The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (36 page)

Lisbon, 11 December 1931

My dear Gaspar Simões,

Thanks very much for your letter, which I’ve just received, and for the page from the Málaga newspaper. It doesn’t matter that
Presença
33 didn’t include the passage from the bookkeeper or the sonnet by Âlvaro de Campos, but I’m glad you did publish my translation of “Hymn to Pan,”* since otherwise I would feel remiss toward its author. And why are you angry with me for the lengthy contribution I published in
Descobrimento?
I will gladly provide one of equal length to
Presença
. But you should know that, in the one case as in the other, I consider the nature of the publication. It
doesn’t seem right to me to send you a contribution that will take up three whole pages, since
Presença
should devote the better and larger part of its space to younger poets and prose writers, only interspersing writers my age out of your friendship toward us and so we can applaud your efforts, and in order to fill in gaps.

Having made these pre-preliminary observations in answer to your letter, I will now attempt a critique of your book
Misterio da Poesia
[The Mystery of Poetry]; it will include my long overdue reaction to your article about me,* which now forms part of your book. Before I begin, please note that this critique will take shape right now, written freely and directly at my typewriter, with no attempt on my part to produce literature, or well-wrought phrases, or anything that doesn’t come out spontaneously in the mechanical act of typing. Since I didn’t bring your book with me, I will have to allude to it rather than quote from it, if and where necessary. I tell you this so that you won’t imagine some obscure motive when in fact it’s simply that I don’t have your book with me.

For a long time now I’ve had a high opinion of your talent in general and of your critical capacity in particular. I want you to know, first and foremost, that this is my basic opinion. Whatever disagreement I may express in this letter concerns only details and incidental points. My opinion of your intelligence is proven, furthermore, though you would perhaps not be able to know this, by the fact that with you I use the words “admiration” and “admirer,” which I don’t just toss around; “appreciation” is as far as I go when I can’t, in honesty to myself, go farther.

In terms of your intellectual development and expression,
The Mystery of Poetry
represents, as I see it, an intermediate stage between
Temas
[Themes] and a book you’ll write in the future.
The Mystery of Poetry—
again, as I see it—belongs by its very nature to an intermediate stage: it is both more profound and more confused than
Themes
. Your mind has grown—one continues to grow mentally until the age of 45—and you are experiencing some mental growing pains. You feel the need to explain more, and more deeply, what you wrote in
Themes
, but you still haven’t mastered the means for going
deeper, and, what’s more, you are trying to fathom parts of the human heart that cannot by any means be fathomed. This results—still and always as I see it—in a feverishness, a recklessness and an anxiousness that cloud the basic lucidity of certain observations, while depriving other observations of almost any lucidity.

While I see much of this as a symptom of your personal, inner development, I think you also submit too readily to the suggestions and influences of the European intellectual milieu, with all of its theories that claim to be science, with all of its able and talented minds that claim (and are proclaimed by others) to be geniuses. I don’t blame you for not seeing this, for it’s something that people your age never see. Today I’m astounded—astounded and horrified—by the kinds of international literature from the past and (what was then) present that I admired with complete intellectual sincerity up until age 30. This was also true for me in politics. Today I’m astounded, with useless (and hence unjustified) embarrassment, by how much I admired and believed in democracy, by how important I thought it was to struggle on behalf of that nonexistent entity known as “the people,” by how sincerely, and not mindlessly, I supposed that the word “humanity” had a sociological meaning and not just the biological one of “human species.”

Among the guides who have led you into the kind of maze which you have entered, I believe I can distinguish Freud, and by Freud I mean both him and his followers. This is to be expected, I think, in light of the general reasons outlined above as well as the particular reason that Freud is truly a man of genius, the inventor of an original and seductive psychological model whose power of influence has manifested itself in him as a full-fledged paranoia of the interpretive type. Freud’s success both in and beyond Europe derives, I think, from the originality of that model, which has the force and narrowness of madness (such as are needed to create religions and religious sects, including fascism, communism and other forms of political mysticism) and which, much more importantly, is based (except in a few heterodox disciples) on a sexual interpretation. This makes it possible to write absolutely obscene
books, billing them as scientific works (which some of them really are), and to “interpret” past and present writers and artists (usually without any critical justification) in a degrading fashion worthy of the Cafe Brasileira of Chiado,* performing psychological masturbations within the vast network of onanism that seems to constitute the mentality of our civilization.

Don’t misunderstand me: I don’t mean to suggest that this last aspect of Freudianism is what has had a hypnotic effect on you personally. But it is this aspect that has aroused such great interest in Freudianism around the world and thus popularized the system.

...

Now as I see it (always “as I see it”), Freudianism is a flawed, narrow, and highly useful system. It is flawed if we imagine that it will give us the key, which no system can give, to the infinite complexity of the human heart. It is narrow if it leads us to suppose that everything can be reduced to sexuality, because nothing can be reduced to just one thing, not even in the subatomic world. It is highly useful, for it has alerted psychologists to three crucial aspects of our inner life and its interpretation: (1) the subconscious, and the corollary fact that we are still irrational animals; (2) sexuality, whose importance had, for various reasons, been underrated or unknown; (3) what I shall call
transferal
, by which I mean the conversion of one kind of psychological phenomenon (not necessarily sexual) into another, when the original one has been inhibited or diverted, and the possibility of identifying certain qualities or defects through ostensibly unrelated behaviors.

Before I had ever read anything about or by Freud, and even before I’d heard of him, I had personally arrived at the conclusion marked (1) and at some of the findings I’ve grouped under (3). Under item (2) I had made fewer observations, due to my generally scant interest in sexuality, whether my own or other people’s—my own, since I’ve never given much importance to myself as a physical and social being; other people’s, because I’ve always been loath to meddle—even interpretively, inside my own mind—in the lives of others. I haven’t read much Freud, nor much about the Freudian
system and its derivatives, but what I’ve read has—I admit—been of great help for sharpening my psychological knife and for cleaning or changing the lenses of my critical microscope. I didn’t need Freud (nor, as far as I know, could he clarify me on this point) to distinguish vanity from pride in the cases where, manifested only indirectly, the two things can be confused. And even within area (2) I didn’t need Freud to recognize, merely through their literary style, the homosexual and the onanist, and, within onanism, the practicing onanist and the psychological onanist. To distinguish the three elements that make up the homosexual’s style and the three elements that make up the onanist’s style (and the difference, in the latter, between the practicing and psychological varieties), I had no need of Freud or of Freudians. But many other things, in this and in the other two areas, were indeed clarified for me by Freud and his followers. It never would have occurred to me, for example, that smoking (and I will add alcohol) is a “transference” of onanism. After reading a brief study on this topic by a psychoanalyst, it immediately dawned on me that, of the five exemplary onanists I have known, four did not smoke or drink, while the fifth smoked but abhorred wine.

This subject has caused me to touch on sexuality, but it was only, you understand, to elucidate my position and to show you how much I recognize, despite my criticisms and divergences, the hypnotic power of Freudianisms over anyone who is intelligent, particularly when their intelligence has a critical bent. What I would now like to emphasize is that this system and all derivative and analogous systems should, I feel, be used by us to stimulate our critical capacity and not held up as scientific dogmas or natural laws. It seems to me that you have employed them somewhat in this latter way and have, as a result, been seduced by the pseudoscientific element that’s found in many parts of these systems and leads to falsification, by the adventurous element that’s found in other parts and leads to recklessness, and by the exaggeratedly sexual element found in still other parts, which leads to instant debasement of the author being studied, particularly in the eyes of the public, so that the critic’s explanation, elaborated in good faith and innocently set forth, comes off as an act
of aggression. Because the public is stupid? Undoubtedly, but the collective nature that makes the public the public also deprives it of intelligence, which is strictly individual. When Shakespeare’s homosexuality, so clearly and constantly affirmed in his sonnets, was mentioned to Robert Browning, who was not only a great poet but a subtle and intellectual one, do you know what he answered? “If so, the less Shakespeare he.” That’s the public for you, my dear Gaspar Simões, even when the public is named Browning, who wasn’t even collective.

These observations, expressed in the mental tone of a solitary conversation and transmitted as fast as they can be typed, contain most of the adverse criticism I have to make of your
Mystery of Poetry
. They turn (to put it pompously) on one of your book’s methodological procedures. But your book also includes, quite independently of your formal methods, instances of unwarranted haste and critical temerity. If you admit to lacking the biographical data needed for forming an opinion about Sá-Cameiro’s inner self, why do you form one based on the absence of such data? Are you sure, just because I say and repeat it, that I feel nostalgia for my childhood and that for me music is—how shall I say?—the frustrated natural vehicle of my self-expression? And please note that your study on Sá-Carneiro, considering the lack of biographical data, is a critically admirable piece, and the only problem with your study on me is that it accepts as true certain statements that are false, since I, artistically, can only lie.

I’ll be more specific. The work of Sá-Carneiro is permeated by a fundamental inhumanity: it has no human warmth or tenderness, except for the introverted kind. Do you know why? Because he lost his mother when he was two years old and never experienced maternal affection. I’ve noticed that people who grow up motherless are always lacking in tenderness, whether they’re artists or not, whether their mother actually died or was simply cold or distant. There is one difference: those who had no mother because she died (unless they’re unemotional by nature, which wasn’t the case of Sá-Carneiro) turn their own tenderness inward, substituting themselves
for the mother they never knew, whereas those who in effect had no mother because she was coldly indifferent lose the tenderness they would have had and become (unless they’ve been especially gifted with tenderness) implacable cynics, monstrous children of the motherly love they were deprived of.

And now I’ll be specific about myself. I’ve never felt nostalgia for my childhood; in fact I’ve never felt nostalgia for anything. I am, by nature and in the most literal sense of the word, a futurist. I’m unable to be pessimistic or to look back. As far as I’m aware, the only things that can make me depressed are lack of money (in the precise moment it’s needed) and thunderstorms (while they last). All I miss from the past are the people I loved who have disappeared; I miss only them, not the time in which I loved them; I wish they were alive today, and with the age they would have now if they had lived until now. The rest are literary attitudes, felt intensely by dramatic instinct, whether they’re signed by Alvaro de Campos or by Fernando Pessoa. Their tone and their truth are suitably illustrated by the short poem of mine that begins “O church bell of my village ....”* The church bell of my village, Gaspar Simões, is the bell from the Church of the Martyrs, in Chiado. The village of my birth was the Sao Carlos Square, now called Directory Square, and the building where I was born (on the fifth floor) ended up housing (on the third floor) the Directory of the Republic* (Note: the building was doomed to be famous, but let’s hope the fifth floor yields better results than the third.)

Now that I’ve dealt with these specifics, or what have you, I would like to return (if I still have the mind for it, as I’m already tired) to a methodological point. As I see it (there are those four words again), the critic’s role is essentially threefold: (1) to study the artist exclusively as an artist, letting no more of the man enter than what’s absolutely necessary to explain the artist; (2) to discover what we might call the
central definition
of the artist (lyric type, dramatic type, elegiac-lyric type, poetic-dramatic type, etc.); and (3) to wrap these studies and these discoveries in a hazy poetic aura of unintelligibility, knowing as we do that the human heart is basically inscrutable. This third function
is in a certain way a diplomatic one, but the fact is, my dear Gaspar Simões, that even with the truth we need diplomacy.

I don’t think any of this needs clarification except perhaps the second function. Partly for the sake of brevity, I will explain it through an example, and I choose myself because I’m the closest one available. The central point of my personality as an artist is that I’m a dramatic poet; in everything I write, I always have the poet’s inner exaltation and the playwright’s depersonalization. I soar as someone else—that’s all. From the human point of view—which the critic shouldn’t even consider, for it serves him no purpose—I’m a hysterical neurasthenic, with the hysterical element predominating in my emotions and the neurasthenic element in my intellect and will (hypersensibility in the former, apathy in the latter). But as soon as the critic understands that I’m essentially a dramatic poet, he will have the key to my personality, or to as much of it as he or anyone else needs to know, except a psychiatrist, which the critic need not be. Armed with this key, he can slowly open all the doors to my self-expression. He knows that as a poet I feel; that as a dramatic poet I feel with complete detachment from my feeling self; that as a dramatist (without the poet) I automatically transform what I feel into an expression far removed from what I felt, and I create, in my emotions, a nonexistent person who truly felt that feeling and, in feeling it, felt yet other, related emotions that I, purely I, forgot to feel.