=An Alphabet of My Creative Icons=

Pessoa: I’d woken up early and I took a long time getting ready to exist.

Fernando Pessoa was born on June 13, 1888 in Lisbon, Portugal. He died forty-seven years later on November 30, 1935. Cause: cirrhosis of the liver.

In the years in between, he wrote under at least seventy-five different names. He called these literary aliases heteronyms, as opposed to pseudonyms, because they were not just pen-names, but complete and distinct personalities with their own detailed biographies and peculiar temperaments. Many of the heteronyms held views that Pessoa himself found extreme, even unpleasant, and they wrote in various styles alien to each other and to Pessoa’s own.

Pessoa: Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.

The three main heteronyms that Pessoa used most often were Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Alvaro de Campos. Sometimes his heteronyms wrote critical reviews of other heteronyms and engaged in literary feuds. Pessoa also had a heteronym who was a psychologist who wrote pieces analyzing Pessoa himself.

Pessoa: I am nothing. I’ll never be anything. I couldn’t want to be something. Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.

Pessoa: In order to understand, I destroyed myself .

Pessoa was interested in the occult. He dabbled in automatic writing and spiritualism. He translated Theosophical texts into Portuguese and drew up astrological charts of writers and historical figures. He corresponded with Aleister Crowley, whose philosophy of Thelema, Pessoa wrote commentaries on. The two eventually met and Pessoa helped The Great Beast stage his own fake death.

Pessoa also translated the works of Poe, Hawthorne, and Whitman. He published four books in English.

Pessoa: There are ships sailing to many ports, but not a single one goes to where life is not painful.

He never married. He didn’t need much in the way of companionship. All by himself, he was already quite a crowd.

He left over 25,000 unpublished pages of written fragments in a trunk. Much of this work has still to be edited but a portion of it has been published and translated as “The Book of Disquiet.” It is Pessoa’s most contemporary-seeming work and quite likely his enduring masterpiece.

He liked hanging around in coffee houses a lot. Taverns, too. He drank quite a bit. He cultivated the life of the flaneur. 

He was well-known in his time to other writers, but not so much to the general public. His fame came late, at least for him. He was dead by the time he became a Portuguese literary icon.

Pessoa: I’ve always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself.