[lit-ideas] Borges: A Life

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  • Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2004 14:11:45 EDT

From the Atlantic Monthly:
 
 
Borges: A Life 
by  _Edwin  Williamson_ 
(http://www.powells.com/atl/search/DTSearch/search?author=%20Edwin%20Williamson)
  
The  Immortal 
A Review by Christopher Hitchens 
 
In early 1925, in a literary magazine in Buenos  Aires called Proa ("Prow"), 
which he had helped to found, Jorge Luis  Borges wrote an essay called "El 
Ulises de Joyce." He would then have  been just twenty-five years old, and was 
anxious to boast of being "the first  Hispanic adventurer to have arrived at 
Joyce's book." Far from content with this  avant-garde claim, he evolved the 
further ambition to do for his native Buenos  Aires what Joyce had done for 
Dublin, and to weave from its slums and boulevards  the lineaments of a 
universal 
city. On the centennial of Leopold Bloom's epic  meanderings this is a 
delightful coincidence to come upon if you believe -- but  cannot perhaps quite 
prove 
-- that there is something universal about  literature, too, and that 
unforgiving Time, as Auden said in farewell to Yeats,  nonetheless "Worships 
language 
and forgives / Everyone by whom it lives."  
In this altogether first-rate biography, Edwin Williamson identifies another  
element in Joyce that kindled an answering spark in Borges. The Irish, Borges 
 wrote, "have always been famous agitators of the literature of England." 
Might  it not be possible, then, that a young writer in Spanish, in a Spanish 
ex-colony  at the other end of the world, could also raise a body of work that 
would  resonate in the wider tongue, and bring the local practice of letters 
one 
step  beyond the national, the folkloric, and the epic? 
Had he cared to do so, Williamson could have pressed the analogy a little  
further. Like Joyce, Borges was never quite at ease with his countrymen, and 
was 
 permanently at odds with the Roman Catholic Church. Like Joyce, he was 
immured  within an increasingly untreatable blindness. He was fascinated by Old 
Norse and  Anglo-Saxon philology. He is buried in Switzerland, which he loved 
and 
where he  died. He even had a tempestuous girlfriend named Norah. But with 
the ostensibly  negligible difference made by that single, redundant, 
non-aspirate h -- a  Borgesian micro-element of distinction between his own 
adored 
object and Nora  Barnicle -- the parallels would begin to diverge. Borges did 
not 
have even a  hundredth of Joyce's libido. And he had been cursed with the 
opposite of Joyce's  family problem: he had a somewhat weak and futile father 
and a 
mother who just  would not quit. The father made the decision to send him, on 
or around his  nineteenth birthday, to a brothel in Geneva. This was a course 
of action that,  we can be sure, Joyce could and would have decided on for 
himself; but the  effect on a sensitive boy who could not quite rise to the 
occasion appears to  have been lifelong and disabling. (It put me in mind of 
the 
narrator of  Robertson Davies's Deptford Trilogy, a much less tender figure who 
is quite as  thoroughly nauseated by the same paternal notion of what 
constitutes un rite  de passage.)  
Joyce had to struggle for his cosmopolitanism, and indeed for his  
philo-Semitism, which were in Borges's case innate. As well as 
Spanish-Argentine  
lineage, Borges had a grandmother called Fanny Haslam, than which I suppose  
there 
could be no more English name outside the pages of Jane Austen; and she  made 
sure to rear him (as he once told me) so that he spoke both tongues before  he 
could become aware of any distinction between them. His first immersion was  
in the literature of Anglophilia, from Stevenson to Shakespeare. The name 
Borges  is originally Portuguese, and this Lusitanian-Brazilian blood was 
commingled  through another branch of the family tree with that of an Italian 
Jew named 
 Suarez. Buenos Aires has always had ethnic neighborhoods, principally 
Italian  and German and Jewish, on which the grandeur of Spanish conquest and 
the  
aloofness of a British merchant-and-rancher colonial class are 
superimpositions.  Someone had to be born to whom this was a natural and also 
appealing state 
of  affairs -- someone to whom the Babel of discrepant languages and cultures 
was  not chaos but, rather, the design for an eventually imposing but also  
microscopically intricate tower.  
Williamson lays stress on the word criollo, which in Argentina is  cognate 
with "Creole" without having at all the same meaning. It signifies an  
Argentine 
of inarguably Spanish descent, and it mixes this definition of  
ethno-linguistic security with the more uncertain pursuit of a distinctly  
"Argentine" 
identity. For Borges, taking up this cultural ambiguity meant trying  for a 
specific national literature that could nonetheless be valuable and  
intelligible to 
non-Argentines. Taking up the same ambiguity in its political  form involved 
a belief in democracy and in local vernaculars and idioms. Yet, as  Joyce 
himself found when the Irish repudiated his beloved Parnell, a democrat  and 
republican can sometimes find himself sickened by public opinion. A version  of 
this irony was to break Borges's heart. 
Given the somewhat conservative demeanor that he had adopted by the time he  
became globally celebrated, it is fascinating to find just how much Borges in  
his earlier years was prepared to stake on radical and modernist positions. 
He  came onto the stage almost like an extra in Tom Stoppard's Travesties, in  
which James Joyce converges with Lenin and the Dadaist Tristan Tzara in 
Zurich.  He welcomed the Russian Revolution, made lifelong friendships with 
Swiss 
Marxist  Jews, took part in Surrealist and Expressionist masquerades, and 
shuttled  between Europe and Latin America. In 1928 he gave a public address in 
Buenos  Aires in which he told his fellow criollos to integrate. 
In this house which is America, my friends, men from various  nations of the 
world have conspired together in order to disappear in a new  man, who is not 
yet embodied in any one of us and whom we shall already call  an "Argentine" 
so as to begin to raise our hopes. This is a confederacy  without precedent: a 
generous adventure by men of different bloodlines whose  aim is not to 
persevere in their lineages but to forget those lineages in the  end; these are 
bloodlines that seek the night. The criollo is one of the  confederates. The 
criollo, who was responsible for creating the nation as  such, has now chosen 
to be 
one among many.
As far as was possible, Borges remained true to this loftily expressed  
ambition. He argued earnestly about the national epic The Gaucho Martín  
Fierro, 
which is to Argentina -- though it boasts a far more "accessible"  demotic 
appeal -- what the sagas are to Iceland or Beowulf is to  Anglo-Saxon England. 
That 
the lone gaucho might be the nation's emblematic  figure -- a Robin Hood or a 
Daniel Boone -- Borges was happy to concede. But  that such a person -- 
unscrupulous, untied by any social obligation, and thirsty  for murder and 
spoils 
-- should be the model citizen was a bit more debatable.  
This may be the moment to say that Borges's repeated fascination with tigers, 
 knife fighters, daredevils, and solitary horsemen, some of it passed on from 
his  stiff-necked criollo mother, has a tinge of the vicarious about it, and  
strikes the only faintly inauthentic note in his fiction. It corresponds,  
probably not all that obliquely, to his oft manifested wince of fascinated  
disgust at sexual relations. In his intense story "The Cult of the Phoenix," 
for  
example, the initiates are wedded to lubricity and, indeed, "slime"  (legamo), 
and the penny will drop for most readers long before Borges  closes by 
saying, 

On three continents I have merited the friendship of many  worshipers of the 
Phoenix; I know that the Secret at first struck them as  banal, shameful, 
vulgar and (stranger still) unbelievable. They could not  bring themselves to 
admit that their parents had ever stooped to such acts ...  Someone has even 
dared 
to claim that by now it is instinctive.
Williamson permits himself a rare lapse into the dead-literal by noting with  
solemnity that "years later Borges would tell Ronald Christ that he meant the 
 Secret to refer to sexual intercourse." Perhaps the name of this 
interlocutor  was irresistible ...? Incidentally, I have taken the quotation 
above, and 
also  the title of the story, from Andrew Hurley's translation. Some may prefer 
Norman  Thomas di Giovanni's version, "The Sect of the Phoenix." It sometimes 
amazes me  that Borges, with his immaculate English, felt he needed a 
dragoman at all. But  who would not have desired the job? 
Keeping up his cultural optimism about Argentina in public, and spending ever 
 more of his private and literary life in codexes and codicils, Babels and  
Babylons, lotteries and labyrinths, Borges postponed for some time the  
disagreeable realization that his country and his culture were turning against  
him. 
In the 1930s he took a bold position against the local version of fascism  
while simultaneously distrusting and even disliking the great cats of the  
Hispanic literary "left," Pablo Neruda and Federico Garcia Lorca, both of whom  
paid 
notable visits to Buenos Aires. Williamson suggests persuasively that there  
was an element of sexual envy involved in this too. But no such considerations 
 would have influenced Borges in the detestation he felt for Juan Peron, and 
the  fear that he experienced as he witnessed the birth of a raw, localist 
populism.  The foul genius of Peronism lay in its demagogic dexterity: it was 
at 
once  anti-oligarchic, anti-Jewish, and anti-English. By persecutions large 
and small  -- he lost his job at a library; his mother and sister were briefly 
imprisoned;  "elitist" magazines and clubs were peremptorily closed down -- 
Borges became  persuaded that the masses who applauded this kind of thing were 
not to be  trusted. Every time Peron fell or was exiled, the crowd yelled for 
him to come  back. And in the sordid figure of his whorish wife Eva (or 
"Evita") 
all the  brothels and tango bars, all the popular culture of the city, allied 
to all the  suspect machismo of the Martin Fierro ballad tradition, underwent 
 a horrid mutation into the philistine, the greedy, and the cruel. Borges's 
story  "Ragnarok," about false gods and the need to destroy them, is very 
probably  derived from his contempt for the votaries of such idols.  
Peron, like Franco and Salazar, survived the supposed defeat of fascism in  
the Second World War, and he kept on torturing Argentina with his revenant 
third  and fourth acts, ultimately dying and then ruling by posthumous proxy 
through  the cult of his dead wife and the actual agency of his second one, the 
charmless  Isabel. At a point in the mid-1970s the armed forces decided to put 
a 
stop to  all this, and to much else besides, by an employment of the mailed 
fist. So when  I called on Jorge Luis Borges in his upstairs apartment, 6B at 
Calle Maipu 994,  just off the Plaza San Martín, in December of 1977, the 
streets of the city were  being prowled by death squads. 
The inscription on Edgar Allan Poe's door at the University of  Virginia -- 
"Domus parva magni poetae" ("Small home of a great poet") --  would have been 
almost perfectly apt for the tiny quarters in which Borges and  his tireless 
mother had for so long resided. But, no less aptly, the place was  lined and 
piled with volumes, and the blind old man seemed to know the location  of every 
one of them. He liked my English voice, and asked me if I would do him  the 
courtesy of reading aloud (I later discovered, without chagrin, that he did  
this 
to a lot of visitors). Pointing to where a Kipling anthology could be  found, 
he asked me to begin with "Harp Song of the Dane Women." "And please,  read 
it slowly. I like to take long, long sips."  
This lovely and stirring poem is made up almost entirely of Anglo-Norse words 
 (and, incidentally, there is no way to read it fast). He told me that he'd 
taken  up the study of Old English in 1955, when he went blind, and that 
"increasing  blindness helped me to write 'The Library of Babel.'" Language in 
any  
permutation was a subject for which he showed immediate enthusiasm. "Do you 
know  that in Mexico they say 'I am seeing you' when they mean 'I will see 
you'? 
I  find the translation of the present into the future very ingenious." 
Without the  smallest appearance of affectation, he said that reverse and 
obverse 
were always  the same to him, "which is why I find infinity almost banal," and 
that in his  dreams he was always "lost" -- "hence perhaps my interest in 
labyrinths."  
His shy invitation to return on the morrow and read further from his library  
was at once the mildest and the most imperative request I have ever received. 
 Later leading him slowly downstairs, and across the perilous traffic to La  
Ciudad for lunch, I felt as if I had been entrusted with a unique coin or  
ancient palimpsest or precious astrolabe. (What if I tripped and took him down  
with me? It would be scant consolation to reflect that such a calamitous  
narrative would contain all other potential narratives: I was Anglo-Saxon 
enough  
to see myself being stuck with the ur-one.)Whatever I read, he commented  on. 
"Kipling was not really appreciated in his own time because all his peers  were 
socialists.""Chesterton -- such a pity he became a Catholic!" When I  queried 
his rather stilted praise for Neruda, he admitted that he preferred  Gabriel 
Garcia Marquez. (In 1926 Borges had written an essay, "Tales of  Turkestan," 
praising stories in which "the marvelous and the everyday are  entwined ... 
there are angels as there are trees." In "The Postulation of  Reality" (1931) 
he 
declared that fiction was "an autonomous sphere of  corroborations, omens and 
monuments," as demonstrated by the "predestined  Ulysses of Joyce."Along with 
so-called "magic realism," this prefigures  the realistic magic of his "Tlon, 
Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" -- another work that it  is highly inadvisable to read 
in a hurry.)  
The enduring rapture with magic and fable has always struck me as latently  
childish and somehow sexless (and thus also related to childlessness). But  
"Orbis Tertius" ("Third World") had another, less innocent and more concrete  
meaning in those days, symbolizing the grainy and harsh battles of urban  
guerrillas against the metropole. Buenos Aires was the scene of such combat as  
we 
spoke: it was impossible to avoid the subject. Borges placidly replied with a  
couplet from Edmund Blunden: "This was my country and it might be yet, / But  
something came between us and the sun." That something, he left me in no doubt, 
 had been Peronism. As for the generals and admirals who had seized power -- 
he  sounded like an Evelyn Waugh impersonator ("the sword of honor" is a 
frequent  reference in his work) when he announced that it was better to have a 
government  "of gentlemen rather than pimps." Seizing the occasion to elucidate 
the specific  Buenos Aires dockland slang for "pimp," which is canfinflero (a 
term of  almost untranslatable -- or do I mean too easily translatable? -- 
obscenity), he  discoursed with some warmth about his enthusiasm for 
dictatorship. 
(Re-reading  my notes of our conversation today, and knowing now about that 
shriveling moment  in the Geneva brothel, I wonder if the flesh trade had a 
special horror for  him.) When he invited me back for the following day, I had 
to 
decline, with real  regret, because I was taking an early plane to Chile. At 
this he asked me with  perfect gravity if I would be calling on General 
Pinochet, and hearing my answer  in the negative, expressed regret in his turn, 
adding, "A true gentleman. He was  kind enough to present me with a literary 
award 
when I last visited his  country."  
Edwin Williamson's biography passes what I consider to be a small  but by no 
means paltry test. It is absolutely solid wherever it can be checked  against 
this reviewer's knowledge. In particular it brought back to me with  
extraordinary vividness the vertiginous shifts in feeling that I experienced  
during 
those two Borgesian days of languorous conversation, attentive reading,  and 
sheer alarm. Moreover, the book shows with great care and fairness what had  
brought Borges to this pass. The world now knows, and some of us knew even 
then,  
that the regime of General Videla, too, was depraved by violence and 
corruption,  and was viciously anti-English and pathologically anti-Semitic. As 
for the 
 canfinflero question: Henry Kissinger's old confrere Videla is now in  
prison for his part in selling the babies of the rape victims he held in secret 
 
prisons -- something a little rawer than mere "pimping."  
At our lunch Borges joked a bit about his failure to win the Nobel Prize for  
Literature. ("Though when you see who has had it ... Shaw! Faulkner!  Still, 
I would grab it. I feel greedy.") In another context he described the  sport 
of denying him the prize as "a minor Swedish industry." Williamson shows  that 
by his defense of Videla and especially Pinochet, and his public attack on  
the memory of Garcia Lorca during a visit to post-Franco Spain, Borges was  
almost willfully denying himself the laureateship. That was a measure of how  
distraught he felt about chaos and subversion in Argentina. Thus it speaks  
doubly 
well of him that before the dictatorship fell, he signed a statement of  
concern about the desaparecidos ("disappeared") and wrote a sardonic poem  
lampooning the mad war of grandiose and futile aggression launched by the  
generals 
against the Falkland Islands. 
If there is a key story in Borges, as Williamson seems to imply, it may be  
contained in or near The Aleph. Much of his work led up to this  collection, 
and much depends on it. In one of the tales within -- "The Immortal"  -- we 
come 
upon this:  

There is nothing very remarkable about being immortal; with the  exception of 
mankind, all creatures are immortal, for they know nothing of  death. What is 
divine, terrible, and incomprehensible is to know  oneself immortal. I have 
noticed that in spite of religion, the conviction as  to one's own immortality 
is extraordinarily rare. Jews, Christians, and  Muslims all profess belief in 
immortality, but the veneration paid to  the first century of life is proof 
that they truly believe only in those  hundred years, for they destine all the 
rest, throughout eternity, to  rewarding or punishing what one did when alive.
It is this capacity, I believe, that promotes Borges so far above the level  
of the exotic antiquarian, the obsessed bibliophile, the cloistral mapmaker, 
the  crazed pedant, and the unreliable editor: diverting roles that he vastly 
enjoyed  and at which he excelled. So often one comes across a passage as 
perfectly cut  and honed as that one, uttered with a certain diffidence and yet 
-- 
as is  frequent with perfectionists -- the product of much silent labor, 
reflection,  and, I might add, stoicism.  
When his yearning heart and brain were not engaged with the Vikings and the  
gauchos, or the equally heroic explorers and cartographers of the New World,  
Borges would turn again and again to the shaded stone arbors of Cordoba and  
Baghdad and ancient Persia. He was evidently magnetized by the great scholars  
and reasoners of the Andalusian renaissance, as they sought to peer beyond the 
 veils of clerical dogma. (His love for Fitzgerald and Omar Khayyam makes the 
 same point in a different fashion; how marvelous that he praised 
Fitzgerald's  "indolence and tenacity.") Other fascinations -- with the Jewish 
Prague of 
Kafka  and also of the golem -- manifest the same commitment to cities that 
are  at once authentic and imaginary. If Borges could have drawn at all, he 
would  have wanted to fuse Piranesi with Escher. It was not by chance that one 
of 
his  absolutely favorite critics was F. H. Bradley, the author of Appearance 
and  Reality.  
Borges may have secretly wanted a happy ending, and certainly appears to have 
 secretly planned for one. Having survived a number of inconclusive 
courtships  and a null marriage, all under the vulturelike surveillance of his 
mother, 
he  managed at the end to form some kind of alliance with Maria Kodama, a 
devoted  young half-Japanese student of his work who was, like him, a "seeker," 
albeit a  more amateur one. His subsequent interest in Shintoism and Buddhism 
lacks the  mordancy and introspection (the "agenbite of inwit," as Joyce liked 
to put it)  of his earlier hermeneutic investigations. At a certain point talk 
about  "essence" and "oneness" and the universal becomes more tautological 
than  inquisitive. But Borges did live to be honored eventually by a democratic 
 
Argentina; did finally get some time to himself with a girl of his own 
choosing;  and did ultimately elect to arrive in Geneva and to surprise Kodama 
by 
telling  her with decision that he wouldn't leave again. Thus he managed to 
cancel -- I  should probably say "exorcise" -- his adolescent humiliation in 
that 
city, and  some of the disappointments of his maturity as well. His lengthy 
examination of  his own life, one undevoutly hopes, had proved it to be worth 
living. Long  before, F. H. Bradley had provided Borges with a reflection that 
is 
exactly  right, in that it promises more than it delivers: "For love 
unsatisfied the  world is a mystery, a mystery which satisfied love appears to  
understand."

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