Nom de Plume

by Carmela Ciuraru

  In his lifetime, he wasn’t quite the Emily Dickinson of Lisbon—except for having apparently died a virgin. Mostly he kept to himself, to be sure, but he also published hundreds of poems, journalistic pieces, and essays. He became a respected intellectual figure, if not quite a celebrity, yet his literary genius was not widely recognized until after he died. In his home country he is now considered the greatest Portuguese poet since Luís de Camões, the sixteenth-century author of the epic Os Lusíadas (which Pessoa is said not to have cared much about). He is also regarded as one of the greatest modernists in any language and is one of the most fascinating figures in the history of literature.

  On November 29, 1935, the forty-seven-year-old Pessoa suffered from abdominal pain and developed a high fever. He was taken to the Hospital de São Luís in Lisbon, where he wrote, in English, his last words: “I know not what tomorrow will bring.” The next day he died from cirrhosis of the liver.

  A statue of Pessoa now stands near one of the coffeehouses he used to frequent. At the time of his death, those who knew his work understood that the country had lost an important man. “Fernando Pessoa is dead,” a young doctor (later to become a distinguished literary figure) named Miguel Torga wrote in his journal. “As soon as I heard the news in the paper, I closed my surgery and plunged into the mountains. There, with the pines and the rocks, I wept for the death of the greatest poet of our times, whom Portugal watched pass by in his coffin, on his way to immortality, without even asking who he was.”

  In the opening lines of what is perhaps his best-known poem, “The Tobacco Shop,” Pessoa declares:

  I’m nothing.

  I’ll always be nothing.

  I can’t want to be something.

  But I have in me all the dreams of the world.

  He was someone who felt like “nothing” to such an extent that he strove for self-expulsion, yet like Whitman, he contained everything that he needed, desiring nothing from the universe beyond his imagination. His statement presents the speaker as both meek and grandiose: I have nothing, I am nothing, but don’t you wish you had what I have? Don’t you wish to be what I am? Pessoa’s self-abnegation is the source of his power and vitality. In his free-floating way, he implicates us, his readers, in the telling and interpretation of his story. As he wrote in his posthumously published masterpiece, The Book of Disquiet:

  I am the suburb of a non-existent town, the prolix commentary on a book never written. I am nobody, nobody. I am a character in a novel which remains to be written, and I float, aerial, scattered without ever having been, among the dreams of a creature who did not know how to finish me off.

  Pessoa has been dead for decades. We haven’t even begun to finish him off.

  He slept with prostitutes, hated bad smells, and dressed like a tramp

  Chapter 8

  George Orwell & ERIC BLAIR

  Had Eric Arthur Blair been a working-class bloke from Birmingham instead of an Old Etonian, George Orwell might never have existed. By the age of six, Blair aspired to become a writer, and as a young man he knew that he wanted to explore the lowest stratum of society in his work. Given his genteel family background, this kind of subject matter might have been problematic. If he wanted to write, he would have to conceal himself.

  Blair was born on June 25, 1903, in Motihari, a village in colonial India near the Nepalese border. His parents were stationed there while his father, Richard, held a minor post with the Indian Civil Service. They were not wealthy—Eric would later describe his family as “lower-upper-middle-class”—but both his parents came from prominent families in decline. Richard was descended from West Indian slave owners (his great-grandfather was rich and had married the daughter of an earl), and was instilled with a strong sense of public service; Blair’s mother, Ida, grew up in Burma, the daughter of a French timber merchant who himself came from a distinguished family of artisans.

  Ida was working at a boys’ school in India when she met Richard, who was thirty-nine, unmarried, and in a dead-end job that paid poorly. He was eighteen years older than Ida. They married in 1897, and she gave birth to a daughter, Marjorie, the following year. (Another daughter, Avril, was born five years after Eric, in 1908.) Without being affluent, they enjoyed the usual perks of colonial life, including servants and access to a whites-only club. Soon after Eric was born, Ida took the children back to England; she wanted them to enjoy a comfortable middle-class existence (and education) in Oxfordshire. In the town where they settled, which dated to the fourteenth century, Ida found an active social life, something she’d missed terribly.

  Growing up, Blair was keenly aware of his family history and of the divisions of caste and class systems. He would later reject organized religion and declare himself an atheist, but he had a strong sense of moral duty (even when he didn’t live up to his own code, which was often). He was a stubborn, sensitive, and studious boy who loved reading Dickens, Swift, Defoe, and especially Kipling, whom he called a “household god” and whose work would greatly influence his own. His mother recorded his first word, uttered when he was eighteen months old: “beastly.”

  In temperament, Blair was more like his soft-spoken, introverted father than his outgoing, chatty mother, and he found unbearable the frivolous tea parties he was forced to attend. “As a child I was taught to say ‘Thank you for having me’ after a party, and it seemed to me such an awful phrase,” he recalled later. Ida loved being part of a well-to-do social set, playing croquet, shopping, going to theater and music events in London, attending a local regatta, and watching tennis at Wimbledon. Yet she was an attentive, loving mother, and Blair is said to have inherited his vicious wit from her. “I barely saw my father before I was eight,” he recalled in the opening of his 1946 essay, “Why I Write.” “For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays.”

  Coming of age in Edwardian England, when “the sheer vulgar fatness of wealth” was everywhere, and “without any kind of aristocratic elegance to redeem it,” Blair assumed the stance of a critical outsider. “[T]he social status of nearly everyone in England could be determined from his appearance, even at two hundred yards’ distance.” Social order was not an abstract notion; it was present in his everyday life, and he was made to understand its significance both at home and at school. “I was forbidden to play with the plumber’s children; they were ‘common’ and I was told to keep away from them,” he wrote in his 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier. “This was snobbish, if you like, but it was also necessary, for middle-class people cannot afford to let their children grow up with vulgar accents. So, very early, the working class ceased to be a race of friendly and wonderful beings and became a race of enemies.”

  It was partly because of his chronic ill health that Blair was highly attuned to disparities in social conditions. (He had defective bronchial tubes and a lesion in one lung, which was not diagnosed until later in his life.) He knew what it was to feel helpless, to feel apart from one’s own community, to be judged as weak and inferior. He was not yet two years old when he endured a bout of bronchitis, the first of many (along with influenza) to recur throughout his life. A decade after failing an army medical exam in 1940, Blair would be dead of tuberculosis at the age of forty-six. His entire life was spent with a sense of urgency regarding his work, with the constant knowledge that he was running out of time. “Until I was about thirty I always planned my life not only on the assumption that any major undertaking was bound to fail, but that I could only expect to live a few years longer,” he once wrote.

  Perhaps because he was confined to bed so often as a child, in enforced solitude, he developed a rich imagination. He believed in ghosts and was enchanted by ghost stories. He also believed that his dreams had symbolic meaning and were sometimes prescient. And he was highly superstitious, a believer in black magic. When his father died in 1939, he placed pennies on Rich
ard’s eyes and threw the pennies into the sea.

  In fact, years later, Blair is said to have thought that assuming a pseudonym meant no one could use his real name against him for evil purposes. The notion of peeling off identities appealed to him, anyway. “I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons,” he later recalled, “and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued.”

  Blair produced his first poem at the age of four, dictated to his mother. Seven years later, in 1914, he published an exuberantly patriotic poem in a local newspaper, with the opening stanza:

  Oh! Give me the strength of the lion,

  The wisdom of Reynard the fox,

  And then I’ll hurl troops at the Germans,

  And give them the hardest knocks.

  He also produced what he later described as “bad and unfinished ‘nature poems’ in the Georgian style,” a rhyming play, and short fiction—most of which he regarded as embarrassing. But he recognized his facility with language and his love for it. “From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer,” he later recalled. “Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.”

  Even in childhood he was cultivating “the making up of a continuous ‘story’ about myself, a sort of diary existing only in the mind. . . . As a very small child I used to imagine that I was, say, Robin Hood, and picture myself as the hero of thrilling adventures, but quite soon my ‘story’ ceased to be narcissistic in a crude way and became more and more a mere description of what I was doing and the things I saw.” (That storytelling self would later be manifested as George Orwell.) He always felt a need to describe things, events, and people, and his early stories were, if nothing else, impressive in their descriptive quality.

  In 1911, a fateful event occurred: Ida decided to send her son away to St. Cyprian’s, a fashionable preparatory school in Sussex for boys aged eight to thirteen. The five years he spent there traumatized him and filled him with contempt, yet the school’s “values” did shape his socialist views—and proved formative in the making of George Orwell, whom V. S. Pritchett called “the conscience of his generation.”

  He set down an account of his sufferings at the “expensive and snobbish school” in the ironically titled, fifteen-thousand-word essay, “Such, Such Were the Joys,” which took him years to write. (It was not published in the UK until 1968, after the widow of the cruel headmaster died.) Soon after his arrival at St. Cyprian’s, he recalled, “I began wetting my bed. I was now aged eight, so that this was a reversion to a habit which I must have grown out of at least four years earlier.” The guilt and self-mortification he’d acquired from a Catholic school education was exacerbated by his time at St. Cyprian’s. “[I]t was looked on as a disgusting crime which the child committed on purpose and for which the proper cure was a beating,” he wrote. “Night after night I prayed, with a fervour never previously attained in my prayers, ‘Please God, do not let me wet my bed! Oh, please God, do not let me wet my bed!’ but it made remarkably little difference.”

  For such an elite institution, “the standard of comfort was in every way far lower than in my own home,” Blair recalled bitterly, “or, indeed, than it would have been in a prosperous working-class home.” He found that there was never enough food, and what was available tasted awful—including porridge containing unidentifiable black lumps. (He resorted to stealing stale bread from the pantry in the middle of the night.) The boys were allowed a hot bath only once a week, and the towels were damp, with a foul smell. “Whoever writes of his childhood must beware exaggeration and self-pity,” Blair admitted. “But I should be falsifying my own memories if I did not record that they are largely memories of disgust.”

  He was surrounded by boys boasting about “my father’s yacht,” “my pony,” “my pater’s touring car,” and the like. “How much a year has your pater got?” “What part of London do you live in?” “Is that Knightsbridge or Kensington?” “Have you got a butler?” and “How many bathrooms has your house got?” were the kinds of interrogations intrinsic to the school’s culture. The boys were constantly keeping score and ranking themselves socially above or below their peers; Blair was always below. He was well aware that aside from money or a title, he lacked every other virtue that might bolster his standing—athleticism, good looks, confidence, and charm.

  One of his few friends at St. Cyprian’s was the future literary critic Cyril Connolly, who later recalled Blair’s appearance as grotesque: “Tall, pale, with his flaccid cheeks, large spatulate fingers, and supercilious voice, he was one of those boys who seem born old.”

  Blair was bullied as well as beaten at school, and he found no comfort in his holidays at home. His father, now fifty-five, had retired with a modest pension and returned to the family. Ida, having been left alone to raise three children, was chilly and remote to Richard. He was a stranger to Eric and did nothing to cultivate closeness between them. Eric felt no love for his father, and was mortified by Richard’s habit of removing his false teeth and setting them on the table at mealtime. “Most of the good memories of my childhood, and up to the age of about twenty, are in some way connected with animals,” he wrote in “Such, Such Were the Joys.”

  Even then, as a morose and timid boy, haunted by “a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness,” as he once recalled of his younger self, Blair aspired to greatness. He knew he would become an author someday—and not just any, but a famous one. He announced that his writing name would be the distinguished-sounding “E. A. Blair,” rather than “Eric Blair,” which he deemed too plain.

  His education at St. Cyprian’s prepared him for a spot at the Mount Olympus of English public schools, Eton, where he was awarded a scholarship in 1916. (His parents could never have afforded the full boarding and tuition fees.) But Blair had already been worn down by his unhappy experience at St. Cyprian’s, and he hated Eton. He felt more miserable than ever, and even more alone. One of his classmates once described him in even more unflattering terms than did Cyril Connolly (who also attended Eton with Blair), as having had “a large, rather fat face, with big jowls, a bit like a hamster.” Another said that Blair was “pretty awful” and “a bit of a bastard.” One boy Blair particularly disliked was Philip Yorke—the oldest brother of Henry Yorke, who would assume the authorial name Henry Green.

  At Eton, Blair cranked out stories and plays in his notebooks, all of which he signed “Eric the FAMOUS AUTHOR.” He savored a few aspects of his time there, including having been taught French by Aldous Huxley. And his reading experiences were extraordinary: Zola, Maupassant, Flaubert, Twain, and Milton were among his favorites. He also took up smoking and cultivated a rebellious streak, which won him the admiration of his peers.

  At St. Cyprian’s, Blair had at least soared academically, but at Eton his grades were poor. His tutor found him lazy and impudent. Upon graduation, for reasons he never explained, Blair took a commission with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, where he spent five monotonous years feeling exiled. (Among his few pleasures were frequent visits to Burmese brothels, which, as a sexual late bloomer, he found addictive.) Perhaps his decision to enter government service was an easy way to deal with his confusion about what to do next, and to figure out what kind of man he should become. The experience would buy him time. Cambridge and Oxford—the two universities of destiny for Eton’s finest—held no interest for him, and in any case he was considered by Eton to be “unsuitable” for either. That was upper-class code for “an embarrassment.”

  In 1927, Blair returned to England a heavy smoker, gaunt (having suffered his usual bronchial problems, along with dengue fever), and, as one of his parents’ neighbors
noted, someone who “looks as though he never washes.” His classmates from Eton had already started to publish and even achieve renown. Although Blair would eventually exorcise the bad memories from his time in Burma, which represented wasted years (and lost innocence), in his 1934 novel Burmese Days, for the time being he was still six years away from his publishing debut, Down and Out in Paris and London.

  He rented a cheap room in Notting Hill for a while to fashion himself into a “FAMOUS AUTHOR,” but it wasn’t until he set off for Paris that things seemed to click into place. Like so many other literary expatriates, Blair felt that in Paris life would truly begin. He arrived in 1928 in search of culture, education, writing material, and undoubtedly romance. (Brothels were legal at the time, so sex could be obtained one way or another.) The city had a buzz that dour London seemed to lack. Henry Miller was there, as were Joyce, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, among other famous writers.

  Blair soon managed to complete his first novel, but when it was rejected for publication he burned it. At that time his heart was still set on fiction—he had no intention of becoming a celebrated essayist, even though he was deeply political (while refusing to join any one party) and interested in provocative reportage. He wasn’t sure how he intended to use the sketches he wrote about the beggars and tramps he encountered on the city’s streets, but “common people”—the kind he’d been raised to ignore, like a good and proper snob—interested him most. The self-declared socialist was drawn to down-and-out types much more than to writers or artists, and least of all to anyone with the odor of affluence.