Pessoa wrote under roughly seventy-five other selves
Lisbon's Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) ranks among the twentieth century's pivotal literary minds. He refused the word pseudonym for about seventy-five other names—especially Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis—inventing the term heteronym because each seemed to him an independent mind.
Pessoa was five when his father died of tuberculosis, and his one-year-old brother Jorge followed in January 1894. His mother remarried by proxy a military officer who became Portuguese consul in Durban, and early in 1896 mother and son sailed to join him. In a 1918 letter Pessoa named that English schooling in Natal as the factor that shaped his whole life. He shone at Durban High School and in 1903 won the new Queen Victoria Memorial Prize for the best English paper in the Cape matriculation exam.
The habit of other selves started young. As a child he invented a French nobleman, Chevalier de Pas, and in Durban he signed work as Charles Robert Anon, David Merrick, Horace James Faber and Alexander Search. At sixteen he placed a satirical poem in The Natal Mercury, which later printed his sonnets. A schoolmate remembered a thin, stooping boy who ignored sport, read constantly and wrote English with a splendid style despite learning it late.
He left Durban for good at seventeen, sailing home through the Suez Canal, a voyage later reworked in two poems credited to Álvaro de Campos in the journal Orpheu in 1915. In Lisbon he started a diplomacy course, but illness, poor results and a student strike against João Franco's dictatorship ended it, and he taught himself in libraries. He worked for a mercantile agency and spent a small inheritance from his grandmother on a publishing house, Empreza Ibis, which folded in 1910.
A step-uncle introduced him to Portuguese Romantic and Symbolist poetry. In 1912 an essay in A Águia launched a famous quarrel by predicting a super-Camões who would outshine Portugal's national poet. His heteronyms sometimes held extreme or unpopular views, and together they made him a poet, critic, translator and publisher in Portuguese, English and French.
Source: Fernando Pessoa
