TypeTown #45: “Drink till you write well and feel sick.”

🇵🇹 Fernando Pessoa and an extraordinary life of secret work

Mar 27, 2026

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Olá e bom dia!

Welcome, welcome, to our latest ramblings and a first trip in TypeTown history to sun-kissed Portugal.

In June 1888, Fernando Pessoa was born in Lisbon and thrust into what proved a tumultuous childhood.

Aged five, he lost his father to tuberculosis. Eighteen months later, with his mother already remarried, his life was uprooted to Durban, South Africa.

There, he attended an English school. Then, aged 17 and equipped with a language that brought in valuable translation work, he returned to Portugal and began his own secretive writings.

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”

He kept his profile relatively low.

Aside from literary criticism in low-circulation journals, he published just three collections of poetry in English and one in Portuguese.

But things were happening behind the scenes.

“Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I will always be. And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams, and their hopeless hopes.”

He created three major pseudonyms -- Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Alvaro de Campos -- and returned to each of them for the next two decades. Dozens of others played minor parts in his production schedule.

And his Royal 10 was never short of action.

Just as photographer Vivian Maier did 40 years later, Pessoa was busy amassing a vast library of hidden work.

As each page came off the platen, it was deposited in a large trunk in his office.

Today, researchers and archivists are still working through the 25,000 sheets he left behind.

“Wise is he who enjoys the show offered by the world.”

Pessoa’s mother died in 1925. Ten years later, his own lifestyle choices -- and the resulting cirrhosis of the liver -- provided him with his own exit, stage left, from this mortal world.

“Your poems are of interest to mankind; your liver isn’t. Drink till you write well and feel sick. Bless your poems and be damned to you.”

After his death, his work found a larger readership.

He is now considered one of the forefathers of western literature. The Book of Disquiet, first published in 1982, ranks among the most important works of the 20th century.

Visitors to Lisbon can tour his house at the Casa Fernando Pessoa museum.