by Colm Toibin
‘In every lecture I gave, I would always express my views against the government,’ Borges wrote. ‘Many distinguished men of letters did not dare set foot inside the doors of the Society of Writers.’ After the death of Eva Perón in 1952, when Borges refused to put up a portrait of Perón and his dead wife on the walls of the society’s premises, the society was closed.
After the fall of Perón in 1955, Borges wrote: ‘I remember the joy we felt; I remember that at that moment no one thought about themselves: their only thought was that the patria had been saved.’ Within weeks, with the help of Victoria Ocampo, among others, he was appointed director of the National Library. Doña Leonor was delighted; the family was being restored to a position of importance.
The fall of Perón represented a problem for his opponents. It was clear that in any free election he would win, with considerable support from the trade unions and the city’s poor. Nonetheless, he was a demagogue who behaved like a dictator. He was replaced by the military, themselves representatives of an old oligarchy. Borges supported the new regime wholeheartedly as they banned the Peronist party, including banners, symbols and music. When a further military coup, led by men who wished to allow free elections, was put down, the government, ignoring the sentences handed down by a military tribunal, executed thirty-two of the rebels by firing squad.
Elections were held, with Perón and his party banned. Perón ordered his supporters to return blank ballot papers and these numbered more than the votes for the legal parties. Borges and Bioy drew up a manifesto to support the government. Borges wrote that Argentina was rapidly recovering its health, ‘but there still remain many recalcitrant patients who refuse to get better and who resist revolutionary therapy. We shall have to persist with the treatment, increasing the dose of democracy for the more rebellious to see if they can be cured once and for all.’ Borges, for his support, was rewarded with the Chair of English and American Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. In his ‘Autobiographical Essay’, he gives a funny, folksy version of the reason for his appointment: ‘Other candidates had sent in painstaking lists of their translations, papers, lectures and other achievements. I limited myself to the following statement: “Quite unwittingly, I have been qualifying myself for this position throughout my life.” My plain approach gained the day.’ This is rubbish. He got the job because of his support for the regime. His mother, who had conspired to get it for him, had thus further reason for joy.
Other writers, who were as anti-Peronist as Borges, were appalled by the new government and Borges’s blanket support for it. These included Ernesto Sabato. Borges’s predicament is put succinctly by Williamson: ‘How do you create a democracy when the largest sector of the electorate will elect a totalitarian leader who is ideologically opposed to liberal democracy?’ In 1963, as Perón increased his influence, and new elections were called, Borges left the Radical Party and joined the Conservatives, believing them to have better anti-Peronist credentials. He allowed them to hold a reception to announce his membership, at which he made a speech.
The spectre of Perón continued to haunt Argentina. In 1973 his party, once more legalized, won the election, which paved the way for his return. Borges told an Italian newspaper that those who voted for Perón were ‘six million idiots’. He was now too famous to be fired from his job and was told that he could remain without interference. He resigned, however, in October 1973. Nine months later, Perón died, to be replaced by his widow, Isabelita.
Borges had lost his arch-enemy. He had no one now to denounce except the people. ‘Our country,’ he said in 1975, ‘is going through a moral crisis. We have taken to worshipping luxury, money and other myths and dogmas. I think ours is a venal country.’ Around this time Naipaul came to Argentina to cast his cold eye on Borges and his country. He made many sweeping statements, including the following two marvellous sentences: ‘There is no history in Argentina. There are no archives; there are only graffiti, polemics and school lessons.’ Perón, Borges told Naipaul, ‘represented the scum of the earth’.
‘For the contemplation of his country’s history,’ Naipaul wrote, ‘Borges substitutes ancestor worship.’ But in the second half of the 1970s, as the Peronists developed a terrorist army, a new breed of army general emerged in control of the country. The myth of a military splendour that had created Argentina, and the sense of glamorous lone knife-fighters, both of which had nourished Borges’s work, became a pale parody of what was really happening in the streets of his city. ‘Perhaps, then,’ Naipaul wrote, ‘parallel with the vision of art, there has developed, in Borges, a subsidiary vision, however unacknowledged, of reality. And now, at any rate, the real world can no longer be denied.’
The real world came to Borges in the guise of the young men who visited his apartment to read to him. Buenos Aires is now full of them. The best account of that experience is by Alberto Manguel in A History of Reading (1996) and With Borges (2004):
In that sitting-room, under a Piranesi engraving of circular Roman ruins, I read Kipling, Stevenson, Henry James, several entries of the Brockhaus German encyclopedia, verses of Marino, of Enrique Banchs, of Heine (but these last ones he knew by heart, so I would barely have begun my reading when his hesitant voice picked up and recited from memory; the hesitation was only in the cadence, not in the words themselves, which he remembered unerringly) … I was the driver, but the landscape, the unfurling space, belonged to the one being driven … Borges chose the book, Borges stopped me or asked me to continue, Borges interrupted to comment, Borges allowed the words to come to him. I was invisible.
Paul Theroux in The Old Patagonian Express (1979) remembered reading Kipling ballads to the blind old man, being stopped after every few stanzas as Borges exclaimed how beautiful they were, his favourite being ‘The Ballad of East and West’. Evita, he told Theroux, was ‘a common prostitute’, as the writer, taking a more benign view than Naipaul, went back to see him again and again.
He stayed up late, eager to talk, eager to be read to; and he was good company. By degrees, he turned me into Boswell … There was something of the charlatan in him – he had a way of speechifying, and I knew he was repeating something he had said a hundred times before. He had the beginnings of a stutter, but he calmed that with his hands. He was occasionally magisterial, but he could be the opposite, a kind of student, his face elfin with attentiveness, his fingers locked together. His face became aristocratic in repose, and when he bared his yellow teeth in the exaggerated grin he used to show pleasure – he laughed hard at his own jokes – his face came alight and he looked like a French actor who has realized that he has successfully stolen the show.
In 1976 Isabelita Perón’s government was replaced by a military dictatorship, the most murderous regime in Argentine history. As in 1955, Borges was so pleased at the end of the Peronist regime that he was happy to support the new one. He had lunch with General Videla and thanked him ‘for what he had done for the patria, having saved it from chaos, from the abject state we were in, and, above all, from idiocy’. This support was noted by Chile; Pinochet offered him an Order of Merit, which he accepted. He then agreed, against the advice of his friends, to visit Chile to accept an honorary doctorate. He attended a private dinner with Pinochet. He made a mad speech praising the sword of his ancestors and the sword that was ‘drawing the Argentine republic out of the quagmire’. This would not have helped him to win the Nobel Prize for which he was heavily tipped that year.
Nor would his remarks on a visit to Spain in 1976 have done him much good. He called Videla’s regime ‘a government of soldiers, of gentlemen, of decent people’. He declared his admiration for what General Franco had done in Spain. He then, sounding like Salvador Dalí, made rude remarks about Lorca:
Neither he nor his poetry have ever interested me. I think he’s a minor poet, a picturesque poet, a sort of professional Andalusian … The circumstances of his death were rather favourable to him; it’s convenient for a poet to die in that fashion and,
what’s more, his death provided Antonio Machado with the opportunity to write a marvellous poem.
Like a good number of Argentines, Borges discovered the truth of what was happening when he was outside Argentina. In Spain in 1980, where he received the Cervantes Prize, the highest honour that can be given to a writer in the Spanish language, he indicated a change of heart about the regime. While he had refused to support the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who were the first to protest openly about the disappearances, he soon began to relent. Later, in Argentina, he was visited by a woman from an old Buenos Aires family who told him that her daughter had disappeared. He told her ‘he lived a very insulated life because he was blind and could not read the newspapers’, but that he believed her story. When she brought a friend whose daughter had also disappeared, Borges decided to sign a petition calling on the government to provide information on the fate of the disappeared. He persuaded Bioy to sign also. In a dispute between Argentina and Chile over islands in the Beagle Channel, he supported Chile. Nonetheless, Borges’s new dislike of the regime was not unequivocal. Even by the end of 1981 he would say: ‘I think this government is a necessary evil because democracy would give us another Frondizi’ – one of the leaders of the Radical Party in the 1950s – ‘or at worst another Perón.’
Once the Falklands War was over – he had described it as ‘two bald men fighting over a comb’ – he could no longer maintain the view that the military government was a necessary evil. He revised his position.
It is true we have had dictators … but they had popular support. These are gangsters. This is a country of madmen. No, this is a country of wise but desperate people in the hands of madmen … I believe our only hope is democracy. Our only way out is an election … If elections are held the Peronists will win … and if they aren’t held we shall continue to be governed by people who are equally discredited.
In the end, when the election was won by Raúl Alfonsín of the Radical Party in 1983, Borges said: ‘We had emerged from a nightmare, and that collective act of faith was what could save us all.’
For 1984 and 1985, however, Argentina was forced to relive the nightmare, first through the commission of inquiry into the disappearances chaired by Ernesto Sabato, which reported in December 1984, and then by the trial of the generals, with evidence given by the relatives of the disappeared and by those who were tortured. Borges attended this trial in July 1985 and heard evidence of torture. He expressed his horror to reporters afterwards and in an open letter to a newspaper.
It must have occurred to him that his own earlier support for the generals was well remembered. As Alfonsín’s position slowly weakened in 1985, Borges realized that one or other of the parties he now hated – the Peronists or the military – would retake power in Argentina. On 16 October, in an interview with a Swiss journalist, he expressed the wish to become a Swiss citizen and to die in Switzerland. In the new will in which he disinherited Fanny, he also left his sister his share in the family tomb in the Recoleta cemetery where his mother was buried.
His final journey to Europe with Maria Kodama would become controversial in Argentina. Fanny insisted he did not wish to leave: ‘Of one thing I am sure: Señor Borges did not want to go, but he did not have sufficient energy to oppose whoever brought him. He said to me in a half-broken voice: “Fanny, I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go.” ’
This, considering the evidence, seems unlikely. His going alone to Europe with Kodama knowing that he would not return to Argentina seems to have been a deliberate act. In a late poem, ‘The Web’, he began:
Which of my cities will I die in?
Geneva, where revelation came to me
Through Virgil and Tacitus, certainly not from Calvin?
After the Falklands War he had also written a poem, ‘The Confederates’, in favour of Switzerland, praising its ‘tower of reason and firm faith’ where different races and religions and languages had ‘resolved to forget their differences and accentuate their affinities’. He made it the title poem of his last book of verse.
On 26 April, while in Geneva, Borges and Maria Kodama were married by proxy in Paraguay. He died in Geneva on 14 June. He is buried close to John Calvin in the Cimetière de Pleinpalais, also known as the Cemetery of the Kings, close to the old city in Geneva. It is a calm, unostentatious cemetery, with single graves mostly of famous people, the very opposite in tone to the Recoleta in Buenos Aires in which baroque and gothic-windowed family vaults do battle with the rococo and the overadorned. Borges’s gravestone was clearly designed by Kodama with references and images that mattered to them both in their relationship. In death, his grave did not make him an Argentine hero, but rather the husband of a woman he had loved for the last fifteen years of his life. After Borges’s death, Kodama did not make many friends among his family and associates. Both Norah Borges’s sons and Fanny sought to have the revised will thrown out, but they lost. Kodama runs Borges’s estate.
In 1999 Kodama told Edwin Williamson that Borges was fully aware of the political import of his dying in Geneva and his wishing to be buried there. ‘You see,’ Borges had told her, ‘I’ve become a kind of myth, and whenever the issue arises of my being buried over here, people may recall the book I have written, The Confederates, and they’ll think about it, people will come here and ask themselves: why? That will be my small contribution to changing the world.’
In Buenos Aires, Norah Borges made a statement: ‘I have heard through the newspapers that my brother has died in Geneva, far from us and from many friends, of a terrible illness that we did not know he had. I am surprised that his last wish was to be buried there, he always wanted to be with his ancestors and with our mother in the Recoleta.’
While Kodama suggested that Borges’s reasons for dying in Geneva were essentially political and public, there were also private reasons. Borges spoke a great deal about his father in the last weeks. His father had taken him to this city at the age of fifteen in an effort to civilize him, to remove him from the world of his ancestors to a place where the shadows were more complex and rich, from a place, run by his mother, where battles were glorified, to a place, run by his father, where poetry would matter and becoming a writer could be a real vocation. His father, Borges had written, ‘was such a modest man that he would have liked being invisible’. Now, in the weeks before his death, Borges wrote to the Spanish news agency EFE asking to be left alone: ‘I am a free man. I have decided to stay in Geneva, because I associate Geneva with the happiest days of my life … I think it strange that someone should not understand and respect this decision by a man who, like a certain character of Wells’s, has resolved to be an invisible man.’
Hart Crane: Escape from Home
There are certain single volumes of American poetry, some of them first books or early books, that carry with them a special and spiritual power; they seem to arise from a mysterious impulse and to have been written from an enormous private or artistic need. The poems are full of a primal sense of voice, and the aura of the voice in the rhythms of the poem suggests a relentless desire not to make easy peace with the reader. If some of these poems have the tone of prayers, they are not prayers of comfort or of supplication as much as urgent laments or cries from the depths where the language has been held much against its will or has broken free, and now demands to be heard.
Such tones can be found in the very opening lines of the first poem in Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s Song (1995):
Listen: there was a goat’s head hanging by ropes in a tree.
All night it hung there and sang. And those who heard it
Felt a hurt in their hearts and thought they were hearing
The song of a night bird.
Or Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris (1992):
At the end of my suffering
there was a door.
Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.
Or the first lines of ‘Epistle’, the first poem of Li-Young Lee’s first book
, Rose (1986):
Of wisdom, splendid columns of light
waking sweet foreheads,
I know nothing
but what I’ve glimpsed in my most hopeful of daydreams.
Of a world without end,
amen,
I know nothing,
but what I sang of once with others,
all of us standing in the vaulted room.
In ‘General Aims and Theories’, written in 1925, Hart Crane tried to outline his sense of where this tone, so apparent in his own work, came from: ‘I am concerned,’ he wrote,
with the future of America, but not because I think that America has any so-called par value as a state or as a group of people … It is only because I feel persuaded that here are destined to be discovered certain as yet undefined spiritual qualities, perhaps a new hierarchy of faith not to be developed so completely elsewhere. And in this process I like to feel myself as a potential factor; certainly I must speak in its terms and what discoveries I may make are situated in its experience.
As is clear from his early letters, Crane as a reader set about preparing himself with enormous zeal and moral seriousness to become that ‘potential factor’. Despite his provincial background and his problems with his parents, and then partly because of them, he found a tone and a poetic diction that matched a sensibility that was both visionary and deeply rooted in the real. In his poems he worked a gnarled, edgy sound against the singing line; he played a language dense with metaphor and suggestion against images and rhythms of pure soaring beauty. His syntax had something hard and glittering in it, utterly surprising. In his best poems he managed to make the rhythms – the hidden nervous system in the words and between the words – so interesting, intense and effortless that they command attention and emotional response despite their verbal density, basic difficulty and what Crane himself called ‘tangential slants, interwoven symbolisms’.