“Pessoa” is the definitive and sublime life of a genius and his many alternate selves
By Richard Zenith (Liveright)
Does genius know itself? Adrienne Rich thought so. She held that Emily Dickinson chose seclusion not out of eccentricity, but as a practical measure: to fasten her concentration and keep distraction at bay.
Does genius fear itself?
Another figure stumbles into view now, in customary camouflage — dark suit, face obscured beneath owlish glasses and thick mustache — another virtuoso of the necessary economies that allow the imagination to flourish. It is Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet, critic, translator, mystic and giant of modernism.
He published a few books that went mostly unnoticed, but there were rumors of a trunk in his room stuffed with his true life’s work. After his death in 1935, the trunk was discovered, brimming with notes and jottings on calling cards and envelopes. They were authored not only by Pessoa. but by a flock of his personas: a doctor, a classicist, a bisexual poet, a monk, a lovesick teenage girl. Among his writings was a sheaf of papers that would become his masterpiece: “The Book of Disquiet,” a mock confession in sly, despairing aphorisms and false starts — “The active life has always struck me as the least comfortable of suicides.”
Mammoth, definitive and sublime, Richard Zenith’s new biography, “Pessoa,” gives us a group portrait of the writer and his cast of alternate selves.
If we accept that biography, as Julian Barnes once wrote, is, at best, “a collection of holes tied together with string,” how does one go about writing a biography of a person allergic to personhood? That Pessoa’s name is Portuguese for “person” must have given him perverse satisfaction, he who wrote the word “me” in quotation marks. “I’m beginning to know myself. I don’t exist,” he wrote. “I’m the gap between what I’d like to be and what others have made of me.”
As a child, Pessoa professed hatred for “decisive acts” and “definite thoughts.” His greatest booklength work was, in fact, “a quintessential nonbook,” as Zenith describes it, having translated one edition: “a large but uncertain quantity of discrete, mostly undated texts left in no sequential order, such that every published edition — inevitably depending on massive editorial intervention — is necessarily untrue to the nonexistent ‘original.’”
You might as well lasso a cloud. But Pessoa has enjoyed a happy afterlife, and been fortunate in his translators. When we praise biographies, we often praise stamina and thoroughness, a kind of density of detail — the subject seems to live again. In reading “Pessoa,” it was the necessity of a certain kind of tact that struck me. Zenith reconstructs a life with supple scholarship and just the right kind of proportion, applying the right amount of pressure on those formative experiences of childhood, grief, sexual anxiety and humiliation, early ecstatic encounters with art — never losing sight of the fact that Pessoa’s real life happened elsewhere, as for many writers, alone and at his desk.
His father and brother died of tuberculosis when he was a boy — and very disconcertingly, six months into mourning, his mother fell in love. She married and moved to South Africa, taking Pessoa with her. He would return to Lisbon for more schooling, engage in an epistolary flirtation with a young woman who seemed to produce in him more agitation than desire. He remained, Zenith writes, “almost certainly a virgin.” He co-founded an influential literary magazine. He drank. He died, in 1935, of cirrhosis.
Such a summary tells us so little about Pessoa’s real life, which unfurled in his imagination.
“To say things! To know how to say things!” he once wrote. “To know how to exist through the written voice and the intellectual image! That’s what life is about: The rest is just men and women, imagined loves and fictitious vanities, excuses born of poor digestion and forgetting, people squirming beneath the great abstract boulder of a meaningless blue sky, the way insects do when you lift a stone.”