QI The Book of the Dead

Pessoa’s life, a pain he numbed with drink. It also assumes that he was in control of his heteronyms, which it seems he wasn’t. That is what makes him so fascinating. As far as we can tell he wasn’t suffering from a psychologicalcondition like schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder, but his ‘possession’ was so extreme and complete that it chips away at our stable notions of ‘self’ and ‘personality’. In his influential essay, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, another great poet, T. S. Eliot, makes a very pertinent observation:
    Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things .
     
    What was Pessoa escaping from?
    He had spent much of his childhood in South Africa: his stepfather was the Portuguese consul in Durban. As a result, he became bilingual in Portuguese and English from the age of seven. His father had died from tuberculosis two years earlier (the year before Fernando created his first heteronym), and the following year he lost his younger brother too. His mother and stepfather soon produced two half-sisters and two half-brothers, but the rapid disappearance of his original family left Fernando feeling isolated and rejected.
    At school in Durban he excelled, winning poetry prizes and creating his own ‘newspaper’ in which he wrote all the stories and drew all the illustrations under the name Alexander Search. By the time he was fourteen he was sending riddles to a newspaper in Lisbon under the pseudonym ‘Dr Pancrácio’ (Dr Simpleton). When his mother took the family back to Portugal in 1902 he sent newspaper articles in the opposite direction – to a Durban newspaper written under the name ‘Tagus’ or signed with the initials J.G. H.C. or as Charles Robert Anon.

    When Pessoa’s grandmother died in 1907 she left him some money. He used this to set up a small printing company called ‘Ibis’, but it soon failed. Few anecdotes survive about him, but his half-brother João said that Fernando used to embarrass the family by staggering along the street, swinging on lamp-posts pretending to be drunk. Standing on one leg he would shout out ‘I am an ibis’. It’s fairly tame behaviour for a twentieth-century poet, but in the staid confines of Lisbon society it probably seemed extreme. Later on, Pessoa didn’t need to pretend to be drunk, as alcohol increasingly took over his life.
    Pessoa’s rejection of self is fascinating, especially as, of all ironies, pessóa means ‘person’ in Portuguese. (His name should properly be spelt Pessóa but he removed the accent over the ‘o’ because it felt more cosmopolitan.) Outside his immediate family Pessoa seems to have had no close friendships. He eked out a living as a translator, working for businesses that needed to conduct relationships with English speakers, and kept himself to himself in a set of small, furnished rooms in the old city of Lisbon. ‘Bernardo Soares’ explained:
    The idea of any social obligation – going to a funeral, discussing an office matter with someone, going to the station to wait for someone I know or don’t know – the mere idea disturbs a whole day’s thoughts .
     
    When he was thirty-two he formed an attachment with a young woman of nineteen named Ophelia Queiroz. There was probably no physical side to the relationship, he just wrote to her under different heteronyms for nine months and then broke it off. Almost a decade later, he made contact with Ophelia again but once more stopped communicating suddenly and refused toanswer her letters. He also wrote to the English occultist Aleister Crowley, assisting him to fake his own suicide when he visited Lisbon in 1930. Crowley must have found him beguiling. Pessoa would be gripped by what he called ‘automatic writing’ where he transcribed communications from the Other Side. He also received messages from his dead uncle, from the English philosopher Henry More (1614–87), from an inscrutable entity called ‘Wardour’ and occasionally from Count Alessandro di Cagliostro (q.v.). Some of these spirits rather sensibly urged Pessoa to stop masturbating and encouraged him to lose his virginity. He ignored their advice. Pessoa himself ridiculed the idea that actual spirits were getting in touch with him, but said he liked the