Last September, I spent a week in Lisbon, long one of my favorite cities. I was there for a conference, but I knew I have a lot of free time and had decided to use it to engage in being what I love most: a flaneur.
I had flaneured in Lisbon many times before and I knew it wouldn’t disappoint. Its charming alleyways wind up and down the hills that make up the city, all leading to its coast on the river Tagus, just where it meets the Atlantic. All you need to do for perfect flânerie is to get lost in the alleys and wait for the sun to set on the ocean, a perfect time to go down and let your day end by the water. With its omnipresent cafes and the soulful urban energy it oozes out, Lisbon gives a flaneur all he or she could demand.
In my recipe of flânerie, all the strolling must be regularly interspersed with reading in random cafes and I knew what to pick. I had already started Alex Fernandes’s The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal’s Dictatorship Fell and it couldn’t be more fitting. The book’s account of the Portuguese Revolution of 1974 is obsessed with Lisbon’s geography in a way that I always demand, but seldom receive, from history books. Every time the rebellious officers gather to plan, Fernandes tell us exactly where they did it, just as he does in his history of the long years leading up to the revolution. As he details the events of April 25, the day of the coup, he shows meticulous attention to the topography of the revolution, taking us blow by blow up and down the streets as the revolutionaries successfully bring down the ancien regime. As I had predicted, it proved exhilarating to read the book shortly after walking on those very streets. Before I knew it, the book was done and I now needed another companion.
I knew immediately what my next read should be. For a long time now, I had been meaning to get into the work of Fernando Pessoa, the fabled sad boy poet of Portuguese letters whom I had somehow never got to read closely. My interests had been piqued by the celebrated 1000-page biography of the grand poet that came out in 2022 and all the conversation that followed it. I decided that it could no longer wait. This had to be a Pessoa trip.
Luckily for me, I was in Chiado, Lisbon’s historic center where volumes of Pessoa are almost as obliquitous as the annoyingly prevalent and kitschified-to-death Pastel de Nata, the tart pastry that has become a Lusophone communal mascot. I found my way to the cave-like Livraria Bertrand, founded in 1732 and claiming to be the oldest operating bookstore in the world. Pessoa was known to frequent the store and it was no surprise that his work features all across the shop, in a dozen of languages. I settled on a recent edition of The Book of Disquiet in English translation of Margaret Jull Costa. Over the next few days, I was to savor every word of it, as I flaneured around Pessoa’s Lisbon, fully absorbed by the city and the poet.
I had started with an uneasy feeling. Unlike Fernandes’s book, I wasn’t sure if reading Pessoa was apt for flânerie. In fact, based on what little I had read from him, I seriously doubted it. If The Carnation Revolution beat with the pulse of a fundamentally urban revolution, Pessoa’s prose was known for its slow listlessness. He was famed for looking inside himself, not outside; interested in creating alternative worlds, not exploring the one around him. I knew that that this was supposed to be his most autobiographic work and I asked myself: Was Pessoa even someone who cared to roam the streets of the city he lived in?
I soon found out how deeply wrong I was. To my joy, I discovered a quintessential flaneur writer, a rival in this regard to Baudelaire himself.
***
Born in Lisbon in 1888, Pessoa was only five when he lost his dad to tuberculosis, shortly before his younger brother also died at the age of one. But the start of his literary life is rooted not in the city that came to treasure him but in a fairy tale-like journey he made at 8 years old to the then British Colony of Natal, part of today’s South Africa. His mother had been wed in absentia to Portugal’s consul in Natal and they sailed to its capital, Durban, the grand African port of the Indian Ocean, to join the new step-father. Like elsewhere in the British empire, the English language reigned here and, lonely-ish in his adopted land, Pessoa took to the books. His first literary inspirations were thus Shakespeare, Milton and Oscar Wilde not classics of his native Iberia. Deeply enmeshed in this Anglophone world, he might have followed his career to the peak of empire, Oxbridge, if not for a fluke. Due to a months-long family holiday in Portugal’s Azores islands, he didn’t qualify for a Natal-based scholarship for universities in England, despite having performed excellently in his exams. After about 9 years in Africa, the 17-year-old Fernando headed back to Lisbon on a journey he remembered for the rest of his life. On the ship Herzog, they passed through the Suez Canal and crossed the Mediterranean to get back home in 1905. He lived here for all the rest of his life, before dying in 1935.
Pessoa came to be a literary hero of his native land but his formative Anglophone years left an eternal mark on the man. Look closely at his prose and you can see, despite its Latinesque lyricism, the English influence. He also wrote English verses which, failing to find a publisher in Britain, he published as little pamphlets in Portugal for small audiences. He also had to move between the two languages for entirely non-literary reasons. Having dropped out of university after a student strike freaked him out, he used his English knowledge to get day jobs in international business. This was to define the monotonous pace of the rest of his life: By day, he’d lead a dreary office life, translating mundane business matters to and from English; in his free time, he’d read and write, mostly in Portuguese, with much of it not seeing publication in his lifetime.
Pessoa never got to put The Book of Disquiet in the final book format during his lifetime. It came together after a box full of his notes was discovered in his apartment. Decades later, in 1982, it was first published as a book, his most extensive book of prose, a strange counterpart to his only Portuguese-language book ever published during his lifetime, Mensagem (The Message), a collection of poems on the history of Portugal.
Today, Mensagem is the one celebrated everywhere you go in Lisbon, including in A Brasileira, the Chiado café, once a venerable hangout of intellectuals, as detailed in A Carnation Revolution. Today, a statue of Pessoa sits on a bench at the cafe and shiny copies of Mensagem are on window displays, turning the place into a tourist trap, a fate similar to that of Sartre and de Beauvoir’s hangout, Les Deux Magots, in Paris. But it is in The Book of Disquiet where you get to the heart of Pessoa’s style, the most unadulterated version of his outlook on humanity.
Pessoa is often compared to the American-English poet T.S. Eliot and it’s not hard to see all these uncanny resemblances. Beside the common British education, Eliot too worked an office day job, he too made art of the tediousness of daily life. They are both quintessential poets of modernism.
They are also both known for what Adam Kirsch, one of the many who has drawn the comparison, calls “a tendency to cherish unhappiness.”
It doesn’t take much digging into The Book of Disquiet for this tendency to reveal itself. Pessoa’s ennui is there with such force that nothing rivalling it could be found in even the saddest verses of The Waste Land.
The feelings in the book are technically not of himself but that of the narrator Bernando Soares, one of his more than 70 so-called ‘heteronyms’ (he created this term as an upgraded version of pseudonym – the latter it just a false identity whereas Pessoa’s heteronyms are fully fleshed characters on whose behalf he writes.) But even Pessoa himself, in a letter in 1935, was to admit that this was “a semi-heteronym because his personality, although not my own, doesn’t differ from my own but is a mere mutilation of it… he’s me without my rationalism and emotions…. His Portuguese is exactly the same.”
The book, which was written in two different periods in 1910s and 1930s, has therefore acted as something like a secret key to Pessoa’s supposedly real self, not hidden behind his dozens of heteronyms. When Pessoa, in his introductory note, introduces “a man in his thirties, thin, fairly tall, very hunched when sitting though less so when standing, and dressed with a not entirely unselfconscious negligence” and with his “suffering apparent in his pale, unremarkable features” we know he is talking about himself. (Although in Pessoa’s playful introduction, this is supposedly Soares, a man he met in a Lisbon tavern.)
But my most valuable discovery from the book was the degree to which Pessoa was a flaneur, shaped by the streets that his semi-heteronym roams, just as he ponders about life. Yes, this is a man concerned with interiority but it’s the streets of Lisbon that shape him.
This influence is not a conventional shaping by a writer’s social context. In fact, modern history and politics are famously absent from the pages of The Book of Disquiet and Pessoa/Soares seems apathetic to the grand events surrounding him, from the First World War to the tumultuous 1930s. Scholar Rhian Atkin even attributes a “philosophy of inaction” to Soares’s flânerie in the book.
It should be noted that this stance wasn’t because Pessoa was apolitical. Yes, he had recoiled from the leftie campus politics, which made him leave academic life together. He had only disdain for socialism and communism, just as he did for fascism and even Catholicism. But his wasn’t a position of political neutrality. He defined himself in clear ideological terms, as “a British-style conservative, that is to say, liberal within conservatism and absolutely anti-reactionary.” This explains his well-known opposition to the New State of strongman Antonio Salazar, although he had initially been supportive of it. Towards the end of his life, he even dabbled in political journalism, writing in critique of Mussolini’s 1935 invasion of Abyssinia, an aspect of his life missed by many critics.
But streets of Lisbon don’t need the action of masses, of the kind so vividly described by Ferndandes, to inspire Soares/Pessoa. It is their very setting as backgrounds to quotidian life that helps spark The Book of Disquiet.
In an entry, dated to July of 1930, Soares says that when he dreams a lot, he “[goes] out into the street with my eyes open but I’m still wrapped in the safety of those dreams.” Here lies a perfect explanation of how the interior interacts with Pessoa’s world. He is dreaming – but while on the streets. The act of day-dreaming finds resonance via the city.
Even Soares’s landscape descriptions have an urban flavor. In one entry he disapprovingly quotes Swiss diarist Henri-Frederic Amiel who said “a landscape is a state of mind,” (Pessoa has no time for such metaphors.) When he gets to describing his own favorite landscape, he speaks of “the great expanse of city I saw lit by the universal light of the sun, from high up on Sao Pedro de Alcantara.” He can love nature but not in that idyllic Swiss fashion of a fetish for the Alps; he loves watching the Tagus in the city, from the city. The terrace he mentioned is still there, right in the middle of Lisbon. I went there to see the city in Pessoa’s eyes, what he found worthy of looking on.
Critics often point out to Soares’s long-winded descriptions of weather as saying something fundamental about him. But, in The Book of Disquiet, such descriptions almost always make sense not on their own but in an urban context. Pessoa is not just describing the sun or the clouds but how they interact with the city, the main protagonist. In an entry on a sunset, he writes: “I walk, leisurely and distracted, down Rua da Alfandega towards the Tagus and as Terriero do Paco opens out before me, I can clearly see the sunless western sky.” Isn’t it clear that the streets here matter as much as the sky?
In one undated entry, Soares is writing “from the terrace of this café” from where he is looking “tremendously out at life.” Watching life of passers-by go by, he is battled by confused feelings. Torn between what he should make of life, Soares decides that: “As a man of ideals, perhaps my greatest aspiration really does not go beyond occupying this chair at this table in this café.”
Here, it is not hard to see, a lack of investment in life, that famed Pessoan concept of futility. But is it also not the fact that Pessoa does aspire to sit in that café and, more importantly, to write to us about it all?
In an entry counting his literary influences, he points to Cesario Verde, a 19th century forerunner of modern Portuguese poetry and a fellow Lisboeta. Verde’s influence on Pessoa is well-cited but here he adds others to the list of influences: the ordinary people he knows in Lisbon — Senhor Vasques, Moreira the book-keeper, Vieria the cashier and Antonio the office boy. He is also quick to add: “And after each of them I would write in capital letters the key word: LISBON.”
***
Editors of The Book of Disquiet have long battled about the method of arranging the entries and the divergent versions differ widely on the matter. The Jull Costa translation is based on an edit by Maria Jose de Lancastre which aims to be roughly chronological, a tough task since not all of the notes found in the box have a date attached to them. For the book’s starting shot, de Lancastre has picked a two-sentences-long entry which was number 90 in previous editions. “Sometimes I think I will never leave Rua dos Douradores [a street in central Lisbon],” the entry reads. “Once written down, that seems to me like eternity.”
Given how dismissively Soares talks elsewhere of his life on his office on Rua dos Douradores, this entry is sometimes taken to show his impatience and even disgust at his daily life. But it’s hard not to see in it also a form of love.
As I flaneured around the streets of the Lisbon of Verde and Pessoa, up and down the uncomfortably narrow Rua dos Douradores, I could see how he might have felt trapped by the city of his birth. But it also became clear to me that life wasn’t meaningless for Pessoa, no matter how unhappy and perennially drunk he was (he was to ultimately die of a liver failure.) In something of an existentialist spirit, he was attempting to give meaning to life. And for him there was clearly only one meaning: Lisbon. Life was to go through its streets, to sit its cafes, to observe its sunsets. Life was to flaneur.
