The Book of Disquiet Read Free Page A

grasped it), for in yet another letter to Cortes-Rodrigues he wrote that The Book of Disquiet , ‘that pathological production’, was going ‘complexly and tortuously forward’, as if of its own accord.
    And so Pessoa let the book go, scribbling B. of D. at the head of all sorts of texts, sometimes as an afterthought, or with a question mark indicating doubt. The Book of Disquiet – forever tentative, indefinite and in transition – is one of those rare works in which forme and fond perfectly reflect each other. Always with the intention of revising and assembling the variously handwritten and typed passages, but never with the courage or patience to take up the task, Pessoa kept adding material, and the parameters of the already unwieldy work kept expanding. Besides his post-Symbolist flights and diary-like musings, Pessoa included maxims, sociological observations, aesthetic credos, theological reflections and cultural analyses. He even put the B. of D. trademark on the copy of a letter to his mother (in Appendix II).
    Though Pessoa hatched dozens of publication plans for his works, he saw only one real book, Mensagem ( Message ), make it into print, the year before he died. (He self-published several chap-books of his English poems.) Pessoa was so addicted to writing and scheming – and the schemes included unlikely business ventures as well as the publication of his œuvre – that he had no time or energy left over to get that œuvre into publishable shape. Or perhaps it was just tootedious to think about. Nothing better illustrates the problem than The Book of Disquiet , a micro-chaos within the larger chaos of Pessoa’s written universe. But that consummate disorder is what gives The Book its peculiar greatness. It is like a treasure chest of both polished and uncut gems, which can be arranged and rearranged in infinite combinations, thanks precisely to the lack of a pre-established order.
    No other work of Pessoa interacted so intensely with the rest of his universe. If Bernardo Soares says that his heart ‘drains out… like a broken bucket’ (Text 154) or that his mental life is ‘a bucket that got knocked over’ (Text 442), Álvaro de Campos declares ‘My heart is a poured-out bucket’ (in ‘The Tobacco Shop’) and compares his thinking to ‘an overturned bucket’ (in a poem dated 16 August 1934). If Soares thinks that ‘Nothing is more oppressive than the affection of others’ (Text 348), a Ricardo Reis ode (dated 1 November 1930) maintains that ‘The same love by which we’re loved/Oppresses us with its wanting.’ And when the assistant bookkeeper longs to ‘notice everything for the first time… as direct manifestations of Reality’, we can’t help but think of Alberto Caeiro, whose verses are a continual hymn to the direct, unmediated vision of things.
    We can leaf through The Book of Disquiet as through a lifelong sketchbook revealing the artist in all his heteronymic variety. Or we may read it as a travel journal, a ‘book of random impressions’ (Text 442), Pessoa’s faithful companion throughout his literary odyssey that never left Lisbon. Or we may see it as the ‘factless autobiography’ (Text 12) of a man who dedicated his life to not living, who cultivated ‘hatred of action like a greenhouse flower’ (Text 103).
    The Book of Disquiet , which took different forms, also knew different authors. As long as The Book was just one book, consisting of post-Symbolist texts with titles, the announced author was Fernando Pessoa, but when it mutated to accommodate diaristic passages, inevitably more intimate and revealing, Pessoa followed his usual custom of hiding behind other names, the first of which was Vicente Guedes. In fact Guedes was initially responsible only for the diary (or diaries) that pushed its (or their) way into The Book of Disquiet . The ‘autobiography of a man who never existed’ is how Pessoa, in a passageintended for a Preface, described Guedes’s