Where we are is who we are.” But while he recognized the defining role of environment, Pessoa was by no means a hard-core determinist. In a longer version of the piece just cited, he wrote: “The man who jumped over the wall had a wall to jump over.” The wall, being a necessary condition, was in that sense determining, but not compelling, since the man could choose whether or not to jump it.

Pessoa’s particular genius is at least partly explained by the two environments that shaped him—Lisbon, where he spent his first seven years and the whole of his adult life, and Durban, South Africa, where he lived during his intellectually and emotionally formative years, from age seven to seventeen. Pessoa’s basic personality was no doubt set in place before he moved with his mother from Lisbon to Durban, but his literary output was clearly the product of the meeting, or clash, of those two environments and their different languages, their different cultures. It’s as if English culture—and Durban, at the time, was more thoroughly, traditionally English than England itself—were a wall that the young, displaced Pessoa successfully jumped over, while remaining forever and utterly Portuguese.

 

Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was born in 1888 on June 13, the feast day of St. Anthony and an official holiday in Lisbon, where elaborate festivities are organized in honor of the saint and in honor of the city itself. St. Anthony’s day is Lisbon’s day, and no birthday could be more appropriate for Pessoa, who is his native city’s quintessential writer. Even more, I would argue, than Kafka is Prague’s writer, or Joyce is Dublin’s writer. Though Kafka spent his whole life in Prague, the city isn’t much felt in his writing, except in the diaries. Joyce, on the other hand, wrote obsessively about the city of his birth, but from memory, having spent very little time there as an adult. Pessoa rarely left Lisbon as an adult, and he wrote about the city both directly (especially in The Book of Disquiet) and out of imaginative memory, through the voice of footloose Álvaro de Campos, who on return visits from Britain (where he was supposedly living) produced the nostalgia-imbued “Lisbon Revisited (1923)” and “Lisbon Revisited (1926),” two of his most striking poems.

Both of Pessoa’s parents fostered his cultural development. The family lived just opposite Lisbon’s opera house, where as a small boy Pessoa may have attended a performance or two with his father, an impassioned music critic as well as a government employee. Pessoa’s mother, who was from the Azores, was unusually well educated and taught her son to read and write at a very young age. But Pessoa’s early Lisbon years were also, ultimately, marked by loss and separation. One month after his fifth birthday, his father died from tuberculosis, and six months later his baby brother died. Between the two deaths, the family moved to smaller quarters. In the following year Pessoa’s mother met her second husband, a naval officer who left Lisbon some months later to take up a new post in Mozambique, and soon thereafter was made the Portuguese consul in Durban, capital of the English colony of Natal.

The prospect of his mother moving to Africa to be with her future husband and of Pessoa perhaps being left behind with relatives prompted his first poem, in July of 1895:

TO MY DEAR MOTHER

Here I am in Portugal,
In the lands where I was born.
However much I love them,
I love you even more.

This quatrain is often cited as a demonstration of Pessoa’s filial devotion, but it is also proof of his unusual affection for his homeland—“unusual,” since a seven-year-old whose personal relationships are mostly with his immediate family could hardly be expected to have a very clear idea of what a nation is, much less feel emotionally attached to one. Throughout his life Pessoa, though he would criticize the Portuguese for being provincial and revile Portugal’s political leaders and its economic system, was fiercely loyal to the country of his birth.

In February of 1896 Pessoa and his mother, married to her second husband by proxy two months earlier, arrived at Durban, where the boy was enrolled in a primary school run by Irish and French nuns. Three years later he entered Durban High School, where he received a demanding, first-rate English education. Pessoa, despite being a foreigner, immediately stood out as a brilliant student, and when he sat for the Matriculation Examination of the University of the Cape of Good Hope, in 1903, he won the Queen Victoria Prize for the best essay in English. There were 899 examinees.

Pessoa’s African experience was basically a bookish experience. Though liked well enough by his classmates, he did not participate much in sports or cultivate many friends, and neither the town of Durban nor the surrounding country seems to have left much of an impression on him. Among the hundreds of literary pieces he wrote during his adult life, Africa was never explicitly referred to until the year of his death, when in “Un Soir à Lima,” a poem evoking his mother playing the piano at home in Durban, he recalls listening to her from next to the window while he gazed outside at the vast African landscape, lit up by the moon. Pessoa’s environment, while in Africa, was mostly that of English literature: Shakespeare and Milton, the romantic poets—Shelley, Byron, Keats, Wordsworth—and Dickens and Carlyle for prose. He also read and admired Poe.

Pessoa very nearly became an English writer. What “saved” him for Portuguese literature was a year-long trip that the family—Pessoa, his mother and stepfather, and several children born to the new couple—made to Portugal in 1901-02. It was there that Pessoa wrote his earliest known poems in Portuguese (besides the above-mentioned quatrain to his mother), one of which was published in a Lisbon newspaper in 1902. Both in Lisbon and on the island of Terceira, where the family went to visit Pessoa’s mother’s sister, the budding adolescent, who suddenly had a lot of time with no schoolwork to fill it, invented a series of elaborate, make-believe newspapers containing news, jokes, commentary and poems credited to a team of fictional journalists, several of whom he invented biographies for.

Back in Durban, Pessoa, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, invented Charles Robert Anon, his first alter ego to sign a substantial body of creative writing, including poems, short stories, and essays. This English proto-heteronym was soon joined by the even more prolific Alexander Search, either while Pessoa was still in Durban or else shortly after his definitive return to Lisbon, in the fall of 1905. Search, who likewise wrote in English but was supposedly born in Lisbon on the same day as Pessoa, expressed, like Anon, the intellectual concerns and existential anxieties of a young man on the threshold of becoming an adult.