Pessoa by Richard Zenith

Pessoa: A Biography
by Richard Zenith
Liveright, 2021

Fernando Pessoa, who was born in Lisbon in 1888, spent most of his life there in sometimes-genteel poverty and forlornly-controlled alcoholism, published virtually nothing there or anywhere else, and died in 1935, would on the surface seem an odd choice for a modern thousand-page doorstop biography, but this is exactly what he's received: new from Liveright and the world's foremost Pessoa scholar, Richard Zenith, is Pessoa: A Biography.

Most biographies don't begin with a list of Dramatis Personae, as Zenith's does, but even so, you'd have to venture deep into the territory of farce or mania to find a list like this one: it's name after name, thumbnail-biography after thumbnail-biography – but they're all Pessoa. They come from different cities and countries, have radically different reading tastes and writing styles, some of them are effete snobs, others are workaday hacks, some eventually sicked and die – but they're all Pessoa. Some of these characters became so elaborately developed in Pessoa's mind – very dissimilar poets like Alberto Caerio or Álvaro de Campos – that they took on the status of a “heteronym,” a legitimately alternate creative persona. When Pessoa climbed the stairs alone to his little apartment, carrying the fixings of his nightly meal, carrying his cigarettes and his cheap brandy, he was entering a teeming, crowded space. As Jonathan Griffin has noted, “Pessoa was a poet who wrote poets as well as poems.”

In addition to that remarkable crowd, the little apartment contained something else: a trunk containing 25,000 papers. There were finished poems, hundreds of them, and there were hundreds of scraps and sketches, and enormous library of written outpourings, the stuff of both the dreams and the nightmares of any would-be biographer. “Pessoa's first biographer had not dug deeply or thoroughly into the famous trunk,” Zenith writes, with the understated deadpan humor that runs throughout the book, “which is understandable, since to do so would have taken him the rest of his life, and he wasn't wealthy, he needed to earn a living.”

Zenith has delved more deeply into that trunk of papers than any previous scholar, and he's also investigated Pessoa's life and times so exhaustively (his fine-print chapter notes run for dozens of pages and include some of the most fascinating details in the entire book; one hopes for a biographer's memoir at some point, although sheer exhaustion would be totally understandable in this case) that it's difficult to imagine a more comprehensive life of Pessoa in any language.

But research alone – even research as self-evidently prodigious as this – wouldn't save a thousand-page biography about a weird writer, even a writer as endlessly, endearingly weird as Pessoa. The extended family of formidable eccentrics, the childhood in far-flung Durban, the seemingly vast web of friends and acquaintances in Lisbon's literary and political circles, the tortured life-long bachelorhood, all of it would add up to very little if Zenith hadn't remembered – or hadn't been able – to fashion it into an effective narrative. What really makes Pessoa: A Biography stand out is how infinitely, companionably readable it is in all its great length. One of Pessoa's “heteronyms” once commented the Fernando Pessoa effectively doesn't exist (precisely the sort of awkward crack you hope one of your alter egos never makes), but he certainly exists in these pages: fulsomely, ebulliently so. The pairing makes the comment a bit odd, but even so: this is the most enjoyable author biography since Heather Clark's book on Sylvia Plath last year.

“Pessoa's search for God was a search for language, and his search for language was a search for God,” Zenith writes. “He might see only trouble and confusion on the horizon, he might doubt that any gods existed, that the world mattered, or that his life had any purpose, but words still enchanted him, commanding his loyalty and demanding to be enunciated.” A great deal of that fundamentally lonely courage illuminates these pages. And if the book prompts even a few readers to take up Pessoa's published work, Zenith's own editions of both the poetry and The Book of Disquiet are readily available and every bit as seductive as this big life story.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.