Literary branding in Lisbon and Lyon

In Lisbon, where I vacationed recently, images of Fernando Pessoa were everywhere, in street art, on mugs and shirts and puzzles, even on books.  This lovely tile example is near the Pantheon, overseeing the Saturday flea market where I bought my own Pessoa souvenir, a €1 tile with the image of Pessoa used on the cover of one of the many Richard Zenith translations.  There were three different Pessoa tiles available.  That seems like a lot to me.

Maybe it is not.  Maybe more cities than I know use once-obscure Modernist writers as their mascot, as their brand.  Kafka in Prague.  Others?  There should be others.  The portrait of Pessoa amounts to a moustache, glasses, and a hat, so it is endlessly flexible and instantly recognizable.  Why is New York City not full of stylized Marianne Moore art?  She wore a distinctive hat.  She was even famous while alive.

Lisbon’s pride in its writers is so great that it was easy to find souvenirs for other writers, the most thorough being a little box meant to contain a tealight; one side of the box had a caricature of Pessoa, of course, and the others had Luís de Camões, José Maria de Eça de Queirós, and José Saramago.  I know that Saramago has had international best-sellers, but it is hard to believe that this is an item for non-Portuguese tourists.  More Eça stuff is visible on the right.

I wondered about Lyon.  It should be more heavily stamped with writers.  The airport is named after Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, but images of the Little Prince are rare.  Even this snowy statue of the Prince and the Aviator is almost hidden, a surprise.  Maybe the Little Prince is too expensive.

François Rabelais is public domain.  He was only in Lyon for a few years, working as a doctor in the Hôtel-Dieu, the big Renaissance hospital, and editing humanist texts with his printer friends, but these are also the years that he wrote and published both Pantagruel (1532) and Gargantua (1534).  The renovated hospital is about to reopen as a gargantuan International City of Gastronomy, whatever that is, the perfect setting for cartoons of Rabelais, Gargantua, and Pantagruel.

Too openly gluttonous, maybe, and anyway Lyon already has its literary restaurant mascot, the puppet Guignol, created in Lyon in the early 19th century.  Although here he has a popsicle, he is normally carrying a wooden club.  It makes a deeply satisfying thwack against the heads of other puppets.  “Should I hit him [the pirate] again, or has he had enough,” Guignol asked the children at the performance I saw.  Guess how the children responded.  Guignol is a version of Punch, but friendlier and much less weird.

That performance, at La Maison de Guignol, included a surprise guest appearance by another Lyon icon, not exactly literary, although he is responsible for a number of books.  Please see this article in the regional paper Le Progres for the origin of the puppet of Paul Bocuse.  The pirates, in this play, kidnap M. Paul for their ship’s mess, as is logical.  Bocuse had died just a few weeks before we saw the play, which was not stopping anybody.  They even added a line: “You can’t kill me, I’m already dead!”  French theater works fast, and is ruthless.

Images of Paul Bocuse are everywhere in Lyon, is my point.  Maybe they will fade away, but maybe not.  Maybe a hundred years from now, this will be the Platonic ideal of what a chef looks like. He is not a literary character yet, but might become one.  Still, the city’s branders should make room for Rabelais and Gargantua, for the legendary gluttons who swallow of all that great, bold, heavy Lyon food and wine.

Antonio Tabucchi's "The Last Three Days of Fernando Pessoa" - with bonus lobster recipe

How could I resist the Tabucchi book with Fernando Pessoa right there in the title?  The Last Three Days of Fernando Pessoa (1994) is really a short story, only about thirty little pages in the City Lights volume, where it accompanies Dreams of Dreams.  The Pessoa story is a good companion since it is really just another fictional dream (“A Delirium” is the story’s subtitle), another way for the author to play with his most beloved literary toys.

This delirium is the sanest, least delirious delirium I have encountered.  Pessoa is in the hospital and receives a series of visitors, poets, mostly, all great admirers of Pessoa.  The visitors are all imaginary, Pessoa’s heteronyms, the characters he created in a wild burst of creative activity circa 1914 that resulted in the ingenious and perplexing body of writing I have been reading and messing around with off and on over the past year:  the pastoral poet Alberto Caeiro, the energetic Álvaro de Campos, the skeptical neo-pagan Ricardo Reis, the prosaic Bernardo Soares, and the mad philosopher António Mora, who I have not really read.  I am not sure that he got much down on paper.

Each heteronym makes his farewell to his creator, poignantly, sometimes, as when Caeiro gives Pessoa a final poem, or more comically, as when Soares brings Pessoa a bowl of his favorite tripe soup, likely knowing that Pessoa had no appetite and he would be able to eat the soup himself.  Reis is given permission to write more poems:

But they will be apocryphal poems, Ricardo Reis replied.

It doesn’t matter, said Pessoa, the apocryphal does no harm to poetry, and my work is so vast that it accommodates even apocryphal poems.

Is this a nod to José Saramago’s The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis?

Tabucchi, in each episode, is interpreting Pessoa.  The story is a covert form of literary criticism.  Caeiro, for example, the poet who inspired all of the others, is revealed to be Pessoa’s father who died when Pessoa was five.  Or, really, a self-generated psychological substitute for his absent father:

The fact is that I needed a guide and coagulant – I don’t know if I’m making myself clear – otherwise my life would have shattered into pieces.  Thanks to you I found cohesion, it’s really I who chose you to be my father and master.

Not that any of this is necessary to enjoy Pessoa’s work.  It is all play.

Soares brings not just soup but a recipe for lagosta suada, sweaty lobster.  How this does not by itself bring a dying man back to life is a mystery of existence:

You need butter, three onions, tomatoes, and a bit of garlic, oil, white wine, a little aged aguardente, which I know you like [a little joke about Pessoa’s alcoholism], two wine glasses of dry port, a dash of hot pepper, black pepper, and nutmeg.   First, you steam the lobster, just a little.  Then you add the ingredients I gave you and put it in the oven.  I don’t know why it’s called “sweaty,” probably because it produces a very tasty broth.

What any of this will mean to a reader unfamiliar with Pessoa and his creations is beyond me.

Many thanks to Caroline for declaring Antonio Tabucchi week!  Many more Tabucchi books should be appearing at her site and scattered around book blogdom.

The Portuguese Literature Challenge signoff with many thank-yous

Cruges, after a silence, shrugged and muttered:

“Even if I wrote a good opera, who would put it on?”

“And if Ega wrote a fine book, who would read it?”

The maestro concluded:  “This country is simply impossible.  I think I’ll have a coffee too.”  (The Maias, Ch. VIII, 192)

Now just hang on a minute, pal!  What have I been doing since August if not reading the finest Portuguese books?

When I launched the Portuguese Literature Challenge, I guessed that I would be sick of it all by the end of April.  Pretty close.  Know thyself.  So this is a wrap-up.  I do not have any original insights into Portugal or Brazil or their literatures but I did read a lot of good books in good company.

Although I wandered around plenty, three authors took up most of my time, as they should have.  I have written so much about them that I will limit myself to notes and thank yous.

Machado de Assis.  Shelf Love Jenny joined me for The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas.  The last five novels of Machado (I only got to four of them) are uniquely odd and inventive.  My greatest surprise, though, was discovering Machado’s accomplishment as a short story writer.  I came across a critic who credited Machado with “at least sixty world-class masterpieces” of short fiction, which is absurd, but a couple dozen, now that is not absurd at all.  And how often does Machado show up in short story anthologies?  So I understand the special pleading.  I had no idea.  Rise and mel u wrote about Machado’s short stories, and mel’s post has links to posts about some other Brazilian short stories.

Eça de Queirós.  “[E]verything he wrote was enjoyable” says Borges, and with nine of his books behind me I will agree.  His character work is especially good.  Please see Richard and litlove, who both have interesting things to say about The Crime of Father Amaro, and Scott Bailey on The Illustrious House of Ramires.

As good as Eça typically is, though, his best book is clearly The Maias.  Also his longest, by far, sorry, but the length is part of what makes it the best.  The Maias has no more story or plot or characters than Amaro or Cousin Basilio, for example.  Very similar, actually, which likely frustrates some readers.  So the novel is not "epic Eça."  For whatever reason, Eça chose this particular book as his masterpiece and worked on it more.  It has a more complex, multi-layered pattern than the other books.  I am not sure that it is more meaningful than his other novels, but it is more intricate.  It has a higher thread count than his other tapestries.  Not everyone, I know, thinks this means "best."

Fernando Pessoa.  An original, an endless source of puzzles and ideas.  You do not even have to read his work for him to generate ideas, but just read about him and his system of heteronyms.   Please see seraillon for a recent post on The Book of Disquiet and a piece about Antonio Tabucchi and Pessoa.

I also want to thank Miguel of St. Orberose, whose blog and comments here pointed me in all sorts of useful directions.

What should I do next?  Austria, Italy?  19th century plays?  The 1890s?  Maybe too big, that one.  The late 1890s?  19th century literary criticism – but who would want to read along with that?  Mountaineering books?  Old timey kiddie lit?  Ideas welcome.

And thanks again for everyone’s assistance, participation, spurs to thought, and generally enthusiastic attitude.

That’s precisely what literature should do, be disquieting I mean - Antonio Tabucchi's Requiem

Antonio Tabucchi’s Requiem: A Hallucination (1991) is a love letter to Portuguese culture.  Tabucchi is an Italian writer who became, through diligence and enthusiasm, a Portuguese adoptee.  Fitting its subject, Requiem is written in Portuguese.  The subtitle, the hallucination, is an addition to the English version,* but a useful one.

A Tabucchi-like narrator spends a hot July day – noon to midnight, actually – wandering in a dream Lisbon, revisiting its cultural treasures and sites from his past, encountering ordinary Portuguese and dead friends.  The climax of the novel is a dinner with Fernando Pessoa:

I know, he said, with me it always finishes that way, but don’t you think that’s precisely what literature should do, be disquieting I mean?, personally I don’t trust literature that soothes people’s consciences.  Neither do I, I agreed, but you see, I’m already full of disquiet, your disquiet just adds to mine and becomes anxiety.  I prefer anxiety to utter peace, he said, given the choice.  (99)

Requiem is honestly not an anxious or even disquieted novel.

Portuguese cuisine is one of the featured cultural treasures.  Oh yes yes:

I’ll tell you the ingredients for a real sarrabulho, I never measure anything, I do everything by eye, anyway, you need loin of pork, fat, lard, pig’s liver, tripe, a bowl of cooked blood, a whole bulb of garlic, a glass of white wine, an onion, salt, pepper and cumin.  (37-8)

No need to give the whole recipe here, I guess.  The result “looked revolting,” “drenched in a brown sauce that was probably made from wine or cooked blood [the latter!],” but has “the subtlest of flavors” (36).

Perhaps I overemphasize close attention to food in fiction.  I am only reflecting the attention I give it.

Close attention is also paid to a painting in the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Hieronymus Bosch’s Temptation of St. Anthony.  Who says your culture’s treasures have to be from your own culture?  We study the details, the skate in the lower center, the  - well what is that in the upper right?

I know this painting like the back of my hand, he said, for example, you see what I’m painting now?. Well, all the critics have always said that this fish is a sea bass, but it isn’t at all, its’ a tench.  A tench, I said, that’s a freshwater fish, isn’t it?  It is indeed, he said, it lives in swamps and ditches, it loves mud, it’s the greasiest fish I’ve eaten in my life, where I come from they cook a rice dish made with tench which is just swimming in grease, it’s a bit like eels and rice only greasier, it takes a whole day to digest.  The Copyist paused briefly.  (65)

You see, it is not just me who gets distracted by the food.

A sort of story is carried along in Requiem, a plot about an old, tragic love affair, but that as the novel progresses that story recedes to the background, its incidents taking place not in but between chapters.  The Portuguese background moves to the front.  What a fine novel to round off my little Portuguese project.

I read the translation of my hero Margaret Jull Costa.  The seraillon blog is suffused with Antonio Tabucchi.

* No it's not! Please see Miguel's comment.

The best thing is to just sit still - Pessoan Nescio

Nescio is slotted with his contemporaries Robert Walser and Franz Kafka as an example of “clerk literature” by Joseph O’Neill.  That’s my term; O’Neill goes on for a while longer.  Stories in which the main characters are bureaucrats, whether private or government.  Clerk characters are ubiquitous in 19th century Russian literature, but strangely rare elsewhere, with the glorious exception of “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” a story that could not possibly have been known to Nescio, even though Melville feels like a direct influence.  The profession of clerk is literarily rich exactly because it is so dull:  what meaning can be found in a life spent as a poorly paid, over-educated human photocopier?

“And it goes on for years.  Then your old man sticks you in an office.  And you realize that the reason you learned all those things was so that you could wet slips of paper with a little brush.”  (“The Freeloader,” 23)

Working conditions and pay have improved, but the existential problem remains.

O’Neill missed a crucial example:  Fernando Pessoa, who made his living as a clerk in a shipping company, much like the “author” of The Book of Disquiet.  Pessoa displace his search for meaning onto his heteronyms, particularly the shepherd poet Alberto Caeiro who writes as if he has found a solution:

I believe in the world as in a daisy,
Because I see it.  But I don’t think about it,
Because to think s to not understand.
The world wasn’t made for us to think about it
(To think is to have eyes that aren’t well)
But to look at it and to be in agreement.  (tr. Richard Zenith, from Fernando Pessoa & Co, 48)

The title character of “The Freeloader, Japi, is a pest and a sponger, but in his strongest moments he possesses a Caeiro-like clarity:

“No,” Japi said, “I am nothing and I do nothing.  Actually I do much too much.  I’m busy overcoming the body.  The best thing is to just sit still; going places and thinking are only for stupid people.  I don’t think either.  It’s too bad I have to eat and sleep.  I’d rather spend all day and all night just sitting.”  (5)

There is a painter in “The Freeloader” who struggles and strains for his art, but does produce paintings (Caeiro: “And there are poets who are artists \ And work on their poems \ Like a carpenter on his planks!”).  He befriends Japi who produces nothing, even less than Caeiro, but is adept at seeing, or sensing,  or perhaps I mean existing, “[s]omeone who thought it was fine just to let the wind blow through his hair, let the cold, wet wind soak his clothes and his body, who ran his tongue over his lips because the taste of the ocean was so ‘goddamn delicious,’ who sniffed his hands at night to smell the sea” (10).

As adept as Japi is at mooching food and cigars from his bohemian friends, he cannot live this way forever – he is the one speaking up above about his father’s office.  Japi becomes a clerk after all, just like Bernado Soares, but if he has his own Book of Disquiet, he burns it.

The World War II story, “Insula Dei” (“Island of God”), touches on the same themes, but with a horrible new context:  how can one find meaning in a world where everything has been ruined?  What happens to a Caeiro- or Japi-like life of the senses when everything you see has been corrupted?  Is it ethical to be an island in the face of evil?  Or is any other choice ethical?  I think I will not pursue this idea.  Someone else might.  Perhaps I will pick up the trail somewhere else.

I play with everything I could have said - writing against disquiet

Friday is a holiday, so this will be the end of my wrassling with The Book of Disquiet.  I do not write anything for Wuthering Expectations when I have a day off.  Why I let my arbitrary work schedule determine my writing schedule is a mystery, but why I write anything at all is the greater mystery, the one to solve first.

Bernardo Soares and Fernando Pessoa take on the question in The Book of Disquiet.  As I read more of the novel, the central puzzle of the book moves from “Why do I exist?” to “Why does this book exist?”  The questions answer each other.  Soares exists to write his journal.  The journal exists so that Soares may exist.  Soares deflects his anxiety about meaninglessness by writing, by creating his own meaning.  His writing is – Jenny reminds me that Soares anticipates Albert Camus – Soares’s unending Sisyphean task, intensely purposeful even if otherwise empty.

I cure it [the “sinister absurdity” of the fear of “ceasing to exist”] by writing it down.  Yes, there is no desolation – if it is really profound and not just pure emotion – without the intelligence having some part in it, for which there exists the ironic remedy of saying it doesn’t exist.  If literature had no other purpose, it would have this one, if only for a few people …  I write the way others sleep…  (168, p. 151)

Writing is thus not creation but negation, or negation of negation:  “sometimes I write because I have nothing to say” (223, p. 209).  The word “because” is the Pessoan signature.  Writing leads not to anything of lasting value, or even to feeling, but to a “dream in prose.”  Soares, rereads “everything I have written” only to “find that all of it is worthless, that it would have been better off if I hadn’t done it” (241, p. 229).  Yet he continues, ending this passage with a grim metaphor:  “rereading, I see my dolls burst, the straw stuffing pouring through their torn sides, emptying without having existed.”  The metaphor in the earlier passage is even more nightmarish:

I write lingering over the words, as if they were shopwindows I can’t see through and which stand as half-meanings, quasi-expressions, like the colors of a cloth I never saw, harmonies made of I don’t know what objects.  I write lulling myself, like an insane mother lulling a dead child.  (223, p. 209)

Hmmm.  I will say that this is not exactly how I feel about Wuthering Expectations, although there have been times – well.

The end of the novel returns to writing.  “If I man only writes well when drunk, I would tell him: Get drunk” (274, p. 268), even at the price of liver disease – “the poems you write live forever.”  The Pickwick Papers and jolly, amiable Mr. Pickwick are suggested as models.  Literature is “the goal to which every human effort ought to strive” – every human effort!   “The novelist is all of us.”  In the last line, Soares writes like a cat – “I play with everything I could have said” (276, p. 270)

Now that in fact does exactly describe Wuthering Expectations.

I’m almost convinced that I’m never awake. - dreaming, screaming, nausea, and other signs of disquiet

What I would like to do is work through an interpretation of The Book of Disquiet.  What I am likely to do is string together a bunch of curious and odd quotations from the book and sprinkle them with light commentary.

Bernardo Soares is assistant bookkeeper at a shipping company and has been for a long time, almost timelessly.  His desk is a “bulwark against life” (58, p. 52).  For Soares, “against” is a good thing:  “Life disgusts me, like a useless medicine”  962, p. 55).  Soares eats every dinner at the same café, lives in the same apartment, and wanders the same Lisbon streets.  Although he contributes poems or other writings to avant garde magazines, he has no friends (or: Because he contributes etc.).  He has no family.  His father committed suicide when Bernardo was three (citation, please! – where is this passage?).

One direction – I am interrupting myself –  that might be fruitful would be to piece together the scattered reference Soares makes to his family and childhood and see how they relate to his existential crisis.  Say Soares is erecting a defense against the attraction of his father’s suicide.

Soares’s basic crisis is one of meaning and identity.  He not only assumes that his life is meaningless, but he is not entirely clear that he is living at all:

I’m almost convinced that I’m never awake.  I don’t know if I’m not dreaming when I live, if I don’t live when I dream, or if my dreaming and living aren’t mixed, intersected things, out of which my conscious being is formed by interpenetration.  (160, p. 146)

He is not sure he exists, everything may be a dream, and what if he is a character in a novel.  Soares returns to the difference between sleeping and waking repeatedly.  Other repeated metaphors of his condition:  illness, nausea, ennui.  Human contact is destructive:  “I feel physical nausea toward the common man, which is, in any case, the only kind there is” (60, p. 53).

I am omitting all of the amusing and inventive metaphors that accompany all of Soares’s simpler declaration.  If I paid closer attention to them they would like complicate – perhaps upend – everything I have said.

The Modernist mentalité is often characterized as fragmented, alienated, and neurotic, conditions caused by, say, the increasing separation between home and work or the isolation of urban life or sexual repression.  I am usually not sure how these ideas fit any particular Modernist text, so it is amusing to see them all concentrated in this one character, both effects and causes.  Soares may be a mess, but he is a representative mess, even if I, an ordinary fellow, only catch glimpses of myself in his life:

An enormous disquiet made me tremble making even the slightest gestures,  I was afraid of going mad, not of madness itself, but going mad.  My body was a latent scream.  My heart beat as if it were sobbing.  (114, p. 102)

I will remind myself that this kind of description of an extreme state or crisis is typically surrounded by passages describing shops and storms and so on (roof tiles in the moonlight are "liquid with a blackened whiteness," 113, p. 101).

The odd thing is that Soares has created a meaning for himself, has found a mechanism to prop himself up.  Perhaps this is obvious from the concept of the plotless fictional journal.  Soares works, eats, sleeps, dreams – and writes.  He writes this book.

So that will be Part IV of Disquiet week, tomorrow.  Friday is a holiday for me.

My implicit empire is going to be invaded by barbarians - cataloging The Book of Disquiet

The Book of Disquiet could use – I could use – an index.  If I were to do something more thoughtful with the book, my first step would be to make my own, to create a typology for the entries.

There are, for example, the thunderstorm passages:

New light of a rapid yellow shrouds the mute blackness, but now there was a possible breath before the fist of tremulous sound quickly echoed from the other point; like an angry farewell, the thunder began not to be here…   A sudden amazing light splinters. […]  Everything froze where it stood.  Hearts stopped for a moment.  They are all very sensitive.  The silence is frightening, as if death itself were present.  The sound of the rain growing stronger is a relief, like the tears of the everything.  It’s like lead.  (33, pp. 29-30)

The storms recur, and are also used metaphorically.  I detect the hand of the poet in this passage.  Soares, and Pessoa, are especially good with colors, with light.  That is another category:  descriptions of Lisbon, of people, streets, sunsets, the river.  Sometimes descriptive passages lead Soares in philosophical directions, and other times the passages stand on their own.

The assistant bookkeeper writes well about office life, bosses, co-workers, so that’s another category:

I don’t know why – I suddenly realize it – I’m alone in the office.  Just now I sensed it vaguely.  There was in some aspect of my awareness of myself an expansion of relief, a deeper breathing with other lungs.  (137, p. 123)

Soares riffs on the pleasures of being the only person at work, but soon enough footsteps approach and Soares’s “implicit empire is going to be invaded by barbarians.”

Sleep and dreams.  Childhood and memory.  Reading, writing.  A long section about love comes towards the end.  Whether the love is directed at an actual or imaginary person is a matter of interpretation*, but “I” switches to “we” for long stretches (The Book of Disquiet uses the word “I” more than any text I have read recently aside from The Collected Wuthering Expectations).

Some passages are directly philosophical, working on fundamental questions of existence and knowledge.  Why do I exist, how am I different than other people, how do they see the world – big questions.  Some are metaphorical, moving from prose to prose poem, like 248, the “Funeral March for King Ludwig II of Bavaria,” which begins “Today, more slowly than ever, Death came to my doorstep to sell things” and ends “Flowers of the abyss, black roses, moonlight-colored carnations, poppies of a red that has light” (pp. 237 & 241)

Many passages contain aphoristic ideas that are ready, or nearly so, to be pulled from context.  I am terrible at remembering or even identifying these lines.  Levi Stahl has done better, featuring a couple of good paradoxes of perfection:

We worship perfection because we can't have it; if we had it, we would reject it.  Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.

I should have used this one last week:

Reading the classics, which do not talk about sunsets, has made many sunsets, in all their colors, intelligible to me.  (6, p. 8)

One could read The Book of Disquiet just for its well-phrased wisdom or anti-wisdom, for its wry understanding of human nature, without ever worrying so much about the puzzling fellow who is supposedly writing the whole thing.  That line about classics and sunsets makes Soares sound quite a bit sweeter than he really is.  I guess I am more interested in him than in his wisdom, so that is where I will go next.

* "My horror of real women endowed with a sex is the road that led me to find you" (199, p. 186). I have my guess.

Everything around me is evaporating - beginning the rambling, disconnected Book of Disquiet

The Book of Disquiet begins with instructions:  how to organize The Book of Disquiet.  Instructions to an editor, presumably, not the reader:

The final organization of The Book of Disquiet should be based on a most rigid selection of the passages that exist in various forms, adapting the oldest, which do not contain Bernardo Soares’s psychology, as that true psychology is now pouring out.  Aside from that, a general revision of the style will have to be made, taking care that it not lose, in its intimacy, the rambling manner and the disconnected logic that characterizes it. (Entry 1, p. 3)

A strange way to begin any book, since the bound text I have been reading has already been organized, in this case into 276 numbered entries or passages, some just a line or two, some several pages long.   An Appendix keys the numbers to a different text, the 1982 Portuguese edition of the book which has at least 520 entries, and is thus less rigidly selected.

Your version of The Book of Disquiet, if it is not the 1991 Alfred Mac Adam translation (or, actually, the 1998 Exact Change edition), likely begins differently, its contents selected by differently rigid principles.

Who is supposed to adapt older passages?  Who is supposed to revise the style?  This note is actually from Pessoa to himself.  At the end of his life, he was preparing – or planning to prepare – a number of books for publication, including this one.  Who knows what decisions he might have made.

Or I could assume that even the first paragraph is part of the fiction of The Book of Disquiet, that despite the mention of Bernardo Soares it is in fact (in fictional fact) written by Soares, that it is a note from Soares to himself about how to organize his “real” journal, which then doubles as a real note by the real Pessoa about this novel he wrote, a novel in the form of a fictional journal.

For the next few days, I believe I will simply call this book a novel and its narrator a character.  The novel is a character study, without ordinary plot or story, arranged just as that first paragraph describes, not without logic but with disconnected logic.  The character, Soares, is “an assistant bookkeeper in the city of Lisbon” who does little but work, eat in the same café, wander the city, sleep, and write this journal. – “[t]hese pages are the scribbles of my intellectual unawareness of myself” (177, p. 158).  He is suffering from some sort of crisis of identity, but if the crisis is permanent is it still a crisis or rather a condition of existence?

A question of interpretation:  is Soares an extreme case who highlights some important psychological feature of the modern personality, or is he an ordinary or representative man who expresses himself with unusual force:

Everything around me is evaporating.  My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality – it’s all evaporating.  I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else.  What I’m attending here is a show with another set.  And the show I’m attending is myself.  (12, p. 15)

Or Soares is nuts and it’s all a bunch of hooey.  I do not plan to follow that path, although it has the advantage of clear and accurate signage.  Instead, I will spend a few days making notes on Pessoa’s oddly organized, oddly argued, oddly compelling Book of Disquiet.

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen: Our attention to the world is the observance they claim, or Writing insists on solitudes and deserts

Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen is a poet of the sea, but which sea?  She is a dedicated Hellenist, and a characteristic poetic effect is a blurring of the difference between Portugal’s ocean and Greece’s Mediterranean.  When Sophia, a dedicated Catholic, discovers the gods in the landscape, which gods does she mean?

She shares her interest in Greece and its gods with an earlier Portuguese poet, an imaginary one, the sad Epicurean Ricardo Reis.  Reis insisted that he was a true pagan, and that his encounter with the shepherd poet Alberto Caeiro showed him how to turn his beliefs into poetry.  Reis perhaps taught Sophia something similar:

Homage to Ricardo Reis III

The gods are absent yet they preside.
    We inhabit this
    Ambiguous transparency.

Their thought emerges when everything
    Suddenly becomes
    Solemnly exact.

Their gaze guides ours:
    Our attention to the world
    Is the observance they claim.

I cannot tell if Sophia is speaking to Reis or as Reis.  The poem is meaningful either way; the poets share their purpose, even if the absent gods are less metaphorical for Reis than for Sophia.

Our world is transparent yet ambiguous - an obscure enough adjective.  The transparent becomes visible, the ambiguous fixed, when we direct attention to the things of the world, to their exactness.  Or the confused invisibility then becomes “exact” as the result of our attention.  “Lord, free us from the dangerous game of transparency” she writes in “On Transparency.”  Sophia is positing a corollary to Heisenberg’s much-abused Uncertainty Principle: we can observe either the position or momentum of a particle with precision, but not both; but without “attention to the world” we know nothing at all.  The poet is the operator of the electron microscope.  Like Coral the cat, the poet asks each thing its name.

Lest Sophia de Mello Breyner seem too mystical,  the editor of the Marine Rose collection sets beside the pair (only two, unfortunately) of Homage to Ricardo Reis poems an alternative description of the poet’s vocation.  What can Sophia share with Lord Byron, a writer of satire and long narrative poems about pirates and lady-killers?  The title is the first clue:

Writing

In Palazzo Mocenigo where he had lived alone
Lord Byron used every grand room
To watch solitude mirror by mirror
And the beauty of doors no one passed through

He heard the marine murmurs of silence
The lost echoes of steps in far corridors
He loved the smooth shine on polished floors
Shadows unrolling under high ceilings
And though he sat in just one chair
Was glad to see the other chairs were empty

The empty chairs imply full ones, and in fact Byron’s life in Venice at this time was manically social:

By the end of the year 1818, in which he had begun his greatest poem, Don Juan, he was to be discovered morosely climbing the balcony of an 18-year-old Italian heiress at midnight.  He afterwards told Medwin that he was indifferent to the outcome of the affair, and did not care whether the police officer had come to have him shot or married. (Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit, 420)

Sophia is interested in the first part of that passage, the writing, amidst chaos, of the great poem, as her poem concludes:

Of course no one needs so much space to live
But writing insists on solitudes and deserts
Things to look at as if seeing something else

We can imagine him seated at his table
Imagine the full long throat
The open white shirt
The white paper the spidery writing
And the light of a candle – as in certain paintings –
Focussing all attention

Byron, too, if guided by the gaze of the gods and giving them the observance they claim.  He is a poet.

Translations are again from Ruth Fairlight's Marine Rose.

Was it worth the effort? - closing with Pessoa's Message

Readers curious about Fernando Pessoa, those who plan to read The Book of Disquiet in the near future, for example, but who have been impatient with all of his poetry or my prose will find Carmela Ciararu’s 4,770 words worthwhile.  That appears to be a chapter from her recent book on pseudonyms.

I think I’ll end this run at Pessoa with a stumper, the only book of Portuguese poems from Pessoa’s lifetime, the 1934 Message.  Edwin Honig and Susan Brown include the entire thing, which only covers 23 pages, in the City Lights Poems of Fernando Pessoa. Plus six pages of notes.  It is the only work of Pessoa’s I have seen that, for a non-Portuguese reader, absolutely demands notes, as Pessoa works his way, stanza by stanza, through the succession of Portuguese kings and explorers.

Although, as I leaf through the poem, it looks less obscure.  Are young’uns in American schools still taught about the Portuguese explorers?  We were back in the old days.  And then all of the stuff about King Sebastian – that’s the Battle of the Three Kings!  And the sea monster is from The Lusiads.  The entire poem is a cryptic Modernist compression of The Lusiads.  Still, some obscurity:

First Part:  Coat of Arms
II.  The Castles
Seventh (II):  Philippa of Lancaster

What enigma was borne in your womb
Which bore only geniuses?
What archangel came on a day
To guard your maternal dreams?

Turn your somber visage toward us,
Princess of the Holy Grail,
Mortal womb of Empire,
Godmother of Portugal!

To the notes:  1359-1415, English wife of King João I (ruled 1385-1433, author of The Book of Hunting), six surviving children “were named The Illustrious Generation by Camões.”  I guess this is helpful.

King Sebastian, mentioned above, was killed in battle in Morocco but subsequently became a Portuguese King Arthur figure, a hero who would come to Portugal’s aid in dark times.  A cult or myth of Sebastianism recurs during difficult periods of Portuguese history, sometimes as political metaphor, and sometimes as something more mystical, which is what gets Pessoa’s attention.  Pessoa, who had a longtime interest in esoterica, climaxes the poem with a mishmash of messianic Sebastianism and Rosicrucian symbols (“On the dead and fateful Cross, \ The Rose of the Hidden One”) and the visions of the Portuguese mystic António Vieira.  Some of Vieira has only recently been brought into English, in a book tantalizingly entitled Saint Anthony’s Sermon to the Fish and Other Texts.

In summary, no, I do not know what I am talking about.

In the middle of all of this sidewise patriotism and mystification is something else entirely:

Portuguese Sea

O sea of salt, how much of all your salt
Contains the tears of Portugal?
So we might sail, how many mothers wept,
How many sons have prayed in vain!
How many girls betrothed remained unwed
That we might possess you, Sea!

Was it worth the effort? Anything’s worth it
If the soul’s not petty.
If you’d sail beyond the Cape
Sail you must past cares, past grief.
God gave perils to the sea and sheer depth,
But mirrored heaven there.

I am tempted by an allegorical reading of the poem, one more personal to Pessoa than Portuguese seafaring, but I will instead abandon my own navigation of Pessoa here.  Until the end of March at least – The Book of Disquiet!

Thank God I cannot know What inside me is going on! - Pessoa the poet

If I’m then told that it’s absurd to speak of someone who never existed, I reply that neither do I have proof that Lisbon ever existed or that I who write exist, or that anything does, whatever it is.

Just to remind myself what I am up against with Fernando Pessoa.  This line is from one of a number of introductions to his Collected Works or Selected Poems that Pessoa wrote, books that never existed during Pessoa’s life, not that I have proof either way.  Always Astonished: Selected Prose, tr. Edwin Honig, p. 14, that’s where I found that bit of epistemological skepticism.

The imaginary Pessoa is impossible to separate from the actual Pessoa.  The only reason I know that such a creature should be considered is that Campos and Reis discuss Pessoa, and mention that he, like them, changed poetic directions when he by chance met the shepherd poet Alberto Caeiro and heard him recite his poems.  Caeiro, Campos, and Reis are imaginary, so I am taking the Pessoa who lives in their world as similarly situated.  But of course the poems of Caeiro and his disciples exist in my world (I have read them, or I believe I have), so the fact that poems attributed to Fernando Pessoa also exist tells me nothing about which Pessoa, the real one or the otherly real one, wrote them.

Half the fun of messing around with Pessoa is writing nonsense like this.

The other half is reading his poems.  I think this one, from November 1914, should be taken as a product of Pessoa’s encounter with Caeiro, but it could just as well be the “real” Pessoa writing about his creation of the other poets:

The wind is blowing too hard
For me to be able to rest.
I sense there’s something in me
That’s coming to an end.

Perhaps this thing in my soul
That thinks life is real…
Perhaps this thing that’s calm
And makes my soul feel…

A hard wind is blowing.
I’m afraid of thinking.
If I let my mind go,
I’ll heighten my mystery.

Wind that passes and forgets,
Dust that rises and falls…
Thank God I cannot know
What inside me is going on! (Zenith)

The ellipses are Pessoa's. Feeling against thinking, internal versus external – these are common Pessoan concerns.  Campos feels, Reis thinks, Caeiro is, or so he says.  The wind that blows through this poem is some expression of psychological unease, one that the poet himself does not understand.

The last lines suggest that he prefers not to understand, which suggests to me that he knows more than he is revealing in the poem.  And that is what the heteronyms are for, to allow Pessoa to externalize his internal mysteries, to give him some distance from himself.  I guess.

The wind is never stilled.  It returns in later Pessoa poems. It is more frightening in this one from 1932, a sign of something dangerous:

The wind in the darkness howls,
Its sound reaching even farther.
The substance of my thought
Is that it cannot cease.

It seems the soul has a darkness
In which blows ever harder
A madness that derives
From wanting to understand.

The wind in the darkness rages,
Unable to free itself.
I’m a prisoner to my thought
As the wind is a prisoner to air. (Zenith)

I overemphasize the playfulness of Pessoa, but his self-fragmentation has a bleaker side.  The heteronyms can look like a defense against – I do not know what.

I tell with my thought - sad, cold Ricardo Reis

Ricardo Reis is the narrowest, most theoretical of Pessoa’s heteronyms.  His thinking is pinched; his poems are repetitive.  Not only does he only have a few themes or ideas to work with, he could go on at length about why he should be as narrow as he is.  “The colder the poetry, the truer it is,” he told Álvaro de Campos (H&B, Poems, p. 126).  Roughly speaking, Reis is a gloomy intellectual pagan, Epicurean and neoclassicist who in most of his poems imitates Horace’s odes.  He is the kind of guy who talks a lot about hedonism and freedom but never seems to have any fun himself.

I find Reis minor compared to the expansive Campos or the narrow but deeper Caeiro.  My judgment is conventional.  All three Pessoa collections I have read give the least space to Reis.  Two caveats, though.  First, perhaps because of his thinness, because he is so easy to define along certain dimensions but otherwise shadowy, later writers have made all kinds of curious uses of him.  I should read José Saramago’s 1986 novel The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, shouldn’t I?  And at least one major Portuguese poet, Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, has clearly gotten far more out of Reis than I can see.  I have just begun to read her – perhaps she will help me read Reis differently.

The second caveat is that minor poets write good poems.  Pessoa, as Reis, wrote many.

Lips red from wine,
White foreheads under roses,
Naked white forearms
Lying on the table:

May this be the picture
Wherein speechless, Lydia,
We’ll forever be inscribed
In the minds of the gods.

Rather than this life
As earthly men live it,
Full of the black dust
They raise from the roads.

The gods, by their example,
Help only those
Who seek to go nowhere
But in the river of things. (Zenith)

The last few lines of this 1915 poem reveal the influence of Alberto Caeiro, who helped Reis channel his paganism into poetry.  The first verse summarizes the paradox of Reis.  The scene at first sounds sensual, even lush, but is revealed to be frozen, lifeless.  Campos, an “earthly man,” would not be bothered by some black dust on his forehead.  Reis always uses his poems for abstract, ideal purposes.

Some of them are little more than statements of purpose or verse manifestos, like this early one, presumably used by Pessoa to clarify his concept of Reis:

Others narrate with lyres or harps
  I tell with my thought.
For he finds nothing, who through music
  Finds only what he feels.
Words weigh more which, carefully measured,
  Say that the world exists. (Zenith)

Many people would see this as an argument against poetry, however much Reis insists on the importance of form.  I am more curious about the early use of “nothing,” a favorite concept (“nowhere” in the first poem) of Reis:

Nothing comes of nothing.  We are nothing.
Briefly in sun, in air, we postpone
The unbreathable darkness that weighs us down
And humble earth imposes,
Delayed corpses that breed.
[snip]
We’re stories telling stories, nothing. (Honig and Brown)

“Delayed corpses that breed” is the sort of line that makes me laugh, not cry or sigh or whatever I am supposed to feel, or since this is Reis, think.  I laugh with the vivacious Campos.

The Zenith book has minimal overlap with Honig and Brown.  Credit to the translators – in both books, Reis sounds like Reis.

Real and metaphysical gibberish in the age of the rubber stamp - Pessoa's great "Maritime Ode"

“Tobacco Shop,” from 1928, is an example of mature Campos, or mature Pessoa.  Post-Boom Pessoa.  The Boom was the invention, in 1914, of Alberto Caeiro and the writing of the poems The Keeper of Sheep, and the creation of the Campos and Reis heteronyms and the accompanying poems, especially two long Whitman-inspired poems by Campos, “Maritime Ode” and “Salutation to Walt Whitman.”

Along with the Caeiro poems, Pessoa’s blending of Whitman into his own thought is his most impressive achievement.  By impressive, I mean ambitious, or of large scope.  Pessoa wrote plenty of interesting short poems, and another impressive long one before he died.  I have barely brushed against “Maritime Ode,” and do not plan to interpret it today, so much as to poke at it.

Campos is “Alone, on the deserted dock,” looking “out toward Indefinitude” (?), watching a little steamer approach.  “Maritime Ode” is explicitly a descendant of Whitman’s great seashore poems.  Pessoa has made Campos a naval engineer by trade, perhaps only because he wanted the writer of this poem to have a direct connection with seafaring.  He asks “all you seafaring things” to

Give me metaphors, images, literature,
Because in actual fact, seriously, literally,
My sensations are a ship with its keel in the wind,
My imagination a half-sunken anchor,
My anxiety a broken oar,
And the weave of my nerves a net to dry on the beach.

“[I]n me a flywheel starts spinning lightly,” and the poet launches into an elaborate nautical visionary fantasy, much of which involves pirates (“The Pirate Chief!  King of the pirates! \ I pillage, I kill, I tear, I cut everything up!”).  Some of this is pretty ridiculous, but the violence and crime becomes more cruel and less cartoonish, until the poet makes a surprising masochistic flip and becomes the willing victim of the violence of the pirates.  “Subdue me like a dog you kick to death!” etc. etc.  It goes on for a while.  I cannot remember a Whitman poem that works itself into such a frenzy, that shrieks like “Maritime Ode.”

The intensity and pain are, fortunately, unsustainable; the flywheel slows, and Campos drops out of the vision:

Ah, how could I have thought and dreamt of such things?
How removed I am now from what I was a few minutes ago!
The hysteria of one’s sensations – first one thing, then the opposite!

The poem continues placidly, even gently, with a visit to a childhood aunt, some marveling at naval machinery and shipping.  This is “the age of the rubber stamp,” which does not sound so poetic, but Campos insists, with Whitman’s example behind him, that “Poetry hasn’t lost out a bit!”  The poet ends the poem still open to all sensations: “God knows what emotion” might be inspired by a “slow-moving crane” or the glitter of sunlight on the Lisbon buildings.

I have not even gotten to the “real and metaphysical gibberish” – now this is the poet for me! – of “Salutation to Walt Whitman,” which is punchier line for line – “Maritime Ode” is 34 pages in the Honig and Brown collection, “Salutation” nine pages, “Tobacco Shop” six.  Richard Zenith’s book omits both “Maritime Ode” and “Salutation to Walt Whitman,” possibly because they are ably translated elsewhere.  The two collections work well together.  Taking a run at Pessoa without sampling “Maritime Ode” would be a shame.

Look, there’s no metaphysics on earth but chocolates (but not for nonmetaphysical Stevens) - "Tobacco Shop" by Álvaro de Campos

I’m going to wander through a long Pessoa poem, “Tobacco Shop” (1928), written under the guise of Álvaro de Campos.  The translation is Honig and Brown’s, from the City Lights Poems of Fernando Pessoa.  Richard Zenith’s version is just as good.

“Tobacco Shop” begins with a typical paradox of Pessoan identity:

I’m nothing.
I’ll always be nothing.
I can’t even wish to be something.
Aside from that, I’ve got all the world’s dreams inside me.

Campos is sitting across the street from a tobacco shop, which is symbolically serving as “reality,” or an anchor to the real, while the poet has some sort of epistemological crisis.  Campos was a naval engineer by profession, so I should artfully scatter metaphors like “anchor” throughout my post.

Today I’m mixed up, like someone who thought something and grasped it, then lost it.
Today I’m torn between the allegiance I owe
Something real outside me – the Tobacco Shop across the street,
And something real inside me – the feeling that it’s all a dream.

If the long, prosy lines remind you of Walt Whitman: yes, correct.

The poet has lost confidence in himself, in his art.  “I’ve secretly thought up more philosophies than Kant ever wrote down,” but to what purpose? “[W]e wake and the world is opaque.”

I take the poem as a train of thought (cross out “train,” insert, um, “steamboat”) which is intermittently interrupted by an ordinary event on the street, like a girl eating a chocolate: “Look, there’s no metaphysics on earth but chocolates.”  For some reason, though, Campos finds even the philosophy of chocolates unsatisfying, failing to provide reassurance.  He will die, as will his poems, and even his language, and so on to, in an adolescent touch, the entropic heat death of the universe.

At this point:

a man’s gone into the Tobacco Shop (to buy tobacco?)
And the plausible reality of it all suddenly hits me.
I’m getting up, full of energy, convinced, human,
And about to try writing these lines, which say the opposite.

Campos, of all the Pessoan poets, is the funniest, or at least the one most evidently amused by his own contradictions.

The poet has not quite left his reverie, narcotized by his own cigarettes (“As long as fate permits, I’ll go on smoking”).  But he is almost ready to return to ordinary concerns.  The man he saw before leaves the shop:

Ah, I know him; it’s nonmetaphysical Stevens.
(The Tobacco Shop Owner comes back to the door.)
As if by divine instinct, Stevens turns around and sees me.
He waves me a hello, I shout back Hello Stevens! and the universe
Reorganizes itself for me, without hopes or ideals, and the Tobacco Shop Owner smiles.

And that’s the end of “Tobacco Shop.”

I find Campos to be the “biggest” of Pessoa’s personae, the one with the most energy, the one who, like Whitman, is unafraid of contradiction.  He is a true follower of Alberto Caeiro (“I went off to the country with great plans \ But found only grass and trees there”), allowing things to be themselves, but also a dreamer, imaging things to be other than what they are, at least until nonmetaphysical Stevens brings him back to earth (strike that – drags him back to shore).

I believe in their infinite number - or Pessoa's fun with heteronyms

The two Pessoa collections I have been thumbing through (Zenith, Honing & Brown) both divide Pessoa’s poems by heteronym; the old and excellent Peter Rickard translation does the same thing.  Alberto Caeiro’s poems always comes first.  Álvaro de Campos always gets the most pages; Ricardo Reis the least.  A highly recommended exception is the Honig and Brown book that assembles Caeiro’s The Keeper of Sheep into a single, separate book.

Even with the Caeiro-only book – no, moreso – the emphasis of the editors is on the character, on the imagined poet.  Pessoa-himself fades.  Caeiro brightens.  This is why I like the Caeiro-only book: Pessoa’s fiction is so convincing.  These are just the poems the semi-naïve non-shepherd genius poet would have written.  No wonder Reis and Pessoa and Campos were so impressed.

Both Zenith and Honig & Brown preface each heteronym’s section with explanatory material about the poet.  Zenith writes his own summary, while Honig & Brown go to the author himself (authors themselves).  Pessoa says Ricardo Reis “was born inside my soul on January 29, 1914, around 11 o’clock at night.”  An invented brother describes Reis’s philosophy as “sad Epicureanism.”  Then Reis describes his own aesthetic  and spiritual beliefs: “The colder the poetry, the truer it is”; “I believe in the existence of the gods; I believe in their infinite number, in the possibility of man to ascend to divinity.”  All of this is from Poems of Fernando Pessoa, Honig and Brown, pp. 125-6.  Edwin Honig’s selection of Pessoa’s prose, Always Astonished (1988), has more more more of this stuff.

All of this phony biography and positioning and commentary comes before the poems themselves.  The editors seem to think it is important to know beforehand.  This is an amusing challenge to readers who dismiss any interest in the biography of the author, and a different challenge, also amusing, to readers who demand a biographical capsule before starting any new author.  Here is the biography and more, but all invented.  Or ignore the biography, and miss much of the intent and inventiveness of the actual author.

Well, in reality, we can read in multiple ways, yes?  The imagined author, the real author hidden by the imagined, the text as such.  Pessoa gives the reader more to play with, not less.

The great question is what creative problem the heteronyms solved for Pessoa.  The primary problem must have been idiosyncratic, a search for a means of expression that could contain his ideas.  But I think there was another purpose.  Pessoa was, like many of his conceptual peers, obsessed with artistic “movements,” Symbolism and Futurism and Cubism, that sort of thing.  All of these were imports into Portugal. 

The cluster of fictional poets allowed Pessoa to immediately create his own Modernist Portuguese movement.  One poet becomes four; the surviving poets (Caeiro unfortunately died in 1915, soon after writing the Keeper of Sheep poems) could then behave like members of a movement, promoting or arguing with each other.  I do not believe that Pessoa ever expelled any of his creations from the movement which would have been a good joke, especially if the poet he expelled had been Fernando Pessoa.

The movement, as such, is Sensationism, which I will summarize with these lines of Caeiro’s:

To think a flower is to see it and smell it
And to eat a fruit is to taste its meaning. (IX, H&B, 17)

and then with any luck I will never mention Sensationism again.  I am not so interested in “movements” or schools, but I am not a conceptual artist.

Next week, poems, just poems.

Conceptual Pessoa - no need to read him; just read about him

Everyone who writes about Fernando Pessoa spends too much time describing the heteronyms, his stable of invented poets who wrote real poems.  Critics and translators have trouble moving from the concept of Pessoa’s poetry to the poems themselves.  The English-language collections I have been reading include substantial supplementary prose, often by Pessoa (or Reis, or Campos), explaining or mystifying the different characters.   I include myself – see today, see yesterday, see, I would guess, tomorrow.  When, last spring, I spent several days writing about the poems of Alberto Caeiro while pretending that I did not know that he was an invention of Pessoa’s, I was in part trying to move away from the heteronyms and spend some time with the poems as poetry.

Alternately, writers spend, if anything, too little time on the nature of Campos and Reis and the dozens of other Pessoa names.  Readers skeptical of conceptual innovations might ask if there is any need to read any of the actual poems.  The concept of the poet-turned-dramatist, who creates a little universe of poets who know and write about each other, and who writes poems in their voices or from their aesthetic stance – is this idea not entirely graspable from its description?  Does it matter at all, for the concept to be useful, if the poems are any good, or if they exist at all?

By which I mean: a budding conceptual poet (or painter, or composer) could very well read about what Pessoa did and extend the idea into his own work without knowing a thing about what Pessoa wrote.  Why not attribute paintings in different styles to different imaginary painters, each with their own biography and aesthetic stance, why not invent critics to misunderstand the paintings?

Creating the artworks, the real poems by imaginary poets, is actually a different idea than simply positing their existence.  If nothing else, it makes the joke funnier.  I am thinking of a conceptual artist like Tom Friedman – imagining a self-portrait carved out of a single aspirin is funny, but creating such an object is even funnier (search for “bust”).

Although the writing of the poems was important for Pessoa, it is not at all clear how much their publication mattered.  It is unfortunately even less clear for me as I read the English collections of his work, since the translators are often vague about the wheres and whens of publication.  Am I reading something that Pessoa published in one of the literary magazines he helped found himself, or in someone else’s magazine, or is this one of the texts from the huge volume of unpublished manuscripts Pessoa left behind?

The Book of Disquiet, I remind myself, was not published until 45 years after Pessoa’s death.  Pessoa did publish a substantial amount of magazine writing, criticism and essays and poems, but he only finished  four books, all of them more like chapbooks:  two little collections of English poems – Pessoa had written poetry in English since he was a child - Antinous and 35 Sonnets, both appearing in 1917, another English-language collection in 1920, and a peculiar nationalistic mini-epic, Message, from 1934, which was “awarded a prize by the Ministry of national Propaganda, under very special circumstances” (Honig & Brown quoting Pessoa, p. 222).  Pessoa planned to publish a larger collection of his poems, but died in 1935, age 47.  His bibliography now resembles that of his contemporary Franz Kafka, a mix of the published and unpublished, the complete and incomplete, the public and private.

At some point I should try to get to the poems, and ignore or at least suppress the cloud of text that surrounds them.

The poet is a faker \ Who’s so good at his act - a start on Pessoa

I have been reading Pessoa, and thinking, if that is not too strong a claim, about his poems and his project.  The examples I wrote about Monday and yesterday have certain Pessoan qualities to them.

Fernando Pessoa had been interested and had written in pseudonyms from an early age, but in 1914 he made or had a conceptual breakthrough, quickly writing a series of poems as if they were written by a fictional poet, a poet with his own biography and distinct philosophical and aesthetic ideas.  That poet was Alberto Caeiro, the naïve shepherd poet, the poems the bulk of The Keeper of Sheep.

At this point, Pessoa was not doing anything much different than writing in character, like Robert Browning writing dramatic monologues or a playwright creating a character.  The result was impressive – I think the poems that resulted are themselves extraordinary, certainly much more interesting than what I have read of Pessoa’s earlier poetry.

The next step, though, is the wild one.  Having summoned one poet, he quickly conjured a couple more, both of whom, in their fictional (but also real) writings claimed their Caeiro as life-changing, inspirational forebear.  The classicizing neo-pagan doctor Ricardo Reis was one poet; the ecstatic naval engineer Álvaro de Campos was another.  Pessoa wrote – and published – essays by each poet, discussing the influence of Caeiro on their work, and arguing with each other’s interpretation of their master.  At one point they even interview each other.  They both agree that Fernando Pessoa is a peculiar fellow who completely misunderstands Caeiro.

Autopsychography

The poet is a faker
Who’s so good at his act
He even fakes the pain
Of pain he feels in fact.

And those who read his words
Will feel in what he wrote
Neither of the pains he has
But just the one they don’t.

And so around its track
This thing called the heart winds,
A little clockwork train
To entertain our minds.

This is a Fernando Pessoa poem written in 1931, after Pessoa had been working on his heteronyms for fifteen years.  I like this Richard Zenith translation, and its forthright emphasis of the poem’s central paradox, better than its competition.*

“Fernando Pessoa” has at this point become another heteronym, another mask.  Attaching the name of Pessoa to a text simply means that the actual Pessoa is working with that particular character.  The real Pessoa, for example, actually wrote the poems of Alberto Caeiro.  The character Pessoa did not, and in fact is a disciple of Caeiro, just like Reis and Campos.  All three had their (fictional) lives changed by a lucky encounter with (fictional) Caeiro and his (real) unpublished poems, inspiring their own new and superior (real) poems.

If the poems were no good, none of this would matter much.  The most amazing feature of the conceit is that it resulted in great poems, and allowed the real Pessoa to be a great poet.  The second most amazing thing, to me, is that Pessoa was able to successfully create two quite different fictional great poets (Campos and Caeiro), one promising but self-limiting minor poet (Reis), and another messy, irritating, but occasionally brilliant one (Pessoa).

My plan is to keep writing about Pessoa until he exhausts me.

* Zenith’s version is on p. 247 of Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems (1998); an alternative on p. 167 of Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown’s Poems of Fernando Pessoa (1986 & 1998).  These are the two books of poems I will use as I mess around with Pessoa.

Read The Book of Disquiet - before you DIE!

Yesterday, after putting up my invitation to read The Book of Disquiet along with whatever group of sharp characters plans to join in with me, I discovered that the novel-like non-novel has been included in the last couple of editions of the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.  So I used this as a marketing hook in my Twitter promotional effort, under the untested assumption that some readers out there somewhere are neurotically working off of (surely not through) this list.

I think this was my favorite joke (de-Twittered just a bit):

Imagine the poor reader, trapped in his deathbed, who has read all 1,001 books except #PessoaDisquiet.  He feebly turns the pages of the Richard Zenith translation, but his eyesight and concentration are insufficient for the difficult concepts and miniscule type of Pessoa’s text.  His strength wanes; the book slips from his fingers; he feels the icy shadow of Death approach, knowing that he ends his life unloved, and badly read.  Just one book short of being well-read, actually.

Do not be that reader.

Perhaps others are not so amused by the title of that book as I am.  The official position of Wuthering Expectations is that there is no book that a generalized “you” must read before “you” die.  Specific “you”s will want to consult a religious authority within “your” faith for some important exceptions.  Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet will not be among them.  I can come up with a long list of shoulds, but no musts, and even the shoulds need to be preceded by ifs.  E.g.:  If you are at all interested in literature, you should get to know some of Shakespeare’s plays.

 Not that I am knocking the Must Read book as such.  It is a list among many lists, but a pretty good one.  The accompanying website has a nifty gadget to search the list by date, language, nationality, and so on.  I find sixteen books in Portuguese, the oldest being The Lusiads, The Crime of Father Amaro, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, and Dom Casmurro, outstanding choices.  Then a standard cluster of Portuguese and Brazilian Modernists:  Amado, Lispector, Guimăres Rosa, Saramago, and Lobo Antunes (plus Pessoa).  And then two novels by Paulo Coelho, about whom I will admit suspicion but plead ignorance.  I doubt that the typical purchaser of Before You Die is quite so fond of avant garde fragmentation and alienation and extremely long paragraphs as this list of authors would suggest, but this is a great list for me.

The Must… Die list also includes a number of oddities I never see anywhere else, which I wish someone else would read and tell me about.  Who is up for Emilio Salgari’s The Tigers of Mompracem (1900), the second of an eleven-volume series about the adventures of a Malaysian pirate?  See left, and do not miss this amazing page of Salgari’s Italian book covers, provided by his current English-language publisher.  I would also like to hear, from a reliable book blogger, something about Ivan Vazov’s 1888 Under the Yoke, the classic Bulgarian epic.

Why did I write this?  Oh yes, to encourage morbid neurotics who read in order to make checkmarks in spreadsheets to read The Book of Disquiet with me.  To encourage other people, too.

It is more difficult to be someone else in prose - the Book of Disquiet readalong.

I am thinking March, aiming at the last week of March, as a good time to write about The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa’s semi-fictional non-novel un-diary.  Whatever it is.  I invite anyone interested to join in however they like.

The Book of Disquiet is only a novel in the sense that we now stretch the word “novel” to cover unclassifiable fictional objects.  The book has no obvious story, no plot, or characters aside from the narrator, but is instead a series of observations, sketches, and aphorisms, the diary of a Lisbon bookkeeper, Bernardo Soares.  Pessoa wrote that Soares has Pessoa’s style, but was “distinct from me in ideas, feelings, modes of perception, and understanding.”*  So the book is a fictional exercise of some sort.

I am in large measure the very prose I write.  I punctuate myself, and, in the unchained distribution of images, I wear newspaper hats, the way children do when they play at being king; by making rhythm out of a series of words, I crown myself, the way mad people do, with dried flowers that remain alive in my dreams.  And above all, I am tranquil, like a sawdust-stuffed doll, which, having acquired awareness of itself, shakes its head from time to time so that the bell on its pointed hat plays something, life rung by the dead, a minimal warning by Destiny. (152-3, Alfred Mac Adam translation)

Please see this essay at Vapour Trails for more Disquiet.

The What-is-it problem is worse than it seems.  The Book of Disquiet is unfinished, perhaps never meant to be finished, and was unpublished until 1982, forty-seven years after Pessoa’s death.  The order of the elements of the book cannot be established with certainty.  The text is not stable.

The book’s English history is odd, too.  Four versions exist (Richard Zenith, Alfred Mac Adam, Margaret Jull Costa, Iain Watson) all of which were published in 1991.  That must have been handy for book reviewers.  The Zenith version is the longest and most complete, including fragments and appendices and so on.  I will be reading Alfred Mac Adam.  The thing I want to emphasize is  that these are not just different translations, but translations of different texts, different orderings and excerpts of the mass of material.

I see this as an opportunity for a group read, not an obstacle.  With many readers, it might be possible to see more than I can by myself.  The Book of Disquiet is a perfect candidate for many readings, and many kinds of reading.  Seraillon recently finished it, over the course, he says, of two months (about four chapters a day).  Another reader may want to guzzle Pessoa, or just read fragments, such as the samples of The Book of Disquiet found in Edwin Honig and Susan M. Brown’s Poems of Fernando Pessoa (1986) or Honig’s Always Astonished: Selected Prose (1988).

Pessoa wrote and even published one more ordinarily fictional piece of fiction, the 1922 story “The Anarchist Banker,” a thirty page short story of ideas that has characters and dialogue and even a story, the story of how the anarchist became a banker, and why the banker is still an anarchist.  Read that instead.  Or, like me, also.

OK, March.  The end of March.

A couple of other readalong opportunities will intersect with Wuthering Expectations:  Bolaño's The Savage Detectives (see Caravana de recuerdos and in lieu of a field guide) and Our Mutual Friend (see The Argumentative Old Git).  The former has more of a schedule, while the latter does not.  When I finish Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend, I will have read every Dickens novel.  How many pages into Little Dorrit was I, by the way, before I realized that “Dorrit” only had one “t”?  (Answer: 200).  What kind of an English name is that?

*  This quotation, and the post’s title, are from the fragment of Pessoa’s “Concerning the Work of Bernardo Soares” found on p. 209 of the Honig and Brown Poems of Fernando Pessoa.