, or Straw Sea, because of how it goldenly reflects the sun at dusk, the city offers an ever-changing spectacle of light glinting off the pastel-colored buildings of its slopes. And the sky in Lisbon is more dynamic than in other European capitals, with sun and clouds and rain often entering and exiting in rapid succession, as if the pagan gods were still alive, vying for control of the weather.

Pessoa is one of those writers, like James Joyce, whom we automatically associate with the city of their birth, as if one were the reconfigured equivalent of the other.

“My nation is the Portuguese language,” he famously wrote in 1931, affirming a patriotism that was in the first place linguistic, rather than geographical. Far less quoted, since it is politically or socially incorrect, is this admission: “An adjective matters more to me than the real weeping of a human soul.” Which is not to say that Pessoa was insensitive to human tears. He shed many of his own. But words—and what words could represent—were what he lived for.

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A Victorian Novel

Of his mother: Maria's high-placed friends were impressed with her intelligence and regretted that she had not been born a boy, in which case she could have aspired to a brilliant career.

Pessoa's father is an enigmatic figure. Perhaps Pessoa's mother fell for a man she perceived as an artistic type, but he never tried to make art or music or to write creatively. He would have needed audacity for that. And a willingness to handle, shape, and transform the raw matter of his deep thoughts and emotions.

Pessoa’s father had neither the inclination nor the physical stamina for the armed forces. He was consumptive, to use an outmoded word that has the virtue of graphically evoking the effect of pulmonary tuberculosis.

Pessoa wrote: "I remember his death as a grave silence during the first meals we ate after learning about it. I remember that the others would occasionally look at me. And I would look back, dumbly comprehending. Then I’d eat with more concentration, since they might, when I wasn’t looking, still be looking at me."

THEN—AS HAPPENS IN FAIRY tales and also, less often, in real life—her fortune abruptly changed.  Maria’s new sweetheart was many things that her first husband was not: close to her in age (four years older instead of eleven), strong and a little husky, outgoing, jovial, and serene. In her mind his whole being radiated serenity and safety.

But, in yet another blow to the weary bride, who had dreamed of wearing a fancy dress made of black velvet for the occasion,  the captain-turned-consul could not make a trip home so soon after taking up his new post, she had to settle for a wedding ceremony with his older brother, a gentleman with wild eyes and a walrus moustache whom she hardly knew, serving as proxy.

No less strange for Pessoa than the fact that things end, including things as enormous and profound as his father’s soul, was the fact that life continues, inexorably.

Together they would set sail (as they learned several months later) for the town of Durban, on the eastern seaboard of South Africa.

If they had not gone to South Africa, the rest of this story would be very different, or, more likely, there would be no story to merit a biography. Not only genes but also myriad contributions from one’s surroundings all combine to shape one of those rarely occurring specimens known as a genius.

Pessoa would always feel a little out of place, there but not all there, irremediably foreign. Strange soil, it turned out, was exactly what he needed for his kind of genius to flower.

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Gandhi and Pessoa in South Africa

However much they resisted mixing with and being influenced by other groups, and however superior they deemed their own culture to be, they were forced to recognize that it was not the only one.

Racially tripartite Durban, with its imbricated subdivisions along religious, economic, and class lines, may have been just the right breeding ground for the spirit of tolerance that marked the thinking of Pessoa as well as of Gandhi, both of whom deemed truth to be as variable as the people who live by truth.

Durban was indeed well managed, for the comfort of white people, and if life there impressed Pessoa as a quasi-socialist paradise, it was because even strictly middle-class whites could live like kings and queens, thanks to the racist division of labor.

Like virtually all the city’s white residents, he would have instinctively preferred to remain as ignorant as possible.

The article in The Natal Mercury described how the hostile crowd of pursuers “began to assert itself, and Mr. Gandhi became the object of kicks and cuffs, while mud and stale fish were thrown at him. One person also produced a riding whip, and gave him a stroke, while another plucked away his peculiar hat. As the result of the attack, he was very much bespattered, and blood was flowing from the neck.”

The admiration Pessoa expressed for Gandhi in the later years of his life suggests that Pessoa—who was not a vegetarian, a teetotaler, or a nonsmoker, let alone an active defender of humanitarian causes—somehow identified with Gandhi, almost in an atavistic way.

They [both] conceived salvation as a private matter, insofar as each person has to find and follow their own path toward self-realization, and at the same time as a joint concern, with all individual efforts contributing toward human betterment. Their asceticism, taking different forms, implied in both cases a rejection of conventional notions of well-being and progress.

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The Writer

Pessoa was a volcanic writer, and when the words started flowing, he used whatever sort of paper was close to hand….

All of which he deposited in the large wooden trunk, his legacy to the world.

But as we read the work, it almost seems that Fernando Pessoa, and even we ourselves, are variations on this invented self, who expresses with uncanny precision our unuttered feelings of disquiet and existential unsettledness, speaking not only to us but also for us. “The only way to be in agreement with life is to disagree with ourselves,” observes Bernardo Soares, who refuses to adapt to the world.

Pessoa, like his semiheteronym, was an abundance of qualities that did not cohere and would not settle into just one soul.  “The active life has always struck me as the least comfortable of suicides,” he wrote.  He remarks on his instinctive hatred “for decisive acts, for definite thoughts.”  He is actively, militantly passive. Dreaming is not a vice that hinders him from accomplishing his goals; dreaming is what he lives for, and he organizes his existence accordingly.

He wrote “Nature is parts without a whole” , yet he often berated himself for being unable to create whole works of literature.

Pessoa could not imagine that his literary dispersion, which faithfully mirrors our ontological instability and the absence of intrinsic unity in the world we inhabit, would make him required reading by the time the next century arrived.

His universe of disconnected parts prefigured our own worldview, with developments in history, science, and philosophy having disabused us of whatever harmonious wholes we once cherished.

His fashioning of the heteronyms may be construed as a religious act, as his way of paying homage to God, by realizing his divine potential as a co-creator, made in God’s likeness and image.

One day he copied out, on a sheet of paper tossed into the trunk and not discovered by researchers until the present millennium, a single verse from the ninth chapter of St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians: “I became all things to all men, that I might save all.”

But what he imagined, envisioned, and projected was uniquely vast and varied. “Be plural like the universe!” he imperatively wrote on a slip of paper found in the trunk in the 1960s.

"Ever since I was a child, I’ve felt the need to enlarge the world with fictitious personalities—dreams of mine that were carefully crafted, envisaged with photographic clarity, and fathomed to the depths of their souls. When I was just five years old, an isolated child and quite content to be isolated, I already enjoyed the company of certain characters from my dreams, including a Captain Thibeaut, the Chevalier de Pas, and various others whom I’ve forgotten, and whose forgetting—like my imperfect memory of the two I just named—is one of my life’s great regrets."

"And instead of ending with my childhood, this tendency expanded in my adolescence, taking firmer root with each passing year, until it became my natural way of being. Today I have no personality: I have divided all my humanness among the various authors whom I’ve served as literary executor. Today I am the meeting-place of a small humanity that belongs only to me…."

Zenith, Richard (2021-07-19T22:58:59). Pessoa: A Biography .