by Colm Toibin
The Borges family spent the war years in Switzerland; once the war was over they moved to Spain: first to Barcelona, then to Majorca, then to Seville and Madrid. Jorge Luis was writing poetry and allying himself with any young Spanish avant-garde writers he could find. The group with which he became involved in Seville and Madrid was called the Ultraísta movement. They were close in aims and style to the Imagists, and influenced by the work and personalities of Apollinaire and Marinetti. Borges loved staying up all night talking books and poetry, sitting in cafés and walking the streets. Madrid, where the family stayed for two months, was a perfect site for this; Borges got to know many of the leading young Spanish poets there. When he left Madrid to go back to Majorca with his family, he had young literary men in Madrid and in Geneva to write to regularly, sending new poems and letters of hope and despair about the work he was attempting. ‘I lack a goal,’ he wrote to Abramowicz, ‘or rather I have too many goals before me. I think I’m sunk, and won’t be able to salvage more than two or three metaphors from the wreckage.’
In 1921, after an absence of seven years, the family returned to Buenos Aires. Borges had very little formal education, no qualifications and no friends. He walked the streets of the Palermo district where he had grown up, and then began to explore other parts of the city, until the city itself became the subject of his first book of poems:
If things are void of substance
And if this teeming Buenos Aires
Is no more than a dream
Made up by souls in a common act of magic,
There is an instant
When its existence is gravely endangered And that is the shuddering instant of daybreak.
He was an exile in his own country. He wrote to a friend in Spain: ‘Don’t abandon me in this exile of mine, which is overrun by arrivistes, by correct youths lacking any mental equipment, and by decorative young ladies.’ Once more, however, he found a kindred spirit, a friend of his father’s called Macedonio Fernández, who met with friends on a Saturday night in a café to discuss matters such as ‘the uses of metaphor or the inexistence of the self’. In these first months in Buenos Aires, as his father promised and then postponed a return to Europe, Borges also began to write philosophical essays with titles like ‘The Nothingness of Personality’ and ‘The Blue Sky Is Sky and Is Blue’. Soon, he became involved in a number of literary magazines.
In July 1923 the Borges family, complete with Fanny Haslam, set sail for Europe again, spending a year wandering in England, France, Switzerland and the Iberian Peninsula. Borges renewed friendships in Madrid. Williamson in his biography is ‘virtually certain’ that Borges met Lorca on this visit, but it is absolutely certain in any case that he read Lorca’s work and paid real attention to his efforts at blending folk poetry with the most modern techniques.
What Lorca was doing became for Borges and his friends in Argentina, as it would for writers in every country on the periphery, a working-out of a serious dilemma: whether to adopt a full European Modernist identity or to describe Argentina (or Trinidad, or Ireland) in all its colour and exotic variety to the world. If the second choice were to be taken in Argentina, there was a useful example: a long narrative poem, using a great deal of dialect, by José Hernández called El Gaucho Martín Fierro, the first part of which was published in 1872. The poem quickly became immensely popular, its six-line ballad-like stanzas glorifying the life of the Argentine pampas and the rough, brave cowboys who inhabited them. The poem was published in English in a translation by Walter Owen in 1935:
And on the spot like two mad bulls
Into each other we tore;
The man was quick, but a bit too rash,
And a backhand slash soon settled his hash,
And I left him grunting and thrashing about,
With his tripes all over the floor.
‘The figure of the gaucho,’ Williamson writes, ‘thus came to embody the unresolved question of national identity, a question that would gnaw away at the Argentine conscience and would resurface periodically in a violent impulse to hold onto or to retrieve some vital essence that might be lost as Argentina acquired the trappings of a modern nation.’ Indeed, Hernández’s impulse in writing the first part of the poem was to protest against Argentina turning its back on its heritage and becoming unduly modern and civilized.
In a lecture he gave in Buenos Aires in 1950 about gaucho literature, Borges very cleverly ducked the choice between Martín Fierro and a pure European example. He pointed out that the richness of gaucho literature in Argentina arose not from the gaucho’s isolation but from the close relationship many of the gaucho writers had with the literary world of Buenos Aires. ‘Gaucho poetry,’ he wrote, ‘is a perhaps unique fusion between the city spirit and rural forms.’ The following year, in a brilliant and wise lecture called ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’, he returned to the subject, pointing out that El Gaucho Martín Fierro and other poems by Hernández’s contemporaries did not come direct from an oral tradition, but were highly wrought literary artefacts. ‘I believe that Martín Fierro,’ he wrote, ‘is the most lasting work we Argentines have written; I also believe, with equal intensity, that we cannot take Martín Fierro to be, as has sometimes been said, our Bible, our canonical book.’ His argument was with critics who suggested that ‘the lexicon, techniques and subject-matter of gauchesco poetry should enlighten the contemporary writer, and are a point of departure and perhaps an archetype’. He attacked the idea that ‘Argentine poetry must abound in Argentine differential traits and in Argentine local colour’.
Borges admired Martín Fierro, then, for its self-conscious manipulation of language and for its hybrid nature. In 1924 he read Joyce’s Ulysses and found a template for what he would view as the role of peripheral societies in the creation of literature. Of Irish writers he wrote:
The fact of feeling themselves to be Irish, to be different, was enough to enable them to make innovations in English culture. I believe that Argentines, and South Americans in general, are in an analogous situation; we can take on all the European subjects, take them on without superstition and with an irreverence that can have, and already has had, fortunate consequences.
This was written in 1951, when most of Borges’s great work had been done, but as early as 1925 he was arguing the case for a new and strange cosmopolitanism that would also make a hero of the local: ‘Already Buenos Aires, more than a city, is a country, and one must find the poetry and the music and the painting and the religion and the metaphysics that will do justice to its grandeur. That is the extent of my hope, which invites us all to be gods and to work towards its incarnation.’ Over the next few years, as he wrote a short biography of a minor poet of the city’s suburbs, he would refine this view; he would come to see both his city and his country as places of estrangement and their legacy as thin; he would accept a need to create a universe in their stead and find a language precise enough to re-create the essential contours of that new world.
In 1951, to illustrate his point, he described his story ‘Death and the Compass’, composed nine years earlier, as
a kind of nightmare, a nightmare in which elements of Buenos Aires appear, deformed by the horror of the nightmare; and in that story, when I think of the Paseo Colón, I call it Rue de Toulon, when I think of the quintas of Adrogué, I call them Triste-le-Roy; after the story was published my friends told me that at last they had found the flavour of the outskirts of Buenos Aires in my writing. Precisely because I had not abandoned myself to the dream, I was able to achieve, after so many years, what I once sought in vain.
In the early 1930s Borges began to consider what could be done in fiction. ‘He was proposing an aesthetics of radical mistrust,’ Williamson writes. ‘His basic contention was that fiction did not depend on the illusion of reality; what mattered ultimately was an author’s ability to generate “poetic faith” in his reader.’ Fiction, Borges believed, did not hold up a mirror to reality, instead it became ‘an autonomous spher
e of corroborations, omens and monuments’.
In 1931 the magazine Sur was launched by Victoria Ocampo, a member of one of the oldest and wealthiest families in Argentina, a woman ‘easily dictatorial and excessively bossy’ in Borges’s words. She would play a significant role in winning him fame as a writer. Borges continued to write essays and reviews and to take part in literary faction fighting. In 1933 he found his first real job, working on the literary supplement of a daily paper. Here he wrote a number of fictionalized biographies and some fables; he assembled them in his first book of fiction, A Universal History of Infamy, which was published in April 1935; by the end of the year it had sold thirty-seven copies. Borges had placed himself in what was for him a fortunate position of having no world to describe, except an invented one, and no audience to speak of, allowing him the luxury to address his fictions to one or two of his friends. The world could, if it pleased, listen in, but it would take time.
Bioy Casares, the reader who would matter most to Borges, came, like Ocampo, from the higher reaches of Argentine society. Ocampo introduced them in 1932, when Bioy was eighteen and Borges thirty-two. Borges’s mother must have been pleased at his friendship with this scion of the cattle-ranching oligarchy whose father was a cabinet minister and whose family owned one of the most prominent dairy businesses in the country. Bioy was handsome, self-confident and well read. He would come to have what was perhaps the largest personal library in all of South America. He also owned an estate in the country where Borges spent some time in 1935. Both men loved recondite references, strange books, literary jokes. Bioy, like Borges, had no illusions about his fellow countrymen’s interest in serious literature, but he had many other illusions and he sought now with his new friend to put them into print.
After Borges lost his job at the literary supplement, he began his career as a librarian in January 1938 in a working-class district on the other side of Buenos Aires. It was ignominious. There were so few books in the library that they did not need anyone to catalogue them; fifty people were doing a job that a third of them could have easily done. When Borges attempted to do some work, he was taken aside and told that he would ruin it for the rest of them. His colleagues had no interest in books. Borges did his day’s work in an hour. The pay was miserable. In his ‘Autobiographical Essay’, he wrote: ‘Sometimes in the evening, as I walked the ten blocks to the tramline, my eyes would be filled with tears.’ He kept sane by doing translations, including a selection of Kafka’s stories. Soon after he started his work in the library his father died.
Over the next two years Borges published some of his best fiction. ‘Pierre Menard’ appeared in Sur in May 1939, ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ a year later. In between, he wrote ‘The Library of Babel’. In December 1940 Sur published ‘The Circular Ruins’ and the following month ‘The Lottery in Babylon’, and ‘A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain’ three months later. These were among the stories gathered into a book, The Garden of Forking Paths, which Sur published at the end of 1941. While the author’s friends viewed this as a significant literary event, it failed to win any of the National Awards for Literature, the judges deeming it inappropriate to recommend to the Argentine people ‘an exotic and decadent work’ that followed ‘certain deviant tendencies of contemporary English literature’, hovering ‘between the tale of fantasy, a pretentious and recondite erudition, and detective fiction’.
The eight stories that make up the sixty pages of The Garden of Forking Paths represent Borges’s best work. For any biographer an exhumation and an autopsy of the years during which they were composed is a great challenge. It is hard to allow for the possibility that nothing, nothing at all, caused these to come into being. Borges did not keep diaries or write many letters; in interviews done years later he tended to be vague and misleading.
It is possible that certain things that happened in 1939 and 1940 mattered. His translating Kafka, for example; his having a magazine at his disposal with an imperious editor and an international circulation; his father’s death; his dreadful job with seven or eight hours a day free to do nothing; his reading of Dante while travelling on the tram to and from work – or perhaps more importantly his claim to have done so; the outbreak of war and his deep opposition to the Nazi and Peronist regimes; his rejection by a woman with whom he had fallen in love; his need to amuse and impress Bioy Casares. Any biographer has to take these into account, and Williamson does so. He gives, however, an extraordinary emphasis in his book to Borges’s relationship with a number of women, suggesting that these doomed and deeply unhappy relationships were fundamental to Borges’s work.
Borges, it is true, spent much of his life hanging out with women who would neither sleep with him nor marry him. The advantage for any biographer is that if you throw a stone in Buenos Aires you are likely to hit one of these women or their many descendants, or indeed their volumes of memoir.
The story begins in Geneva where, it is said, Borges Senior asked his son, then aged nineteen, if he had ever slept with a woman. When Borges said no, his father arranged ‘to help the youth negotiate the usual rites of passage to manhood’, as Williamson puts it, by giving him the address of a brothel and telling him that ‘a woman would be waiting there’ at an appointed time. It was, of course, a disaster. Borges Junior was shocked at the idea that he was sharing a woman with his father. Afterwards, according to Williamson, the adolescent Borges was taken to see a doctor who recommended a change of climate and fresh air and exercise. Williamson’s footnote for this points us to page 50 of María Esther Vázquez’s Borges: Esplendor y Derrota (1996). Vázquez had known Borges well, but this is no excuse for her account of the aftermath of his visit to the brothel: ‘He had such a terrible crisis that he cried for three successive days; he did not eat nor sleep … he only cried.’ She goes on: ‘With the stoicism of a monk, this healthy young man seemed to give up the necessities of the body to find in literature the only source of satisfaction and enjoyment.’
Even had Vázquez written that Borges cried for merely two days and then rose on the third, I would not believe a word of it. Nor do I believe the account in James Woodall’s life of Borges, also published in 1996: ‘What happened is a matter for speculation. It seems probable that Georgie’s virginity ended with the predictable fumbling and rush of any inexperienced teenage male, though he was especially horrified at the loss of physical self-possession at the moment of climax.’ Woodall points then to a reference to this disastrous sexual initiation in Borges’s story ‘The Other’, published in 1975. Borges, in the story, meets his double and tells him: ‘Nor have I forgotten a certain afternoon in a second-floor apartment on the Plaza Dubourg.’ His double corrects him: ‘Dufour.’ And he accepts the correction. Woodall quotes an earlier biographer who has, in his wisdom, pinpointed the place of assignation nominated by Borges Senior as the rue Général Dufour in Geneva.
It really is possible that all of this is rubbish, that, despite the breathless accounts by a number of his women friends who fell for the story, Borges’s father never sent him to a brothel at all and that something much less dramatic – his first reading of Whitman, for example – happened on the Plaza, or rue, Dufour. Or else Borges put the name in for no reason, just as he briefly allowed in the same story American bank-notes to carry a date.
We do have real evidence, however, that Borges went to brothels in Majorca in 1921. His literary group used to meet in a brothel, or what innocent young men might have thought was a brothel. Borges wrote to the writer Guillermo de Torre, who would marry Norah in 1928, about ‘feeling up the breasts or thighs of the smiling, uncomprehending girls’. And in a letter to Abramowicz, he wrote:
And then at roulette I enjoyed an unheard-of run of luck – at least for me – (60 pesetas with a capital of one peseta!) which allowed me to score three nights in a row at the brothel. A sumptuously filthy blonde, and a brunette we called ‘The Princess’ on whose humanity I took off as if flying a plane or riding a horse.
He a
lso wrote about his love for a prostitute called Luz: ‘I tell you, I really loved that Luz: she was so playful with me and behaved with such ingenuous indecency. She was like a cathedral and also like a bitch.’
While it is possible that some of this is true, it reads more like boasting and is treated with caution by Williamson. Nonetheless, Borges himself, the arch-priest of pure invention trading as deep research, would surely have been appalled at the inability of Vázquez, Woodall, Williamson and many more who have not yet written their books to create at least the illusion of verisimilitude in their statements and assertions about his early sex life.
Williamson, however, follows every lead. Each intellectual woman who rejected Borges is given star treatment, and he cleverly finds clues in the poems and stories. Borges, during all this time, was living with his mother and going slowly blind. One evening, when he was out with one of his women friends, Estela Canto (who, in her book Borges a contraluz, would propagate the story of Borges and the brothel), Canto overheard him calling his mother on the telephone: ‘Yes, yes, Mother … Yes … from here we’ll be going to the Ambassador … Yes, Mother. Estela Canto … Yes, Mother.’ He was forty-five years old. Williamson lists many of the other women with whom Borges was in love. For their names alone they deserve to be remembered: Norah Lange, Haydée Lange, Marta Mosquera Eastman, Susana Bombal, Esther Zemborain de Torres Duggan, Pippina Diehl de Moreno Hueyo, Beatriz Bibiloni Webster de Bullrich, Ema Risso Platero, Silvina Bullrich, Delia Ingenieros, to name but a few. Williamson’s analysis of Borges’s ‘single, involuntary criterion’ in choosing these women is interesting. ‘He fell for women who would be unacceptable to Mother, either because they came from an inferior social class or because they did not meet the high standards of respectability required by Doña Leonor.’
