WHAT DO WE OWE DEAD WRITERS?
Literature is a morbid business
LISBON—I am visiting a couple of friends who are on writing fellowships in Portugal. There are a lot of tourists around accomplishing something, making their way to palaces and coastal villas before the sun goes down, shaking the rust off their personalities, finding themselves via endurance quests of dancing and inebriation. On the square below the terraced street where we’re staying there are opera performances in the evening. The music drifts in through the window in the evening confirming that we are not in New York City. A statue of Fernando Pessoa stands in the square. A book replaces his head. Another statue of Pessoa, in a bowler hat, legs crossed with an empty chair beside him, is up the hill. You can have your picture taken perched next to Pessoa, as did the young woman who sat beside him after I snapped my portrait. ‘Why they got Pessoa in a bowler hat?’ my novelist friend asked the other night as we were passing by. Well, he was a city-dwelling, office-working modernist active in the first four decades of the 20th century. Men wore hats then. It wasn’t a hipster affectation. We may see ourselves in the work of dead writers, all the way back to Sappho and Homer, but we shouldn’t expect them to resemble us in the ways that ultimately don’t mean much: their attire, their manners, their haircuts, their eating habits, what their tipple was.
I have never read Pessoa, never seriously undertaken The Book of Disquiet, though I obtained a copy of the new edition a few years ago, and it now sits in storage, unread, in Brooklyn. Over two decades I have read enough essays about Pessoa and his many personas to be able to crack jokes about him whenever a writer in my company confesses to submitting or publishing under a pseudonym. The last few weeks I have been rereading the novels of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo for work. I have spent a few afternoons and nights this summer writing obituaries of writers, some of whom are not dead and I may yet predecease. Of course, it’s good work to have. Of course, the books are wonderful. Of course, returning again to the enthusiasms of youth makes you feel . . . whatever. The way I feel doesn’t matter. The trouble is that the hazard of writing about the dead, especially the recently dead, even more especially the inevitably soon-to-be dead, is a stale reverence, a purely sepulchral fealty. Yet what’s the point of killing somebody who’s already dead, when the dandelions haven’t even sprouted on the grave, before any statues have been erected to receive the daily tributes of birds and the nocturnal donations of tourists, literary and otherwise?