Getting Ready to Exist

Adam Phillips

• A Centenary Pessoa edited by Eugénio Lisboa and L.C. Taylor
  Carcanet, 335 pp, £25.00, May 1995, ISBN 0 85635 936 X
• The Keeper of Sheep by Fernando Pessoa, translated by Edwin Honig and Susan Brown
  Sheep Meadow, 135 pp, $12.95, September 1997, ISBN 1 878818 45 7
• The Book of Disquletude by Fernando Pessoa, translated by Richard Zenith
  Carcanet, 323 pp, £9.95, January 1997, ISBN 1 85754 361 0

‘True originality,’ Cocteau Pessoa’s contemporary, wrote, ‘consists in trying to behave like everybody else without succeeding.’ It was once characteristically modern to idealise originality, and to conceive of it as a form of failure. The fittest as those who didn’t fit. If there is nothing more compliant now than the wish to be original – to find one’s own voice etc – it is also assumed that originality and success can, and should, go together. But for the European Modernist writers of Pessoa’s generation – he was born in Lisbon in 1888 and died there in 1935 – the question was still: what has been lost when words like ‘success’ or ‘originality’ become ultimate values, when lives and writing are judged by these criteria? The Romantic concept of genius, after all – the apotheosis of originality – was itself a kind of elegy for a lost community. All the solitary, disillusioned moderns – Baudelaire, Kafka, Eliot, Beckett – are preoccupied by their sociability: its impossibility, its triviality, its compromises, its shame. For these writers ambition without irony flies in the face of the evidence; a successful life was a contradiction in terms, because the Modernist revelation was that lives don’t work. A certain revulsion was integral to their vision.