The Writer and the World (60 page)

The other word that recurs is
mediocre.
Argentines detest the mediocre and fear to be thought mediocre. It was one of Eva Perón’s words of abuse. For her the Argentine aristocracy was always mediocre. And she was right. In a few years she shattered the myth of Argentina as an aristocratic colonial land. And no other myth, no other idea of the land, has been found to take its place.

B
ORGES
, speaking of the fame of writers, said: “The important thing is the image you create of yourself in other people’s minds. Many people think of Burns as a mediocre poet. But he stands for many things, and people like him. That image—as with Byron—may in the end be more important than the work.”

Borges is a great writer, a sweet and melancholy poet; and people who know Spanish well revere him as a writer of a direct, unrhetorical prose. But his Anglo-American reputation as a blind and elderly Argentine, the writer of a very few, very short, and very mysterious stories, is so inflated and bogus that it obscures his greatness. It has possibly cost him the Nobel Prize; and it may well happen that when the bogus reputation declines, as it must, the good work may also disappear.

The irony is that Borges, at his best, is neither mysterious nor difficult. His poetry is accessible; much of it is even romantic. His themes have remained constant for the last fifty years: his military ancestors, their deaths in battle, death itself, time, and old Buenos Aires. And there are about a dozen successful stories. Two or three are straightforward, even old-fashioned, detective stories (one was published in
Ellery Queens Mystery Magazine).
Some deal, quite cinematically, with Buenos Aires low life at the turn of the century. Gangsters are given epic stature; they rise, they are challenged, and sometimes they run away.

The other stories—the ones that have driven the critics crazy—are in the nature of intellectual jokes. Borges takes a word like “immortal” and plays with it. Suppose, he says, men were really immortal. Not just men who had grown old and wouldn’t die, but indestructible vigorous men, surviving for eternity. What would be the result? His answer—which is his story—is that every conceivable experience would at some time befall every man, that every man would at some time assume every conceivable character, and that Homer (the disguised hero of this particular story) might in the eighteenth century even forget he had written the
Odyssey
Or take the word “unforgettable.” Suppose something were truly unforgettable, and couldn’t be forgotten for a single second; suppose this thing came, like a coin, into your possession. Extend that idea. Suppose there were a man—but no, he has to be a boy—who could forget nothing, whose memory therefore ballooned and ballooned with all the unforgettable details of every minute of his life.

These are some of Borges’s intellectual games. And perhaps his most successful piece of prose writing, which is also his shortest, is a pure joke. It is called “Of Exactitude in Science” and is meant to be an extract from a seventeenth-century book of travel:

This is absurd and perfect: the accurate parody, the grotesque idea. Borges’s puzzle and jokes can be addictive. But they have to be recognized for what they are; they cannot always support the metaphysical interpretations they receive. There is, though, much to attract the academic critic. Some of Borges’s hoaxes require—and sometimes disappear below—an extravagant display of curious learning. And there is the occasional baroque language of the early stories.

“The Circular Ruins”—an elaborate, almost science fiction story about a dreamer discovering that he himself exists only in somebody else’s dream—begins:
“Nadie lo vió desembarcar en la unánime noche.”
Literally, “Nobody saw him disembark in the unanimous night.” Norman Thomas di Giovanni, who has been translating Borges full-time for the last four years, and has done more than anyone else to push Borges’s work in the English-speaking world, says:

Di Giovanni went with Borges on a lecture tour of the United States in 1969:

Borges has for years enjoyed a considerable reputation in the Spanish-speaking world. But in “An Autobiographical Essay,” which was published as a “Profile” in
The New Yorker
in 1970, he says that until he won the Formentor Prize in 1961—he was sixty-two then—he was “practically invisible—not only abroad but at home in Buenos Aires.” This is the kind of exaggeration that dismays some of his early Argentine supporters; and there are those who would say that his “irresponsibility” has grown with his fame. But Borges has always been irresponsible. Buenos Aires is a small town; and what perhaps was inoffensive when Borges belonged only to this small town becomes less so when foreigners queue up for interviews. Once, no doubt, Borges’s celebration of his military ancestors and their deaths in battle flattered the whole society, giving it a sense of the past and of completeness. Now it appears to exclude, to proclaim a private grandeur; and to many it is only egotistical and presumptuous. It is not easy to be famous in a small town.

Borges gives many interviews. And every interview seems to be like every other interview. He seems to make questions irrelevant; he plays, as one Argentine lady said, his
discos
, his records; he performs. He says that the Spanish language is his “doom.” He criticizes Spain and the Spaniards: he still fights that colonial war, in which, however, the old
issues have become confused with a simpler Argentine prejudice against the poor and backward immigrants from northern Spain. He makes his tasteless, and expected, jokes about the pampa Indians. Tasteless because just twenty years before he was born these Indians were systematically exterminated; and yet expected, because slaughter on this scale becomes acceptable only if the victims are made ridiculous. He talks about Chesterton, Stevenson and Kipling. He talks about Old English with all the enthusiasm of a man who has picked up an academic subject by himself. He talks about his English ancestors.

It is a curiously colonial performance. His Argentine past is part of his distinction; he offers it as such; and he is after all a patriot. He honours the flag, an example of which flies from the balcony of his office in the National Library (he is the director). And he is moved by the country’s anthem. But at the same time he seems anxious to proclaim his separate-ness from Argentina. The performance might seem aimed at Borges’s new Anglo-American campus audience, whom in so many ways it flatters. But the attitudes are old.

In Buenos Aires it is still remembered that in 1955, just a few days after Perón was overthrown and that nine-year dictatorship was over, Borges gave a lecture on—of all subjects—Coleridge to the ladies of the Association for English Culture. Some of Coleridge’s lines, Borges said, were among the best in English poetry,
“es decir la poesía
[that is to say poetry]
”
. And those four words, at a time of national rejoicing, were like a gratuitous assault on the Argentine soul.

Norman di Giovanni tells a balancing story.

Borges is of medium height. His nearly sightless eyes and his stick add to the distinction of his appearance. He dresses carefully. He says he is a middle-class writer; and a middle-class writer shouldn’t be either a dandy or too affectedly casual. He is courtly: he thinks, with Sir Thomas Browne, that a gentleman is someone who tries to give the least amount of trouble. “But you should look that up in
Religio Medici.”
It might seem then that in his accessibility, his willingness to give lengthy interviews which repeat the other interviews he has given, Borges combines the middle-class ideal of self-effacement and the gentleman’s manners with the writer’s privacy, the writer’s need to save himself for his work.

There are hints of this privacy (in accessibility) in the way he likes to be addressed. Perhaps no more than half a dozen people have the privilege of calling him by his first name, Jorge, which they turn into “Georgie.” To everyone else he likes to be just “Borges” without the
Señor
, which he considers Spanish and pompous. “Borges” is, of course, distancing.

And even the fifty-page “Autobiographical Essay” doesn’t violate his privacy. It is like another interview. It says little that is new. His birth in Buenos Aires in 1899, the son of a lawyer; his military ancestors; the family’s seven-year sojourn in Europe from 1914 to 1921 (when the peso was valuable, and Europe was cheaper than Buenos Aires): all this is told again in outline, as in an interview. And the essay quickly becomes no more than a writer’s account of his writing life, of the books he read and the books he wrote, the literary groups he joined and the magazines he founded. The life is missing. There is the barest sketch of the crisis he must have gone through in his late thirties and early forties, when—the family money lost—he was doing all kinds of journalism; when his father died, and he himself fell seriously ill and “feared for [his] mental integrity”; when he worked as an assistant in a municipal library, well known as a writer outside the library, unknown inside it. “I remember a fellow employee’s once noting in an encyclopaedia the name of a certain Jorge Luis Borges—a fact that set him wondering at the coincidence of our identical names and birth dates.”

“Nine years of solid unhappiness,” he says; but he gives the period
only four pages. The privacy of Borges begins to appear a forbidding thing.

Mark Strand translates:

This is Borges on Emerson; but it might be Borges on Borges. Life, in the “Autobiographical Essay,” is indeed missing. So that all that is important in the man has to be found in the work, which with Borges is essentially the poetry. And all the themes he has explored over a long life are contained, as he himself says, in his very first book of poems, published in 1923, a book printed in five days, three hundred copies, given away free. Here is the military ancestor dying in battle. Here, already, at the age of twenty-four, the contemplation of glory turns into the meditation on death and time and the “glass jewels” of the individual life:

In W. S. Merwin’s translation:

Somewhere around that time life stopped; and all that has been followed has been literature: a concern with words, an unending attempt to stay with, and not to betray, the emotions of that so particular past.