Pessoa: An Experimental Life by Richard Zenith

06 Jul, 2024

My sticky notes from Pessoa: An Experimental Life by Richard Zenith, probably the fattest book I have ever read.

Page 236:

New life in nature, innovative forms of literature, changed social orders, new systems of government (such as the imminent Portuguese republic), and spiritual transformations all implied the decay and death of what preceded them.

Page 316:

after drawing up an updated list of old debts and new expenditures in a memo book, he scribbled in large letters, in English: "Cut and run for clear intellectual life! December to reconstruct life."

Page 364:

The Book of Disquiet never ceased to be an experiment in how far a man can be psychologically and affectively self-sufficient, living only off his dreams and imagination. It was an extreme, monomaniacal version of Pessoa's own, essentially imaginative way of living live.

Page 366:

At the same time that Pessoa, in Lisbon, was keeping track of his debts, securing fresh loans, and devoting a significant amount of energy to assorted schemes and odd jobs that earned him not very much money, the poet Constantine Cavafy, who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, spent a few hours each morning working for the Irrigation Service—where he usually arrived late—and had the rest of the day free for reading, writing, and other pleasures. Why couldn’t Pessoa, like the Greek poet, hold a part-time job, which would have saved him considerable time and stress?

Page 404:

"happiness cannot be felt by someone exiled from his own faith and from his soul's natural habitat." Rejecting the modern world and the Christian religion that prevailed in the country of his birth, Ricardo Reis espoused the revival of Greek moral, social, and aesthetic ideals, and the introduction of a new paganism, adapted to the contemporary mentality.

Page 421:

Pessoa closely followed the unfolding of the Great War, which rapidly escalated beyond all expectations, spreading beyond Europe to battlefronts in Africa, the Middle East, and east Asia, but he did not let the unsettling events distract him from his own campaign of defeating the world through dreams, literature, imagination, and his heteronyms. It’s almost as if the poet, recognizing how appalling the war really was, became all the more determined to overcome reality itself.

Page 428:

In those days, with few governments and almost no private foundations providing grants to writers, patronage was direct and personal, and often came from women. We might not have Joyce's Ulysses, let alone Finnegans Wake, were it not for Harriet Shaw Weaver (1876–1961); Yeats counted on Lady Gregory (1852–1932) for financial help as well as lodging at Coole Park; and Margaret Cravens (1881–1912) underwrote Ezra Pound in his early years. Olivia Shakespear (1863–1938) directly or indirectly aided Yeats, Pound, Joyce, and Eliot. In the discretest way possible, without ever thinking of herself as a patron of literature, Lisbela da Cruz Pessoa Machado sponsored her cousin Fernando.

Page 430:

The more urgent and pragmatic function of the three movements was to furnish Pessoa’s literary circle with avant-garde credentials, setting it apart from the rest of Portuguese literature. Pessoa was also anxious to establish their originality in the international context, which is why he went out of his way to attack cubism and any other ism that hailed from Paris, lest anyone suppose that the isms of his own invention were mere offshoots.

Page 572:

Pessoa's most curious idea for fomenting culture was a "correspondence college" to be called Athena. Like his project for a magazine called Athena, dedicated to reconstructing the paganism of antiquity, the school of the same name aspired to leaven modern ways of thinking and doing with the spirit of the Greeks. It would offer instruction in some practical business skills, but the main focus would be on personal development, through courses in subjects such as Mental Culture, Literary Culture, and the Science of Idling. Some copy written by Pessoa for an advertising brochure explained: "We teach idlers, society people and mere decorative personalities—all those, in fact, who have no purpose in the world except having no purpose in the world." With English as its exclusive language of instruction, the school was conceived as a form of international outreach, whereby Portuguese professors—Fernando Pessoa and perhaps several Anglophone heteronyms—would teach the rest of the world how to sublimely, aristocratically do nothing at all.

Faithful to the spirit of idling promoted by its core curriculum, Pessoa took no practical steps to make the Athena school a reality.

Page 598:

Almost every great modernist is in some sense a classicist, and a Romantic too, since the Poundian aspiration to "make it new" implies familiarity and engagement with previous literary traditions. James Joyce wrote the quintessentially modernist novel by recasting The Odyssey.

Page 598:

"We pass and dream. Earth smiles." Painfully aware that all human endeavor is condemned to eventual oblivion, Pessoa sought to delay that fate through literature. Words, he believed, when organized into superior literary compositions, can outlive actions. Hence Oliver Cromwell, in some distant future, "will be remembered only because Milton mentioned him in a sonnet."

Page 595:

He retained, however, a few lessons from the Ibis disaster: think big but start small, reply on others for the initial capital investment, and use established print shops instead of purchasing his own press.

Page 649:

Deciding that it was better to show and not tell, Pessoa tried to make his magazine [Anthena] convey the spirit of paganism without any theorizing, explaining, or proselytizing.

Ophelia Queiroz around the time she met Pessoa:

The Russian naturist and poet Eliezer Kamenezky, in downtown Lisbon:

Page 728:

"No man should leave twenty different books unless he can write like twenty different men."

Page 854:

And yet he still, now and then, felt nostalgia for Catholicism. Sylvia Plath, in her only novel, used the bell jar to symbolize the life that stifles for lack of freedom, lack of air. Pessoa, in a poem written in April 1934, used the very same image to evoke the cozy feeling of being enclosed and protected by the Catholic Church as a little boy, before he began to ask questions.

Page 878:

On February 14 a magazine editor acquainted with Pessoa published an article whose headline promised “Revelations” concerning “the ‘enigmatic’ poet everyone is talking about.” He began by assuring his readers that the name nobody had ever heard of, now “drenched by a thousand floodlights,” was not an alias. A “minuscule intellectual minority” remembered him as the “occult, phlegmatic guide” of the Orpheu generation, whose “new theories of art and literature” were widely mocked but eventually prevailed. Since then the poet had kept a low profile, apparently determined “to hide like a secret” his “mission in life” and “to zealously fulfil it like a command of God.” Sometimes he could be found with other poets, journalists, and artists at the Café Martinho da Arcada, where he was the least talkative one in the group, but when he did talk, he inevitably delivered “the final word on the topic under discussion—using a strange line of reasoning, seemingly distilled by a brain […] from another planet.”

Page 914:

He distilled the essence of that truth in a new, three-part motto: "everything for the Individual, nothing against Society; everything for Humanity, nothing against the Nation; everything for Equality, nothing against Liberty."

Page 931:

Fernando Pessoa was an experimentalist, whose own life was the permanent subject of his research. Each of the heteronyms was an experiment, as was each of the philosophical, political, literary, and religious points of view that he successively adopted and successively abandoned. His relationship with Ophelia Queiroz was an experiment. So was the correspondence he had recently struck up with Madge Anderson. His attempts to be a businessman. His communications with astral spirits. His involvement with Aleister Crowley, pitting his inclination to white magic against the compelling allure of the black magician from Great Britain. All were experiments, most of whose procedures and results he recorded, like a scientist of love, of commerce, of religion, and so on.

Page 932:

According to The Book of Disquiet: "To belong is synonymous with banality. Creeds, ideals, a woman, a profession—all are prisons and shackles. To be is to be free."