Soares had no inner life of his own, and the full-fledged heteronyms hardly had more. A novelist’s characters are often based on friends or family members, but all of Pessoa’s characters were carved out of his own soul – of what he really was (in the case of Soares) or of what he wanted to be (in the case of the early, adventurous Campos) – and they each received only a piece of him. When we read Soares or Campos, we get lost in their universes and forget about their author, but they are Pessoa, or parts of Pessoa, who made himself into nothing so that he could become everything, and everyone. Pessoa was the first one to forget Pessoa.
If Bernardo Soares does not measure up to the full Pessoa, neither are his reflections and reveries the sum total of The Book of Disquiet, to which he was after all a Johnny-come-lately. The book went through various permutations before the bookkeeper arrived with his well-wrought but emotionally direct style of prose, and even the word ‘disquiet’ changed meaning over time.
In its early days The Book of Disquiet, attributed to Pessoa himself, consisted largely of post-Symbolist texts cast in the rarefied register of ‘In the Forest of Estrangement’ but usually without the shimmery finish, and some of them weren’t finished at all. This did not necessarily make them less beautiful, but it was an understandable frustration for their author. ‘Fragments, fragments, fragments,’ Pessoa wrote to his friend Cortes-Rodrigues, because certain texts abounded in blank spaces for words or phrases or whole paragraphs to be inserted later (but they rarely were), while other ‘texts’ were no more than sketches or notations for prose pieces that never materialized. The Book of Disquiet always remained – as if this were a condition for its existence – a work that was still waiting to happen, that needed to be written in large part, rewritten in other parts, then articulated and fine-tuned, or was it time to rethink the whole project? Pessoa was never sure.
The initial idea was a book of texts with titles, for which he left various lists. Certain titles, such as ‘Dolorous Interlude’ and ‘Rainy Landscape’, became generic designations, applied to various texts that shared the announced theme or atmosphere but remained autonomous. Other titles, such as ‘Our Lady of Silence’, denoted ambitious works in progress, made up of passages written at different times and varying in length from a few scribbled sentences to several pages crammed with tiny letters. And there are titles for which no texts have been found, perhaps because they were never written. (Pessoa’s archives contain dozens of lists with titles for non-existent poems, stories, treatises and entire books. Had he even halfway realized all his literary projects, the tomes would fill up a respectable library. The Book of Disquiet, a non-book in the non-library, is emblematic of the capricious author’s difficulty.) These early texts attempted to elucidate a psychic state or mood via a deliberately archaic use of gothic and romantic themes. Lush descriptions of court life, of sexless women, of strange weather and unreal landscapes prevail. The underlying psyche belongs to Pessoa but is abstracted. The writing is impersonal and the narrative voice ethereal, with the things and the words that name things all seeming to hover in a yellowish space. The word ‘disquiet’ refers not so much to an existential trouble in man as to the restlessness and uncertainty everywhere present and now distilled in the rhetorical narrator. But other forms of disquiet start to impinge on the work, which takes unexpected turns.
Not so unexpected, perhaps, was the theoretical and pedagogical dimension that emerged here as it did almost everywhere in Pessoa’s œuvre. It was only natural, even inevitable, that the oneiric texts of Disquiet would lead to expository texts that set forth the why and how of dreams, with the four passages titled ‘The Art of Effective Dreaming’ constituting a veritable manual for dreamers at all levels, from beginner to advanced. ‘Sentimental Education’, in much the same way, serves as a kind of primer to accompany the many ‘Sensationist’ texts.
It was likewise in this didactic spirit, but with a rather bizarre result, that Pessoa wrote his ‘Advice to Unhappily Married Women’, in which he teaches dissatisfied wives how to cheat on their husbands by ‘imagining an orgasm with man A while copulating with man B’, a practice that yields best results ‘in the days immediately preceding menstruation’.
Pessoa’s sexual abstinence (it is probable, though not provable, that he died a virgin) was by his own account a conscious choice, which he apparently sought to justify in The Book of Disquiet, with passages insisting on the impossibility of possessing another body, on the superiority of love in two dimensions (enjoyed by couples that inhabit paintings, stained-glass windows and Chinese teacups), and on the virtues of renunciation and asceticism. The Book, indeed, is rife with religious vocabulary, although the mysticism preached by Pessoa hallowed no god, except perhaps himself (‘God is me,’ he concludes in ‘The Art of Effective Dreaming for Metaphysical Minds’).
But more than anything else, it was existential concerns – operating on both a general and personal level – that subverted the initial project of The Book of Disquiet. On a general level, since The Book’s author belonged ‘to a generation that inherited disbelief in the Christian faith and created in itself a disbelief in all other faiths’. And since ‘we were left, each man to himself, in the desolation of feeling ourselves live’, the generational sense of lostness quickly became a personal struggle for identity and meaning (Text 306). Pessoa’s inner life – registered in ‘Fragments of an Autobiography’, ‘Apocalyptic Feeling’ and similar texts, with and without titles – invaded the pages of what had begun as a very different kind of book. Pessoa realized that the project had slipped out of his hand (if in fact he’d ever firmly grasped it), for in yet another letter to Cortes-Rodrigues he wrote that The Book of Disquiet, ‘that pathological production’, was going ‘complexly and tortuously forward’, as if of its own accord.
And so Pessoa let the book go, scribbling B. of D. at the head of all sorts of texts, sometimes as an afterthought, or with a question mark indicating doubt. The Book of Disquiet– forever tentative, indefinite and in transition – is one of those rare works in which forme and fond perfectly reflect each other. Always with the intention of revising and assembling the variously handwritten and typed passages, but never with the courage or patience to take up the task, Pessoa kept adding material, and the parameters of the already unwieldy work kept expanding. Besides his post-Symbolist flights and diary-like musings, Pessoa included maxims, sociological observations, aesthetic credos, theological reflections and cultural analyses. He even put the B. of D. trademark on the copy of a letter to his mother (in Appendix II).
Though Pessoa hatched dozens of publication plans for his works, he saw only one real book, Mensagem (Message), make it into print, the year before he died. (He self-published several chap-books of his English poems.) Pessoa was so addicted to writing and scheming – and the schemes included unlikely business ventures as well as the publication of his œuvre– that he had no time or energy left over to get that œuvre into publishable shape. Or perhaps it was just too tedious to think about. Nothing better illustrates the problem than The Book of Disquiet, a micro-chaos within the larger chaos of Pessoa’s written universe. But that consummate disorder is what gives The Book its peculiar greatness. It is like a treasure chest of both polished and uncut gems, which can be arranged and rearranged in infinite combinations, thanks precisely to the lack of a pre-established order.
No other work of Pessoa interacted so intensely with the rest of his universe. If Bernardo Soares says that his heart ‘drains out… like a broken bucket’ (Text 154) or that his mental life is ‘a bucket that got knocked over’ (Text 442), Álvaro de Campos declares ‘My heart is a poured-out bucket’ (in ‘The Tobacco Shop’) and compares his thinking to ‘an overturned bucket’ (in a poem dated 16 August 1934). If Soares thinks that ‘Nothing is more oppressive than the affection of others’ (Text 348), a Ricardo Reis ode (dated 1 November 1930) maintains that ‘The same love by which we’re loved/Oppresses us with its wanting.’ And when the assistant bookkeeper longs
to ‘notice everything for the first time… as direct manifestations of Reality’, we can’t help but think of Alberto Caeiro, whose verses are a continual hymn to the direct, unmediated vision of things.
We can leaf through The Book of Disquiet as through a lifelong sketchbook revealing the artist in all his heteronymic variety. Or we may read it as a travel journal, a ‘book of random impressions’ (Text 442), Pessoa’s faithful companion throughout his literary odyssey that never left Lisbon. Or we may see it as the ‘factless autobiography’ (Text 12) of a man who dedicated his life to not living, who cultivated ‘hatred of action like a greenhouse flower’ (Text 103).
The Book of Disquiet, which took different forms, also knew different authors. As long as The Book was just one book, consisting of post-Symbolist texts with titles, the announced author was Fernando Pessoa, but when it mutated to accommodate diaristic passages, inevitably more intimate and revealing, Pessoa followed his usual custom of hiding behind other names, the first of which was Vicente Guedes. In fact Guedes was initially responsible only for the diary (or diaries) that pushed its (or their) way into The Book of Disquiet. The ‘autobiography of a man who never existed’ is how Pessoa, in a passage intended for a Preface, described Guedes’s ‘gentle book’, which is referred to in another passage as the Diary, as if this were its actual title. Pessoa, in his publication plans, began to cite Vicente Guedes as the fictional author of The Book of Disquiet, which suggests that it and the ‘gentle’ Diary were one and the same book. On the other hand, the archives contain a fragmentary passage from a ‘Diary of Vicente Guedes’, dated 22 August 1914, which pokes fun at a second-rate Portuguese writer and surely does not belong in Disquiet. Diaries usually have dates, but almost no dated material entered The Book of Disquiet until 1929, when Vicente Guedes had already been given his walking papers. Whatever intentions Pessoa may have one day had, the early Book of Disquiet never boiled down to a diary, though it did encompassa ‘Random Diary’ and a ‘Lucid Diary’ – or single entries from projected diaries with these names – as well as the a forecited ‘Fragments of an Autobiography’, all of which date (according to manuscript and stylistic evidence) from 1915 to 1920, when Guedes was active.
Vicente Guedes was one of Pessoa’s busiest and most versatile collaborators in the 1910 s. Besides his diary writings, Guedes translated, or was supposed to translate, plays and poems by the likes of Aeschylus, Shelley and Byron, as well as ‘A Very Original Dinner’, a mystery story penned by Alexander Search, the most prolific of the English-language heteronyms. Though he shirked his duties as a translator, Guedes ‘really’ wrote a few poems, a number of short stories and several mystical tales. In one of these tales, ‘The Ascetic’, the title character tells his interlocutor that paradises and nirvanas are ‘illusions inside other illusions. If you dream you’re dreaming, is the dream you dream less real than the dream you dream you’re dreaming?’ This sort of musing is vaguely reminiscent of Disquiet in its formative phase, which may be why Pessoa decided to entrust it to Guedes, whose wide-ranging literary talents made him a potentially excellent author-administrator of such a capacious work.
The manuscript identifying Vicente Guedes as the author of a Diary that was supposed to be part (or perhaps all) of the early Book of Disquiet also includes a passage titled ‘Games of Solitaire’ (Text 351), which evokes the evenings that the narrator spent as a child with his elderly aunts in a country house. The passage is preceded by this notation:
B. of D.
A section entitled: Games of Solitaire (include In the Forest of Estrangement?)
In its language and tone, ‘Forest of Estrangement’ has absolutely nothing in common with the passage about old aunts playing solitaire while their sleepy maid brews tea. Perhaps this was conceived as a mere port of entry to the section that would have the same name and whose ‘games of solitaire’ would be exercises in daydreamy prose such as ‘Estrangement’, written by Pessoa for the same reason we play cards: to pass the time. Whatever the case, The Book was in trouble. Pessoa didn’t know what to do with the early texts that wafted in the misty atmosphere of the strange forest, and perhaps he considered excluding them altogether. What place could they have in a diary? Or even next to a diary?
More than ten years later, Bernardo Soares would reformulate the games of solitaire (Text 12):
I make landscapes out of what I feel. I make holidays of my sensations… My elderly aunt would play solitaire throughout the endless evening. These confessions of what I feel are my solitaire. I don’t interpret them like those who read cards to tell the future. I don’t probe them, because in solitaire the cards don’t have any special significance.
In the same passage, Soares compares his mental and literary activity to another domestic pastime, crochet, as Álvaro de Campos also does in a poem dated 9 August 1934:
I also have my crochet.
It dates from when I began to think.
Stitch on stitch forming a whole without a whole…
A cloth, and I don’t know if it’s for a garment or for nothing.
A soul, and I don’t know if it’s for feeling or living.
What’s highly significant about the assistant bookkeeper’s crochet is that ‘between one and another plunge’ of the hooked needle, ‘all enchanted princes can stroll in their parks’. This observation would seem odd or just plain weird, were it not for the royal dreams and reveries that filled up many pages of Disquiet in its early days. In Soares, as we shall see, Pessoa managed to conciliate (though never to his full satisfaction) the sumptuous, imperial dreams of The Book’s first phase with the concerns of a modest, twentieth-century office clerk. Vicente Guedes, who was also an assistant bookkeeper, seems to have been groomed for the same conciliatory role, but in spite of his several mystical tales, Guedes was too coldly rational in his diary entries to be believable as a writer of wispy post-Symbolist texts, and Pessoa never directly named him as their author. But Guedes held the title of general author of The Book of Disquiet for at least five years and perhaps as long as ten, for whatever it’s worth, since the manuscript evidence suggests that most of the 1920s was (as indicated earlier) a fallow period for The Book.
It was probably in 1928 that Pessoa, now wearing the mask of Bernardo Soares, returned to The Book of Disquiet, which became a resolutely confirmed diary, as acutely personal as it was objective – as if the world around and inside the diarist were all the same film that he stared at intently, sometimes listened to, but never touched. Many of the passages were dated, though this practice was never systematic and seems to have been only gradually adopted. It’s curious that the first passage from this period with a date, 22 March 1929 (Text 19), is post-Symbolist in flavour, with drums, bugles and ‘princesses from other people’s dreams’ but with no mention of the assistant bookkeeper, whose fiction was perhaps still hazy and needed to be fleshed out. It was only in 1930 that Pessoa began to date a large number of the passages destined for The Book of Disquiet, which had finally found its street: the Rua dos Douradores, where Soares worked in an office and where he also lived, in a humble rented room, writing in his spare time. And so Art, notes Soares, resides ‘on the very same street as Life, but in a different place… Yes, for me the Rua dos Douradores contains the meaning of everything and the answer to all riddles, except for the riddle of why riddles exist, which can never be answered’ (Text 9).
We know almost nothing about Bernardo Soares before he moved to the Rua dos Douradores. His name heads a list of ten stories in one of Pessoa’s notebooks, where we also find a rather extensive publication programme for Pessoa’s œuvre, with Soares identified only as a short-story writer. The Book of Disquiet, listed in the same programme, isn’t attributed to any author. Had Vicente Guedes already been sacked? Perhaps not yet. But once Soares assumed The Book’s authorship, he also assumed, more or less, the old author’s biography. More accurately, Vicente Guedes, who died young (it was Pessoa who was to publish and present his manuscript to the public), was ap
parently reincarnated in Bernardo Soares, who had the very same profession, who also lived in a fourth-floor room in Lisbon’s Baixa district (only the name of the street changed), and who was also a highly motivated diarist. To judge by his elderly aunt who spent long evenings playing solitaire, Soares even inherited Guedes’s childhood.
Though not identical to Guedes, Soares came to replace him, and since Pessoa could move his pawns forwards and backwards, this replacement was able to have retroactive effect. The eleven excerpts from Disquiet published in magazines between 1929 and 1934 were naturally attributed to Bernardo Soares, but Pessoa also credited him (in a typed inventory of Soares’s literary production) with the only previously published excerpt, namely ‘Forest of Estrangement’, dating from long before Soares was ever conceived. In Pessoa’s notes and extensive correspondence from the 1930s, in which he discussed in detail the heteronymic enterprise, Guedes never merits the slightest reference, and the three Disquiet passages from the teens that mention him by name were left out of the large envelope in which Pessoa, some time before his death, gathered material for the book. That same envelope includes a typed ‘note’ (in Appendix III) explaining that the earlier passages would have to be revised to conform with the ‘true psychology’ of Bernardo Soares. It may be argued that since Pessoa never actually brought off this revision, the early passages retain Vicente Guedes’s style and tone – more analytical, less emotionally impressionable than Soares – and therefore his authorship. But this is to take the game even further than Pessoa did. What is actually happening? The narrator – whether his name is Guedes or Soares – ages as the creating and informing spirit of Pessoa ages, and so the voice naturally changes, but not as strikingly as the voice of Álvaro de Campos, whose short and melancholy poems of the 1930 s were vastly different from the loud ‘Sensationist’ odes of the 1910s.