New Ways to Kill Your Mother (32 page)

Neither he nor his poetry have ever interested me. I think he’s a minor poet, a picturesque poet, a sort of professional Andalusian … The circumstances of his death were rather favourable to him; it’s convenient for a poet to die in that fashion and, what’s more, his death provided Antonio Machado with the opportunity to write a marvellous poem.

Like a good number of Argentines, Borges discovered the truth of what was happening when he was outside Argentina. In Spain in 1980, where he received the Cervantes Prize, the highest honour that can be given to a writer in the Spanish language, he indicated a change of heart about the regime. While he had refused to support the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who were the first to protest openly about the disappearances, he soon began to relent. Later, in Argentina, he was visited by a woman from an old Buenos Aires family who told him that her daughter had disappeared. He told her ‘he lived a very insulated life because he was blind and could not read the newspapers’, but that he
believed her story. When she brought a friend whose daughter had also disappeared, Borges decided to sign a petition calling on the government to provide information on the fate of the disappeared. He persuaded Bioy to sign also. In a dispute between Argentina and Chile over islands in the Beagle Channel, he supported Chile. Nonetheless, Borges’s new dislike of the regime was not unequivocal. Even by the end of 1981 he would say: ‘I think this government is a necessary evil because democracy would give us another Frondizi’ – one of the leaders of the Radical Party in the 1950s – ‘or at worst another Perón.’

Once the Falklands War was over – he had described it as ‘two bald men fighting over a comb’ – he could no longer maintain the view that the military government was a necessary evil. He revised his position.

It is true we have had dictators … but they had popular support. These are gangsters. This is a country of madmen. No, this is a country of wise but desperate people in the hands of madmen … I believe our only hope is democracy. Our only way out is an election … If elections are held the Peronists will win … and if they aren’t held we shall continue to be governed by people who are equally discredited.

In the end, when the election was won by Raúl Alfonsín of the Radical Party in 1983, Borges said: ‘We had emerged from a nightmare, and that collective act of faith was what could save us all.’

For 1984 and 1985, however, Argentina was forced to relive the nightmare, first through the commission of inquiry into the disappearances chaired by Ernesto Sabato, which reported in December 1984, and then by the trial of the generals, with evidence given by the relatives of the disappeared and by those who were tortured. Borges attended this trial in July 1985 and heard evidence of torture. He expressed his horror to reporters afterwards and in an open letter to a newspaper.

It must have occurred to him that his own earlier support for the generals was well remembered. As Alfonsín’s position slowly weakened in 1985, Borges realized that one or other of the parties he now hated – the Peronists or the military – would retake power in Argentina. On 16 October, in an interview with a Swiss journalist, he expressed the wish to become a Swiss citizen and to die in Switzerland. In the new will in which he disinherited Fanny, he also left his sister his share in the family tomb in the Recoleta cemetery where his mother was buried.

His final journey to Europe with Maria Kodama would become controversial in Argentina. Fanny insisted he did not wish to leave: ‘Of one thing I am sure: Señor Borges did not want to go, but he did not have sufficient energy to oppose whoever brought him. He said to me in a half-broken voice: “Fanny, I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go.” ’

This, considering the evidence, seems unlikely. His going alone to Europe with Kodama knowing that he would not return to Argentina seems to have been a deliberate act. In a late poem, ‘The Web’, he began:

Which of my cities will I die in?

Geneva, where revelation came to me

Through Virgil and Tacitus, certainly not from Calvin?

After the Falklands War he had also written a poem, ‘The Confederates’, in favour of Switzerland, praising its ‘tower of reason and firm faith’ where different races and religions and languages had ‘resolved to forget their differences and accentuate their affinities’. He made it the title poem of his last book of verse.

On 26 April, while in Geneva, Borges and Maria Kodama were married by proxy in Paraguay. He died in Geneva on 14 June. He is buried close to John Calvin in the Cimetière de Pleinpalais, also known as the Cemetery of the Kings, close to the old city in
Geneva. It is a calm, unostentatious cemetery, with single graves mostly of famous people, the very opposite in tone to the Recoleta in Buenos Aires in which baroque and gothic-windowed family vaults do battle with the rococo and the overadorned. Borges’s gravestone was clearly designed by Kodama with references and images that mattered to them both in their relationship. In death, his grave did not make him an Argentine hero, but rather the husband of a woman he had loved for the last fifteen years of his life. After Borges’s death, Kodama did not make many friends among his family and associates. Both Norah Borges’s sons and Fanny sought to have the revised will thrown out, but they lost. Kodama runs Borges’s estate.

In 1999 Kodama told Edwin Williamson that Borges was fully aware of the political import of his dying in Geneva and his wishing to be buried there. ‘You see,’ Borges had told her, ‘I’ve become a kind of myth, and whenever the issue arises of my being buried over here, people may recall the book I have written,
The Confederates
, and they’ll think about it, people will come here and ask themselves: why? That will be my small contribution to changing the world.’

In Buenos Aires, Norah Borges made a statement: ‘I have heard through the newspapers that my brother has died in Geneva, far from us and from many friends, of a terrible illness that we did not know he had. I am surprised that his last wish was to be buried there, he always wanted to be with his ancestors and with our mother in the Recoleta.’

While Kodama suggested that Borges’s reasons for dying in Geneva were essentially political and public, there were also private reasons. Borges spoke a great deal about his father in the last weeks. His father had taken him to this city at the age of fifteen in an effort to civilize him, to remove him from the world of his ancestors to a place where the shadows were more complex and rich, from a place, run by his mother, where battles were glorified,
to a place, run by his father, where poetry would matter and becoming a writer could be a real vocation. His father, Borges had written, ‘was such a modest man that he would have liked being invisible’. Now, in the weeks before his death, Borges wrote to the Spanish news agency EFE asking to be left alone: ‘I am a free man. I have decided to stay in Geneva, because I associate Geneva with the happiest days of my life … I think it strange that someone should not understand and respect this decision by a man who, like a certain character of Wells’s, has resolved to be an invisible man.’

Hart Crane: Escape from Home

There are certain single volumes of American poetry, some of them first books or early books, that carry with them a special and spiritual power; they seem to arise from a mysterious impulse and to have been written from an enormous private or artistic need. The poems are full of a primal sense of voice, and the aura of the voice in the rhythms of the poem suggests a relentless desire not to make easy peace with the reader. If some of these poems have the tone of prayers, they are not prayers of comfort or of supplication as much as urgent laments or cries from the depths where the language has been held much against its will or has broken free, and now demands to be heard.

Such tones can be found in the very opening lines of the first poem in Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s
Song
(1995):

Listen: there was a goat’s head hanging by ropes in a tree
.

All night it hung there and sang. And those who heard it

Felt a hurt in their hearts and thought they were hearing

The song of a night bird
.

Or Louise Glück’s
The Wild Iris
(1992):

At the end of my suffering

there was a door
.

Hear me out: that which you call death

I remember
.

Or the first lines of ‘Epistle’, the first poem of Li-Young Lee’s first book,
Rose
(1986):

Of wisdom, splendid columns of light

waking sweet foreheads
,

I know nothing

but what I’ve glimpsed in my most hopeful of daydreams
.

Of a world without end
,

amen
,

I know nothing
,

but what I sang of once with others
,

all of us standing in the vaulted room
.

In ‘General Aims and Theories’, written in 1925, Hart Crane tried to outline his sense of where this tone, so apparent in his own work, came from: ‘I am concerned,’ he wrote,

with the future of America, but not because I think that America has any so-called par value as a state or as a group of people … It is only because I feel persuaded that here are destined to be discovered certain as yet undefined spiritual qualities, perhaps a new hierarchy of faith not to be developed so completely elsewhere. And in this process I like to feel myself as a potential factor; certainly I must speak in its terms and what discoveries I may make are situated in its experience.

As is clear from his early letters, Crane as a reader set about preparing himself with enormous zeal and moral seriousness to become that ‘potential factor’. Despite his provincial background and his problems with his parents, and then partly because of them, he found a tone and a poetic diction that matched a sensibility that was both visionary and deeply rooted in the real. In his poems he worked a gnarled, edgy sound against the singing line; he played a language dense with metaphor and suggestion against images and rhythms of pure soaring beauty. His syntax had something hard and glittering in it, utterly surprising. In his best poems he managed to make the rhythms – the hidden nervous system in
the words and between the words – so interesting, intense and effortless that they command attention and emotional response despite their verbal density, basic difficulty and what Crane himself called ‘tangential slants, interwoven symbolisms’.

Even though most of his poems were written when he was in his twenties – he was born in 1899 and committed suicide in 1932 – there is a definite sense from the few essays that Crane wrote and from the selection of his richly interesting correspondence now collected with his poems in a single volume that he had put considerable thought into his literary heritage and viewed his place in it with passionate sophistication. In 1926, in a letter to the editor of
Poetry
, Harriet Monroe, replying to her complaints about obscurity in his poem ‘At Melville’s Tomb’, Crane set down his defence of his poetry and offered one of his most detailed and useful explanations of what his lines actually meant, while making it clear that their meaning, while concrete and direct, was a dull business indeed compared to what we might call their force. The first stanza reads:

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge

The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath

An embassy. Their numbers as he watched
,

Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured
.

‘Take me for a hard-boiled unimaginative unpoetic reader, and tell me how
dice
can
bequeath an embassy
(or anything else),’ Monroe wrote. Crane in his reply admitted that:

as a poet I may very possibly be more interested in the so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness (and their combinations and interplay in metaphor on this basis) than I am interested in the preservation of their logically rigid significations at the cost of limiting my subject matter and perceptions involved in the poem.

In his next paragraph he emphasized, however, that there was nothing aleatory in his method. ‘This may sound,’ he wrote,

as though I merely fancied juggling words and images until I found something novel, or esoteric; but the process is much more predetermined and objectified than that. The nuances of feeling and observation in a poem may well call for certain liberties which you claim the poet has no right to take. I am simply making the claim that the poet does have that authority, and that to deny it is to limit the scope of the medium so considerably as to outlaw some of the richest genius of the past.