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COPYRIGHT 2006 Modern Humanities Research Association
Abstract. Fernando Pessoa was clearly fascinated, if not openly obsessed, by Oscar Wilde. His espolio contains at least thirty-seven manuscript fragments on the aesthete, including comparative horoscopes for himself and Wilde. Seven books either written by Wilde or directly connected to the Wilde story can be found in Pessoa's personal library, and his extensive marginalia reveals an attentive reading of the texts.
Much of Pessoa's writing, including some of his best-known poems, are clearly influenced by his predecessor's artistic ideals. This article demonstrates that, far from this influence being a mere consequence of the wider influence Wilde enjoyed over the Modernist generation as a whole, in the case of Pessoa--particularly in the context of lying in art--it is both traceable and direct. It outlines the main points of contact between the two writers, and goes on to examine the psychological reasons behind Pessoa's urgent efforts to forge a greater distance between himself and Wilde than in reality exists. Pessoa everywhere attempts to escape the anxiety of Wilde's influence by claiming that the aesthete was nowhere a model, despite quite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Keywords. Pessoa; Wilde; art; lying; sincerity; posing; masks; artist; Alvaro de Campos; distancing; influence
Resumo. E evidente que Fernando Pessoa se sentia fascinado--se nao mesmo obcecado--pela figura de Oscar Wilde. No seu espolio existem pelo menos trinta e sete fragmentos manuscritos sobre Wilde, incluindo dois horoscopos comparados de ambos. Na biblioteca de Pessoa figuram sete livros escritos por Wilde ou relacionados com a sua historia, todos eles profusamente anotados pelo Poeta, provando uma leitura minuciosa e atenta.
Muitos textos de Fernando Pessoa, incluindo alguns dos seus poemas mais conhecidos, reflectem claramente a influencia das teorias esteticas de Oscar Wilde. Este artigo comeca por demonstrar que, para alem da influencia generica que Wilde exerceu sobre a geracao Modernista, no caso de Pessoa tal influencia e detectavel e directa, especialmente no que se refere ao conceito de fingimento em arte. Demonstram-se os principais pontos de contacto entre os dois escritores, e estudam-se, a seguir, as razoes que podem ter levado Pessoa a procurar distanciar-se de Wilde nos seus escritos. Esforcando-se continuamente por se libertar da influencia de Wilde, Pessoa proclama que o Esteta nunca foi para ele um modelo--mas todas as provas que nos deixou nos seus escritos apontam em sentido contrario.
Palavras-Chave. Pessoa; Wilde; arte; mentira; sinceridade; imagem; mascaras; Alvaro de Campos; distanciamento; influencia
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'In so far, however, as I am compared to Wilde, I object to the comparison, which is insulting because it is false'. (1)
When one considers how few critics have ever compared Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) to Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), his anxiety on the matter is remarkable. In Pessoa's numerous fragmentary writings on Wilde he continually attempts to distance himself from the aesthete on both a literary and a personal level.
Despite his efforts to convince us of the contrary, however, there is ample evidence that Pessoa was fascinated by Wilde. He owned no fewer than four of his books: De Profundis and the Ballad of Reading Gaol (containing a preface by Robert Ross), The Poems of Oscar Wilde, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Prose Pieces and Le Portrait de Monsieur W. H., an edition of prose pieces previously unpublished in French comprising translations of 'The Portrait of Mr. W. H.', 'The Canterville Ghost', 'The Sphinx Without a Secret', 'Poems in Prose', and 'The Soul of Man Under Socialism'. (2) All of these books are still in Pessoa's personal library, now at the Casa Fernando Pessoa in Lisbon, and the marginalia within them reveal an attentive reading of the texts. It is also evident that Pessoa was familiar with the essays that constitute Wilde's critical volume Intentions (1891), even if a copy does not today exist in his library. (3)
In addition, Pessoa owned a significant number of books written by Wilde's friends or contemporaries. Among the three books by T. W. H. Crosland in his library is The First Stone: On Reading the Unpublished Parts of De Profundis, a scathing satirical attack on Wilde. (4) He also had a copy of Lord Alfred Douglas's Sonnets and Andre Gide's Oscar Wilde: In Memoriam (Souvenirs), Le De Profundis. (5) In sum, then, Pessoa purchased, read, annotated, and kept until his death seven books either written by Wilde himself or directly connected to the Wilde story. To put this figure into context, it exceeds the number of books he owned by James Joyce (one, in two volumes), Francis Bacon (two), Lord Byron (two), Marcel Proust (one), Mark Twain (two), Walt Whitman (one) and even W. B. Yeats (one). (6)
The extent of Pessoa's interest in Wilde is further supported by his espolio at the Biblioteca Nacional in Lisbon which contains, among the twenty-seven thousand or so manuscripts left behind after his death, at least thirty-seven fragments directly related to Wilde, only six of which have been published. (7)
One of Pessoa's fragments on Wilde is an extraordinary piece of automatic writing, a list entitled 'Will I ever know'. (8) It contains twenty-six names which, according to the instructions of the spirits Pessoa is communicating with, have either a tick or a cross placed next to them. This list, as far as we know the only one of this kind he was to write, includes such important figures as the 'King of England' and 'Dom Manuel'. It also contains the names Lord Alfred Douglas, Robert Ross and T. W. H. Crosland.
Pessoa's works, including some of his most well-known poems, show a clear and direct influence from Wilde's artistic ideals, which centre around the importance of creating masks, myth-making about the artist, and lying in art. 'The Decay of Lying' and 'The Truth of Masks' (both 1891) assert the supremacy of art over life, arguing that the value of art lies in its rejection of reality in favour of lies, in the rejection of the face in favour of the mask. 'The Decay of Lying' is dotted with aphorisms to this effect: 'what I am pleading for is Lying in art'; 'Life imitates Art [...] Life in fact is the mirror, and Art the reality'; 'Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates life'. (9) Such ideals are notably similar in spirit to some of Pessoa's most famous literary expressions: 'o poeta e um fingidor', 'fingir e conhecer-se', 'a sinceridade e o grande obstaculo que o artista tem a vencer', 'artisticamente [...] nao [sei] senao mentir.' (10) It is psychologically revealing that Pessoa should everywhere protest that Wilde was in no way an influence, despite such overwhelming influence to the contrary.
Lying in Art
'The central circumstance, of course, is that Oscar Wilde was not an artist.' (11) In his fragments, Pessoa is scathing about Wilde's lack of poetic ability:
[Wilde's] style is itself, qua style, very little decorated. He has no fine phrases. Very seldom does he strike on a phrase which is aesthetically great, apart from being intellectually striking. [...] The 'exquisite phrase' of the poets, the poetic phrase proper, is a thing in which his works are signally lacking. The sort of thing that Keats produces constantly, that Shelley constantly hits upon, that Shakespeare is master in [...]--this he lacks. (12)
Despite such criticism, however, Pessoa owned an extensive collection of Wilde's poems of over three hundred pages, and inside this book he made at least one exception to his general condemnation of Wilde's lack of poetic artistry by underlining the line 'The Universe itself shall be our Immortality'. (13) This verse, at least, Pessoa must have considered 'aesthetically great'. He also took the trouble to translate no fewer than seventeen lines of 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' (1896) in his personal copy of Wilde's De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol--a great tribute indeed to a supposed minor poet. (14)
Wilde's most characteristic stylistic technique, his use of the aphorism, is the only one for which Pessoa expresses a small degree of guarded admiration: 'He is full of striking phrases, of the kind of thing that inferior people call paradoxes and epigrams.' (15) His enthusiasm for Wilde's aphorisms is further evidenced by his marginalia, where he marks out his favourites in his copies of Wilde's writings. He is visibly influenced by them, and derivative 'paradoxes and epigrams' feature prominently in his own works: 'Fernando Pessoa amava o dito espirituoso, a maxima graciosa, a expressao sintetica, o paradoxo.' (16) Appearing independently, or organized into lists, or featuring in the middle of longer passages of texts, Pessoa's aphorisms prove him a master in the genre. Most are written in English, and many have a distinctly Wildean flavour: 'I am not conscience-stricken, but consciousness-stricken'; 'To define the beautiful is to misunderstand it'; 'A beleza e grega. Mas a consciencia de que ela e grega e moderna.' (17) One in particular appears to be a direct dig at the self-promoting character of the aesthete: 'Art for art's sake is, really, only art for the artist's sake'. (18)
Bernardo Soares's O Livro do desassossego (1982) (19) is dotted with short philosophical meditations in the form of aphorisms. Following an introspective passage on the problems of desiring the unattainable ('O mal romantico e este: e querer a Lua como se houvesse maneira de a obter') we are presented with an adage that perfectly captures the consequences of such a desire: 'Nao se pode comer um bolo sem o perder.' (20) It reads like a direct translation of the English popular saying 'you can't have your cake and eat it', an expression not common in Portuguese. There is a whole chapter in Desassossego entitled 'Maximas', devoted entirely to maxims which, like Wilde's, rely upon the device of turning conventional ideas on their heads. One shows the general notion of love as a selfless, altruistic act to be entirely false: 'Amar e cansar de estar so: e uma cobardia portanto, e uma traicao a nos proprios (importa soberanamente que nao amemos)'. (21) Another reads: 'Dar bons conselhos e insultar a faculdade de errar que Deus deu aos outros.' (22) This is decidedly evocative of an aphorism Pessoa had underlined in his copy of Wilde's Lord Arthur Savile's Crime: 'It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal'. (23) It supports Wilde's words by explaining the validity of the earlier dictum.
Apart from the aphorism, one further stylistic technique employed by Wilde is copied by Pessoa. His heteronyms frequently engage in fictional conversations with one another, usually arguing about philosophical and artistic ideas. The form of the short story O Banqueiro Anarquista (1922) is also extended dialogue. Sadlier is wrong when she claims that Pessoa's 'habit of creating a dialogue among imaginary voices is a distinctive trait'. (24) The technique is foreshadowed by Wilde in his prose pieces 'The Decay of Lying' and 'The Critic as Artist'. It must be conceded that the Socratic dialogue form has historical origins, for example in the writings of Plato, but they are unusual in Portuguese literature.
Wilde's reputation as critic rests largely on his volume Intentions, a collection consisting of the four essays 'The Truth of Masks', 'Pen, Pencil and Poison', 'The Decay of Lying' and 'The Critic as Artist'. In these pieces he champions the autonomy of art and separates art from ethics. Throughout, he disdains the sincere in favour of artistic posing, insincerity, subjectivity, the multiplicity of personality and the adoption of literary masks: 'all Art [is] to a certain degree a mode of acting'. (25)
Such ideas are 'presciently, even shockingly, modern'. (26) They were to influence Modernists as diverse as Yeats, T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, who developed these qualities further in their own writings and critical theories. The influence Wilde held over Pessoa in terms of lying in art must therefore be considered in the context of the wider influence he enjoyed over the Modernist generation as a whole. As Pessoa recognized, Wilde's legacy to the Modernists cannot be overstated: 'He interpreted by theory all that modern art is'. (27)
Yeats's famous theory of the mask, concerning insincerity in art, owes much to Wilde. In the final paragraph of 'The Truth of Masks' Wilde argues for the importance of assuming different masks: 'in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true. [...] The truths of metaphysics are the truths of masks.' (28) It is easy to perceive strong affinities between Pessoa's heteronyms and Yeats's masks, but it is worth pointing out that it was to a large extent Wilde who influenced Yeats in this respect. Ellmann is unequivocal on the point, stating bluntly that 'most of Yeats's speculations about the mask derive from' Wilde's essay 'The Critic as Artist.' (29) Wilde had claimed that the first duty in life was to assume a pose, and Yeats would insist after him that the imaginative creation of oneself goes on almost from birth. The polyphony of competing voices in Eliot's poems and Joyce's Ulysses (1922) are grounded in Wilde's belief that 'the basis of life [...] is simply the desire for expression, and Art is always presenting various forms through which the expression can be attained.' (30) Joyce goes so far as to give speech to previously inarticulate objects, like the typewriter in the newsroom.
Wilde's influence on Yeats, Eliot and Joyce is clear, and has been the subject of vast critical enquiry, so it is surprising that his influence on the greatest Portuguese Modernist has merited so little attention. It is worth noting, too, that Pessoa is not the only Portuguese Modernist deeply indebted to Wilde. Mario de Sa-Carneiro's A Confissao de Lucio (1914) owes much to the aesthetic ideals Wilde lived by, such as the cult of the artistic personality: 'Pois Gervasio partia do principio de que o artista nao se revelava...
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