[...] Campos was the dynamic, free-spirited heteronym—a bisexual dandy who studied in Glasgow, traveled to the Orient, and lived it up in London, acting out many things Pessoa dreamed of but never dared to do. Or never cared to? Whatever the case, Pessoa had no reason to regret having delegated his adventurous streak to Campos, who eventually wearied of his boisterous, footloose existence, coming home to Lisbon and to the realization that all his travels and shenanigans had been quite useless, since, as he had already discerned in an early poem, “however much I felt I never felt enough,/ And life always pained me, it was always too little, and I was unhappy.” So that Campos, besides sparing his creator the bother of living, vindicated Pessoa’s decision to let himself be spared.

[...] The only way Pessoa could conceive of being a poet was by not being, by pretending, by achieving complete insincerity:

The poet is a faker
Who’s so good at his act
He even fakes the pain
Of pain he feels in fact.
And those who read his words
Will feel in what he wrote
Neither of the pains he has
But just the one they don’t.

Or should we call those writings an expanding universe? Over the last ten years, as new texts from the archives have been transcribed and published and with many new players entering the picture, Fernando Pessoa & Co. has proved to be a larger, more complex enterprise than anyone had imagined. When Pessoa called his heteronymic venture a drama, he meant it quite literally, for his personae interacted, with him and with each other. They collaborated on publication projects, critiqued, and even translated one another. To use a trendy term, they networked. And so, in the heyday of Sensationism, his most fruitful literary theory, Pessoa invented Antonio de Seabra to serve as one of its critics and Sher Henay to compile an English-language “Sensationist Anthology,” which —had it been executed—would have featured work by Álvaro de Campos and Alberto Caeiro, the movement’s two most illustrious practitioners. Another movement, Neo-paganism, was ardently defended by Pessoa’s philosophical persona, Antonio Mora, who wrote at length about the importance of Alberto Caeiro and Ricardo Reis for the cause. Interaction was most intense among the main writer-characters, with Campos and Reis frequently commenting on Caeiro’s poetry, usually in glowing terms, while they were rather harsher on each other’s work.

Despite his megalomania, Pessoa harbored no illusions about the unexceptional, even bourgeois etiology of his disquiet

Thus all of the heteronym forger’s mysticism, nationalism, and other ardent divagations came back to none other than himself

Any nostalgia I feel is literary. I remember my childhood with tears, but they’re rhythmic tears, in which prose is already being formed. . . . I feel nostalgia for scenes. Thus someone else’s childhood can move me as much as my own; both are purely visual phenomena from a past I’m unable to fathom, and my perception of them is literary. They move me, yes, but because I see them, not because I remember them.

In what appears to be a cynical act of self-promotion, some of today’s theorists are building high-visibility careers on their “discovery” that the subject is a fiction, that there is only text born of text and leading to more text. Pessoa, acting on better faith, lived out the textual dream, or nightmare, paying the logical price of self-effacement, and he was well aware of the limits and potentialities of his enterprise and of verbal expression in general. Consider the following observation, which many a deconstructionist could subscribe to without qualms:

Everything stated or expressed by man is a note in the margin of a completely erased text. From what’s in the note we can extract the gist of what must have been in the text, but there’s always a doubt, and the possible meanings are many.

[...] The opposite of Faust, this troubled Portuguese soul traded in real life for the spiritual world of his writing. Perhaps most writers do this to some extent, but who has annulled himself like Pessoa? Not Joyce. Not Pound. Not even Franz Kafka. We can see Joyce as the brilliant conductor of his daringly dissonant narratives. We can see Pound hyper-actively promoting literary, political, and personal causes. We can see Kafka suffering—as it were in his own flesh—the agony of his negative metamorphoses. With Pessoa all we can visualize is what a handful of surviving photos show: a materialized nondescriptness endowed with a mustache. Pessoa was no language master à la Joyce or Pound. He wrote careful, elegant Portuguese, inventing new locutions and recasting worn-out clichés, but his project was not to deform and reform words and syntax. His project was the universe, with himself as the raw material. He was the object clay, endlessly molded, twisted, divided, and reworked by his writing. And in this autometamorphosis there was no torment or suffering à la Kafka. As if following the recommendation of a Reis poem to “Leave pain on the altar/ As an offering to the gods,” Pessoa stoically endured nonsuffering.