Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume One

by Short Story Anthology

  Discovery in Europe: An Adolescent Awakening

  Relief from Argentine bullies came in 1914, when Borges's life was to make a drastic shift. Forced to an early retirement due to his failing eyesight, his father packed up the family and moved to Europe, spending a few weeks in Paris before setting out for Geneva. In Geneva the Borges children went to school, and his father was to see a Swiss eye specialist . . . But war broke out, and by necessity their lives changed. Their travelling was cut short, and they were forced to settle in Geneva, where they were later joined by their grandmother Fanny Haslam. (His other grandmother, Leonor Suarez de Acevedo, was already with them.) The Borges children would spend four years in Geneva, attending "high school" at the College Calvin and learning to speak Latin, German, and French -- at which Norah surprisingly became more proficient than her brother. Fortunately, however, the students here were of a higher caliber than those who attended the state-run school in Buenos Aires, and most of them warmly embraced friendship with Jorge Luis. In fact, it was his peers who convinced the headmaster to promote Borges despite his poor mastery of French!

  It was at the College Calvin that Borges got his first taste of Symbolist literature, introduced to him via a pair of sophisticated Polish friends. Perusing the work of Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarme, he discovered a completely new way of relating the world through abstract literature. But that was just one facet of his new world -- he was learning about so many more writers and philosophers. From Carlyle, he discovered something as equally important as Symbolism: often inventing the idea of a book is just as effecting as writing it. . . . And it was also in Geneva where he first acquired his love of Schopenhauer, his favorite of all the philosophers, and Walt Whitman, whom for a while he believed to be the culmination of all the subtle aims of poetry. All in all, it was a productive four years, and it certainly altered the course of his life, making him aware of a whole new world of ideas awaiting exploration. And despite the War, the family even managed to take a trip to Northern Italy, where Borges clearly remembers reciting gaucho poetry in the empty amphitheaters of Verona. . . .

  In 1919 Borges's maternal grandmother died, and the family left Geneva to settle in Lugano; and Borges, now equipped with a degree, decided it was time to become a serious writer. After a few abortive attempts in English and French, he accepted that Spanish was to be his language. Moving to Spain, the family lived here for over a year, moving from Barcelona to Majorca, then to Seville and onto Madrid. In Spain, the younger Borges began helping his father write a novel about the civil war of the 1870's. Jorge Luis himself had a story turned down by a magazine in Madrid; but during the winter in Seville, he finally saw one of his poems in print. After a few unsuccessful attempts to join various literary circles, in 1920 in Madrid he finally found an inspiration and a mentor in the Andalusian poet Rafael Cansinos-Assens. Under his influence, Borges associated himself with a new literary circle, the "ultraists." A group of idealists that met every Saturday night at the Cafe Colonial, the ultraists "admired American jazz, and were more interested in being Europeans than Spaniards." All night long they would bandy ideas back and forth, engaging in sparkling literary conversation that fueled the fires of Borges's imagination. It was among this circle that Borges finally realized that he needn't be tied down to any one single tradition, particularly a national one. He wrote two books of essays and poems, praising among other things pacifism, anarchy, the Russian Revolution, and freethinking in general. However he quickly became embarrassed with his efforts, and he destroyed them both before leaving Spain in 1921.

  Fervor de Buenos Aires: The Roaring Twenties

  The Borges family returned to Buenos Aires in March 1921. The city, having experienced a new growth in the seven years of his absence, was thriving; and Borges discovered that he had come home to a new Buenos Aires ripe with opportunities. Shortly after returning, he was to fall under the influence of one of his father's friends, the poet Macedonio Fernandez. A terrific conversationalist, Macedonio's personal beliefs echoed those of Schopenhauer, Berkeley and Hume, and his wit had the ability to frequently spur Borges into new pathways of thought. His philosophical ideas were complex and his writing style eccentric, and one of his biggest influences on Borges was to teach him to read everything with skepticism. Similar to Cansinos-Assens in Madrid, Fernandez presided over a Saturday night literary circle in Buenos Aires, and charged by his European experience and his new-found enthusiasm, Borges threw himself into the life of Buenos Aires with all the fervor of a young artist riding the wave of his growing talent. He began producing poems that praised the local color, and in addition he and some friends founded an "ultraist" magazine called Prisma. Taking the form of a large broadsheet, citizens of Buenos Aires would occasionally wake up to find new issues plastered over the walls of the city, exploding with poems, essays, manifestoes, and woodcuts by Norah.

  By 1923 Borges had felt ready to bring out his first collection of poems. Called Fervor de Buenos Aires, the 64-page book was financed by his father. Rather hastily printed, the cover boasted a Norah woodcut, and without much thought in the way of profit, almost all of the three hundred copies were distributed freely -- and often surreptitiously, such as slipping copies into the pockets of editor's overcoats!

  In 1923 the family returned to Switzerland so his father could continue his eye treatment, and in Spain Borges was disappointed to find that the ultraist movement had petered out; but while in Spain he managed to have a few of his poems published, and a favorable review of Fervor de Buenos Aires appeared in Revista de Occidente, a Spanish magazine. When Borges and his family returned to Argentina in 1924 he discovered that he had developed a small reputation as a poet! It seemed that his guerilla tactic of covert book placement had paid off. . . .

  The years from 1924 to 1933 were quite prolific and exciting for Borges. He founded several more literary magazines with varying amounts of success, and he contributed a variety of pieces to many existing magazines, most notably Martin Fierro. Ironically, his contributions to this magazine were to take an unexpected turn when the editors of the magazine decided to "invent" a literary feud. The publicity stunt involved two groups of writers -- the aristocratic and intellectual "Florida" group, and the streetwise "Boedo" group, steeped in gaucho lore. Because of his European attachments and his reputation as an intellectual, Borges was assigned to the "Florida" group, a decision which he unsuccessfully appealed. He wanted to write common literature filled with danger and local color -- but nevertheless his reputation had merited the "Florida" designation. Disappointed, he spent the next few years attempting to divorce himself of that image, and as a consequence he spent many hours exploring the less reputable areas of the city, talking with the hoodlums, learning the tango, and absorbing the Italian/Portuguese dialect. (All to the dismay of his mother.) As a result, several more books of poems and essays were to issue from his pen, including Luna de Enfrente in 1925 and Cauderno San Martin in 1929. Named for the brand of notebook in which he wrote them, Cauderno San Martin netted him the Second Municipal Prize, a handsome sum of 3000 pesos. (One of the things he bought with the money was a complete set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a purchase that would serve him well over the years.) In 1930, he wrote a book about his boyhood hero, the poet Carriego, who had died of tuberculosis in 1912. Unfortunately the book, Evaristo Carriego,became more of a reminiscence of old-time Buenos Aires than a biography of the poet, and it was not very successful. (He revised it in 1955.)

  It was also during this period that he struck up two important friendships with women: Victoria Ocampo and Elsa Astete Millan. Ocampo, whom he met through his family in 1925, was a translator who would later promote Borges's writing as an editor of the influential Sur literary magazine; and Millan was a 17-year old beauty with whom Borges fell in love. Unfortunately she married someone else; but some forty years later the two would reunite and marry in 1967. The twenties were to also bring a new -- albeit mild -- political awareness to Borges. In an interesting and controve
rsial break with family tradition, he supported the campaign of former president Hipilito Irigoyen, a figure whom he compared favorably to an old family enemy, the Dictator Rosas. In 1928 Borges, perhaps attracted to Irigoyen's underdog campaign, featured prominently in the Committee of Young Intellectuals, a group dedicated to his re-election as president. Unfortunately, the only fruit to spring from his efforts was disillusionment -- surprisingly, Irigoyen won the election; and to the disappointment of many of his younger supporters, he proved to be too out of touch with the times to be an effective ruler. Borges's dismay increased when Irigoyen was overthrown by a military junta, which would turn out to be only the first of many more repressive governments. Finally, like many of his generation, Borges's disgust with politics became complete.

  Sadly, the myopia he saw in the political world was becoming reflected in his own personal physical world: blindness was beginning to manifest itself in Borges as it had in his father, who was now completely blind. In 1927 he had an operation for cataracts; it would be the first of a long series of eight operations. None would succeed, and by the end of his life he would be totally blind.

  Later Borges would write off this period of his life and virtually disown the literary output from these years, all of which he now disavows as being overtly derivative of others' styles. He claims that several pieces were so drenched in local color that "the locals could hardly understand it." His later embarrassment is such that he was actually known to buy up any copies he found of these works and burn them.

  Transformations: The Darkening Thirties

  Putting politics behind him, the thirties were to see his talent taking new directions, both in the topics of his writing and in the fundamental style of his expression. In 1932 he published another collection of essays, Discusion. Many of these essays revolved around a more recent, non-literary passion -- the magical world of the cinema. His work began to appear in the magazine Megafono, literary endeavors which brought him recognition in the form of a round table discussion about his writing in 1933. His first short story -- an art form he would later perfect -- was called "Streetcorner Man," and inspired by the death of a local compadrito, the story had a gritty realism with an interesting twist at the end. Published in Critica, a local newspaper, Borges was sufficiently tenuous about his effort that it appeared under the pseudonym of "Francisco Bustos," the name of one of his ancestors. It was a tremendous success; but Borges had no intentions of settling down as a mere writer of populist dramas. In 1933 Borges began a series of sketches called Historia universal de la infamia, or "A Universal History of Infamy." Published between the years 1933 and 1934 in Critica, these stories took characters and ideas from other published works and "re-invented" them. Blending fact and fiction, often mythic in resonance, many of the stories had a vague feeling of surrealistic authenticity; and later more than a few Latin American "magical realists" would cite Borges as their primary inspiration. But his career was just really beginning: in 1935, he wrote what is considered to be the prototype of the typical "Borgesian" story, "The Approach to al-Mu'tasim," a review of a fictional novel. In 1936 he published another collection of essays, Historia de la eternidad, or "A History of Eternity."

  Although Borges was finally coming into his own as a writer, the thirties were of course not all that kind; the world was in an economic crisis, and Borges's father was now completely dependent on his mother. It was clearly time for Borges to rely on a more steady income than his writing allowed, and in 1937 he landed a $70/month job as First Assistant in the Miguel Cane branch of the Municipal Library. His work involved classifying and cataloging the library's holdings, and it was a disappointingly simple job in which he was actually advised by his colleagues to slow down so that they could spread the task out as long as they could! He remained in the library for nine years, nine years of "solid unhappiness" leading a "menial and dismal existence." He worked among colleagues who were less concerned with literature than with horse racing and girl watching, and to add insult to injury, his superiors and colleagues didn't realize that he was the same Jorge Luis Borges who wrote some of the very same stories which they were cataloging! Usually, Borges would finish his work in the first hour of his day and spend the rest of the time in the basement, reading the classics or translating modern fiction into Spanish. (Borges was the first to translate Woolf and Faulkner into Spanish.)

  In 1938 two tragedies were to occur. First, his beloved father died; and then on Christmas Eve, Borges himself had an accident that would be complicated by a serious illness. (He would later recast this incident into fiction in the story "The South.") While running up a stairway, he grazed a freshly painted casement with his forehead, and soon after the wound became infected and he fell ill, hallucinating in bed for a week. After an operation in the hospital, he developed septicemia, and for a month hovered between life and death.

  Visions from the Library Basement: A Mid-life Rebirth

  Borges biggest fear was that he had lost his creative ability; that the disease had burned it out of him. In fact, nothing could be farther from the truth -- he was about to embark on a creative arc that would eventually carry him to world fame. In an attempt to discover whether or not he still possessed his creative faculties, he penned a new story, an attempt at something different, something unique. The result was "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote." Next he wrote "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." Both were well received and published in Victoria Ocampo's Sur. Delighted at his new surge in creativity, he began writing stories in the basement of the library, and so while his co-workers above obliviously frittered away their time on gossip, Borges was busy in the basement planting the seeds of post-modernism. "The Library of Babel" became his nightmare allegory for his job, and other stories quickly followed. In 1941, a collection of these stories was published, The Garden of Forking Paths, which would later be added to Artifices and retitled Ficciones in 1944. In 1942 he published a series of spoof detective stories with his younger friend Adolfo Bioy-Casares, Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi, under the joint pen-name of "Bustos Domecq."

  In addition to his new stories, which ingeniously mixed philosophy, fact, fantasy and mystery, Borges also began to write political articles again. Appearing in El Hogar, these articles didn't so much support any one political system as criticize many of the general trends of the time: anti-semitism, nazism, and the increasing decline into fascism. Ironically he gained wider recognition for his articles than for his brilliant, but largely unnoticed, fictions -- a fact that was to cause him problems when the fascists came into power in the mid forties. In 1946 Juan Peron was "elected" president, and due to his political affiliations, Borges was "promoted" to "Inspector of Poultry and Rabbits in the Public Markets." He immediately decided to resign, remarking that "dictatorships foment subservience, dictatorships foment cruelty; even more abominable is the fact that they foment stupidity. To fight against those sad monotonies is one of the many duties of writers."

  God's Splendid Irony: The Fifties

  Fortunately for Borges, being fired turned out to be a mixed blessing. Soon after leaving the library, he accepted positions as a lecturer on American and English literature. He travelled across Argentina and Uruguay, giving talks on subjects that ranged from Blake to Buddhism. He was paid well, and for the first time in a long while, he was happy -- although he could not conceal his pain at the direction taken by his country. The Peron regime, though coming short of directly detaining him, did attempt to make life more difficult for his family and friends. After taking part in a protest, his mother and Norah were arrested in 1948; his mother was placed under house arrest, but Norah was thrown in a jail reserved primarily for prostitutes. (When given the opportunity to be set free -- if she wrote a letter of apology to Evita Peron -- Norah elected to remain in jail.) Borges could rarely give a lecture without the presence of a police informer in the audience . . . although on a very Borgesian note, he actually came to know the agent, who himself was less than thrilled with his duties but needed to
earn a paycheck. Still, his work went on. In 1949 his second major book of short stories appeared, The Aleph. It is perhaps notable that the title story concerns itself with a disillusioned man who painfully denies the ability to experience the entire universe to his enemies.

  In 1950 Borges was elected President of the Sociedad Argentina de Ecritores (The Argentine Writer's Society.) The SADE had mainly political overtones -- as in non-Peronista -- and was under scrutiny. A typical meeting eventually fell into an interesting pattern, whereby the artists would airily discuss complex literature and philosophy until the police agents present would be bored into sleeping or departing, after which the real political discussions would take place. Despite their precautions, however, the SADE was eventually closed.

  In 1952 Borges published his major collection of essays, Other Inquisitions.

  In 1955 the Cordoba revolution took place, and Borges was back in favor. Even though the government was still military in nature, they decided that too much culture was wounded under the gentle graces of Juan Domingo and his lovely wife Evita.The SADE was reopened, and much to his amazement Borges was appointed Director of the National Library, the job of his dreams. By this time Borges was going completely blind; ironically two of the previous directors of the National Library had also been blind. He took it as stoically and gently as possible: "I speak of God's splendid irony in granting me at one time 800,000 books and darkness." He took his job very seriously, and determined to make the library into a cultural center, he started a program of lectures and resurrected the library's journal. In 1956 he was named to the professorship of English and American Literature at the University of Buenos Aires, a position he was to hold for twelve years; and later that same year, he unsurprisingly won the National Prize for literature. By the late fifties, he was astonished to find out that books were being written about his life and work, and he rapidly attracted a wide circle of dedicated students. It was around this time that he wrote one of his most intriguing pieces, "Borges and I."