Chapter 114: Breakthroughs

We can often pinpoint the moments that changed our lives for the better, whether their meaning was evident from the start, or in light of their retelling and consequences. 

The result, whether it led to a belief, a vocation, or a partner, might so profoundly be a part of who we’ve become that we struggle to imagine ourselves otherwise. And yet there is that watershed we return to, a juncture in time.

The same can happen in writing, by some author’s accounts: a breakthrough that stands out like a flare amidst the indistinguishable days of jotting down. The moment that changed an author’s writing life.

One such breakthrough happened to Fernando Pessoa, and it bears retelling. Other than his pieces in Portuguese magazines, he would publish only one book in his lifetime, yet the posthumous discovery of over 25,000 pages in his trunk revealed an astounding body of work in poetry and prose. In his telling, it stemmed from a night like no other he’d lived, before or after. He described it to critic Adolfo Casais Monteiro, in a letter from January 13th, 1935, ten months before he died.

“One day when I had finally given up -it was March 8, 1914- I went to a high chest of drawers and, taking a piece of paper, I began to write, standing up, as I write whenever I can. And I wrote thirty-odd poems in a row, in a kind of ecstasy whose nature I will not succeed in defining. It was the triumphant day of my life, and I shall never have another like it,” the letter reads.

What was happening to Pessoa was not solely an instance of writing flow or inspiration. A part of who he had always been finally burst into his writing. Since childhood Fernando had invented “Various unreal figures that were for me as visible and as mine as the things which we call, perhaps abusively, real life.” They would not fade, as childish inventions tend to do. “I made, and spread, several friends and acquaintances that never existed, but that still today, almost thirty years later, I hear, feel, and see. I repeat: I hear, I feel, I see... And I have nostalgia for them.”

They took on a life of their own, that night in 1914. “I began with a title, The Keeper of Sheep. And what followed was the appearance of someone in me, to whom I promptly gave the name Alberto Caeiro. Please excuse the absurdity of the phrase: my teacher had appeared in me. That was the immediate sensation I had. And so much so that, those thirty-odd poems having been written, I immediately took another piece of paper and wrote, also in the same vein, the six poems that make up Fernando Pessoa's Oblique Rain. Immediately and totally... It was the return from Fernando Pessoa-Alberto Caeiro to Fernando Pessoa-all by himself. Or, better still, it was Fernando Pessoa's reaction against his non-existence as Alberto Caeiro.”

These imaginary beings came forth in his writing, not as mere subjects emanating from him, but as separate entities who wrote in a distinctive style and for whom he intuited whole biographies. Pessoa would call them heteronyms. He invented seventy-two of them.

“When Alberto Caeiro appeared, I immediately tried to discover for him –instinctively and subconsciously– some disciples. I tore the latent Ricardo Reis from his false paganism, discovered his name, and adjusted it to his self because I could already see him at this point. And, suddenly, and in a derivation opposite that of Ricardo Reis, a new individual emerged impetuously. In a spurt, and at a typewriter, without interruption or amendment, the Triumphal Ode of Álvaro de Campos emerged: the Ode with that title and the man with his own name.”

Pessoa, a fragmented individual, without unity of souls or spirit, found the only way in which could truly write: his splinters took on a life of their own on the page. It was not just the blossoming of one writing career, but many. More than just a manner of writing, his breakthrough was a way to live out every one of the facets within.

Such breakthroughs, of course, are infrequent, rarely witnessed, and you have to take the person’s word for it. If writers are among your closest relations, you’ll often gauge the state of the work by the state they’re in, notice the frequent correlation between writing and mood: writer’s block and deflation, breakthrough and elation.

You’ve seen the former, the deflation, often enough, whether the mumble and moping, the edginess, the ashtray filling. From my childhood, I remember the open attic window out of which a scream burst forth unto our quiet alley: “I want to wriiiiite!”

The latter, the breakthroughs, are often low-key affairs. Some may occur late at night, or with deadlines muting the fireworks. They can be quite intimate experiences. Though there are some notable exceptions.

Egyptologist E.A. Wallis Budge recounts how, in 1872, his colleague George Smith was at work on Assyrian clay tablets, which had lain broken and undisturbed since 612 B.C. until being unearthed in the 1850s. He was painstakingly attempting to be the first to make sense of their cuneiform script. “Smith took the tablet and begin to read (…) when he saw that they contained the portion of the legend he had hoped to find there, he said, ‘I am the first man to read that after more than two thousand years of oblivion!’”

Smith’s breakthrough was to find and translate the heart of The Epic of Gilgamesh, an epic poem composed nearly 4,000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia, that predates the earliest known passages of the Bible or Greek literature by centuries.

He celebrated accordingly: “Setting the tablet on the table, he jumped up and rushed about the room in a great state of excitement, and, to the astonishment of those present, began to undress himself!"…Inside the lofty British Museum.

If the days of hand wringing are challenging, witnessing a breakthrough is a memorable experience, as well as a lesson in patience. The idea for this piece came about during a visit to a colleague working in Prague, who for some years now had been struggling with his second book. His children had been born and grown without any words surviving the morning after their typing. By then he genuinely doubted that he’d ever find meaning on the page again.

On the day we met, he was returning from a long-postponed weekend of isolation in a nearby city where nobody knew him, with just the notebook and laptop for company. He arrived with his rucksack, mildly manic and overflowing with words, pacing to a fro excitedly, repeating “The method!” Not merely words accumulating, but the lasting vision of a form that felt necessary and could, finally, break his silence. He’d found his way back. He looked like bottled lightning.

Imagine wearing a rough glove that numbs all sensitivity, leaving things sterile to the touch, an impenetrable block without a grip. And then suddenly taking it off. You can feel textures, rediscover all the subtleties at the tip of the fingers, and mold all the experiences and paragraphs that had seemed out of reach.

This experience lived out over a career, can be found in Virginia Woolf’s diaries and letters. They are a sheer delight of ebb and flow –and anecdotes– in which we can see these breakthroughs dawn upon her and lead to the works we now admire. 

Woolf had written two novels before she found her style, and struggled and pondered how to write otherwise, more truthfully, something entirely different. It was during the challenging and often mind-numbing writing of her second novel, Night and Day, that she allowed herself to play around with seemingly minor forms, in short impressionistic pieces. It was like doodling on a scrapbook in between the time-consuming painting of a large mural. And yet…

In a letter to her friend Ethel Smyth, Woolf looks back on these short stories written as a “diversion” from her struggles: “They were the treats I allowed myself when I had done my exercise in the conventional style. I shall never forget the day I wrote The Mark on the Wall –all in a flash, as if flying, after being kept stone-breaking for months. The Unwritten Novel was the great discovery, however. That - again in a second - showed me how I could embody all my deposit of experience in a shape that fitted it (...) I saw, branching out of the tunnel I made, when I discovered that method of approach, Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway, etc – how I trembled with excitement."

And that is another point to be made about breakthroughs, they are a starting point, not an isolated event, or a single moment of grace. Indeed, a watershed. In Woolf’s case, as in Pessoa’s, it was the lasting ability to write as only they could write. And it is beautiful when Virginia Woolf, whose dark days are harrowing to read, shares the excitement of being one with her art.

“One thing burst into another. Blowing bubbles out of a pipe gives the feeling of the rapid crowd of ideas and scenes which blew out of my mind, so that my lips seemed syllabling of their own accord as I walked,” she recounts.

As she beautifully writes in To the Lighthouse: "Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision."