39 Books: 1999

I've always preferred the Serpent's Tail edition of Pessoa's Book of Disquiet over the others published around the same time, such as from Quartet Encounters and Carcanet, the latter with a fussy variant on the title: The Book of Disquietude. But this one is the most pleasurable to hold and read. It's curious how the production values of a book can affect one's experience of its content, or at least the perception of the experience. Isn't the first translation of a poem one reads always the one held deep within despite knowing better?

By the time I read this edition I had completed an MA in (what else?) Modern European Literature and was working full-time after abandoning a PhD. But fascination with the subject would never leave me and while I wrote a few essays and reviews for one of the early ezines, my reading was a desultory drift in spare time. In 100 Days, which partly inspired this 39 Books series, Gabriel Josipovici says he didn't feel cut out for writing the PhD he had begun, but much of the ideas for it were later incorporated into his first book of criticism The World and the Book. It would take a few years before I found my equivalent, albeit paltry in comparison. (Referring to Josipovici is relevant to The Book of Disquiet, as you'll see.)

Despite my preference for this edition, I cannot find the passage that opens the one edited by Richard Zenith and which Pessoa had marked 'opening passage':

I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it – without knowing why.

Replace 'God' with 'Literature' and the condition I found myself in between abandoning working towards recognised and socially valuable qualifications and casting around during the evenings and weekends begins to make sense. Did I read such books without knowing why? Yes, indeed, as the agitated partisanship of my early work displays. The self-conscious despair and self-pity of Bernardo Soares would then have naturally appealed, dovetailing with a distracted, haphazard intellectual life. 

Against the universal acclaim it has received, Gabriel Josipovici is a dissenting voice on The Book of Disquiet. In his TLS review of the Penguin edition in 2001, he says "while I recognize Pessoa's greatness as a poet" and despite The Book of Disquiet displaying all of the themes of his greatest poetry – "a concern with solitude, with anonymity, with boredom, with the dreamlike nature of life" – all we find here is "Pessoa the solitary and depressive individual".

Unfinished works, or works whose authors felt would have to be released into the world despite their failure to find an adequate form for them, abound in Romantic and post-Romantic literature, from Keats's Hyperion to Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, from Kafka's Castle to Wittgenstein's Investigations. All are fascinating and magnificent works, in spite or perhaps because of their lack of completion. So what is it that makes The Book of Disquiet so unlike these works?

One answer, he believes, is the book's lack of shape. The works such as those mentioned above "have always given the readers the sense that their incompleteness was their shape, that the struggle to build a mighty cathedral, followed by the acceptance that all we had was a ruin, was somehow what they were about" while Pessoa/Soares "seems curiously satisfied with its fragmentary status, curiously uninterested in reaching out for more".

In his book-length study, Thomas Cousineau's also compares the book to other fragmentary or unfinished greats by using one of Pessoa's poems, as written by one of his famous heteronyms, in which a vase lies shattered on the ground:

What is most striking [in the poem] is the way that an initial impression of loss...coexists with the implication that the dropping of the vase has led not only to loss but also to a reshaping of space into a pattern. [...] What had hitherto been just an ordinary vase has now—thanks to its being “smashed into more pieces than there was china in the vase”—become the scattered parts of a sheltering pattern. [...] We may think of The Book itself as also having resulted from a comparable kind of shattering.

But he then notes that Pessoa "frequently stressed the fundamental importance of construction to the value of a literary work. He claimed, for example, that the structure of the Pindaric Ode is not merely a literary convention, but, rather, an axiom of the human spirit". We might see doubts about the book's incompletion more generally in the very number of editions with their own selections and organisations, culminating in 2017 with the sumptuous The Book of Disquiet: The Complete Edition, also published by Serpent's Tail, with its handsome cover and cloth bookmark. Without knowing why, we still value the intact vase above all.