Jean Seul de Méluret Pessoa’s French heteronym, born on 1 August 1885, seems to have dawned on Pessoa’s imagination some time around 1907. Besides writing poetry, Jean Seul left two unfinished essays: ‘Des cas d’exhibitionnisme’, concerned with the phenomenon of young women who perform half naked in Paris music halls, and a moral satire titled ‘La France en 1950’ (or, alternatively, ‘La France à l’an 2000’), in which the futuristic narrator observes such oddities as a certain ‘Monsieur Sleeps-in-the-bed-of-fourwomen Giraud’ being hauled off to prison for ‘the crime of refusing to commit incest’.
Vicente Guedes The first large-scale heteronym to write in Portuguese probably came into existence in 1907 or 1908. Besides poetry, stories, translations and diaristic writings, Guedes was for a time in charge of The Book of Disquiet (see the Introduction). His biographical details – assistant bookkeeper and solitary bachelor living in a rented fourth-floor room in Lisbon – exactly match those of Bernardo Soares, who seems to have been his reincarnation.
Alberto Caeiro Recognized as their master by Álvaro de Campos, by Ricardo Reis and by Pessoa himself, Alberto Caeiro da Silva was born in Lisbon on 16 April 1889, lived most of his life with an old aunt in the country, and died in Lisbon in 1915, the victim of tuberculosis. He continued, however, to write poems through Pessoa until at least 1930. Billed as ‘Nature’s poet’, this supposed shepherd admitted in his very first poem that ‘I’ve never kept sheep,/But it’s as if I did.’ Conceived in 1914, Caeiro was originally destined to be a highly eclectic vanguardist, responsible not only for the apparently naïve, anti-metaphysical poems of The Keeper of Sheep but also for the long Futurist odes that came to be written by Campos and for some Cubist-inspired poems that were ultimately attributed to Pessoa himself. Divested of these more self-consciously literary modes, Caeiro retreated to the country with no other ambition than to see things as things, without philosophy.
Álvaro de Campos Pessoa’s most vociferous heteronym was born in Tavira, the Algarve, on 15 October 1890, studied naval engineering in Glasgow, interrupted his studies to make a voyage to the Orient, lived for a time in London, and eventually settled in Lisbon. A dandy who used an in-those-days stylish monocle, smoked opium, drank absinthe, and was as readily attracted to young men as to young women, Campos the writer initially produced loud and long ‘Sensationist’ odes reminiscent of Walt Whitman, but as the years wore on his poems became shorter and more melancholy. He never stopped being mischievous, however, meddling at frequent intervals in his creator’s real-world life. To the ire and chagrin of Pessoa’s friends, the naval engineer sometimes showed up in his stead at appointments, and in 1929 Campos took it upon himself to write to Ophelia Queiroz, Pessoa’s one sweetheart, exhorting her to flush all thought of her beloved ‘down the toilet’.
Ricardo Reis Born 19 September 1887 in Oporto, this classicist and trained physician was hazily revealed to Pessoa in 1912 but did not heteronymically affirm himself until two years later. A monarchist sympathizer (Portugal’s last king abdicated in 1910, whereupon a republic was formed), he supposedly moved to Brazil in 1919, though Pessoa elsewhere reports that he was a ‘Latin teacher in an important American high school’, and the archives contain an address for a Dr Ricardo Sequeira Reis in Peru. Characterized by Pessoa as ‘a Greek Horace who writes in Portuguese’, Reis composed short odes that advocated a stoic acceptance of life with its small and fleeting pleasures, its inevitable sorrow, and its lack of any discoverable meaning.
Frederico Reis Ricardo’s brother, of whom we know only that he lived abroad, wrote a pamphlet about the so-called Lisbon School of poetry (whose key practitioners were Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis), defending it as Portugal’s only truly cosmopolitan literary movement. He was also a sympathetic critic of his brother’s ‘profoundly sad’ poetry, which he described as ‘a lucid and disciplined attempt to obtain a measure of calm’.
Thomas Crosse Responsible for taking Portuguese culture to the English-speaking world, this essayist and translator was especially committed to promoting the work of Alberto Caeiro. ‘Strange and terribly, appallingly new’ is how he characterized Caeiro in an Introduction he wrote for an edition of the pseudo-shepherd’s Complete Poems, which he was supposed to translate into English. But this worthy project, like so many plans announced by Pessoa and his fictional collaborators, never amounted to more than a good intention.
I. I. Crosse This probable brother of Thomas Crosse wrote critical pieces in praise of Caeiro (for his ‘mysticism of objectivity’) and Campos (‘the greatest rhythmist that there has ever been’).
A. A. Crosse This third Mr Crosse competed for cash prizes in the puzzle and word games published in the pages of English newspapers.
António Mora As the chief theoretician of Neopaganism, a movement designed to replace an ailing and decadent Christianity, Mora passionately elucidated the genius of Caeiro and Reis, whom he regarded as direct poetic expressions of paganism. He also left dozens and dozens of typed and handwritten passages belonging to ambitious works-in-progress with titles such as Return of the Gods (co-authored by Ricardo Reis), Prolegomena to a Reformation of Paganism and The Foundations of Paganism (billed as a ‘rebuttal of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and an attempt to reconstruct pagan Objectivism’).
Raphael Baldaya Identified in a letter by Pessoa as an astrologer with a long beard, Baldaya was conceived in late 1915. In addition to horoscopes and his writings on the stars, he produced several philosophical texts, including a ‘Treatise on Negation’, in which he affirmed that being is ‘essentially Illusion and Falsehood. God is the Supreme Lie’.
Bernardo Soares The ultimate fictional author of The Book of Disquiet seems to have taken on this job in 1928, presumably the same year he moved to the Rua dos Douradores, but he was originally cast in the role of a short-story writer. Pessoa’s strong kinship with Soares – whom he called a semiheteronym, since his was not a different personality but a mutilated version of Fernando’s – is reflected in their names, ‘Bernardo’ and ‘Soares’ containing almost the same letters as ‘Fernando’ and ‘Pessoa’.
Maria José Pessoa’s only known female persona was the author of a single, long and pathetic love letter to Senhor António, a handsome metalworker who passed by her window on his way to and from work each day. Hunchbacked, virtually crippled, and dying of TB, Maria José had no intention of ever sending her desperate letter. ‘My days are numbered,’ she explained in one of its last paragraphs, ‘and I’m only writing this letter to hold it against my chest as if you’d written it to me instead of me to you.’
Baron of Teive Conceived in 1928, the Baron may have been Pessoa’s last invented author. Similar in many respects to Bernardo Soares (Pessoa compares the two in his Preface to Fictions of the Interlude – in Appendix III), Teive may likewise be classified as a semi-heteronym, as a mutilated or distorted copy of Pessoa. Endowed with Pessoa’s ultra-rationalist bent, he also incarnated his creator’s aristocratic pretensions (Pessoa was rather proud of the vaguely blue blood that trickled on his father’s side). Haunted, like Pessoa, by a helpless inability to finish any of his writing projects, the Baron finally took the rational, logical step of committing suicide. His creator, perhaps with a giggle, kept on writing.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
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