In a passage dating from the 1930s (Text 130) Bernardo Soares, the book’s fictional author, called Lisbon the “crucial address” of “the main literary influences on my intellectual development,” which were none other than the common, everyday people whom the bookkeeper worked with. Had Pessoa written those words in his own name, they would have been an exaggeration, but the people who were part of the scenery in the Lisbon he inhabited—shopkeepers, restaurant waiters, streetcar operators, sellers of lottery tickets, fruit vendors, delivery boys, office workers, schoolchildren—are a striking presence in his literary work, partly because of the absence of more intimate kinds of social contact: romance, close friendships, family life. It seems, for the same reason, that a few of those almost anonymous people were a strong, if quiet, presence in Pessoa’s sentimental life. It was the case, probably, of the tobacco shop owner who inspired poems signed by Campos and by Pessoa himself. And it was surely the case of the barber who made cameo appearances in The Book of Disquiet and elsewhere. Among the family members and the literary people at the funeral on December 2, he was spotted—the barber—paying, or repaying, a kind of respect.

Fernando Pessoa, Prose Writer

 

“I prefer prose to poetry as an art form for two reasons, the first of which is purely personal: I have no choice, because I’m incapable of writing in verse.” To be able to make such a statement, Fernando Pessoa—the greatest Portuguese poet of the last four centuries—lent his typewriter to Bernardo Soares, a literary alter ego who wrote only prose. But what was the point of having Soares write, not just a simple statement of personal preference (or competence), but a five-paragraph eulogy for The Book of Disquiet (Text 227) that defended prose as the highest art form, greater than music or poetry? No point at all. It probably just reflected how Pessoa felt, in the persona of Bernardo Soares and even in his own person, on the 18th of October, 1931, the day he wrote it. Pessoa made his fame as a poet, but he embarked on literally hundreds of prose projects large and small: dozens of short stories, twenty or more plays, detective novels, philosophical treatises, sociological and psychological studies, books on Portuguese culture and history, a tour guide of Lisbon, pamphlets about sundry political and economic issues, astrological works, essays on religion, literary criticism, and more. Few of these ever arrived at or near completion, but as the years went by and Pessoa launched new projects, he did not abandon the old ones. The Book of Disquiet, which he worked on furiously from 1913 to 1919, yawed in the doldrums in the 1920s, to return in its fullest splendor in the thirties, though it proceeded, as it always had, without firm direction, never finding nor even seeking a port of arrival.

“What’s necessary is to sail, it’s not necessary to live!” shouted Pompey the Great to his frightened sailors after ordering them to weigh anchor in a heavy storm. Those words, reported by Plutarch, became Pessoa’s motto, which he expressed—like his own self—in multiple versions, including “It’s not necessary to live, only to feel” (The Book of Disquiet, Text 124) and “Living isn’t necessary; what’s necessary is to create” (in a random note). Pessoa’s world was almost all ocean, dotted by occasional islands of truth and its corollary, beauty, though he realized that those might after all be illusions, the reward of much sailing. There was also, as if it were a motive for the voyage, a not too insistent hope, or belief, in unknown lands that were perhaps worth discovering. But it was essentially a voyage of self-discovery, or self-invention (“To pretend is to know oneself”)—an existential circumnavigation that would not end until Pessoa did. In the last years of his life, that self-exploration became less “inventive” and more investigative, more urgently expository, as if Pessoa sensed that time was running out. He tried to get to the heart of the matter he called the soul, and prose—in his letters, in The Education of the Stoic, and especially in The Book of Disquiet— became a privileged vehicle. Which brings us to the second and real reason Bernardo Soares preferred prose to poetry:

In prose we speak freely. We can incorporate musical rhythms, and still think. We can incorporate poetic rhythms, and yet remain outside them. An occasional poetic rhythm won’t disturb prose, but an occasional prose rhythm makes poetry fall down.

Prose encompasses all art, in part because words contain the whole world, and in part because the untrammeled word contains every possibility for saying and thinking.

 

In Pessoa the untrammeled word did not necessarily probe more deeply than poetry, but it drew a closer, more naked picture of its subject. This was particularly true in the 1930s when, with no more youthful striving after literary effects, that word became truly, completely free.

Pessoa’s prose was even more fragmentary than his poetry, or more conspicuously so. His failure (except in Message and 35 Sonnets) to organize his poetry into neat and orderly books hardly affects our appreciation of the individual poems that would have gone into them, and the same holds true for many of the finished and even unfinished passages from The Book of Disquiet But the page of perfectly gauged dialogue, the exact explanation of a protagonist’s motives, or the paragraph that lays down an astonishingly clear argument, necessarily suffers without the rest of the play, the short story, or the essay for which it was written. Suffers, that is, in its ability to make an impact on the reader. Pessoa wanted to make such an impact, even if the only reader would be him, but he couldn’t stand to put the final period to a work that was less than perfect. Most writers put it there anyway, because life is short, but Pessoa’s destiny—or so he wrote in a letter breaking off with Ophelia Queiroz, his only paramour—belonged to “another Law” and served “Masters who do not relent.” He patiently endured under the weight of his written fragments, as if waiting for the Architect to reveal the plan.

In 1928 Pessoa invented what was probably his last variation on himself, the Baron of Teive, a proud perfectionist whose major frustration—the one that leads him to commit suicide—is precisely his inability to finish any of his literary works. In that same year, several countries north and east of Portugal, Walter Benjamin published One-Way Street, which contains a seeming homage to Pessoa qua Baron:

To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they work throughout their lives. For only the more feeble and distracted take an inimitable pleasure in conclusions, feeling themselves thereby given back to life. For the genius each caesura, and the heavy blows of fate, fall like gentle sleep itself into his workshop labor. About it he draws a charmed circle of fragments.

 

Pessoa’s charmed circle was not, however, so gently static.