One evening, after his classes at the Catholic University, and while the police sirens screamed outside, Borges told me: “We had a sense that the whole thing should have been forgotten. Had the newspapers been silent, there would have been no Peronism today—the Peronistas were at first ashamed of themselves. If I were facing a public audience I would never use his name. I would say el prófugo, the fugitive, el dictador. The way in poetry one avoids certain words—if I used his name in a poem the whole thing would fall to pieces.”
It is the Argentine attitude: suppress, ignore. Many of the records of the Peronist era have been destroyed. If today the middle-class young are Peronists, and students sing the old song of the dictatorship—
Perón, Perón, qué grande sos!
Mi general, cuánto valés!
Perón, Perón, how great you are!
How good and strong, my general!
—if the dictatorship, even in its excesses, is respectable again, it isn’t because the past has been investigated and the record modified. It is only that many people have revised their attitudes towards the established legend. They have changed their minds.
There is no history in Argentina. There are no archives; there are only graffiti and polemics and school lessons. Schoolchildren in white dustcoats are regularly taken round the Cabildo building in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires to see the relics of the War of Independence. The event is glorious; it stands in isolation; it is not related, in the text books or in the popular mind, to what immediately followed: the loss of law, the seeking out of the enemy, endless civil wars, gangster rule.
Borges said on another evening: “The history of Argentina is the history of its separateness from Spain.” How did Perón fit into that? “Perón represented the scum of the earth.” But he surely also stood for something that was Argentine? “Unfortunately, I have to admit that he’s an Argentine—an Argentine of today.” Borges is a criollo, someone whose ancestors came to Argentina before the great immigrant rush, before the country became what it is; and for the contemplation of his country’s history Borges substitutes ancestor worship. Like many Argentines, he has an idea of Argentina; anything that doesn’t fit into this is to be rejected. And Borges is Argentina’s greatest man.
An attitude to history, an attitude to the land. Magic is important in Argentina; the country is full of witches and magicians and thaumaturges and mediums. But the visitor must ignore this side of Argentine life because, he is told, it isn’t real. The country is full of estancias; but the visitor mustn’t go to that particular estancia because it isn’t typical. But it exists, it works. Yes, but it isn’t real. Nor is that real, nor that, nor that. So the whole country is talked away; and the visitor finds himself directed to the equivalent of a gaucho curio shop. It isn’t the Argentina that anyone inhabits, least of all one’s guides; but that is real, that is Argentina. “Basically we all love the country,” an Anglo-Argentine said. “But we would like it to be in our own image. And many of us are now suffering for our fantasies.” A collective refusal to see, to come to terms with the land: an artificial, fragmented colonial society, made deficient and bogus by its myths.
TO BE ARGENTINE was not to be South American. It was to be European; and many Argentines became European, of Europe. The land that was the source of their wealth became no more than their base. For these Argentine-Europeans, Buenos Aires and Mar del Plata became resort towns, with a seasonal life. Between the wars there was a stable Argentine community of one hundred thousand in Paris; the peso was the peso then.
“Many people think,” Borges said, “that quite the best thing that could have happened here would have been an English victory [in 1806–7, when the British twice raided Buenos Aires]. At the same time I wonder whether being a colony does any good—so provincial and dull.”
But to be European in Argentina was to be colonial in the most damaging way. It was to be parasitic. It was to claim—as the white communities of the Caribbean colonies claimed—the achievements and authority of Europe as one’s own. It was to ask less of oneself (in Trinidad, when I was a child, it was thought that the white and the rich needed no education). It was to accept, out of a false security, a second-rateness for one’s own society.
And there was the wealth of Argentina: the British railways taking the wheat and the meat from all the corners of the pampa to the port of Buenos Aires, for shipment to England. There was no pioneer or nation-making myth of hard work and reward. The land was empty and very flat and very rich; it was inexhaustible; and it was infinitely forgiving. Dios arregla de noche la macana que los Argentinos hacen de día: God puts right at night the mess the Argentines make by day.
To be Argentine was to inhabit a magical, debilitating world. Wealth and Europeanness concealed the colonial realities of an agricultural society which had needed little talent and had produced little, which had needed no great men and had produced none. “Nothing happened here,” Norman di Giovanni said with irritation one day. And everyone, from Borges down, says, “Buenos Aires is a small town.” Eight million people: a monstrous plebeian sprawl, mean, repetitive and meaningless: but only a small town, eaten up by colonial doubt and malice. When the real world is felt to be outside, everyone at home is inadequate and fraudulent. A waiter in Mendoza said, “Argentines don’t work. We can’t do anything big. Everything we do is small and petty.” An artist said, “There are very few professionals here. By that I mean people who know what to do with themselves. No one knows why he is doing any particular job. For that reason, if you are doing what I do, then you are my enemy.”
Camelero, chanta: these are everyday Argentine words. A camelero is a line-shooter, a man who really has nothing to sell. The man who promised to take me to an estancia, and in his private airplane, was only doing camelo. The chanta is the man who will sell everything, the man without principles, the hollow man. Almost everybody, from the president down, is dismissed by somebody as a chanta.
The other word that recurs is mediocre. Argentines detest the mediocre and fear to be thought mediocre. It was one of Eva Perón’s words of abuse. For her the Argentine aristocracy was always mediocre. And she was right. In a few years she shattered the myth of Argentina as an aristocratic colonial land. And no other myth, no other idea of the land, has been found to take its place.
2 BORGES AND THE BOGUS PAST
BORGES, speaking of the fame of writers, said: “The important thing is the image you create of yourself in other people’s minds. Many people think of Burns as a mediocre poet. But he stands for many things, and people like him. That image—as with Byron—may in the end be more important than the work.”
Borges is a great writer, a sweet and melancholy poet; and people who know Spanish well revere him as a writer of a direct, unrhetorical prose. But his Anglo-American reputation as a blind and elderly Argentine, the writer of a very few, very short, and very mysterious stories, is so inflated and bogus that it obscures his greatness. It has possibly cost him the Nobel Prize; and it may well happen that when the bogus reputation declines, as it must, the good work may also disappear.
The irony is that Borges, at his best, is neither mysterious nor difficult. His poetry is accessible; much of it is even romantic. His themes have remained constant for the last fifty years: his military ancestors, their deaths in battle, death itself, time, and old Buenos Aires. And there are about a dozen successful stories. Two or three are straightforward, even old-fashioned, detective stories (one was published in Ellery Queens Mystery Magazine). Some deal, quite cinematically, with Buenos Aires low life at the turn of the century. Gangsters are given epic stature; they rise, they are challenged, and sometimes they run away.
The other stories—the ones that have driven the critics crazy—are in the nature of intellectual jokes. Borges takes a word like “immortal” and plays with it. Suppose, he says, men were really immortal. Not just men who had grown old and wouldn’t die, but indestructible vigorous men, surviving for eternity. What would be the result? Hi
s answer—which is his story—is that every conceivable experience would at some time befall every man, that every man would at some time assume every conceivable character, and that Homer (the disguised hero of this particular story) might in the eighteenth century even forget he had written the Odyssey Or take the word “unforgettable.” Suppose something were truly unforgettable, and couldn’t be forgotten for a single second; suppose this thing came, like a coin, into your possession. Extend that idea. Suppose there were a man—but no, he has to be a boy—who could forget nothing, whose memory therefore ballooned and ballooned with all the unforgettable details of every minute of his life.
These are some of Borges’s intellectual games. And perhaps his most successful piece of prose writing, which is also his shortest, is a pure joke. It is called “Of Exactitude in Science” and is meant to be an extract from a seventeenth-century book of travel:
In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome and, not without Irreverence, abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.
This is absurd and perfect: the accurate parody, the grotesque idea. Borges’s puzzle and jokes can be addictive. But they have to be recognized for what they are; they cannot always support the metaphysical interpretations they receive. There is, though, much to attract the academic critic. Some of Borges’s hoaxes require—and sometimes disappear below—an extravagant display of curious learning. And there is the occasional baroque language of the early stories.
“The Circular Ruins”—an elaborate, almost science fiction story about a dreamer discovering that he himself exists only in somebody else’s dream—begins: “Nadie lo vió desembarcar en la unánime noche.” Literally, “Nobody saw him disembark in the unanimous night.” Norman Thomas di Giovanni, who has been translating Borges full-time for the last four years, and has done more than anyone else to push Borges’s work in the English-speaking world, says:
You can imagine how much has been written about that “unanimous.” I went to Borges with two translations, “surrounding” and “encompassing.” And I said, “Borges, what did you really mean by the unanimous night? That doesn’t mean anything. If the unanimous night, why not the tea-drinking night, or the card-playing night?” And I was astonished by his answer. He said, “Di Giovanni, that’s just one example of the irresponsible way I used to write.” We used “encompassing” in the translation. But a lot of the professors didn’t like losing their unanimous night …
There was this woman. She wrote an essay on Borges for a book. She didn’t know any Spanish and was basing her essay on two rather mediocre English translations. A long essay, about forty pages. And one of the crucial points was that Borges wrote a very Latinate prose. I had to point out to her that Borges could not help but write a Latinate prose, because he wrote in Spanish, and Spanish is a dialect of Latin. She didn’t consult anybody when she was laying the foundation. At the end she calls out “Help!” and you run up and see this enormous skyscraper sinking in quicksand.
Di Giovanni went with Borges on a lecture tour of the United States in 1969:
Borges is a gentleman. When people come up and tell him what his stories really mean—after all, he only wrote them—he has the most wonderful line you’ve ever heard. “Ah, thank you! You’ve enriched my story. You’ve made me a great gift. I’ve come all the way from Buenos Aires to X—say Lubbock, Texas—to find out this truth about myself and my story.”
Borges has for years enjoyed a considerable reputation in the Spanish-speaking world. But in “An Autobiographical Essay,” which was published as a “Profile” in The New Yorker in 1970, he says that until he won the Formentor Prize in 1961—he was sixty-two then—he was “practically invisible—not only abroad but at home in Buenos Aires.” This is the kind of exaggeration that dismays some of his early Argentine supporters; and there are those who would say that his “irresponsibility” has grown with his fame. But Borges has always been irresponsible. Buenos Aires is a small town; and what perhaps was inoffensive when Borges belonged only to this small town becomes less so when foreigners queue up for interviews. Once, no doubt, Borges’s celebration of his military ancestors and their deaths in battle flattered the whole society, giving it a sense of the past and of completeness. Now it appears to exclude, to proclaim a private grandeur; and to many it is only egotistical and presumptuous. It is not easy to be famous in a small town.
Borges gives many interviews. And every interview seems to be like every other interview. He seems to make questions irrelevant; he plays, as one Argentine lady said, his discos, his records; he performs. He says that the Spanish language is his “doom.” He criticizes Spain and the Spaniards: he still fights that colonial war, in which, however, the old issues have become confused with a simpler Argentine prejudice against the poor and backward immigrants from northern Spain. He makes his tasteless, and expected, jokes about the pampa Indians. Tasteless because just twenty years before he was born these Indians were systematically exterminated; and yet expected, because slaughter on this scale becomes acceptable only if the victims are made ridiculous. He talks about Chesterton, Stevenson and Kipling. He talks about Old English with all the enthusiasm of a man who has picked up an academic subject by himself. He talks about his English ancestors.
It is a curiously colonial performance. His Argentine past is part of his distinction; he offers it as such; and he is after all a patriot. He honours the flag, an example of which flies from the balcony of his office in the National Library (he is the director). And he is moved by the country’s anthem. But at the same time he seems anxious to proclaim his separate-ness from Argentina. The performance might seem aimed at Borges’s new Anglo-American campus audience, whom in so many ways it flatters. But the attitudes are old.
In Buenos Aires it is still remembered that in 1955, just a few days after Perón was overthrown and that nine-year dictatorship was over, Borges gave a lecture on—of all subjects—Coleridge to the ladies of the Association for English Culture. Some of Coleridge’s lines, Borges said, were among the best in English poetry, “es decir la poesía [that is to say poetry] ”. And those four words, at a time of national rejoicing, were like a gratuitous assault on the Argentine soul.
Norman di Giovanni tells a balancing story.
In December 1969, we were at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. The man doing the introduction was an Argentine from Tucumán and he took advantage of the occasion to point out to the audience that the military repression had closed the university in Tucumán. Borges was totally oblivious of what the man had said until we were on our way to the airport. Then someone began to talk about it and Borges was suddenly very angry. “Did you hear what that man said? That they’d closed the university in Tucumán.” I questioned him about his rage, and he said, “That man was attacking my country. They can’t talk that way about my country.” I said, “Borges, what do you mean, ‘that man’? That man is an Argentine. And he comes from Tucumán. And what he says is true. The military have closed the university.”
Borges is of medium height. His nearly sightless eyes and his stick add to the distinction of his appearance. He dresses carefully. He says he is a middle-class writer; and a middle-class writer shouldn’t be either a dandy or too affectedly casual. He is courtly: he thinks, with Sir Thomas Browne, that a gentleman is someone who tries to give the least amount of trouble. “But you should look that up in Religio Medici.” It might se
em then that in his accessibility, his willingness to give lengthy interviews which repeat the other interviews he has given, Borges combines the middle-class ideal of self-effacement and the gentleman’s manners with the writer’s privacy, the writer’s need to save himself for his work.
There are hints of this privacy (in accessibility) in the way he likes to be addressed. Perhaps no more than half a dozen people have the privilege of calling him by his first name, Jorge, which they turn into “Georgie.” To everyone else he likes to be just “Borges” without the Señor, which he considers Spanish and pompous. “Borges” is, of course, distancing.
And even the fifty-page “Autobiographical Essay” doesn’t violate his privacy. It is like another interview. It says little that is new. His birth in Buenos Aires in 1899, the son of a lawyer; his military ancestors; the family’s seven-year sojourn in Europe from 1914 to 1921 (when the peso was valuable, and Europe was cheaper than Buenos Aires): all this is told again in outline, as in an interview. And the essay quickly becomes no more than a writer’s account of his writing life, of the books he read and the books he wrote, the literary groups he joined and the magazines he founded. The life is missing. There is the barest sketch of the crisis he must have gone through in his late thirties and early forties, when—the family money lost—he was doing all kinds of journalism; when his father died, and he himself fell seriously ill and “feared for [his] mental integrity”; when he worked as an assistant in a municipal library, well known as a writer outside the library, unknown inside it. “I remember a fellow employee’s once noting in an encyclopaedia the name of a certain Jorge Luis Borges—a fact that set him wondering at the coincidence of our identical names and birth dates.”
The Writer and the World Page 46