The restless Mr. Pessoa: he was not alone in his head

Who was the man behind the artist? The question, a bit vague, comes up again and again when it comes to painting the portrait of a personality who has disappeared or is in the process of being so. In the case of Fernando Pessoa, however, the most accurate formulation would undoubtedly be the following; who were the artists behind the man?

Because the Portuguese writer, who died of a liver damaged by the quantities of alcohol he consumed daily, led a rather singular artistic life, fatally linked to his own personal destiny. In his new graphic novel, Nicolas Barral, who undertook to tell the story of Portugal from its origins in the magnificent Sur un air de fadoadopts an original point of view since, far from offering us a “stupid” biopic, it narrates the last days of the turbulent existence of the man of letters, orphaned by a father who was too young and struggling to adapt, then, to the Australian exile desired by his mother, with a second husband who hardly liked little Fernando.

“It was better for me to write than to risk living“, he wrote later, and we understand why. Solitary, if not sunny, Pessoa returned to Lisbon at the age of 17, and signed an abundant work there, in his own name, but also in a multitude of pseudonyms… which he considered more as heteronyms since these other novelists were, in his eyes, well and truly alive, endowed with their own energy and style, Schizo, No, just a writer?We all need witnesses to our existence, to give it meaning.estime Barral. So what do you do when you have no friends? We invent them. How much ? As much as necessary. If you are a writer, they will be writers. And we will invent a work for them all. And we will then offer ourselves the incredible luxury of being able to live several lives. Because why would we condemn ourselves to being one? Doesn’t everyone wear a mask from time to time? Why not embrace them and offer yourself a panoramic view of the world? Isn’t that the best way to get to the truth of things?“

The restless Monsieur Pessoa does not therefore only speak of the Portuguese poet and novelist, of whom a young Portuguese freelancer undertakes to write the future obituary here. But also of the mystery of creation. And Barral finds something in common with his prestigious elder: “I would be tempted to include myself, too, in the tribe of the restless. I have always been more comfortable in fiction than in reality. I spend my life straddling the two.”