QI The Book of the Dead

fact that he could ask them for advice. They provided him with the social contact he couldn’t get from real people. For Pessoa, the only true reality was the one he (or, in this case, Soares again) created for himself:
    The experience of life teaches nothing, just as history teaches nothing. True experience consists in restricting our contact with reality and increasing our analysis of that contact. In that way our sensibility extends and deepens itself, because everything is within us; all we have to do is look for it and know how to look for it .
     
    Pessoa was twenty-six when he was first seriously ‘possessed’ by one of his heteronyms. He was standing beside a chest of drawers when he was overcome by the urge to write poetry. Standing upright at the chest he pumped out thirty poems in quick succession, entitling the collection ‘The Keeper of Sheep’ and signing it ‘Albert Caeiro’. He compared the experience to being in a trance, saying ‘my master had appeared inside me’.

    The literary critic Cyril Connolly once said that Pessoa ‘hived off separate personalities like swarms of bees’, but these were only apparent on the page: they were never shared with anyone else. Pessoa was a loner. He dined in the same restaurant every day for thirty years.
    If after I die, they want to write my biography ,
There is nothing more simple .
There are only two dates: my day of birth, day of death .
Between one and the other all the days are mine .
     
    Eerily, it was Álvaro de Campos (the monocle-wearing existentialist) who said, ‘Fernando Pessoa, strictly speaking, didn’t exist.’ The man called ‘person’, with over a hundred different personalities, spent almost his entire life denying his own existence.
    Like so many bright children denied proper affection from their parents, Pessoa read his way out of the lonely realities that surrounded him. The bustling pages of Dickens were a particular favourite:
    There are children who really suffer because they weren’t able to live in real life with Mister Pickwick and could not shake hands with Mister Wardle. I am one of them. I have wept real tears over that novel, for not having lived in that time, with those people, real people .
     
    Again this is not Fernando Pessoa but ‘Bernardo Soares’. Pessoa read the novels but Soares wrote about them. When reading any of Pessoa’s authors, the constant danger is to mistake the mask for the man. Though Soares wrote ‘I will never write a page that will reveal me or reveal anything else’, Pessoa actuallyrevealed a great deal. He is a unique writer – one who can be uniquely described as ‘multiply unique’ – because he delivers so many different styles, so many ideas, such a rich mix of insights and possibilities. It’s almost as if he created his own self-referential literary tradition as both inspiration and company. His own life might have been sad, short and tragic, but every bit as much as Florence Nightingale or Daniel Lambert, he – or rather his team – turned his misfortune into something of lasting value:
    If a man only writes well when drunk, I would tell him: Get drunk. And if he said to me that his liver suffers because of that, I would answer: What is your liver? It’s a dead thing that lives as long as you do, while the poems you write live forever .
     

     
    If Fernando Pessoa had more selves than he could handle, the English writer Dawn Langley Simmons (1937–2000) had only one, but she had two different bodies. In a life that veered wildly between vaudeville and Greek tragedy, she began her life as Gordon Langley Hall, the illegitimate son of Vita Sackville-West’s chauffeur. Later she was adopted by the English character actress Margaret Rutherford and had one of the first sex-change operations performed in America. In 1969 she broke another taboo by marrying her black butler in Charleston, South Carolina, the first legal mixed-race marriage in the state. As one of her obituaries commented: ‘It is a measure of the ascending scale of prejudice that, of all her transgressions, it was her crossing of the racial divide that most shocked her Southern neighbours.’
    Dawn Simmons was born either with both male and female genitalia, or –as she always insisted – with female genitalia that anadrenal abnormality had caused to look male. In any event, although she always felt female, her family brought her up to be a boy called Gordon. ‘He’ was raised by his grandmother Nelly