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A personal approach to the work of Fernando Pessoa
by António Dinis Lopes
I don’t know how you approached the work of Fernando Pessoa (FP), but if I had to recommend it to someone then it should be done only with an introduction, contextualizing it. True, some poems survive a pure reading of them. By pure I mean that the reader was not exposed to any other by FP before or doesn’t know what’s behind them. But FP for me, in order to be fully enjoyable and for his texts to gain other dimensions, needs some blah-blah, blah.
The best blah-blah in English I came across so far is of a contemporary and actual editor, Richard Zenith. He had the pleasure of rummaging an almost mythical trunk full of FP’s writings on various qualities of stationary (which constitutes the majority of what he left at his death, having been published only lightly).
If I had to produce a not so specialized blah-blah, blah, I would probably point out his life route, from Lisboa to Durban, South Africa, the contact he had there with the English language and literature, and his coming back for good to Lisboa at the age of 17, where the major part of his work is written, and which town he barely left except on a few visits to family and to neighbouring towns such as Sintra (a poem is written celebrating it, for instance). He travelled – and enjoyed it the most, according to his own words – with his mind. He wrote about a boy, who was gathering postcards of the places he wanted to travel to, that that same boy was the real traveller, and would cease to be when he started the travel itself. It might be at the same time, if not only, an excuse for FP’s lack of wealth in order to travel, an excuse for being who he was, an averse to action sort of person – and his financial situation was never fine during all his life. (He would have been a tad rich if he had been published in life as he is nowadays).
Then I’d say that in Durban he already showed he was keen or inclined to write as if he was other. «Other» is a crucial word for him and for reading him. He played alone, developing his own social circle. That propensity certainly developed from the fact that he was an introvert person aided by a self-conscious lack of good looks, an apparently lacklustre human being. Does that fact help to develop the mind? I think it does. It’s almost as a natural strategy for balancing things: “You are the good-looking, and therefore your looks will bring you many social benefits, while you are the one who in order to succeed needs to think more and better.” Name three good-looking geniuses for instance. But I’m still not fully sure. It is just a subject that tends to come to mind from time to time when faced with more data that might feed it or shrink its head. FP was insecure in the physical presence of others; he can turn into a ravaging pirate and the ravaged girl simulatenously in his writings. His undefined or suppressed homosexuality; his so virginal sexual inexperience is the cherry on top of his cake.
And then I’d mention the heteronyms, which I think cannot be abridged without at least FP’s own accounts of them and their meetings, their relationships. Simply put, I’d say that Alberto Caeiro (inspired by Walt Whitman but with a Portuguese rural flavour) is the master, even though such heteronym appeared later than his disciples, as FP tells us on a letter to a friend. His most intriguing, intrigued and rebellious disciple is the naval engineer Álvaro de Campos (my favourite, if I had to choose). FP, also a disciple of his own heteronym Alberto Caeiro, is deemed as a poor character by Álvaro de Campos and it was even this heteronym that terminated the real life relationship with the only girlfriend FP had! Álvaro de Campos is then almost an alter-ego of FP, reflecting the views the writer has of himself. Finally and regarding Álvaro de Campos, this heteronym reminds me of FP's friend and artist Almada Negreiros. Ricardo Reis should be given not much importance but makes sense as an «other», as he is a formalist poet, a posing one, a Greek statue but without the split body, half in motion half in rest; he is not paradoxical, not human, not for me anyway.
I’d continue by saying that Bernardo Soares, whom FP called a semi-heteronym (probably because of his own fears of self-exposure), casts many a light on FP’s concept of himself and, of course, that of others, on The Book of Disquiet (which was never a book and never published, but, like the majority of his work, a bundle of notes… for he was «moving», for sure, in many directions at different times but with short intervals in between them, almost never ending a task before getting engaged in a new one).
As a later note, I’d add that some authors approach FP for his mystical side and writings, enquiries, astrological charts, even his automatic writing. They all tend to forget that FP himself later on dismissed that phase of his life as rubbish. And we all should have our freedom to make mistakes.
Maybe I’d then say that this is enough of blah-blah, and would recommend, based on my own taste, the reading of Álvaro de Campos’ text «Ultimatum», his poems «The Tobacconist» and «Maritime Ode», the whole poems of the master Alberto Caeiro («The Keeper of Sheep») and Bernardo Soares’ The Book of Disquiet. If after that my interlocutor would find FP to be uninteresting, then that would be none of my problem as I'd have given almost all I could about the author(s)(r)(s)(r)(s).
