The Book of Disquiet Read Online Free Page A

him (in a typed inventory of Soares’s literary production) with the only previously published excerpt, namely ‘Forest of Estrangement’, dating from long before Soares was ever conceived. In Pessoa’s notes and extensive correspondence from the 1930s, in which he discussed in detail the heteronymic enterprise, Guedes never merits the slightest reference, and the three Disquiet passages from the teens that mention him by name were left out of the large envelope in which Pessoa, some time before his death, gathered material for the book. That same envelope includes a typed ‘note’ (in Appendix III) explaining that the earlier passages would have to be revised to conform with the ‘true psychology’ of Bernardo Soares. It may be argued that since Pessoa never actually brought off this revision, the early passages retain Vicente Guedes’s style and tone – more analytical, less emotionally impressionable than Soares – and therefore his authorship. But this is to take the game even further than Pessoa did. What is actually happening? The narrator – whether his name is Guedes or Soares – ages as the creating and informing spirit of Pessoa ages, and so the voice naturally changes, but not as strikingly as the voice of Álvaro de Campos, whose short and melancholy poems of the 1930 s were vastly different from the loud ‘Sensationist’ odes of the 1910s.
    Yet another disquieted persona, the Baron of Teive, was vaguely orpotentially connected to The Book of Disquiet , not as its author but as a contributor. Pessoa gave birth to aristocratic Teive in 1928, probably the same year that Bernardo Soares went from being a minor short-story writer to the author of Pessoa’s major prose work. Like Soares, Teive also suffered from tedium (one of the most oft-occurring words in The Book ), also found life stupidly meaningless, and was also sceptical to the point of no return, no salvation. His ‘only manuscript’, written on the eve of his suicide and titled The Education of the Stoic , was found in the drawer of a hotel room, presumably by Pessoa, who compared the Baron with the bookkeeper in a fragmentary Preface (see Appendix III ). Their Portuguese, wrote Pessoa, is the same, but whereas the aristocrat ‘thinks clearly, writes clearly, and controls his emotions, though not his feelings, the bookkeeper controls neither emotions nor feelings, and what he thinks depends on what he feels’. Pessoa himself was not always certain of this subtle distinction, for he labelled one passage (Text 207) B. of D. (or Teive?) , and there were a handful of other passages clearly labelled Teive that he subsequently placed in the large envelope with Disquiet material. Was he thinking of pillaging parts of the Baron’s ‘only manuscript’ for the benefit of Bernardo Soares? Quite possibly so, since Teive’s opus, contrary to what its ‘only’ designation suggests, was a hodgepodge of unassembled and fragmentary pieces that Pessoa had perhaps despaired of ever pulling together and cleaning up. The Book of Disquiet , much vaster, was that much more unorganized, but Pessoa loved it too dearly to ever dream of giving up on it.
    Besides threatening the Baron’s intellectual property, the ostensibly unassuming bookkeeper almost took over a large chunk of poetry signed by Pessoa himself. The above-mentioned inventory of Bernardo Soares’s literary output includes not only the poetic prose texts of The Book ’s inaugural period but also ‘Slanting Rain’ (written in 1914, published in 1915), ‘Stations of the Cross’ (written in 1914–15, published in 1916) and other poems by Pessoa founded on ‘ultra-Sensationist experiences’. These poems are nearly contemporaneous with ‘Forest of Estrangement’ and drink from the same post-Symbolist waters, so Pessoa thought – for a moment – that they might as well live under the same roof, on the Rua dos Douradores, which is cited at the top of the inventory. In fact the inventory is