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The History of Literature
678 Fernando Pessoa (with Bartholomew Ryan) | My Last Book with Robin Waterfield
01:09:28
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- [00:02]
Jack Wilson
The History of Literature podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. Remember last year's amazing trip? That cute first birthday party? All those photos, all those memories can be freed from your phone with a Shutterfly photo book. Rediscover and share your favorite moments with those you love. You'll be amazed how easy it is to make a photo book with Shutterfly and enjoy it for years to come. Get 40% off orders over $20. Code pod40@shutterfly.com and make something that means something. Welcome to the White Lotus in Thailand.
- [00:41]
Bartholomew Ryan
It's a wellness center. You should get a facial. The lady in the airport thought you were my dad.
- [00:46]
Jack Wilson
My God.
- [00:47]
Bartholomew Ryan
The Emmy award winning HBO original series returns.
- [00:50]
Jack Wilson
There has been more crime on the island. I'm a little freaked out. What happens in Thailand stays in Thailand. What does that mean? It means we're not dead yet. Amen.
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Bartholomew Ryan
Amen. A new season of the HBO original series the White Lotus premieres February 16th at 9pm on MAX.
- [01:08]
Jack Wilson
Hello. As a young man, the Portuguese modernist Fernando Pessoa aspired to be plural, like the universe. How did he do it? Well, he invented over 100 fictional alter egos which he called heteronyms and got them to work writing poetry. We'll ask his biographer, Bartholomew Ryan to help us make sense of one of the 20th century's greatest and most baffling poets today on the history of literature. Okay, here we go. Where to begin? Oh, wait, I know where to begin and I've forgotten myself. Here we begin with a theme song and a few little words like, I'm Jack Wilson, welcome to the show. Thank you for being here today. Fernando Pessoa. Where to begin with him? This is someone you can dive deep into and never come back. Really? Maybe a little like my trip to Tibet. I went up and up and up and I've never really come back down. I still feel that way. I would imagine that you go deep into Pessoa and maybe you don't quite come back intact as the self you once were because your mind has compartmentalized in a bunch of different ways. Trying to get a hold of who this guy was and what exactly he was up to in his poetry. It's like those Star Trek beamings where they dissolve into. What is it? They dissolve into molecules, atoms. And then they're re beamed back up into the spaceship. And now I have to look it up so the Trekkies don't groan so loud that I can hear them all the way up here in my Spaceship. So, let's see. Transporters allow for teleportation by converting a person or object into an energy pattern, a process called dematerialization, then sending, beaming it to a target location or else returning it to the transporter where it is reconverted into matter. Rematerialization. Okay, so that's the stuff of science fiction. We can't actually do that. And, well, if someday scientists invent it, it will be very cool. I wouldn't mind getting rid of my commute and beaming around the world would be a joy. But you know what? I'm not going first. You first, Elon. But of course, we're at least six months away from this happening. And we will be six months away from rolling it out, probably forever. Pessoa had a different idea. Pessoa said, I actually don't know if Pessoa ever thought about his body being reduced to energy and transported from one location to another. But he didn't need to. Pessoa's idea was, what if me, my essence, my personality, is reduced in some way, dissolved into something and transformed into something slightly different? A different version of me. Or maybe not me. Maybe it's someone else. And maybe that person, too, is a poet who has different needs and wants and desires and stylistic preferences and who fits into the canon of poetry in a slightly different way. It sounds like the work of a madman. And maybe it is. Or maybe a genius. Or both. We'll ask Bartholomew Ryan to weigh in on what Pessoa did and why he did it. And then we'll have Robin Waterfield, our expert in Aesop's fables, who will join us for a discussion of the last book that Robin will ever read. But first, Bartholomew Ryan and Fernando Pessoa. Okay. Joining me now is Bartholomew Ryan, a philosopher, musician and researcher who is based at Efil Nova, New University of Lisbon. He's here today to discuss his book, Fernando Pessoa, part of the Critical Live series from Reaction Books. Bartholomew Ryan, welcome to the history of literature.
- [05:16]
Bartholomew Ryan
Thank you very much, Jack. It's a pleasure. And thank you for the invitation.
- [05:21]
Jack Wilson
So a lot of this is going to take us into the world of the imaginary or the shifting realities. But let's start with some basic facts, if we can. Fernando Pessoa was born in 1888 and he died in 1935. How would you describe his childhood?
- [05:45]
Bartholomew Ryan
Well, as you said, yeah. Fernando Pessoa, he was born in Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, just at the end of the 19th century. And he was born into a. I guess a Middle class family in Lisbon. He was born right in the center of Lisbon, literally opposite the Teatro Sao Carlos apartment there. And you could say, but already from a very young age, he was moving around a bit because his father died in 1983, only a few years after Fernando was born. His brother Georges died in 1894. So very quickly there was this kind of sense of loss. But quite a good fortune happened to his mother and that she met a man on a tram called Joao Miguel Rosa, who was a naval officer and soon to be a Portuguese consul in Durban, which was the capital of the British colony of Natal, and she married him and in 1895. So when Pessoa was just six, they moved to South Africa. So he spent his childhood in South Africa and lived there with his mother. And they were very happy. His mother was very happy in the new marriage, despite the loss. So his actual father, biological father, and he lived there for. Right until he was, I guess, 17 and 18 in 19 oh, what was it now? It would be 1905, he moved back to Lisbon and went there by himself. He traveled alone or both from South Africa up to Lisbon. So you have this kind of sense of exile within him from an early age.
- [07:27]
Jack Wilson
Right.
- [07:28]
Bartholomew Ryan
It was a formal Portuguese family, but his mother was able to adapt. And he grew up with different languages as well, because he was speaking Portuguese, but also French. His father and mother both spoke French and he was speaking English. He got an English, a British kind of British colonial education. So he grew up writing in English and. But having some kind of trilingual. So very early on he had this capacity for languages and was. Was exposed to this. And he was also already quite a loner, you know, so that was really his childhood.
- [08:02]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. Did he come back to Portugal to continue his education?
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Bartholomew Ryan
He came back to start university there.
- [08:10]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
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Bartholomew Ryan
So. And from a very early age he showed a great proficiency in writing. He won a number of prizes in the South African education, and so high proficiency. And interestingly enough, he wrote his first few hundred poems in English and he wanted to be an English language poet, but he moved back to Lisbon to study at the University of Lisbon. It didn't last. He dropped out a year later from university and he felt that he wasn't going to learn much from there.
- [08:40]
Jack Wilson
Right. So when did he start writing poetry? Was this part of his South African experience as well or something? He started when he was in South Africa.
- [08:52]
Bartholomew Ryan
Well, actually, it's quite amazing because I think his first poem, as far as we know, was written to his mother in Portuguese. Would have Been. I think it was in 1895. In the spring of 1895. So you're talking when he was only five or six.
- [09:08]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [09:09]
Bartholomew Ryan
And he wrote that to his mother in Portuguese and it's quite a proficient little poem, a beautiful little poem to my dear mother in Portuguese just before they. They moved to South Africa. He wrote his first English language poem in 1901. Separated from the, you know, gone. You see this isolation already 1901, when he was, I guess 11. So it started very early his interest in poetry and, you know, articulating through the kind of poetic form. So. And right at 7 page and then later on and in English at 11 years of age. So very young.
- [09:46]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. Now did he. We're going to have to tackle this. Even though this could. It kind of makes my head spin. But his alternative selves, when did he start inventing them? Were they always connected to his poetry and he was creating different characters in his mind to write different poems or was this something that he did in real life as well, imagining himself in other guises?
- [10:18]
Bartholomew Ryan
Yeah, it's a big question. I mean, of course, again, he started creating alter egos or different selves very early as well. The first one was in. And it's very revealing was in French, neither Portuguese or English, called the chevalier de Pas. 6 years of age and already you see Fernando Pessoa's playfulness because that the Chevalier de Pas could be translated as Knight of not, but also Knight of Step Pa has this ambiguity in French. So already he was. And Chevalier the pad didn't really write anything already. It was just a name. And so a lot of these early. It started very early and then all the way through his life and they became more and more developed. Chevalier didn't have much of a personality. It was just a beginning. And then he started to create kind of fictional friends in school in South Africa and that had clubs like the Nothingness Club and these different. They weren't exactly poets. Some of them they were potentially writers or essayists or had theories and different kind of figures. So was playing with as a kind of a young. Young boy and then as a teenager and then his first kind of most. First really developed. We'll get on to the name of it. Heteronym, we'll say. But was Alexander Search, that was his first. Oh yeah, you say that. Was it part of him or was something else? Because already Alexander Search was still kind of almost a synonym of Pessoa because he shared the same birthday as Pessoa, but he wasn't it was hard to know. He could have been Portuguese or Scottish, he wrote or everything in English and. Or major or. Most of Pessoa's first poems were under that name, Alexander. Search a lot of them. So, and you have already the place in this, in Pessoa's interest in names, titles of the. Of the poets like Alexander, this kind of great. This could be a reference maybe to something. Alexander the Great or Alexander Selkirk from Dying, the foe novel. And the person that out at sea, the exiled person. Alexander then have searched the. The eternal Seeker, which was the eternal seeker. He famously said at one point, the secret of. Of searching is that nothing can be found. He says later in Portuguese. So yes, there wasn't just poets, there was many other types and they were. They were jumping all around the place in his teens, but they weren't. They were just sometimes fragments, maybe just a name of a person, a few fragments, all this kind of thing. And this grew and grew into adulthood and then something transformed later on.
- [12:59]
Jack Wilson
Now you present us with a quote that comes from Lenin, which is. One must always try to be as radical as reality itself. Is this kind of a key to understanding what Pessoa was doing, do you think? He was saying, you know, life is rich and full of. All of us as individuals, have all of these different sides to ourselves. And in order to really capture this, I need to explore the multiplicity of possibilities here.
- [13:37]
Bartholomew Ryan
Yeah, I mean, it was quite provocative to begin a book on Fernando Pessoa with a quote from Vladimir Lenin, not John Lennon, from people. Pessoa couldn't be more different than Vladimir Lenin. Pessoa hated mass movements and hated the Bolshevik Revolution. He was probably, if you wanted to kind of put him in a bracket of kind of a. Politically, he was kind of a liberal conservative. He believed in total freedom, freedom of speech, but he wasn't into any kind of mass movements. He was very suspicious of mass religious movements, groups and also. But also extreme movements of both fascism and communism. But at the same time, that quote by Lenin personally, I wanted to use it at the hook almost from my book, almost always tried to be as radical as reality itself, because he was answering a question to a young poet at the time in 1917, a Romanian poet, Valerio Marco, who documented that he was actually the first biographer of Lenin when he was kind of asking about creativity and how to go about being a poet. And that's what Lenin said. I found that fascinating when you think about with Pessoa, because Pessoa, he says, I mean, through one of his alter Egos or heteronyms. He more interested in reality than truth. You know, with reality is, you know, is this totality of both the unknown and the known. It applies to all. And suddenly I started seeing the word reality in lots of different places from all the different poets, the three major fictional poets of Pessoa interest in reality. And to the point where one would say, I'm not interested in the present, I'm interested in reality. Another one, that reality was insoluble, as it is everywhere, you know, that we're so this grasping. And then that famous line from Abu Dhabos and that I'm not reality, I want reality, not truth. And this reality, I think, is something that helps us to understand the. So is literally multiplication of the self, or be plural, like the universe. As he says in the scrap of paper, that to delve into the. I won't become the multiplicity. And so it's interesting to look at that as realities rather than identities. Pessoa was creating multiple identities, which was the reality of existence in all its forms. So this was the hook that I kind of begin and end the book with. Even the heterogeneous. You think about Albert Campbell. He doesn't exist, as I say, you know, but he very much does exist. We're talking about him today. There's someone that doesn't exist in flesh and blood, but his poetry and his expression is very much alive. And that's the reality of Fernando Pessoa without existing in truth, if you know what I mean.
- [16:21]
Jack Wilson
Right.
- [16:22]
Bartholomew Ryan
He was always delving into this, both material reality and immateriality. And it never stops. He's relentless. And we'll see this now as we go on in all the various avenues that Priscilla takes shredded out life and pursuing reality.
- [16:37]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, that is interesting, because in some ways, you know, we often will talk about literature and we'll say, well, it isn't reality, but it is truth. And he's got it flipped around there, where he's saying he's interested in reality instead of truth. And I guess what he means is you might say, well, the facts here are that you, Fernando Pessoa, wrote this poem. We know that you are that person. And this poem was written by your hand, so to speak. And what he's saying is, well, no, the way literature works is you see a poem on the page and there's a name attached to the poem, and then it has its own reality at that point. It's sort of you in your mind are attaching the name to the poem and the Image you have of the poet comes just from those words on the page.
- [17:35]
Bartholomew Ryan
Yeah, I would agree with that. Yep. Of course, Pessoa as well. I mean, there's so much, so many contradictions with Pessoa. That's what's great about it, I guess, is that even the poet is a representation of that reality as well. So these fictional poets, they have a personality, they have feelings, they have political views, and they're always transforming. And so Pessoa is almost the least present of them in some forms. There's a point speaking, Fernando, Pessoa doesn't really exist. And so this question of existence, what is more real, the practical existence or the reality of creation, that's something that is left there. I think we find this in Faust by Goethe. And when Mephistopheles says life is short, the art is long, that very much Pessoa he kind of knew. Well, look, they'll be reading long after I'm gone. It doesn't. So he had a terrible, terrible problem publishing things and finishing things. But there was this certainty with Pessoa that his writing was going to be. Was entering a reality that here we are, you know, almost 100 years later, discussing Pessoa, and it's growing and growing as we go on. So this is the reality that Pessoa was interested in and fluidity of being human. And he was very much inspired by. I mean, this was already. You see this in romantic poets like John Keats, the idea of a negative capability living in uncertainties. This negative capability that John Keats talks about, becoming the chameleon poet. To be a poet is to be chameleon, is to be a trickster. And you're always being fluid. And that's what reality is, biologically speaking, where our blood cells, where everything is changing all the time. And that so is very helpful. And for us to know that as well, that this. We look at that as reality. It's not to do away with truth, but we have to be wary that truth is not a fixed thing. It belongs to reality. We forge truths and we discard truths. It's very Nietzsche as well. You know, the idea of Nietzsche, when Nietzsche taught the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, that truth is a mobile army of metaphors. And that is fantastic. And it's. It can stick. It can stick for thousands of years, it can stick for a few hundred years, but it will crumble and something else will be born out of that reality. Other hands seems to encompass, as I said this, the known and the unknown, the mystery and the physical things at the Same time. And we see this then with the. So as he tries to express this to various different voices and various different contrasting opinions to his different poets.
- [20:22]
Jack Wilson
You've used the term a few times, heteronym, and that is the Pessoa prefer. He preferred that term to pseudonym. Why did he prefer heteronym over pseudonym? What did he mean by heteronym?
- [20:39]
Bartholomew Ryan
Yeah, that's obviously very important and one of the crucial parts of the whole of Pessoa's universe or multiverse, because I think as far as we can see, kind of more or less literally popularized or coined this phrase heteronym, which literally means other name, but and pseudo nom means false name. So big difference for Pessoa, because pseudonyms often are just are articulating ideas that you have and you want to hide under a different name. But with Pessoa, heteronyms literally had different personalities. They could disagree completely to Pessoa. With Pessoa they had biographies, they knew each other. I mean, there was three great heteronyms for Pessoa that were poets. They all knew each other. They had different styles of writing, different political views, different religious views. So they were very much completely othered than Pessoa. And Pessoa would talk about them, especially one of them about the. Cairo was his greatest achievement because he said he was so unlike him. That's why it was. He was his proudest achievement creating this one poet called Alberto Cairo, because he was so different than Pessoa in personality and style, way of life in his writing. And that's what makes a heteronym. So Pessoa created all these poets, and in Portugal today, many of these. You could consider three or four of these poets as the greatest poets in the Portuguese language of the 20th century. Some of them rejecting. They're all under the invention of Fernando Pessoa. So they're not pseudonyms at all. But yes, heteronyms, as Pessoa calls them.
- [22:11]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, sometimes when we talk about a pseudonym, we talk about, well, this freed up the writer, this, you know, using a pseudonym, or an author will say later, I found that it was liberating for me to inhabit this role or this Persona and to get away from myself. Maybe that seems like that might be part. Do you think that's true to some extent for Pessoa, or do you think that explains a lot? Or do you think it's only a part of what he's up to here?
- [22:45]
Bartholomew Ryan
Yeah, that's a great question, because I think it's good to make a comparison with and I like to do that as part of my book, is to have this creative conversation going on with other poets and thinkers. A good example, like Sren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher who use pseudonyms famously to give different points of view. So he has over a dozen pseudonyms kind of analogous to Pessoa in poetry. But I think the difference is Kierkegaard pseudonyms are kind of between being pseudonyms and heteronyms, because they also. Some of them know each other and they have different points of view. But as you said, I think Kierkegaard used them to literally empty out himself, empty out different aspects of the self and show different you as part of his philosophical existential project. With Pessoa, it's a bit different because yes, it was definitely a way. An artist famously, and so was fond of Oscar Wilde and references Oscar Wilde often to put on a mask and he'll tell you the truth, famously as. As kind of think as Oscar Wilde said. But in this case, yes, it helped Pesso a lot to communicate and express himself and to liberate himself from himself. But it goes deeper because he started so young, remember I said, at five years of age, body of the path. And they literally become, as he calls it, a drama in people he creates. He wants the. For him, Shakespeare was the great writer to kind of. To surpass the same way that James Joyce saw Shakespeare as the author to surpass. So as Shakespeare created so many different personalities, extraordinary characters, and Shakespeare disappears completely in his plays, de so wanted to try to do the same thing, to be completely gone. So maybe there of course is an element of being able to express yourself much more through a different name. But he goes much further than that in that he really kind of finds this Archimedean point, this way of really going deep, and maybe we'll get on to this. But he as in trying to experiment through esoteric writings and all these other ways of exploring that he really seems to be able to touch or become something completely other. And you'll see this when you read the other poets. They really take a life of their own. And they are characters and poets and separate entities where they even invade his own life, you know. And the one brief time that Pessoa had a love affair with a woman called Ophelia Courage Alva the campus, one of his heteronyms interfered, wrote her a letter telling her to kind of more or less leave Pessoa alone. He needs to. He needs to get back to his work. And she also said to Pessoa in Person, I don't like your friend out of the campus. So she exist in any in the real sense. But she was entering Pessoa's reality. She realized this person was very real. And so would say, today I am not. I'm Albert de Campos. So is not here. So there was. He was channeling these avatars, you know, and these different figures. And you'll see this more and more as it goes on, especially in his great unfinished book, the Book of Disquiet. The way talking about how delving inside oneself you become many other things. It was. So it's there from the beginning to the end of his life. Yeah, very deep.
- [26:00]
Jack Wilson
You know, as you were talking about this and comparing him with Shakespeare and Shakespeare's characters, it made me wonder. I mean, I've been thinking about this as well. He would put on these different cloaks, so to speak, or these different Personas in order to get the poems that he wanted to get out onto the page. But what I'm thinking now is maybe his project was less about how do I get the poems that I want to get out in the different voices, and more that he wanted to create poets, that he wanted to create these. That his real project wasn't so much the end result being the poems, but the end result were the poets who were writing these poems.
- [26:47]
Bartholomew Ryan
Yes, I mean, he says himself to kind of create an empire of poets. Yeah, this is the kind of the revolution of the modernism, the Portuguese modernism. I mean, he set up a magazine called Orfeo with a very good friend of his, a poet also called Mario de Seconero, who's a very famous poet in Portugal today, who died quite young. Died very young. But they were. They formed this magazine, only had two issues where they had this project to really scandalize the kind of literary environment in Portugal. And Alva de Campos publishes his first poems in this magazine. Pessoa publishes a play. And there are other quite eccentric and some of the mad poets that are involved. And Pessoa literally wants to create this empire. He called it the Fifth Empire later on. And of course, again, Pessoa, he always kind of believes in everything and nothing that's very. It's very playful and very serious at the same time. The purpose and the folly, to go back to Shakespeare is always there with the sower. So as I said before, it's the poems and the poets all together create this revolution of poets. The Fifth Empire will be a spiritual empire for Fernando Pessoa, led by, of course, his poets that he had created. And the Fifth empire that comes from kind of these visionary poets in Portugal and a priest, Antonio Vieira and Bandara, back in the 17th and 18th centuries, the height of the Portuguese empire then. And they had these kind of prophetic texts about this empire of poets. And Pessoa develops this messianic element that in the future there will be a spiritual empire. We've had the Greek and Roman, we've had the Persian, we have the British Empire. The next will be a Portuguese, but it will be an empire of poets. It's quite beautiful, really.
- [28:39]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. Right, okay, let's take a quick break and then come back with more from Bartholomew Ryan about the life and works of Fernando. We're back. So, Bartholomew, do you think that Pessoa could have arisen at any time, that he was just that unusual of a person and thinker, that he would have developed these ideas? And especially because he started so young, maybe this is just something that was intrinsic to him. Or do you think he was tapping into the zeitgeist of what was happening in politics or music or. Or philosophy or literature of his particular era, the modernism. And a lot of modernism is full of fragments and fragmentation, for example.
- [29:58]
Bartholomew Ryan
Yeah, it's a good question. I think it's a bit of both, definitely. Pessoa, you can look at Pessoa and he fits in very well into the narrative of modernism. Remember, he's born in 1888 and dies 1935. Extraordinary years in Europe that. The first 30 years of 35 years of the 20th century and all over Europe. So in Portugal alone, it was extremely destructive and transformative times. So I mean, in 1908 the king of Portugal and his son were satinated in broad daylight in the middle of Lisbon. And that two years later the birth of the Republic of Portugal began. And that was the end of a 500 year old dynasty of the monarchy in Portugal. And so it was a massive big change and birth of a republic which was quite radical. This republic that was. That emerged when Pessoa. So by 1910s, Pessoa was just 20, 22 years of age. And then for the next kind of 20, next 15, 16 years, there was over 40 different governments. It was just chaos, bit like in Germany with the Weimar Republic and same a lot of experimentation. Pessoa was playing with the isms like all over Europe with Cubism, you know, you haven't got Cuban Expressionism, but so was inventing his own isms, Sensationism and Taoism and various different types of isms he was playing with. So that's very much with the Zeitgeist of modernism. And as you say, you know, this idea of plurality, you can hear this with Trotsky talks about the permanent revolution. Or you. This is the age of Einstein with, you know, the theory of relativity and our concept of space and time has been radically rethought. And you have this in painting, of course, with Picasso, and you have. So it's definitely happening. And then in 1926, a dictatorship was formed in Portugal. And then a few years later, the Salazar became the dictator of the military dictatorship until for the next 45 years. So yes, Pessoa, or 50 years almost. So Pessoa was very much part of that, playing with that and very much involved with that, writing lots of political texts as well and changing his mind over various things. The end of his life. Attacking Salazar because of censorship. He also. But earlier on, in 1928, he had written a piece on the necessity for dictatorship. So he had shifted all over the place himself at the same time. He is unique in a way. I think what makes him unique, of course, is obviously the heteronym invention and of creating all these poems. But he would have been a different kind of poet if he had been born two years ago. We have no idea what kind of poet he would have been. So. But you could also play the field of, you know, is this a very postmodern kind of poet or is he a classic kind of poet? Because so is many, many things. So. But yes, but he fits in and he's a great commentator of. Of that period, this extraordinary period. And it's not. I think it's quite fitting that in 1888, when he was born, that is the year that Friedrich Nietzsche said he wrote it wasn't. It wasn't published, was published posthumously about the advent of nihilism. The next 200 years will be the age of nihilism. What's ahead of us? And so I feel was not a nihilist. He was obsessed with nothing. And this idea, this chaos that was happening, you know, about the end of the gods per se, or when Nietzsche says God is dead, what he means is that old values are crumbling. The values of our old politics, the values of different, of Christianity, the values of colonialism collapsing and new values are emerging and there's going to be a big kind of violence. And we see this with what happens in the Soviet Union and the collapse of various empires like the Prussian Empire, the Habsburg Empire and the Portuguese Empire as well. And the birth of democracy, of course, and the birth of fascism. So many things were happening And Pessoa was tapped into the Zeitgeist completely. And so of course it informed a lot of his writings.
- [34:08]
Jack Wilson
Right. And Nietzsche had referred to it as kind of like the abyss, you know, that he's. He's going to be. He's looking into the abyss, which I had explained to me once as well. What happens when a society or a culture has everything that has given its structure, Christianity or it's the relationship between the individual and the state. And what happens when you pull that down? What happens when that disintegrates or disappears? What are people left with? What kind of self do they have when they can no longer define themselves by their relationship to God, for example? And it seems like Pessoa is almost like the exemplar of this idea that if you don't have these things that unify everyone because everyone is defining themselves by these well established institutions, then what you have is kind of a potential for a free for all and self invention, or everyone is creating it for themselves. And what he did was just did it for not just himself, or maybe instead, instead of doing it for himself, he did it for these poets and writers that he was dreaming up.
- [35:29]
Bartholomew Ryan
Yeah, I think that idea, there's definitely this in between the gap, there's a vacuum there. Another controversial philosopher in the early 20th century is Heidegger. And he talked about we're too late for the gods and too early for being. And that kind of mirrors the beginning of the book of described by the Soul when he talks. I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God for the same reason their elders had it, without knowing why. And then these young people choose humanity to replace God. And he's thinking, well, I don't want to accept humanity and I know it's too late to accept the God of the past. So he, as I said, creates all these different realities and he talks about neopaganism, one of his heteronyms, and tries to create a kind of a neopagan idea and where all the gods are welcome, you know, and they're on the same plane, including Christ and the Greek gods and Pan. And he's playing with that. And he wasn't alone. Of course, that was happening with William Butler Yeats and others, as esoteric realms were being embraced as we've had this massive vacuum, especially in World War I period, where there was this terror of what's going to happen next. And this is something interesting because 100 years later there's this feeling again, you know, of pessimism. What's ahead of us, you know. Yeah, we're entering a new era again and I think so it's very pertinent to read now. I don't think there's anything out of date about Pessoa at all when you read his. His ideas of. Of what it is to exist and the different pluralities. Because unlike Dante, for example, who calls on the muses to help him, Pessoa talks. Where are my muses? The muse is this echo, you know, I look down on a well and it echoes back at me and I have to kind of call on some kind of consciousness which is. Which is washed some nothingness and out of that vacuum create these figures and we have the stories. And that's how he keeps going then, you know. And that's a very modern idea, I guess, and a very contemporary idea.
- [37:30]
Jack Wilson
So what was his project in the Book of Disquiet? What was he attempting to accomplish in that book?
- [37:39]
Bartholomew Ryan
Yeah, I mean, the book is quite an interesting one because it, of course, it's the one big prose book, the unfinished book, a non book, because it was never finished. So he started writing that in 1913 with the first kind of fragments of it. And he was writing it until, I guess, a year before he died. So. And it never finished, so. And it had almost three authors that started this for Natapasoa. Then there was Vicente Greatest, which was a heteronym, and then that. And this was. And then he disappeared and there was a gap of about a few years. And then the late twenties he suddenly started writing the Book of Disquiet. And almost half the Book of Disquiet was written in the last kind of five years under the name Bernardo Suarez. And it's an assistant bookkeeper wandering through Lisbon, an ordinary human being and who dreams, talks about lucid dreaming. And at the Book of Disquiet. I mean, the title is Libro de seso Sego, a beautiful five syllable word which could be translated as disquietude or uncanniness or something, just unsettledness. But Disquiet, I think is a good title in English, the Book of Disquiet. And it literally, you could. It's one of these books. Every edition is different because it was left in kind of in chaos. There's lots of the. The entries are dated, so you can. You can publish it there. There are two major publications of it in English. One's published with chronologically and the other one kind of fixed almost thematically or to try to have some sort of flow. But they both work very well. And he delves into such contemporary themes on tedium or nothingness. And also he talks about different forms of literature and meeting different people. And the. The idea almost being extraordinary by being so ordinary, not having to go anywhere, just kind of wandering within a small universe, which is Lisbon, a kind of defeated city, and yet seeing the whole universe. And this is classic Pessoa. You know, Pessoa himself travels in his imagination so far. I mean, Alberto Campos goes everywhere. He was an engineer, studied in Glasgow, traveled to India and Africa, all over the world. Pessoa himself had never even been to Porto. I mean, he had that childhood in South Africa. But once he went back to Lisbon, he never went anywhere. He'd never been to any other country in the world. And I think as far as I can tell, he only went to Sintra and Cascais, just outside Lisbon, and down to Tavira, a small village where Abba, the camp was born in the south, and the Azores. But that's it. There was never. He never went anywhere else. He never went to port, never went anywhere. And yet he went everywhere. He talks about India. Why would I go to India when I've got my imagination, the thousand rails? And this is the great dream of the book of Disquiet. And there are so many incredible, concise passages about selfhood, you know, that he's one of the sensations or the character of an unwritten novel. There's another passage where he talks about he's the center that only exists in the geometry of the abyss and the nothing around which everything spins. Extraordinary passages. And Pessoa is one of the great elements or talents of Pessoa was being able to make philosophical ideas very concise. It's a very strong critique of someone like Descartes, where he said, I think, therefore I am. The famous birth of modern philosophy in Western philosophy, with Descartes coquito eco sombre. Pessoa writes, I doubt therefore I think, you know, to say I think therefore I am. For Pessoa's ludicrous I think then I become a multiplicity. And there's something quite close to the. Some of the ancient Indian ideas there, that this I is a multiplicity and a nothingness. And he really thinks there was quite something very reductionist in Western philosophy in trying to think, well, I've got my. I can think, therefore I am. And this Fukaso is a very much, a much more multi layered idea. And you see this with all the way through the book of Disquiet, and you can pick up a passage and read it anywhere, and it works in different levels, is almost a theory of abnegation. He's just refusing to live action. It can be seen as a very depressing book in some ways, but at the same time, it's a total celebration of literature and the word. And he plays with words, and it's unlike Joyce or something. It's easy to read. It's not so experimental in the language per se, but it's extremely profound in the structure and the ideas that are running through. The Book of Disquiet, as I said, which only published posthumously, and the first edition was only published 50 years after his death in 1982. And then since then, editions have got bigger in the 21st century because they found different parts. And now you have really some beautiful editions available in both Portuguese and in English.
- [42:35]
Jack Wilson
So, I mean, the distinction with Descartes is very interesting. The contrast with Descartes is very interesting, because Descartes is saying, I am going to take a skeptical approach to the concept of self and see if there's a bedrock, see if there's some kernel that I can't reduce things down beyond. And then from there I'm going to build it back up so I can find myself as an individual by finding that essential quality or the essential truth of it. And what Pessoa seems to be saying is if you are really going deep into examining yourself as an individual, you'll find that the self melts away. You'll find that you dissolve into multiplicity, and that you're more part of the cosmos and part of multiple voices. Not a single voice that you build yourself up from, but you realize that there exists no single voice. It's. It's a multiplicity. But as you as a biographer, how do you navigate that? Are you searching for the real Pessoa? Are you honoring his idea that he disappears in these characters? What do you try to get between the pages of your book?
- [43:57]
Bartholomew Ryan
Well, I think you said it there. I found one sentence in the Book of Disquiet, just it reiterates again, as a contrast to Descartes, he says, the. The author of the Book of Disquiet, by thinking so much, I became echo and abyss by delving when I made myself into many. And so what I tried to do in the biography, I think it's a combination of things. The so himself is, as he says himself very early, be plural, like the universe. He is a multiplicity. And of course you have Pessoa. He was born in a particular place. He has friends, he. But even in the intimate relationships, you know, with this Ophelia Querosch who has his letter, there's. There's a distance there of Pessoa. He never gets too intimate with this girl. It's mostly to do with letters. And then he drifts off again. I mean, his definitely, his loyalty was to literature above all things. And he had. He was loved and he had friends and they have. But they all speak about him in different ways as well. This kind of otherworldliness that he knew too much. Somebody said about him that he had to die. Very mysterious thing about Pessoa. So he was always this kind of ghost like figure in some ways that he was so deeply embedded in his imagination and in creativity that that's who the SOA became. And he talks about crying real tears about certain heteronyms. And the three heteronyms are Ricardo Reich about the Cairo, Alberta Campos. And very often, if you want to say the real Pessoa, sometimes we see the real Pessoa only when Alvar de Campos is talking about Pessoa or Alberto Caller. When Alberto Caller writes a love poem, he writes six love poems, which there's more kind of intensity and credibility to these than Pessoa's own love letters to Ophelia. So Pessoa does disappear completely into the other characters. But at the same time it's interesting because if you want to get to know, at the end of his life, you know, he died of 47, so he's very young, but he had accomplished so much in his writing, he feels like he's quite old. You see this kind of bridging together of the different poems. They're attributed to the heteronyms, but they could have been written by Pessoa himself and is a very revealing poem by Ricardo Reich, even though they're very distinct from each other, the different poets. But at the end of Pessoa's life, you see that maybe they're all kind of coming into each other at the end. If I could just find it for you. Where's it gone now? Yeah, it has no title and it was published in. In 1935. 13th of November 1935. So literally over two weeks before he died in 30th of November. And it's under Ricardo Reich. And he says, I'll just read out the first few lines. Countless lives inhabit us. I don't know when I think or feel who it is that thinks or feels. I'm merely the place where things Are thought or felt. That's attributed to Ricardo Reich. But that could be the campus of Fernando Pessoa as well. There is this merge maybe finding that is the Pessoa. And because they all as different as they are. At least Campos Reich and Pessoa come together in that depiction of the eye disappearing. And it goes back to Shakespeare again. I mean remember the first two words of Hamlet by Shakespeare are who's there? And that really sums up the. The universe of Pessoa. Who's there? It's a guard that's saying it to the. Into the. Into the night and to the ghost that's about to arrive. And their Pessoa is ghosts. And Pessoa, it's a beautiful name by the way. Pessoa because it means Pessoa is person in. In Portuguese. And you have that relationship to person in French, which is nobody or Persona, which is mask.
- [48:00]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [48:00]
Bartholomew Ryan
So I mean beautiful math nobody and person and that's Pessoa. You know.
- [48:06]
Jack Wilson
Did you feel like you. I mean you've explained this all so well. I feel like you've. You've kind of unlocked the clues here, unlocked the secrets for us. Did you feel that way when you were writing or did you feel like you were constantly pulling threads and opening doors that would take you into new areas and you were coming up with more questions than answers? And did it feel kind of vertiginous to be trying to write a biography of such a hard to pin down figure?
- [48:45]
Bartholomew Ryan
Well, I think the problem is, of course this biography is that I was kind of a contract to write a short biography. So I had to be as, as, as kind of concise as possible. And of course you miss a lot of things. But same time I'm. I'm hoping that the secret remains. It's up to the reader and, and go and travel with these secrets and to ponder. So I was really just trying to open up the university Pessoa under, you know, in less than in 200, whatever, 220 pages and to show the different. The kind of political vision, the obviously the poetic vision, the esoteric visions and the friendship and of course the book of disquiet and modernism. And what I did discover was I was quite pleased. I did see more and more of this kind of, for lack of a better word, this humanity in Pessoa, this, this love of humans for Pessoa, which I thought he was colder, you know, before. Yeah, actually it was not the case. There is a love in Pessoa which I kind of admissed somehow. I Saw it there, but I didn't kind of take it as seriously. But the deeper I went into. I mean, I've been living in Portugal and reading Basoa over the last 15 years, 13 years. So it's been a long journey before thinking about him and writing different texts on him and editing books. Until I came to write, the biography was always ripe. And of course, Richard Dennett's monumental biography, which is over a thousand pages, had done all the hard work for many years. And he's an extraordinary job. So I had an easier job, at least to just the information was there that Richard Zenith had miraculously brought together. But I was trying to figure out, yes, just to give these elements and to focus on reality. So I saw this kind of love and humanity in Pessoa, which I was really pleased about. And, and. And I think also the humor of the soa. There's a playfulness in Pessoa which sometimes is overlooked and sometimes you have this. People take it almost too seriously and all the depressing Pessoa and you read it out as if you're some kind of, you know, shadowy priest. And it's all very reverent. But actually there's a lot of fun in Pessoa and you have to kind of enjoy this whirlwind and don't take words sometimes. There's a mischief maker in Pessoa as well, and it's an openness. And I hope that in this condensed biography, the reader goes away wanting to know more. I want to read some Pessoa and is given just little, you know, hints and nudges and say, oh, yes. And then. So I was trying to navigate there by not giving ideas and having a creative conversation, as I said, with other poets and philosophers. For me, Pessoa is a philosophical poet. He famously says he writes it in English. I was a poet animated by philosophy, not a philosopher with poetic faculties. So he is a philosophical poet because you think of the philosopher. The philosopher is always the one in pursuit of the truth, and the poet may be the one who is his kind of create. The poem is a mode of truth. With Pessoa, it's both. You know, he's constantly pursuing truth and he's presenting modes of truth at the same time. And that's what I loved about Pessoa and this kind of both the pursuit and throwing you into the middle of things at the same time, you know, and not giving you a beginning or an end.
- [52:09]
Jack Wilson
Right. Well, what I like is that you. I asked you a few questions about you as a biographer. And both times you deflected it and suggested that it wasn't so much about your work or your result, but that you were giving it over to the readers. It's almost as if you're dissolving yourself. You're disappearing yourself as the biographer and putting it in the minds of the readers, which feels like a very poisoned move for you to make.
- [52:38]
Bartholomew Ryan
Okay.
- [52:38]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. Very appropriate.
- [52:42]
Bartholomew Ryan
Yeah. I think my voice is still there. I can't help it, because that would be great, actually, as long as they get beyond the first few pages and they, you know, they're, you know, brought in. They're seduced. Yeah. Into the universe of the SOA and the small book. And I think. So that was the goal, at least, you know.
- [53:06]
Jack Wilson
Well, and the other thing that I think is very useful is what you've said about his humanity and his warmth, because I think I know why it was easy to miss that. Because when you hear about this project, you think it's someone who is going to be holding the reader at arm's length all the time and saying, don't look for me. You won't get to know me, you won't see me. And it says a lot about our. The way we want to read, that we want to have an author at the other end of things. We want. I mean, even if we don't have one, like in the case of Homer, we'll invent one because we are so tied to this idea that this is another person who's speaking to us and telling us a story. And so when you hear about Pessoa inventing all of these Personas, you think, well, here's somebody who doesn't want to hold up his end of the bargain. He wants to be detached or removed from us. And instead, I like the idea that, no, no, you don't feel like it's going to be this iciness or that you're going to feel cold in looking for Pessoa or in reading these works by Pessoa, what you'll find is actually there is a lot of humanity there. It's just maybe not in the form that you're expecting it to take.
- [54:23]
Bartholomew Ryan
Yeah. And that we should also. I think we should also, when you delve ourselves into reading the different poets as real poets, you know, and there's so much heart and emotion in reading Alphabet. So, yes, we can get lost in this cerebral project of Pessoa. It's like, wow, that's really clever and unique and the Heteronyms and all these different characters, and we can get lost in the whole framework. Then just read the poem or read a poem by Alberto Cairo and you'll be swept away by the beauty and simplicity of the Alberto Cairo poem and say that's Alberto Cairo. Or then you go in reading Alva the Campos, this is the mad Alva de Campos who's totally neurotic and traveled the world and who he is. And it's. Or read the resignation of retardation in another moment and you've. He was kind of this pessimist and very elegant short poems like kind of almost odes of the Horatian type. Or then you read. So there's very different kinds of souls. So himself. So we shouldn't be afraid of doing that. And you know, I think in the. In the opening, which is sometimes in the book of Disquiet, it says Bernardo Suarez could it think the heart would stop beating? And it's a beautiful sentence. Could it think the heart stopped beating? And there's always this mixture or mixture of both thinking and feeling. So of course, extremely smart, intelligent, but there's a lot of feeling in there as well. All the time that. And he's. And that's very modern as well. This contradiction, you know, right. Think feeling always and. And that's of course what the poet has the advantage of over the philosopher. There's five senses this visceral. And the poetry he. Soa says he's quoting again John Keats. He writes in that same passage about being a poet animated by philosophy. The poetry of the earth is never dead. So he remains loyal to the earth. You know, Pessoa always. And I think that that's a wonderful thing at the end. You see this even as he gets older, at the end he's. There's an even more open minded human. As Pessoa develops. He's always changing, even though you'll say I'm not changing at all. But actually there's a lot of changing going on. Pessoa all the time. It just sounds a bit cerebral at the beginning, but actually there's a lot of heart and humanity all the way through. You know, as one commentator, Eduardo Arendt called him. If Kierkegaard is the spy of God, so is the spy of nothing. But what is nothing? Nothing is our consciousness. It could be that access into the abyss, which doesn't have to be a negative thing. It's actually this extraordinary kind of. Well, that creates all these wonderful things that we do as humans or we can do as humans at least.
- [57:04]
Jack Wilson
Okay, well, let's leave things There. Bartholomew Ryan, thank you so, so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [57:11]
Bartholomew Ryan
Pleasure. Thank you so much.
- [57:28]
Jack Wilson
Okay, and finally today, Robin Waterfield was here to tell us about Aesop and his fables. Would he choose a fable or two to be his last book? Let's find out. We are joined now by scholar and translator Robin Waterfield, who specializes in Greek philosophy and history, including Plato's Republic and Aesop fables. Robin, this question comes from a listener who asks, what do you want your last book to be? This will be the last book you will ever read. You can either choose one that exists or describe one that has not yet been written.
- [58:18]
Robin Waterfield
Well, all right. Some interesting assumptions in the question. It assumes I know the hour of my day and even how many hours or weeks I have to go before. But even so. Even so, whatever the logical flaws of the question, it has one perfectly simple answer for me. I would reread Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy. Yeah, I've read it. I've read it countless times, I think, certainly 20 times, maybe a bit more, and it's still my favorite book ever. I love it every time I read it, and so I might as well end my life on a note of love.
- [59:00]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. What do you love about it?
- [59:04]
Robin Waterfield
It's brilliantly written, by and large. It's a very, very exciting adventure. The characters are brilliantly drawn. The detail. I mean, he was a Knox for Don. He was an academic geek. Details of all the sort of elfish languages and so on and so forth. Just everything. And if I can make a slightly contentious comparison, I hate the films. I'm glad they were made. They've introduced a lot of people to the stories who might not otherwise have come across them. But films substitute gimmicks for profundity, plus introducing all sorts of episodes which didn't actually happen.
- [59:47]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [59:48]
Robin Waterfield
Whereas the books are just a pleasure to read every time. And you always get. However many times I've read it, I always get something more out of them.
- [59:57]
Jack Wilson
Now, how has it changed for you over the reading? I'm guessing when you started, you were probably quite young. How have your readings. Have they changed for you over the years?
- [60:10]
Robin Waterfield
Yeah, I actually used to say this to myself. I started reading them when I was 11. I'd already previously read everything else by Tolkien, Tree and Leaf and the Hobbit and Farmer Giles of Ham and all those things, and started badgering my parents to get me the Lord of the Rings, which, you know, we couldn't really afford. They were hardbacks and expensive and things like that. But I badgered successfully. And I actually remember saying to myself at the age of 12 or 13 or something, after having read them two or three times, that just. It's the sort of book that you get from suits every age and every level because you're always going to get out of it what you can.
- [60:50]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [60:51]
Robin Waterfield
So I'm sure I've, you know, every. Every time I read it, I see slightly different aspects of it. I mean, the last time I read it, which was I finished a couple of weeks ago, I think I was deeply impressed, as I have been before. But this was the sort of striking feature of this read, with his descriptions of nature, which are beautiful and obviously really heartfelt. You know, he loved just tramping around the woods and things like that and putting. And describing the woods and the hills and so in the books. Great stuff. Just great stuff.
- [61:25]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. I heard once, I think it was the critic Wayne Booth, who said he had read Anna Karenina three times and when he was 20, he identified with Anna and he thought, what is she doing with this old man? And when he was 40, he thought, how nice. He will teach her. And then when he was 60, he thought, what on earth are these people doing? But do you feel like you identify more with different characters as during your different reads? No.
- [61:59]
Robin Waterfield
And I think this is one of the great things about the book. I don't identify with any of the characters. I don't feel myself to be Frodo or Aragorn or anything like that. It's more. It's just. It's such a good adventure story that you're kind of rising above it and you're just seeing the characters move and do what they have to do and get into awfully horrible situations and extricate themselves and things like that.
- [62:24]
Jack Wilson
Right. Okay. Robin Waterfield, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [62:29]
Robin Waterfield
Thanks, Jack.
- [62:37]
Jack Wilson
Okay, there we go. My thanks to Bartholomew Ryan and Robin Waterfield for joining me today. Start your Henry James engines, people. Vroom, vroom. We're diving into the Jolly Corner next. And next. And next. That's right, three parts. So read along if you'd like to get a head start. Or don't, because I'm going to be reading the story aloud to you in three, hopefully digestible pieces. The Annotated Jolly Corner. What a great story for February. And then we'll lighten things up a bit with a trip to our own archives and some Nathaniel Hawthorne. Yikes. That's not exactly lightning, is it? How about. How about fairy tales? In Europe, which it turns out were racist as hell. And Emerson's reluctant. How about Emerson's reluctance to commit to an anti slavery view? He gads still not very light, is it? How about Sylvia Plath apocalyptic literature? Can I offer you Wuthering Heights? Boy, it's darkness all the way down, isn't it? No. No, it's not. We'll also have Emily Dickinson and Charles Chestnut and Alan Lightman. Boy light. Right there in the name. I'm Jack Wilson with Eck. Right there in the name. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.