Chapter excerpted from my book Loners: Writers, Thinkers, and Solitude, available in paperback and kindle versions. Read the introduction for free here.
The writer Fernando Pessoa is a notable Portuguese loner, and his The Book of Disquiet might serve as the little red book for somewhat depressive urban solitaries. Just as certain moods, attitudes, and experiences are brilliantly captured by Beckett, so that he keeps returning to them in his plays and prose, Pessoa returns in that manner to certain moods of boredom, inertia, and a rather metaphysical sadness. These moods are being expressed by an unattached bachelor observing Lisbon, often on a rainy afternoon that seems to eat away at his soul and leave him with an unnamable feeling of desperation.
Pessoa, born in 1888, lost his father and his only full sibling, a brother not quite a year old, during a sixth-month period when he was five. (That is astonishingly like the experience of Nietzsche.) His mother then married a man who had just been named Portuguese consul to Durban, South Africa, and at the age of seven Fernando found himself in Durban. He studied at first at a convent school run by nuns and then in the public school of that city, so that the primary language for his education and his writing as a youth was English, and his first poems and essays were in that language. He even won a Queen Victoria prize for the best essay in English in a competition in Natal province. His mother and the consul had a daughter and two sons. Fernando was close with the daughter, Henriqueta, both in South Africa and later in Portugal, but the two half-brothers were extremely young children when he left for education in Portugal and they later studied in England, so that he never came to know them well.
Fernando seems as a child to have been exceptionally intelligent and already something of a loner. In the rich sports culture of South African schools, he was unathletic and seemed to live a great deal of his life in his imagination. It was typical that his interest in soccer and cricket was expressed not by his playing the sports but by his making up, all on his own, complicated imaginary soccer and cricket leagues, with outcomes determined by a throw of the dice and with careful records kept. He later confessed that the worlds of his dream life, of his imagination, and of the fictional world of books, especially those of Dickens, were far more real to him in his youth than was the social life around him or his own interactions with that social life. Back in Lisbon without his immediate family, who were still in Durban, Fernando did not complete his higher-education studies because he wanted to be a writer as well as the editor of a literary journal publishing the most up-to-date writers. While his first mature poems were written in English and submitted to British periodicals and publishers, he soon formed an extravagant sense of himself as leading a Portuguese literary renaissance that would transform European culture in the way that Prince Henry the Navigator, Dias, da Gama, and Magellan had transformed that world through their daring voyages out of Lisbon.
From the time of his mid-20s Pessoa developed what many take to be the most notable feature of his poetry. In 1914 he experienced moments of powerful inspiration in which he was moved to write poetry not just under different names but as written by different characters. He liked the idea of being a dramatist in the manner of Shakespeare and perhaps one might think of his poetic practice in the following way. Imagine that Shakespeare came up with his great characters Iago, Hamlet, Lear, and so forth, and then decided not to put these characters into plays but to make each of them a poet. Iago would write poetry out of the depths of his character, Hamlet out of the depths of his, and Shakespeare would be behind the scenes orchestrating the performances, so that it would remain unclear how much of himself he was expressing through these characters.
It is Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, a series of reflections and expressions of mood rather than a poem, that interests me here. It was put together and edited by scholars after his death at 47, relying on some published writing but especially on often seemingly random scraps of paper kept in a large storage chest. The passages making up this book were written over a period of almost two decades and the earlier-dated ones were ascribed at first to various heteronyms, as he called his poetic characters who supposedly produced his poems. But eventually from 1929 on Pessoa attributed authorship of this book to one Bernardo Soares, a lower-level bookkeeper living alone in a small rented room in Lisbon. It is Bernardo who gives such acute expression to his feelings of tedium, of the metaphysical pressure and fatigue of selfhood, of the virtues of isolation and distance from others, and of the worthlessness of any attempt to form intentions and desires that one aims to realize in the world. Pessoa claimed that of all his heteronyms, Bernardo Soares was the one closest to being autobiographical. Although he lived for different periods with family members in Lisbon, for the last 12 years of his life, from 1923 to 1935, he was alone in his Lisbon apartment. He worked for several Lisbon businesses, at a level above that of the lowly Bernardo. Since he was fully bilingual in English and Portuguese and could speak and write French very well, and in addition had taken business courses in South Africa, he was invaluable for preparing business documents and correspondence requiring translation.
I believe the moods and attitudes he assigns to Bernardo are moods and attitudes he himself felt strongly and painfully. He is not just constructing a fictional character. On the other hand, he himself had a much more varied set of mental states than the ones he assigns to Bernardo, who is a very real side of him, but just one side. While Bernardo’s deep pessimism about the emptiness of human agency makes him see any intervention in the world as inherently worthless, Pessoa himself could be rather ambitious. He truly wished to transform Portuguese literary culture in a way that would make it an important European phenomenon, and on behalf of this project he would often write for literary journals and support particular Portuguese writers. He also came up with ambitious plans for money-making businesses and intervened in political debates, often on a conservative side. There does seem to be a deep loneliness at the heart of his character, but he is not alone in the sense that Bernardo is. He has a regular table at a favorite café and younger writers like to visit him there while he drinks somewhat more wine than he should. He has a close friend in fellow writer Mário de Sá-Carneiro, but four years after they meet Sá-Carneiro commits suicide in a Paris hotel. Pessoa tries to find allies for his literary movement and in doing so, he becomes, very much against the moral grain of Portuguese cultural life, a strong supporter of the gay writers Antonio Butto and Raul Leal. So, Bernardo Soares will not represent all sides of Pessoa, but one has a sense that Bernardo’s moods capture something central to the psychological core of him.
Pessoa seems an especially apt exemplar of the story I am telling, where a powerful intersection of the psychological, the aesthetic, and the metaphysical is due to the continuing, profound effects in the adult of patterns operative in the childhood space of separation-individuation. Throughout the jottings that make up The Book of Disquiet (BD), Bernardo Soares is dealing with the issues defined by that space: the weight of selfhood; the negotiation of separateness and attachment; the stabilizing of an architecture of self and other; the handling of loss; the burden of agency and self-consciousness; the determination of what, if anything, can truly count as one’s own. Faced with that weight of selfhood, he profoundly wishes “to think no more, to feel no more, to leave behind the march of time and the sun like a piece of wrapping paper, to remove like a heavy suit – next to the big bed – the involuntary effort of being.” (BD 329) Bernardo tells us: “But sometimes right in the middle of my work . . . my soul overflows with a bitter inertia, and I’m tired, not of working or resting, but of me.” (BD 229) “An anxiety for being me, forever trapped in myself, floods my whole being without finding a way out, shaping me into tenderness, fear, sorrow, and desolation.” (BD 370) Tedium is often his central topic. “Tedium, yes, is boredom with the world, the nagging discomfort of living: tedium is indeed the carnal sensation of the endless emptiness of things . . . It is not only the emptiness of things and living beings that troubles the soul afflicted by tedium, it’s the emptiness of something besides things and beings – the emptiness of the very soul that feels this vacuum, that feels itself to be this vacuum, and that within this vacuum is nauseated and repelled by its own self.” (BD 316)
Both in how he lived his life and in the passages of The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa seems to be raising and trying to settle issues about quite elemental structures of selfhood and otherness. Are there ways of opening oneself to others that are not threatening to the boundaries and rhythms, the fragile private space, that define one’s status as an individual? He keeps coming back to the need to be alone, to resist the invasions of others, as if that resistance is needed to sustain any sense at all of himself. Yet being alone is also painful. “Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me.” (BD 48) It is solitariness that wins out as the better strategy. “And we should especially protect our personality against being invaded by others. . . To love is to tire of being alone; it is therefore a cowardice, a betrayal of ourselves. . . Art is an isolation. Every artist should seek to isolate others, to fill their souls with a desire to be alone.” (BD 429) He insists often on the dangerous oppressiveness of the mere presence of others rubbing against him. We must develop “a velvety indifference to insulate our soul against the invisible blows of coexisting with others.” (BD 266) He claims that interaction with others, letting them intrude on one’s mental life, always makes one worse off. “Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are free if you can withdraw from people . . .” (BD 243) He continues to reflect on the overall psychological architecture of self and other, as if he has kept on working through the young child’s processes of experiencing and securing the self. When we think we are loving others, he says, we are really loving only a projection of ourselves onto others. One aspect of his seemingly metaphysical sadness is that he finds it difficult to draw secure boundaries between himself and the world around him. He says at one point that he is seeking any state at all, “even tedium – anything but this general blurring of the soul and things, this bluish forlorn indefiniteness of everything!” (BD 319) It is clear that Bernardo has not mastered a healthy, mature structuring of self and other such as Hegel described in his dialectic of self-consciousness, where the master-slave relationship leads eventually to a mutual recognition of, and indeed mutual dependence of, one’s own autonomy and that of the other. Instead, he believes he will lose himself if he gives himself over to communal activities with others. “To join in or collaborate or act with others is a metaphysically morbid impulse. The soul conferred on the individual shouldn’t be lent out to its relations to others.” (BD 184) “Collective thought is stupid because it’s collective. Nothing passes into the realm of the collective without leaving at the border – like a toll – most of the intelligence it contained.” (BD 99) “I’d like my life’s activity to consist, above all, in educating others to feel more and more for themselves and less and less according to the dynamic law of collectiveness.” (BD 322) Socialists make him sick to his stomach. (BD 331) On this matter he can sound rather like Nietzsche and Proust.
Being a separate individual means taking on the responsibility of shaping an individual life. We thus enter into the realm of agency: intentions, preferences, deliberation, choices, planning, decisions, and so forth. Bernardo experiences so strongly the weight and painfulness of selfhood that he wishes at times to leave it behind. He says often that states of sleepiness or dull torpor are more desirable than states of ordinary wakefulness. “I have never found convincing arguments for anything other than inertia.” (BD 216) How can he enter the world of human agency when he has very little sense what he wants? “These late afternoons fill me, like a sea at high tide, with a feeling worse than tedium but for which there’s no other name. It’s a feeling of desolation I’m unable to pinpoint, a shipwreck of my entire soul. . . I’ve stopped wanting, stopped knowing how to want, stopped knowing the emotions and thoughts by which people generally recognize that they want something or want to want it.” (BD 163) Action is a disease of thought, he says. (BD 272)
Bernardo has discovered, he says, that the best way to handle such painful mental states is to engage in a harsh, rigorous self-analysis regarding them. Not only does such analysis bring about a measure of distance but also a very intense concentration on the painful state can find even a degree of pleasure in it. He adds the claim: “I write because this is the final goal, the supreme refinement, of my cultivation of the states of soul.” (BD 456) So we appear to have someone who wishes us to recognize, and to concentrate on, the cultivation of mental states that are truly our own, without contamination by the opinions of others. Yet here Bernardo makes a somewhat unpredictable turn. He discovers that the more he studies his own inner states, the more he seems to realize that they are not his own. He wonders at times if they have arrived somehow in his own mind but were really intended for someone else and have been misdirected. He recognizes that the states of mind of the fictional characters he reads about in books often seem to have a more legitimate presence and authenticity for him than do his own impressions as he is moving through the world. For a long time he has had the habit of taking what he feels and externalizing it into the mind of some character he has created, so all feelings have begun to feel artificial and fictional to him. “I’ve become so entirely the fiction of myself that any natural feeling I may have is immediately transformed, as soon as it’s born, into an imaginary feeling.” (BD 375) As soon as he starts having certain experiences or feelings, he externalizes them in a fictional character, in one of his heteronyms who comes to lead an independent life, so that he automatically has a kind of distance from them. He can never say truly what he wants; his own desires appear alien to him. “If I want, it seems that I’ve been placed in a vehicle, like freight to be delivered, and that I continue with a movement I imagine is my own towards a destination I don’t want until I get there.” (BD 245) He keeps emphasizing that his feelings do not quite seem to be his own, as they come off as artificial constructs that might well be those of someone else or of a fictional character. “I don’t know if others are like me, or if the science of life consists essentially in being so alienated from oneself that this alienation becomes second nature, such that one can participate in life as an exile from his own consciousness.” (BD 284) “For it’s never I who thinks, speaks or acts. It’s always one of my dreams, which I momentarily embody, that thinks, speaks and acts for me. I open my mouth, but it’s I-another who speaks. The only thing I feel to be really mine is a huge incapacity, a vast emptiness, an incompetence for everything that is life.” (BD 188)
Bernardo tells us that once he was loved by another individual and briefly felt that he was in love. His first reaction was bewilderment, as if he had won a grand prize in an unconvertible currency. But very soon his sense of vanity at being valued by another was replaced by an uncomfortable feeling “composed of tedium, of humiliation, and of weariness.” (BD 202) He experiences the “weariness of being the object of other people’s burdensome emotions.” (BD 203) Being loved has turned out to be a case “of tedium, as if a new duty – that of a hideous reciprocity – had been ironically foisted on me as a privilege for which I was expected to thank Fate profusely. Of tedium, as if the irregular monotony of life weren’t enough, so that on top of that I needed the obligatory monotony of a definite feeling. . . It all seems like something that I read somewhere, like an incident that happened to someone else.” (BD 202-03) It is best if he returns to his isolation as one who lets the full metaphysical pressure of rainy afternoons in Lisbon and of the self in its very emptiness, while bearing the weight of individuality, fall upon him. At the same time he wishes “to be something, anything, that doesn’t feel the weight of the rain outside, nor the anguish of inner emptiness . . . (BD 42)
The relationship mentioned here by Bernardo seems to reflect Pessoa’s own interaction with a very young woman, Ophelia Queiroz, whom he met in 1920 at one of the offices he worked in. She appears to have fallen genuinely in love with him. But after several months he sends her a rather cruel break-up letter in which he explains that those who are intelligent recognize how very quickly the appearance of passion fades away, and only foolish believers in illusion pretend that it has kept on going. The relationship is almost certainly never consummated and Pessoa uses his favorite heteronyms to create greater distance from her, suggesting that one of these imaginary characters must come along when the two of them meet and be allowed to offer judgments about her. Nine years later her eighteen-year-old nephew Carlos, hoping to be a poet, becomes a close friend of Fernando and through him Fernando and Ophelia begin their relationship anew. But soon enough he is not showing up for their appointments and is avoiding her calls. He has one of his heteronyms, Ricardo Reis, telephone her and break things off.
One wonders what might be made of a comparison among the relationships of Felice Bauer to Kafka, Emily Hale to T. S. Eliot, and Ophelia Queiroz to Pessoa. What is common to all these cases is a desire on the male’s part to master a dialectic of distance and closeness, attachment and solitude, intimacy and separateness. Epistolary distance allows for some expressions of affection, but it is crucial that such distance be maintained. We are dealing once again with a hangover into adulthood of the childhood space of separation-individuation. Separateness is painful but violating it threatens a dissolving of the self. What seems common as well is a very strong fear of female sexuality. To become entangled with women on a physical level is to fail in the basic project of sustaining a fragile individuality against whatever would challenge it. Pessoa’s flight from a world of matter he associates with women is shown by his commitment to spiritualism. He believes firmly in the idea that there is another plane of existence beyond the present material one, and that such practices as theosophy, Rosicrucianism, Gnosticism, Freemasonry, and the like are valid sources of insight into that spiritual world. He studies astrology seriously, deals out cards to predict his future, and even participates in a fake suicide in Portugal by the British charlatan-spiritualist Aleister Crowley, while also translating works by Madame Blavatsky, the theosophist. Such practices express a great desire on his part to ascend as a poet to such a higher spiritual level, to have an awareness that such an advanced level is speaking through him.
His biographer Richard Zenith, on whom I am very much dependent here (he is also the translator into English of The Book of Disquiet), is quite sure that Pessoa’s sexual orientation was a predominately homoerotic one, though he believes it unlikely that this orientation was ever physically expressed. Pessoa’s disgust at the idea of physical intercourse seems to have applied to males as well as to females. He himself confesses that there is a notable homoerotic component in his own psyche but claims this is only a mental attitude; he would be terribly ashamed if it should transform itself into a desire for actual physical intercourse with males. (P-RZ 368) In The Book of Disquiet he has Bernardo say that his attraction to others is very strongly a visual one, not involving contact: “I don’t remember ever having loved more than the ‘painting’ in someone, the pure exterior, in which the soul’s only role is to animate and enliven it . . . I love with my gaze, and not even with fantasy.” (BD 458) “I’ve always felt that a handsome body and the carefree rhythm of a youthful stride were more useful in the world than all the dreams that exist in me.” (BD 450) Pessoa thus seems an exemplar of a phenomenon I discussed earlier: the recruiting of eros, perhaps starting at a young age, for the project of individual self-formation. In being visually attracted to bodies, apparently male, that seem to express vitally an internal animating force, and that move with a carefree rhythm and stride, he is attempting to identify, in a fairly primitive fashion, with others who seem to master the project of separation-individuation well, who generate easily and gracefully a self-sustaining rhythm and animation of their own. He gives credence to such a visually determined investment but does not believe that sexual intercourse with such an admirable other will give him a more robust sense of identification, of claiming such qualities for himself; it is likely rather to disgust him.
Pessoa wrote transparently homoerotic poems and was deeply interested in Walt Whitman, in Oscar Wilde, and in what he was certain was the homosexuality of Shakespeare, which he linked to Shakespeare’s achievements as a dramatic genius. His most romantic poem, Alcinoos, tells the story of Hadrian’s love for a beautiful young male who drowned in the Nile and whom he raised to the status of a god. In “Maritime Ode” he imagines being violently manhandled and degraded by sailors (perhaps thinking of an early poem of Rimbaud). Since he continued to assign his poetry to the heteronyms, such as Álvaro de Campos, he could always say that the sentiments and fantasies were those of the character he had invented, not of himself, or that he was simply as a writer playing upon previous fictional or poetic works.
Bernardo forms a self-sustaining inner space in which he can analyze his mental states with a tough-minded precision, so that he is no longer overwhelmed by them. He accepts the inevitability of his own emptiness, inertia, and generalized sadness. His disillusionment and nostalgia are directed not toward the past but toward present moments even as he is having them. (BD 312) Even in the immediate moment of experience, his mental states have already been constructed as disenchanted items that he can be nostalgic about, since what is central to them has been lost in the very having of them. Other individuals, he grants, are just scenery and decoration to him. (BD 146) Whereas Nietzsche represents his inner life as melting into a torrent that flows powerfully and irresistibly towards its oceanic destination, Pessoa pictures himself as ending in a puddle on the beach that seeps unnoticeably into the sand. (BD 137) Only by forming life into aesthetic and psychological analyses, with ruthless observation, can he get through it. He admits he has something in him of the decadent poets who transformed their emotional states into well-crafted artifacts that they seemed to have a clear mastery over, since they were responsible for reshaping and redesigning them. Unlike Nietzsche and Proust, he doubts that what he uncovers can count properly as his own. But at least analysis and honest description may cool off their disturbing character and bring them under his imaginary and literary mastery. The arbitrary intrusiveness of the world is transformed into a set of emotional states that he has given a dream-like fictionality to. That transformation must at least begin with an accurate registering of what he is feeling, even if he is not sure he can call these feelings his own. He has become so adept at reassigning his feelings to external, fictional characters and at making them into literary artifacts that none of his feelings seem natural.
Yet there are traces, even for Bernardo and perhaps for Fernando as well, of a history that might have gone differently. Twice in his adolescence, Bernardo says, he enjoyed the humiliating grief of being in love and he believes it a good thing that this experience of disillusion happened to him so early (BD 141) He has generally been treated decently and courteously by others in the world, he grants, but is never granted real affection or devotion. ‘I’ve always wanted to be liked. It always grieved me that I was treated with indifference . . . I wanted to be the object of someone’s affection. (BD 353) Hearing the rain, “cowering in my insignificance, so human and alone in the last vestige of the darkness that’s deserting me, I begin to weep. I weep, yes, over solitude and life,” as well as over “the arm to embrace me that I never found, the shoulder to lean on that I never had.” (BD 359) “People are friendly to me right away. But I never receive affection. I’ve never been shown devotion. To be loved has always seemed impossible to me, like a stranger calling me by my first name.” (BD 353)
Bernardo’s claim elsewhere of a stoic indifference to the world and to others seems constructed over early experiences, likely those of Fernando, in which a shy boy living mostly an interior life was attracted to more vital, more athletic male classmates but saw how any emotional connection with them was impossible. “Suddenly I’m all alone in the world. . . I’m a child in a nightshirt carrying a dimly lit candle and traversing a huge empty house.” (BD 80) The entire dialectic of individuation and separateness involves far more painful feelings than he typically wishes to admit to. “It’s always with exaggerated emotion that I leave something behind, whatever it may be.” (BD 173) So all his efforts to alienate himself from his emotions, to find them as artifacts or fictions that can hardly be his own, may be an attempt to distance himself from their true emotional power, from the great force they still carry as reminders of childhood loss and grief, as separation from earlier attachments was necessary or as desired attachments were impossible. The careful reader may very well conclude that Pessoa was a man of very powerful emotional needs who, perhaps because of his homoerotic desires or perhaps because of some more general flaw in his overall patterning of what is self and what is other, was sure that these would never be satisfied by his interactions with others. He tried to construct an artificial, literary relationship to these feelings so that they would seem less overwhelming and less the sad outpouring of his own quite natural self. At times he admits what is lost in this strategy. “One of my life’s greatest tragedies . . . is my inability to feel anything naturally.” (BD 354) Pessoa seems to construct Bernardo as a character whose great contempt and skepticism regarding the virtues of attachment disguises a great need and desire to experience natural human feelings and satisfying responses to them.
Pessoa is like Nietzsche in fighting painful states of loneliness and rejection by others by constructing a divine-like psychological universe of self-to-self activity that he can sustain through his own power, without dependence on such others. He will construct a framework showing that what he cannot have he has never truly wanted, as he is most at home in being alone. The sadness he is feeling that goes beyond a psychological mood, that seems indeed a metaphysical fact pervading the world itself, is in fact the key to the literary states that are most promising for him, that make him open, perhaps, to vibrations from a higher, more spiritual world.
Nietzsche believed that his writing, with a distinctive style of ordering experience, could contribute to a redesign of his psyche that generated a greater sense of power, of exuberance, of what was his own. Pessoa is not so optimistic. Regarding the registering of his impressions through writing: “None of this is of any use to me, because nothing is of use to me. But writing makes me calmer, as when a sick man breathes easier without the sickness having passed.” (BD 286) Yet in the end: “Literature - which is art married to thought, and realization untainted by reality - seems to me the end towards which all human effort would have to strive, if it were truly human and not just a welling up of our animal self.” (BD 30) He is like Kafka here, in that fears of regressing to an animal existence are faced by a writing that promises ascent to a more ideal, more spiritual realm. Despite the claims of Bernardo in The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa has achieved a style that is distinctively, recognizably, convincingly, and movingly his own. After reading him, we cannot help but think of some of our own moods as Pessoan.
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