The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa by Fernando Pessoa Page B

even greater in Sá-Carneiro than in Pessoa. Or if not greater, at least more in evidence, and more agonizing, for Sá-Carneiro did not have Pessoa’s uncommon capacity for making emotions submit to reason. Pessoa was intellectually distressed by the gap between what he was and what he wanted to be; Sá-Carneiro, because of the same gap, committed suicide. The theme of all but his earliest work was precisely the torment he felt for not living up—in his flesh, in his writing, and even in his imagination—to an ideal of beauty he could only intuit, not define, though it was obviously informed by a Decadent
,
post-Symbolist aesthetic. In
Paulismo
he found the perfect vehicle to express, through charged images and linguistic “strangeness,” his anguished vision of an unattainable beauty, and in the space of four years he produced one of the most exquisite poetic oeuvres in Portuguese
.
    Sensationism was born in 1914, the same year as Pessoa’s major heteronyms, two of whom were its foremost exemplars. Caeiro, whose poetry (according to Thomas Crosse, p. 53) was based on “the substitution of sensation for thought,” embodied the Sensationist doctrine that reality, for us, is summed up in our sensations, since everything we know comes through them. Campos, whose motto was to “feel everything in every way possible,” exemplified the corollary doctrine that since the only reality we have is that of sensations, we should experience them as intensely as possible. Intersectionism, which is a form of Sensationism but seems to have been born first, can be roughly characterized as literary Cubism, whereby reality is broken down into its temporal and spatial components, which are then organized into a compositional ensemble. The best example of this technique is Pessoa’s poem sequence titled “Slanting Rain,” in which contrasting poetic subjects are superimposed, or the same subject is seen from diverse points of view. (See Campos’s description of these poems on p. 50
).
    But Sensationism and Intersectionism, even more than
Paulismo,
exceeded the bounds of Fernando Pessoa and his heteronymic company. By the spring of
1914
a small group of writers had gathered around Pessoa, who was not really their leader, since leadership was not a role that suited his personality, but they were his tacit followers, recognizing and feeding off his genius, and some of their ideas no doubt went into the literary doctrines he forged. They met in cafes, where they discussed, showed each other their written work, and plotted how best to launch themselves and their movement, which was tantamount to launching European Modernism in Portugal. Several of the group’s members, including Mario de Sá-Carneiro, were based in Paris, where they had direct contact with the Futurists and the Cubists, whose tenets were incorporated into Sensationism and Intersectionism
.
    It was probably Pessoa’s idea to create a magazine, significantly titled
Europa,
whose pages would have featured Intersectionist theory, Inter-sectionist poetry, and Intersectionist fiction
. A
supplement to the first issue
,
evidently meant for distribution abroad, would have contained work by Pessoa, Sá-Cameiro, and Alexander Search (one of Pessoa’s early hetero-nyms, see pp. 15–16) in French and English. The magazine idea was superseded by a book idea, an
Anthology of Intersectionism,
which likewise fizzled, but in
1915
the group founded and published two issues of
Orpheu,
where five of Pessoa’s masterworks saw print:
The Mariner
and “Slanting Rain,” signed by his own name, and the Campos poems “Opiary,” “Triumphal Ode,” and “Maritime Ode.” The youngest group member to publish in the magazine, Jose de Almada-Negreiros
(1893–1970),
went on to have a long career as an experimental writer and painter. Some of his best works were practical demonstrations of Intersectionist theory, and he may be considered the third leader—after Pessoa and Sá-Cameiro
—
in