The emergence of Fernando Pessoa as one of the world’s great modern writers, one worthy of Richard Zenith’s monumental new biography, has been nearly a century in the making. When Pessoa died in 1935, his family found one of the most sensational literary treasures to come to light since Lavinia Dickinson discovered 40 notebooks in her dead sister Emily’s chest. In the kind of featureless trunk used to store blankets or winter coats were 25,000 pages of writings.
Some of these works were complete. Most were not. It was hard to know what to do with this legacy, or even what it was. Pessoa’s handwriting was notoriously bad, first of all. He wrote in both Portuguese and English, the product of a South African childhood. But the most mystifying thing was that he didn’t seem to be a single person. He was a whole galaxy of writers — heteronyms, as he called them, with entirely different personalities and different, often radically conflicting, views on poetry, style, nature, politics and the antique. If they were all the creations of the man named Fernando Pessoa, the variety of the dozens of heteronyms made it hard to say who Pessoa himself was.
When his prose masterpiece, “The Book of Disquiet,” was published in Portuguese — this didn’t happen until 1982 — the edition immediately, inevitably became controversial. Some questioned the editors’ arrangement of the hundreds of fragments that make up the uncategorizable book. Others tried to distinguish between those that were written by Bernardo Soares, the professed author of the later sections; those by Vicente Guedes, who began the work; and those by Pessoa. These were harder questions to answer than they seemed — because technically, of course, Soares, Guedes and Pessoa were the same person.