The Book of Disquiet Read Free Page B

‘gentle book’, which is referred to in another passage as the Diary , as if this were its actual title. Pessoa, in his publication plans, began to cite Vicente Guedes as the fictional author of The Book of Disquiet , which suggests that it and the ‘gentle’ Diary were one and the same book. On the other hand, the archives contain a fragmentary passage from a ‘Diary of Vicente Guedes’, dated 22 August 1914, which pokes fun at a second-rate Portuguese writer and surely does not belong in Disquiet . Diaries usually have dates, but almost no dated material entered The Book of Disquiet until 1929, when Vicente Guedes had already been given his walking papers. Whatever intentions Pessoa may have one day had, the early Book of Disquiet never boiled down to a diary, though it did encompassa ‘Random Diary’ and a ‘Lucid Diary’ – or single entries from projected diaries with these names – as well as the a forecited ‘Fragments of an Autobiography’, all of which date (according to manuscript and stylistic evidence) from 1915 to 1920, when Guedes was active.
    Vicente Guedes was one of Pessoa’s busiest and most versatile collaborators in the 1910 s. Besides his diary writings, Guedes translated, or was supposed to translate, plays and poems by the likes of Aeschylus, Shelley and Byron, as well as ‘A Very Original Dinner’, a mystery story penned by Alexander Search, the most prolific of the English-language heteronyms. Though he shirked his duties as a translator, Guedes ‘really’ wrote a few poems, a number of short stories and several mystical tales. In one of these tales, ‘The Ascetic’, the title character tells his interlocutor that paradises and nirvanas are ‘illusions inside other illusions. If you dream you’re dreaming, is the dream you dream less real than the dream you dream you’re dreaming?’ This sort of musing is vaguely reminiscent of Disquiet in its formative phase, which may be why Pessoa decided to entrust it to Guedes, whose wide-ranging literary talents made him a potentially excellent author-administrator of such a capacious work.
    The manuscript identifying Vicente Guedes as the author of a Diary that was supposed to be part (or perhaps all) of the early Book of Disquiet also includes a passage titled ‘Games of Solitaire’ (Text 351), which evokes the evenings that the narrator spent as a child with his elderly aunts in a country house. The passage is preceded by this notation:
B. of D.
A section entitled: Games of Solitaire (include In the Forest of Estrangement ?)
    In its language and tone, ‘Forest of Estrangement’ has absolutely nothing in common with the passage about old aunts playing solitaire while their sleepy maid brews tea. Perhaps this was conceived as a mere port of entry to the section that would have the same name and whose ‘games of solitaire’ would be exercises in daydreamy prose such as ‘Estrangement’, written by Pessoa for the same reason we play cards: to pass the time. Whatever the case, The Book was in trouble. Pessoa didn’t know what to do with the early texts that wafted in the misty atmosphere of the strange forest, and perhaps he considered excluding them altogether. What place could they have in a diary? Or even next to a diary?
    More than ten years later, Bernardo Soares would reformulate the games of solitaire (Text 12):
    I make landscapes out of what I feel. I make holidays of my sensations… My elderly aunt would play solitaire throughout the endless evening. These confessions of what I feel are my solitaire. I don’t interpret them like those who read cards to tell the future. I don’t probe them, because in solitaire the cards don’t have any special significance.
    In the same passage, Soares compares his mental and literary activity to another domestic pastime, crochet, as Álvaro de Campos also does in a poem dated 9 August 1934:
I also have my crochet.
It dates from when I began to think.
Stitch on stitch forming a