But to keep up the pretense (even if no one divulged the secret) would be virtually impossible in Portugal’s small intellectual milieu, and it wouldn’t be worth the mental effort to try.

In the vision that I call inner merely because I call the “real world” outer, I clearly and distinctly see the familiar, well-defined facial features, personality traits, life stories, ancestries, and in some cases even the death, of these various characters. Some of them have met each other; others have not. None of them ever met me except Álvaro de Campos. But if tomorrow, traveling in America, I were to run into the physical person of Ricardo Reis, who in my opinion lives there, my soul wouldn’t relay to my body the slightest flinch of surprise; all would be as it should be, exactly as it was before the encounter. What is life?

You should approach these books* as if you hadn’t read this explanation but had simply read the books, buying them one by one at a bookstore, where you saw them on display. You shouldn’t read them in any other spirit. When you read Hamlet, you don’t begin by reminding yourself that the story never happened. By doing so you would spoil the very pleasure you hope to get from reading it. When we read, we stop living. Let that be your attitude. Stop living, and read. What’s life?

But here, more intensely than in the case of a poet’s dramatic work, you must deal with the active presence of the alleged author. That doesn’t mean you have the right to believe in my explanation. As soon as you read it, you should suppose that I’ve lied—that you’re going to read books by different poets, or different writers, and that through those books you’ll receive emotions and learn lessons from those writers, with whom I have nothing to do except as their publisher. How do you know that this attitude is not, after all, the one most in keeping with the inscrutable reality of things?

...

THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN AND HETERONYM

 

Fernando Pessoa’s adventures in heteronymy began in his early childhood, according to his own account, which he might well have fabricated, but we know that self-multiplication was the main generator of his writing life by the time he reached puberty. Pessoa’s archives contain a number of make-believe newspapers that he began to create when he was thirteen. These are elaborate, three-column productions containing real and invented news, poems, short stories, historical features, riddles, and jokes, signed by a gallery of writers with distinct interests and literary styles. The papers were written in Portuguese, mostly in 1902, when the family had gone to Portugal for a year to visit relatives, but Pessoa penned at least one newspaper back in Durban, in 1903, and there’s even one that dates from September of 1905, right after he had returned to Portugal for the second and last time. A biographical sketch for one of the pseudo-journalists, Eduardo Lança, reports that he was born in Brazil in 1875 and immigrated as a young man to Portugal, basing himself in Lisbon but traveling all over the country. And several of Lança’s colleagues—Dr. Pancrácio, Gaudéncio Nabos—weren’t limited to their newspaper collaborations but signed poems and prose pieces as well.

Far more prolific and psychologically complex, Charles Robert Anon and Alexander Search may be considered the first veritable heteronyms. Anon came first, when Pessoa was still in South Africa, and then Search, who may not have been conceived until Pessoa returned to Lisbon in 1905. Pessoa even had calling cards printed for Alexander Search, whose output includes over 150 English poems (some dating as late as 1910), essays, commentaries, and a short story titled “A Very Original Dinner,” in which human flesh was served to the unsuspecting guests. Search, who was born in Lisbon on the same day as Pessoa, had an older brother, Charles James Search, who was a translator of Portuguese and Spanish literature into English. The two brothers had a French-language colleague, Jean Seul, who was a poet and a writer of moral satires, including “France in 1950,” found further on in this volume. Curiously enough, Alexander Search, in the passage from this section dated October 30, 1908, refers to his “Jean Seul projects.” This would suggest, though it seems rather unlikely, that Pessoa intended Jean Seul to be a French heteronym of his English heteronym. Pessoa did not leave us any biographical information about C. R. Anon, whose last name perhaps indicates that this anonymity was deliberate.

Search and Anon incarnated the anxieties and existential concerns of a young intellectual entering adulthood, but the two heteronyms were more stridently outspoken than Pessoa himself, and more virulently anti-Catholic. Their styles are not easy to distinguish, and Pessoa may have meant for Search to replace Anon.