A number of poems originally signed by the latter were subsequently attributed to the former, and there’s even a poem (revised and recopied) signed “C. R. Anon, id est Alexander Search.”

The transition from his South African childhood to life as a young adult in Lisbon, separated from his mother for the first time, brought Pessoa new kinds of stress and insecurity that came to a head in the year 1907. The usual pressure felt by a nineteen year old to define or discover himself was magnified by his sense of geographical and linguistic displacement and by the lack of structure in his daily life, especially after he dropped out of the University of Lisbon. His paternal grandmother, who had been in and out of mental hospitals during the last twelve years of her life, died in a state of advanced dementia in the summer ofigoy, and Pessoa seemed to be quite sincerely afraid of going mad himself. Living under the same roof with her (along with two great-aunts) and reading, during the same period, Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892) set him to thinking and writing almost obsessively about the relationship between genius and madness (his archives contain over a hundred texts on the topic, nearly all of them unpublished). Perhaps his main problem was that very obsessiveness. At the end of the above-mentioned passage signed by Alexander Search in 1908, we read: “One of my mental complications—horrible beyond words—is a fear of insanity, which itself is insanity.”

Pessoa remarked, in The Book of Disquiet and elsewhere, that a madman is not liable to see the madness of his own ideas, which may explain his keen interest in learning how other people saw him. Knowing that he would probably never return to South Africa, he decided to go for broke, writing several of his former teachers under a false name, as a psychiatrist requesting information about his mentally deranged patient, namely Pessoa. In a letter of inquiry to Clifford Geerdts, a former classmate, the phony shrink was to announce that Pessoa had, apparently, committed suicide. Pessoa did not strictly follow his plan, but we know that in 1907 Mr. Belcher, who was Pessoa’s English teacher in Durban, did receive a letter from a “Dr. Faustino Antunes” asking for information about his former student, and Geerdts was also sent a letter—not the rough draft published on pp. 12–13, but a letter like the one to Belcher, stating that Pessoa was suffering from a mental disorder. Both men duly replied, and Geerdts’s letter—which was the more forthcoming—included the following observations about Pessoa:

 

• “He was pale and thin and appeared physically to be very imperfectly developed. He had a narrow and contracted chest and was inclined to stoop.”

• “... he was inclined to be morbid.”

• “[He was] regarded as a brilliantly clever boy.”

• “... he had learned [English] so rapidly and so well that he had a splendid style in that language.”

• “[He was] meek and inoffensive and inclined to avoid association with his schoolfellows.”

• “He took no part in athletic sports of any kind and I think his spare time was spent in reading. We generally considered that he worked far too much and that he would ruin his health by so doing.”

In fact Pessoa, with incredible sangfroid, first wrote to Mr. Belcher in South Africa, waited for his reply, then wrote Geerdts at Oxford (where he had gone to study), relaying some of Belcher’s comments and asking if Geerdts agreed. All of this in the name of Dr. Faustino Antunes, who turns out to be more than just a clinical psychiatrist, for he was also the signing author of an “Essay on Intuition.”

From the schoolboy script in which it was written, we know that the opening passage in this section probably dates from when Pessoa was still in his teens, but he posed as an old man looking back: “I was a poet animated by philosophy,” and, in the penultimate paragraph, “There is for me—there was—a wealth of meaning (...)”. Whether writing under his own or an invented name, Pessoa already revealed what he called—in a passage signed by Alexander Search—“an inborn tendency to mystification, to artistic lying.”

“I was a poet animated by philosophy”

 

I was a poet animated by philosophy, not a philosopher with poetic faculties. I loved to admire the beauty of things, to trace in the imperceptible and through the minute the poetic soul of the universe.

...

Poetry is in everything—in land and in sea, in lake and in riverside. It is in the city too—deny it not—it is evident to me here as I sit: there is poetry in this table, in this paper, in this inkstand; there is poetry in the rattling of the cars on the streets, in each minute, common, ridiculous motion of a workman who [on] the other side of the street is painting the signboard of a butcher’s shop.

Mine inner sense predominates in such a way over my five senses that I see things in this life—I do believe it—in a way different from other men. There is for me—there was—a wealth of meaning in a thing so ridiculous as a door key, a nail on a wall, a cat’s whiskers. There is to me a fullness of spiritual suggestion in a fowl with its chickens strutting across the road. There is to me a meaning deeper than human fears in the smell of sandalwood, in the old tins on a dirt heap, in a matchbox lying in the gutter, in two dirty papers which, on a windy day, will roll and chase each other down the street.

For poetry is astonishment, admiration, as of a being fallen from the skies taking full consciousness of his fall, astonished at things. As of one who knew things in their soul, striving to remember this knowledge, remembering that it was not thus he knew them, not under these forms and these conditions, but remembering nothing more.

“The artist must be born beautiful”

 

The artist must be born beautiful and elegant; for he that worships beauty must not himself be unfair. And it is assuredly a terrible pain for an artist to find not at all in himself that which he strives for.