The Lesson of the Master

‘No, no!’ he protested, flying into a rage. ‘I won’t publish another book. I haven’t published a new book in eight years and I won’t be judged by this stuff.’

He was beside himself in a way I had never seen before. It was a hot potato, and I let it drop.

But over dinner the next night at Bioy’s he blurted out aggressively, ‘Di Giovanni has a crazy idea. He wants me to publish a new book of poems.’ It was the manner he used, I was to learn, when he found himself on unsure ground but wanted to give the opposite impression.

‘But, Georgie,’ Bioy immediately chimed in, chuckling his infectious little chuckle. ‘That seems to me a splendid idea.’

Silvina agreed; Peyrou agreed. I had no need to add a word.

One day the next week, there was an unexpected phone call from Borges, with a hint of mystery in his voice, saying he had an errand to run that morning and would I meet him at the library a bit later on. When around midday we eventually got together again, he was jubilant. ‘I’ve been to see Frías,’ he said. Carlos Frías was his editor at Emecé. ‘I told him, “Frías, I want to publish a new book of poems.”’ Again the aggressive tone.

‘Let me guess his decision,’ I said, playing the straight man. ‘He accepted.’

Borges was stunned and momentarily deflated. ‘Yes. How did you know?’

That did it. His mind was made up. He was writing a new book and he wanted everyone to know he was writing a new book. ‘Thirty-four poems, eh? You think that’s about right, do you? That’s the figure I gave Frías. Now you’re sure we have seventeen. Let’s go over that list of yours once again.’

We went over the list, which he learned by heart, ticking each title off on his fingers. What this meant, I told him, was that from then on we would work together only in the afternoons. He must devote his mornings to dictating new work. Borges offered no demur.

That was a skirmish. The real battle loomed ahead – the bits of evidence are there in the diary jottings – but I would not be aware of this for another six months. The entry for 4 December 1968 relates that in the evening we went out to Palermo, the neighbourhood of Buenos Aires where Borges had grown up, and we walked around the streets before going around the corner to eat empanadas at the home of Elsa’s cousin Olga.

‘Don’t expect anything now,’ Borges had prefaced the journey in his characteristic way.

It was a year and a day since we had first met. We stopped at an old almacén, where two men played with a pack of greasy cards at a plain wooden table. The place was ill-lit and nearly empty. Borges asked for a couple of cañas quemadas, an old-fashioned rum-like liqueur. Afterwards, outside, he confessed, ‘I asked for a small one because a big one would have defeated me.’ He told me he hadn’t been out this way for thirty years. Then, like an eager schoolboy, he showed me a narrow, cobbled alleyway, pointing out that it was untypical for running in a diagonal instead of forming the side of a square. And on the spot he began recounting the ‘plot of a story that has the ghost of Juan Muraña as a protagonist.’ (An entry in a pocket notebook tells me this.) But of course he at once lamented the fact that, though he might still compose poems, he would never set down this story, since there was no way he could ever manage to write prose again. I gave him a sympathetic ear.

He and Elsa were invited to Israel for a few weeks early in the new year, and he came back full of wry little stories about the Holy Land. The Israelis, one notebook jotting tells me, were ‘a bunch of Russians or Germans in disguise, playing at being characters out of the Old Testament – Noahs.’ But he was elated. He was working, which in Borges’s terms meant justifying his existence. And, what was more, harder than ever before in his life. (This was Bioy’s observation; he had close to forty years’ experience of Borges’s habits.) Mornings were spent working on new poems for his book, dictating them to a secretary. In February, our afternoons were given over to a translation and rewriting of the long series of miniature essays that made up The Book of Imaginary Beings. By then I had burned my bridges and decided to stay on in Argentina longer than the five months I had initially planned. We finished the Imaginary Beings on 20 May 1969; he was so delighted with the result that any future translation of the book, he insisted, must be based on our English version. He also insisted that we now celebrate the end of the job by writing some new pieces for the book directly in English. We concocted four, working into them all manner of silly things, like the long Dutch name of one of my friends, a family surname, and my Buenos Aires street and flat number. It was all in good fun and the kind of thing Borges took delight in. Three days later, we wrapped the book up with a new foreword; three days after that, the typescript was winging its way to New York.

‘Norteamérica,’ Borges told the pillarbox, giving it an affectionate pat. ‘I always tell the box where the letter goes. Otherwise, how would it know?’

The jotting in the peace calendar for this year tells that on 11 June Borges and I had worked on Foreword to the First Edition of his 1951 short story ‘Ibn Hakkan al-Bokhari, Dead in His Labyrinth’, and that that evening we took a taxi out to his publishers in the two thousand block of Alsina to turn in the last poem of his new book Elogio de la sombra – In Praise of Darkness. An emendation added later in brackets records that ‘more material was turned in after this date.’ This was his fifth book of poems, he was to write in his foreword to the volume later that month, and to ‘the mirrors, mazes, and swords which my resigned reader already foresees, two new themes have been added: old age and ethics.’ As it turned out, there was something else in the book too – a grain of sand that would make a pearl. This was a story, not a prose poem, no more than three or four pages long about a man who hides out in a cellar for nine years.

Borges’s lament about not being able to write down short stories that he was forever working out in his head did not end after our Palermo excursion. Over the next months these stories became a more and more frequent topic of conversation on our walks to and from the library. At some point – but this was much later on – I began keeping track of them; by then the list I drew up numbered eight. That autumn (it was the southern hemisphere) I no longer just lent a silent ear but began a subtle campaign of egging him on, shoring up his confidence, and proving to him that his writing days were far from over. I had two arrows in my quiver. One was the five-page story ‘The Intruder’ that he had dictated to his ancient mother three years earlier; the other was the recent ‘Pedro Salvadores’, the man in the cellar.

‘Sure you can,’ I’d point out. ‘After all, the difference in length between “The Intruder” and any of your other stories is a bare page or two.’

This was a slight exaggeration, perhaps, but he never opposed the argument. On the contrary, my persuasiveness made him open up, and he began using me as a sounding board for yet another tale whose plot he now wove aloud to me. And he’d ask my opinion of specific elements – should he add another incident? Were the main characters different enough?

I never tried to supply answers but would raise more questions. ‘What are the alternatives?’ I kept wanting him to tell me.

He’d ponder, come up with an idea, and we’d kick it around. I knew he was girding himself and working up to something; and I was determined to feed his mood whilst not letting him off the hook.

Then, at his doorstep: ‘No, I fear it’s too late in the day; I don’t think I could manage it.’

‘Tommyrot,’ I’d say. His Edwardian slang, as I called it, was one of our pet jokes. ‘Why not try? It’s a good story. It’s only a matter of writing “Pedro Salvadores” twice. Eight pages. You can do it.’

And on and on it went for several weeks. One day, in the midst of this, Manuel Peyrou rang from La Prensa, where he worked as an editor, to tell Borges that the paper was celebrating its centenary later in the year and was inviting every Argentine writer of note to contribute to a succession of special Sunday supplements. Here was another turning point. Not long after this, Borges took a poem around to them. But the next day, rather than feeling good about it, he was actually glum.

‘I don’t think a poem’s what they had in mind,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I think they’d like a story.’

‘Of course they’d like a story. We’d all like a story. Why not write them one?’

I never for a moment believed La Prensa was unhappy with his poem; certainly Peyrou knew that Borges had more or less given up writing stories since 1953. This was Borges having a pang of conscience. La Prensa had offered him the same fee whether they got a poem or a story out of him, and he felt he had cheated them. Whatever the truth of the matter, the mysterious strands were coming together fast now.

It became an open secret at the library that Borges was dictating a full-length short story; he knew I knew, but superstitiously he refused to breathe a word of it to me. He didn’t have to, as the team of secretaries gave me daily reports. It went through two or three drafts and took him two or three weeks to write. He finally came clean when he’d finished, but he made no offer to show me the result. I bided my time.

A few days later I lied and told him I was short of money. Reaching for the billfold he kept in his inside breast pocket, he asked how much I needed. No, I laughed, what I had in mind was the new story, which I wanted to translate and sell to the New Yorker, where our work had been appearing. This took place on a Monday. All right, he said, but not that day. I would have to wait until Friday.

There was no earthly reason for his not handing me the story then and there, except that as the remote possibility did exist that Friday might never come round he could actually trick himself into believing he would escape having to stand judgement. It was complicated; it was capricious; it was Borges.

But that Friday did come round – according to my diary it was 16 May – and the delivery could be put off no longer. After our afternoon’s ration of Imaginary Beings and just before we knocked off, he put the typescript in my hands, saying, ‘Don’t read it until Monday; we’ll talk about it then.’ I suppose it was one last desperate try; maybe he thought he’d have better luck and Monday would never happen.

The story was ‘The Meeting’, a marvellous tale set back in 1910 about two well-off young men who quarrel over cards and fight a duel with knives in which one of them dies. At the same time, on the fantastic side, the story is about the secret life of the weapons the men had chosen. I found it remarkably polished, and the draft contained only a couple of minor flaws. One was that in the dark, in a house without electric light, two characters begin studying a cabinet that houses a collection of old knives.

‘That’s easy,’ Borges said as we worked out the translation. ‘We’ll have one of them light a lamp.’ And on the spot, in English, he dictated a line to correct the lapse. My diary entries record that on 3 June I worked very late typing up ‘The Meeting’ for the New Yorker, and that at the library the next evening Borges and I translated the bits of new material into Spanish and inserted them into a set of galley proofs that we then delivered to La Prensa, where Peyrou gave each of us a copy of his latest novel El hijo rechazado.

Within three weeks we heard from Robert Henderson at the New Yorker that they were taking ‘The Meeting’, and the news had a dramatic effect on Borges. In fact, nothing could have done more just then to send his confidence soaring. In July, on the seventeenth and eighteenth, I read page proofs of Elogio de la sombra to him, then read through them a second time alone. I corrected fresh proofs on the twenty-eighth. The book was published to great acclaim in August, on Borges’s seventieth birthday. Two days earlier, on the evening of the twenty-second, Emecé gave the book an extravagant send-off on a stage in the Galería Van Riel, where one Dr E. Molina Mascías (whoever he was) spoke at some length, and the ‘primera actriz’ (whatever that means) María Rosa Gallo and the ‘primeros actores’ (ditto) Enrique Fava and Luis Medina Castro read a large number of the poems. The place was packed out and a bit of a circus. On the copy of the book he gave me the day before, Borges had written, ‘Al colaborador, al amigo, al promesso sposo’, for in a few days’ time I was to be married. On the Sunday, his birthday, Elsa threw a little party at home with a cake iced in blue and white in the shape and colours of the book itself. You could even read the title on it. It was not at all Borges’s style, but he was nonetheless radiant. The next day was the wedding, with Elsa and Borges as the official witnesses at the registry office, and with her sister Alicia Ibarra and cousin Olga and Teddy Paz as extras. Poor Elsa, she was obliged to throw a second party in two days – this one for the promessi sposi. Silvina Ocampo and Manuel Puig were there; so was Elogio de la sombra – not the book but the cake, or, rather, what was left of it. Plus the wedding cake. By then, though, quite sensibly, Borges had had enough and did not attend. Instead, he went to work at the library.

After that, it all became a whirlwind. In October, two days before ‘El encuentro’ appeared in La Prensa, Borges finished another new story, the one called ‘Rosendo’s Tale’ in English; the day we completed the translation of it we delivered the original to La Nación. Now the work found its way into my hands as soon as he finished it. In November came ‘The Unworthy Friend’, which we took with us to translate in the United States while Borges was lecturing at Oklahoma and where we gave readings and talks at a number of other universities. ‘Juan Muraña’, the story he had told me about the year before on the very spot where it was set, was finished in mid-January 1970. There was no stopping him now. ‘The Duel’ came next, but before he put the finishing touches to it he began dictating ‘The End of the Duel’. He had long since known he was doing the impossible – writing a new book of stories. On 3 March he finished ‘Guayaquil’ and on the fifth began ‘Doctor Brodie’s Report’. The day he finished ‘Brodie’ he began ‘The Gospel According to Mark’, completing the first draft of it in under a week. The only hiccup came when he had reached the eight mark. By then he was so anxious to see the collection in print that he ran out of patience. Not of stories, thank goodness, but of patience. He had another three in mind but he simply couldn’t wait. As the completed stories were very short, a book of them would have come to no more than seventy pages, and I considered that a mistake. He had been invoking Kipling and the Plain Tales from the Hills as a kind of model for his brevity; I pointed out, however, that Plain Tales ran to over three hundred pages and contained forty stories. It was no use; he was going to see Frías to tell him he wanted to publish a book of eight stories. And off he went.

I picked up the phone, got Frías, and explained the situation. ‘Say no to him,’ I told the publisher. ‘Tell him he’s got to write at least three more. They’re there in his head but he’s just being lazy.’

Frías saw that I was right. Borges came back and told me that Emecé wanted another three stories. To his credit, he didn’t sulk over the news for even a second. Sulking, like self-pity, was never one of Borges’s traits. Instead, he immediately set to work writing the three required stories, probably counting his blessings that he had three more stories to tell. I never told him about my intervention. We set about rereading and ordering the book-length typescript in mid-April, a week later he turned it in, and El informe de Brodie was published early in August. By any standard, it was a remarkable achievement; by his own, it was nothing short of a miracle. After nine years without writing a book, he had now, within twelve months, written two.

Like Turner, a painter he admired, Borges in his old age also set out to fashion something new, freer, more personal. In many ways he succeeded; undeniably, the prose of his late work is less cluttered and more responsible. He felt that at last he had found his voice. Six more volumes of poetry were to follow In Praise of Darkness; seventeen more short stories followed Doctor Brodie’s Report.

‘I no longer regard happiness as unattainable,’ he said bravely on reaching seventy-one.

That year, there were no celebrations when the book came out, and certainly there was no cake. Somewhat sadly, circumstances had changed.

There are among my papers two spiral-bound notebooks with ruled pages, workbooks I called them, in which I took down from his dictation on sixty-four recto leaves the story of Borges’s life. As far as I am aware, this autobiography is the single most extensive piece of writing Borges ever committed to paper. Like much else that we did, it too seems to have been born of a series of accidents or obstacles – unforeseen and unforeseeable events that somehow or other, uncannily, we kept turning to advantage.

With The Book of Imaginary Beings in print and a number of the recent stories and poems beginning to appear in American magazines, Borges and I itched for a chance to present in our own versions a selection of his older stories, the ones on which his fame rested. Of course, we would have preferred to translate the seventeen stories of his best book, El Aleph, written in the very rich period between 1945 and 1953, but a competing publisher, who claimed rights to about half these tales, prevented us from doing so. Our own publisher, however, the understanding and very accommodating Jack Macrae, was not averse to obliging us. So by begging, borrowing, and nearly stealing – that is, given the chance, we would have stolen – Borges and I were able to map out the volume that eventually appeared in the autumn of 1970 as The Aleph and Other Stories 1933–1969.

The exercise in autobiography had twofold roots. The first of them was in the vexing problem just described, when Borges was denied the right to determine the form and fate of his own work. As our compromise volume took shape, I grew ever more convinced that it needed something in addition to our spanking-new translations if we were to avoid hoodwinking the public with yet another anthology of Borges’s work.

The second part of these roots and of the story is a happier affair and even funny. At the University of Oklahoma, several months earlier, I had been able to prevail upon Borges – not without great difficulty – to conclude his set of six lectures on Argentine literature by talking about himself. But on the afternoon of that final lecture he was in a blue funk. He had never before spoken about his own work publicly – it would never have occurred to him to indulge in such a pointless, immodest activity – and it was late in the day, and why on earth, and he simply was not going to be able to go through with it, etc. I saw I had a full-scale panic on my hands. By some strange chemistry, however, his panics always managed to turn the blood in my veins to iced water. It was a partnership, after all, and one of us had to be steady at all times. After our customary afternoon naps – his sleepless and unrefreshing, he claimed – I could see how pent up he was, so I suggested a walk. Our hotel stood about three-quarters of a mile from the campus on what seemed to be the edge of Norman, Oklahoma, where it occupied the corner of a perfectly square block. Arm in arm, Borges and I slowly circumnavigated that block. Once.

‘Just remember your Dickens,’ I told him. Twice.

‘David Copperfield,’ I told him, ‘“I was born on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night.”’ And three times.

‘Nothing fancy, now. You’re telling a story, that’s all there is to it.’

Every once in a while, Borges’s lips began to move. ‘I was born in Buenos Aires, in 1899,’ he mumbled.