The Book of the Dead

corresponded with many of the most famous people of her time, including Mrs. Gaskell, General Gordon (of Khartoum), William Gladstone, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. As far as romantic entanglements went, the closest she came to that was a long and witty correspondence with Benjamin Jowett, the master of Balliol College in Oxford, who became her spiritual confessor, encouraging her to write the last in her now tall pile of unpublished books, Notes from Devotional Authors of the Middle Ages, a history of mysticism. He called her “Florence the First, Empress of Scavengers, Queen of Nurses, Reverend Mother Superior of the British Army, Governess of the Governor of India.” She responded with: “Maid of all dirty work rather, or, the Nuisances Removal Act, that’s me.” As Lytton Strachey remarked, “She remained an invalid, but an invalid of a curious character—an invalid who was too weak to walk downstairs and who worked far harder than most Cabinet Ministers.”

Against all odds, Florence Nightingale outlived the misery of her condition. She died in her sleep at the age of ninety, shortly after becoming the first woman to receive the Order of Merit. In the last two decades of her life, she had mellowed. The intellectual arrogance, the not-suffering-fools-gladly impatience, and the perfectionism that had driven her faded, and she became an indulgent, eccentric old lady, devoted to her cats. Animals had always been a solace to her and she had often recommended the healing power of pets to her patients. For a while she had shared her life with a small owl she had found while visiting the ruins of the Parthenon in 1850. A fledgling, it was being tormented by some Greek boys after falling from its nest. Florence gave them a farthing and kept the owl, which she named Athena. It lived in a bag in her coat pocket during the day and flew around the house at night. But cats were her constant companions during the long years spent in bed. She owned more than sixty over the years, including Quiz, Muff, Dr. Pusey, and Bismarck. As enigmatic, self-contained, and sedentary as a cat herself, you can see why she liked them:

I learned the lesson of life from a little kitten, one of two. The old cat comes in and says, “What are you doing here, I want my missus to myself.” The bigger kitten runs away. The little one stands her ground, and when the old enemy comes near, kisses his nose and makes the peace. That is the lesson of life: kiss your enemy’s nose while standing your ground.

Few people have stood their ground like Florence Nightingale. She once boasted she had never been “swayed by a personal consideration.” Her body may have let her down, but she always knew her own mind. The Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) suffered from an entirely different affliction. He had a hundred different minds to choose from. Like Florence Nightingale he was a depressive who died a virgin. He was also an alcoholic hypochondriac who died of liver failure at forty-seven. He had published almost nothing. The problem with Pessoa, though, is, who exactly was “he.”

After Pessoa died, a wooden trunk was discovered containing more than twenty-five thousand handwritten sheets of his work, much of it still unsorted to this day. The archive contains both poetry and prose, everything from horoscopes to detective stories. The contents established him as one of the great poets of the twentieth century, or maybe several of the great poets—the work was written by Pessoa’s hand but under more than a hundred different names, not mere pseudonyms but individual literary identities who wrote in consistently different styles. Pessoa said that the names were not synonyms but “heteronyms.” He described his alter egos as “nonexistent acquaintances.”

Pessoa began creating heteronyms at age six, writing letters to himself in French from “Le Chevalier de Pas.” His best-known creations are Alberto Caeiro (1889–1915), whom he described as “an ingenious unlettered man who lived in the country and died of TB,” and Ricardo Reis, a doctor who wrote classical odes. There was also Alvaro de Campos—a monocle-wearing existentialist and naval engineer who liked writing in free verse. Caeiro, Reis, and de Campos even wrote about one another’s work, dissecting it and being critical when needed. Some of the minor heteronyms were exotic, like the Baron of Tieve, a suicidal aristocrat, or Jean Seul de Meluret, a French essayist with an interest in dancing girls. Only one of Pessoa’s heteronyms was a woman—Maria Jose, a tubercular hunchback with crippled legs who pined after a handsome metalworker who passed by her apartment every day.

Pessoa’s best-known identity is Bernardo Soares, who wrote most of The Book of Disquiet, a remarkable, sprawling biography that reads, in part, like a diary and was published long after Pessoa’s death. In his letters, Pessoa referred to the book as “a pathological production” and a “factless autobiography.” At the beginning of the book he wrote, “These are my confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it is because I have nothing to say.” Soares’s personality, said Pessoa, “is not my own, but it doesn’t differ from it, but is a mere mutilation of it.” He said Soares “appears when I am tired and sleepy, when my inhibitions are slightly suspended; that prose is a constant daydreaming.” This might sound more like fun than misfortune, but that would be to miss the quiet desperation of much of Pessoa’s life, a pain he numbed with drink. It also assumes that he was in control of his heteronyms, which it seems he wasn’t. That is what makes him so fascinating. As far as we can tell, he wasn’t suffering from a psychological condition like schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder, but his “possession” was so extreme and complete that it chips away at our stable notions of “self” and “personality.” In his influential essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” another great poet, T. S. Eliot, makes a very pertinent observation:

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.

What was Pessoa escaping from?

He had spent much of his childhood in South Africa: His stepfather was the Portuguese consul in Durban. As a result, he became bilingual in Portuguese and English from the age of seven. His father had died from tuberculosis two years earlier (the year before Fernando created his first heteronym), and the following year he lost his younger brother, too. His mother and stepfather soon produced two half sisters and two half brothers, but the rapid disappearance of his original family left Fernando feeling isolated and rejected.

At school in Durban he excelled, winning poetry prizes and creating his own “newspaper” in which he wrote all the stories and drew all the illustrations under the name Alexander Search. By the time he was fourteen he was sending riddles to a newspaper in Lisbon under the pseudonym Dr. Pancracio (Dr. Simpleton). When his mother took the family back to Portugal in 1902, he sent newspaper articles in the opposite direction—to a Durban newspaper—written under the name Tagus or signed with the initials J. G. H.C. or as Charles Robert Anon.

When Pessoa’s grandmother died in 1907 she left him some money. He used this to set up a small printing company called Ibis, but it soon failed. Few anecdotes survive about him, but his half brother Joao said that Fernando used to embarrass the family by staggering along the street, swinging on lampposts pretending to be drunk. Standing on one leg he would shout out “I am an ibis.” It’s fairly tame behavior for a twentieth-century poet, but in the staid confines of Lisbon society it probably seemed extreme. Later on, Pessoa didn’t need to pretend to be drunk, as alcohol increasingly took over his life.

Pessoa’s rejection of self is fascinating, especially as, of all ironies, pessoa means “person” in Portuguese. (His name should properly be spelled Pessoa but he removed the accent over the o because it felt more cosmopolitan.) Outside his immediate family Pessoa seems to have had no close friendships. He eked out a living as a translator, working for businesses that needed to conduct relationships with English speakers, and kept himself to himself in a set of small, furnished rooms in the old city of Lisbon. “Bernardo Soares” explained:

The idea of any social obligation—going to a funeral, discussing an office matter with someone, going to the station to wait for someone I know or don’t know—the mere idea disturbs a whole day’s thoughts.

When he was thirty-two he formed an attachment with a young woman of nineteen named Ophelia Queiroz. There was probably no physical side to the relationship; he just wrote to her under different heteronyms for nine months and then broke it off. Almost a decade later, he made contact with Ophelia again but once more stopped communicating suddenly and refused to answer her letters. He also wrote to the English occultist Aleister Crowley, helping him to fake his own suicide when he visited Lisbon in 1930. Crowley must have found him beguiling. Pessoa