The death of Fernando Pessoa, the poet who was many, 30 November 1935

On Friday 29 November 1935, a man of 47 was taken, against his wishes, to the Hospital de São Luís dos Franceses in the Bairro Alto, the old hilltop quarter above Lisbon's Chiado. The little hospital, in a former palace, had been set up for French sailors and residents of the city and was run by a French order of nuns, the Daughters of Charity.2 sources2 sources

The patient was Fernando Pessoa, who earned his living writing business letters in English and French. The doctors' diagnosis was hepatic colic linked to cirrhosis of the liver, which was put down to years of heavy drinking.2 sources2 sources

Some time that day he took a sheet of paper and wrote the date, 29-11-1935, and one sentence in pencil. It was in English, the language of his schooling in South Africa. They are the last words he is known to have written.2 sources2 sources

He died the next evening, Saturday 30 November, at about eight o'clock. According to his biographers, a nurse, a doctor and the hospital chaplain were with him at the end. The words he is said to have spoken last were a request: “Dá-me os óculos”, “Give me my glasses”.3 sources3 sources

Few outside Lisbon's literary circles knew his name. Respected in the city as an intellectual and a poet, he had published one book of Portuguese poems the year before. No one, his family included, realised how much writing was in the trunk in his rented flat in Campo de Ourique.2 sources2 sources

Pessoa was born on 13 June 1888 in a flat on the Largo de São Carlos, in the centre of Lisbon. His father died of tuberculosis when he was five. His mother married again, to the Portuguese consul in Durban, then a town in the British colony of Natal, and the boy spent nine years there.3 sources3 sources

Durban gave him a traditional English education and an English that he wrote almost like a mother tongue. Shortly after his seventeenth birthday he sailed back to Lisbon alone, in 1905, to study arts and letters at university. He left after two years without sitting an exam and taught himself instead at the National Library.3 sources3 sources

He never had a career. He lived with relatives or in rented rooms and paid his way by drafting letters in English and French for Lisbon firms that traded abroad. In a biographical note written eight months before he died, he described his job himself.2 sources2 sources

In 1920 his widowed mother came back from South Africa, and Pessoa rented a first-floor flat at Rua Coelho da Rocha 16 for the reunited family. It was his eighteenth address in the city, and he lived there for his last fifteen years, sometimes with his mother, who died in 1925, sometimes with his half-sister's family, often alone.3 sources3 sources

His days ran between the offices where he worked and the cafés, which he used as offices too; many of his texts are on café notepaper. From 1920 his friends could find him most afternoons at the Martinho da Arcada on the Praça do Comércio.1 source1 source

In his twenties Pessoa was at the centre of a small group of young writers and painters who met in the Chiado cafés. In February 1915 the poet Luís de Montalvor, just back from Brazil, proposed a modernist magazine. Its aim, as Pessoa put it, was to take in “everything that represents advanced art” (translated from Portuguese). Two months later it was ready, designed by José Pacheco, with contributions from Pessoa, Mário de Sá-Carneiro, José de Almada Negreiros and others.3 sources3 sources

Orpheu went on sale on 26 March 1915. The night before, extracts of the “Ode Triunfal”, signed Álvaro de Campos, were read aloud in the streets of the Chiado. Pessoa cast a horoscope for the launch, and the first copy was sold at seven in the evening, as it prescribed.1 source1 source

The press was delighted to be outraged. Days later the daily A Capital ran a piece headlined “Literatura de manicómio”, “Madhouse literature”, quoting doctors who thought the poets paranoid; other papers called them the lunatics of Rilhafoles, Lisbon's asylum. Orpheu was “the talk of the day in Lisbon”, Pessoa wrote to his friend Armando Côrtes-Rodrigues on 4 April. “I say this without exaggeration. The scandal is enormous.” (Both translated from Portuguese.)1 source1 source

A second issue appeared on 28 June, now edited by Pessoa and Sá-Carneiro. A third was set in proof but never came out: on 13 September Sá-Carneiro wrote that they would have to give up, because his father, who had paid the printer, would pay no more. Two issues were enough: for scholars such as Jerónimo Pizarro, 1915 is the moment modernism crystallised in Portugal.2 sources2 sources

Orpheu printed Álvaro de Campos as a contributor in his own right. He was one of Pessoa's heteronyms, invented poets with their own biographies, looks, opinions and styles. Pessoa drew the line himself in 1928: a pseudonym is the author writing under another name; a heteronym is “the work of an individual completely fabricated by him” (in the Casa Fernando Pessoa's translation).2 sources2 sources

He told the story of their birth in a long letter to the writer Adolfo Casais Monteiro on 13 January 1935. He had wanted to play a trick on Sá-Carneiro by inventing a bucolic poet. Nothing came for days. Then, he wrote, on 8 March 1914 he went to a tall chest of drawers, “acerquei-me de uma cómoda alta”, and began to write standing up.2 sources2 sources

Earlier in the same letter he had offered a blunter, clinical explanation: “A origem dos meus heterónimos é o fundo traço de histeria que existe em mim”, the origin of his heteronyms was “the deep trace of hysteria that exists in me” (translated from Portuguese).2 sources2 sources

Those four were only the best known. Pessoa wrote English poems as Alexander Search and Charles Robert Anon, French essays as Jean Seul, philosophy as António Mora, and gave lives to an astrologer, a friar and a hunchbacked girl named Maria José. Counts differ with the criteria: Teresa Rita Lopes listed 72 figures in 1990; Jerónimo Pizarro and Patricio Ferrari collected 136 fictional authors in 2013.4 sources4 sources

He also wrote under his own name, which he called the orthonym. One of his best-known poems as himself, “Autopsicografia”, written in 1931, opens with four lines on pretending. In plain English: the poet is a faker who fakes so completely that he even fakes, as pain, the pain he truly feels.2 sources2 sources

Pessoa published little and late. His first books were in English: 35 Sonnets and Antinous in 1918 and English Poems in 1921. The heteronyms appeared only in magazines: Campos in Orpheu in 1915, Reis and Caeiro in Athena in 1924 and 1925. His one book in Portuguese came out in 1934.3 sources3 sources

Mensagem (Message) is a sequence of 44 poems on Portugal's history, heroes and myths. Critics still argue over how nationalist it really is. For years Pessoa had called the project Portugal; he changed the title late on, after a friend, Alberto da Cunha Dias, remarked that the country's name was being used to sell shoes and hotels.2 sources2 sources

Its middle part, “Mar Português”, had appeared almost whole in the magazine Contemporânea in October 1922. The book was printed in October 1934, and Pessoa put it on sale, as he wrote, “purposely on 1 December” (translated from Portuguese: “propositalmente em 1 de Dezembro”).2 sources2 sources

He entered it for the poetry prize of the Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional (SPN), the regime's propaganda office, headed by António Ferro, the same man who had been Orpheu's editor in 1915. He had not published the book with the prize in mind, he told Casais Monteiro, but copies were ready by the October deadline. “O livro estava exactamente nas condições (nacionalismo) de concorrer. Concorri”: the book met the conditions, nationalism, so he entered (translated from Portuguese).3 sources3 sources

The rules offered a prize for a book of verse of at least 100 pages and a lesser one for a single poem or loose poems. The jury held that Mensagem fell into the second category and gave the main award to a priest, Vasco Reis, for Romaria. Ferro, who chaired the jury, then raised Mensagem's prize from 1,000 to 5,000 escudos, the same as the first category. Hence the talk, beginning in the magazine Presença, of Pessoa's “second prize”.2 sources2 sources

The cause of death is still argued over. The official diagnosis was a liver crisis linked to cirrhosis, generally blamed on long, heavy drinking. Some medical studies argue that he died of acute inflammation of the pancreas instead. Richard Zenith, in his 2021 biography, concluded that he probably died of an intestinal obstruction.3 sources3 sources

He was buried in the Prazeres cemetery beside his grandmother Dionísia. She had lived with the family on the Largo de São Carlos when he was a child, suffering bouts of a mental illness. Zenith thinks she was part of the reason the boy grasped early that a single, stable self was a fiction.2 sources2 sources

Pessoa seems to have held on to most of what he wrote, in a large trunk. It held poetry, prose, plays, philosophy, criticism, translations, linguistic theory, political writing and horoscopes, in Portuguese, English and French, typed, handwritten or scrawled on notebooks, loose sheets, envelopes, handbills, office stationery and café notepaper.2 sources2 sources

Publication began in 1942, when Casais Monteiro edited a two-volume anthology and the publisher Ática started its Complete Works with a volume of poems, prepared by Luís de Montalvor and João Gaspar Simões. Campos followed in 1944, Reis in 1945 and Caeiro in 1946. The Book of Disquiet, the fragments credited to Soares, did not appear as a book until 1982, in two volumes edited by Maria Aliete Galhoz and Teresa Sobral Cunha.3 sources3 sources

The inventory of the trunk began only in 1968. In December 1979 the state bought the papers and deposited them at the Biblioteca Nacional in Lisbon, where they are catalogued as Espólio E3. Since 1988 a team of scholars has worked on a critical edition, and the library has kept buying papers that stayed with the family, including more than 300 documents in 2020.2 sources2 sources

Pessoa's work entered the public domain in 1985, fifty years after his death. In 1997, under an EU directive that set copyright at seventy years after death, the publisher Assírio & Alvim bought the publishing rights from his heirs. The work entered the public domain for good in 2005. In 2009 a government decree classified the archive as a national treasure.1 source1 source

In 1985, the fiftieth anniversary of his death, Pessoa's remains were moved from Prazeres to the cloister of the Jerónimos Monastery in Belém, where the remains of Vasco da Gama and of the epic poet Luís de Camões had been laid in 1880. The sculptor Lagoa Henriques made the tomb.2 sources2 sources

The move put the commercial correspondent who wrote under other names in the monastery that holds the tomb of Portugal's national poet. The year before, José Saramago had published O Ano da Morte de Ricardo Reis, a novel in which the dead Pessoa walks Lisbon in 1936 to talk with Reis, the heteronym who outlived him.2 sources2 sources

In the late 1980s Lisbon City Council bought the run-down building on Rua Coelho da Rocha, which was at risk of demolition. It was rebuilt, keeping only the façade, the stairs to the first floor and two rooms of the family's flat, and opened as the Casa Fernando Pessoa on 30 November 1993, the anniversary of his death.1 source1 source

After a refit in 2019 and 2020 it won the Portuguese Museum Association's award for best museum in 2021. At its centre is his private library, classified as a national treasure and digitised in full. Of its 1,200 or so titles, more than half are language and literature; philosophy and psychology come a distant second.3 sources3 sources

In the Chiado, a bronze Pessoa by Lagoa Henriques has sat at a café table outside A Brasileira since 1988. Pessoa was a regular there from his student years, as he was at the Brasileira on the Rossio and the Martinho da Arcada.2 sources2 sources

In February 2025 the hospital still occupied the buildings where he died, the former Palácio Cunhal das Bolas on Rua Luz Soriano. That month the city council approved plans to turn them into a five-star hotel with 68 rooms. One condition was that the plaque with Pessoa's inscription, which used to hang by the main gate, be put back.1 source1 source