Making the Book of Disquiet
How a lost modern masterpiece and its author were reconstructed from scraps
When he died in Lisbon at the age of forty-seven, Fernando Pessoa--poet, journalist, translator--was a failure. He had no career besides his freelance translation, having turned down the only steady job he was ever offered (professor of literature) and losing the only one he ever applied for (museum curator). Not one of his business ventures had lasted more than a year, leaving him with more creditors than friends. A diplomat’s son, he spoke three languages and grew up between Gujaratis, Brits, and Zulus in colonial South Africa, but never left Lisbon in his adult life. The only wide audience his poetry ever found was, inadvertently, among his enemies supporting the Salazar regime. Alcoholism had poisoned his body as an obsession with the occult had filled his mind with astrological mush. Too timid to pursue his attractions to men and women even when they themselves at him, he died a virgin, the end of the Pessoa line.
Pessoa, for his part, was not especially bothered. Richard Zenith, in his monumental thousand-pager Pessoa: A Life, has found evidence among Pessoa’s earliest writings that he had always known he was a genius, and always planned for posthumous fame. “It’s a crime that your work is still unknown,” a friend told him. “Don’t worry,” Pessoa said: “When I die, I’ll leave boxfuls of it behind.”
It was actually a trunk. He carried it with him every time he moved to another rented room, and it carried the real lives of Fernando Pessoa, some 25,000 pages of writing, spread out among notebooks, loose pages, hotel stationery, the backs of calendars, envelopes, endpapers, dust jackets, invitations, postcards--whatever was at hand as he composed, late into the night, his poetry, stories, essays, histories, astrological charts, and letters. Finished or abandoned, all of these papers made into the trunk. As its contents were slowly pieced together in the decades after his death, a new Pessoa emerged, the minor avant-garde writer becoming, as the Portuguese like to joke, their country’s three or four greatest poets.
It’s almost too perfect: a man whose name means “person” in Portuguese had cultivated, through his writings, a cast of alternate selves who wrote through him. He called them his heteronyms: imaginary personalities with their own names, ideas, styles, birthdays, careers, and lives. “I don’t know how many souls I have,” he wrote:
Attentive to what I am and see,
I become them and stop being I.
Each of my dreams and each desire
Belongs to whoever had it, not me.
I am my own landscape,
I watch myself journey--
Various, mobile, and alone.
Here where I am I can’t feel myself.
The heteronyms wrote poetry, stories, essays, business plans, manifestos, philosophy, history, criticism, letters to editors. At least one of them appeared in public a few times, and made phone calls. In Zenith’s telling, the heteronyms were something more than a literary conceit, but less than a delusion: at the height of his occult obsession, Pessoa was regularly summoning spirits through automatic writing, (appearing via automatic writing, these ghosts mostly told him to stop masturbating) but he never confused them with the heteronyms.
Going back to his earliest imaginary friends--like most kids, Pessoa had them, but unlike most, the bookish Pessoa conducted these friendships through correspondence--Zenith counts about seventy heteronyms in all, although most of them just names and a few lines; a few dozen were active for brief periods of time before retiring or falling silent after turning out a poem, essay, or story. Four of them are the most beloved poets in modern Portuguese.
Each of the four had published a little bit in literary journals, but the bulk of their work had to be unearthed from the trunks. The sheep-herding metaphysician Alberto Caeiro and ecstatic futurist Alvaro de Campos came first, as Pessoa had already organized most of their work with the hope of getting them published. The pithy Grecophile Ricardo Reis and his formalist odes to destiny followed soon after. The most important heteronym by far, though, Pessoa’s masterpiece, was by far the longest and latest in coming: Bernardo Soares, author of The Book of Disquiet.
It is easy enough to summarize the book--the heteronym Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper living in a rented room in downtown Lisbon, writes diary entries about his dreams and fantasies, his dead-end job, and his long walks around the city--but hard to describe its enchantment. It’s not a novel, with characters and a plot, but it’s also not formal enough to be an essay clothed in fiction. The Book of Disquiet probably resembles no other genre as much as the confession, in the mode of Augustine or Rousseau: a man reckoning with his existence, justifying himself and his ways. As a character, Soares is often compared to the protagonists in Joyce or Kafka, but to me he looks more like Hamlet: sarcastic, tender, searching, skeptical, with a gift for metaphor. Few books are so honest about what it’s like to be a person, or at least a nervous person who thinks too much (ahem).
Pessoa worked on The Book of Disquiet for the last twenty years of his life, jotting down the title and an author in 1913. Originally, the author was named Vincente Guedes, who in his earliest incarnation was a minor, downwardly-mobile aristocrat squandering his fortune in decadent idleness. By 1914, when Pessoa was writing a foreword to the book and claimed to have met Guedes in a cafe, the heteronym had become a middle-class assistant bookkeeper, though his attitudes were unchanged. The book, in these years, took the form of dreamy, aphoristic micro-essays like “An Aesthetics of Indifference” and “Millimeters (the observation of infinitesimal things),” detached from reality and happening mostly in the hazy, symbolic mists of Guedes’s mind. He fell silent around 1920, and the book was set aside.
When Pessoa took it up again, Guedes had changed his name to Bernardo Soares. Whatever the heteronym’s name, both he and his creator in 1929 were older and mellower, still withdrawn, but more alive to the real world. Where Guedes lived in the empty void of solipsism, Soares dwelled in Lisbon, enjoyed its seasons, noticed its people. His book has autumn leaves, harried tram conductors, streetlights in evening fog, the powder of chocolate truffles sticking to fingers. More satisfied with this later version of the book, Pessoa thought constantly of publishing it in his final years. Like most of his projects, he drew up plans, then did nothing. Besides a few fragments accepted by small journals in Pessoa’s lifetime, the world would have to wait on The Book of Disquiet for 47 years--exactly as long as Pessoa had lived. It would take a dedicated team of editors several years of heroic labor to rescue Pessoa’s masterpiece from his trunk.
The first problem was simply finding it. Pessoa kept most of its entries in an envelope labeled “L. do D.”--Livro do desassossego--but dozens more were scattered throughout the unsorted papers in the trunk, many of them unlabeled and undated, with no indication that they were written by Guedes/Soares. Pessoa himself called Soares a “semi-heteronym” who shared much with his creator, and confessed that even he had trouble telling their ideas apart sometimes. Scholars go back and forth on which of these ambiguous passages to include. A hundred of them were added to the second Portuguese edition. In English versions alone, the number of fragments ranges from 259 to 523. Richard Zenith, taking the most conservative approach to these borderline cases in his translation for Penguin, still wound up with fifty.
Once picked out, the next obstacle was actually reading the texts. Many of the fragments only exist in Pessoa’s atrocious handwriting, often illegible even to the experts. Most of these were drafts, too, full of cross-outs, alternate phrasings on the lines above or below, and spaces left blank when he couldn’t find the right word or phrase. This caused all kinds of editorial headaches: do you include a crossed-out word when no alternative is given? When a line is grammatically broken, do you keep it or correct it? When two readings are possible, which should be chosen? There were hundreds of these cases for the editors to sort through. Even then, every new edition of the book inevitably makes dozens of corrections, alternate readings, and new interpretations.
Putting everything in order was the next challenge. While the book itself doesn’t have anything like a narrative progression, there are mentions of seasons passing, changes of address, employees coming and going at work, holidays taken, and other details that would make a purely thematic organization jarring. A purely chronological order is also impossible: most of the fragments are undated, and even among those that are, it’s not always clear if Pessoa actually wrote it on that day, or was adding it as part of the fiction; we know from drafts and internal evidence that at least a few passages were back-dated in this way. Pessoa himself had no idea, speculating on the margins of his drafts about interspersing short passages with long ones, or grouping entries thematically. All the experts, in any case, agree that the book should never be read straight through, and is best sampled randomly, in small doses.
It was one of the greatest publishing challenges of the 20th century, but it paid off well: The Book of Disquiet has been consistently sold, translated, and adored since it appeared in 1982. Every one of those copies, in Portuguese or otherwise, represents years of reconstructive surgery, interpretation, and guesswork, all of it a long way from the scattered papery of Pessoa’s trunk.
Perhaps Half Pint Press, then, came at it the right way. While all the major press editions of the Disquiet are bound between covers and all the apparatuses of the modern critical edition, Half Pint simply printed all the fragments separately and threw them in a box. Using a table-press, they printed fragments on old stationery, matchbooks, the backs of pamphlets, loose notebook paper, bus tickets, and even pencils. This seems, to me, like the most appropriate way to publish an incomplete book of scattered fragments, missives from a man who never quite existed and had to be conjured, like some magician’s trick, from the mazy clutter of a failed poet’s trunk.
Sources & Further Reading:
The details of Pessoa’s life and writing are all taken from Richard Zenith’s magnificent Pessoa: A Biography, out now in hardcover. Zenith’s book is perhaps too long at a thousand pages, but most of it is indisputably good reading and highly recommended.
Other details on the publication history of The Book of Disquiet come from Richard Zenith’s foreword to his English translation for Penguin Classics.
The translation of “I don’t know how many souls I have” comes from Zenith’s Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems”
Lest it seem like Zenith is the only game in town, it should be noted that I have also read and enjoyed Margaret Jull-Costa’s translations of Pessoa for New Directions very much: her Book of Disquiet is the most attractive edition on the market, and her Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro is the only bilingual edition of Pessoa, with the original Portuguese on the left pages.