‘In how many of the garrets and non-garrets of this world / Are there self-styled geniuses dreaming this very moment?’ By his death in 1935, the genius of Fernando Pessoa was in danger of emerging from anonymity. For decades, remaining unknown outside a small circle of literary friends had been a source of inspiration and a rampart from which to engage in period polemics. Pessoa drifted between cafés, rented rooms and tobacconists, quays and commercial offices in Portugal’s backwater metropolis, imagining one day his fame would surpass that of Camões. He had doubts: ‘At this moment / A hundred thousand brains dream themselves geniuses like me!’footnote¹ But in his last years there were promising signs. He had acquired readers: a younger generation of modernist poets, clustered around the magazine Presença, would succeed in conveying his work to a broader national audience after the Second World War.

Internationally, talk of Pessoa spread in the 1960s, with a sweeping critical treatment from Octavio Paz at the start of the decade and another, narrowly formal, from linguist Roman Jakobson at its close.footnote² In the New York Review of Books the critic Michael Wood soon seconded Jakobson’s assessment of Pessoa as a great undiscovered figure of the generation of Joyce and Picasso.footnote³ But the breakthrough came after the publication in Portugal of his incomparable collocation of prose fragments, O Livro do Desassossego, in 1982. Four different English translations of it as The Book of Disquiet appeared in 1991 alone, and three years later Harold Bloom saw fit to include Pessoa in the elite group of writers of his Western Canon (1994), on the merits of his visionary reading of Whitman. Today a cottage industry of Pessoa scholarship rivals the Joyce machine. Every several years since the 1970s has seen the publication of fresh poems and prose from the massive trunk the author left behind at his death, a treasure trove still unexhausted.

Now Richard Zenith, Pessoa’s leading English translator, has delivered a comprehensive biography of the poet, the first of its kind in any language. Previous treatments of the poet’s life have been idiosyncratic, one recent effort the fanciful product of the retirement project of a former Minister of Justice in Brazil.footnote⁴ The very first biography, written by his contemporary João Gaspar Simões before Pessoa’s subsequent canonization, is in its fashion markedly Freudian in outlook.footnote⁵ The task Simões took on was and remains extremely difficult, due to the obscurity in which Pessoa operated throughout much of his life, the tumultuous political conditions of early twentieth-century Portugal and the poet’s own radical literary dispersion. Zenith has acquitted his huge undertaking—over nine hundred meticulously sourced pages—splendidly, the fruit of a dozen years of scrupulous research overturning many a legend accumulated in the previous literature (not a few deriving from Pessoa’s own canards or those of contemporaries), and dispelling the confusions that have surrounded even some of the most prominent episodes in Pessoa’s life. The portrait of the poet that emerges from his book is a work of striking sobriety and delicacy.

Typical of this combination is Zenith’s calm treatment of the sensitive subject of Pessoa’s sexuality. Conscious of the limitations of Gaspar Simões’s handling of this issue, he nevertheless takes it seriously and, without accepting the assessment of Pessoa as psychosexually infantile, devotes much space to charting the cursus of the poet’s eros, and the complexity of his competing desires. Through his poems, prose, letters and innumerable fragmentary notes, we see Pessoa navigating his homosexual impulses, slowly shedding an early resentment of women, embarking on an amitié amoureuse with a young woman who longed to marry him, acutely aware of the strange shapes of desire in human life, yet in all probability dying a virgin. Searching for the best description of the contradictions of this temperament, Zenith finally terms it ‘monosexual’, the pattern of an existence of what the poet himself called ‘self-fecundation’.footnote⁶ Such self-fecundity was, of course, directly related to Pessoa’s extraordinary literary originality: the invention of his famous ‘heteronyms’, dissimilar figures endowed with distinctive styles, backgrounds, and philosophical views to whom he attributed much of his poetry. As the monarchist Ricardo Reis, Pessoa composed carefully balanced neoclassical odes until he dispatched Reis into exile in Brazil after the failure of a royalist rising. Whereas Alberto Caeiro’s forte was nature poetry of an anti-philosophical cast, while the futurist naval engineer Álvaro de Campos staged bravura performances in wild free verse like a ‘Salutation to Walt Whitman’.footnote⁷ Besides this major triad there were dozens more, including the ‘semi-heteronyms’ Vicente Guedes and Bernardo Soares, two obscure assistant bookkeepers—‘sleepy’ versions of Pessoa who authored in successive stages the fragments that compose the Book of Disquiet. How appropriate that Pessoa, meaning ‘person’ in Portuguese, comes from the Latin persona, or mask. Many of these masks seem more approachable than Pessoa himself, whose ‘orthonymic’ poetry, signed with his own name, is uneven: capable but stilted English poems after Shakespeare, ‘swampist’ verses and ‘static dramas’ in Portuguese, a handful of poems in French: only the heraldic cycle Mensagem stands out as an indisputably major work.footnote⁸

Zenith’s biography is predominantly concerned, as it should be, with the nature and scale of Pessoa’s achievement as a divided, self-multiplied poet, in keeping with his reception around the world as a literary master. At the same time, his reconstruction of Pessoa’s life situates him not only in the aesthetic debates but the ideological conflicts that marked the cross-currents of Portuguese public life of the period. His report of Pessoa’s political interventions in these is attentive and respectful, if occasionally unsparing—holding that Pessoa, in seeing politics chiefly ‘through a poetic lens’, was often too sweeping in his assessment of actors on the public stage.footnote⁹ But though Zenith’s judgements of this record are nearly always balanced and fair, they lack the depth and detail of the rest of his book. For his biographer politics is not a passion, whereas for Pessoa it unpredictably was. Nothing is stranger than this side of his life. For if he was seldom assured writing poetry in his own voice, Pessoa displayed surprising fluency and self-confidence in his writing on politics. This neglected portion of his corpus is enormously varied, encompassing contributions to some fifty publications, drafts of articles intended for English or French newspapers, innumerable unpublished notes of varying tone and level of completion. In sheer quantity and diversity, it is doubtful if there is a poet of his age who could match Pessoa’s political output, which comes to us as a sprawling mine of insights on a disordered time by one of its most remarkable minds, as capable of unsettling analytic capacity as of polemical excess. A full appreciation of Pessoa’s gifts cannot escape taking the measure of this unexpected dimension of them.

Keeping his distance equally from ‘demo-liberal’ bourgeois opinion, from fascism and from traditionalist monarchism, Pessoa presented himself idiosyncratically as a nationalist averse to Catholicism, a severe critic of democracy yet a proud liberal. That pose attracted little contemporary attention. As Paz puts it, though the ‘harsh light of scandal’ momentarily fell on his name on several occasions, each time it faded always into the darkness of obscurity.footnote¹⁰ His political writing, often incisive, sometimes infuriating, always unusual, has never attracted a posthumous readership on a par with his poetry, and what scant attention it has drawn from scholars has for the most part been highly critical. The leading exception is José Barreto, editor of an impressive collection of Pessoa’s texts on themes of fascism and dictatorship in Portugal and abroad, handsomely produced by Tinta da China, featuring many documents appearing in print for the first time, an extensive introduction by Barreto, careful explanatory notes to the texts and painstaking descriptions of their provenance and publication history.footnote¹¹ Photos of newspaper articles offer a glimpse into the literary culture of the period, while scans of Pessoa’s handwritten notes show the author’s infamously indecipherable penmanship and rejection of modernizing orthographic reforms introduced by the republican government of his early adult years. The sheer volume of political material composed by Pessoa—the trunk in which he left his unpublished writings numbered some 28,000 items—has nevertheless forced Barreto to be selective chronologically as well as thematically. Concentrating on the period from 1923 to Pessoa’s death in 1935, the collection omits the highly productive phase of his life from 1914 to 1922, without which no overview of Pessoa’s political writing can be complete.

Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888. Descended on his mother’s side from the minor nobility of the Azores and on his father’s from a general who fought on the liberal side in the civil wars of the nineteenth century, like many Portuguese he was also in part a descendant of Jewish conversos. On his fifth birthday his father, a civil servant and music critic for a Lisbon newspaper, died of tuberculosis, leaving the family in a precarious financial situation—promptly remedied by his mother’s remarriage to a naval officer appointed Portuguese consul in South Africa, which brought the child to Durban. There he proved an excellent student at the English colonial school in which he was enrolled, absorbing Poe, Keats and Tennyson, and contributing to its student magazine a suggestive, precocious essay championing Carlyle over Macaulay. Yet as a Portuguese national his prospects within the British Empire were dim, and in 1905 the seventeen-year old returned alone to Lisbon, while his mother and stepfather remained in Africa.