A Man of Disquiet: Fernando Pessoa

The name Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa is not well known in Australia, where the literary canon is predominantly of British origin although some French, German and Italian writers are included. Portuguese literary figures, including Fernando Pessoa, one of Portugal’s most famous poets and eminent essayists, are rare.

Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888. When he was five his father died, leaving his wife, Maria Magdalena Pinheiro Nogueira, a widow with a baby son, Jorge. He died in the following year. In 1895 she married Commander Joao Miguel dos Santa Rosa, in a proxy marriage. At the time, he was serving in South Africa as the Portuguese consul in Durban. In 1896 she and Fernando joined him.

After an early education at St Joseph Convent School, he moved to Durban High School. This was a turning point in his life, for it was there he received an English education, and his love of English literature began. Pessoa described this move as a “factor of supreme importance in my life and, whatever my fate may be, indubitably shaping it”. ¹

He shunned sport but was a brilliant academic. A school fellow described him as “pale and thin and … physically to be very imperfectly developed. He had a peculiar walk and some defect in his eyesight gave to his eyes also a peculiar appearance, the lids seemed to drop over the eyes.”²

As a youthful iconoclast, in 1902 he wrote, “If a mystic can claim to have a personal knowledge and a clear vision of Christ, a human being can claim to have a personal knowledge and clear vision of Mr Pickwick.”³ In 1903 he won the Queen Victoria Memorial Prize for English, choosing as his reward the works of Keats, Tennyson, Ben Jonson and Edgar Allan Poe.

At about this time, he began writing under the pen name David Merrick, an idiosyncrasy he was to invoke throughout his life. These he called heteronyms, in preference to pseudonyms. He created his earliest heteronym, Chevalier de Pas, when he was six years old.

His use of heteronyms was unique in that they were more than noms de plume. He gave them “a full life, separate from his own, assigning and adopting in turn each persona’s psychology, aesthetics, and politics”. ⁴ His three main literary heteronyms were: Alberto Caeiro, an uneducated poet who wrote free verse; Ricardo Reis, a physician who composed odes, in the style of Horace; and Álvaro de Campos, who worked in London as a naval engineer and wrote poetry influenced by Walt Whitman and the Italian Futurists. While other writers have used literary personas, Pessoa’s heteronyms had full lives, they were not mere pseudonyms. In his mind, and perhaps those of the readers, they became real people. In total, he created seventy-two of them.

In 1905 he returned to Lisbon, intending to study diplomacy. However, two years of ill health and social unrest against the dictatorship of the prime minister, Joao Franco (1906 to 1908), resulted in his receiving unsatisfactory academic results.

He then worked for a mercantile information agency until 1907 when he established the publishing house Empreza Ibis, financed by a small inheritance from his grandmother. The venture was not successful and closed in 1910.

Pessoa studied Portuguese culture, with a special interest in nineteenth-century romantics and symbolists. This led him to publish a critical essay in 1912 that resulted in a lively literary debate about Luís Vaz de Camões (c. 1524/25–1580), whom some considered to have been Portugal’s greatest poet.

Three years later he joined with several artists in founding Orpheu, a literary journal that focused on modernist literature. Pessoa contributed to it under the heteronym Álvaro de Campos. However, only two issues appeared. He used the same heteronym for his poems “Lisbon Revisited” (1925 and 1926) which described the city as follows:

O blue sky—the same one I knew as a child—
Perfect and empty eternal truth!
O gentle, silent, ancestral Tagus,
Tiny truth in which the sky is mirrored!
O sorrow revisited, Lisbon of bygone days today!
You give me nothing, you take nothing from me, you’re nothing I feel is me.

Leave me in peace! I won’t stay long, for I never stay long …
And as long as Silence and the Abyss hold off, I want to be alone!

In 1924, together with Ruy Vaz, an artist, he established the art magazine Athena, in which he published poetry under the heteronyms Alberto Caeiro and Ricardo Reis. Once more, however, the journal did not prosper.

From around 1912, writing as a literary critic and political analyst, he contributed articles to a variety of journals. Pessoa, who spoke fluent English, Portuguese and French, supplemented his income by working as a freelance commercial translator.

 Among the works he translated into Portuguese were books such as The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, short stories by O. Henry, and a selection of poems by Tennyson, Wordsworth, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Greenleaf Whittier and Edgar Allan Poe.

 He also translated into Portuguese some of the theosophical books of Helena Blavatsky, Annie Besant, Mabel Collins and Charles Webster Leadbeater. These were influential in his later interest in spiritualism, automatic writing and astrology. Neopaganism, Rosicrucianism and Freemasonry also played a role in his writing. In 1915, he invented another heteronym, Raphael Baldaya, an astrologer. Pessoa associated with the English occultist and magician Aleister Crowley, who visited Portugal in 1930, and for whom Pessoa translated his poem “Hymn to Pan”.

After living in fifteen rented rooms from the time he returned to Lisbon until 1920, he moved to a more permanent home in Douradores Street, where he created the heteronym Bernardo Soares, who was to be his doppelganger. In Pessoa’s words, Soares was a “demi-heteronyn, a literary personage … or rather a simple mutilation of my own personality”. ⁵

Like Pessoa, Soares lived in Douradores Street, where he wrote The Book of Disquiet, wherein he describes many of Lisbon’s sites, its crowded streets, passers-by, ancient buildings, even the weather—“a ballet with no coda, leaves shaken by the wind, clouds where sunlight assumes shifting colours, a labyrinth of old streets, laid out by chance in the bizarre neighbourhoods of the city”.⁶

Soares was a flâneur, an urban wanderer who “endorses a philosophy of inaction as a form of resistance to the changes of modernity that he witnessed around him, and his gaze inevitably turns inwards”.⁷ In The Book of Disquiet Soares describes Pessoa as about thirty, tall and slim with a pale face that radiated suffering born of indifference to past suffering.

 Pessoa’s style of writing is one of philosophic, dream-like meandering. His words are not directed to the reader, but to himself. Rhian Atkin ⁸ identifies “the features that mark Soares as an introspective flâneur whose real focus is not the city of Lisbon, but himself”. His words are carefully crafted profundities derived from Pessoa’s detailed observations of the world in which he lived and moved.

To gain some insight into Pessoa’s mind, his poetry is the place to start. In his poem “Autopsychography” that he published under his own name, he wrote:

The poet is a man who feigns

And feigns so thoroughly, at last

He manages to feign as pain

The pain he really feels,

And those who read what once he wrote

Feel clearly, in the pain they read,

Neither of the pains he felt,

Only a pain they cannot sense.

And thus, around its jolting track

There runs, to keep our reason busy,

The circling, clockwork train of ours

That men agree to call a heart.

Metaphysical themes that originated from his introspective nature run through Pessoa’s poetry.  From an early age he was an introvert, a thinker who observed the world but was rarely part of it. A psychologist might argue that it was for this reason that Pessoa substituted heteronyms for real friends. However, he was not without friends, including the poet and writer Mário de Sá-Carneiro and the artists Ruy Vaz and Almada Negreiros.

Pessoa saw himself as “a British-style conservative … a liberal within conservatism and absolutely anti-reactionary”. ⁹ An elitist, he opposed totalitarian ideologies including socialism, communism, fascism and Catholicism. As a result of his criticism of António de Oliveira Salazar, prime minister and dictator of Portugal (1932 to 1968), and his defence of Freemasonry, in 1935 Pessoa was banned.

For most of his adult life he had been a heavy drinker and in November 1935 he was admitted to hospital with fever and abdominal pain. He died on the following day, his last words being, “I know not what tomorrow will bring.”¹⁰ There is some dispute whether the cause of death was cirrhosis of the liver or pancreatitis, but in either case alcoholism was the major factor. His remains are interred in Lisbon’s Hieronymites Monastery.

Soon after his death a wooden trunk filled with thousands of unfinished and unpublished manuscripts was found in his room. They are held in the Portuguese National Library, Lisbon. Pessoa is considered to have been Portugal’s greatest poet of the twentieth century, a writer of intellectual brilliance, who would achieve fame only after death.

1. Pessoa, Fernando (1999).Correspondência 1905–1922, ed. Manuela Parreira da Silva. Lisboa, Assírio & Alvim, p. 258.

2. Geerdts ,Clifford E. Letter to Faustino Antunes, 10 April 1907. In Pessoa, Fernando (2003). ‘Escritos Autobiográficos, Automáticos e de Reflexão Pessoal,’ ed. Richard Zenith. Lisboa, Assírio & Alvim, pp. 394–398.

3. ,Watson, Ian. ‘The Book of Disquiet. A Selection.’ Quartet Books Ltd. 1991, p.viii.
4. Fernando Pessoa 1888-1935. Poetry Foundation, Chicago. https://www.poetryfoundation.org › poets › fernando-pessoa.

5. Quoted in Watson, op. cit, ix.

6. Watson, ibid, 66-67.

7. Atkin, Rhian. ‘Bernardo Soares, Flânerie, and the Philosophy of Inaction,’ Iberian and Latin American Studies, v.11, 2010.

8. Aitkin, ibid.

9. Barreto, Jose (2008), “Salazar and the New State in the Writings of Fernando Pessoa”,Portuguese Studies, 24 (2): 169.

10. ^‘ ‘Fernando Pessoa & His Heteronyms.’Poetry Society of America, retrieved 14 March  2023.