We wipe bap flour from our hands as we finish our pints. Later, as we walk up Grey Street, W. points out the building in which Eca de Queiroz, the famous Portuguese writer, used to work. How did he end up here in Newcastle?, we wonder. Was he happy here? Did he miss the cramped streets of Bairro Alto? Did his heart yearn for the fado of his homeland? We wonder what Bernardo Soares, Pessoa's famous creation, might have made of the city. W. has always seen something of Soares in me, he says. It's a great compliment.
Grainger's city centre has always impressed W. He chose his archiects locally. He used local materials. W. points out the fine ashlar facings of the terraced buildings. Grainger was a man of the enterpreneurial mid nineteenth century, after the Napoleonic wars, W. says. Didn't he demolish half the city, like T. Dan Smith? Undoubtedly, says W. But it was in the name of civic pride, W. says. It was in the name of utopia. Smith was a utopian too, of course. He, too, in his own way, was a man of civic pride. But he was a man of the car, above all. A man of the city motorway, which means the destruction of utopia.
Still, at least he wasn't a property developer, W. says. There's nothing worse! W. is unimpressed by the regeneration of the quayside, with its so-called public art. So-called public art is invariably a form of marketing for property development, he says. It's inevitably the forerunner of gentrification.
What is it in art that lends itself to such uses?, W. wonders. Has art – the whole history of art – come to an end, just as history is supposed to have done? Has it entirely lost its aura? But W. is suspicious of this view, just as he is suspicious of art. Perhaps it is only now, at the end of times, that art reveals itself for what it always was: shameless.
W. is an enemy of art. We ought to fine artists rather than subsidise them, he says. They ought to be subject to systematic purges. He has a special ire for the Baltic art museum, on the quayside, he says. What's it got to do with the city, with the people of the city? The working class should come and smash it all up, he says. But they moved them out west, didn't they? They moved the working class right out to the airport. Where are the public? W. says, looking round at the waterfront developments, at the new urban villages and cultural quarter. Where have they gone?
Was Pessoa a man of the public?, W. wonders. He thinks he might have been a monarchist and a reactionary, for all that he wrote in Lisbon cafes. I've been working on one of Pessoa's manuscripts as part of my studies of fate, W. knows that. The Education of a Stoic, which appealed to me because of its title, because of its resonances with the Stoic amor fati, the acceptance of destiny.
The Education of a Stoic: it's authored by one of Pessoa's most mysterious heteronyms, I tell W., Alvaro Coehlo de Athayde. He's said to be the 20th Baron of Tieve, and Pessoa has had him take his life, his book his last manuscript, having been supposedly left in a desk drawer.
The Education of a Stoic: W. doesn't know it, he says. Of course he has The Book of Disquiet close to him at all times. He can quote whole chunks of it from memory, he says. Well, he thinks he can. He probably gets it all wrong. The Baron killed himself, but Bernardo Soares did not, W. says.
He wonders whether writing and completing The Education of the Stoic was simply a way for Pessoa to short-circuit his ever-sprawling Book of Disquiet. Wasn't it a way to silence a voice in him which he also attributed to Bernardo Soares? W. wishes he could silence me, too. He wishes he could silence himself!
Amor fati: will we ever be capable of that? We're whiners, W. says. We're moaners, and it could never be otherwise. We live a posthumous life, that's what W.,'s always said. We live posthumously.
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