‘Portugal’s four greatest poets from the twentieth century were Fernando Pessoa’, writes Richard Zenith. At first glance this seems absurd and confusing, but Pessoa’s work breaks the boundaries of identity and personhood as he adopts a plethora of personae and writes not only for himself but for hundreds of voices. A man whose very name means ‘person’, Pessoa is anything but. He is an enigma and a hazy shadow, a volcanic source of personae and identities, a man without a solid core.
Pessoa is known for what he called ‘heteronyms’: over 100 invented personae that Pessoa adopted in his many poetry and prose pieces. He was insistent that his heteronyms were different from mere pseudonyms, as they were completely separate from himself and his identity and beliefs. Instead, they had their own philosophies, political viewpoints, and styles of writing. Most of his heteronyms even knew each other: some inspired each other to write, others had heated debates and disagreements.
Pessoa said, ‘it has been my tendency to create around me a fictitious world, to surround myself with friends and acquaintances who never existed (I cannot be sure, of course, if they never existed, or if it is me who does not exist …)’. This tendency can be seen running throughout his whole life, beginning in childhood. After Pessoa’s death, Zenith discovered a large archive of letters from Pessoa to a wide circle of acquaintances. He was struck by the unconventionality of their exchanges, saying that the unconventionality ‘reached the supreme extent of their not even existing’. Every single letter had been written by young Pessoa to and from invented people. Pessoa tried to explain this impulse to create, suggesting that the identities derive from ‘an aspect of hysteria that exists within me’. In his writing, he calls himself a ‘nomadic wanderer through my consciousness’, saying that he ‘break[s] [his] soul into pieces and into different persons’.
Some heteronyms wrote many book-length works, such as the neo-paganist Antonio Mora; others, like his only female heteronym, nineteen-year-old, consumptive, hunchback Maria José, wrote very little. Maria herself only wrote one piece: a love letter to the handsome metalworker who passed her window every day. Most wrote in Portuguese, some wrote in English, and Jean Seul de Méluret wrote only in French, but all were offshoots of Pessoa himself: a playful way for him to acknowledge and embrace the unsteady nature of his own being and identity, a space for him to explore ideas while being free to contradict himself and roam in a world of paradoxes. Pessoa himself described having an instinctive hatred ‘for decisive acts, for definite thoughts’ and once wrote that a modern intellectual should be obligated to change opinions several times in one day: to be ‘a republican in the morning and a royalist at dusk’.
His three most prominent and well-known heteronyms were Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis. Caeiro was born in 1889 and died in 1915 of consumption. He was a medium height and pale man with blue eyes, who lived in a simple white house in the country. He was a philosophical man who had no profession or any sort of education and wrote free-verse poems asserting that things must be taken for what they are, without interpretation. Campos was a bisexual unemployed naval engineer born in 1890. Pessoa describes him as tall and slender a ‘vaguely Jewish-Portuguese type, hair therefore smooth and normally parted on the side, monocled.’ Determined to live life to the extreme, Campos’s writing is restless and powerful but also betrays a poignant sense of melancholy. Campos is plagued by the fact that life will never be enough, no matter how intensely it is lived. Pessoa mocked his ‘mania of supposing that things can be proven’. Finally, Reis was a trained medical doctor born in 1887 and living in Brazil. A fervent classicist, he wrote Horace-inspired odes prescribing a stoic acceptance of whatever the gods have given us. Both Reis and Campos acknowledged Caeiro as their ‘master’ (as did Pessoa himself). Reis had never written poetry until he met Caeiro when he was 25 and Campos had only written very little when he met Caeiro in 1914.
However, were these heteronyms projections for Pessoa to manipulate and play with, or did they themselves control him? Pessoa claimed to be nothing more in life than a ‘medium’ for his heteronyms for whom he served as ‘literary executor’. He said that he was ‘less real, less substantial, less personal, and easily influenced by them all’. Instead, he described himself as ‘the suburbs of a non-existent town, the long-winded commentary on a book never written’. Campos himself even once wrote that he didn’t believe Pessoa was real. One man who knew him perfectly describes this sense of unsubstantiality, saying, ‘Never when I bade him goodbye, did I dare to turn back and look at him; I was afraid I would see him vanish, dissolved air.’
Obsessed with the occult, Pessoa considered making his living as an astrologer and created horoscopes for many of his friends and lots of his heteronyms. Despite being a lifelong outsider and eccentric, he enjoyed meeting acquaintances in coffee-houses and restaurants to discuss philosophy, literature, religion, and politics. However, wanting to keep a tight control over social interactions, he rarely invited anyone to his apartment where he was rumoured to keep a trunk full of thousands of unpublished writings.
After Pessoa’s death in 1935, three hundred pages were discovered in an envelope and published as The Book of Disquiet. Pessoa called it his ‘factless autobiography’ and ‘lifeless history’ and it explores themes of alienation, mortality, and introspection. It is mostly written by Pessoa’s ‘semi-heteronym’ Bernardo Soares, who jokes, ‘I’m suffering from a headache and the universe’. An assistant bookkeeper who ‘seems always to be tired or sleepy’, Pessoa described Soares as himself without his ‘rationalism and emotions’.
Much like Pessoa himself, the contents and arrangements of The Book of Disquiet are unclear. Many editors have added material not found in the original envelope and disagree about what is really meant to be part of it. Similarly, the pages can appear in many different arrangements at the choice of the editor. However, no matter what order the pages appear in, there is a strange coherence to them, centring on the idea that nothing is as it seems. Zenith writes that ‘as we read the work, it almost seems that Fernando Pessoa, and even we ourselves, are variations of this invented self, …. express[ing] our unuttered … existential unsettledness, speaking not only to us but also for us.’
Despite dying relatively unknown and publishing only 44 poems in his lifetime, Pessoa is perhaps Portugal’s most influential writer with his innovative work helping to establish Modernism in Portugal. Years after his death, the music of what he called the ‘hidden orchestra of [his] soul’ still plays on.
Ciuraru, C. (2012) Nom De Plume: A (secret) history of pseudonyms. New York: Harper Perennial.
Zenith, R. (2023) Pessoa: A biography. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Tóibín, C. (2021) I haven’t been I, London Review of Books. Available at: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n16/colm-toibin/i-haven-t-been-i (Accessed: 25 October 2023).
