Of Swords and Daggers

An off-target biography of J. L. Borges

BY JOSHUA BRAU

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Borges Book Cover

JORGE LUIS BORGES, who died in 1986, is considered by some as the father of postmodern literature, an epithet he would detest. Though he enjoyed varying levels of fame in his native Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America since the 1920s, Borges first came to prominence in the English-speaking world in the 1960s, and has since been assigned a comfortable position in the upper reaches of the 20th century literary pantheon.

Beginning in the late 1990s, Penguin published a new library of Borges's work. In quick succession they put out three beautifully matching but equally disappointing volumes: the Collected Fictions, Selected Non-Fictions, and Selected Poems. The new translations of the fictions fall far short of their predecessors, many of which were produced in collaboration with the author, himself fluent in English; the essays, while bringing into English many essential writings, are disorganized and poorly edited; the poems, which have never translated well into English, are of relatively minor importance.

More recently, Viking (a subsidiary of Penguin) added the element that is often most profitable for the publisher: the biography. In Borges: A Life, Edwin Williamson employs the usual means necessary to reconstruct the life of the master: letters, interviews with loved ones and acquaintances, and previous published accounts (most notably, Borges's "Autobiographical Essay," written in English and originally published in the New Yorker). Yet while no serious literary biographer can neglect an artist's work, Williamson has thrown caution to the wind and placed Borges's vast and labyrinthine oeuvre at the core of his narration of the life that produced it. This is an error that American students of literature learn to avoid in high school. For Williamson, an Oxford don and an expert on Cervantes, to do this falls slightly short of an intellectual crime.

Little Georgie Porgie

Williamson does the least damage when discussing the period when Borges produced little or no work that his life might be read through: from before his birth in 1899 to about the age of 15. Borges was the product of illustrious bloodlines on both sides of his family. His maternal great-grandfather, Colonel Isidoro Suárez, "led the cavalry charge that turned the tide of" the battle at Junín, the penultimate battle in the Latin American War of Independence, and earned a place in history with his bravery during battle at Ayacucho, where Simón Bolívar's armies completed the liberation of South America. Borges's paternal grandfather, Colonel Francisco Borges, was a top Argentine military official who met an untimely and mythologized death on the battlefield. The notable military careers of both men lived on in their grandson's mind as impossible standards of manly courage.

The lives and achievements of ancestors like these are set forth within a historical context that suffuses the entire book and constitutes one of its sole merits. Williamson provides a sweeping view of a changing Argentina in the 19th century and deftly weaves the narratives of Borges's ancestors into the fabric of Argentine history without the overflowing romanticism which Borges himself attributed to his lineage.

Williamson's portrait of Borges as a child is somewhat disconcerting, however. Unfortunately, no accounts enable the biographer to dispel the assumptions of the Borges mythology, which casts the artist as a boy in an unflattering light. Lovers of Borges seeking a conjunction of the fearlessness and enthusiasm of the stories with the life will not find this here. Georgie, as he was called, was a pitiful and pathetic child. From birth he was largely confined to his parents' home in the Palermo district of Buenos Aires. He spent much of his time in the family's library with his British paternal grandmother Fanny Haslam, who lived with the family and introduced her curious grandson to some of the authors in whom he would maintain an intense interest for years to come: Stevenson, Poe, Kipling, Walter Scott and others created the world Georgie inhabited.

The boy learned Spanish and English simultaneously and gravitated towards the literature of the latter; he later famously declared that his first reading of Don Quixote was in English translation. Though Williamson does not neglect the singular importance of literature for Borges, one of the biography's principle drawbacks is its single-minded emphasis on Borges the writer and its subsequent neglect of the activity for which Borges was equally known: reading. Though he eventually went blind, Borges was the 20th century's greatest reader. Those attending his lectures or discussing literary topics with him were left with the impression that he seemed to contain all of world literature in his mind. His knowledge was encyclopedic and the breadth of his tastes was vast; no literature, of the East or West, went untouched by his eyes. Borges was equally comfortable with Faulkner (who he translated) and Murasaki, Old Norse poetry (an obsession of his in later life) and Schopenhauer.

From childhood, Borges was enraptured with literary pursuits. As a teen he became a poet, and in his twenties, was involved with a number of journals associated with avant-garde literary movements in the Spanish-speaking world. This early fulfillment of Georgie's literary passion also marked his first assimilation into normal social life. Perhaps reluctant to depend too much on the poetry Borges produced during these years as a key to understanding the young artist's psychology, Williamson delivers the narrative of these years of the life with uncanny agility. We have a picture of an insecure and awkward youth whose literary brilliance, by no means fully realized, is surpassed in scale only by enthusiasm.

Enter The Queen

Williamson reads Borges's initial entry into the literary milieu of Buenos Aires as the source of the author's personal troubles. Williamson's reductive argument about Borges's emotional life, which he reiterates ad nauseum, begins-this is not quite a surprise-with Borges's parents. Borges's father was something of a frustrated artist and a mediocre family man who seemed unsatisfied with the life he had been given yet equally incapable of creating a new one for himself. Borges's overbearing mother, Leonor Acevedo, was her son's principal female companion until her death in 1975 and, in Williamson's account, the reason for her son's impotence (whether literal or metaphorical).

This conflict between fulfilling the desires of an ambitious mother and proving himself worthy of a skeptical father complements Borges's other, more present, personal struggle, namely what Williamson calls the search for a "new Beatrice." Williamson attributes Borges's romantic trials and tribulations to a desire for a sort of Dantean salvation, achievable only with the love of a woman. As a result of this Williamson depicts Borges desperately falling in love with every potential Beatrice, each of who is an only half enthusiastic object of the strange man's affection.

The woman who looms largest for Williamson is Norah Lange, queen of the Buenos Airean avant-garde community. Borges fell in love with the enigmatic poetess in his mid-20s, and she initially appeared to return his affections. Based on readings of poetry written by both of the lovers, Williamson assumes that the relationship reached what for Georgie were emotional and erotic heights, and asserts that the two were briefly engaged. The relationship began to decay toward the end of 1926, when Norah accompanied Borges to a party in honor of the poet Ricardo Güiraldes and left with Oliverio Girondo, a mysterious European of noble descent whom she eventually married. This drama, which played out over a number of years, was traumatic for Borges, whose consistent failure to win back Norah Lange left him ever more desperate.

The book's midsection consists primarily of an endless repetition-far too reminiscent of one of Borges's favorite concepts from Nietzsche, and one he refers to specifically in his work, the eternal recurrence-of this love triangle (Borges, Norah Lange, and Oliverio Girondo). Williamson's claim that this struggle was the dominant force in Borges's life for years after the initial split would be legitimate if it were corroborated with sufficient evidence, anecdotal, epistolary, or otherwise. But Williamson's principal means of understanding these events is Norah Lange's supposedly thinly-veiled novelistic account of the triangle entitled Voz de la Vida (The Voice of Life). Williamson subjects the reader to an endless close reading of this forgotten work that is welcome as a source by dint of its coming from an alternate perspective, but Williamson's willingness to glean facts of the life from the novel of a former lover is disconcerting.

The Aleph Is Real

Much of the rest of the biography unfolds in the same way. Williamson constructs fact from fiction with alarming confidence. He extracts concepts from Borges's work-such as the "aleph" of Borges's eponymous story-and interpolates them into the life in a manner that suggests he neither understands the man nor his work.

Borges: A Life, I think, would inspire considerable anguish in its subject were the latter alive to read it (or hear it read to him). Its few values are "easily and briefly enumerated," (to use Borges's own words in his brief biography of Pierre Menard): it places Borges as Argentina's public intellectual in a historical context and rescues him from the few faint charges of fascism and inaction which have been leveled against the author since the 1960s and which many claim are the sole reason he was denied the Nobel Prize; it provides a handful of memorable anecdotes that give shape to a life that was generally inactive and devoted almost exclusively to books; and it offers the serious reader a serious caution: what happens in the mind and in books (the two being one and the same for Borges) really happens, and not the paltry occurrences in the pithy world of sight and sense.

Joshua Brau B'05 doesn't ever quite know what he's talking about.

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