Interview
A morning with Borges
Nicholas Shakespeare
On the hottest day of the Argentine summer, in what must surely be the hottest capital of the Southern hemisphere, I was fortunate enough to spend a morning with Jorge Luis Borges, who now rarely emerges from 994 Maipu, and even more rarely receives any visitors. Humidity, irritation and claustrophobia are not soluble ingredients for apprehensive conversationalists especially when the other party enjoys a renown in South America equal to, if not surpassing that of Peron, an achievement by any standards, and when one also recollects that in the western world this Latin American author now ranks with Solzhenitsyn as a cult figure.
Emerging from the lift I felt the same element of surprise as Dr Plarr must have experienced when visiting the novelist Dr Saavedra in Graham Greene's Honorary Consul. A modest brass plate badly tarnished, was all to signify the author's existence on the sixth floor of a building which revealed little of its internal contents from an unimpressive facade. I was ushered into a small room comfortably but not sumptuously furnished — a bookcase, table, chairs, sofa and various paintings, photographs of artistic or nostalgic value. An elderly man raised himself from the sofa and proffered his hand.
He talked about England, his English heredity, his various pilgrimages to the home towns of our more eminent authors, his love for Scotland; he implied that Europe contained an atmosphere that could not be sensed in South America. He revealed then how he had fallen foul of the Peronist government and cast critical comments on the present regime. "They are all go-getters ... how can Peron return after all those things he did ... he is one of the richest men alive — but they like that. I resigned as director of the Biblioteca Nacional in protest at his return ... now a police agent follows me wherever I go." He shrugged and then laughed as he recalled that, "the other day I made a harmless joke. I asked how Peron could have afforded to live in Madrid for seventeen years — by teaching Spanish perhaps ... they took it badly." He is depressed by life everywhere: "If it were only Argentina that was bad — it would not matter. But it is universal."
Of all literature he prefers English ... "It is a trite observation, but of course it is the best." French is somewhat ugly, "take Gide's translation of Hamlet; I like German, but Goethe is a pompous fool ... Yes, I really think he is." He considers that his own short stories translate admirably into English: "Spanish is too cumbersome, the words are too long; in English, the word 'gladly' connotes the meaning of 'sadly' too, by s7irtue of the rhyme. In Spanish `alegremente' is too mechanical, so unsuggestive."
Although he holds the view that everyone who quotes Shakespeare is indeed Shakespeare, it seemed I had a stronger claim than most for he became ecstatic when I revealed my heredity and immediately invited me to meet his mother with whom he has been living for some time. "Of course, Shakespeare wrote from emotion, he wrote for the stage — It explains his inconsistency." However, it appeared that Kipling had earned his most passionate acclaim, both for his short stories and for his poetry; he asked me to read out, 'one of the greatest of poems, 'Harp Song of the Dane Women'," and as I read, would stop me to nod in agreement or apprehension at
the following lines ... "and his greatest line:" he placed his head on his hands as I repeated, "Sicken again for the shouts and the slaughters."
Of the English language authors, Eliot, Pound, are "superficial, liable to run dry at any moment," he prefers T. E. to D. H. Lawrence and Browning's works would have deservedly endured longer had they been advertised as novels. For the last fifteen years, however, Borges has been perfecting his taste for old English literature; he showed me a bookcase in his sparsely furnished bedroom, containing such a collection, which though not numerous in tomes was extensive in content for it had taken all this time to assemble. He quoted fragments of an Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, "in the most beautiful sounding of all languages."
Borges now had an appointment with his publisher and invited me to accompany him. As I guided him out of the apartment he gestured at some canvasses which had been executed in a simple, tranquil and tender fashion but undercut by a vein of melancholy. "My sister painted them." He paused by an old photograph of himself and muttered, "ah ...I was still a blind old_ beggar ... even then."
In the streets he seemed to be recognised by every passer-by; as we climbed into a taxi, a woman hurried up and gazed in through the open window; "Senor Borges?" her face lit up, she exploded into words and thrust her hand across me and grasped him. It .had made her day, but Borges added sardonically about his many admirers that "they are from an agency and one has to pay them. They flock to me because I am anti-Peronist, not because of my works."
&forges had brought along some more written work for his publisher who proudly displayed a blazer from the University of Nottingham. One poem had been mislaid and Borges dictated from memory before listening to his publisher read out the assortment of remaining poems. Every now and then he would turn to me and ask scattered questions ... "Do you think anyone will actotice if this poem is five lines when it should be six?... Oxford is a beautiful place, Matthew Arnold was there ... forgive this •Eatin American blasphemy, but when Shakespeare wrote, "Oh, my prophetic soul, my uncle,' don't you think it should have been, 'Oh, my prophetic soul, his brother'?"
He asked me to walk with him for some blocks, through the city which he had so often depicted ... "the spotted plane trees, the square plots at the root of each, the respectable houses with their little balconies." "The heat is intolerable and this sprawling city is too noisy, so decadent. It hardly affects me, I can only make out black, white, and yellow. Yellow, I can make out, like that ... and he stopped to touch a gold painted placard. "Everything else seems an indistinct haze." He added as an afterthought, "I have had a Methodist upbringing, but now ... I am no Protestant ... perhaps an agnostic ... like Kipling — he was something of an agnostic."
"When I was young, my father presented me with a copy of Wells's Invisible Mak. I longed to be invisible and I now am; I do not want publicity, I do not seek it." He talked about the beauty of Iceland, of Peru but it was a beauty that was aesthetic rather than one of literary inspiration. "Me — I wait until something irritates me so much that I have to put it down on paper. One must let beauty come to one."
His works, his volumes of short stories which fill the window of every bookshop in Buenos Aires are a true enough testament to the fact that beauty in a literary form has found its way to this remarkable man.
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