QI The Book of the Dead

her condition. She died in her sleep at the age of ninety, shortly after becoming the first woman to receive the Order of Merit. In the last two decades of her life, she had mellowed. The intellectual arrogance, the not-suffering-fools-gladly impatience and the perfectionism that had driven her faded, and she became an indulgent, eccentric old lady, devoted to her cats. Animals had always been a solace to her and she had often recommended the healing power of pets to her patients. For a while she had shared her life with a small owl she had found while visiting the ruins of the Parthenon in 1850. A fledgling, it was being tormented by some Greek boys after falling from its nest. Florence gave them a farthing and kept the owl, which she named Athena. It lived in a bag in her coat pocket during the day and flew around the house at night. But cats were her constant companions during the long years spent in bed. She owned more than sixty over the years, including Quiz, Muff, Dr Pusey and Bismarck. As enigmatic, self-contained and sedentary as a cat herself, you can see why she liked them:

    I learned the lesson of life from a little kitten, one of two. The old cat comes in and says, ‘What are you doing here, I want my missus to myself.’ The bigger kitten runs away. The little one stands her ground, and when the old enemy comes near, kisses his nose and makes the peace. That is the lesson of life: kiss your enemy’s nose while standing your ground .
     

     
    Few people have stood their ground like Florence Nightingale. She once boasted she had never been ‘swayed by a personal consideration’. Her body may have let her down, but she always knew her own mind. The Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) suffered from an entirely different affliction. He had a hundred different minds to choose from. Like Florence Nightingale he was a depressive who died a virgin. He was also an alcoholic hypochondriac who died of liver failure at forty-seven. He had published almost nothing. The problem with Pessoa, though, is, who exactly was ‘he’?
    After Pessoa died, a wooden trunk was discovered containing more than 25,000 handwritten sheets of his work, much of it still unsorted to this day. The archive contains both poetry and prose, everything from horoscopes to detective stories. The contents established him as one of the great poets of the twentieth century, or maybe several of the great poets – the work was written by Pessoa’s hand but under more than a hundred different names – not mere pseudonyms but individual literary identities who wrote in consistently different styles. Pessoa said that the names were not synonyms but ‘heteronyms’. He described his alter egos as ‘non-existent acquaintances’.

    Pessoa began creating heteronyms aged six, writing letters to himself in French from ‘Le Chevalier de Pas’. His best-known creations are Alberto Caeiro (1889–1915), whom he described as ‘an ingenious unlettered man who lived in the country and died of TB’, and Ricardo Reis, a doctor who wrote classical odes. There was also Álvaro de Campos – a monocle-wearing existentialist and naval engineer who liked writing in free verse. Caeiro, Reis and de Campos even wrote about each other’s work, dissecting it and being critical when needed. Some of the minor heteronyms were exotic, like the Baron of Tieve, a suicidal aristocrat, or Jean Seul de Méluret, a French essayist with an interest in dancing girls. Only one of Pessoa’s heteronyms was a woman – Maria José, a tubercular hunchback with crippled legs who pined after a handsome metalworker who passed by her apartment every day.
    Pessoa’s best-known identity is Bernardo Soares who wrote most of The Book of Disquiet , a remarkable sprawling biography that reads, in part, like a diary and was published long after Pessoa’s death. In his letters, Pessoa referred to the book as ‘a pathological production’ and a ‘factless autobiography’. At the beginning of the book he wrote, ‘These are my confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it is because I have nothing to say.’ Soares’s personality, said Pessoa, ‘is not my own, but it doesn’t differ from it, but is a mere mutilation of it’. He said Soares ‘appears when I am tired and sleepy, when my inhibitions are slightly suspended; that prose is a constant daydreaming’. This might sound more like fun than misfortune, but that would be to miss the quiet desperation of much of