The Lesson of the Master

‘That’s the hang of it,’ I said.

He was unconvinced. I couldn’t tell him, but so was I.

Of course, he did marvellously, his audience loved it, and our Oklahoma sponsors, Lowell Dunham and Ivar Ivask, were duly pleased. Three months later in Buenos Aires, recalling the little triumph, I had a brainstorm and asked them at Norman to provide us with a transcript of the talk. I wrote to Macrae to tell him that we’d hit on an idea to beef up the book: we would add to it Borges’s story of his own life, written directly in English. The lecture, I knew, would come to around twenty pages; I figured that with a few days’ work we’d be able to flesh it out to thirty. So carried away was I that somewhere along the line I promised Jack we’d provide the book with a kind of appendix as well, also to be written in English, in the form of commentaries on each of the book’s twenty stories. I knew that readers were having difficulty with Borges; worse, I knew that the universities kept him swathed in unnecessary mystery. At the same time, since his stories were really all about himself, his various guises, and dimensions of his thought, what better setting for them by way of introduction than the story of his life?

The pages from Oklahoma reached us sometime in April 1970. By then, we had most of the stories translated and seemed to be on target. But reading the transcript of the lecture, my heart dropped down into my shoes. The talk started out like David Copperfield, all right, but it soon went jumping all over the place without order or logic. Sick with worry, I explained the predicament to Borges, for some reason or other fearing a negative response on his part. Instead, undaunted, and paraphrasing one of his favourite authors – English and nineteenth century, of course – he said, ‘Fling it aside and be free! We’ll start again from scratch.’

We did. On 21 April, the day after the typescript of El informe de Brodie went off to Emecé, we pitched in. That first day I took down five pages. I was prepared this time. I made us outline the material beforehand, breaking his life down into manageable chunks, chapters, of which we ended up with five. I made him stick to that outline. ‘No, no, don’t jump ahead to your mother; let’s get it all down about your father and his family first and then we’ll tackle her.’ It went like that. The next day, I took down five more pages; the day after that, six. At this rate, it was going to come out longer than hoped for, which was all to the good. And better than anything, it looked like being a piece of cake.

On the fourth day, there was a flood of visitors to see Borges at the library and he had a lecture to give at seven o’clock. ‘No work done,’ says the diary entry. The following week started with permission coming from Grove Press to allow us to make new translations of two vital stories, so we immediately tackled them, since it would permit Macrae to send a good portion of the typescript to the printer while Borges and I worked on. But alas! it was not to be so simple. What with the two translations to get out, a steady stream of visitors from abroad plaguing me, and Borges giving lectures on what seemed every other night, we got not one jot further on the story of his life until 16 May. That day we were down to three and a half pages, and it was not much good.

The fact of the matter was that Borges’s mind was on something else. It was at this point that he said to me, ‘I’ve committed what seems to me now an unaccountable mistake, a huge mistake. A quite unexplainable and mysterious mistake.’

He was, of course, referring to his rocky marriage to Elsa, and he was in a pit of despair. It was significant that 16 May was a Saturday. We hadn’t worked together on weekends for a very long time, yet here we were once more at the National Library. And it was not because of our deadline with Macrae – it was because Borges could no longer bear life at home. The marriage was not three years old. My diary records that on two days that week Borges had been too distraught for us even to attempt any work. What he needed was to talk about his private life, a thing that was so completely unlike him it only drove home to me the depths of his misery. Most of what he told me I already knew. He poured it out; I listened.

That Saturday was another turning point, for in the afternoon I invited a friend of ours, a lawyer from Córdoba who was in town that week, to tea at the Molino, the big old-fashioned confitería by the Congress that he was fond of. Two days later, he and I and Borges went to consult a friend of mine, a local lawyer. Between these two legal minds a bleak picture was painted. For starters, there was no divorce as such under Argentine law – only a form of legal separation that everyone referred to as divorce and that was as effective as any divorce but that did not allow for remarriage.

The next six weeks were an agony. As far as I could, I carried on with the autobiography by myself, typing up whatever dictation we had completed, doing the necessary background research, and checking facts and dates. One Saturday we actually managed to revise half the first chapter. But the next was devoted to drawing up a list of Borges’s marital grievances for the Córdoba lawyer. It was not until 28 May that the opening chapter was finished; not until 9 June that we had rewritten the second. We had begun working Sundays now too. But the trouble was that in addition to the delicate, surreptitious work on the legal front – endless meetings with a team of lawyers, countless errands and researching on their behalf – at one and the same time we had too many other matters clamouring for our attention. There were the proofsheets of El informe de Brodie to read. That stole three or so days’ time, and on the heels of that four more days were lost when we had to produce, in English, a thousand-word introduction to an encyclopaedia article for Grolier, the New York publisher, which was at least a year overdue. Macrae, getting understandably nervous, wanted to publish the stories without any of the new material, but I lied through my teeth and wrote to him that all was coming along fine. It was. What I failed to say was fine – but at a snail’s pace.

Meanwhile, I sent the first chapter of the autobiography to Henderson at the New Yorker, asking whether he thought they might be able to use it. He replied at once to say that if the rest were as good, yes. The entire week of 15 June is blank in my diary with only an explanatory scribble, ‘no work on auto. essay this week. Spent most of time preparing the divorce.’ The next month started out with blank pages as well.

D-Day was 7 July 1970. Only it was not an invasion but a getaway. That chill, grey winter’s morning – as part of our elaborately hatched plan – I lay in wait for Borges in the doorway of the National Library, and the moment he arrived I leapt into his taxi and off we sped for the intown airport. Borges, a trembling leaf and utterly exhausted after a sleepless night, confessed that his greatest fear had been that he might blurt the whole thing out to Elsa at any moment. Hugo Santiago, the film-maker, who was in on the plot, and my wife were there at the flight counter with a pair of single tickets to Córdoba for Borges and me, where the lawyer had booked us into a hotel only we two knew the name of. Like good conspirators, we allowed no one knowledge of the whole plan. That way, no lies needed to be told, nor could anything be given away. Doña Leonor, Borges’s ninety-four-year-old mother, who was punctilious in her rectitude, feared that Elsa would be quick to ring her for information, and while Leonor wanted to be able to say in truth that she did not know her son’s whereabouts, still she was anxious to be able to reach him if necessary. That was easy. I gave her a telephone number on a slip of paper in a sealed envelope and had her watch me secrete it in a drawer of her desk.

Bad weather delayed our flight, and a jittery Borges thought the jig was up. Santiago and I did our best to put him at ease, laughing at our own feeble attempts at gallows humour, but it was nervous laughter and both of us, I know, were quaking in our boots. Eventually, by twelve o’clock, our plane took off.

We holed up for a whole week, first in Córdoba, then in Coronel Pringles, where, after a daylong drive across the pampa, we barely arrived in time for a lecture Borges was to deliver on the subject of the Indian raids and the conquest of the desert – meaning the conquest of the Indians – of the previous century. Borges put on a brave face, stubbornly insisting that he was fit to travel these enormous distances, fit to engage in public speaking, but he was on the edge of nervous collapse. The next day his spirits picked up when he could show me the town of Coronel Suárez, some seventy-five kilometres away, named after his great-grandfather. We drove there in caravan with the mayor and other town officials of Pringles, to be met by their counterparts in Suárez, where a splendid midday banquet was laid on for us all. I sat next to the priest, a jolly fellow who, when I told him my religion was nada, nothing, made a rather good pun, retorting, ‘Nada, nada y nunca se ahoga’ – swim, swim, and never drown. Borges, who hated puns, pronounced this one first-rate.

Eventually, we got to our destination, Pardo, where we stayed in the old dusky-rose house belonging to Bioy Casares, the one that figures in the opening of Borges’s story ‘The South’. Eventually, we got back to the autobiography too. In fact, by sheer coincidence, it was at Pardo that we reached the point in his life when Borges met Bioy, and we wrote those pages of the story before crackling eucalyptus fires laid on by Bioy’s steward. Eventually, we finished the autobiography, not there, nor back in Buenos Aires even, but in the town of Tres Arroyos, again in the far south of the province. Borges had been invited to lecture on the poet Almafuerte. It was 29 July. In a room in the Parque Hotel, Borges lay stretched out on a single bed while I sat on the edge of another, a cleared bedside table between us as my desk, taking down the last words of his dictation. They were not the fine words that come at the end of the finished essay but emendations and additions to the conclusion of the previous paragraph, in which he speaks of longing to write, under a pen name, a merciless tirade against himself. ‘Ah, the unvarnished truths I harbour!’

The next week, back home, galley proofs of The Aleph and Other Stories arrived; the week after, the New Yorker’s cable saying they were taking the autobiography as a Profile. That same day, 12 August, Borges finished the final draft of his long story ‘El Congreso’, and together we finished the last two commentaries and our foreword to the book for Macrae. In my diary, there is no mention that the next day I posted the material off, but I must have. Instead, my mind was already on something else. The abstemious entry reads only, ‘Errands for Brazil trip.’ For it was just then, when he needed it, that the highly remunerative Matarazzo prize had been awarded to Borges for his life’s work.

‘Here in Argentina,’ Borges had told me on my very first morning in Buenos Aires, ‘friendship is perhaps more important than love.’

II

Borges and His Interpreters

For the most part, explanations of Jorge Luis Borges’s work have been more complicated than Borges’s work itself. Employing unpronounceable terminology, sometimes even inventing it, these interpretations usually map out elaborate systems whose outline the author, the most haphazard of men, never had the patience or curiosity to follow. Borges had no system, no programme, no grand scheme, and he tells us so twice over in one of his forewords. ‘I lay no claim to any particular theories’, he wrote in In Praise of Darkness, and added, ‘I am skeptical of aesthetic theories. They are generally little more than useless abstractions….’ He had what he called dreams – by which he meant daydreams. Whim, caprice, and daydreams guided him, even in his private life. So whimsical was he in his daily conduct, in fact, that once asked why he had signed a contract to provide an encyclopaedia article he had no intention of writing, he replied that he was being badgered, that it was a way of changing the subject, and that – as he was leaving for the Argentine the next day – hopefully the publisher would forget all about it.

Such erraticism, hand in hand with a chronic lack of confidence, even spilled over into the way Borges presented his work to the public. Convinced that each published volume would be his last, he never quite knew what to do with a new story or poem. A glimpse into the tangled web of his bibliography in the twenty or so years from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s tells the story. Fresh work would find its way unannounced not only into a new edition of an old book but also – still secretly – into one or another impression (or, more accurately, ‘reimpression’) of that edition. (A case in point is Borges’s story ‘La intrusa’, tucked silently into the back of the 1957 edition of El Aleph in its so-called sixth impression, which is dated April 1966.)

Had Borges been systematic, his fiction – in terms of separate volumes – would have been richer by at least another title or two.

Writers on Borges have taken him far more seriously than he took himself. Laughter loomed large in Borges’s world, and to him literature was joy. Whenever these things are pointed out to his commentators, inevitably they go all solemn and fall back on the unanswerable. Invoking the subconscious, they claim that Borges was never fully aware of what he had created. Worse still, so po-faced are these exegetes that to a man (or woman) they miss the point that Jorge Luis Borges was one of the great comic writers of our time.

So let’s be guided straight into the vaunted labyrinth of Jorge Luis Borges, unencumbered by the thicket of critical apparatus that has grown up around his work. There is a line in Byron’s Don Juan – ‘I only say, suppose this supposition’ – that comes to our aid. If we place these words at the head of almost any Borges story, the Argentine master is made instantly accessible, more so than by any of the vast unreadable library of books, articles, reviews, and doctoral theses that for years now his work has spawned.

Supposing that something were truly unforgettable, thinks Borges; and he imagines the character and circumstances of Funes, a young Uruguayan who, as the result of a childhood accident, is afflicted with total recall, so that he possesses ‘more memories than the rest of mankind since the world began’. Supposing the past could be undone, muses Borges; and he constructs the masterful tale ‘The Other Death’, in which, forty years after committing a cowardly act in battle, a man dies the kind of death he would have preferred to die. What if, asks Borges, all expression, all language, all poetry could be reduced to a single line or even a single word; and he dreams up two of his most genial tales, ‘The Mirror and the Mask’ and ‘Undr’, in which an Irish bard and a Norse skald, respectively, set out in quest of the unfathomable essence of absolute poetry. Or what if, Borges posits, there were a book with an infinite number of pages; and he invents the Book of Sand, a volume in which ‘None is the first page, none the last.’

Borges formally commented on a number of his own stories. Twenty of them, in fact. These remarks, written directly in English, appear in a long-out-of-print volume called The Aleph and Other Stories 1933–1969. One has only to compare what he said there with what the exegetes have concocted to see how simple and direct Borges was, how far from the inhuman, slightly monstrous literary intelligence he was too frequently made out to be. Having worked with him for a number of years, having lived in Buenos Aires, where I was immersed in his world, having translated ten or so of his books and studied his writing for decades, I find the line from Byron almost magical for the ease with which it lets us into Borges’s mind. In the teeth of the mystification, complication, and misconception that the bulk of Borges’s commentators have strewn in our path, I view him as an exacting craftsman and as a pure and rather old-fashioned teller of tales – one whose starting point is not ‘Once upon a time …’ but rather ‘Let us suppose …’ or ‘What if …’

Some years ago, I commented on a book about this Borges, the story-teller. The volume under scrutiny, I said at the time, was perhaps the the best-written book on Borges to date in English. It managed to be scholarly without too great a reek of the academy. Borges’s stories, its author accurately pointed out,

are exemplary, not morally exemplary like the stories once written by Cervantes and others to teach improving lessons in human conduct, but technically exemplary in that they dramatise the rules and procedures of the narrative genre to which they belong….

The book correctly went on to characterize Borges’s fiction as ‘think pieces’, tales about ideas rather than people. The volume contained several chapters of other valuable insights and observations, including one which comprised a perfect discussion of the philosophical basis of so much of Borges’s work.

Yet oddly the book was peppered with misconceptions and strange little inaccuracies that turned some of its arguments comic. At one point, to illustrate a particular thesis, the volume cited a four-page tale from Borges’s first fictional work, A Universal History of Infamy, claiming that the piece was ‘loosely derived from the Arabic’ and that it was ‘one of Borges’s earliest inventions’. But the story was not by Borges at all. While indeed a similar tale figures in an Arabian collection, the one borrowed by Borges here was an almost straight transcription from the medieval text of the Spanish infante Don Juan Manuel. As it turned out, Borges deliberately chose the story and put it into his own collection for the simple reason that as narrative – as the kind of imaginative narrative he was to make his hallmark – it was a better piece of work than he was then, in the early 1930s, capable of writing. That, it seems to me, is the point that should have been made.

Elsewhere in the same study, discussing another of the tales from A Universal History of Infamy, the author got a more serious detail wrong. Citing a lead given him by an American Borges commentator, Ronald Christ, the author states that Borges’s version of the Tichborne claimant story was derived from an account of it in Philip Gosse’s History of Piracy. It is difficult to comprehend what place the story of the great swindle of Victorian times, involving a noted old Catholic family and the supposed return of their long-lost son, could possibly have in a survey of buccaneers. I once pointed out to Christ that his interpretation had been based not on a reading of Gosse but on an error committed by an Argentine typesetter who, in a reprint of the Historia universal de la infamia, misplaced the linotype slug that accurately credits the source of the Tichborne story to the pages of the Encyclopædia Britannica. Christ later acknowledged this in print and recounted how a simple printer’s error had led to what he called, poking fun at himself, ‘inevitable interpretive fictions’.

Some forty pages after first speaking of Gosse in the volume I reviewed, its author made the following full-blown reference to this same story, perpetrating yet another ‘inevitable interpretative fiction’:

As readers of Borges’ story we might … compare his Tichborne claimant with the original…. By comparison with Gosse, Borges’ story is the most blatant of fictions and all the more interesting for being so. He no more wants to imitate Gosse than Bogle [a character in the story] wants to imitate Roger Tichborne. On the other hand, it is Gosse’s story that we have to see as the ‘reality’ from which Borges’ translation departs…. The two versions vary in their circumstances, Borges having invented, for his purposes, quite different circumstances from those invented, or selected, by Philip Gosse.

While I was engaged in the translation of A Universal History of Infamy back in 1971, Borges made me a gift of several of the books he had used as source material when writing his tales. One of them was the Gosse volume, which had been utilized – quite logically – for a story about Chinese pirates. There is no connection or reference whatever in Gosse to the Tichborne affair, therefore I cannot even begin to speculate on what led the commentator to become so carried away by a text that does not exist. But then how typical of Borges, the sleight-of-hand master of bogus attributions and of texts that go missing, to subsume his interpreters in this way.

The story does not end there. In his notes to a 1998 compendium of Borges’s stories, Andrew Hurley – twenty-six years after Christ’s confession of error – could still claim in a statement that is a model of unclarity and equivocation that Gosse’s history is the source given by Borges, but ‘In my view, this attribution is the result of an initial error seized upon by Borges for another of his “plays with sources”; as he subsequently admitted freely, and as many critics have noted, much of this story comes from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition….’ So much for Hurley’s scholarship and his insight into Borges’s mind. So much for the acumen of the Borges estate in specifying that Hurley’s compendium be based on a substandard edition of Borges’s works. So much for the competence of Borges’s Buenos Aires publisher. A mere glance by any of these at the original edition of the work in question would have been enough to correct the typographical error, set the record straight, and bring to an end decades of waffle and absurd supposition. In the preface to one of his story collections, Borges mocked a standard reference work ‘dont chaque édition fait regretter la précédente’ – of which each new edition makes you yearn for the previous one. He laughed when we translated the passage and, with a tinge of sadness, added, ‘My complete works.’

My point is that these interpreters have been so cowed by Borges that rather than read what is there on the page with a bit of common sense they have instead been overly eager to intellectualize, to construct theories, to pit themselves against Borges in playing a far more complicated game than he ever intended. Blame for this to some extent can be laid to the fact that Borges is often studied in English, in poor translations, without reference to his Argentine roots. English-speaking critics, when they first came across Borges’s work in the early 1960s, appeared to believe that he had sprung from nowhere. Because his work drew on all Western (and Eastern) culture, his admirers often branded him a European writer. So did his detractors at home. Paradoxically, these virulent nationalists – because Borges refused to dabble in local colour, because he displayed maverick qualities such as a fondness for irony and subversion, because he thought for himself and was not afraid to speak his mind – could not see his profound roots in Argentine soil.

My greatest discovery when I went to work with Borges in Buenos Aires was to find that his books could not have been written by anyone but an Argentine.

Down the years there has been an uncanny and unholy tendency in academic circles – American ones, in particular – to overinterpret. I suppose this came about for two reasons. One is because the grinders out of doctoral theses do not understand how writers write. As a result of the verbal fireworks perpetrated by James Joyce in Finnegans Wake, they erroneously believe that the prose writer’s basic unit is the word, when in fact an author works in ideas, pages, paragraphs, or sentences, all guided by cadences – in short, a flow, a sweep, not a dribble. Towards the end of his life, Borges told a London audience that to him literature was made

Not just juggling with words. I try to forget the words and to say what I have to say perhaps not through the words but in spite of the words, and if a book is really good you forget the words.

A second reason for overinterpreting is that the academic, like the politician in office, must perpetuate himself in his position. Therefore, it has been a matter of interpreting or perishing, of putting every word under the microscope and finding the hidden fauna. In Borges exegesis this has often amounted to dwelling on single words and overloading them with significance.

A favourite anecdote about this brand of overloading concerns a private interview I once had with a professor at a Pennsylvania university. He was teaching a Borges story in English and asked me what the significance of the colour red was on the walls of a particular building in a certain Borges story. I imagine he wanted it confirmed that the hue stood for bloodshed and violence, thus foreshadowing the conclusion of the tale in question. Perhaps it did, though I doubt it. (Perhaps it even had a remote political significance, but I doubt that too.) For one thing, I always noted a concern in Borges not to give his endings away, a tendency that made him shun foreshadowing. Not to give their themes away when he attached epigraphs to at least two of his stories, he quoted no words but cited only the name, chapter, and verse of his sources.

Chagrined and disbelieving, my professor walked away when I told him that what Borges had described was the actual colour of an actual structure, one that belonged to his friend Adolfo Bioy Casares.

I knew the place, for once – when Borges was having marital difficulties – he and I had holed up there for a few days. The building, as was common in those parts, was simply red. I never got the chance to tell the professor that the colour, a traditional one, was originally derived from lime wash mixed with the blood of a bull. In fact, in his Spanish, Borges did not employ the general word for red but mentioned a certain vivid red known in the Argentine as punzó. The political comment, if there was one, concerns the use of this particular word. Borges qualified it with a nicely observed detail and said that the place had once been this shade of red but that ‘to its bene fit the years had softened that vivid colour.’ The colour, I prefer to believe, reflects a fact of daily life on the Argentine pampa – as does the fact that the building needed a coat of paint. On two counts, Borges had accurately depicted the structure. Anything else he would probably have looked on as mere cleverness. For the reader of Borges, there is no need to ignore what is before one’s eyes and look for the far-fetched.

When it becomes difficult to trust that a wall is red because it is red because it is red, we must question the limits of legitimate interpretation. Common sense should apply, just as in rabbinical exegesis, as a safeguard against esoteric and misleading interpretation, the primary meaning of language takes precedence. Writers are admired for pinning down an object, a mood, the ineffable, with precision. Borges’s prose, largely modelled on writers like Stevenson, Wells, and Chesterton, is realistic and as such it is full of sharp definition. Alas, the diction and mistakes of poor translations of Borges into English blur his prose and make it the victim of distortion born of ignorance. A common enough meteorological phenomenon, the red ring around the moon that forecasts rain, comes out in one story as ‘the crimson circle around the moon presaged rain.’ In another, a small kettle used to brew maté – an everyday household utensil on the River Plate – is transmogrified into a ‘soup cauldron’. In another, ‘a growth of tall reeds’, a common detail of the Argentine countryside, is bludgeoned into ‘a field covered in dried-out straw’. (While Borges was fascinated by the exotic in alien cultures, paradoxically he hated exotic descriptions of life in his own country.) In a fourth, the word jineta, which in Spanish means ‘shoulder braid’ or ‘insignia’, is misread for the word jinetes, which means ‘horsemen’ or ‘riders’. In the tale, the hero, a policeman who is about to take the side of the man he is hunting down, is troubled over his rank and uniform – in other words, over his shoulder braid, the emblem of his authority. The translation in question has him troubled about ‘the other cavalry-men’. The wonder was, Borges remarked, that the translator had not taken jinetas for the feminine of jinetes and had the hero troubled about ‘the Amazons’.

Another stock-in-trade of many interpreters has been the clever game of combing words for double meanings. Not satisfied that the Spanish word fuentes means only ‘fountains’ in a particular instance, one study tells us that the word is more helpfully translated into English as ‘sources’, which is a second Spanish meaning of the word. I grow impatient with this. Borges was writing about public fountains in a place like Trafalgar Square. I do not believe we find ‘sources’ in London squares. Fuente in Spanish can also meaning a serving dish. Why hadn’t that been thrown in for good measure? I am reminded of one translator of a Borges poem who went in for such surrealism when, translating the Spanish word cascos, he opted for ‘helmets’ instead of ‘hoofs’. The poem was about horses. Perhaps in Hieronymus Bosch horses have helmets, but in Borges, on the Argentine pampa, they have hoofs. In this case, the translator – a Latin American and at the time a professor at yet another Pennsylvania university – astonished Borges with his arrogance. The man read his version one day to an audience that included Borges. Afterwards, Borges took him aside and said, ‘Look here, cascos is “hoofs”.’ That evening, the man read the poem out again at another public gathering. Of course, the word had not been changed.