The poet with many lives

This is an ingenious and infuriating book about an ingenious and infuriating writer. I first encountered Fernando Pessoa in the wonderful and lamented Penguin International Poets series, and what intrigued me was that he was more than one person. There was his poetry, but also sections attributed to his heteronyms, or imaginary alter egos. Stylistically they were very different. There was the rustic naïf, Caeiro; the neo-classicist, Reis (later to be a subject for one of Portugal’s other major literary figures, José Saramago); and the loud-mouthed modernist, Alvaro de Campos, a naval engineer who apparently studied in Glasgow. Later, I bought a copy of The Book of Disquiet, a posthumous publication and the stuff of much mythology. Found in a trunk with many other papers, the melancholic musings of Bernardo Soares is a book which sits on one of my shelves alongside Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and other books that can only be classified as ‘unclassifiable’.

These were not the only identities Pessoa assumed. The earliest, it seems, was the Chevalier de Pas, whose name might have been the Knight of Nothing. He would adopt scores of personas — as a political commentator, a writer of business letters, an astrologer and adept of white magic, an editor, a publisher and a constant café presence, holding court but not saying much. In a late poem attributed to Reis, Pessoa wrote: ‘I have more than just one soul./ There are more I’s than I myself.’ The heteronyms had fully fledged biographies, and at one point Pessoa claimed he could provide photographs of these alternate selves.

Pessoa himself was reserved, probably died a virgin, and was quiet and obsessive, with his fantasies ranging from the mystical return of King Sebastian to the Fifth Empire, which Portugal would command.