BORGES: Embarrassing.
REID: A little embarrassing.
BORGES: I’m sorry. I apologize.
REID: You have on more than one occasion alluded to surrealism as producing an art and literature of no value or interest. You have even compared it unfavorably with expressionism.
BORGES: But of course.
REID: Would you please explain and develop this view?
BORGES: I think there is a wide difference. The expressionists were mystics, for example, while the surrealists aimed at astonishing the readers. I think expressionism was important, in their painting also. Kandinsky, Marc Chagall, Beckman, they were poets. Then—of course this is my personal bias—I love German, and I rather tend to dislike French. Not French literature, of course, because I much admire it, but the French language. There is something petty about it. Something trivial about it. As a good Argentine, I shouldn’t say those things. But really, that’s the way I feel about it. Maybe it’s my English background at work.
REID: Have you always found that some languages fit you better than others or suit you better than others?
BORGES: I wish I could achieve English or achieve German, or achieve Latin. I wonder if I have achieved Spanish, for that matter. Maybe I have made a muddle of the whole thing.
COLEMAN: May I ask Borges about expressionist film? And early film. Films that you remember seeing.
BORGES: I wonder if they were expressionist. I think of films by Joseph von Sternberg, for example, films like Underworld, The Showdown, The Dragnet. I remember I have seen those over and over again. And also Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. I’ve seen that several times over.
COLEMAN: I think you may have said on one occasion that you saw West Side Story seventeen times. Is that true?
BORGES: I must have seen it perhaps sixteen times, or three or four times. Porgy and Bess also.
COLEMAN: Could you tell us what appealed to you in a film by Sternberg or a film by Eisenstein. What was the technique that appealed to you that might possibly have some relation with your writing?
BORGES: I never thought much of Eisenstein whatever. I worship Joseph von Sternberg. I think he was a far better director. What I liked in Sternberg was the fact that he was laconic. That he would give you, let’s say, a murder in three scenes, three images. I enjoyed something in his style that I see akin to Seneca.
COLEMAN: It was the laconic quality of the narration.
BORGES: Yes, it was. And I tried to ape that quality, I played the sedulous ape to Sternberg, when I wrote a too famous story called “The Streetcorner Man.” I was doing my best to be Joseph von Sternberg, and to be Chesterton also.
COLEMAN: But what about other American films, the classic American films, Borges?
BORGES: I have always enjoyed the westerns. Especially La hora señalada.
COLEMAN: High Noon?
BORGES: Yes, High Noon, yes. It’s a very fine film. There is something epic about it.
COLEMAN: How about Bogart films?
BORGES: I remember them, but in a rather dim way. I think chiefly of George Bancroft, or William Powell, of Fred Kohler, those actors who were gangsters, who played the part of gangsters.
COLEMAN: But why are there so many gangsters and evil people in your stories? You obviously love to see them in film, and there are certainly plenty of murderers in your stories. But you don’t seem to be a very violent man.
BORGES: No, but I have known violent men. I am not a violent man of course.
COLEMAN: What do you mean when you say you’ve known violent men?
BORGES: Well, a friend of mine was a murderer. A very likable fellow.
COLEMAN: How about the Germanophiles of Buenos Aires?
BORGES: They are not interesting at all, so far as I remember.
COLEMAN: What sort of people were these people, these adorers of Hitler in 1941?
BORGES: They were nationalists. They were Catholics. I can’t understand Catholicism or nationalism. Those things are unknown to me. I don’t want to know anything about them. They are rather hateful to me. But why speak about it?
COLEMAN: Let’s stop. We will stop.
REID: But just one more thing. Among the heroic figures throughout your writing are the cuchilleros “the knifers” in Buenos Aires, and you actually knew them. You talked to them, no?
BORGES: Yes, I did.
REID: The knife-fighters. Now that means that there was a stage for what we call “the law of the gun,” or what we would call “the law of the knife” in Buenos Aires.
BORGES: Yes, but that was quite different because you had to be brave.
REID: And honorable, no?
BORGES: You can shoot a man at a distance. Knife-fighters? No. You had to challenge him. Then you had to choose your weapons and take your stand.
REID: So it was a duel, like fighting a duel.
BORGES: No, not a duel. For a duel you had to make an arrangement to fight.
REID: There were actual figures in your life, that you knew?
BORGES: At least one was. Why not mention the name of Don Nicolás Paredes in New York. He was my friend.
COLEMAN: Those naipes de tahur “gambler’s cards.”
BORGES: That rings a bell, eh, tahur is a fine word.
COLEMAN: It means gambler, is that right? There is a very prosaic question, and it is a question that is always asked of writers, but I hope you don’t mind my asking it. The question is: What are your working methods? How do you work as a writer? You dictate.
BORGES: Yes, but I work all day and all night. All day I am scheming poems or fables. And at night I am dreaming and that’s the same thing, going on. Then when people come I dictate maybe a stanza or a page to them.
COLEMAN: But, Borges, when you were writing out manuscripts, did you write out, let’s say, a whole paragraph or did you inch ahead line by line? Do you recall how you composed?
BORGES: No, I began by the wrong method.
COLEMAN: Which is?
BORGES: The wrong method is to write a paragraph and emend it. Then write a second paragraph. But that made the whole thing jolting all the time. But I think the real way is to write as much as you can and then to emend it. But not to revise one sentence and then begin the rough draft of another. You begin by making a rough draft of the whole thing.
REID: It’s what’s known among writers nowadays, Borges, as vomiting.
BORGES: Yes, that’s right.
COLEMAN: No, al fresco, please. Italian.
BORGES: I would say retching. Anglo-Saxon.
*Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan,” lines 51–54.
*“God’s irony” is a phrase from “Poem of the Gifts.”
*“Requiem,” lines 1–4.
*“Whose name I do not wish to remember,” allusion to the first line of Don Quixote: En un lugar de la Mancha cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme.
10
The Nightmare, That Tiger of the Dream
Indiana University,
April 1980 I am often haunted by nightmare. And I feel that were I a theologian—happily I am not—I might find an argument in favor of hell…. The nightmare has a peculiar horror to it. The nightmare, that tiger of the dream.
WILLIS BARNSTONE: In the years that we have known each other we have spoken almost exclusively about poetry.
JORGE LUIS BORGES: Yes. It’s the only subject, really.
BARNSTONE: A few days ago when we took a plane in New York, you asked what the name of the airline was, and I said TWA. You asked what that stood for, and I said Trans World Airlines. Do you remember what you said?
BORGES: Yes. I said that that stood for Walt Whitman Trans World. He would have enjoyed that.
BARNSTONE: What about that pioneer transworld pilot?
BORGES: I think that what I have to say now is what I said quite some time ago in an essay:* the fact, forgotten by many people, that Whitman thought of Leaves of Grass as an epic, not as a series of short poems. Now, the epic has been attempted many times,
but there always was a central figure. Arma Virumque canō. I mean you always had a character larger than life. For example, you had Ulysses, you had Beowulf, you had Roland. But when Walt Whitman thought of writing an epic, Sewuld he thought, well, this should be an epic of democracy, and so I can’t have a central figure. In one of his poems he says: “There are painters who give us pictures of crowds, and one of them has a halo. But I want all of my characters, all the people in my pictures, to have halos.” And then he came to a very strange scheme, and nobody seems to have remarked it, since the people who imitated, or tried to imitate, Walt Whitman did not imitate his method but the results of his method. I am thinking of very important poets, for example, Carl Sandburg, Pablo Neruda, Edgar Lee Masters. Since Whitman had to write an epic of democracy, he created a character and that character is a very strange trinity, and yet many people mistake him for the writer. But the writer is not the character. When Walt Whitman began, he thought of his own life. He thought of having been born on Long Island, but he thought that this isn’t enough: I should have been born all over America. Then he created that very strange character, Walt Whitman, not to be taken for the writer of the book, the Brooklyn journalist, who had written a novel about alcohol—he had written, I think, a tract in favor of slavery. But here he attempted a very daring experiment, the most daring and the most successful experiment in all literature as far as I know. The experiment was this. The central character would be called after the author, Walt Whitman, but he was, firstly, Walt Whitman the human being, the very unhappy man, who wrote Leaves of Grass. Then a magnification, or transmogrification of that Walt Whitman, called Walt Whitman, who was not the real Whitman at all, or at least not the Whitman his contemporaries knew, but a divine vagabond. And that man was a real character in “Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,/ Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding.”* It appears from the biographies that those facts are not quite true. We find many distressing things about Whitman, but not about Walt Whitman. And then, since that character had to be a trinity—for he thought of it as a trinity—he introduced a third person. That third person is the reader.
So Walt Whitman is compounded of Walt Whitman the man, of Walt Whitman the myth, and also of the reader, because he thought of the reader as being also the hero of the book, being also the central man of the picture. So the reader speaks to Walt Whitman, and asks him: “What do you see, Walt Whitman? What do you hear, Walt Whitman?’’ And then Whitman answers back, “I hear America” or, for example—I’m an Argentine and I have chosen this particular example:
I see the gaucho crossing the plains, I see the incomparable
rider of horses with his lasso on his arm,
I see over the pampas the pursuit of wild cattle for their hides.*
“The incomparable rider of horses.” That is taken of course from the last line of the Iliad: “Hector, tamer of horses.” But had Whitman written “the incomparable rider,” he would have written nothing, but “rider of horses” gives it that peculiar strength.
And so we have this very strange character: the Whitman whose dates are given in the dictionaries and is forgotten, the Whitman who died in Camden, the magnification of Whitman, and then the reader. And the reader is made to stand for all future readers, and he thought of them as being all Americans. He did not know that he would be known the world over. He never thought in terms of that. He thought in terms of America, and of America the democracy.
Sometimes Whitman tells things of himself. But since he wanted to be everybody, he said something that no poet had ever said. I think the verses go thus:
These are really the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands,
they are not original with me,
If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing,
or next to nothing,
If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle
they are nothing,
If they are not just as close as they are distant
they are nothing.
This is the grass that grows wherever the land is
and the water is,
This common air that bathes the globe.†
Other poets, for example, Edgar Allan Poe or one of his disciples, Baudelaire, were trying to say uncommon things. They were trying to surprise the reader. Poets still keep on working at that game. But Whitman went further. Whitman thought of his thought as being the “thoughts of all men in all ages and lands.” “They are not original with me.” He wanted to be everybody else. He wanted to be all men. He even saw himself as a pantheist, but the world is rather priggish. I think it comes from a deep feeling in Whitman. Now I wonder if that has been detected, because people read, and they don’t think that they are one of the persons in that trinity which is Walt Whitman. And yet that was Whitman’s idea. He wanted to stand for all America. In one of his poems, he writes:
Now I tell what I knew in Texas in my early youth,
(I will tell not the fall of Alamo,
Not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo,
The hundred and fifty are dumb yet at Alamo,)*
Well, he never was in Texas in his life. And he also wrote: “As I have walk’d in Alabama my morning walk.”† He never went to Alabama, as far as I know. But in another poem he says that he remembers having been born in the South. Of course I don’t think he was born in several places at once, a kind of miracle. But still that made him into a great poet. Nobody seems to have attempted anything like it. They have just copied his intonation, his use of Biblical free verse, but nobody seems to have seen how strange was his personal experiment.
And even Walt Whitman did not live up to that one epic, because afterwards, there came the Civil War, and Walt Whitman was not all Americans. He was a partisan, as may be expected, on the side of the North. He did not think of himself as being also Southern, as he had felt himself in the beginning. And then in a sense he became less of Walt Whitman. He became someone in particular. He was no longer all men in all ages and lands. He was a contemporary of the War between the States. But should we say those things, since perhaps he wrote the most beautiful lines at the end of the book, when he says “Camerado”—he thought he was using Spanish but he was inventing the word:**
Camerado, this is no book,
Who touches this touches a man,
(Is it night? are we here together alone?)
It is I you hold and who holds you,
I spring from the pages into your arms—decease calls me forth.‡
And then:
I am as one disembodied, triumphant, dead.”*
The book ends with that single word of one syllable, dead. But the book is living. The book is still living, and every time that we open the book, every time that we go back to it (and I’m doing that all the time), we become part of that trinity. We are Walt Whitman. So I am grateful to Whitman, not for his ideas—after all, I have no personal use for democracy myself—but democracy was a tool needed by Whitman in order to form that extraordinary epic called Leaves of Grass, and changed from edition to edition. Emerson said that that book when it appeared was the “finest piece of wit and wisdom that America had yet contributed.”
I think of Walt Whitman not only as a myth but as a friend of mine. I think of him as having been rather unhappy, and having worked himself into singing joy and happiness, and that has been done perhaps by another poet, perhaps in Spanish, by Jorge Guillén, who really gives us a sensation of happiness. And now and then Shakespeare. As for Whitman, you can always see that he was doing his best to be happy, although he really wasn’t happy, and that is part of the interest he has for us. Well, now you should say something, I have been talking far too much, Barnstone.
BARNSTONE: One thing I wanted to ask you was—
BORGES: Why one thing, many things!
BARNSTONE: —what you think of Whitman’s notion of writing one book all his life. And you mentioned Jorge Guillén as one who also wrote one book for at least thirty-o
ne years, Cántico.†
BORGES: A very fine book.
BARNSTONE: The way Baudelaire also wrote one book, Les Fleurs du Mal.
BORGES: Yes, alas, he did.
BARNSTONE: What do you think of the notion of a writer, in the prophetic manner of Whitman, who dedicates his life to the elaboration of one long book?
BORGES: Personally, I suppose all writers are writing the same book over and over again. But I suspect that every generation rewrites, with very slight variations, what the other generations wrote. I don’t think a man can do much by himself since, after all, he has to use a language, and that language is a tradition. Of course he may change that tradition, but at the same time that tradition takes for granted all that came before it. I think Eliot said that we should try to renew with a minimum of novelty. And I remember that Bernard Shaw said, in a very unjust, derogatory way, of Eugene O’Neill: “There is nothing new about him except his novelties,” meaning that novelties are trivial. As for one book—well, I wonder. All my writings have been bound together in a single volume. Maybe a few pages may survive.
BARNSTONE: It is very curious that Poe for Europe is what Whitman is for the Americas.
BORGES: Yes, and we owe that to France; we owe that to Baudelaire and to Mallarmé. When I was a boy, Poe was known to us through the French.
BARNSTONE: But why was Walt Whitman for the New World what Poe was for the Old World? Virtually every Latin American poet, including yourself, has a poem to Walt Whitman.
BORGES: I think that Whitman appealed to Europe also. I remember reading Whitman through a fine German translation by Johannes Schlaf. He also appeals to Europe. The fact is that America has given the world at least three names that cannot be thought away without changing everything. And those names are Whitman, the second one is Poe, and as to the last, I would choose Robert Frost. Other people might choose Emerson perhaps. You can do your own choosing. But America gave the world three men that cannot be thought away. They are essential. All contemporary literature would not be what it is had it not been for those two very different and those two very unhappy men, Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman.
Borges at Eighty: Conversations Page 15
