Hell and Back
Page 5
Famous now, finally secure economically, Borges was seized by a longing for the domestic happiness that had always eluded him. In 1967, he married an old friend and widow with whom he had lost touch for twenty years. How long was it before he appreciated that this was not the beautiful thing he had wanted? The energetic and ambitious Norman Di Giovanni, Borges’s translator and uncomfortably close collaborator over the next few years, claimed that the writer was already unhappy when he, Di Giovanni, first met him only months after his marriage. Crass statements of the variety, “he had a lousy marriage - and I was getting divorced from my first wife,’ give us a measure of the distance between Di Giovanni and Borges.
Still, it is truly difficult to leave somebody in a beautiful and gentleman-like fashion. Three years after their wedding, the unsuspecting Elsa Borges went to the door to find, not her husband back for lunch, as he had promised, but a lawyer and a group of men from a removals company with instructions to remove his books. The Thousand and One Nights was going back to Mum. ‘A New Refutation of Time’, the essay in which Borges most energetically sets out to deny the reality of substance and time, ends with a brutal, indeed breathtaking volte-face: ‘The world unfortunately is real; I unfortunately am Borges.’ Here is drama.
But what does Borges ultimately understand by the aesthetic? What makes something beautiful? An essay entitled ‘The Wall and the Books’ begins: ‘I read, a few days ago, that the man who ordered the building of the almost infinite Chinese Wall was the first Emperor, Shih Huang Ti, who also decreed the burning of all the books that had been written before his time.’ Borges ponders the relation between these two extraordinary gestures of construction and destruction; are they complementary, or do they cancel each other out? After much ingenious hypothesising, he is obliged to concede that the enigma remains intact. But this is never a problem for Borges, who enjoys ‘those things that can enrich ignorance’. He concludes:
Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, all want to tell us something, or have told us something we shouldn’t have lost, or are about to tell us something; that imminence of revelation as yet unproduced is, perhaps, the aesthetic fact.
The ‘imminence of revelation’. When do we most frequently sense it? When reading. On three or four occasions in this collection Borges fields the idea that ‘each time we repeat a line by Dante or Shakespeare, we are, in some way, that instant when Dante or Shakespeare created that line’. Reading is a transmigration of souls, the sacred act by which Borges can become, if only for the period of the reading, somebody else. In its yearning for and respect of another’s otherness, and likewise our shared oneness, reading has a profound moral content. It is beautiful and good. ‘A book is a thing among things … until it meets its reader … What then occurs is that singular emotion called beauty, that lovely mystery which neither psychology nor criticism can describe …’
Beauty is the superimposition of separate minds in the experience of art. It is in this sense that we must understand Borges modest boast, often repeated, that he was first and foremost a reader not a writer. As the most immediate fruit of that reading, bringing together the writer’s consumption and creation of literature in the paradise of his personal library, the essays are his greatest gift to us.
These reflections may help us to understand the relation between Borges’s wonderfully lucid prose and his underlying vision. In the early days he had been more baroque, he had sought to amaze in each sentence. One or two of the early essays in the collection give us a taste of this. He was excited by the invention of compound words (imagining, for example, a word that might mean at once sunset and the sound of cattle bells). But later, and under the influence of his friend Bioy, he moved to a prose at once simpler and more assured, and above all to a style that erases, so far as is possible, everything personal. His quarrel with Finnegan's Wake for example, is precisely its creation of a personal language, largely through the invention of compound words.
The result of this switch from the personal to the urbane, the romantic to the classical, is that the complex and dazzling connections that his mind was ever generating now come to the fore with greater clarity, unencumbered with ‘literary ornament or that tiresome “look-at-me’ cleverness that characterised so much of the avant-garde writing of the period. In particular, in the essays the style becomes, as it were, the pure transparent air through which the echoes of all the writers he is exploring can be heard. A medium in which many minds can meet.
Garrulous as he had once been shy, blessedly famous as he had been obscure, Borges toured the globe, accepting countless literary honours, cheerfully chattering to hangers-on, determined to redeem his early sin, as he described it, of having been unhappy. Mother was dead at last. Well aware that his best work was behind him, he dictated poetry and lectures to nice young women. Were the girls more important to him than the pieces he was composing? Certainly a great deal of the poetry would have been better left out of the large and largely dull selection Viking have put together, while only a process akin to sanctification could account for the Harvard University Press’s decision to publish in full the transcripts of his bumbling Norton Lectures. In editing the selected non-fiction, however, Eliot Weinberger has been sharper and kinder, offering us only such late material as is as exciting as anything else in the collection. He also adds sufficient biographical notes to spare most readers from looking at James Woodall’s uninspired biography. It is amusing, however, to discover from Woodall that Borges’s politics were such that he was glad to accept the Grand Cross of the Order of Bernardo O’Higgins from the hands of General Pinochet. This in 1976. Ten years later, terminally ill, Borges made a final attempt to extract himself from Argentine history, by going to Geneva to die. At last he was back in the place of his early reading, the town where he first met Schopenhauer and Berkeley and Cervantes. Shortly before the music stopped, he married the young companion then in the chair beside him, Maria Kodama.
But now that he is in paradise, with whom does Borges find he shares his identity? To say his mother would be banal. Everybody knew they were one throughout. To say his arch-antagonist General Peron would be a mockery, though I suspect of the kind that Borges himself, after a little time for adjustment, might have proposed. Let me close with an act of conflation that I hope will be understood as a tribute to the fascinating thought processes which animate this wonderful writer’s work.
In 1961, Borges shared the first International Publishers Prize with Samuel Beckett. He never mentions Beckett in the Selected Non-Fictions nor from what I have been able to gather, did he ever read him. Let us count the ways in which the two writers are similar. Both men came from countries considered peripheral to the cultural centre, countries undergoing periods of intense nationalism, from which these writers largely dissociated themselves. Both suffered from chronic inhibitions. Both spoke the same four languages: Spanish, French, English, German. Both translated. Both had domineering mothers. Both were obsessed with Dante. Both were theologians and atheists. Both were writers whose adventurous fiction was largely fed by their readings of philosophy (in many cases the same philosophy). Both opposed Nazism in courageous ways. Both mocked modern scholasticism and have been appropriated by it. Both were fascinated by the extent to which language has an inertia of its own, which speaks itself regardless of individual intentions. Both were childless. Both concentrated on those experiences essential to all men, rather than the dramas generated by different characters and contingent circumstance. Both became fascinated by the multiplicity of the self and the inability to escape the self. Both wondered at the border between finite and infinite, mathematics and metaphysics. Both lived more or less contemporaneously into highly praised old age. Both longed for extinction.
‘Racine and Mallarmé,’ Borges claimed, “are the same writer.’ Now that they are ‘quite dead at last’, as Beckett’s Malone put it, can we say as much of Borges and Beckett? “If people vary at all,’ wr
ites Henry Green in Party Going, 'it can only be in the impressions they leave on others’ minds.’ To read Borges is an entirely different experience, a different encounter, a different transmigration, than to read Beckett. Whatever their status in a bibliophile’s paradise, we can only wonder that two men who insisted on the oneness of human experience and who themselves had so much in common, should also have such sharply distinct, but equally enchanting voices. The all-seeing gentleman is a genius of impersonation.
Here Comes Salman
[Salman Rushdie]
‘The art [of the novel], wrote Schopenhauer, ‘lies in setting the inner life into the most violent motion with the smallest possible expenditure of outer life. Salman Rushdie would not agree. It is not that there is no inner life in his novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Nor indeed does one feel that Rushdie would require any external occurrences at all to set his fertile mind in motion. It is just that the sheer quantity of events that crowd these 575 pages is such as to overwhelm any depiction of inner life or any mind’s attempt to grasp the half of them. For brevitys sake, more elaborate syntax will have to give way to the list - as so often it does in Rushdies prose - if we are to offer the slightest idea of what is between these covers.
We have, in the first third of the book: Bombay in the forties and fifties, with the immensely complex shenanigans of various extended families, scams, superstitions, Zoroastrianism, arson, cricket, politics, suicides, murders, love at first sight, cinema interiors, mythology, rock music and goat farming (the inner life is present most strikingly in the form of bizarre psychic experiences).
Then: London in the sixties with more of most of the above, plus drugs, sex, pirate radio stations, music business entrepreneurs, a delightfully erotic young lady who can pass through walls, Chelsea boutiques, record contracts, a car accident, deep coma and intimations of a variety of catastrophes. In the Bombay section I omitted to mention an earthquake and some lessons in photography. We discover that Lou Reed is a woman and that Kennedy survived both Lee Harvey Oswald and the second gunman on the grassy knoll, only to be murdered later by the same bullet that slew his brother (and incumbent president) Bobbie.
Finally we have New York and the US in general through the seventies, eighties and nineties, with more selections of the above (especially the mythology), plus some rock concerts (though still fewer than the murders and earthquakes). There is stardom and its penthouses, the discovery that ‘alternative worlds are in ‘tectonic collision’, a recording-contract dispute with global ramifications, more extremely weird psychic experiences and even Orphic expeditions to bring back the dead (though this may just be a morbid form of voyeurism), and - to close - earthquake, death, murder and, at the last - why not? - happy love.
In his novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Rushdie has his charming young protagonist say: ‘I always thought storytelling was like juggling … You keep a lot of different tales in the air, and juggle them up and down, and if you’re good you don’t drop any.’ In The Ground Beneath Her Feet Rushdie tosses up a great many balls, most of them very large and decidedly colourful. Certainly he is determined to dazzle. Whether he manages to keep them usefully in the air or not is something it is hard at first for the reader to judge, since the pages are very soon, with respect, so full of balls that the mind can only boggle. Rushdie’s dazzle is not of the variety that illuminates or clarifies. He seems nervous of letting more than a page or two go by without some melodramatic event to distract our attention. In the London section, I see I forgot to mention a potion-brewing, fashion-queen witch-murderer. I also forgot to say that the whole story is told by one who declares himself one of the world’s great sceptics and rationalists.
Along with a considerable school of critical thought, Rushdie is among those who have sought over recent years to turn the energy of the ‘multicultural’ and the hybrid into an elaborate stories within the terms of which they do not consider themselves evil at all? Far from objecting to stories in general (usually they will be well content to have people read innocuous tales that have nothing to do with anything), don’t they rather object to those particular stories that undermine their own? Good storytelling is always seductive and potentially coercive {Midnight’s Children was a most seductive tale). It draws us, powerfully, to its own position, which, however complex and open to interpretation, may be very far from compatible with other positions. Its enchantments, like Prospero’s, are enchantments that bind as much as they please, insisting that reality is this way or that. It is in this sense that Shelley thought of poets, not as charmingly sensitive people unwilling, as Rushdie’s Moor, to choose between rival systems, but as ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the World’.
‘The only leaps of faith I’m capable of,’ we read in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, ‘are those required by the creative imagination, by fictions that don’t pretend to be fact, and so end up telling the truth.’ Perhaps when one begins to feel that it is enough to write fiction to be engaged on the right side of some global moral battle and indeed to ‘end up telling the truth’, then there is a risk of growing careless. For just as it is notoriously difficult to do anything without making choices and becoming this guy or that (Rushdie’s musician, after all, becomes the guy who dismissed his support musicians), so, and this is particularly true of writing, the things one merely ‘ends up’ saying will rarely bear examination.
The Ground Beneath Her Feet is narrated in the first person by the self-styled rationalist and war photographer Rai Merchant, the secret third in a love triangle whose other members, Ormus Cama and Vina Apsara, are the book’s larger-than-life rock-star heroes. Vina dies in an earthquake at the beginning of the book and Rai explains his decision to tell his tale thus:
We all looked to her [Vina] for peace, yet she herself was not at peace. And so I’ve chosen to write here, publicly, what I can no longer whisper into her private ear: that is, everything. I have chosen to tell our story, hers and mine and Ormus Cama’s, all of it, every last detail, and then maybe she can find a sort of peace here, on the page, in this underworld of ink and lies, that respite which was denied her by life. So I stand at the gate of the inferno of language, there’s a barking dog and a ferryman waiting and a coin under my tongue for the fare.
Rushdie loves the grand narrative gesture and there is a sprint for the portentous in his writing which often comes at the expense of sense. Rai chooses to tell the story so that Vina can find ‘peace on the page’. Presumably, as a man who insistently pronounces himself a rationalist, he means so that he can find peace (the dead, after all, for a rationalist, are beyond our reach). As we approach the end of the book, however, we discover that Rai is now blissfully happy with a new girlfriend. Why then is he writing? Whose peace is at stake? And why, if the book is inspired by a need to get a grip on their love triangle, will it have to include so much extraneous material? Again, if the page is, as he so melodramatically claims, an ‘underworld of ink and lies’, is it reasonably a place where one would expect to find peace anyway?
Then what are we to make of the word ‘lies’ after Rai’s confessional solemnity in the opening lines of the paragraph? And why does he use the word ‘respite’, a temporary cessation of the painful, if what we are talking about here is a final laying to rest? The more one progresses with Rushdie’s novel the more one feels that its most formidable enemy will not be any evil fundamentalism, but simply a moment’s attention on the part of the wakeful reader.
There are further questions to ask about this passage. Since the story of Orpheus has been amply introduced only a few pages earlier with Vina singing Eurydice ‘s part from Gluck’s opera shortly before disappearing, presumably swallowed up by the shaky ground beneath her feet, must we then understand the narrator’s entry to the underworld as an Orphic expedition to recover the lost lover rather than, as he claims, to lay her to rest? What would Rai’s new girlfriend think about such a project? The idea of a narrative as a doomed expedition of retrieval is one I find fascinating, but t
his particular ball is quickly dropped, the analogy is not repeated, and in any event we will shortly discover that Rai is tone-deaf and hence hardly an Orpheus candidate. It is rather his friend and rival, Ormus the musician, who will assume the roll of Orpheus obsessively seeking the dead Vina (by casting about for lookalikes) in the final chapters of the book. Why then was the parallel so dramatically invited?
The love triangle is fairly static and its story is quickly told. Growing up in Bombay, the awesomely handsome and musically talented Ormus Cama fritters away his teens seducing the local girls. After spending her early childhood in the USA, the slightly younger Vina Apsara, of mixed Asian-Indian and Greek-American parentage, comes to Bombay where she will eventually find herself living with the family of the, again slightly younger, Rai Merchant. Vina is awesomely beautiful and has an extraordinary voice. The nine-year-old Rai falls immediately and irretrievably in love with her. Shortly afterwards the twelve-year-old Vina and the nineteen-year-old Ormus fall immediately and irretrievably in love with each other.
From this point on, a series of delays stretches out developments over a lifetime (thus allowing Rushdie to fill the spaces with all kinds of digressions and sub-plots). With surprising chivalry, Ormus agrees to wait until Vina is sixteen before so much as kissing her. Four years. They enjoy a night’s delirious pleasure (which Rai is able to describe in detail), but then Ormus’s hasty offer of marriage causes Vina to run off and the following morning complicated coincidences lead the couple to lose sight of each other for ten years, during which time Vina will, if only fleetingly, become Rai’s lover. Having moved to America, Vina rediscovers Ormus when his first successful record is released, but at this point, following a car accident that was actually a murder attempt, the hero is in a coma in a house by the Thames. At the sound of Vina’s voice Ormus immediately reawakens and over the next year she nurses him back to health.