In Which This Is What You Are About to Read

Aspects 

by FERNANDO PESSOA

The Complete Work is essentially dramatic, though it takes different forms — prose passages in this first volume, poems and philosophies in other volumes. It's the product of the temperament I've been blessed or cursed with — I'm not sure which. All I know is that the author of these lines (I'm not sure if also of these books) has never had just one personality, and has never thought or felt dramatically — that is, through invented persons, or personalities, who are more capable than he of feeling what's to be felt.

There are authors who write plays and novels, and they often endow the characters of their plays and novels with feelings and ideas that they insist are not their own. Here the substance is the same, though the form is different.

Each of the more enduring personalities, lived by the author within himself, was given an expressive nature and made the author of one or more books whose ideas, emotions, and literary art have no relationship to the real author (or perhaps only apparent author, since we don't know what reality is) except insofar as he served, when he wrote them, as the medium of the characters he created.

Neither this work nor those to follow have anything to do with the man who writes them. He doesn't agree or disagree with what's in them. He writes as if he were being dictated to. And as if the person dictating were a friend (and for that reason could freely ask him to write down what he dictates), the writer finds the dictation interesting, perhaps just out of friendship.

The human author of these books has no personality of his own. Whenever he feels a personality well up inside, he quickly realizes that this new being, though similar, is distinct from him — an intellectual son, perhaps, with inherited characteristics, but also with differences that make him someone else.

That this quality in the writer is a manifestation of hysteria, or of the so-called split personality, is neither denied nor affirmed by the author of these books. As the helpless slave of his multiplied self, it would be useless for him to agree with one or the other theory about the written results of that multiplication.

It's not surprising that this way of making art seems strange; what's surprising is that there are things that don't seem strange.

Some of the author's current theories were inspired by one or another of these personalities that consubstantially passed — for a moment, for a day, or for a longer period — through his own personality, assuming he has one.

The author of these books cannot affirm that all these different and well-defined personalities who have incorporeally passed through his soul don't exist, for he does not know what it means to exist, nor whether Hamlet or Shakespeare is more real, or truly real.

So far the projected books include: this first volume, The Book of Disquiet, written by a man who calls himself Vicente Guedes, then The Keeper of Sheep, along with other poems and fragments by Alberto Caeiro (deceased, like Guedes, and from the same cause), who was born near Lisbon in 1889 and died where he was born in 1915. If you tell me it's absurd to speak that way about someone who never existed, I'll answer that I have no proof that Lisbon ever existed, or I who am writing, or anything at all.

This Alberto Caeiro had two disciples and a philosophical follower. The two disciples, Ricardo Reis and Alvaro de Campos, took different paths: the former intensified the paganism discovered by Caeiro and made it artistically orthodox; the latter, basing himself on another part of Caeiro's work, developed an entirely different system, founded exclusively on sensations. The philosophical follower, Antonio Mora (the names are as inevitable and as independent from me as the personalities), has one or two books to write in which he will conclusively prove the metaphysical and practical truth of paganism. A second philosopher of this pagan school, whose name has still not appeared to my inner sight or hearing, will write an apology for paganism based on entirely different arguments.

Perhaps other individuals with this same, genuine kind of reality will appear in the future, or perhaps not, but they will always be welcome to my inner life, where they live better with me than I'm able to live with outer reality. Needless to say, I agree with certain parts of their theories, and disagree with other parts. But that's quite beside the point. If they write beautiful things, those things are beautiful, regardless of any and all metaphysical speculations about who "really" wrote them. If in their philosophies they say true things — supposing there can be truth in a world where nothing exists — those things are true regardless of the intention or "reality" of whoever said them.

Having made myself into what I am — at worst a lunatic with grandiose dreams, at best not just a writer but an entire literature — I may be contributing not only to my own amusement (which would already be good enough for me) but to the enrichment of the universe, for when someone dies and leaves behind one beautiful verse, he leaves the earth and heavens that much richer, and the reason for stars and people that much more emotionally mysterious.

In view of the current dearth of literature, what can a man of genius do but convert himself into a literature? Given the dearth of people he can get along with, what can a man of sensibility do but invent his own friends, or at least his intellectual companions?

I thought at first of publishing these works anonymously, with no mention of myself, and to establish something like a Portuguese neopaganism in which various authors — all of them different - would collaborate and make the movement grow. But to keep up the pretense (even if no one divulged the secret) would be virtually impossible in Portugal's small intellectual milieu, and it wouldn't be worth the mental effort to try.

In the vision that I call inner merely because I call the "real world" outer, I clearly and distinctly see the familiar, well-defined facial features, personality traits, life stories, ancestries, and in some cases even the death, of these various characters. Some of them have met each other, others have not. None of them ever met me except Alvaro de Campos. But if tomorrow, traveling in America, I were to run into the physical person of Ricardo Reis, who in my opinion lives there, my soul wouldn't relay to my body the slightest flinch of surprise; all would be as it should be, exactly as it was before the encounter. What is life?

You should approach these books as if you hadn't read this explanation but had simply read the books, buying them one by one at a bookstore, where you saw them on display. You shouldn't read them in any other spirit. When you read Hamlet, you don't begin by reminding yourself that the story never happened. By doing so you would spoil the very pleasure you hope to get from reading it. When we read, we stop living. Let that be your attitude. Stop living, and read. What's life?

But here, more intensely than in the case of a poet's dramatic work, you must deal with the active presence of the alleged author. That doesn't mean you have the right to believe in my explanation. As soon as you read it, you should suppose that I've lied — that you're going to read books by different poets, or different writers, and that through these books you'll receive emotions and learn lessons from those writers, with whom I have nothing to do except as their publisher. How do you know that this attitude is not, after all, the one most in keeping with the inscrutable reality of things?

Fernando Pessoa died in 1935. He wrote this as a preface to the first collection of his complete heteronymic works in the early 1920s. This translation is by Richard Zenith, and you can purchase The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa here.

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There’s no greater tragedy than an equal intensity, in the same soul or the same man, of the intellectual sentiment and the moral sentiment. For a man to be utterly and absolutely moral, he has to be a bit stupid. For a man to be absolutely intellectual, he has to be a bit immoral. I don’t know what game or irony of creation makes it impossible for man to be both things at once. And yet, to my misfortune, this duality occurs in me. Endowed with both virtues, I’ve never been able to make myself into anything. It wasn’t a surfeit of one quality, but of two, that made me unfit to live.

- Fernando Pessoa

 

In Which There Is Something About Paris This Time of Year

Mary Cassatt: An American in Paris

by HILTON KRAMER

The career of Mary Cassatt is one of the most remarkable in the history of American art. So remarkable, indeed, that only Henry James, whom she apparently disliked and disapproved of, might have done justice to both her personal story and the artistic achievement that is its principal ornament. What a pity that he never interested himself in this subject, which is the eyes of posterity has assumed so many of the features of a Jamesian fiction.

There was, first of all, the indelible mark of her European upbringing. Born in 1844 in Allegheny City, now part of Pittsburgh, she was taken as a child to live in Paris, Heidelberg, and Darmstadt. Her parents were amateurs of French culture, her father a businessman who could never really get interested in making a fortune. They lived for a time in Germany to provide their son Alexander - Mary's older brother — with the technological education his gifts seemed best suited to, and thus launched him on a career that led to his becoming president of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

In 1858 the Cassatt family returned to the United States, settling in Philadelphia, and by 1860 Mary Cassatt — at the age of sixteen — was already determined to be an artist. There is a reference that year in one of Alexander's letters about plans for her to study in Rome. These plans never quite materialized, but the next year she entered the Pennsylvania Academy.

The kind of academic art instruction available to an ambitious student in Philadelphia in the 1860s proved unequal to her ambitions, and by 1866 she had persuaded her father to allow her to study abroad. She went first to Paris, however, rather than to Rome, probably because the Cassatt family's social connections in the French capital assured her of a style of life consistent with their strict bourgeois standards of respectability.

For the next few years — in France, Italy, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands - she steeped herself in the Old Masters, having found the academic instruction available in Paris no more to her taste than what she had found in Philadelphia. Her true masters, she later said, were Manet, Courbet and Degas, and when at least her pictures were give a place beside theirs, her fondest dreams were realized.

"I began to live," she told her French biographer in 1913, sounding more than ever like the quintessential Jamesian heroine. But Mary Cassatt gave the Jamesian fable a special twist. To the artistic vocation, usually reserved in James' fiction for his male characters, she brought all the independence and determination, all the courage and ambition, of the Jamesian heroine in search of romance. For art was indeed the great romance of her life, there being no evidence of any other.

She began submitting her pictures to the official Salon in Paris, and one of these — a small portrait of a woman — happened to be noticed by Degas in the Salon of 1874. He pronounced it "genuine" — high praise from an artist known to be a misogynist and never renowned for lavishing extravagant compliments on the work of his contemporaries. Three years later he sought her out - she was, by then, permanently settled in Paris — and invited her to join the "Independent" group of painters already known as Impressionists. In this, too, there is an irony worthy of a Jamesian scenario, for Mary Cassatt thus passed into the history of modern art under the banner of a style that ill-describes either her interests or her achievements.

"I will not admit that a woman can draw so well" — Degas' famous back-handed tribute to Cassatt's draftsmanship remains an important key to an understanding of her work. She had little of the Impressionists' interest in outdoor effects of light. She was not really a distinguished colorist. She produced few landscapes, and these are never her strongest or most personal pictures. She was primarily interested in the figure — in portraiture, in fact, and in that radical revision of pictorial space for which the Impressionist generation found inspired precedents in the Japanese print. Degas, who repudiated the Impressionist label, was the great exemplar of the style she aspired to, and he became the guiding spirit of her work.

In the biography of Mary Cassatt that Frederick A. Sweet published in 1966, he wrote that she "was not a very inventive painter and could prosper only when she was surrounded by strong influences." The question raised in this harsh judgment is certainly the one that haunts the visitor to the large retrospective exhibition of her work at the National Gallery of Art.

This is the largest exhibition of her work we have ever had - one hundred paintings, pastels, and graphic works. The career they trace is so interesting, the artistic intelligence embodied in the finest examples so forceful, and the incidental charm of her work so engaging, that one is reluctant to admit, even to oneself, a certain dissatisfaction with the exhibition as a whole. But the admission must be made. There is simply not the pressure here to sustain an exhibition on this scale. This dissatisfaction fades, of course, in the presence of her undoubted masterpieces. The greatest of these, in my opinion, is the portrait of her mother, "Reading Le Figaro" (1883).

This marvellous painting, all whites and grays, is a triumph of pictorial realization. The design, with its mirror-image locking the figure into a space that is totally felt, achieves a perfection rare for this painter. The figure, moreover, is beautifully integrated into this space — unlike so many of Cassatt's figures, which seem to exist in a physical realm almost separate from the space they occupy. Then, too, there is the iron grasp of character, a psychological dimension that raises the painting to a height all its own. Seeing this picture, one can well understand why Gauguin, comparing Cassatt to Berthe Morisot, declared, "Miss Cassatt has as much charm, but she has more power."

The power could not be sustained, however. The truth seems to be that few subjects moved Mary Cassatt as deeply as her mother, and she was the kind of painter who needed a subject that moved her — moved her beyond the boundaries of "pictorial problems" into a more personal realm of inspired expression. She was repeatedly drawn to the subject of children, and with certain exceptions — the best, I think, is the "Child in a Straw Hat" (1886) — these repeatedly failed her.

Degas characterized one of these pictures as "little Jesus with his English governess" and his remark sums up a great deal of what still troubles us about this aspect of Cassatt's work. The exhibition is certainly welcome, nonetheless. What remains so impressive about Mary Cassatt as an artist, even beyond her isolated masterpieces, is the absolute seriousness of her work. She aspired to the highest standards of her day, and she knew what they were. She felt nothing but contempt for compromises with fashionable or official taste. She was, in the best sense, an Independent — James' "passionate pilgrim," unwilling to settle for innocence, provincialism, or a fate determined by moribund custom.

Hilton Kramer was born in 1928. You can purchase his collection of essays, The Age of the Avant-Garde, here.

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In Which He Can't See Without His Glasses

Word for Word

by ALICE GREGORY

My Girl

dir. Howard Zieff

102 minutes

It took great restraint, watching My Girl last weekend, not to mouth along to all the dialogue. I was a little nervous – it had been a decade since I had seen it last. Though I knew 11-year-old Vada Sultenfuss ("Tough break!" "I like my name.") couldn't possibly be as compelling to me now, I worried that I wouldn't be able to empathize with my former self who tried to imitate her every gesture. Only recently have I heard people my age reference My Girl as some sort of common childhood artifact. I didn’t realize it was a generational touchstone, and I’m glad I wasn’t aware of its popularity as a kid. If I had known that my worship was anything less than private, I might have been embarrassed. Idols should be individual.

Poor Howard Zieff. It’s always surprising to re-remember that My Girl isn’t a John Hughes movie. It bears all the marks of his auteurship: the leafy, recognizably American town; the broken fourth wall; the cued pop music. It’s tender and funny and sad and it takes its young protagonist seriously. Vada (Anna Chlumsky), the daughter of a widowed mortician (Dan Aykroyd), grows up lonely, somewhat neglected, and preoccupied with death. Her only friend is the similarly unpopular Thomas J. (Macaulay Culkin) in whom she confides her love of her teacher, Mr. Bixler (Griffin Dunne) and her hatred of her soon-to-be-stepmother, Shelly (Jamie Lee Curtis). When Vada loses her mood ring in the woods, Thomas J. goes searching for it, is attacked by a swarm of bees, and dies. Only in the grief-ridden aftermath of the event does Vada bond with her father, finally accept that she did not kill her own mother who died in childbirth, and come to love Shelly. Vada’s voiceover is introspective and familiar, full of tidy revelations and moments of self-actualization.

I remember not only the words and intonation of every line of dialogue but also trying, gracelessly, to integrate them into daily conversation:

“Oh, wow, a real Evil Knievel.”   

“Nephritis is a kidney disease, you don't get it from hot dogs.”

“Dad, didn't you say you needed prunes REAL bad?

It goes without saying that the lines were too specific to blend in very seamlessly. Like an idiot savant, my recall can be at once prodigious and frighteningly narrow. I can still recite Vada’s poem by heart (“I like ice cream a whole lot/It tastes good when days are hot/On a cone or in a dish/This would be my only wish/ Vanilla, chocolate, or rocky road/Even with pie à la mode”), but I seemed to have forgotten the more major elements of the story: the general morbidity, her dream to be a writer, the brazen foreshadowing of Thomas J.’s death (the tiny coffin carried in at the beginning, the boy in the wheelchair at the doctor’s office, the dead fish). This attention to detail at the expense of a larger message, if anything, set the precedent for later lapses in critical reading. 

I’ve thought a lot about why I revered Vada Sultenfuss so much. Not having brothers, the fact that her best friend is a boy must have been attractive to me. I too had a close male friend, Charles, but our rapport was much different. I didn’t have the upper hand, for one; I mostly trailed him, pretending to enjoy his hobbies: netting crabs, hunting mushrooms, firing potato guns. Charles is in school to become a dentist now, and we don’t have much in common anymore. But I remember our friendship as imbued with romance, much of which was mentally kindled, surely in the image of My Girl.  

Cool Girls abound in middle school, thin out in high school, and are mostly forgotten about by college. They can effortlessly transform a heinous outfit into a stunning one and render a forgettable song into an anthem. No matter their age, they force aporetic thought: is she wearing that necklace because it’s cool or is that necklace cool because she’s wearing it? Adolescent overvaluation of another person – fictional or not – is good practice for being in love, a state in which the hierarchy of action and justification is inverted and every gesture seems retroactively inspired, amazing because they did it.

Vada was my original Cool Girl, endowing random items with totemic value: phrenology charts, Sunbonnet Sue quilts, Schwinn bikes with streamers, those perfectly worn-in overalls the Gap could never replicate. And so many mannerisms to copy! There was that half-cannon ball she did when jumping into the lake, left leg jutting out, nose plugged. There was the way her forearms hyperextended on the nurse's desk. I learned the word "resilient" from her and the phrase "intellectually stimulating." I overused both.  

I gave myself hangnails and taught myself to dribble a basketball like Vada. I wasn’t reckless enough to be become blood brothers with anyone though, as she does with Thomas J. – I knew about AIDS.  I asked for a copy of War and Peace for Christmas one year, not realizing that Vada reading Tolstoy in 5th grade was meant to indicate naiveté and pretension. My mom refused the request, suspecting correctly that my interest was not literary. Instead, she told me that not only would I like Anna Karenina better but that we already owned a copy.

I envied the sort of after-dark freedom shared between Vada and Thomas Jay, the warm nights of Madison, Pennsylvania, which allowed her to wear peasant blouses while I, in Northern California, was stuck bundled in Patagonias. These were the days before eBay, so my imitation was more approximate than it was accurate. I wanted a red, straw cloche like Vada’s, but a rust-colored, canvas bucket hat would have to do. I wore a mood ring, but the gem would fall off during games of recess foursquare and I had to Epoxy it back on when I got home everyday. Like Vada, I dressed in flannel shirts, cut-off shorts, and high-top converse. Only now can I look back and identify the uniform of a lesbian fixed-gear biker.  

I also, obviously, just thought Vada was really pretty. At one point, Shelly catalogues her every feature: “sparkling eyes,” “the cutest little nose,” an amazing mouth.” There is indeed an overripeness to Anna Chlumsky’s beauty, an actress whose face, come puberty, would rot into a Topanga-esque vulgarity. Macaulay Culkin too: a cherub-turned-skull. Together, they’re like a visual justification for pedophilia; their fresh faces stamped with the expiration date of looming adolescence. Acne and swollen hips are just around the corner. Get ‘em before they turn.

Though surely unable to articulate it, even at nine I could sense that there was some crucial contrast at play between intellectualism and infantile habits, between reading War and Peace and climbing willow trees. Vada Sultenfuss represented a sort of personality that I’m still attracted to now, that ability to modulate between two polar registers: the jock who studies, the scholar who watches reality TV, the White House chief of staff who attends all his childrens’ soccer games.  

Really though, what I was most drawn to was the film’s permission to indulge imaginary crises. Like most everything directed at young adults, My Girl suggests that reckoning with tragedy yields complexity, that misery breeds interiority. Vada is smarter, funnier, and more feeling than her classmates. She succeeds in adult writing classes, talks sarcastically about terminal illness, and is hopelessly in love with her teacher. Growing up, I feared that I was too untroubled to be interesting. My Girl was my first confrontation not with death, but with its absence in my own life. It prodded me to hypothesize perverse fantasies about being orphaned, about cousins drowning. I knew I couldn’t rely on my own experience for the sort of suffering we’re told makes one smart.     

I could recruit friends to play cards with me on the front deck, as Vada does; I could fast-forward to the scene in which she recites her final poem and copy it down, word-for-word, in my notebook; I could convince my parents to buy me a goldfish, like the one she wins at the carnival. I could acquire Vada’s props and mime her movements, but I was unable to copy her melancholy. My mother wasn’t dead; my father wasn’t an undertaker; my friends were all alive. Superficial mimicry seemed like the easiest way to cultivate depth. My emotions were – and still are – performative. Affecting a sentiment until I feel it remains my first instinct, my greatest strength, and my worst foible. Thanks, Vada!  

Alice Gregory is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. She tumbls here and you can read Salad & Candy here. She last wrote in these pages about Breaking Upwards.

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