Few of the poet Fernando Pessoa’s diaries survive, mostly businesslike lists of classes he attended or didn’t attend, people he met roaming the cafés of Lisbon, and daily activities. The most intriguing thing about these diaries is that they were generally written by someone else. For a few months shortly before he turned 18, Pessoa had a diary rubber-stamped on the top right corner of every page with its author’s name: “C. R. Anon.” Charles Robert was already the author, in English, of most of Pessoa’s teenage poetry. It seems that Pessoa felt his life was a novel, or else that his diary was the nonfictional record of an “Anon,” someone else who was living his life.
Pessoa: A Biography
by Richard Zenith
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Liveright, 1,088 pp., $40.00
Pessoa had dozens of these alter egos, which he would eventually call “heteronyms.” He gave them birthdates and biographies, cast their horoscopes, practiced their signatures, and brought them along on dates to sabotage himself. The three most famous heteronyms were poets: zenlike sage Alberto Caeiro, who saw things as they truly are, absent of concepts (“What is a row of trees? There are just trees. / ‘Row’ and the plural ‘trees’ are names, not things”; “Remembrance is a betrayal of Nature, / Because yesterday’s Nature isn’t Nature”); Dionysian Álvaro de Campos, a kind of Walt Whitman on futurist steroids who fully lived out all urges and desires, his and other people’s, with numerous male and female lovers and fantasies of everything from worldwide travel to being raped by pirates; and Ricardo Reis, stoic and classicist, author of rational odes to restraint and renunciation. These three figures are widely considered three of the four greatest twentieth-century Portuguese poets, the fourth being Pessoa himself—or at least Pessoa under his own name: Pessoa “himself.”