Jorge Luis Borges (2 page)

After his successful poetry reading at Harvard (where Robert Lowell introduced him, saying, “It would be impertinent for me to praise him. For many years I’ve thought he should have won the Nobel Prize”), I decided that I simply had to arrange a similar affair at Brandeis. With the help of Professor Lida of the Spanish department, who is a friend and devoted admirer of Borges, we set a date for April 1. When I told Borges he said, “Well, I hope it’s not all a huge practical joke.” Then he asked me if I thought twenty or thirty people might show up. It turned out that over five hundred attended
(about a fourth of the school’s population) and every seat in one of the university’s biggest auditoriums was filled twenty minutes before the programme began.

Downstairs, below the auditorium, Borges was nervously going over what he wanted to say about each poem. This in turn made me nervous, but once he sensed my nervousness, he began joking with me, quite spontaneous jokes really, until we had both calmed down. I had the honour of introducing him, and Mr. Murchison and one of Borges’s translators, Norman Thomas di Giovanni, read the poems in translation, after which Borges would comment for two or three minutes about each poem. As I led him onstage, I thought how terrifying it must be for a blind person to face and talk to such a large audience. But once he was onstage, Borges’s nervousness vanished. He spoke with a fluency that constantly rose to eloquence. The audience was overwhelmed. When I called him the next day and congratulated him again, he seemed upset and cross with himself. “I always make such a fool of myself.”

“But how can you say that?” I said. “Everybody loved it.”

“Because I feel it, I feel that I acted like a fool.”

By the time of his last lecture at Harvard, Borges was the literary hero of Cambridge. I understand that wherever he went in the country, giving his lectures and poetry readings, his reception was equally enthusiastic. In Cambridge, writers like Robert Lowell, Robert Fitzgerald, Yves Bonnefoy, John Updike and Bernard Malamud attended his lectures and lined up to meet him. John Barth said Borges was the man “who had succeeded Joyce and Kafka.”

Borges’s response to his long overdue success in America
was one of delight and gratefulness, yet he remained, as he will always remain, the most humble and gracious of men. I remember the day I came to see him at the larger and brighter apartment he had just moved in to. After ringing his bell, I hesitated in the lobby, a lobby that seemed like a labyrinth to me, with hallways going in every direction and cryptic numbers with arrows underneath them on each wall. But Borges had anticipated my difficulty and, with the aid of his cane, had walked down three flights of stairs to help me find my way. I was touched, but felt terrible that he had come all the way downstairs on my account. Borges smiled and extended his hand.

—Richard Burgin

A childhood of books; blindness and time; metaphysics;
Cervantes; memory; early work; mirrors and appearances …

BURGIN:
Was there ever a time when you didn’t love literature?

BORGES:
No, I always knew. I always thought of myself as a writer, even before I wrote a book. Let me say that even when I had written nothing, I knew that I would. I do not think of myself as a good writer, but I knew that my destiny or my fate was a literary one, no? I never thought of myself as being anything else.

BURGIN:
You never thought about taking up any career? I mean, your father was a lawyer.

BORGES:
Yes. But after all, he had tried to be a literary man and failed. He wrote some very nice sonnets. But he thought that I should fulfill that destiny, no? And he told me not to rush into print.

BURGIN:
But you were published when you were pretty young. About twenty.

BORGES:
Yes, I know, but he said to me, “You don’t have to be in a hurry. You write, you go over what you’ve written, you destroy, you take your time. What’s important is that when you publish something you should think of it as being pretty good, or at least as being the best that you can do.”

BURGIN:
When did you begin writing?

BORGES:
I began when I was a little boy. I wrote an English handbook ten pages long on Greek mythology, in very clumsy English. That was the first thing I ever wrote.

BURGIN:
You mean “original mythology” or a translation?

BORGES:
No, no, no, no, no. It was just saying, for example, well, “Hercules attempted twelve labors” or Hercules killed the Nemean Lion.”

BURGIN:
So you must have been reading those books when you were very young.

BORGES:
Yes, of course, I’m very fond of mythology. Well, it was nothing, it was just a, it must have been some fifteen pages long … with the story of the Golden Fleece and the Labyrinth and Hercules—he was my favourite—and then something about the loves of the gods, and the tale of Troy. That was the first thing I ever wrote. I remember it was written in a very short and crabbed handwriting because I was
very shortsighted. That’s all I can tell you about it. In fact, I think my mother kept a copy for some time, but as we’ve travelled all over the world, the copy got lost, which is as it should be, of course, because we thought nothing whatever about it, except for the fact that it was being written by a small boy. And then I read a chapter or two of
Don Quixote
, and then, of course, I tried to write archaic Spanish. And that saved me from trying to do the same thing some fifteen years afterwards, no? Because I had already attempted that game and failed at it.

BURGIN:
Do you remember much from your childhood?

BORGES:
You see, I was always very shortsighted, so when I think of my childhood, I think of books and the illustrations in books. I suppose I can remember every illustration in
Huckleberry Finn
and
Life on the Mississippi
and
Roughing It
and so on. And the illustrations in the
Arabian Nights
. And Dickens—Cruikshank and Fisk illustrations. Of course, well, I also have memories of being in the country, of riding horseback in the estancia on the Uruguay River in the Argentine pampas. I remember my parents and the house with the large patio and so on. But what I chiefly seem to remember are small and minute things. Because those were the ones that I could really see. The illustrations in the encyclopedia and the dictionary, I remember them quite well.
Chambers Encyclopaedia
or the American edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
with the engravings of animals and pyramids.

BURGIN:
So you remember the books of your childhood better than the people.

BORGES:
Yes, because I could see them.

BURGIN:
You’re not in touch with any people that you knew from your childhood now? Have you had any lifelong friends?

BORGES:
Well, some school companions from Buenos Aires and then, of course, my mother, she’s ninety-one; my sister who’s three years, three or four years, younger than I am, she’s a painter. And then, most of my relatives—most of them have died.

BURGIN:
Had you read much before you started to write or did your writing and reading develop together?

BORGES:
I’ve always been a greater reader than a writer. But, of course, I began to lose my eyesight definitely in 1954, and since then I’ve done my reading by proxy, no? Well, of course, when one cannot read, then one’s mind works in a different way. In fact, it might be said that there is a certain benefit in being unable to read, because you think that time flows in a different way. When I had my eyesight, then if I had to spend say a half an hour without doing anything, I would go mad. Because I had to be reading. But now, I can be alone for quite a long time, I don’t mind long railroad journeys, I don’t mind being alone in a hotel or walking down the street, because,
well, I won’t say that I am thinking all the time because that would be bragging.

I think I am able to live with a lack of occupation. I don’t have to be talking to people or doing things. If somebody had gone out, and I had come here and found the house empty, then I would have been quite content to sit down and let two or three hours pass and go out for a short walk, but I wouldn’t feel especially unhappy or lonely. That happens to all people who go blind.

BURGIN:
What are you thinking about during that time—a specific problem or …

BORGES:
I could or I might not be thinking about anything, I’d just be living on, no? Letting time flow or perhaps looking back on memories or walking across a bridge and trying to remember favourite passages, but maybe I wouldn’t be doing anything, I’d just be living. I never understand why people say they’re bored because they have nothing to do. Because sometimes I have nothing whatever to do, and I don’t feel bored. Because I’m not doing things all the time, I’m content.

BURGIN:
You’ve never felt bored in your life?

BORGES:
I don’t think so. Of course, when I had to be ten days lying on my back after an operation I felt anguish, but not boredom.

BURGIN:
You’re a metaphysical writer and yet so many writers like, for example, Jane Austen or Fitzgerald or Sinclair Lewis, seem to have no real metaphysical feeling at all.

BORGES:
When you speak of Fitzgerald, you’re thinking of Edward Fitzgerald, no? Or Scott Fitzgerald?

BURGIN:
Yes, the latter.

BORGES:
Ah, yes.

BURGIN:
I was just naming a writer who came to mind as having essentially no metaphysical feeling.

BORGES:
He was always on the surface of things, no? After all, why shouldn’t you, no?

BURGIN:
Of course, most people live and die without ever, it seems, really thinking about the problems of time or space or infinity.

BORGES:
Well, because they take the universe for granted. They take things for granted. They take themselves for granted. That’s true. They never wonder at anything, no? They don’t think it’s strange that they should be living. I remember the first time I felt that was when my father said to me, “What a queer thing,” he said, “that I should be living, as they say, behind my eyes, inside my head, I wonder if that makes sense?” And then, it was the first time I felt that, and then instantly I
pounced upon that because I knew what he was saying. But many people can hardly understand that. And they say, “Well, but where else could you live?”

BURGIN:
Do you think there’s something in people’s minds that blocks out the sense of the miraculous, something maybe inherent in most human beings that doesn’t allow them to think about these things? Because, after all, if they spent their time thinking about the miracle of the universe, they wouldn’t do the work civilization depends on and nothing, perhaps, would get done.

BORGES:
But I think that today too many things get done.

BURGIN:
Yes, of course.

BORGES:
Sarmiento wrote that he once met a gaucho and the gaucho said to him, “The countryside is so lovely that I don’t want to think about its cause.” That’s very strange, no? It’s a kind of non sequitur, no? Because he should have begun to think about the cause of that beauty. But I suppose he meant that he drank all those things in, and he felt quite happy about them, and he had no use for thinking. But generally speaking, I think men are more prone to metaphysical wondering than women. I think that women take the world for granted. Things for granted. And themselves, no? And circumstances for granted. I think circumstances especially.

BURGIN:
They confront each moment as a separate entity
without thinking about all the circumstances that lead up to it.

BORGES:
No, because they think of …

BURGIN:
They take things one at a time.

BORGES:
Yes, they take them one at a time, and then they’re afraid of cutting a poor figure, or they think of themselves as being actresses, no? The whole world looking at them and, of course, admiring them.

BURGIN:
They do seem to be more self-conscious than men on the whole.

BORGES:
I have known very intelligent women who are quite incapable of philosophy. One of the most intelligent women I know, she’s one of my pupils; she studies Old English with me, well, she was wild over so many books and poets, then I told her to read Berkeley’s dialogues, three dialogues, and she could make nothing of them. And then I gave her a book of William James, some problems of philosophy, and she’s a very intelligent woman, but she couldn’t get inside the books.

BURGIN:
They bored her?

BORGES:
No, she didn’t see why people should be poring over things that seemed very simple to her. So I said, “Yes, but are
you sure that time is simple, are you sure that space is simple, are you sure that consciousness is simple?” “Yes,” she said. “Well, but could you define them?” She said, “No, I don’t think I could, but I don’t feel puzzled by them.” That, I suppose, is generally what a woman would say, no? And she was a very intelligent woman.

BURGIN:
But, of course, there seems to be something in your mind that hasn’t blocked out this basic sense of wonder.

BORGES:
No.

BURGIN:
In fact, it’s at the centre of your work, this astonishment at the universe itself.

BORGES:
That’s why I cannot understand such writers as Scott Fitzgerald or Sinclair Lewis. But Sinclair Lewis has more humanity, no? I think besides that he sympathizes with his victims. When you read
Babbitt
, well, perhaps I think in the end, he became one with Babbitt. For as a writer has to write a novel, a very long novel with a single character, the only way to keep the novel and hero alive is to identify with him. Because if you write a long novel with a hero you dislike or a character that you know very little about, then the book falls to pieces. So, I suppose, that’s what happened to Cervantes in a way. When he began
Don Quixote
he knew very little about him and then, as he went on, he had to identify himself with Don Quixote, he must have felt that, I mean, that if he got a long distance from his hero and he was always poking fun at
him and seeing him as a figure of fun, then the book would fall to pieces. So that, in the end, he
became
Don Quixote. He sympathized with him against the other creatures, well, against the Innkeeper and the Duke, and the Barber, and the Parson, and so on.