autobiographical essay borges

Find anything you save across the site in your account

Autobiographical Notes

By Jorge Luis Borges

I cannot tell whether my first memories go back to the eastern or to the western bank of the muddy, slow-moving Rio de la Plata—to Montevideo, where we spent long, lazy holidays in the villa of my uncle Francisco Haedo, or to Buenos Aires. I was born there, in the very heart of that city, in 1899, on Tucumán Street, between Suipacha and Esmeralda, in a small, unassuming house belonging to my maternal grandparents. Like most of the houses of that day, it had a flat roof; a long, arched entrance way, called a zaguán ; a cistern, where we got our water; and two patios. We must have moved out to the suburb of Palermo quite soon, because there I have my first memories of another house with two patios, a garden with a tall windmill pump, and, on the other side of the garden, an empty lot. Palermo at that time—the Palermo where we lived, at Serrano and Guatemala streets—was on the shabby northern outskirts of town, and many people, ashamed of saying they lived there, spoke in a dim way of living on the Northside. We lived in one of the few two-story homes on our street; the rest of the neighborhood was made up of low houses and vacant lots. I have often spoken of this area as a slum, but I do not quite mean that in the American sense of the word. In Palermo lived shabby-genteel people as well as more undesirable sorts. There was also a Palermo of hoodlums, called compadritos , famed for their knife fights, but this Palermo was only later to capture my imagination, since we did our best—our successful best—to ignore it. Unlike our neighbor Evaristo Carriego, however, who was the first Argentine poet to explore the literary possibilities that lay there at hand. As for myself, I was hardly aware of the existence of compadritos , since I lived essentially indoors.

My father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, worked as a lawyer. He was a philosophical anarchist—a disciple of Spencer—and also a teacher of psychology at the Normal School for Modern Languages, where he gave his course in English, using as his text William James’s shorter book of psychology. My father’s English came from the fact that his mother, Frances Haslam, was born in Staffordshire of Northumbrian stock. A rather unlikely set of circumstances brought her to South America. Fanny Haslam’s elder sister married an Italian-Jewish engineer named Jorge Suárez, who brought the first horse-drawn tramcars to Argentina, where he and his wife settled and sent for Fanny. I remember an anecdote concerning this venture. Suárez was a guest at General Urquiza’s “palace” in Entre Ríos, and very improvidently won his first game of cards with the General, who was the stern dictator of that province and not above throat-cutting. When the game was over, Suárez was told by alarmed fellow-guests that if he wanted the license to run his tramcars in the province, it was expected of him to lose a certain amount of gold coins each night. Urquiza was such a poor player that Suárez had a great deal of trouble losing the appointed sums.

It was in Paraná, the capital city of Entre Ríos, that Fanny Haslam met Colonel Francisco Borges. This was in 1870 or 1871, during the siege of the city by the montoneros , or gaucho militia, of Ricardo López Jordán. Borges, riding at the head of his regiment, commanded the troops defending the city. Fanny Haslam saw him from the flat roof of her house; that very night a ball was given to celebrate the arrival of the government relief forces. Fanny and the Colonel met, danced, fell in love, and eventually married.

My father was the younger of two sons. He had been born in Entre Ríos and used to explain to my grandmother, a respectable English lady, that he wasn’t really an Entrerriano, since “I was begotten on the pampa.” My grandmother would say, with English reserve, “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.” My father’s words, of course, were true, since my grandfather was, in the early eighteen-seventies, Commander-in-Chief of the northern and western frontiers of the Province of Buenos Aires. As a child, I heard many stories from Fanny Haslam about frontier life in those days. One of these I set down in my “Story of the Warrior and the Captive.” My grandmother had spoken with a number of Indian chieftains, whose rather uncouth names were, I think, Simón Coliqueo, Catriel, Pincén, and Namuncurá. In 1874, during one of our civil wars, my grandfather, Colonel Borges, met his death. He was forty-one at the time. In the complicated circumstances surrounding his defeat at the battle of La Verde, he rode out slowly on horseback, wearing a white poncho and followed by ten or twelve of his men, toward the enemy lines, where he was struck by two Remington bullets. This was the first time Remington rifles were used in the Argentine, and it tickles my fancy to think that the firm that shaves me every morning bears the same name as the one that killed my grandfather.

Fanny Haslam was a great reader. When she was over eighty, people used to say, in order to be nice to her, that nowadays there were no writers who could be with Dickens and Thackeray. My grandmother would answer, “On the whole, I rather prefer Arnold Bennett, Galsworthy, and Wells.” When she died, at the age of ninety, in 1935, she called us to her side and said, in English (her Spanish was fluent but poor), in her thin voice, “I am only an old woman dying very, very slowly. There is nothing remarkable or interesting about this.” She could see no reason whatever why the whole household should be upset, and she apologized for taking so long to die.

My father was very intelligent and, like all intelligent men, very kind. Once, he told me that I should take a good look at soldiers, uniforms, barracks, flags, churches, priests, and butcher shops, since all these things were about to disappear, and I could tell my children that I had actually seen them. The prophecy has not yet come true, unfortunately. My father was such a modest man that he would have liked being invisible. Though he was very proud of his English ancestry, he used to joke about it, saying with feigned perplexity, “After all, what are the English?! Just a pack of German agricultural laborers.” His idols were Shelley, Keats, and Swinburne. As a reader, he had two interests. First, books on metaphysics and psychology (Berkeley, Hume, Royce, and William James). Second, literature and books about the East (Lane, Burton, and Payne). It was he who revealed the power of poetry to me—the fact that words are not only a means of communication but also magic symbols and music. When I recite poetry in English now, my mother tells me, I take on his very voice. He also, without my being aware of it, gave me my first lessons in philosophy. When I was still quite young, he showed me, with the aid of a chessboard, the paradoxes of Zeno—Achilles and the tortoise, the unmoving flight of the arrow, the impossibility of motion. Later, without mentioning Berkeley’s name, he did his best to teach me the rudiments of idealism.

My mother, Leonor Acevedo de Borges, comes of old Argentine and Uruguayan stock, and at ninety-four is still hale and hearty and a good Catholic. When I was growing up, religion belonged to women and children; most men in Buenos Aires were freethinkers—though, had they been asked, they might have called themselves Catholics. I think I inherited from my mother her quality of thinking the best of people and also her strong sense of friendship. My mother has always had a hospitable mind. From the time she learned English, through my father, she has done most of her reading in that language. After my father’s death, finding that she was unable to keep her mind on the printed page, she tried her hand at translating William Saroyan’s “The Human Comedy” in order to compel herself to concentrate. The translation found its way into print, and she was honored for this by a society of Buenos Aires Armenians. Later on, she translated some of Hawthorne’s stories and one of Herbert Read’s books on art, and she also produced some of the translations of Melville, Virginia Woolf, and Faulkner that are considered mine. She has always been a companion to me—especially in later years, when I went blind—and an understanding and forgiving friend. For years, until recently, she handled all my secretarial work, answering letters, reading to me, taking down my dictation, and also travelling with me on many occasions both at home and abroad. It was she, though I never gave a thought to it at the time, who quickly and effectively fostered my literary career.

Her grandfather was Colonel Isidoro Suárez, who, in 1824, at the age of twenty-four, led a famous charge of Peruvian and Colombian cavalry, which turned the tide of the Battle of Junín, in Peru. This was the next to last battle of the South American War of Independence. Although Suárez was a second cousin to Juan Manuel de Rosas, who ruled as dictator in Argentina from 1835 to 1852, he preferred exile and poverty in Montevideo to living under a tyranny in Buenos Aires. His lands were, of course, confiscated, and one of his brothers was executed. Another member of my mother’s family was Francisco de Laprida, who, in 1816, in Tucumán, where he presided over the Congress, declared the independence of the Argentine Confederation, and was killed in 1829 in a civil war. My mother’s father, Isidoro Acevedo, though a civilian, took part in the fighting of yet other civil wars in the eighteen-sixties and eighties. So, on both sides of my family, I have military forebears; this may account for my yearning after that epic destiny which my gods denied me, no doubt wisely.

I have already said that I spent a great deal of my boyhood indoors. Having no childhood friends, my sister and I invented two imaginary companions, named, for some reason or other, Quilos and The Windmill. (When they finally bored us, we told our mother that they had died.) I was always very nearsighted and wore glasses, and I was rather frail. As most of my people had been soldiers—even my father’s brother had been a naval officer—and I knew I would never be, I felt ashamed, quite early, to be a bookish kind of person and not a man of action. Throughout my boyhood, I thought that to be loved would have amounted to an injustice. I did not feel I deserved any particular love, and I remember my birthdays filled me with shame, because everyone heaped gifts on me and I thought that I had done nothing to deserve them—that I was a kind of fake. After the age of thirty or so, I got over the feeling.

At home, both English and Spanish were commonly used. If I were asked to name the chief event in my Ilife, I should say my father’s library. In fact, I sometimes think I have never strayed outside that library. I can still picture it. It was in a room of its own, with glass-fronted shelves, and must have contained several thousand volumes. Being so nearsighted, I have forgotten most of the faces of that time (perhaps even when I think of my Grandfather Acevedo I am thinking of his photograph), and yet I vividly remember so many of the steel engravings in Chambers’s Encyclopædia and in the Britannica. The first novel I ever read through was “Huckleberry Finn.” Next came “Roughing It” and “Flush Days in California.” I also read books by Captain Marryat, Wells’ “First Men in the Moon,” Poe, a one-volume edition of Longfellow, “Treasure Island,” Dickens, “Don Quixote,” “Tom Brown’s School Days,” Grimms’ “Fairy Tales,” Lewis Carroll, “The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green” (a now forgotten book), Burton’s “A Thousand Nights and a Night.” The Burton, filled with what was then considered obscenity, was forbidden, and I had to read it in hiding up on the roof. But at the time, I was so carried away with the magic that I took no notice whatever of the objectionable parts, reading the tales unaware of any other significance. All the foregoing books I read in English. When later I read “Don Quixote” in the original, it sounded like a bad translation to me. I still remember those red volumes with the gold lettering of the Garnier edition. At some point, my father’s library was broken up, and when I read the “Quijote” in another edition I had the feeling that it wasn’t the real “Quijote.” Later, I had a friend get me the Garnier, with the same steel engravings, the same footnotes, and also the same errata. All those things form part of the book for me; this I consider the real “Quijote.”

In Spanish, I also read many of the books by Eduardo Gutiérrez about Argentine outlaws and desperadoes—“Juan Moreira” foremost among them—as well as his “Siluetas militares,” which contains a forceful account of Colonel Borges’ death. My mother forbade the reading of “Martin Fierro,” since that was a book fit only for hoodlums and schoolboys and, besides, was not about real gauchos at all. This, too, I read on the sly. Her feelings were based on the fact that Hernandez had been an upholder of Rosas and therefore an enemy to our Unitarian ancestors. I read also Sarmiento’s “Facundo,” many books on Greek mythology, and later Norse. Poetry came to me through English—Shelley, Keats, FitzGerald, and Swinburne, those great favorites of my father, who could quote them voluminously, and often did.

A tradition of literature ran through my father’s family. His great-uncle Juan Crisóstomo Lafinur was one of the first Argentine poets, and he wrote an ode on the death of his friend General Manuel Belgrano, in 1820. One of my father’s cousins, Alvaro Melián Lafinur, whom I knew from childhood, was a leading minor poet and later found his way into the Argentine Academy of Letters. My father’s maternal grandfather, Edward Young Haslam, edited one of the first English papers in Argentina, the Southern Cross , and was a Doctor of Philosophy or Letters, I’m not sure which, of the University of Heidelberg. Haslam could not afford Oxford or Cambridge, so he made his way to Germany, where he got his degree, going through the whole course in Latin. Eventually, he died in Parank. My father wrote a novel, which he published in Majorca in 1921, about the history of Entre Ríos. It was called “The Caudillo.” He also wrote (and destroyed) a book of essays, and published a translation of FitzGerald’s “Omar Khayyam” in the same metre as the original. He destroyed a book of Oriental stories—in the manner of the Arabian Nights—and a drama, “Hacia la nada” (“Toward Nothingness”), about a man’s disappointment in his son. He published some fine sonnets after the style of the Argentine poet Enrique Banchs. From the time I was a boy, when blindness came to him, it was tacitly understood that I had to fulfill the literary destiny that circumstances had denied my father. This was something that was taken for granted (and such things are far more important than things that are merely said). I was expected to be a writer.

I first started writing when I was six or seven. I tried to imitate classic writers of Spanish—Miguel de Cervantes, for example. I had set down in quite bad English a kind of handbook on Greek mythology, no doubt cribbed from Lemprière. This may have been my first literary venture. My first story was a rather nonsensical piece after the manner of Cervantes, an old-fashioned romance called “La visera fatal” (“The Fatal Helmet”). I very neatly wrote these things into copybooks. My father never interfered. He wanted me to commit all my own mistakes, and once said, “Children educate their parents, not the other way around.” When I was nine or so, I translated Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince” into Spanish, and it was published in one of the Buenos Aires dailies, El País . Since it was signed merely “Jorge Borges,” people naturally assumed that the translation was my father’s.

I take no pleasure whatever in recalling my early school days. To begin with, I did not start school until I was nine. This was because my father, as an anarchist, distrusted all enterprises run by the state. As I wore spectacles and dressed in an Eton collar and tie, I was jeered at and bullied by most of my schoolmates, who were amateur hooligans. I cannot remember the name of the school but recall that it was on Thames Street. My father used to say that Argentine history had taken the place of the catechism, so we were expected to worship all things Argentine. We were taught Argentine history, for example, before we were allowed any knowledge of the many lands and many centuries that went into its making. As far as Spanish composition goes, I was taught to write in a flowery way: “ Aquellos que lucharon por una patria libre, independiente, gloriosa . . .” (“Those who struggled for a free, independent, and glorious nation . . .”). Later on, in Geneva, I was to be told that such writing was meaningless and that I must see things through my own eyes. My sister Norah, who was born in 1901, of course attended a girls’ school.

During all these years, we usually spent our summers out in Adrogué, some ten or fifteen miles to the south of Buenos Aires, where we had a place of our own—a large one-story house with grounds, two summerhouses, a windmill, and a shaggy brown sheepdog. Adrogué then was a lost and undisturbed maze of summer homes surrounded by iron fences with masonry planters on the gateposts, of parks, of streets that radiated out of the many plazas, and of the ubiquitous smell of eucalyptus trees. We continued to visit Adrogué for decades.

My first real experience of the pampa came around 1909, on a trip we took to a place belonging to relatives near San Nicolás, to the northwest of Buenos Aires. I remember that the nearest house was a kind of blur on the horizon. This endless distance, I found out, was called the pampa, and when I learned that the farmhands were gauchos, like the characters in Eduardo Gutiérrez, that gave them a certain glamour. I have always come to things after coming to books. Once, I was allowed to accompany them on horseback, taking cattle to the river early one morning. The men were small and darkish and wore bombachas , a kind of wide, baggy trousers. When I asked them if they knew how to swim, they replied, “Water is meant for cattle.” My mother gave a doll, in a large cardboard box, to the foreman’s daughter. The next year, we went back and asked after the little girl. “What a delight the doll has been to her!” they told us. And we were shown it, still in its box, nailed to the wall like an image. Of course, the girl was allowed only to look at it, not to touch it, for it might have been soiled or broken. There it was, high up out of harm’s way, worshiped from afar. Lugones has written that in Córdoba, before magazines came in, he had many times seen a playing card used as a picture and nailed to the wall in gauchos’ shacks. The four of copas , with its small lion and two towers, was particularly coveted. I think I began writing a poem about gauchos, probably under the influence of the poet Ascasubi, before I went to Geneva. I recall trying to work in as many gaucho words as I could, but the technical difficulties were beyond me. I never got past a few stanzas.

In 1914, we moved to Europe. My father’s eyesight had begun to fail and I remember his saying, “How on earth can I sign my name to legal papers when I am unable to read them?” Forced into early retirement, he planned our trip in exactly ten days. The world was unsuspicious then; there were no passports or other red tape. We first spent some weeks in Paris, a city that neither then nor since has particularly charmed me, as it does every other good Argentine. Perhaps, without knowing it, I was always a bit of a Britisher; in fact, I always think of Waterloo as a victory. The idea of the trip was for my sister and me to go to school in Geneva; we were to live with my maternal grandmother, who travelled with us and eventually died there, while my parents toured the Continent. At the same time, my father was to be treated by a famous Genevan eye doctor. Europe in those days was cheaper than Buenos Aires, and Argentine money then stood for something. We were so ignorant of history, however, that we had no idea that the First World War would break out in August. My mother and father were in Germany when it happened, but managed to get back to us in Geneva. A year or so later, despite the war, we were able to journey across the Alps into northern Italy. I have vivid memories of Verona and Venice. In the vast and empty amphitheater of Verona I recited, loud and bold, several gaucho verses from Ascasubi.

That first fall—1914—I started school at the College of Geneva, founded by John Calvin. It was a day school. In my class there were some forty of us; a good half were foreigners. The chief subject was Latin, and I soon found out that one could let other studies slide a bit as long as one’s Latin was good. All these other courses, however—algebra, chemistry, physics, mineralogy, botany, zoology—were studied in French. That year, I passed all my exams successfully, except for French itself. Without a word to me, my fellow-schoolmates sent a petition around to the headmaster, which they had all signed. They pointed out that I had had to study all of the different subjects in French, a language I also had to learn. They asked the headmaster to take this into account, and he very kindly did so. At first, I had not even understood when a teacher was calling on me, because my name was pronounced in the French manner, in a single syllable (rhyming roughly with “forge”), while we pronounce it with two syllables, the “g” sounding like a strong Scottish “h.” Every time I had to answer, my schoolmates would nudge me.

We lived in a flat on the southern, or old, side of town. I still know Geneva far better than I know Buenos Aires, which is easily explained by the fact that in Geneva no two street corners are alike, and one quickly learns the differences. Every day, I walked along that green and icy river, the Rhone, which runs through the very heart of the city, spanned by seven quite different-looking bridges. The Swiss are rather proud and standoffish. My two bosom friends were of Polish-Jewish origin—Simon Jichlinski and Maurice Abramowicz. One became a lawyer and the other a physician. I taught them to play truco , and they learned so well and fast that at the end of our first game they left me without a cent. I became a good Latin scholar, while I did most of my private reading in English. At home, we spoke Spanish, but my sister’s French soon became so good that she even dreamed in it. I remember my mother’s coming home one day and finding Norah hidden behind a red plush curtain, crying out in fear, “ Une mouche, une mouche! ” It seems she had adopted the French notion that flies are dangerous. “You come out of there,” my mother told her, somewhat unpatriotically. “You were born and bred among flies!” As a result of the war—apart from the Italian trip and journeys inside Switzerland—we did no travelling. Later on, braving German submarines and in the company of only four or five other passengers, my English grandmother joined us.

On my own, outside of school, I took up the study of German. I was sent on this adventure by Carlyle’s “Sartor Resartus” (“The Tailor Retailored”), which dazzled and also bewildered me. The hero, Diogenes Devil’sdung, is a German professor of idealism. In German literature I was looking for something Germanic, akin to Tacitus, but I was only later to find this in Old English and in Old Norse. German literature turned out to be romantic and sickly. At first I tried Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” but was defeated by it, as most people—including most Germans—are. Then I thought verse would be easier, because of its brevity. So I got hold of a copy of Heine’s early poems, the “Lyrisches Intermezzo,” and a German-English dictionary. Little by little, owing to Heine’s simple vocabulary, I found I could do without the dictionary. Soon I had worked my way into the loveliness of the language. I also managed to read Meyrink’s novel “Der Golem.” (In 1969, when I was in Israel, I talked over the Bohemian legend of the Golem with Gershom Scholem, a leading scholar of Jewish mysticism, whose name I had twice used as the only possible rhyming word in a poem of my own on the Golem.) I tried to be interested in Jean Paul Richter, for Carlyle’s and De Quincey’s sake—this was around 1917—but I soon discovered that I was very bored by him. Richter, in spite of his two British champions, seemed to me very long-winded and perhaps a passionless writer. I became, however, very interested in German Expressionism and still think of it as beyond other contemporary schools, such as Imagism, Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, and so on. A few years later, in Madrid, I was to attempt some of the first, and perhaps the only, translations of a number of Expressionist poets into Spanish.

At some point while in Switzerland, I began reading Schopenhauer. Today, were I to choose a single philosopher, I would choose him. If the riddle of the universe can be stated in words, I think these words would be in his writings. I have read him many times over, both in German and, with my father and his close friend Macedonio Fernández, in translation. I still think of German as being a beautiful language—perhaps more beautiful than the literature it has produced. French, rather paradoxically, has a fine literature despite its fondness for schools and movements, but the language itself is, I think, rather ugly. Things tend to sound trivial when they are said in French. In fact, I even think of Spanish as being the better of the two languages, though Spanish words are far too long and cumbersome. As an Argentine writer, I have to cope with Spanish and so am only too aware of its shortcomings. I remember that Goethe wrote that he had to deal with the worst language in the world—German. I suppose most writers think along these lines concerning the language they have to struggle with. As for Italian, I have read and reread “The Divine Comedy” in more than a dozen different editions. I’ve also read Ariosto, Tasso, Croce, and Gentile, but I am quite unable to speak Italian or to follow an Italian play or film.

It was also in Geneva that I first met Walt Whitman, through a German translation by Johannes Schlaf (“ Als ich in Alabama meinen Morgengang machte ”—“As I have walk’d in Alabama my morning walk”). Of course, I was struck by the absurdity of reading an American poet in German, so I ordered a copy of “Leaves of Grass” from London. I remember it still—bound in green. For a time, I thought of Whitman not only as a great poet but as the only poet. In fact, I thought that all poets the world over had been merely leading up to Whitman until 1855, and that not to imitate him was a proof of ignorance. This feeling had already come over me with Carlyle’s prose, which is now unbearable to me, and with the poetry of Swinburne. These were phases I went through. Later on, I was to go through similar experiences of being overwhelmed by some particular writer.

We remained in Switzerland until 1919. After three or four years in Geneva, we spent a year in Lugano. I had my bachelor’s degree by then, and it was now understood that I should devote myself to writing. I wanted to show my manuscripts to my father, but he told me that he didn’t believe in advice and that I must work my way all by myself through trial and error. I had been writing sonnets in English and in French. The English sonnets were poor imitations of Wordsworth, and the French, in their own watery way, were imitative of symbolist poetry. I still recall one line of my French experiments: “ Petite boîte noire pour le violon cassé .” The whole piece was titled “Poéme pour être récité avec un accent russe.” As I knew I wrote a foreigner’s French, I thought a Russian accent better than an Argentine one. In my English experiments, I affected some eighteenth-century mannerisms, such as “o’er” instead of “over” and, for the sake of metrical ease, “doth sing” instead of “sings.” I knew, however, that Spanish would be my unavoidable destiny.

We decided to go home, but to spend a year or so in Spain first. Spain at that time was slowly being discovered by Argentines. Until then, even eminent writers like Leopoldo Lugones and Ricardo Güraldes deliberately left Spain out of their European travels. This was no whim. In Buenos Aires, Spaniards always held menial jobs—as domestic servants, waiters, and laborers—or were small tradesmen, and we Argentines never thought of ourselves as Spanish. We had, in fact, left off being Spaniards in 1816, when we declared our independence from Spain. When, as a boy, I read Prescott’s “Conquest of Peru,” it amazed me to find that he portrayed the conquistadores in a romantic way. To me, descended from certain of these officials, they were an uninteresting lot. Through French eyes, however, Latin Americans saw the Spaniards as picturesque, thinking of them in terms of the stock in trade of García Lorca—gypsies, bullfights, and Moorish architecture. But though Spanish was our language and we came mostly of Spanish and Portuguese blood, my own family never thought of our trip in terms of going back to Spain after an absence of some three centuries.

We went to Majorca because it was cheap, beautiful, and had hardly any tourists but ourselves. We lived there nearly a whole year, in Palma and in Valldemosa, a village high up in the hills. I went on studying Latin, this time under the tutelage of a priest, who told me that since the innate was sufficient to his needs, he had never attempted reading a novel. We went over Vergil, of whom I still think highly. I remember I astonished the natives by my fine swimming, for I had learned in swift rivers, such as the Uruguay and the Rhone, while Majorcans were used only to a quiet, tideless sea. My father was writing his novel, which harked back to old times during the civil war of the eighteen-seventies in his native Entre Ríos. I recall giving him some quite bad metaphors, borrowed from the German Expressionists, which he accepted out of resignation. He had some five hundred copies of the book printed, and brought them back to Buenos Aires, where he gave them away to friends. Every time the word “Paraná”—his home town—came up in the manuscript, the printers had changed it to “Panama,” thinking they were correcting a mistake. Not to give them trouble, and also seeing that it was funnier that way, my father let this pass. Now I repent my youthful intrusions into his book. Seventeen years later, before he died, he told me that he would very much like me to rewrite the novel in a straightforward way, with all the fine writing and purple patches left out. I myself in those days wrote a story about a werewolf and sent it to a popular magazine in Madrid, La Esfera , whose editors very wisely turned it down.

The winter of 1919-20 we spent in Seville, where I saw my first poem into print. It was titled “Hymn to the Sea” and appeared in the magazine Grecia , in its issue of December 31, 1919. In the poem, I tried my hardest to be Walt Whitman:

O seal O myth! O sun! O wide resting place! I know why I love you. I know that we are both very old, that we have known each other for centuries. . . . O Protean, I have been born of you— both of us chained and wandering, both of us hungering for stars, both of us with hopes and disappointments . . . !

Today, I hardly think of the sea, or even of myself, as hungering for stars. Years after, when I came across Arnold Bennett’s phrase “the third-rate grandiose,” I understood at once what he meant. And yet when I arrived in Madrid a few months later, as this was the only poem I had ever printed, people there thought of me as a singer of the sea.

In Seville, I fell in with the literary group formed around Grecia . This group, who called themselves Ultraists, had set out to renew literature, a branch of the arts of which they knew nothing whatever. One of them once told me his whole reading had been the Bible, Cervantes, Dario, and one or two of the books of the Master, Rafael Cansinos-Asséns. It baffled my Argentine mind to learn that they had no French and no inkling at all that such a thing as English literature existed. I was even introduced to a local worthy popularly known as “the Humanist” and was not long in discovering that his Latin was far smaller than mine. As for Grecia itself, the editor, Isaac del Vando Villar, had the whole corpus of his poetry written for him by one or another of his assistants. I remember one of them telling me one day, “I’m very busy—Isaac is writing a poem.”

Next, we went to Madrid, and there the great event to me was my friendship with Rafael Cansinos-Asséns. I still like to think of myself as his disciple. He had come from Seville, where he studied for the priesthood, but, having found the name Cansinos in the archives of the Inquisition, he decided he was a Jew. This led him to the study of Hebrew, and later on he even had himself circumcised. Literary friends from Andalusia took me to meet him. I timidly congratulated him on a poem he had written about the sea. “Yes,” he said, “and how I’d like to see it before I die.” He was a tall man, with the Andalusian contempt for all things Castilian. The most remarkable fact about Cansinos was that he lived completely for literature, without regard for money or fame. He was a fine poet and wrote a book of psalms—chiefly erotic—called “El candelabro de los siete brazos,” which was published in 1915. He also wrote novels, stories, and essays, and, when I knew him, presided over a literary circle.

Every Saturday I would go to the Café Colonial, where we met at midnight, and the conversation lasted until daybreak. Sometimes there were as many as twenty or thirty of us. The group despised all Spanish local color— cante jondo and bullfights. They admired American jazz, and were more interested in being Europeans than Spaniards. Cansinos would propose a subject—the Metaphor, Free Verse, the Traditional Forms of Poetry, Narrative Poetry, the Adjective, the Verb. In his own quiet way, he was a dictator, allowing no unfriendly allusions to contemporary writers and trying to keep the talk on a high plane.

Cansinos was a wide reader. He had translated De Quincey’s “Opium-Eater,” the “Meditations of Marcus Aurelius” from the Greek, novels of Barbusse, and Schwob’s “Vies imaginaires.” Later, he was to undertake complete translations of Goethe and Dostoevski. He also made the first Spanish version of the Arabian Nights, which is very free compared to Burton’s or Lane’s, but which makes, I think, for more pleasurable reading. Once, I went to see him and he took me into his library. Or, rather, I should say his whole house was a library. It was like making your way through woods. He was too poor to have shelves, and the books were piled one on top of the other from floor to ceiling, forcing you to thread your way among the vertical columns. Cansinos seemed to me as if he were all the past of that Europe I was leaving behind—something like the symbol of all culture, Western and Eastern. But he had a perversity that made him fail to get on with his leading contemporaries. It lay in writing books that lavishly praised second- or third-rate writers. At the time, Ortega y Gasset was at the height of his fame, but Cansinos thought of him as a bad philosopher and a bad writer. What I got from him, chiefly, was the pleasure of literary conversation. Also, I was stimulated by him to far-flung reading. In writing, I began aping him. He wrote long and flowing sentences with an un-Spanish and strongly Hebrew flavor to them.

Oddly, it was Cansinos who, in 1919, invented the term “Ultraism.” He thought Spanish literature had always been behind the times. Under the pen name of Juan Las, he wrote some short, laconic Ultraist pieces. The whole thing—I see now—was done in a spirit of mockery. But we youngsters took it very seriously. Another of the earnest followers was Guillermo de Torre, whom I met in Madrid that spring and who married my sister Norah nine years later.

In Madrid at this time, there was another group gathered around Gómez de la Serna. I went there once and didn’t like the way they behaved. They had a buffoon who wore a bracelet with a rattle attached. He would be made to shake hands with people and the rattle would rattle and Gómez de la Serna would invariably say, “Where’s the snake?” That was supposed to be funny. Once, he turned to me proudly and remarked, “You’ve never seen this kind of thing in Buenos Aires, have you?” I owned, thank God, that I hadn’t.

In Spain, I wrote two books. One was a series of essays called, I now wonder why, “Los naipes del tahur” (“The Sharper’s Cards”). They were literary and political essays (I was still an anarchist and a freethinker and in favor of pacifism), written under the influence of Pío Baroja. Their aim was to be bitter and relentless, but they were, as a matter of fact, quite tame. I went in for using such words as “fools,” “harlots,” “lars.” Failing to find a publisher, I destroyed the manuscript on my return to Buenos Aires. The second book was titled either “The Red Psalms” or “The Red Rhythms.” It was a collection of poems—perhaps some twenty in all—in free verse and in praise of the Russian Revolution, the brotherhood of man, and pacifism. Three or four of them found their way into magazines—“Bolshevik Epic,” “Trenches,” “Russia.” This book I destroyed in Spain on the eve of our departure. I was then ready to go home.

We returned to Buenos Aires on the Reina Victoria Eugenia toward the end of March, 1921. It came to me as a surprise, after living in so many European cities—after so many memories of Geneva, Zurich, Nimes, Córdoba, and Lisbon—to find that my native town had grown, and that it was now a very large, sprawling, and almost endless city of low buildings with flat roofs, stretching west toward the pampa. It was more than a homecoming; it was a rediscovery. I was able to see Buenos Aires keenly and eagerly because I had been away from it for a long time. Had I never gone abroad, I wonder whether I would ever have seen it with the peculiar shock and glow that it now gave me. The city—not the whole city, of course, but a few places in it that became emotionally significant to me—inspired the poems of my first published book, “Fervor de Buenos Aires.”

I wrote these poems in 1921 and 1922, and the volume came out early in 1923. The book was actually printed in five days; the printing had to be rushed, because it was necessary for us to return to Europe. (My father wanted to consult his Genevan doctor about his sight.) I had bargained for sixty-four pages, but the manuscript ran too long and at the last minute five poems had to be left out—mercifully. I can’t remember a single thing about them. The book was produced in a somewhat boyish spirit. No proofreading was done, no table of contents was provided, and the pages were unnumbered. My sister made a woodcut for the cover, and three hundred copies were printed. In those days, publishing a book was something of a private venture. I never thought of sending copies to the booksellers or out for review. Most of them I just gave away. I recall one of my methods of distribution. Having noticed that many people who went to the offices of Nosotros —one of the older, more solid literary magazines of the time—left their overcoats hanging in the cloak room, I brought fifty or a hundred copies to Alfredo Bianchi, one of the editors. Bianchi stared at me in amazement and said, “Do you expect me to sell these books for you?” “No,” I answered. “Although I’ve written them, I’m not altogether a lunatic. I thought I might ask you to slip some of these books into the pockets of those coats hanging out there.” He generously did so. When I came back after a year’s absence, I found that some of the inhabitants of the overcoats had read my poems, and a few had even written about them. As a matter of fact, in this way I got myself a small reputation as a poet.

The book was essentially romantic, though it was written in a rather lean style and abounded in laconic metaphors. It celebrated sunsets, solitary places, and unfamiliar corners; it ventured into Berkeleian metaphysics and family history; it recorded early loves. At the same time, I also mimicked the Spanish seventeenth century and cited Sir Thomas Browne’s “Urne-Buriall” in my preface. I’m afraid the book was a plum pudding—there was just too much in it. And yet, looking back on it now, I think I have never strayed beyond that book. I feel that all my subsequent writing has only developed themes first taken up there; I feel that all during my lifetime I have been rewriting that one book.

Were the poems in “Fervor de Buenos Aires” Ultraist poetry? When I came back from Europe in 1921, I came bearing the banners of Ultraism. I am still known to literary historians as “the father of Argentine Ultraism.” When I talked things over at the time with fellow-poets Eduardo González Lanuza, Norah Lange, Francisco Piñero, my cousin Guillermo Juan (Borges), and Roberto Ortelli, we came to the conclusion that Spanish Ultraism was overburdened—after the manner of Futurism—with modernity and gadgets. We were unimpressed by railway trains, by propellers, by airplanes, and by electric fans. While in our manifestos we still upheld the primacy of the metaphor and the elimination of transitions and decorative adjectives, what we wanted to write was essential poetry—poems beyond the here and now, free of local color and contemporary circumstances. I think the poem “Plainness” sufficiently illustrates what I personally was after:

The garden’s grillwork gate opens with the ease of a page in a much thumbed book, and, once inside, our eyes have no need to dwell on objects already fixed and exact in memory. Here habits and minds and the private language all families invent are everyday things to me. What necessity is there to speak or pretend to be someone else? The whole house knows me, they’re aware of my worries and weakness. This is the best that can happen— what Heaven perhaps will grant us: not to be wondered at or required to succeed but simply to be let in as part of an undeniable Reality, like stones of the road, like trees.

I think this is a far cry from the timid extravagances of my earlier Spanish Ultraist exercises, when I saw a trolley car as a man shouldering a gun, or the sunrise as a shout, or the setting sun as being crucified in the west. A sane friend to whom I later recited such absurdities remarked, “Ah, I see you held the view that poetry’s chief aim is to startle.” As to whether the poems in “Fervor” are Ultraist or not, the answer—for me—was given by my friend and French translator Néstor Ibarra, who said, “Borges left off being an Ultraist poet with the first Ultraist poem he wrote.” I can now only regret my early Ultraist excesses. After nearly a half century, I find myself still striving to live down that awkward period of my life.

Perhaps the major event of my return was Macedonio Fernández. Of all the people I have met in my life—and I have met some quite remarkable men—no one has ever made so deep and so lasting an impression on me as Macedonio. A tiny figure in a black bowler hat, he was waiting for us on the Dársena Norte when we landed, and I came to inherit his friendship from my father. Both men had been born in 1874. Paradoxically, Macedonio was an outstanding conversationalist and at the same time a man of long silences and few words. We met on Saturday evenings at a café—the Perla, in the Plaza del Once. There we would talk till daybreak, Macedonio presiding. As in Madrid Cansinos had stood for all learning, Macedonio now stood for pure thinking. At the time, I was a great reader and went out very seldom (almost every night after dinner, I used to go to bed and read), but my whole week was lit up with the expectation that on Saturday I’d be seeing and hearing Macedonio. He lived quite near us and I could have seen him whenever I wanted, but I somehow felt that I had no right to that privilege and that in order to give Macedonio’s Saturday its full value I had to forgo him throughout the week. At these meetings, Macedonio would speak perhaps three or four times, risking only a few quiet observations, which were addressed—seemingly—to his neighbor alone. These remarks were never affirmative. Macedonio was very courteous and soft-spoken and would say, for example, “Well, I suppose you’ve noticed . . .” And thereupon he would let loose some striking, highly original thought. But, invariably, he attributed his remark to the hearer.

He was a frail, gray man with a kind of ash-colored hair and mustache that made him look like Mark Twain. The resemblance pleased him, but when he was reminded that he also looked like Paul Valéry, he resented it, since he had little use for Frenchmen. He always wore that black bowler, and for all I know may even have slept in it. He never undressed to go to bed, and at night, to fend off drafts that he thought might cause him toothache, he draped a towel around his head. This made him look like an Arab. Among his other eccentricities were his nationalism (he admired one Argentine president after another for the sufficient reason that the Argentine electorate could not be wrong), his fear of dentistry (this led him to tugging at his teeth, in public, behind a hand, so as to stave off the dentist’s pliers), and a habit of falling sentimentally in love with streetwalkers.

As a writer, Macedonio published several rather unusual volumes, and papers of his are still being collected close to twenty years after his death. His first book, published in 1928, was called “No toda es vigilia la de los ojos abiertos” (“We’re Not Always Awake When Our Eyes Are Open”). It was an extended essay on idealism, written in a deliberately tangled and crabbed style, in order, I suppose, to match the tangledness of reality. The next year, a miscellany of his writings appeared—“Papeles de recienvenido” (“Newcomer’s Papers”)—in which I myself took a hand, collecting and ordering the chapters. This was a sort of miscellany of jokes within jokes. Macedonio also wrote novels and poems, all of them startling but hardly readable. One novel of twenty chapters is prefaced by fifty-six different forewords. For all his brilliance, I don’t think Macedonio is to be found in his writings at all. The real Macedonio was in his conversation.

Macedonio lived modestly in boarding houses, which he seemed to change with frequency. This was because he was always skipping out on the rent. Every time he would move, he’d leave behind piles and piles of manuscripts. Once, his friends scolded him about this, telling him it was a shame all that work should be lost. He said to us, “Do you really think I’m rich enough to lose anything?”

Readers of Hume and Schopenhauer may find little that is new in Macedonio, but the remarkable thing about him is that he arrived at his conclusions by himself. Later on, he actually read Hume, Schopenhauer, Berkeley, and William James, but I suspect he had not done much other reading, and he always quoted the same authors. He considered Sir Walter Scott the greatest of novelists, maybe just out of loyalty to a boyhood enthusiasm. He had once exchanged letters with William James, whom he had written in a medley of English, German, and French, explaining that it was because “I knew so little in any one of these languages that I had constantly to shift tongues.” I think of Macedonio as reading a page or so and then being spurred into thought. He not only argued that we are such stuff as dreams are made on but he really believed that we are all living in a dream world. Macedonio doubted whether truth was communicable. He thought that certain philosophers had discovered it but that they had failed to communicate it completely. However, he also believed that the discovery of truth was quite easy. He once told me that if he could lie out on the pampa, forgetting the world, himself, and his quest, truth might suddenly reveal itself to him. He added that, of course, it might be impossible to put that sudden wisdom into words.

Macedonio was fond of compiling small oral catalogues of people of genius, and in one of them I was amazed to find the name of a very lovable lady of our acquaintance, Quica González Acha de Tomkinsan Alvear. I stared at him openmouthed. I somehow did not think Quica ranked with Hume and Schopenhauer. But Macedonio said, “Philosophers have had to try and explain the universe, while Quica simply feels and understands it.” He would turn to her and ask, “Quica, what is Being?” Quica would answer, “I don’t know what you mean, Macedonio.” “You see,” he would say to me, “she understands so perfectly that she cannot even grasp the fact that we are puzzled.” This was his proof of Quica’s being a woman of genius. When I later told him he might say the same of a child or a cat, Macedonio took it angrily.

Before Macedonio, I had always been a credulous reader. His chief gift to me was to make me read skeptically. At the outset, I plagiarized him devotedly, picking up certain stylistic mannerisms of his that I later came to regret. I look back on him now, however, as an Adam bewildered by the Garden of Eden. His genius survives in but a few of his pages; his influence was of a Socratic nature. I truly loved the man, on this side idolatry, as much as any.

This period, from 1921 to 1930, I was one of great activity, but much of it was perhaps reckless and even pointless. I wrote and published no less than seven books—four of them essays and three of them verse. I also founded three magazines and contributed with fair frequency to nearly a dozen other periodicals, among them La Prensa , Nosotros , Inicial , Criterio , and Sintesis . This productivity now amazes me as much as the fact that I feel only the remotest kinship with the work of these years. Three of the four essay collections—whose names are best forgotten—I have never allowed to be reprinted. In fact, when, in 1953, my present publisher, Emecé, proposed to bring out my “complete writings,” the only reason I accepted was that it would allow me to keep those preposterous volumes suppressed. This reminds me of Mark Twain’s suggestion that a fine library could be started by leaving out the works of Jane Austen, and that even if that library contained no other books it would still be a fine library, since her books were left out.

In the first of these reckless compilations, there was a quite bad essay on Sir Thomas Browne, which may have been the first ever attempted on him in the Spanish language. There was another essay that set out to classify metaphors as though other poetic elements, such as rhythm and music, could be safely ignored. There was a longish essay on the nonexistence of the ego, cribbed from Bradley or the Buddha or Macedonio Fernández. When I wrote these pieces, I was trying to play the sedulous ape to two Spanish-baroque seventeenth-century writers, Quevedo and Saavedra Fajardo, who stood in their own stiff, arid, Spanish way for the same kind of writing as Sir Thomas Browne in “Urne-Buriall.” I was doing my best to write Latin in Spanish, and the book collapses under the sheer weight of its involutions and sententious judgments. The next of these failures was a kind of reaction. I went to the other extreme—I tried to be as Argentine as I could. I got hold of Segovia’s dictionary of Argentinisms and worked in so many local words that many of my countrymen could hardly understand it. Since I have mislaid the dictionary, I’m not sure I would any longer understand the book myself, and so have given it up as utterly hopeless. The third of these unmentionables stands for a kind of partial redemption. I was creeping out of the second book’s style and slowly going back to sanity, to writing with some attempt at logic and at making things easy for the reader rather than dazzling him with purple passages. One such experiment, of dubious value, was “Hombres pelearon” (“Men Fought”), my first venture into the mythology of the old Northside of Buenos Aires. In it, I was trying to tell a purely Argentine story in an Argentine way. This story is one I have been retelling, with small variations, ever since. It is the tale of the motiveless, or disinterested, duel—of courage for its own sake. I insisted when I wrote it that in our sense of the language we Argentines were different from the Spaniards. Now, instead, I think we should try to stress our linguistic affinities. I was still writing, but in a milder way, so that Spaniards would not understand me—writing, it might be said, to be ununderstood. The Gnostics claimed that the only way to avoid a sin was to commit it and be rid of it. In my books of these years, I seem to have committed most of the major literary sins, some of them under the influence of a great writer, Leopoldo Lugones, whom I still cannot help admiring. These sins were fine writing, local color, a quest for the unexpected, and a seventeenth-century style. Today, I no longer feel guilty over these excesses; those books were written by somebody else. Until a few years ago, if the price were not too stiff, I would buy up copies and burn them.

Of the poems of this time, I should perhaps have also suppressed my second collection, “Luna de enfrente” (“Moon Across the Way”). It was published in 1925 and is a kind of riot of sham local color. Among its tomfooleries were the spelling of my first name in the nineteenth-century Chilean fashion as “Jorje” (it was a halfhearted attempt at phonetic spelling); the spelling of the Spanish for “and” as “ i ” instead of “ y ” (our greatest writer, Sarmiento, had done the same, trying to be as un-Spanish as he could); and the omission of the final “d” in words like “ autoridá ” and “ ciudá .” In later editions, I dropped the worst poems, pruned the eccentricities, and, successively—through several reprintings—revised and toned down the verses. The third collection of the time, “Cuaderno San Martín” (the title has nothing to do with the national hero; it was merely the brand name of the out-of-fashion copybook into which I wrote the poems), includes some quite legitimate pieces, such as “La noche que en el Sur lo velaron,” whose title has been strikingly translated by Robert Fitzgerald as “Deathwatch on the Southside,” and “Muertes de Buenos Aires” (“Deaths of Buenos Aires”), about the two chief graveyards of the Argentine capital. One poem in the book (no favorite of mine) has somehow become a minor Argentine classic: “The Mythical Founding of Buenos Aires.” This book, too, has been improved, or purified, by cuts and revisions down through the years.

In 1929, that third book of essays won the Second Municipal Prize of three thousand pesos, which in those days was a lordly sum of money. I was, for one thing, to acquire with it a second-hand set of the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. For another, I was insured a year’s leisure and decided I would write a longish book on a wholly Argentine subject. My mother wanted me to write about any of three really worthwhile poets—Ascasubi, Almafuerte, or Lugones. I now wish I had. Instead, I chose to write about a popular but minor poet, Evaristo Carriego. My mother and father pointed out that his poems were not good. “But he was a friend and neighbor of ours,” I said. “Well, if you think that qualifies him as the subject for a book, go ahead,” they said. Carriego was the man who discovered the literary possibilities of the run-down and ragged outskirts of the city—the Palermo of my boyhood. His career followed the same evolution as the tango—rollicking, daring, courageous at first, then turning sentimental. In 1912, at the age of twenty-nine, he died of tuberculosis, leaving behind a single volume of his work. I remember that a copy of it, inscribed to my father, was one of several Argentine books that we had taken to Geneva and that I read and reread there. Around 1909, Carriego had dedicated a poem to my mother. Actually, he had written it in her album. In it, he spoke of me: “And may your son . . . go forth, led by the trusting wing of inspiration, to carry out the vintage of a new annunciation, which from lofty grapes will yield the wine of Song.” But when I began writing my book the same thing happened to me that happened to Carlyle as he wrote his “Frederick the Great.” The more I wrote, the less I cared about my hero. I had started out to do a straight biography, but on the way I became more and more interested in old-time Buenos Aires. Readers, of course, were not slow in finding out that the book hardly lived up to its title, “Evaristo Carriego,” and so it fell flat. When the second edition appeared twenty-five years later, in 1955, as the fourth volume of my “complete” works, I enlarged the book with several new chapters, one a “History of the Tango.” As a consequence of these additions, I feel “Evaristo Carriego” has been rounded out for the better.

Prisma , founded in 1921 and lasting two numbers, was the earliest of the magazines I edited. Our small Ultraist group was eager to have a magazine of its own, but a real magazine was beyond our means. I had noticed billboard ads, and the thought came to me that we might similarly print a “mural magazine” and paste it up ourselves on the walls of buildings in different parts of town. Each issue was a large single sheet and contained a manifesto and some six or eight short, laconic poems, printed with plenty of white space around them, and a woodcut by my sister. We sallied forth at night—González Lanuza, Piñero, my cousin, and I—armed with pastepots and brushes provided by my mother, and, walking miles on end, slapped them up along Santa Fe, Calao, Entre Ríos, and Mexico Streets. Most of our handiwork was torn down by baffled readers almost at once, but, luckily for us, Alfredo Bianchi, of Nosotros , saw one of them and invited us to publish an Ultraist anthology among the pages of his solid magazine. After Prisma , we went in for a six-page magazine, which was really just a single sheet printed on both sides and folded twice. This was the first Proa ( Prow ), and three numbers of it were published. Two years later, in 1924, came the second Proa . One afternoon, Brandin Caraffa, a young poet from Córdoba, came to see me at the Garden Hotel, where we were living upon return from our second European trip. He told me that Ricardo Gitiraldes and Pablo Rojas Paz had decided to found a magazine that would represent the new literary generation, and that everyone had said that if that were its goal I could not possibly be left out. Naturally, I was flattered. That night, I went around to the Phoenix Hotel, where Güiraldes was staying. He greeted me with these words: “Brandin told me that the night before last all of you got together to found a magazine of young writers, and everyone said I couldn’t be left out.” At that moment, Rojas Paz came in and told us excitedly, “I’m quite flattered.” I broke in and said, “The night before last, the three of us got together and decided that in a magazine of new writers you couldn’t be left out.” Thanks to this innocent stratagem, Proa was born. Each one of us put in fifty pesos, which paid for an edition of three to five hundred copies with no misprints and on fine paper. But a year and a half and fifteen issues later, for lack of subscriptions and ads, we had to give it up.

These years were quite happy ones because they stood for many friendships. There were those of Norah Lange, Macedonio, Piñero, and my father. Behind our work was a sincerity; we felt we were renewing both prose and poetry. Of course, like all young men, I tried to be as unhappy as I could—a kind of Hamlet and Raskolnikov rolled into one. What we achieved was quite bad, but our comradeships endured.

In 1924, I found my way into two different literary sets. One, whose memory I still enjoy, was that of Güiraldes, who was yet to write “Don Segundo Sombra.” Güiraldes was very generous to me. I would give him a quite clumsy poem and he would read between the lines and divine what I had been trying to say but what my literary incapacity had prevented me from saying. He would then speak of the poem to other people, who were baffled not to find these things in the text. The other set, which I rather regret, was that of the magazine Martín Fierro . I disliked what Martín Fierro stood for, which was the French idea that literature is being continually renewed—that Adam is reborn every morning—and also for the idea that since Paris had literary cliques that wallowed in publicity and bickering, we should be up to date and do the same. One result of this was that a sham literary feud was cooked up in Buenos Aires—that between Florida and Boedo. Florida represented downtown and Boedo the proletariat. I’d have preferred to be in the Boedo group, since I was writing about the old Northside and slums, sadness, and sunsets. But I was informed by one of the two conspirators—they were Ernesto Palacio, of Florida, and Roberto Mariani, of Boedo—that I was already one of the Florida warriors and it was too late for me to change. The whole thing was just a put-up job. Some writers belonged to both groups—Roberto Arlt and Nicolás Olivari, for example. This sham is now taken into serious consideration by “credulous universities.” But it was partly publicity, partly a boyish prank.

Linked to this time are the names of Silvina and Victoria Ocampo, of the poet Carlos Mastronardi, of Eduardo Mallea, and, not least, of Alejandro Xul-Solar. In a rough-and-ready way, it may be said that Xul, who was a mystic, a poet, and a painter, is our William Blake. I remember asking him on one particularly sultry afternoon about what he had done that stifling day. His answer was “Nothing whatever, except for founding twelve religions after lunch.” Xul was also a philologist and the inventor of two languages. One was a philosophical language after the manner of John Wilkins and the other a reformation of Spanish with many English, German, and Greek words thrown in. He came of Baltic and Italian stock. “Xul” was his version of “Schulz” and “Solar” of “Solari.” At this time, I also met Alfonso Reyes. He was the Mexican Ambassador to Argentina, and used to invite me to dinner every Sunday at the Embassy. I think of Reyes as the finest Spanish prose stylist of this century, and in my writing I learned a great deal about simplicity and directness from him.

Summing up this span of my life, I find myself completely out of sympathy with the priggish and rather dogmatic young man I then was. Those friends, however, are still very living and very close to me. In fact, they form a precious part of me. Friendship is, I think, the one redeeming Argentine passion.

In the course of a lifetime devoted chiefly to books, I have read but few novels, and, in most cases, only a sense of duty has enabled me to find my way to their last page. At the same time, I have always been a reader and rereader of short stories. Stevenson, Kipling, James, Conrad, Poe, Chesterton, the tales of Lane’s “Arabian Nights,” and certain stories by Hawthorne have been habits of mine since I can remember. The feeling that great novels like “Don Quixote” and “Huckleberry Finn” are virtually shapeless served to reinforce my taste for the short-story form, whose indispensable elements are economy and a clearly stated beginning, middle, and end. As a writer, however, I thought for years that the short story was beyond my powers, and it was only after a long and roundabout series of timid experiments in narration that I sat down to write real stories.

It took me some six years, from 1927 to 1933, to go from that all too self-conscious sketch “Hombres pelearon” to my first outright short story, “Hombre de la esquina rosada” (“Streetcorner Man”). A friend of mine, don Nicolás Paredes, a former political boss and professional gambler of the Northside, had died, and I wanted to record something of his voice, his anecdotes, and his particular way of telling them. I slaved over my every page, sounding out each sentence and striving to phrase it in his exact tones. We were living out in Adrogué at the time and, because I knew my mother would heartily disapprove of the subject matter, I composed in secret over a period of several months. Originally titled “Hombres de las orillas” (“Men from the Edge of Town”), the story appeared in the Saturday supplement, which I was editing, of a yellow-press daily called Crítica . But out of shyness, and perhaps a feeling that the story was a bit beneath me, I signed it with a pen name—the name of one of my great-great-grandfathers, Francisco Bustos. Although the story became popular to the point of embarrassment (today, I only find it stagy and mannered and the characters bogus), I never regarded it as a starting point. It simply stands there as a kind of freak.

The real beginning of my career as a story writer starts with the series of sketches entitled “Historia universal de la infamia” (“A Universal History of Infamy”), which I contributed to the columns of Crítica in 1933 and 1934. The irony of this is that “Streetcorner Man” really was a story but that these sketches and several of the fictional pieces which followed them, and which very slowly led me to legitimate stories, were in the nature of hoaxes and pseudo-essays. In my “Universal History,” I did not want to repeat what Marcel Schwob had done in his “Imaginary Lives.” He had invented biographies of real men about whom little or nothing is recorded. I, instead, read up on the lives of known persons and then deliberately varied and distorted them according to my own whims. For example, after reading Herbert Asbury’s “The Gangs of New York,” I set down my free version of Monk Eastman, the Jewish gunman, in flagrant contradiction of my chosen authority. I did the same for Billy the Kid, for John Murrel (whom I rechristened Lazarus Morell), for the Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, for the Tichborne Claimant, and for several others. I never thought of book publication. The pieces were meant for popular consumption in Crítica and were pointedly picturesque. I suppose now the secret value of those sketches—apart from the sheer pleasure the writing gave me—lay in the fact that they were narrative exercises. Since the general plots or circumstances were all given me, I had only to embroider sets of vivid variations.

My next story, “The Approach to al-Mu’tasim,” written in 1935, is both a hoax and a pseudo-essay. It purports to be a review of a book published originally in Bombay three years earlier. I endowed its fake second edition with a real publisher, Victor Gollancz, and a preface by a real writer, Dorothy L. Sayers. But the author and the book are entirely my own invention. I gave the plot and details of some chapters—borrowing from Kipling and working in the twelfth-century Persian mystic Farid ud-Din Attar—and then carefully pointed out its shortcomings. The story appeared the next year in a volume of my essays, “Historia de la eternidad” (“A History of Eternity”), buried at the back of the book together with an article on the “Art of Insult.” Those who read “The Approach to al-Mu’tasim” took it at face value, and one of my friends even ordered a copy from London. It was not until 1942 that I openly published it as a short story in my first story collection, “El jardin de senderos que se bifurcan” (“The Garden of Branching Paths”). Perhaps I have been unfair to this story; it now seems to me to foreshadow and even to set the pattern for those tales that were somehow awaiting me, and upon which my reputation as a storyteller was to be based.

Along about 1937, I took my first regular full-time job. I had previously worked at small editing tasks. There was the Crítica supplement, which was a heavily and even gaudily illustrated entertainment sheet. There was El Hogar , a popular society weekly, to which, twice a month, I contributed a couple of literary pages on foreign books and authors. I had also written newsreel texts and had been editor of a pseudo-scientific magazine called Urbe , which was really a promotional organ of a privately owned Buenos Aires subway system. These had all been small-paving jobs, and I was long past the age when I should have begun contributing to our household upkeep. Now, through friends, I was given a very minor position as First Assistant in the Miguel Cané branch of the Municipal Library, out in a drab and dreary part of town to the southwest. While there were Second and Third Assistants below me, there were also a Director and First, Second, and Third Officials above me. I was paid two hundred and ten pesos a month and later went up to two hundred and forty. These were sums roughly equivalent to seventy or eighty American dollars.

At the library, we did very little work. There were some fifty of us doing what fifteen could easily have done. My particular job, shared with fifteen or twenty colleagues, was classifying and cataloguing the library’s holdings, which until that time were uncatalogued. The collection, however, was so small that we knew where to find the books without the system, so the system, though laboriously carried out, was never needed or used. The first day, I worked honestly. On the next, some of my fellows took me aside to say that I couldn’t do this sort of thing because it showed them up. “Besides,” they argued, “as this cataloguing has been planned to give us some semblance of work, you’ll put us out of our jobs.” I told them I had classified four hundred titles instead of their one hundred. “Well, if you keep that up,” they said, “the boss will be angry and won’t know what to do with us.” For the sake of realism, I was told that from then on I should do eighty-three books one day, ninety another, and one hundred and four the third.

I stuck out the library for about nine years. They were nine years of solid unhappiness. At work, the other men were interested in nothing but horse racing, soccer matches, and smutty stories. Once, a woman, one of the readers, was raped on her way to the ladies’ room. Everybody said such things were bound to happen, since the men’s and ladies rooms were adjoining. One day, two rather posh and well-meaning friends—society ladies—came to see me at work. They phoned me a day or two later to say, “You may think it amusing to work in a place like that, but promise us you will find at least a nine-hundred-peso job before the month is out.” I gave them my word that I would. Ironically, at the time I was a fairly well-known writer—except at the library. I remember a fellow-employee’s once noting in an encyclopedia the name of a certain Jorge Luis Borges—a fact that set him wondering at the coincidence of our identical names and birth dates. Now and then during these years, we municipal workers were rewarded with gifts of a two-pound package of maté to take home. Sometimes in the evening, as I walked the ten blocks to the tramline, my eyes would be filled with tears. These small gifts from above always underlined my menial and dismal existence.

A couple of hours each day, riding back and forth on the tram, I made my way through “The Divine Comedy,” helped as far as “Purgatory” by John Aitken Carlyle’s prose translation and then ascending the rest of the way on my own. I would do all my library work in the first hour and then steal away to the basement and pass the other five hours in reading or writing. I remember in this way rereading the six volumes of Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall” and the many volumes of Vicente Fidel López “History of the Argentine Republic.” I read Léon Bloy, Claudel, Groussac, and Bernard Shaw. On holidays, I translated Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. At some point, I was moved up to the dizzying height of Third Official. One morning, my mother rang me up and I asked for leave to go home, arriving just in time to see my father die. He had undergone a long agony and was very impatient for his death.

It was on Christmas Eve of 1938—the same year my father died—that I had a severe accident. I was running up a stairway and suddenly felt something brush my scalp. I had grazed a freshly painted open casement window. In spite of first-aid treatment, the wound became poisoned, and for a period of a week or so I lay sleepless every night and had hallucinations and high fever. One evening, I lost the power of speech and had to be rushed to the hospital for an immediate operation. Septicemia had set in, and for a month I hovered, all unknowingly, between life and death. (Much later, I was to write about this in my story “The South.”) When I began to recover, I feared for my mental integrity. I remember that my mother wanted to read to me from a book I had just ordered, C. S. Lewis’s “Out of the Silent Planet,” but for two or three nights I kept putting her off. At last, she prevailed, and after hearing a page or two I fell to crying. My mother asked me why the tears. “I’m crying because I understand,” I said. A bit later, I wondered whether I could ever write again. I had previously written quite a few poems and dozens of short reviews. I thought that if I tried to write a review now and failed, I’d be all through intellectually but that if I tried something I had never really done before and failed at that it wouldn’t be so bad and might even prepare me for the final revelation. I decided I would try to write a story. The result was “Pierre Menard, Author of ‘Don Quixote.’ ”

“Pierre Menard,” like its forerunner “The Approach to al-Mu’tasim,” was still a halfway house between the essay and the true tale. But the achievement spurred me on. I next tried something more ambitious—“Tlön, Ugbar, Orbis Tertius,” about the discovery of a new world that finally replaces our present world. Both were published in Victoria Ocampo’s magazine Sur . I kept up my writing at the library. Though my colleagues thought of me as a traitor for not sharing their boisterous fun, I went on with work of my own in the basement, or, when the weather was warm, up on the flat roof. My Kafkian story “The Library of Babel” was meant as a nightmare version or magnification of that municipal library, and certain details in the text have no particular meaning. The numbers of books and shelves that I recorded in the story were literally what I had at my elbow: Clever critics have worried over those ciphers, and generously endowed them with mystic significance. “The Lottery in Babylon,” “Death and the Compass,” and “The Circular Ruins” were also written, in whole or part, while I played truant. These tales and others were to become “The Garden of Branching Paths,” a book expanded and retitled “Ficciones” in 1944. “Ficciones” and “El Aleph” (1949 and 1952), my second story collection, are, I suppose, my two major books.

In 1946, a president whose name I do not want to remember came into power. One day soon after, I was honored with the news that I had been “promoted” out of the library to the inspectorship of poultry and rabbits in the public markets. I went to the City Hall to find out what it was all about. “Look here,” I said. “It’s rather strange that among so many others at the library I should be singled out as worthy of this new position.” “Well,” the clerk answered, “you were on the side of the Allies—what do you expect?” His statement was unanswerable; the next day, I sent in my resignation. My friends rallied round me at once and offered me a public dinner. I prepared a speech for the occasion but, knowing I was too shy to read it myself, I asked my friend Pedro Henríquez Ureña to read it for me.

I was now out of a job. Several months before, an old English lady had read my tea leaves and had foretold that I was soon to travel, to lecture, and to make vast sums of money thereby. When I told my mother about it, we both laughed, for public speaking was far beyond me. At this juncture, a friend came to the rescue, and I was made a teacher of English literature at the Asociación Argentina de Cultura Inglesa. I was also asked at the same time to lecture on classic American literature at the Colegio Libre de Estudios Superiores. Since this pair of offers was made three months before classes opened, I accepted, feeling quite safe. As the time grew near, however, I grew sicker and sicker. My series of nine lectures was to be on Hawthorne, Poe, Thoreau, Emerson, Melville, Whitman, Twain, Henry James, and Veblen. I wrote the first one down. But I had no time to write out the second one. Besides, thinking of the first lecture as Doomsday, I felt that only eternity could come after. The first one went off well enough—miraculously. Two nights before the second lecture, I took my mother for a long walk around Adrogué and had her time me as I rehearsed my talk. She said she thought it was overlong. “In that case,” I said, “I’m safe.” My fear had been of running dry. So, at forty-seven, I found a new and exciting life opening up for me. I travelled up and down Argentina and Uruguay, lecturing on Swedenborg, Blake, the Persian and Chinese mystics, Buddhism, gauchesco poetry, Martin Buber, the Kabbalah, the Arabian Nights, T. E. Lawrence, medieval Germanic poetry, the Icelandic sagas, Heine, Dante, Expressionism, and Cervantes. I went from town to town, staying overnight in hotels I‘d never see again. Sometimes my mother or a friend accompanied me. Not only did I end up making far more money than at the library but I enjoyed the work and felt that it justified me.

One of the chief events of these years—and of my life—was the beginning of my friendship with Adolfo Bioy-Casares. We met in 1930 or 1931, when he was about seventeen and I was just past thirty. It is always taken for granted in these cases that the older man is the master and the younger his disciple. This may have been true at the outset, but several years later, when we began to work together, Bioy was really and secretly the master. He and I attempted many different literary ventures. We compiled anthologies of Argentine poetry, tales of the fantastic, and detective stories; we wrote articles and forewords; we annotated Sir Thomas Browne and Gracián; we translated short stories by writers like Beerbohm, Kipling, Wells, and Lord Dunsany; we founded a magazine, Destiempo , which lasted three issues; we wrote film scripts, which were invariably rejected. Opposing my taste for the pathetic, the sententious, and the baroque, Bioy made me feel that quietness and restraint are more desirable. If I may be allowed a sweeping statement, Bioy led me gradually toward classicism.

It was at some point in the early forties that we began writing in collaboration—a feat that up to that time I had thought impossible. I had invented what we thought was a quite good plot for a detective story. One rainy morning, he told me we ought to give it a try. I reluctantly agreed, and a little later that same morning the thing happened. A third man, Honorio Bustos Domecq, emerged and took over. In the long run, he ruled us with a rod of iron and to our amusement, and later to our dismay, he became utterly unlike ourselves, with his own whims, his own puns, and his own very elaborate style of writing. Domecq was the name of a great-grandfather of Bioy’s and Bustos of a great-grandfather of mine from Córdoba. Bustos Domecq’s first book was “Six Problems for don Isidro Parodi” (1942), and during the writing of that volume he never got out of hand. Max Carrados had attempted a blind detective; Bioy and I went one step further and confined our detective to a jail cell. The book was at the same time a satire on the Argentine. For many years, the dual identity of Bustos Domecq was never revealed. When finally it was, people thought that, as Bustos was a joke, his writing could hardly be taken seriously.

Our next collaboration was another detective novel, “A Model for Death.” This one was so personal and so full of private jokes that we published it only in an edition that was not for sale. The author of this book we named B. Suárez Lynch. The “B.” stood, I think, for Bioy and Borges, “Suárez” for another great-grandfather of mine, and “Lynch” for another great-grandfather of Bioy’s. Bustos Domecq reappeared in 1946 in another private edition, this time of two stories, entitled “Two Memorable Fantasies.” After a long eclipse, Bustos took up his pen again, and in 1967 brought out his “Chronicles.” These are articles written on imaginary, extravagantly modern artists—architects, sculptors, painters, chefs, poets, novelists, couturiers—by a devotedly modern critic. But both the author and his subjects are fools, and it is hard to tell who is taking in whom. The book is inscribed, “To those three forgotten greats—Picasso, Joyce, Le Corbusier.” The style is itself a parody. Bustos writes a literary journalese, abounding in neologisms, a Latinate vocabulary, clichés, mixed metaphors, non sequiturs, and bombast.

I have often been asked how collaboration is possible. I think it requires a joint abandoning of the ego, of vanity, and maybe of common politeness. The collaborators should forget themselves and think only in terms of the work. In fact, when somebody wants to know whether such-and-such a joke or epithet came from my side of the table or Bioy’s. I honestly cannot tell him. I have tried to collaborate with other friends—some of them very close ones—but their inability to be blunt on the one hand or thick-skinned on the other has made the scheme impossible. As to the “Chronicles of Bustos Domeeq,” I think they are better than anything I have published under my own name and nearly as good as anything Bioy has written on his own.

In 1950, I was elected President of the Sociedad Argentina de Escritores (Argentine Society of Writers). The Argentine Republic, then as now, is a soft country, and the S.A.D.E. was one of the few strongholds against the dictatorship. This was so evident that many distinguished men of letters did not dare set foot inside its doors until after the revolution. One curious trait of the dictatorship was that even its professed upholders made it clear that they did not really take the government seriously but were acting out of self-interest. This was understood and forgiven, since most of my countrymen have an intellectual, if not a moral, conscience. Nearly all the smutty jokes made up about Perón and his wife were the invention of Peronistas themselves, trying to save face. The S.A.D.E. was eventually closed. I remember the last lecture I was allowed to give there. The audience, quite a small one, included a very puzzled policeman who did his clumsy best to set down a few of my remarks on Persian Sufism. During this drab and hopeless period, my mother—then in her seventies—was under house arrest. My sister and one of my nephews spent a month in jail. I myself had a detective on my heels, whom I first took on long, aimless walks and at last made friends with. He admitted that he, too, hated Perón, but said that he was obeying orders. Ernesto Palacio once offered to introduce me to the Unspeakable, but I did not want to meet him. How could I be introduced to a man whose hand I would not shake?

The long-hoped-for revolution came in September, 1955. After a sleepless, anxious night, nearly the whole population came out into the streets, cheering the revolution and shouting the name of Córdoba, where most of the fighting had taken place. We were so carried away that for some time we were quite unaware of the rain that was soaking us to the bone. We were so happy that not a single word was even uttered against the fallen dictator. Perón went into hiding, and was later allowed to leave the country. No one knows how much money he got away with.

Two very dear friends of mine, Esther Zemborain de Torres and Victoria Ocampo, dreamed up the possibility of my being appointed Director of the National Library. I thought the scheme a wild one, and hoped at most to be given the directorship of some small-town library, preferably to the south of the city. Within the space of a day, a petition was signed by the magazine Sur (read Victoria Ocampo), by the reopened S.A.D.E. (read Carlos Alberto Erro), by the Sociedad Argentina de Cultura Inglesa (read Carlos del Campillo), and by the Colegio Libre de Estudios Superiores (read Luis Reissig). This was placed on the desk of the Minister of Education, and eventually I was appointed to the directorship by General Eduardo Lonardi, who was Acting President. A few days earlier, my mother and I had walked to the library at night to take a look at the building, but, feeling superstitious, I refused to go in. “Not until I get the job,” I said. That same week, I was called to come to the library to take over. My family was present, and I made a speech to the employees, telling them I was actually the Director—the incredible Director. At the same time, José Edmundo Clemente, who a few years before had managed to persuade Emecé to bring out an edition of my works, became the Assistant Director. Of course, I felt very important, but we got no pay for the next three months. I don’t think my predecessor, who was a Peronista, was ever officially fired. He just never came around to the library again. They named me to the job but did not take the trouble to unseat him.

Another pleasure came to me the very next year, when I was named to the professorship of English and American Literature at the University of Buenos Aires. Other candidates had sent in painstaking lists of their translations, papers, lectures, and other achievements. I limited myself to the following statement: “Quite unwittingly, I have been qualifying myself for this position throughout my life.” My plain approach gained the day. I was hired, and spent ten or twelve happy years at the university.

My blindness had been coming on gradually since childhood. It was a slow, summer twilight. There was nothing particularly pathetic or dramatic about it. Beginning in 1927, I underwent eight eye operations, but since the late nineteen-fifties, when I wrote my “Poem of the Gifts,” for reading and writing purposes I have been blind. Blindness ran in my family; a description of the operation performed on the eyes of my great-grandfather, Edward Young Haslam, appeared in the pages of the London medical journal the Lancet . Blindness also seems to run among the Directors of the National Library. Two of my eminent forerunners, José Mármol and Paul Groussac, suffered the same fate. In my poem, I speak of God’s splendid irony in granting me at one time eight hundred thousand books and darkness.

One salient consequence of my blindness was my gradual abandonment of free verse in favor of classical metrics. In fact, blindness made me take up the writing of poetry again. Since rough drafts were denied me, I had to fall back on memory. It is obviously easier to remember verse than prose, and to remember regular verse forms rather than free ones. Regular verse is, so to speak, portable. One can walk down the street or be riding the subway while composing and polishing a sonnet, for rhyme and metre have mnemonic virtues. In these years, I wrote dozens of sonnets and longer poems consisting of eleven-syllable quatrains. I thought I had taken Lugones as my master, but when the verses were written my friends told me that, regrettably, they were quite unlike him. In my later poetry, a narrative thread is always to be found. As a matter of fact, I even think of plots for poems. Perhaps the main difference between Lugones and me is that he held French literature as his model and lived intellectually in a French world, whereas I look to English literature. In this new poetic activity, I never thought of building a sequence of poems, as I always formerly did, but was chiefly interested in each piece for its own sake. In this way, I wrote poems on such different subjects as Emerson and wine, Snorri Sturluson and the hourglass, my grandfather’s death and the beheading of Charles I. I also went in for summing up my literary heroes: Poe, Swedenborg, Whitman, Heine, Camões, Jonathan Edwards, and Cervantes. Due tribute, of course, was also paid to mirrors, the Minotaur, and knives.

I had always been attracted to the metaphor, and this learning led me to the study of the simple Saxon kennings and overelaborate Norse ones. As far back as 1932, I had even written an essay about them. The quaint notion of using, as far as it could be done, metaphors instead of straightforward nouns, and of these metaphors’ being at once traditional and arbitrary, puzzled and appealed to me. I was later to surmise that the purpose of these figures lay not only in the pleasure given by the pomp and circumstance of compounding words but also in the demands of alliteration. Taken by themselves, the kennings are not especially witty, and calling a ship “sea-stallion” and the open sea “the whale’s-road” is no great feat. The Norse skalds went a step further, calling the sea “the sea-stallion’s-road,” so that what originally was an image became a laborious equation. In turn, my investigation of kennings led me to the study of Old English and Old Norse. Another factor that impelled me in this direction was my ancestry. It may be no more than a romantic superstition of mine, but the fact that the Haslams lived in Northumbria and Mercia—or, as they are today called, Northumberland and the Midlands—links me with a Saxon and perhaps a Danish past. (My fondness for such a northern past has been resented by some of my more nationalistic countrymen, who dub me an Englishman, but I hardly need point out that many things English are utterly alien to me: tea, the Royal Family, manly sports, the worship of every line written by the uncaring Shakespeare.)

At the end of one of my university courses, several of my students came to see me at the library. We had just polished off all English literature from Beowulf to Bernard Shaw in the span of four months, and I thought we might now do something in earnest. I proposed that we begin at the beginning, and they agreed. I knew that at home, on a certain top shelf, I had copies of Sweet’s “Anglo-Saxon Reader” and the “Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.” When the students came the next Saturday morning, we began reading these two books. We skipped grammar as much as we could and pronounced the words like German. All at once, we fell in love with a sentence in which Rome (Romeburh) was mentioned. We got drunk on these words and rushed down Peru Street shouting them at the top of our voices. And so we had set out on a long adventure. I had always thought of English literature as the richest in the world; the discovery now of a secret chamber at the very threshold of that literature came to me as an additional gift. Personally, I knew that the adventure would be an endless one, and that I could go on studying Old English for the rest of my days. The pleasure of studying, not the vanity of mastering, has been my chief aim, and I have not been disappointed these past twelve years. As for my recent interest in Old Norse, this is only a logical step, since the two languages are closely linked and since of all medieval Germanic literature Old Norse is the crown. My excursions into Old English have been wholly personal and, therefore, have made their way into a number of my poems. A fellow-academician once took me aside and said in alarm, “What do you mean by publishing a poem entitled ‘Embarking on the Study of Anglo-Saxon Grammar’?” I tried to make him understand that Anglo-Saxon was as intimate an experience to me as looking at a sunset or falling in love.

Around 1954, I began writing short prose pieces-sketches and parables. One day, my friend Carlos Frias, of Emecé, told me he needed a new book for the series of my so-called complete works. I said I had none to give him, but Frias persisted, saying, “Every writer has a book if he only looks for it.” Going through drawers at home one idle Sunday, I began ferreting out uncollected poems and prose pieces, some of the latter going back to my days on Crítica . These odds and ends, sorted out and ordered and published in 1960, became “El hacedor” (“The Maker”). Remarkably, this book, which I accumulated rather than wrote, seems to me my most personal work and, to my taste, maybe my best. The explanation is only too easy: the pages of “El hacedor” contain no padding. Each piece was written for its own sake and out of an inner necessity. By the time it was undertaken, I had come to realize that fine writing is a mistake, and a mistake born out of vanity. Good writing, I firmly believe, should be done in an unobtrusive way.

On the closing page of that book, I told of a man who sets out to make a picture of the universe. After many years, he has covered a blank wall with images of ships, towers, horses, weapons, and men, only to find out at the moment of his death that he has drawn a likeness of his own face. This may be the case of all books; it is certainly the case of this particular book.

Fame, like my blindness, had been coming gradually to me. I had never expected it, I had never sought it. Néstor Ibarra and Roger Caillois, who in the early nineteen-fifties daringly translated me into French, were my first benefactors. I suspect that their pioneer work paved the way for my sharing with Samuel Beckett the Formentor Prize in 1961, for until I appeared in French I was practically invisible—not only abroad but at home in Buenos Aires. As a consequence of that prize, my books mushroomed overnight throughout the Western world.

This same year, under the auspices of Edward Larocque Tinker, I was invited as Visiting Professor to the University of Texas. It was my first physical encounter with America. In a sense, because of my reading, I had always been there, and yet how strange it seemed when, in Austin, I heard ditch-diggers on the campus speaking in English, a language I had until then always thought of as being denied that class of people. America, in fact, had taken on such mythic proportions in my mind that I was sincerely amazed to find there such commonplace things as weeds, mud, puddles, dirt roads, flies, and stray dogs. Though at times we fell into homesickness, I know now that my mother—who accompanied me—and I grew to love Texas. She, who always loathed football, even rejoiced over our victory when the Longhorns defeated the neighboring Bears. At the university, when I finished one class I was giving in Argentine literature, I would sit in on another as a student of Saxon verse under Dr. Rudolph Willard. My days were full. I found American students, unlike the run of students in the Argentine, far more interested in their subjects than in their grades. I tried to interest people in Ascasubi and Lugones, but they stubbornly questioned and interviewed me about my own output. I spent as much time as I could with Ramón Martínez López, who, as a philologist, shared my passion for etymologies and taught me many things. During those six months in the States, we travelled widely, and I lectured at universities from coast to coast. I saw New Mexico, San Francisco, New York, New England, Washington. I found America the friendliest, most forgiving, and most generous nation I had ever visited. We South Americans tend to think in terms of convenience, whereas people in the United States approach things ethically. This—amateur Protestant that I am—I admired above all. It even helped me overlook skyscrapers, paper bags, television, plastics, and the unholy jungle of gadgets.

My second American trip came in 1967, when I held the Charles Eliot Norton Chair of Poetry at Harvard, and lectured to well-wishing audiences on “This Craft of Verse.” I spent seven months in Cambridge, also teaching a course on Argentine writers and travelling all over New England, where most things American, including the West, seem to have been invented. I made numerous literary pilgrimages—to Hawthorne’s haunts in Salem, to Emerson’s in Concord, to Melville’s in New Bedford, to Emily Dickinson’s in Amherst, and to Longfellow’s around the corner from where I lived. Friends seemed to multiply in Cambridge: Jorge Guillén, John Murchison, Juan Marichal, Raimundo Lida, Héctor Ingrao, and a Persian physicist who had worked out a theory of spherical time that I do not quite understand but hope someday to plagiarize—Farid Hushfar. I also met writers like Robert Fitzgerald, John Updike, and the late Dudley Fitts. I availed myself of chances to see new parts of the continent: Iowa, where I found my native pampa awaiting me; Chicago, recalling Carl Sandburg; Missouri; Maryland; Virginia. At the end of my stay, I was greatly honored to have my poems read at the Y.M.H.A. Poetry Center in New York, with several of my translators reading and a number of poets in the audience. I owe a third trip to the United States, in November of 1969, to my two benefactors at the University of Oklahoma, Lowell Dunham and Ivar Ivask, who invited me to give talks there and called together a group of scholars to comment on, and enrich, my work. Ivask made me a gift of a fish-shaped Finnish dagger—rather alien to the tradition of the old Palermo of my boyhood.

Looking back on this past decade, I seem to have been quite a wanderer. In 1963, thanks to Neil MacKay of the British Council in Buenos Aires, I was able to visit England and Scotland. There, too, again in my mother’s company, I made my pilgrimages: to London, so teeming with literary memories; to Lichfield and Dr. Johnson; to Manchester and De Quincey; to Rye and Henry James; to the Lake Country; to Edinburgh. I visited my grandmother’s birthplace in Hanley, one of the Five Towns—Arnold Bennett country. Scotland and Yorkshire I think of as among the loveliest places on earth. Somewhere in the Scottish hills and glens I recaptured a strange sense of loneliness and bleakness that I had known before; it took me some time to trace this feeling back to the far-flung wastes of Patagonia. A few years later, this time in the company of María Esther Vázquez, I made another European trip. In England, we stayed with the late Herbert Read in his fine rambling house out on the moors. He took us to Yorkminster, where he showed us some ancient Danish swords in the Viking Yorkshire room of the museum. I later wrote a sonnet to one of the swords, and just before his death Sir Herbert corrected and bettered my original title, suggesting, instead of “To a Sword in York,” “To a Sword in Yorkminster.” We later went to Stockholm, invited by my Swedish publisher, Bonnier, and by the Argentine Ambassador Stockholm and Copenhagen. I count among the most unforgettable cities I have seen, like San Francisco, New York, Edinburgh, Santiago de Compostela, and Geneva.

Early in 1969, invited by the Israel government, I spent ten very exciting days in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. I brought home with me the conviction of having been in the oldest and the youngest of nations, of having come from a very living, vigilant land back to a half-asleep nook of the world. Since my Genevan days, I had always been interested in Jewish culture, thinking of it as an integral element of our so-called Western civilization, and during the Israeli-Arab war of a few years back I found myself taking immediate sides. While the outcome was still uncertain, I wrote a poem on the battle. A week after, I wrote another on the victory. Israel was, of course, still an armed camp at the time of my visit. There, along the shores of Galilee, I kept recalling these lines from Shakespeare:

Over whose acres walk’d those blessed feet Which, fourteen hundred years ago, were nail’d For our advantage on the bitter cross.

Now, despite my years, I still think of the many stones I have left unturned, and of others I would like to turn again. I hope yet to see Mormon Utah, to which I was introduced as a boy by Mark Twain’s “Roughing It” and by the first book of the Sherlock Holmes saga, “A Study in Scarlet.” Another daydream of mine is a pilgrimage to Iceland, and another still to return again to Texas and to Scotland.

At seventy-one, I am still hard at work and brimming with plans. Last year I wrote a new book of poems, “Elogio de la sombra” (“In Praise of Darkness”). It was my first entirely new volume since 1960, and these were also my first poems since 1929 written with a book in mind. My main concern in this work, running through several of its pieces, is of an ethical nature, irrespective of any religious or anti-religious bias. “Darkness” in the title stands for both blindness and death. To finish “Elogio,” I worked every morning, dictating at the National Library. By the time I ended, I had set up a comfortable routine—so comfortable that I kept it up and began writing tales. These, my first stories since 1953, I published this year. The collection is called “El informe de Brodie” (“Doctor Brodie’s Report”). It is a set of modest experiments in straightforward storytelling, and is the book I have often spoken about in the past five years. Recently, I completed the script of a film to be called “Los otros” (“The Others”). Its plot is my own; the writing was done together with Adolfo Bioy-Casares and the young Argentine director Hugo Santiago. My afternoons now are usually given over to a long-range and cherished project: for nearly the past three years, I have been lucky to have my own translator at my side, and together we are bringing out some ten or twelve volumes of my work in English, a language I am unworthy to handle, a language I often wish had been my birthright.

I intend now to begin a new book, a series of personal—not scholarly—essays on Dante, Ariosto, and medieval northern subjects. I want also to set down a book of informal, outspoken opinions, whims, reflections, and private heresies. After that, who knows? I still have a number of stories, heard or invented, that I want to tell. At present, I am finishing a long tale called “The Congress.” Despite its Kafkian title, I hope it will turn out more in the line of Chesterton. The setting is Argentine and Uruguayan. For twenty years, I have been boring my friends with the raw plot. Finally, I came to see that no further elaboration was needed. I have another project that has been pending for an even longer period of time—that of revising and perhaps rewriting my father’s novel “The Caudillo,” as he asked me to years ago. We had gone as far as discussing many of the problems; I like to think of the undertaking as a continued dialogue and a very real collaboration.

People have been unaccountably good to me. I have no enemies, and if certain persons have masqueraded as such, they’ve been far too good-natured to have ever pained me. Anytime I read something written against me, I not only share the sentiment but feel I could do the job far better myself. Perhaps I should advise would-be enemies to send me their grievances beforehand, with full assurance that they will receive my every aid and support. I have even secretly longed to write, under a pen name, a merciless tirade against myself. Ah, the unvarnished truths I harbor!

At my age, one should be aware of one’s limits, and this knowledge may make for happiness. When I was young, I thought of literature as a game of skillful and surprising variations; now that I have found my own voice, I feel that tinkering and tampering neither greatly improve nor spoil my drafts. This, of course, is a sin against one of the main tendencies of letters in this century—the vanity of overwriting—which led a man like Joyce into publishing expensive fragments, showily entitled “Work in Progress.” I suppose my best work is over. This gives me a certain quiet satisfaction and case. And yet I do not feel I have written myself out. In a way, youthfulness seems closer to me today than when I was a young man. I no longer regard happiness as unattainable; once, long ago, I did. Now I know that it may occur at any moment but that it should never be sought after. As to failure or fame, they are quite irrelevant and I never bother about them. What I’m out for now is peace, the enjoyment of thinking and of friendship, and, though it may be too ambitious, a sense of loving and of being loved.

( Translated, from the Spanish, by Norman Thomas di Giovanni. )

New Yorker Favorites

Searching for the cause of a catastrophic plane crash .

The man who spent forty-two years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool .

Gloria Steinem’s life on the feminist frontier .

Where the Amish go on vacation .

How Colonel Sanders built his Kentucky-fried fortune .

What does procrastination tell us about ourselves ?

Fiction by Patricia Highsmith: “The Trouble with Mrs. Blynn, the Trouble with the World”

Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Joseph O’Neill

By Maxine Scates

By Alma Guillermoprieto

By Justin Chang

• Literature & Fiction
• World Literature

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required .

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

Image Unavailable

• To view this video download Flash Player

Follow the author

The Aleph and Other Stories, 1933-1969: Together with Commentaries and an Autobiographical Essay Hardcover – January 1, 1970

• Print length 286 pages
• Language English
• Publisher E. P. Dutton
• Publication date January 1, 1970
• ISBN-10 0525051546
• ISBN-13 978-0525051541
• See all details

Similar items that may deliver to you quickly

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ E. P. Dutton; First Edition (January 1, 1970)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 286 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0525051546
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0525051541
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1 pounds
• #721 in Caribbean & Latin American Literature

About the author

Jorge luis borges.

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges KBE (/ˈbɔːrhɛs/; Spanish: [ˈxorxe ˈlwis ˈborxes] 24 August 1899 - 14 June 1986), was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature. His work embraces the "character of unreality in all literature". His best-known books, Ficciones (Fictions) and El Aleph (The Aleph), published in the 1940s, are compilations of short stories interconnected by common themes, including dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, philosophy, and religion. Literary critics have described Borges as Latin America's monumental writer.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Grete Stern (1904-1999) (http://www.me.gov.ar/efeme/jlborges/1951-1960.html) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Customer reviews

Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness.

• Sort reviews by Top reviews Most recent Top reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. please try again later..

• Amazon Newsletter
• About Amazon
• Accessibility
• Sustainability
• Press Center
• Investor Relations
• Amazon Devices
• Amazon Science
• Start Selling with Amazon
• Sell apps on Amazon
• Supply to Amazon
• Protect & Build Your Brand
• Become an Affiliate
• Become a Delivery Driver
• Start a Package Delivery Business
• Advertise Your Products
• Self-Publish with Us
• Host an Amazon Hub
• › See More Ways to Make Money
• Amazon Visa
• Amazon Store Card
• Amazon Secured Card
• Amazon Business Card
• Shop with Points
• Credit Card Marketplace
• Reload Your Balance
• Amazon Currency Converter
• Your Account
• Your Orders
• Shipping Rates & Policies
• Amazon Prime
• Returns & Replacements
• Manage Your Content and Devices
• Recalls and Product Safety Alerts
• Conditions of Use
• Privacy Notice
• Consumer Health Data Privacy Disclosure
• Your Ads Privacy Choices

• Architecture and Design
• Asian and Pacific Studies
• Business and Economics
• Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
• Computer Sciences
• Cultural Studies
• Engineering
• General Interest
• Geosciences
• Industrial Chemistry
• Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies
• Jewish Studies
• Library and Information Science, Book Studies
• Life Sciences
• Linguistics and Semiotics
• Literary Studies
• Materials Sciences
• Mathematics
• Social Sciences
• Sports and Recreation
• Theology and Religion
• Publish your article
• The role of authors
• Promoting your article
• Abstracting & indexing
• Publishing Ethics
• Why publish with De Gruyter
• How to publish with De Gruyter
• Our book series
• Our subject areas
• Your digital product at De Gruyter
• Contribute to our reference works
• Product information
• Tools & resources
• Product Information
• Promotional Materials
• Orders and Inquiries
• FAQ for Library Suppliers and Book Sellers
• Repository Policy
• Free access policy
• Open Access agreements
• Database portals
• For Authors
• Customer service
• People + Culture
• Journal Management
• How to join us
• Working at De Gruyter
• Mission & Vision
• De Gruyter Foundation
• De Gruyter Ebound
• Our Responsibility
• Partner publishers

Your purchase has been completed. Your documents are now available to view.

Reading and translation in Borgess Autobiographical Essay

Copyright © 2002 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG

• X / Twitter

Supplementary Materials

Please login or register with De Gruyter to order this product.

Journal and Issue

Articles in the same issue.

December 13, 1970 Reviews By GEOFFREY H. HARTMAN THE ALEPH AND OTHER STORIES 1933-1969 Together With Commentaries and an Autobiographical Essay. By Jorge Luis Borges. he reputation of Jorge Luis Borges in the United States is astonishing, and less than a decade old. "Labyrinths" and "Ficciones," the first substantial translations of his work, appeared in 1962, one year after he shared the International Publishers' Prize with Beckett; by then he was 63 and well known in his native Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America and Europe (though not in Great Britain). These two volumes were followed by "Dreamtigers" (1964) as well as collections of lesser note. Several books have now been devoted to him; his conversation is avidly taped and printed; he has served as a visiting professor on several American campuses; and the claim is sometimes heard that he ranks with Joyce and Kafka. This despite the fact that Borges has cultivated a methodical modesty and never departed from the minor genres of essay, story and short poem. What can this new sampler tell us about the truth of his reputation? It is devoted mainly to the stories, and has a wide chronological range, taking us from 1933 to 1969. But it remains an incomplete gathering, since rights to retranslate some of the most famous pieces (such as "Tiön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius") could not be obtained. It is irritating to have Borges divided this way by competing anthologies, but it may be a kind of justice since he is, in fact, a scattered Orpheus whose prose-parts lament a fading power. The inventor of the "Aleph," a miniaturized replica of all visionary experience, knows that human kind cannot bear much fantasy. The present volume, with its charming "Autobiographical Essay" and its chatty comments on the stories, is well adapted to readers who wish to be reminded of great art rather than to experience it. With Borges they can flee from too vivid an enchantment into a little wilderness. There is an art which, like the sounds of a clavichord, provides a perfect setting for thought and conversation. The art of Borges is generally like that: cool, well-tempered, with a consciously easy pace. His questers delay, or are delayed: and even in the most dangerous or baffling situation they have time to look off at the trees, at a "sky broken into dark diamonds of red, green and yellow." Lönnrot, the trapped detective in "Death and the Compass," quietly offers his killer a mystico- mathematical reflection before being shot. What is most human--the "irrelevant texture" of ordinary life--escapes from a ruthless plot by running into such asides. Each story, however, continues to demand its victim despite the intricate delay, the charm of detail. The humanizing asides are felt even more in the stories about the gauchos of Argentina. Here Borges, a reporter of traditions, weaves his thoughts directly into the narrative. In his unusual blend of ballad bloodiness and familiar essay there is sometimes as much reflection as plot: the brutal knife-fight in "The Challenge," little more than a paragraph long, is swathed in asides. Its naked brevity is relaxed by the narrator's comment on the courage of the gauchos, their exact way of duelling, a canto from the "Inferno," "Moby Dick," and so on. While time comes to a point which is also a knife's point, the story swerves, a mental picaresque, from the pure moment of encounter. No Borges story is without this pointed moment, this condensation of time; yet it tends to be undercut by a mock-realistic setting or a whimsical narrator. So the microcosmic Aleph is found in the cluttered cellar of a second-rate poet, the unsavory Carlos Argentino Daneri. The only way that Borges can conduct his narrative is, like so many symbolists before him, by viewing ordinary life as a needful distraction from some symbolic purity. His humorous realism--names, dates and nature- motifs formulaically introduced--is a pseudo-realism. Even the gaucho stories, for all their local color, are fantasies--knives are magical in them, and the knife-fighter's sense of invunerability is like the eternity-experience recorded in so many of the "fantastic" stories. The fatality of form, the humanity of the aside--these are the most obvious pleasures given by Borges. There is, in addition, a wealth of small invention, perfect handling of gradual disclosures, and an elegance that makes life appear sloppy. Mixing, with charming ruthlessness, fantasy and fact, Borges reverses that "decay of lying" which Oscar Wilde (one of his favorite authors) had already deplored. Beyond all this we feel for the narrator, for his quest. He is clearly a man trying to get into his own stories, that is, wishing to discover himself rather than an image. Like the fire-priest in "The Circular Ruins" Borges sets out to dream a real man but seems unable to dream of more than an intruder. Thus in a great many stories a stranger or interloper comes onto the scene and is given a predetermined lease on life before being eliminated. This figure, whether person or magical agent, never effects a lasting change: having played out its role, or lived its bit of dream, it is "sacrificed" like the woman in the late story actually called "The Intruder" (1966) or the upstart gaucho in "The Dead Man" (1946). Surely, Borges himself, as artist, is that intruder. He comes to art belated--deeply conscious of traditions that both anticipate him and will survive his bluff. He is their victim, a dreamer who finds he is dreamt by a larger than personal symbolism--the formal world of legend and archetype with which he must merge. He may think he has mastered the magical instruments called symbols but they have their own will. "I began to wonder," he writes of a strange knife-fight in "The Meeting," whether it was Maneco Uriarte who killed Duncan or whether in some uncanny way it could have been the weapons, not the men, which fought." This living sacrifice of person to myth, of the individual to magic instrument, haunts Borges and is a source of his peculiar pathos. "I live," he says in "Borges and Myself," "I let myself live so that Borges can weave his tales and poems, and those tales and poems are my justification." We are not far, after all, from Mallarmé's remark that the world was meant to become a book. The symbols that purify us also trap us in the end. Symbolism may be nothing more than the religion of over-cultured men; and Borges--curious bibliophile, ardent comparatist--its perfected priest. Return to the Books Home Page

Jump to navigation

Search form

Lapham’s quarterly, a jorge luis borges reading list.

Recommendations from a life of lectures and essays.

By Madeline Grimm

Monday, November 28, 2022

Cover of John Britton’s The Union of Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting , by Longman and Co., 1827. The Metropolitan Museum of Art , bequest of Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, 2019.

“I think the happiness of a reader is beyond that of a writer, for a reader need feel no trouble, no anxiety: he is merely out for happiness,” Jorge Luis Borges said in a 1968 lecture. “And happiness, when you are a reader, is frequent.” This pleasure did not always arrive with a novel, he explained in his 1970 New Yorker essay “ Autobiographical Notes ”: “In the course of a lifetime devoted chiefly to books, I have read but few novels, and, in most cases, only a sense of duty has enabled me to find my way to their last page.” The critic Jason Wilson calls Borges’ reading habits “hedonistic,” noting that he found novels “tedious, packed with irrelevant detail and information.”

Yet Borges did not eschew longer fiction as a child, when he read through the whole of his family’s collection of English and Spanish books. He was taught to read Spanish by his mother and taught English by his paternal grandmother, Fanny Haslam. Haslam was born in Staffordshire, England, and moved to Argentina as a young woman, following her elder sister, whose Italian husband immigrated to Argentina to work on the nation’s first horse-drawn streetcars.

Borges’ grandmother read English passages to him from what he called a “leccionario” (combining the Spanish words for “dictionary” and “lesson”), a collection of extracts from classic works by European authors. In a 1927 essay for the Argentine newspaper La Prensa , he described his youthful open-mindedness toward reading, before the development of his critical faculties:

I suspect that the detective novels of Eduardo Gutiérrez and a volume of Greek mythology and The Student of Salamanca and the reasonable and not at all fanciful fantasies of Jules Verne and Stevenson ’s grandiose romances and the first serial novel ever written, The Thousand and One Nights , are the greatest literary joys I have experienced…I was a hospitable reader in those days, a polite explorer of the lives of others, and I accepted everything with providential and enthusiastic resignation. I believed every­thing, even errata and poor illustrations. Each story was an adventure, and I sought worthy and prestigious places to live it: the highest step of a staircase, an attic, the roof of the house.

Borges suffered from hereditary blindness and was unable to read by 1955, at age fifty-five. He never learned Braille, instead relying on assistants, including his mother, to read to him. In 1985 the Argentine publisher Hyspamerica invited Borges to select one hundred of his favorite books and write introductions for new editions of them. They called the collection “A Personal Library.” At least twenty-eight novels made it on the list , suggesting that Borges’ preference for short fiction didn’t preclude him from appreciating and recommending some of the novels he did read. Borges’ introductions were his final writing project, left incomplete when he died in 1986. Below are a few of the writers Borges selected and others that he enjoyed during a life spent pursuing literary pleasure.

James Joyce

Borges claimed in a 1925 review in Proa , the Argentine literary magazine he cofounded in 1922, that he was “the first traveler from the Hispanic world to set foot upon the shores of Ulysses .” He was given an English copy by the poet Ricardo Güiraldes in 1923; a Spanish translation did not appear until 1945. Borges confessed in his review that he had not “cleared a path through all seven hundred pages,” which didn’t stop him from admiring the “total reality” Joyce had created. He ultimately admitted to finding the novel’s timescale to be overwhelming: “If Shakespeare —to use his own metaphor—invested in the turning of the hourglass the exploits of many years, Joyce inverts the procedure and unfolds his hero’s single day into many days upon the reader. (I haven’t said many naps.)”

Borges did not enjoy Finnegans Wake , which he also did not finish, writing in a 1939 review for the Argentine magazine El Hogar , “I have examined it with some bewilderment, have unenthusiastically deciphered nine or ten calembours , and have read the terror-stricken praise in the Nouvelle Revue Française and the Times Literary Supplement .” When Joyce died two years later, Borges reflected on his singular literary style and the joys of rereading snippets of Ulysses in an essay for the literary magazine Sur :

Like Shakespeare, like Quevedo, like Goethe , like no other writer, Joyce is less a man of letters than a literature. And, incredibly, he is a literature within the compass of a single volume. His writing is intense, as Goethe’s never was; it is delicate, a virtue whose existence Quevedo did not suspect. I (like the rest of the universe) have not read Ulysses , but I read and happily reread certain scenes: the dialogue on Shakespeare, the Walpurgisnacht in the whorehouse, the questions and answers of the catechism: “They drank in jocoserious silence Epps’ massproduct, the creature cocoa.” And, on another page: “A dark horse riderless, bolts like a phantom past the winningpost, his mane moonfoaming, his eyeballs stars.”

Adolfo Bioy Casares

Borges became friends with the Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares in the early 1930s, when Bioy Casares was still a teenager. They began collaborating a few years later, often employing the pseudonyms Honorio Bustos Domecq, B. Suárez Lynch, or B. Lynch Davis, which they derived from the names of deceased ancestors. Borges described their partnership in “Autobiographical Notes.”

He and I attempted many different literary ventures. We compiled anthologies of Argentine poetry, tales of the fantastic, and detective stories; we wrote articles and forewords; we annotated Sir Thomas Browne and Gracián ; we translated short stories by writers like Beerbohm, Kipling , Wells , and Lord Dunsany ; we founded a magazine, Destiempo , which lasted three issues; we wrote film scripts, which were invariably rejected. Opposing my taste for the pathetic, the sententious, and the baroque, Bioy made me feel that quietness and restraint are more desirable.

Bioy Casares married the poet and painter Silvina Ocampo in 1940, with Borges as their witness. In the same year Bioy Casares published his best-known work, The Invention of Morel . Borges wrote an introduction for the novel, which tells of a scientist’s attempt to preserve the perfect day; his sister, the artist Norah Borges, provided illustrations.

For Borges, The Invention of Morel proved that not all contemporary authors wanted to write plotless, “realist” novels about people’s emotional lives. Despite literary critics’ assertions to the contrary, the early twentieth century was a golden age for complex narratives, as he told Bioy Casares’ readers: “During no other era have there been novels with such admirable plots as The Turn of the Screw , The Trial , Le voyageur sur la terre , and the one you are about to read.”

Lord Halifax’s Ghost Book

From 1936 to 1939 Borges edited a biweekly page on “Foreign Books and Authors” for the magazine El Hogar . His eclectic reading tastes shaped his reviewing selections, which rarely included best-selling books . In Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary Biography , critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal recalls picking up a 1936 issue in which Borges reviewed “a book of songs from the Mississippi, an Ellery Queen detective novel, a novel by Henry de Montherlant, a reissue of a study of neurotic writers by Arvède Barine.”

Also in 1936 Borges wrote about Lord Halifax’s Ghost Book , a collection of ghost stories by Charles Lindley Wood, 2nd Viscount Halifax. Wood’s class snobbery—he relied on his well-to-do friends to furnish firsthand tales of paranormal experiences—tempered Borges’ enjoyment of the book’s demonstration of the “charms of superstition.”

Lady Goring, Lord Desborough, Lord Lytton, the Marquis of Hartingdom, and the Duke of Devonshire are among the names whose rest has been troubled…The Honor­able Reginald Fortescue became a firm believer in the existence of “an alarming specter.” As for myself, I don’t know what to think: for the mo­ment, I refuse to believe in the alarming Reginald Fortescue until an honor­able specter becomes a firm believer in his existence.

Virginia Woolf

Victoria Ocampo, Silvina’s sister and publisher of the literary magazine Sur , commissioned Borges to translate Virginia Woolf ’s A Room of One’s Own in 1934; a request for a translation of Orlando soon followed. In a biographical sketch for El Hogar , he characterized the latter as Woolf’s “most intense” work, “one of the most singular and maddening of our era.” He continued, “Magic, bitterness, and happiness collude in this book. It is also a musical work, not only in the euphonious virtues of its prose but in the structure of its composition, which consists of a limited number of themes that return and combine.” Woolf’s 1931 novel The Waves was, to Borges, another noteworthy experiment in narrative structure (and apparently an exception to his preference for well-structured plots): “There is no plot, no conversation, no action. Yet the book is moving. Like the rest of Virginia Woolf’s work , it is weighted with delicate, physical facts.”

Dante Alighieri

Borges’ first full-time job—acquired at the age of thirty-eight—was as an assistant librarian at the Miguel Cané Municipal Public Library, where he worked from 1937 to 1946. He read during his commute via streetcar from the city’s northern suburbs. In a 1977 lecture , the penultimate of seven talks he gave at the Teatro Coliseo in Buenos Aires that summer, he described one memorable choice of reading material: John Aitken Carlyle’s translation of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri .

Chance—except that there is no chance; what we call chance is our ignorance of the complex machinery of causality—led me to discover three small volumes in the Mitchell Bookstore (now gone—it brings back many memories). Those three volumes…were the Inferno , the Purgatorio , and the Paradiso , in the English version by Carlyle (not Thomas Carlyle ). They were very handy books, published by Dent. They fit into my pocket. On the left was the Italian text, and on the right a literal translation. I devised this modus operandi: I first read a verse, a tercet, in the English prose; then I read the verse in Italian; and so on through to the end of the canto.

“The truth is that I don’t know Italian,” Borges explained. “I only know the Italian Dante taught me, and later Ariosto , when I read Orlando Furioso .” He eventually lost his post at Miguel Cané for publicly supporting the Allied powers during World War II—a stance Juan Perón’s government regarded as hostile to Perón’s rule.

Murasaki Shikibu and Miguel de Cervantes

“I ought to have studied the Oriental languages,” Borges said in 1977. “I have only glanced at them through translations. But I have felt the punch, the impact of their beauty.” Like W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound, he enjoyed Arthur Waley’s translations of classic Japanese and Chinese texts, calling Waley “one of the very few Sinologists who is also a man of letters.” In 1938 he reviewed for El Hogar Waley’s translation of Murasaki Shikibu ’s eleventh-century epic novel The Tale of Genji . He rebuffed English-speaking readers who might come to the text seeking “exoticism—that horrible word.” No European writing before the nineteenth century could match the elegance of Murasaki’s prose and her insight into human psychology, claimed Borges, explaining,

This is not to say that Murasaki is more intense or more memorable or “better” than Fielding or Cervantes ; rather that she is more complex, and the civilization to which she belonged was more refined. To put it another way: I don’t claim that Murasaki Shikibu had the talent of Cervantes, but rather that she was heard by a public that was far more subtle. In the Quixote , Cervantes limits himself to distinguish­ing day from night; Murasaki (“The Bridge of Dreams,” chapter X) notes in a window “the blurred stars behind the falling snow.” In the previous paragraph, she mentions a long bridge, damp in the mist, “that seems much farther away.” Perhaps the first detail is implausible; the two together are strangely effective.

Around the same time Borges reviewed The Tale of Genji , he published “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote ,” a story about a fictional French writer trying to rewrite Don Quixote in the twentieth century. Despite the differences between modern France and sixteenth-century Spain, Menard believes he can acquire the same skills and experiences that allowed Cervantes to originally create the book. “Menard’s method was to be relatively simple,” Borges writes. “Learn Spanish, return to Catholicism, fight against the Moor or Turk, forget the history of Europe from 1602 to 1918— be Miguel de Cervantes.”

Old English Poetry

As Borges’ eyesight deteriorated, he became more interested in Old English and Old Norse poetry, compositions intended to be recited rather than read. In 1955 he began teaching English and American literature at the University of Buenos Aires, where he found willing study partners in his undergraduate students. He recounts in “Autobiographical Notes” how he proposed a weekly reading group at the end of a semester.

I knew that at home, on a certain top shelf, I had copies of Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle . When the students came the next Saturday morning, we began reading these two books. We skipped grammar as much as we could and pronounced the words like German. All at once, we fell in love with a sentence in which Rome (Romeburh) was mentioned. We got drunk on these words and rushed down Peru Street shouting them at the top of our voices.

T he Sagas and the Eddas

After learning Old English, Borges moved on to Old Norse and Icelandic. For a 1976 essay in The New Yorker he discussed kenning metaphors, the compound phrases that replace simple nouns in Old Norse and Old English poetry (e.g., “battle-icicle” stands in for “drop of blood”). “In England, poets came to feel that such figures of speech were burdensome,” Borges writes. “Not so with the skalds, the Scandinavian court poets. They thought that if the ship is the stallion (or the stag or the bison) of the sea, and the sea is the whale’s road, why not call the ship the stallion of the whale’s road?”

Some skaldic poets delighted in crafting lengthy metaphors, attaching up to six or seven separate phrases in a single kenning. Borges commented on several kennings from the thirteenth-century Egil’s Saga , when the narrator is mourning his younger brother’s death in battle:

The dyers of the wolf’s fangs squandered the red swan’s meat. The hawk of the sword’s dew fed on heroes in the field. The serpents of the Vikings’ moons fulfilled the will of the irons.

For Borges, “the meaning is irrelevant, the suggestion of little value.” One should appreciate a kenning on different terms than those of modern figurative language: “They neither stir the imagination nor call up images or emotions…Their pleasure—their sufficient pleasure—lies in their variety, in the unexpected linking together of the words.”

Encyclopedia Britannica

Borges was appointed director of the National Library in 1955 after Perón was deposed by a military junta. Despite knowing the new government chose him “for reasons more political than literary,” he was still delighted by the appointment, he said in a 1977 lecture. Yet by the time he assumed his position, he could no longer see well enough to read. He describes his reaction:

Little by little I came to realize the strange irony of events. I had always imagined paradise as a kind of library. Others think of a garden or of a palace. There I was, the center, in a way, of nine hundred thousand books in various languages, but I found I could barely make out the title pages and the spines…Those two gifts contradicted each other: the countless books and the night.

In the same lecture Borges recalled visiting the library as a child with his father. Too shy to request books from the librarians, he browsed volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica sitting on the open shelves. His practice was to choose a volume at random, a method that did not guarantee results: “I remember one night when I was particularly rewarded, for I read three articles: on the Druids, the Druses, and Dryden —a gift of the letter dr . Other nights I was less fortunate.”

During Borges’ childhood, the library’s director was the French-born Argentine writer Paul Groussac, who also progressively lost his eyesight. “We were both men of letters,” Borges said of Groussac, “and we both passed through the library of forbidden books—one might say, for our darkened eyes, of blank books, books without letters.”

For another writer’s recommendations, see “ A Walt Whitman Reading List .” “ For a time, I thought of Whitman not only as a great poet but as the only poet ,” Borges wrote in “Autobiographical Notes” of his experience reading Leaves of Grass as a teenager. “In fact, I thought that all poets the world over had been merely leading up to Whitman until 1855, and that not to imitate him was a proof of ignorance.”

See the other entries in our reading list series: Julia Ward Howe , Willa Cather , Virginia Woolf , Frederick Douglass , Sylvia Plath , Theodore Roosevelt , Nella Larsen , Flannery O’Connor , and Emily Dickinson .

Contributor

Madeline Grimm

Madeline Grimm is an assistant editor at Lapham’s Quarterly .

• Previous The Rest Is History
• Next Reading the Horizon

We will keep fighting for all libraries - stand with us!

Internet Archive Audio

• This Just In
• Grateful Dead
• Old Time Radio
• 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
• Audio Books & Poetry
• Computers, Technology and Science
• Music, Arts & Culture
• News & Public Affairs
• Spirituality & Religion
• Radio News Archive

• Flickr Commons
• Occupy Wall Street Flickr
• NASA Images
• Solar System Collection
• Ames Research Center

• All Software
• Old School Emulation
• MS-DOS Games
• Historical Software
• Classic PC Games
• Software Library
• Kodi Archive and Support File
• Vintage Software
• CD-ROM Software
• CD-ROM Software Library
• Software Sites
• Tucows Software Library
• Shareware CD-ROMs
• Software Capsules Compilation
• CD-ROM Images
• ZX Spectrum
• DOOM Level CD

• Smithsonian Libraries
• FEDLINK (US)
• Lincoln Collection
• American Libraries
• Canadian Libraries
• Universal Library
• Project Gutenberg
• Children's Library
• Biodiversity Heritage Library
• Books by Language
• Additional Collections

• Prelinger Archives
• Democracy Now!
• Occupy Wall Street
• TV NSA Clip Library
• Animation & Cartoons
• Arts & Music
• Computers & Technology
• Cultural & Academic Films
• Ephemeral Films
• Sports Videos
• Videogame Videos
• Youth Media

Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet.

Mobile Apps

• Wayback Machine (iOS)
• Wayback Machine (Android)

Browser Extensions

Archive-it subscription.

• Explore the Collections
• Build Collections

Save Page Now

Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.

Please enter a valid web address

• Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape

Ensaio autobiográfico (1899-1970)

Bookreader item preview, share or embed this item, flag this item for.

• Graphic Violence
• Explicit Sexual Content
• Hate Speech
• Misinformation/Disinformation
• Marketing/Phishing/Advertising
• Misleading/Inaccurate/Missing Metadata

plus-circle Add Review comment Reviews

31 Previews

3 Favorites

DOWNLOAD OPTIONS

No suitable files to display here.

PDF access not available for this item.

IN COLLECTIONS

Uploaded by station12.cebu on March 3, 2022

SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)

Advertisement

A note on jorge luis borges, issue 28, summer-fall 1962.

Jorge Luis Borges is a great writer who has composed only little essays or short narratives. Yet they suffice for us to call him great because of their wonderful intelligence, their wealth of invention, and their tight, almost mathematical style. Argentine by birth and temperament, but nurtured on universal literature, Borges has no spiritual homeland. He creates, outside time and space, imaginary and symbolic worlds. It is a sign of his importance that, in placing him, only strange and perfect works can be called to mind. He is akin to Kafka, Poe, sometimes to Henry James and Wells, always to Valéry by the abrupt projection of his paradoxes in what has been called “his private metaphysics.”

His sources are innumerable and unexpected. Borges has read every thing, and especially what nobody reads any more: the Cabalists, the Alexandrine Greeks, medieval philosophers. His erudition is not profound—he asks of it only flashes of lightning and ideas—but it is vast. For example, Pascal wrote: “Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere, whose circumference is nowhere.” Borges sets out to hunt down this metaphor through the centuries. He finds in Giordano Bruno (1584): “We can assert with certainty that the universe is all center, or that the center of the universe is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.” But Giordano Bruno had been able to read in a twelfth-century French theologian, Alain de Lille, a formulation borrowed from the  Corpus Hermeticum  (third century): “God is an intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.” Such researches, carried out among the Chinese as among the Arabs or the Egyptians, delight Borges, and lead him to the subjects of his stories.

Many of his masters are English. He has an infinite admiration for Wells and is indignant that Oscar Wilde could define him as “a scientific Jules Verne.” Borges makes the observation that the fiction of Jules Verne speculates on future  probability  (the submarine, the trip to the moon), that of Wells on pure  possibility  (an invisible man, a flower that devours a man, a machine to explore time), or even on  impossibility  (a man returning from the hereafter with a future flower). Beyond that, a Wells novel symbolically represents features inherent in all human destinies. Any great and lasting book must be ambiguous, Borges says; it is a mirror that makes the reader’s features known, but the author must seem to be unaware of the significance of his work—which is an excellent description of Borges’s own art. “God must not engage in theology; the writer must not destroy by human reasonings the faith that art requires of us.”

Want to keep reading? Subscribe and save 33%.

Subscribe now, already a subscriber sign in below..

Link your subscription

Forgot password?

Featured Audio

Season 4 trailer.

The Paris Review Podcast returns with a new season, featuring the best interviews, fiction, essays, and poetry from America’s most legendary literary quarterly, brought to life in sound. Join us for intimate conversations with Sharon Olds and Olga Tokarczuk; fiction by Rivers Solomon, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, and Zach Williams; poems by Terrance Hayes and Maggie Millner; nonfiction by Robert Glück, Jean Garnett, and Sean Thor Conroe; and performances by George Takei, Lena Waithe, and many others. Catch up on earlier seasons, and listen to the trailer for Season 4 now.

Suggested Reading

I Love You, Maradona

“I was devastated to be leaving Maradona’s world and returning to the ordinary one, where nobody ever picks a fight with the Pope.”

The Review’s Review

The art of fiction no. 262.

In Florence, on her first trip to Italy, 1994. All photographs courtesy of Jhumpa Lahiri.

My first conversations with Jhumpa Lahiri took place in Rome this past July, in her apartment near the Janiculum, above Trastevere. It was an extremely hot summer—one of our meetings was on the hottest day in Rome’s history, 110 degrees—and we sat with a large fan whirring in the living room, which, as in a scene from Henry James, looks out on the rolling hills over the suburra , until it was safe to step out to the terrace in the late afternoon. Among the bric-a-brac around the apartment were bits of vintage Sicilian-orange packaging, a plaque featuring the logo of the Italian Communist Party, and, framed in a glass case, a jersey signed by the soccer player Daniele De Rossi.

Lahiri was born in London in 1 967 to Bengali parents from Kolkata, and raised in a small town in Rhode Island. In 2012, she moved to Rome with her husband, the journalist and editor Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, and their children, Octavio and Noor. She has spent the better part of the past decade shuttling between Italy and the U.S., where she’s held teaching posts at Princeton, from 2015 until 2022, and, since this past fall, at Barnard College, her alma mater, where she also directs the creative writing program. When we met again in October, it was at her brownstone in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, a four-story building bookended by a large kitchen and living space on the parlor floor and Lahiri’s top-floor study. She and Vourvoulias-Bush hadn’t lived in the house for a year or two, and while we spoke on the sofas, he was getting the place back in shape. Some of their furniture was still in storage, and several art pieces, abstract photo collages and large stretched canvases, lay against a white marble mantelpiece, waiting to be rehung. The walls were painted deep purple.

We spoke Italian in both cities, at her request. She began learning the language in earnest in her thirties, but her manner of speaking is spontaneous and unpretentious, with almost no trace of formality. (In my presence, she and Vourvoulias-Bush addressed each other in Italian.) She used English words only occasionally, as when quoting someone, often a figure from American publishing, a world with which she has a vexed relationship. Lahiri was thirty-two when she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her debut collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), and she remains the youngest writer to have received the award. The stories in that book, and the ones that followed in Unaccustomed Earth (2008), demonstrated an almost painful lightness of touch, an ability to make characters traverse years and emotional states in the span of just a few sentences, and a rare attention to the seismic power of even the smallest shift in a dynamic between two lovers or relatives. She was also celebrated for what many took as her central subject matter, the experience of Indian immigrants in the United States. Her debut novel, The Namesake (2003), was a critical and commercial hit, with a film adaptation three years after it was published; The Lowland (2013), which Lahiri described to me as her most ambitious and personally important book in English, takes a more digressive, fragmentary approach to what might be called the family saga, and is her last work of fiction written in English to date.

“I get the feeling people think that, because I write in Italian, I’m not writing at all anymore,” Lahiri told me. But since turning to Italian, not only has she been especially prolific, publishing six books in nine years, but she’s found new and varied forms in which to write, including the diaristic newspaper columns compiled in In Other Words (2015, translation 2016), about learning the language and beginning to write in it; the vignettes that structure Whereabouts (2018, translation 2021), a short novel following the life of a middle-aged university professor (“The title doesn’t work in English,” Lahiri says); and the very spare, drifting tales in Roman Stories (2022, translation 2023), about encounters between foreigners of various kinds in the city she calls home. Lahiri translated Whereabouts and most of the Roman Stories into English herself; her translations of Domenico Starnone’s novels Ties , Trust , and Trick , the latter a finalist for a National Book Award for Translated Literature, have brought new attention to his work in the U.S. With the classicist Yelena Baraz, she’s now working on a new translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses for the Modern Library.

Speaking to Lahiri, one gets the sense that her restlessness, in life and in writing, is almost an ethic, a deliberate struggle against being pigeonholed. The last time we met, in her office at Barnard, I remembered that a green suitcase had been parked in the middle of her living room in Rome—she’d apologized then for how chaotic her life was. She pointed behind me in the office, and there it was again.

INTERVIEWER

I can’t help but notice the way you gesticulate when you talk ... Do you do that when you’re speaking in English, too?

Jhumpa LAHIRI

No, that’s the Italian part of me. If we were speaking English right now, I’d be more tense, more defensive.

Why the difference?

It’s almost impossible to explain—but in Italian, I can be the Jhumpa who goes to buy a sandwich from the Calabrian couple at the market by the Porta Portese, who goes to the pool in Trastevere, and when I say hi to the person swimming laps in the lane next to mine they won’t have the faintest idea of my other life. Those are the moments I feel most alive and at ease. Italy’s great gift to me is the voice that tells me that I don’t have to follow the rules, that I can be who I want and write what I want on my own terms. It’s only when I’m writing in Italian that I manage to turn off all those other, judgmental voices, except perhaps my own.

With a childhood friend in Kingston, Rhode Island.

Which voices are we talking about exactly?

In my life in English, so to speak, there’s a sense that if I don’t hit a certain benchmark, I’ve failed. That’s the judgment I’ve felt from American culture from the start—the expectation to assimilate, and then, when I became a writer, to “represent” the Indian American experience, the immigrant experience. Then there’s the eternal, original judgment—of my mother, my parents, their immigrant community, their many friends with advanced degrees. Theirs was a language of comparison and competition, everyone striving to establish themselves and get ahead. And there’s the overhanging judgment, of the world my parents left behind in Kolkata. All of which I internalized.

It’s interesting—in your books in English, the family is a totalizing force, but you’ve put solitary women at the center of your Italian books.

Thank you, Dr. Pacifico—maybe that’s because it’s only in Italian that I feel I’m at the center of myself.

Right, end of session! That’ll be three hundred dollars.

Tell me, was there a moment when you first felt happy with your voice?

No. The goal isn’t to be happy with my voice. What I want is simply to have one.

So you didn’t feel, when you were starting out, that you’d hit on something?

When I was working on the stories in Interpreter of Maladies , I wanted to write in a way that was almost without personality—to create a story that was completely neutral, as unobtrusive as possible. It was as though I didn’t want anyone to hear the key turning as I opened the door.

From the Archive, Issue 247

Subscribe for free:  Apple Podcasts  |  Spotify  |  Amazon Music

• Search Menu
• Browse content in Arts and Humanities
• Browse content in Archaeology
• Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Archaeology
• Archaeological Methodology and Techniques
• Archaeology by Region
• Archaeology of Religion
• Archaeology of Trade and Exchange
• Biblical Archaeology
• Contemporary and Public Archaeology
• Environmental Archaeology
• Historical Archaeology
• History and Theory of Archaeology
• Industrial Archaeology
• Landscape Archaeology
• Mortuary Archaeology
• Prehistoric Archaeology
• Underwater Archaeology
• Urban Archaeology
• Zooarchaeology
• Browse content in Architecture
• Architectural Structure and Design
• History of Architecture
• Residential and Domestic Buildings
• Theory of Architecture
• Browse content in Art
• Art Subjects and Themes
• History of Art
• Industrial and Commercial Art
• Theory of Art
• Biographical Studies
• Byzantine Studies
• Browse content in Classical Studies
• Classical History
• Classical Philosophy
• Classical Mythology
• Classical Literature
• Classical Reception
• Classical Art and Architecture
• Classical Oratory and Rhetoric
• Greek and Roman Papyrology
• Greek and Roman Epigraphy
• Greek and Roman Law
• Greek and Roman Archaeology
• Late Antiquity
• Religion in the Ancient World
• Digital Humanities
• Browse content in History
• Colonialism and Imperialism
• Diplomatic History
• Environmental History
• Genealogy, Heraldry, Names, and Honours
• Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing
• Historical Geography
• History by Period
• History of Emotions
• History of Agriculture
• History of Education
• History of Gender and Sexuality
• Industrial History
• Intellectual History
• International History
• Labour History
• Legal and Constitutional History
• Local and Family History
• Maritime History
• Military History
• National Liberation and Post-Colonialism
• Oral History
• Political History
• Public History
• Regional and National History
• Revolutions and Rebellions
• Slavery and Abolition of Slavery
• Social and Cultural History
• Theory, Methods, and Historiography
• Urban History
• World History
• Browse content in Language Teaching and Learning
• Language Learning (Specific Skills)
• Language Teaching Theory and Methods
• Browse content in Linguistics
• Applied Linguistics
• Cognitive Linguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Forensic Linguistics
• Grammar, Syntax and Morphology
• Historical and Diachronic Linguistics
• History of English
• Language Evolution
• Language Reference
• Language Acquisition
• Language Variation
• Language Families
• Lexicography
• Linguistic Anthropology
• Linguistic Theories
• Linguistic Typology
• Phonetics and Phonology
• Psycholinguistics
• Sociolinguistics
• Translation and Interpretation
• Writing Systems
• Browse content in Literature
• Bibliography
• Children's Literature Studies
• Literary Studies (Romanticism)
• Literary Studies (American)
• Literary Studies (Asian)
• Literary Studies (European)
• Literary Studies (Eco-criticism)
• Literary Studies (Modernism)
• Literary Studies - World
• Literary Studies (1500 to 1800)
• Literary Studies (19th Century)
• Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)
• Literary Studies (African American Literature)
• Literary Studies (British and Irish)
• Literary Studies (Early and Medieval)
• Literary Studies (Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers)
• Literary Studies (Gender Studies)
• Literary Studies (Graphic Novels)
• Literary Studies (History of the Book)
• Literary Studies (Plays and Playwrights)
• Literary Studies (Poetry and Poets)
• Literary Studies (Postcolonial Literature)
• Literary Studies (Queer Studies)
• Literary Studies (Science Fiction)
• Literary Studies (Travel Literature)
• Literary Studies (War Literature)
• Literary Studies (Women's Writing)
• Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
• Mythology and Folklore
• Shakespeare Studies and Criticism
• Browse content in Media Studies
• Browse content in Music
• Applied Music
• Dance and Music
• Ethics in Music
• Ethnomusicology
• Gender and Sexuality in Music
• Medicine and Music
• Music Cultures
• Music and Media
• Music and Religion
• Music and Culture
• Music Education and Pedagogy
• Music Theory and Analysis
• Musical Scores, Lyrics, and Libretti
• Musical Structures, Styles, and Techniques
• Musicology and Music History
• Performance Practice and Studies
• Race and Ethnicity in Music
• Sound Studies
• Browse content in Performing Arts
• Browse content in Philosophy
• Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
• Epistemology
• Feminist Philosophy
• History of Western Philosophy
• Metaphysics
• Moral Philosophy
• Non-Western Philosophy
• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Mind
• Philosophy of Perception
• Philosophy of Science
• Philosophy of Action
• Philosophy of Law
• Philosophy of Religion
• Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic
• Practical Ethics
• Social and Political Philosophy
• Browse content in Religion
• Biblical Studies
• Christianity
• East Asian Religions
• History of Religion
• Judaism and Jewish Studies
• Qumran Studies
• Religion and Education
• Religion and Health
• Religion and Politics
• Religion and Science
• Religion and Law
• Religion and Art, Literature, and Music
• Religious Studies
• Browse content in Society and Culture
• Cookery, Food, and Drink
• Cultural Studies
• Customs and Traditions
• Ethical Issues and Debates
• Hobbies, Games, Arts and Crafts
• Lifestyle, Home, and Garden
• Natural world, Country Life, and Pets
• Popular Beliefs and Controversial Knowledge
• Sports and Outdoor Recreation
• Technology and Society
• Travel and Holiday
• Visual Culture
• Browse content in Law
• Arbitration
• Browse content in Company and Commercial Law
• Commercial Law
• Company Law
• Browse content in Comparative Law
• Systems of Law
• Competition Law
• Browse content in Constitutional and Administrative Law
• Government Powers
• Judicial Review
• Local Government Law
• Military and Defence Law
• Parliamentary and Legislative Practice
• Construction Law
• Contract Law
• Browse content in Criminal Law
• Criminal Procedure
• Criminal Evidence Law
• Sentencing and Punishment
• Employment and Labour Law
• Environment and Energy Law
• Browse content in Financial Law
• Banking Law
• Insolvency Law
• History of Law
• Human Rights and Immigration
• Intellectual Property Law
• Browse content in International Law
• Private International Law and Conflict of Laws
• Public International Law
• IT and Communications Law
• Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law
• Law and Politics
• Law and Society
• Browse content in Legal System and Practice
• Courts and Procedure
• Legal Skills and Practice
• Primary Sources of Law
• Regulation of Legal Profession
• Medical and Healthcare Law
• Browse content in Policing
• Criminal Investigation and Detection
• Police and Security Services
• Police Procedure and Law
• Police Regional Planning
• Browse content in Property Law
• Personal Property Law
• Study and Revision
• Terrorism and National Security Law
• Browse content in Trusts Law
• Wills and Probate or Succession
• Browse content in Medicine and Health
• Browse content in Allied Health Professions
• Arts Therapies
• Clinical Science
• Dietetics and Nutrition
• Occupational Therapy
• Operating Department Practice
• Physiotherapy
• Radiography
• Speech and Language Therapy
• Browse content in Anaesthetics
• General Anaesthesia
• Neuroanaesthesia
• Clinical Neuroscience
• Browse content in Clinical Medicine
• Acute Medicine
• Cardiovascular Medicine
• Clinical Genetics
• Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics
• Dermatology
• Endocrinology and Diabetes
• Gastroenterology
• Genito-urinary Medicine
• Geriatric Medicine
• Infectious Diseases
• Medical Toxicology
• Medical Oncology
• Pain Medicine
• Palliative Medicine
• Rehabilitation Medicine
• Respiratory Medicine and Pulmonology
• Rheumatology
• Sleep Medicine
• Sports and Exercise Medicine
• Community Medical Services
• Critical Care
• Emergency Medicine
• Forensic Medicine
• Haematology
• History of Medicine
• Browse content in Medical Skills
• Clinical Skills
• Communication Skills
• Nursing Skills
• Surgical Skills
• Browse content in Medical Dentistry
• Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery
• Paediatric Dentistry
• Restorative Dentistry and Orthodontics
• Surgical Dentistry
• Medical Ethics
• Medical Statistics and Methodology
• Browse content in Neurology
• Clinical Neurophysiology
• Neuropathology
• Nursing Studies
• Browse content in Obstetrics and Gynaecology
• Gynaecology
• Occupational Medicine
• Ophthalmology
• Otolaryngology (ENT)
• Browse content in Paediatrics
• Neonatology
• Browse content in Pathology
• Chemical Pathology
• Clinical Cytogenetics and Molecular Genetics
• Histopathology
• Medical Microbiology and Virology
• Patient Education and Information
• Browse content in Pharmacology
• Psychopharmacology
• Browse content in Popular Health
• Caring for Others
• Complementary and Alternative Medicine
• Self-help and Personal Development
• Browse content in Preclinical Medicine
• Cell Biology
• Molecular Biology and Genetics
• Reproduction, Growth and Development
• Primary Care
• Professional Development in Medicine
• Browse content in Psychiatry
• Addiction Medicine
• Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
• Forensic Psychiatry
• Learning Disabilities
• Old Age Psychiatry
• Psychotherapy
• Browse content in Public Health and Epidemiology
• Epidemiology
• Public Health
• Browse content in Radiology
• Clinical Radiology
• Interventional Radiology
• Nuclear Medicine
• Radiation Oncology
• Reproductive Medicine
• Browse content in Surgery
• Cardiothoracic Surgery
• Gastro-intestinal and Colorectal Surgery
• General Surgery
• Neurosurgery
• Paediatric Surgery
• Peri-operative Care
• Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
• Surgical Oncology
• Transplant Surgery
• Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery
• Vascular Surgery
• Browse content in Science and Mathematics
• Browse content in Biological Sciences
• Aquatic Biology
• Biochemistry
• Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
• Developmental Biology
• Ecology and Conservation
• Evolutionary Biology
• Genetics and Genomics
• Microbiology
• Molecular and Cell Biology
• Natural History
• Plant Sciences and Forestry
• Research Methods in Life Sciences
• Structural Biology
• Systems Biology
• Zoology and Animal Sciences
• Browse content in Chemistry
• Analytical Chemistry
• Computational Chemistry
• Crystallography
• Environmental Chemistry
• Industrial Chemistry
• Inorganic Chemistry
• Materials Chemistry
• Medicinal Chemistry
• Mineralogy and Gems
• Organic Chemistry
• Physical Chemistry
• Polymer Chemistry
• Study and Communication Skills in Chemistry
• Theoretical Chemistry
• Browse content in Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Architecture and Logic Design
• Game Studies
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Mathematical Theory of Computation
• Programming Languages
• Software Engineering
• Systems Analysis and Design
• Virtual Reality
• Browse content in Computing
• Business Applications
• Computer Security
• Computer Games
• Computer Networking and Communications
• Digital Lifestyle
• Graphical and Digital Media Applications
• Operating Systems
• Browse content in Earth Sciences and Geography
• Atmospheric Sciences
• Environmental Geography
• Geology and the Lithosphere
• Maps and Map-making
• Meteorology and Climatology
• Oceanography and Hydrology
• Palaeontology
• Physical Geography and Topography
• Regional Geography
• Soil Science
• Urban Geography
• Browse content in Engineering and Technology
• Agriculture and Farming
• Biological Engineering
• Civil Engineering, Surveying, and Building
• Electronics and Communications Engineering
• Energy Technology
• Engineering (General)
• Environmental Science, Engineering, and Technology
• History of Engineering and Technology
• Mechanical Engineering and Materials
• Technology of Industrial Chemistry
• Transport Technology and Trades
• Browse content in Environmental Science
• Applied Ecology (Environmental Science)
• Conservation of the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Environmental Sustainability
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Environmental Science)
• Management of Land and Natural Resources (Environmental Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environmental Science)
• Nuclear Issues (Environmental Science)
• Pollution and Threats to the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Environmental Science)
• History of Science and Technology
• Browse content in Materials Science
• Ceramics and Glasses
• Composite Materials
• Metals, Alloying, and Corrosion
• Nanotechnology
• Browse content in Mathematics
• Applied Mathematics
• Biomathematics and Statistics
• History of Mathematics
• Mathematical Education
• Mathematical Finance
• Mathematical Analysis
• Numerical and Computational Mathematics
• Probability and Statistics
• Pure Mathematics
• Browse content in Neuroscience
• Cognition and Behavioural Neuroscience
• Development of the Nervous System
• Disorders of the Nervous System
• History of Neuroscience
• Invertebrate Neurobiology
• Molecular and Cellular Systems
• Neuroendocrinology and Autonomic Nervous System
• Neuroscientific Techniques
• Sensory and Motor Systems
• Browse content in Physics
• Astronomy and Astrophysics
• Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics
• Biological and Medical Physics
• Classical Mechanics
• Computational Physics
• Condensed Matter Physics
• Electromagnetism, Optics, and Acoustics
• History of Physics
• Mathematical and Statistical Physics
• Measurement Science
• Nuclear Physics
• Particles and Fields
• Plasma Physics
• Quantum Physics
• Relativity and Gravitation
• Semiconductor and Mesoscopic Physics
• Browse content in Psychology
• Affective Sciences
• Clinical Psychology
• Cognitive Psychology
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Criminal and Forensic Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Educational Psychology
• Evolutionary Psychology
• Health Psychology
• History and Systems in Psychology
• Music Psychology
• Neuropsychology
• Organizational Psychology
• Psychological Assessment and Testing
• Psychology of Human-Technology Interaction
• Psychology Professional Development and Training
• Research Methods in Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Browse content in Social Sciences
• Browse content in Anthropology
• Anthropology of Religion
• Human Evolution
• Medical Anthropology
• Physical Anthropology
• Regional Anthropology
• Social and Cultural Anthropology
• Theory and Practice of Anthropology
• Browse content in Business and Management
• Business Ethics
• Business Strategy
• Business History
• Business and Technology
• Business and Government
• Business and the Environment
• Comparative Management
• Corporate Governance
• Corporate Social Responsibility
• Entrepreneurship
• Health Management
• Human Resource Management
• Industrial and Employment Relations
• Industry Studies
• Information and Communication Technologies
• International Business
• Knowledge Management
• Management and Management Techniques
• Operations Management
• Organizational Theory and Behaviour
• Pensions and Pension Management
• Public and Nonprofit Management
• Strategic Management
• Supply Chain Management
• Browse content in Criminology and Criminal Justice
• Criminal Justice
• Criminology
• Forms of Crime
• International and Comparative Criminology
• Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice
• Development Studies
• Browse content in Economics
• Agricultural, Environmental, and Natural Resource Economics
• Asian Economics
• Behavioural Finance
• Behavioural Economics and Neuroeconomics
• Econometrics and Mathematical Economics
• Economic History
• Economic Systems
• Economic Methodology
• Economic Development and Growth
• Financial Markets
• Financial Institutions and Services
• General Economics and Teaching
• Health, Education, and Welfare
• History of Economic Thought
• International Economics
• Labour and Demographic Economics
• Law and Economics
• Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
• Microeconomics
• Public Economics
• Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics
• Welfare Economics
• Browse content in Education
• Adult Education and Continuous Learning
• Care and Counselling of Students
• Early Childhood and Elementary Education
• Educational Equipment and Technology
• Educational Strategies and Policy
• Higher and Further Education
• Organization and Management of Education
• Philosophy and Theory of Education
• Schools Studies
• Secondary Education
• Teaching of a Specific Subject
• Teaching of Specific Groups and Special Educational Needs
• Teaching Skills and Techniques
• Browse content in Environment
• Applied Ecology (Social Science)
• Climate Change
• Conservation of the Environment (Social Science)
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Social Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environment)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Social Science)
• Browse content in Human Geography
• Cultural Geography
• Economic Geography
• Political Geography
• Browse content in Interdisciplinary Studies
• Communication Studies
• Museums, Libraries, and Information Sciences
• Browse content in Politics
• African Politics
• Asian Politics
• Chinese Politics
• Comparative Politics
• Conflict Politics
• Elections and Electoral Studies
• Environmental Politics
• European Union
• Foreign Policy
• Gender and Politics
• Human Rights and Politics
• Indian Politics
• International Relations
• International Organization (Politics)
• International Political Economy
• Irish Politics
• Latin American Politics
• Middle Eastern Politics
• Political Behaviour
• Political Economy
• Political Institutions
• Political Methodology
• Political Communication
• Political Philosophy
• Political Sociology
• Political Theory
• Politics and Law
• Public Policy
• Public Administration
• Quantitative Political Methodology
• Regional Political Studies
• Russian Politics
• Security Studies
• State and Local Government
• UK Politics
• US Politics
• Browse content in Regional and Area Studies
• African Studies
• Asian Studies
• East Asian Studies
• Japanese Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Middle Eastern Studies
• Native American Studies
• Scottish Studies
• Browse content in Research and Information
• Research Methods
• Browse content in Social Work
• Addictions and Substance Misuse
• Adoption and Fostering
• Care of the Elderly
• Child and Adolescent Social Work
• Couple and Family Social Work
• Developmental and Physical Disabilities Social Work
• Direct Practice and Clinical Social Work
• Emergency Services
• Human Behaviour and the Social Environment
• International and Global Issues in Social Work
• Mental and Behavioural Health
• Social Justice and Human Rights
• Social Policy and Advocacy
• Social Work and Crime and Justice
• Social Work Macro Practice
• Social Work Practice Settings
• Social Work Research and Evidence-based Practice
• Welfare and Benefit Systems
• Browse content in Sociology
• Childhood Studies
• Community Development
• Comparative and Historical Sociology
• Economic Sociology
• Gender and Sexuality
• Gerontology and Ageing
• Health, Illness, and Medicine
• Marriage and the Family
• Migration Studies
• Occupations, Professions, and Work
• Organizations
• Population and Demography
• Race and Ethnicity
• Social Theory
• Social Movements and Social Change
• Social Research and Statistics
• Social Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility
• Sociology of Religion
• Sociology of Education
• Sport and Leisure
• Urban and Rural Studies
• Browse content in Warfare and Defence
• Defence Strategy, Planning, and Research
• Land Forces and Warfare
• Military Administration
• Military Life and Institutions
• Naval Forces and Warfare
• Other Warfare and Defence Issues
• Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution
• Weapons and Equipment

• < Previous chapter
• Next chapter >

Borges’s Self-Figuration Process in the Late Fiction (1970–1983)

Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies, University College London

• Published: 23 January 2024
• Cite Icon Cite
• Permissions Icon Permissions

Jorge Luis Borges was a notoriously shy individual in life yet paradoxically he inscribed himself prominently in his writings. The focus of this chapter is on the late fiction, an underrepresented corpus in traditional Borges studies, and its aim is to examine how the author’s need to depend on others to take down stories which he dictated from memory affected his literary persona. Its originality lies in the investigation’s approach which does not rely on known biographical accounts but on what has been coined as “biographemes”, meaning snippets of biographical information linked to the author without intending to be a complete portrayal. Mostly, these biographemes are transposed clues that are purposely and misleadingly disguised, such as opaque references to his illustrious ancestors, to other writers, or to fictional characters. An underlying concern is whether   and the extent to which this self-figuration is authentic or is itself a subterfuge to mask greater unknowable complexities. The collections examined are El informe de Brodie [ Doctor Brodie's Report ] (1970) which relates tales of rivalry, violence, and bravado while El libro de arena [ The Book of Sand ] (1975) is thematically varied and includes “Ulrikke,” the only love story told from the female perspective, as well as “El congreso” [The Congress], described by the author as his most autobiographical story. La memoria de Shakespeare [ Shakespeare's Memory ] (1983) focuses on the complex relationship between life and its recollection seen from the shadow of death.

This chapter discusses different aspects of Borges’s self-figuration in his late fiction, a subject that has not received much attention hitherto. Its central aim is to discover what new levels of interpretation are revealed by this approach as distinct from one based on direct recollection in biographical or autobiographical accounts with its attendant belief in causality. This is not to minimize the importance of biographies as an informative source of study, and the present essay owes much to Edwin Williamson’s and Emir Rodríguez Monegal’s informative works. My purpose, however, is not to seek authorial endorsement but rather to focus on the subjectivity of associations linked to the author in his literary persona—his textual figurations—and assess their presence and role in the fiction. In this chapter, the “self” is understood as a plural and open-ended concept as opposed to a monolithic entity and “self-figuration” as a term relating primarily to the portrayal of oneself by oneself. In the case of Borges, this can be a direct reference but is more often an opaque representation using transposed clues that are purposely and misleadingly disguised. These are biographical details, momentary snippets that operate on the lines of “biographemes,” the term coined to relate to the minimal unit of biographical discourse. Its relevance to my argument is that these biographemes do not pretend to be ex ungue leonem building blocks of a totality but instead relate to representations that remain fragmentary, without pretension to being representative of a totality. Roland Barthes compares the biographeme to a photograph, a momentary representation, the illustration of a detail, but not necessarily emblematic of its subject (the subject of the photo). The difference, however, is not simply one of size but also of intent: if a biography recounts a destiny, a biographeme can travel outside any destiny or trigger the fantasy of a direct contact with reality. In this sense, it may be considered a metaphorical bridge between reality and fiction. 1

Regarding Borges’s overall use of biographical associations, it has often been observed that he enmeshes his own history with that of his ancestors and, through them, with his place in the story of Argentina’s national and cultural identity. A different tactic relates to other authors with whom he ostensibly identifies either by endowing them with his own characteristics (biographemes) or vice-versa. These are some of the particularities that invite the question of whether and the extent to which, if at all, this self-figuration is authentic or is itself a subterfuge to mask greater unknowable complexities (c.f.: Brant, Herbert J. Dreams and Death: Borges’s El libro de arena . Hispanófila 107 [1993], 71–86.) This is the position that underlies my discussion of the collections published from 1970 onward, namely, El informe de Brodie (1970), El libro de arena (1975), and La memoria de Shakespeare (1983). These works appeared nearly twenty years after the publication of Ficciones (1944) and El Aleph (1949)—both of which led to his worldwide fame—and they focused mainly on poetry and essays. The reason given for this was his failing eyesight, which caused him to rely on memory and dictation, so that when he eventually returned to writing fiction he created less complicated plots and adopted a narrative style based on aural aesthetics rather than the visual effect of handwriting. The aim of this article is to offer an in-depth study of this change in direction as manifest in some carefully selected stories and to consider the presence and effect of this new age-related condition in the late fiction imaginatively and read it in the spirit in which it was written.

El informe de Brodie (1970)

This collection marked a turning point in the direction of Borges’s fiction, as he himself explicitly, though not necessarily reliably, claimed in the Foreword: “now that I am seventy years old I think I have found my own voice,” in “plain tales” written in a “realist” style ( Collected Fictions , hereafter referred to as CF , 346 ). One might infer from this declaration that these new stories will be simpler, or at least more straightforward than his earlier works, but Borges’s elaboration of his terms of reference, his definition of what is “plain” or “realistic” in literature, casts doubt on this contention. Contrary to expectation, he implies that a plain text is more complex than an intricate one and is only to be attempted by an experienced writer “in his [sic] advanced years”; he further undermines the accepted notion of realism as a transparent reproduction of reality by calling it “a genre no less convention-ridden than all the others” ( CF 346 ).

The same can be said about another principal component of realism: the notion of identity. It is important to stress that a distinguishing feature of this collection is the unmissable yet often overlooked fact that the eleven tales that comprise it are framed in a first-person introduction in which a named or easily identifiable Borges-like figure presents himself as the teller of the tales about to be told or, in most of cases, retold. These are mainly violent tales of duplicity, rivalry, and machista bravado, themes whose associations to the Borges-myth are familiar and entirely plausible. Though the actual name “Borges” appears only once, he is unquestionably the first-person narrator interpellated in each story.

Clues in El informe de Brodie , which point to the “real Borges” or rather to the constructed Borges-myth, are copious. They consist mainly of details about his family, such as mentioning a cousin named Lafinur (in “El encuentro” [The Encounter]); the “quinta” in Adrogué in which he and his family spent summer vacations (in “El otro duelo” [The Other Duel]); a free-thinking father and a strictly observant Catholic mother (“El evangelio según Marcos” [The Gospel According to Mark]); and Godel, an old school friend (“Juan Muraña”). I have chosen “Juan Muraña” as an example of the interpretative potential that a passing reference to a Borges-related association may engender. The frame story reads almost like an extract from Borges’s “Autobiographical Essay,” which lends credence to the alleged encounter between “Borges” and the core story’s narrator, the fictional Trápani: “I was taking the train to Morón; Trápani who was sitting beside the window, spoke to me by name. It took me a moment to recognize him; so many years had gone by since we shared a bench in that school on Calle Thames. (Roberto Godel will recall that.)” ( CF 370 ). Godel is not mentioned again, but a connection has been established. The bench allegedly shared with the fictional Trápani alludes to an incident cited by Williamson where he refers to a trauma suffered by Borges during childhood, when Godel, the only other middle-class boy in the rough local school which they both attended, was sent away to another school and Borges was left to deal with the taunts and derision of his classmates on his own (46). These details are not present in the story and the reference appears entirely gratuitous; many sensitive readings of the story are possible without recourse to it and yet no allusion in Borges is ever gratuitous, as I have argued elsewhere.

In the core story, the fictional Trápani tells the story of his aunt, a shy, reclusive old woman, the widow of the famed Muraña of the title, who was being threatened with eviction by her landlord, a man called Luchessi. When one morning the latter is found knifed, Muraña’s ways of dealing with any affront is recalled by the narrator in a haunting dream, but Luchessi’s killer is never found. The explanation offered is that the old aunt, emboldened by the memory of her heroic late husband, adopted his persona and his knife. The point being made is that, in the narrative, she does not simply use the murder weapon but becomes it. It is the knife that enacts the revenge: “The dagger was Muraña, it was the dead man she went on loving” ( CF 374 ). It is not easy to link this to Godel and yet the allusion remains, gnawingly present. I argue that the old, confused, threatened woman reflects the eleven-year-old abandoned schoolboy and that the tale is symbolic of his fear and the burden of his defense. There were many displays of daggers and other tokens of the cult of courage in Borges’s home, and I cite the story’s fanciful elaboration of this biographical snippet as a notable example of the workings of a biographeme. 2 The dagger in “Juan Muraña” acquires a supernatural quality and leads to a reading of the story as a metaphor for the fear felt by his abandonment by Roberto Godel and the old aunt’s eventual triumph as symbolic of Borges’s unexpressed longing for a worthy solution. The autobiographical details in this story have not been noticed hitherto, but I hope to have shown how they allow for unexpected revelation regarding the different ways in which Borges inscribes himself in his fiction.

A strong autobiographical link underpins the plot and writing of the collection’s opening story, “La intrusa” [The Intruder], the tale of two brothers, known as rough and pugnacious to others but very close between themselves. When one brings a prostitute to live with them, jealousy sets in though not over the girl but of each other. To end this conflict the older brother kills her and when he confesses what he has done, the two embrace, now linked by an even stronger bond, “the woman grievously sacrificed and the obligation to forget her” ( CF 531 ). The story has been richly interpreted in its sexual and cultural complexity. To begin, the verse stated in the epigraph, 2 Kings 1:26, does not exist in the King James version of the Bible since the first chapter of the second book of the Kings has only 18 verses and not 26, but the quotation can be found in the second book of Samuel, also known as Kings in the Hebrew Bible. It reads “I am distressed for thee, my brother: very pleasant hast thou been to me: thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.” The question arising is why Borges chose to camouflage this passage in such a way. Is this simply a teasing trick or is there a more profound motivation? The topic of Borges’s sexuality exceeds the scope of this chapter in its vastness and complexity, but, in terms of self-inscription, it is noteworthy that when Estela Canto, a close friend and one-time confidante of Borges, suggested to him the possibility of a homoerotic reading, he was outraged and stated categorically that there was no such implication whatsoever in the love of the two brothers ( Canto 230 ).

Canto’s testimony needs to be assessed in the context of her amorous involvement with Borges and of his mother’s strong disapproval of it, but her insinuation of autobiographical undertones regarding an enclosed mother and son bond, ready to sacrifice an intruding love interest, is based on her personal knowledge ( Williamson 359–60 ). This suggests the plausibility of two opposing yet linked interpretations of the story: one, that Borges might be projecting himself as the perpetrator of the crime in compliance with his mother’s wishes, or, alternatively, as its victim, identifying himself with the silenced sacrificial lamb. Both relate to a childhood incident in Geneva when the young Borges was forced to have sex with a woman also “known” to his father. 3

Regarding the cult of violence in the story, Borges confesses that it was influenced by his interest in Old Norse literature: “Cuando lo escribí intenté proceder como los autores de las sagas islandesas. Las tuve como ejemplo” [When I wrote it I meant to emulate the writers of Icelandic sagas. I had them as an example] ( Hadis 62 ). 4 He refers, presumably, to the importance of the cult of courage and to its use in this fiction, where he establishes a link between these legendary heroic warriors and the “compadritos” [thugs] of his native Buenos Aires. 5 These are interpretative matters regarding the plot: what is known is that when Borges had difficulties in ending the story he asked for his mother’s help. As has been mentioned, because of his increasing blindness, Borges no longer wrote his stories but dictated them, mostly to his mother. At the time of creating “La intrusa,” he recalls that when he came to the point when the older brother tells the younger one that he has knifed the woman, he could not find the right wording to finish the story. He turned to his mother for help, and she duly gave him the ending. Borges relates the incident as follows: “She gave me those words, and for a moment she became, somehow, one of the characters in the story and believed in the story, as if it had actually taken place” ( Barnstone 104 , emphasis added). This biographical gloss adds a touch of the fantastic to the writing of the story, enriching the strong biographical links present in its contents as well as in its telling.

“La señora mayor,” placed in the middle of the collection, is a story permeated with echoes and resonances of Borges’s life and family history, specifically regarding those ancestors who were heroes of the Wars of Independence. The Señora de Jáuregui, the eponymous “señora mayor,” is about to celebrate her hundredth birthday. Living in somewhat straitened circumstances, not poor but not in as grand a manner, she is portrayed as the daughter of an illustrious father, Colonel Mariano Rubio. The gradual demise of her faculties is sympathetically observed and a certain parallel can be drawn between the dwindling of her mental faculties and that of the family fortunes. Her memories are stuck in a mythified past, for she lived firm in her belief in the values of her traditional Hispanic Catholic upbringing. “She still abominated Artigas, Rosas and Urquiza,” rulers who had been important in her youth, and clung to the way streets were called then and insisted in talking of “orientales” [Easterners] the term used in colonial times for “uruguayos.” As is pointed out in the story, she did not do so out of affectation but, because she never left home, she remained unaware of the changes that her native city underwent and this was her only frame of reference.

There is not much written about this story, but Williamson (361–62 , 417) presents an authoritative argument about its biographical connections, alleging that its main character is modeled on Borges’s mother, Leonor Acevedo, but the values upheld by her—a distinct pride in her patrician inheritance—also reflect those of his two grandmothers, Leonor Acevedo’s mother, Leonor Suárez, and Fanny Haslam. The publication of Memorias de Leonor Acevedo de Borges ( Hadis 2021 ) supports this claim. For example, Borges recalls an amusing vignette that illustrates his mother’s general attitude: “Se hablaba de historia argentina y mi madre dijo: yo soy la historia argentina. Ella honraba a sus mayores” [We were talking about Argentina’s history and my mother said: I am the history of Argentina] ( Hadis 109 ). And yet there is a surprisingly forthright outburst from Doña Leonor in these recorded memoirs, expressing annoyance at so much family glorification: “harta ya de tantos elogios un día me dije: ‘Ojalá mi abuelo hubiera sido zapatero’” [Tired of so much praise, one day she told me: If only my grandfather had been a cobbler] ( Hadis 12 ). This anecdote sheds light on the telling of “La señora mayor,” allowing for the speculation that Borges reacted to this pride in the family’s ancestral past with a sense of identification, responsibility, awe, and, ultimately, like his mother in the previous reference, a burden.

There are several passages in this story that relate to the process of Borges’s self-figuration. For instance, the fictional Colonel Rubio fought in Chacabuco, at the defeat of Cancha Rayada, at Maipú, and, two years later, at Arequipa, as did Borges’s ancestor, Colonel Isidoro Suárez, whose actions in the Wars of Independence played a pivotal role in the defeat of the Spanish army. 6 The story mentions that he and Olavarría exchanged swords: this was a romantic custom among generals, and Borges recalls specifically that his grandfather had exchanged swords, though with another general (General Mansilla), on the eve of a battle in the Paraguayan war ( Borges, Veinticinco Agosto 86). The fictional Rubio also overlaps with the legend of General San Martín, an iconic figure in Argentine history who crossed the Andes and fought in the same battles as Rubio is said to have fought. Rubio and San Martín coincide in being remembered as noble generals who selflessly stepped down in favor of Simón Bolívar because San Martín believed Bolívar to be more favorably placed to secure victory against the Spaniards. This idea is held as dogma in Argentine history, which adds to the irony of the way it is recast here as relating to Venezuelans: “Siempre envidiosos de nuestras glorias, los venezolanos atribuyeron esta victoria al general Simón Bolívar, pero el observador imparcial, el historiador argentino, no se deja embaucar y sabe muy bien que sus laureles corresponden al coronel Mariano Rubio” [Always envious of our Argentine glories, the Venezuelans have attributed that victory to General Simón Bolívar, but the impartial observer, the Argentine historian, is not so easily taken in; he knows full well that the laurels won there belong to Colonel Mariano Rubio] ( OC II: 424 ; CF 375 ). 7 Rubio is a first-born child, was made inspector of poultry and rabbits, and was a frequent visitor to the National Library, all of which are biographical snippets that link him to Borges directly and not through his ancestors. My point here is to argue for a certain fluidity in how Borges inscribes himself in the late fiction, sometimes in oblique reference to his ancestors and sometimes to himself. As a social commentary, the story offers a clearly critical stance concerning the hypocrisy of the past and of the present, but this is modulated by a warm feeling of nostalgia, as in the narrator’s recollection: “Me acuerdo de un olor a cosas guardadas” [I recall the odor of things locked away] ( OC II: 425 ; CF 376 ). Similarly, a gloss on the elderly lady’s straitened circumstances, judges that “la pobreza de ayer era menos pobre que la que ahora nos depara la industria. También las fortunas eran menores” [the poverty of yesterday was less squalid than the one we purchase with our industry today. Fortunes were smaller then as well] ( OC II: 425 ; CF 376 ).

“La señora mayor” is one of the few Borges stories in which a female character’s history and her thoughts and memories, are the main focus of the narrative, which is indirectly told by a (Borges-like) narrator. 8 This opens the way for the implication that her fate is seen as no less decisive in the construction of the nation than the contribution of her male relatives, thereby subtly and implicitly undermining the patriarchal assumptions that underlie the cult of courage in the rest of this collection. By showing another side of the picture, “La señora mayor” recasts the values of Borges’s assumed self-figuration. Borges’s biographer and close friend María Esther Vázquez commented on the irony that someone as shy and as inclined to self-effacement should have inscribed himself so often in his writing. This last idea is particularly apposite to his coded presence throughout El informe de Brodie . Most relevant for the present discussion is the shift from Borges’s accepted self-effacement as a given to an appreciation of his subtle, recondite opposite, his coded self-inscription.

El libro de arena

El libro de arena consists of thirteen stories, in which, as in El informe de Brodie , there is a first-person narrator but not the same thematic consistency. These stories evolve around several themes which revisit Borges’s well-known preoccupations but now with greater emphasis on storytelling, using fewer erudite allusions and clearer and more accessible plot lines though, in the words of Rodríguez Monegal , some are “unabashedly fantastic” (461). An added feature of the collection is a fascination with Norse mythologies, the hovering presence of death, and, quite unusually in Borges’s fiction, love. Borges lived, from childhood onward, in the certain knowledge of his predestined blindness, which may be why these late fictions are marked, to an even greater extent than those in El informe de Brodie , by a deepening emotional intensity in which nostalgia plays a prominent role. They revisit earlier topics now recollected from the wider perspective of the aged narrator, where the topic of memory itself is the object of analysis and discussion. Concentrating on three autobiographically significant stories from El libro de arena , I examine different angles from which the author inscribes himself in the narrative.

“El otro” [The Other] is the first story in El libro de arena. It is about an encounter between a seventy-year-old “Borges” sitting on a bench by the Charles River in Boston in 1969, and his younger self sitting at the other end of what purports to be the same bench by the river Rhone in Geneva in 1918. The following dialogue encapsulates the dilemma of the different time and place in which the story is set:

—En tal caso—le dije resueltamente—usted se llama Jorge Luis Borges. Yo también soy Jorge Luis Borges. Estamos en 1969, en la ciudad de Cambridge. —No—me respondió con mi propia voz un poco lejana. Al cabo de un tiempo insistió: —Yo estoy aquí en Ginebra, en un banco, a unos pasos del Ródano. ( OC III: 11–13 )

[“In that case,” I resolutely said to him, “your name is Jorge Luis Borges. I too am Jorge Luis Borges. We are in 1969, in the city of Cambridge.” “No,” he answered in my own slightly distant voice, “I am here in Geneva, on a bench, a few steps from the Rhône”] ( CF 412 )

This story is of crucial relevance to the topic under discussion in that it deals with an essential element of Borges’s self-figuration, a perception of its dual or multiple nature and even of its illusory essence. In what has become to be regarded as a seminal text, “Borges y yo” [Borges and I], the Borges figure is split into the historic person called Borges and the mythical persona created by his literary fame and attendant adulation. The two, person and persona, exist simultaneously: their difference is not resolved but dissolved in that they become one indistinguishable self. In “El otro,” however, the confrontation differs in that it is presented diachronically, set in two disparate time sequences. The interplay between them is maintained throughout the story and becomes its mainstay. The details that are chosen by the two contenders to confirm their identity are of particular interest in so far as they repeat and perpetuate stock features in biographical and autobiographical accounts. Statements presented by either the older or the younger Borges as proof of their inside knowledge take the form of references to his literary works and repeat some of his more idiosyncratic opinions. For example, the allusion to Los himnos rojos [ Red Anthems ] relates to a collection of poems in praise of the Russian Revolution whose utopian ideas and violent imagery he later repudiated; the discussion of metaphor ties in with the already mentioned views in Brodie’s Report ; in 1966 he published, in collaboration with María Esther Vázquez, Literaturas germánicas medievales [ Medieval Germanic Literature ] (it includes a section on Scandinavian literatures) 9 ; the flower in the fantasy by Coleridge alludes to his essay “La flor de Coleridge” [Coleridge’s Flower] ( Obras Completas, 1996 . Vol.2, pp.17–19 ); the predictions concerning Jichlinski, a friend from his Geneva years, are correct, as is the mention of the Geneva restaurant, “ the Crocodile ”; the self-parodic remark about not being surprised if the teaching of Latin were to be replaced by Guaraní accords with the reactionary views expressed in “El duelo” [The Duel] where Guaraní is referred to as “un utensilio casero” [a household implement], whose meaning I read as useful to ladies in Corrientes for communicating with their servants. The younger man’s predictions regarding the older writer’s future publications bear the hallmark of Borges’s famed self-mockery: too many books, poetry admired more by himself than others, writing fantastic stories, teaching “like your father,” a remark slyly intended as an indirect criticism of his father’s failure as a writer (Cf. the saying “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach”).

There are other works of literature mentioned which are inconclusive of the identity of the speaker because they could have been read and left their mark on either of them, but there is one cultural allusion cited by the older man that the younger one admits that he could not have written or memorized because he himself had not come across it by 1918 ( Shaw 172 ). The implication of this is that it could not be the younger one dreaming the older. This is a line by Victor Hugo, “L’hydre-univers tordant son corps écaillé d’astres” whose cryptic meaning is that the universe is wondrously alive and that God exists everywhere, just as we exist in all our former and future selves. 10 The implied parallel between ourselves and God to argue a unified sense of self is a significant new facet in Borges’s self-figuration but, bearing in mind Borges’s known skepticism about any absolutist notion, not a defining one. Rather, it can be fruitfully construed as an ironic inconsistency in Borges’s self-figuration as underlying all these recollections.

Another argument presented as decisive in deciding whether it is the older man recalling his younger self or the younger imagining his future self relates to the recollection of a dated dollar bill from the year 1964, which would make its discussion in 1918 impossible. There is a vast critical literature on this issue but what is relevant in the present context is that, according to the données of the story, dollar bills are not dated individually but according to series and the date when the series was issued. This accepted fact is pivotal in the narrative, which ends in the voice of the younger man, and from his perspective: “El otro me soñó, pero no me soñó rigurosamente. Soñó, ahora lo entiendo, la imposible fecha en el dólar” [The other man dreamed me, but did not dream me rigorously —he dreamed, I now realize, the impossible date on that dollar bill] ( OC III: 16 ; CF 417 , second emphasis added). 11 And so the confusion lives on.

A brief interchange regarding Walt Whitman’s self-figuration offers a most revealing insight regarding Borges’s own self-figuration through that of another author. Voiced by one of his alternating personae, it alludes to Whitman’s recollection of a night when he had been truly happy and the lapidary observation that “Si Whitman la ha cantado … es porque la deseaba y no sucedió. El poema gana si adivinamos que es la manifestación de un anhelo, no la historia de un hecho” [Whitman sang of that night, … it’s because it never happened. The poem gains in greatness if we sense that it is the expression of a desire, a longing, rather than the narration of an event] ( OC III: 15 ; CF 416 ). This idea is an enlightening insinuation that what appears to be an authentic self-portrayal may be the subterfuge for an unfulfilled desire: “Luego está también aquella parte de mi vida que yo no he tenido y que hubiera querido tener” [and then there is that part of my life that I haven’t had and that I would have liked to have had] (qtd. in Rojas 75 ). 12

“Ulrica” [Ulrikke] is the story of a brief encounter between two strangers, one, a university professor from Colombia named Javier Otálora, and the other, a mysterious Norwegian woman, Ulrikke (her surname is not given). They meet by chance one evening at an inn in the city of York where they both happen to be staying for the night on their way in different directions. Otálora, whose first-person account this is, falls in love immediately with Ulrikke, though not much occurs between them that evening. On the following morning they meet again and decide to go out for a walk together, downriver. He now kisses her, and she rejects him gently but firmly, promising to make love to him that evening. They meet again at the same inn and sexual intercourse finally takes place: he possesses her, or rather possesses her image: “Como la arena se iba el tiempo. Secular en la sombra fluyó el amor y poseí por primera y última vez la imagen de Ulrica” [Like sand, time sifted away. Ancient in the dimness flowed love, and for the first and last time, I possessed the image of Ulrikke] ( OC III: 19 ; CF 421 ). This is the only Borges story in which the act of love is extensively imagined and consummated, albeit in dream form. 13

Borges inscribes himself prominently in this story, both directly through overt statements and the inclusion of many recondite autobiographical details ( Williamson 397–98 ) and indirectly through a series of aphorisms associated with his persona. Borges has chosen “Ulrikke” as one of his favorite stories, and while this is a claim he has made elsewhere (“El Sur” [The South], “La intrusa”) there is a ring of truth here in that it deals with a very personal and persistent preoccupation: the attainment of love as an (im)possibility. Like all epigraphs, the one heading this story acts as a gateway to its meaning. It is a quotation from a Norse epic, the Volsunga Saga , whose translation reads: “He takes the sword Gram and lays it between them.” This is a reference to Sigurd placing his sword between himself and his former lover, Brynhild, to ensure his chastity given that she is now betrothed to someone else and is prohibited to him. The epigraph emphasizes the connotation of the sword as an instrument of power, armed conflict, and, ultimately, of prohibition; given the numerous swords displayed in Borges’s home honoring their military ancestors, the quoted inscription has been interpreted as an allusion to Borges’s sexual and emotional difficulties, whether by self-imposition or fear of his mother ( Williamson 399 ). According to the Saga, the lovers’ (incestuous) union is finally consummated in the grave, and Borges’s choice of this epigraph to be placed as an inscription on his tomb is telling in terms of self-projection.

The story was conceived by Borges during a trip with Maria Kodama to Iceland, and he told her that the character of Ulrica was based on her. However, by making her Norwegian, he added a dimension to her portrayal, turning her into the prototype of the northern European woman—proud, noble, and unattainable—and, as such, symbolic of Borges’s long, complex love. The identification of Otálora with Borges is more straightforward. As an aged university professor from the University of the Andes in Bogotá, he resembles Borges who, in 1956, was awarded the title of Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Cuyo (at the foot of the Andes). Otálora’s visit to York is in tune with Borges’s trip to Great Britain in 1964 and in particular to his short stay in the city of York. Further indirect traces of Borges’s self-inscription can be found in some of Otálora’s aphorisms, which are interpolated in the story. For example, “Mi relato será fiel a la realidad o, en todo caso, a mi recuerdo personal de la realidad, lo cual es lo mismo” [My story will be faithful to reality, or at least to my personal recollection of reality, which is the same thing ] ( OC III: 17 ; CF 418 , emphasis added). This sentence foregrounds the solipsism of his view of fiction as a guided dream yet clashes with another comment by the narrator: “La frase quería ser ingeniosa y adiviné que no era la primera vez que la pronunciaba. Supe después que no era característica de ella, pero lo que decimos no siempre se parece a nosotros” [The pronouncement was an attempt at wit, and I sensed this wasn’t the first time she’d voiced it. I later learned that it was not like her— but what we say is not always like us ] ( OC III: 17 ; CF 418 , emphasis added).

The lines “¿Qué es ser colombiano?” [What is ‘being Colombian’?] and “—No sé—le respondí—. Es un acto de fe” [“I’m not sure,” I replied. “It’s an act of faith”] recalls Borges’s many anti-nationalist pronouncements, while “Para un hombre célibe entrado en años, el ofrecido amor es un don que ya no se espera. El Milagro tiene derecho a imponer condiciones” [For a celibate, middle-aged man, proffered love is a gift that one no longer hopes to find. The miracle has a right to impose conditions ] has an unmissable Borges-like nostalgic ring, and the reference to “condiciones” [conditions] and to a girl who, in his youth, had denied him her love, is a likely allusion to his many frustrated love affairs ( OC III: 18 ; CF 419–20 , emphasis added). Reflecting the inscription, love is accompanied by death and the story ends with the impending danger of death: “—En estas tierras —dije—, piensan que quien está por morir prevé lo futuro. —Y yo estoy por morir —dijo ella.” [“In these lands,” I said, “people think that a person who’s soon to die can see the future.” “And I’m about to die,” she said] ( OC III: 19 ; CF 420 ). The purpose of the foregoing discussion is to argue the increased emotional intensity and personal involvement in the late fiction. The intellectual or philosophical complexities of “Emma Zunz” have given way, here, to a story about passion, desire, and fear.

“El congreso” is Borges’s longest story and one which he thought about for much of his creative life, from about the early 1940s until its first publication in 1971. It is the realization of an idea conceived in early life and presented from the vantage point of old age. Borges spoke of it as being “perhaps the most autobiographical,” an obvious reference to the longevity of its gestation but also and pertinently, to the narrator, Alejandro Ferri’s, many points in common with “Borges.” Ferri is the founder and mastermind of the Congress, an ambitious project to include all mankind and its history, and is also the perpetrator of its destruction when he realizes the impossibility of the task because the Universe is essentially irreducible. I confine my discussion of Borges’s self-projection here to a series of paratextual comments followed by an examination of one or two representative biographemes in the core text.

When Borges gave an ironic resumé of his life and writings in an invited talk at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, he singled out “El congreso” with ambivalent praise as “perhaps the best story I have ever written. Though critics have not been too fond of it” ( Leone 215 ). He expands on this opinion in a famed interview with María Esther Vázquez, where he recalls a criticism of the story as “un libro inútil” [a useless book] because it is already included in his previous work, a sort of resumé of his opera omnia. But the author disagrees, pointing out that “El congreso” differs from the rest by uniquely portraying something that was intended as a failure—the annihilation of all that constituted the Congress—to be seen ultimately as a success. The metaphysical significance of this success-in-failure is the illustration that the universe is irreducible, but a more prosaic understanding would note that annihilation is not total because although everything is burned and members of the Congress disperse, one remnant of the Congress escaped the flames, namely the eponymous self-reflective story we are now reading. A recondite association which has not be seen so far, but which may be justified considering Borges’s increasing reference to Norse mythology in the late fiction, is to “Ragnarök,” the Scandinavian myth of the Twilight of the Gods, according to which, after a great conflagration, the world will be renewed. 14 I cite this as one of the many literary writings by Borges which are reflected in the story and which add to its being “the most autobiographical” of his fictions.

The foregoing is a subtle understanding of the autobiographical nature of “El congreso”; more blatantly obvious are the many references that suggest Ferri as an alter ego of Borges. The interchangeability between the two is often teasingly misleading, but at times the divergences become more meaningful. The similarity of the narrator’s age and Borges’s, his arrival in Buenos Aires in 1899 (the year Borges was born), and giving classes to small numbers of students are all known details that I suggest instill a sense of security in the reader; “no me casé” [I never [married] and “estoy solo” [I am alone] are inexact yet an interesting take on his relationship with his mother ( OC III: 20 ; CF 422 ); “un síntoma inequívoco es el hecho de que no me interesan o sorprenden las novedades, acaso porque advierto que nada esencialmente nuevo hay en ellas y que no pasan de ser tímidas variaciones” [one unequivocal sign is that I find novelty neither interesting nor surprising, perhaps because I see nothing essentially new in it] are familiar thoughts regarding a change of direction in his late fiction ( OC III: 20 ; CF 422 ). This is taken further with the words “Cuando era joven, me atraían los atardeceres, los arrabales y la desdicha; ahora, las mañanas del centro y la serenidad. Ya no juego a ser Hamlet” [When I was young, I was drawn to sunsets, slums, and misfortune; now it is to mornings in the heart of the city and tranquility. I no longer play at being Hamlet] ( OC III: 20 ; CF 422 ). On this change in his aesthetics, he commented “I am no longer that writer” ( Carrizo 237 ). As a final example of a controversial self-inscription, I quote “El curioso puede exhumar, en algún oscuro anaquel de la Biblioteca Nacional de la calle México, un ejemplar de mi Breve examen del idioma analítico de John Wilkins , obra que exigiría otra edición, siquiera para corregir o atenuar sus muchos errores” [The curious reader may exhume, from some obscure shelf in the National Library on Calle México, a copy of my book A Brief Examination of the Analytical Language of John Wilkins, a work which ought to be republished if only to correct or mitigate its many errors] ( OC III: 20 ; CF 422 ). This lengthy extract justifies the many oblique allusions it enables. The title refers not to a book but to a seminal essay on the epistemological limitations in understanding the universe; the exact wording is “El idioma analítico de John Wilkins” [The Analytical Language of John Wilkins]. In this fictional essay, Borges caricatures the attempts to offer a linguistic form as equivalent to reality: “notoriamente no hay clasificación del universe que no sea arbitaria y conjectural. La razón es muy simple: no sabemos qué cosa es el universo” [obviously there is no classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and speculative. The reason is quite simple: we do not know what the universe is] ( OC II: 86 ; SNF ) ( Selected Non-Fiction, 231 ), which is a clear reformulation of the gist of “El congreso.” The laconic statement which follows, “obra que exigiría otra edición, siquiera para corregir o atenuar sus muchos errores” is in line with the revelation that Borges corrected and rewrote indefatigably, as shown in Daniel Balderston’s How Borges Wrote ( OC III: 20 ). The tease concludes with the dismissive declaration by the Borges-like Ferri regarding the Borges Director of the National Library: “Nunca he querido conocerlo” [I have never wished to meet him] ( OC III: 20 ; CF 423 ). This twist in the perspective of the narrative epitomizes the deliberate unreliability in Borges’s self-figuration whereby a fictional persona that doubles up into itself becomes the framing component of the story.

La memoria de Shakespeare

Published posthumously in 1983, La memoria de Shakespeare is Borges’s last and shortest collection of fiction. It consists of four stories each told by a Borges-like aged, vulnerable figure as narrator. One, “Tigres azules” [Blue Tigers], is a fictionalization of Borges’s well-known fear of tigers and tells the story of a man’s intuition that the nightmare objects of his dream may be emblematic of his own existence; another, “La rosa de Paracelso” [The Rose of Paracelsus], is about a renowned elderly magician who can no longer perform his miracles for anyone but himself. The association between magician and fabulist need not be argued.

In the section that follows, I discuss the first and last story of the collection.

“Veinticinco de Agosto, 1983” [August 25, 1983] is a variation of “El otro,” told from the vantage point of the older man but not primarily in confrontation with another self but with death. The narrator, at the time of telling the story, is sixty-one years old and the story is about an imagined meeting with his eighty-four-year-old self. In conversation with each other, they recall many incidents from “their” youth and in particular memories of a planned suicide. Vázquez remembers Borges dictating this story to her and recalls that, in real life, he had decided to commit suicide and set the date for this on his thirty-fifth birthday, but when it came to it, he was too cowardly to do so. The shame of this stayed with him forever, and the story gains by being read from this perspective. In contrast to “El otro,” the two Borges figures here do not stand in opposition to each other for they know that “la verdad es que somos dos y somos uno” [the truth is that we are two yet we are one] ( OC III: 376 ; CF 491 ). They consider the intimacy of death, not from an abstract intellectual point of view, but as an authentic life experience, imagined with pathos and rare tenderness, with “una especie de dulzura y de Alivio, que no he sentido nunca” [a sort of sweetness and relief (I’ve) never felt before] ( OC III: 378 ; CF 492 ). However, they still recoil at the thought of touching each other, and, what is more, with the impunity that the knowledge of imminent death gives them, they vent feelings of mutual hatred, which turn out to be self-hatred: “Aborrezco tu cara, que es mi caricatura, aborrezco tu voz, que es mi remedo, aborrezco tu sintaxis patética, que es la mía” [I loathe your face, which is a caricature of mine, I loathe your voice, which is a mockery of mine, I loathe your pathetic syntax, which is my own] ( OC III: 378 ; CF 492 ). The vehemence of this unanticipated outburst of hatred adds a distinctive layer to the palimpsestic assemblage of Borges’s self-figuration, valuable in that it is not a fantasy of desired alternatives to the self but of the horror thereof. A literary-based aspect in this story is Borges’s auto-figuration in a projected book that lists all the main known themes in the existing fiction: “los laberintos, los cuchillos, el hombre que se cree una imagen, el reflejo que se cree verdadero” [the labyrinths, the knives, the man who thinks an image, the reflection that thinks it’s real], and so on ( OC III: 377 ; CF 491 ). Ironically, the author was considered “not actually being Borges yet mirroring all the outward appearances of the original” ( CF 492 ). And I suggest that this sentence mirrors all that has been argued so far—self-projections that are outward appearances of an elusive and possibly absent center.

“La memoria de Shakespeare” is the title of Borges’s last fiction in his eponymous last and shortest collection. The story’s narrator is the fictional character Hermann Soergel, a Shakespeare scholar, who unexpectedly is offered the gift of the Bard’s memory, which he accepts. He is delighted at the thought/possibility of “being Shakespeare,” but when the new memory takes over and destroys his own, he deplores its loss and longs to be himself once more. The title, particularly in the original Spanish, means both “what Shakespeare remembers” and “how Shakespeare is remembered,” a questioning that is placed in the general context of the working and significance of memory. To what extent is memory a reflection of the self or its constituent? How does it function, and what are its limitations? This is defined by the narrator as “La memoria del hombre no es una suma; es un desordern de posibilidades indefinidas” [A man’s memory is not a summation; it is the chaos of vague possibilities] ( OC III: 395 ; CF 513 ). The story is an exploration of these vague possibilities: one, the possibility of willing oneself into another self; another, regarding its cost, namely the destruction of one’s self by this abandonment. A further vague possibility is the author’s imagination of himself as his fictional character.

Borges’s self-inscription in the character of Soergel is subtle yet convincing: bookish, a lover of Shakespeare, fascinated by the English language and its verbal music, an allusion to memorized readings from Chaucer to Plutarch, an article referencing “the versions of Homer,” a thinly disguised rewording of Borges’ essay title, “Las versiones homéricas” [The Homeric Versions]. One could also mention his sexual initiation with a mature woman, his half-blindness, or his tone—at once self-deprecating and assured. A teasing addition is the boasting comment that his book on Shakespeare’s chronology was translated into several languages “incluso el castellano” [ including Spanish ] ( OC III: 391 ; CF 508 , emphasis added). And finally, in the inescapably Borgesian plaintive tone of the Postscriptum: “P.S. 1924 —Ya soy un hombre entre los hombres. En la vigilia soy el profesor emérito Hermann Soergel, que manejo un fichero y que redacto trivialidades eruditas” [P.S. (1924)—I am now a man among men. In my waking hours I am Professor Emeritus Hermann Soergel; I putter about the card catalogue and compose erudite trivialities] ( OC III: 397 ; CF 515 ). The literary and biographical references are familiar but not so the pathos of their recollection.

The story is perhaps unique in its assertion of the existence of the individual self, not only as a fact but as something precious and quintessential. This realization comes to the protagonist through the memory of a saying by Spinoza, “Todas las cosas quieren perseverar en su ser … La Piedra quiere ser una piedra, el tigre un tigre, yo quer[ia volver a ser Hermann Soergel” [the wish of all things … is to continue being what they are. The stone wishes to be stone, the tiger, tiger—and I wanted to be Hermann Sörgel again] ( OC III: 396 ; CF 514 ). Two observations spring to mind: one, this idea is a teasing contradiction of a (Buddhist) notion often argued by Borges, the “nothingness of personality,” and, two, that this sentence about “uniqueness” is itself nearly a verbatim repetition. I refer to its mention in “Borges y yo.” This idea of an essential concept of a unique self in this last fiction is an ironic example of the intensely diversified and complex process of self-figuration noted so far.

Borges’s presence in his fiction has so far been studied mainly from the perspective of biographies written about him, including his own essay, as authoritative and meaningful points of comparison—the author as explanation of the work. The originality of this investigation is that it considers Borges mainly as a fabulist and consequently departs from the fiction itself to study the fictionalization of the “Borges” figure as the subject of the narrative. It looks at the method with which the author weaves biographical snippets, or biographemes, into a story and assesses the effect of this on the interpretative possibilities of the story. A significant finding is that every single one of the late fictions has a first-person narrator. There is a trajectory in how this manifests itself which ranges from the detached narrators in El informe de Brodie who often tell a story told and retold by another, to the increasingly emotional involvement in the later ones. According to Borges’s own claim, these characters are all different manifestations of himself, as he robustly states here: “I’ve never created a character. It’s always me, subtly disguised…. I’m always myself, irreparably, incurably, myself” ( de la Fuente 36 ). The interest of this avowal lies, as I hope to have shown, in the detailed particularity of these “disguises” and the joy that their awareness brings to an appreciation of Borges’s late fiction.

Works Cited

Balderston, Daniel.   How Borges Wrote . University of Virginia Press, 2018 .

Google Scholar

Google Preview

Balderston, Daniel.   Out of Context: Historical Reference and the Representation of Reality in Borges . Duke University Press, 1993 .

Balderston, Daniel. “The Fecal Dialectic: Homosexual Panic and the Origin of Writing in Borges.” ¿Entiendes? Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings . Edited by Emilie L. Bergmann and Paul Julian Smith , Duke University Press, 1995 , pp. 29–45.

Barnstone, Willis , ed. Borges at Eighty: Conversations . University of Indiana Press, 1982 .

Borges, Jorge Luis.   Collected Fictions , translated by Andrew Hurley , Penguin, 1999 .

Borges, Jorge Luis.   Obras completas . 4 vols. Emecé,   1996 , Vol, 2, pp. 17–19.

Borges, Jorge Luis.   Selected Non-Fiction, 1922–1986 , edited by Eliot Weinberger , Penguin, 2000 .

Borges, Jorge Luis.   Veinticinco Agosto 1983 y otros cuentos . Siruela, 1983 .

Borges, Jorge Luis , and María Esther Vázquez . Literaturas germánicas medievales . Falbo, 1965 (first published as Antiguas literatura germánicas , con la colaboración de Delia Ingenieros, Fondo de cultura económica , 1951).

Canto, Estela.   Borges a contraluz . Espasa Calpe, 1989 .

Carrizo, Antonio.   Borges el memorioso. Conversaciones de Jorge Luis Borges con Antonio Carrizo . Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1982 .

de la Fuente, Ariel.   Borges, Desire, and Sex . Liverpool University Press, 2018 .

Greenberg, Michael. “The Daggers of Jorge Luis Borges.” The New York Review , January 9, 2014. https://www-nybooks-com.libproxy.ucl.ac.uk/articles/2014/01/09/daggers-jorge-luis-borges/

Hadis, Martin.   Memorias de Leonor Acevedo . Editorial Claridad, 2021 .

Hadis, Martin.   Siete Guerreros Nortumbrios . Emecé, 2012 .

Hurtado, Ana María. “Ulrica o El enamorado y la Muerte. A propósito de un cuento de Jorge Luis Borges.” Trópico Absoluto , May 19, 2016, https://tropicoabsoluto.com/2019/05/19/ulrica-o-el-enamorado-y-la-muerte-a-proposito-de-un-cuento-de-jorge-luis-borges/

Leone, Leah. “ A Chain of Endless Tigers: Borges at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, April 9, 1976. ” Variaciones Borges , vol. 40, 2015 , pp. 205–224.

Petersen, Alice E. H. “ Borges’s ‘Ulrike’: Signature of a Literary Life. ” Studies in Short Fictions , vol. 33, 1996 , pp. 325–31.

Rodríguez Monegal, Emir.   Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary Biography . Dutton, 1978 .

Rojas, Santiago. “ El desdoblamiento creador-personaje en Borges: Usos y efectos de creación. ” Confluencias , vol. 11, no. 1, 1995 , pp. 75–88.

Shaw, Donald.   Borges’ Narrative Strategy . Francis Cairns, 1992 .

Shehzad Zaidi, Ali. “ The Overlooked Library in Borges’s ‘El otro. ’” Variaciones Borges , vol. 31, 2011 , pp. 181–97.

Williamson, Edwin.   Borges: A Life . Viking, 2004 .

See Urli chapter 14.

2 See Michael Greenberg , “The Daggers of Jorge Luis Borges,” The New York Review , January 9, 2014. https://www-nybooks-com.libproxy.ucl.ac.uk/articles/2014/01/09/daggers-jorge-luis-borges/

This incident will be discussed more fully in the context of “El otro” [The Other].

All unattributed translations are my own.

Old Norse becomes a more prominent feature in El libro de arena .

Borges recalls the memory of Isidoro Suárez in three poems.

The story “Guayaquil” in El informe de Brodie draws on this rivalry. See Balderston, Out of Context (115–31).

Two other key stories with female protagonists are “Emma Zunz” and “Ulrica.”

This is a reedition of the early work that Borges published with Delia Ingenieros ( Antiguas literaturas germánicas [1951]).

See Ali Shehzad Zaidi for a discussion of this idea (189–90).

Dollar bills are not dated according to when they were issued, but they do carry the date of the series to which they belong.

For a longer discussion of Borges and this Whitman poem, see Balderston, “The Fecal Dialectic.”

For a more detailed discussion see Alice E. H. Petersen and Ana María Hurtado .

There is a short piece called “Ragnarök” in El hacedor [ The Maker ].

• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Institutional account management
• Rights and permissions
• Get help with access
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

If you want this website to work, you must enable javascript.

Writing My Autobiography

A re you still writing?” he asked.

“I am,” I answered.

“What are you working on at the moment?”

“An autobiography,” I said.

“Interesting,” he replied. “Whose?”

The implication here, you will note, is that mine hasn’t been a life sufficiently interesting to merit an autobiography. The implication isn’t altogether foolish. Most autobiographies, at least the best autobiographies, have been written by people who have historical standing, or have known many important people, or have lived in significant times, or have noteworthy family connections or serious lessons to convey . I qualify on none of these grounds. Not that, roughly two years ago when I sat down to write my autobiography, I let that stop me.

An autobiography, to state the obvious, is at base a biography written by its own subject. But how is one to write it: as a matter of setting the record straight, as a form of confessional, as a mode of seeking justice, or as a justification of one’s life? “An autobiography,” wrote George Orwell, “is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” Is this true? I prefer to think not.

Autobiography is a complex enterprise, calling for its author not only to know himself but to be honest in conveying that knowledge. “I could inform the dullest author how he might write an interesting book,” wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge. “Let him relate the events of his own life with Honesty, not disguising the feelings that accompanied them.” One of the nicest things about being a professor, it has been said, is that one gets to talk for fifty minutes without being interrupted. So one of the allurements of autobiography is that one gets to write hundreds of pages about that eminently fascinating character, oneself, even if in doing so one only establishes one’s insignificance.

The great autobiographies—of which there have not been all that many—have been wildly various. One of the first, that of the Renaissance sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, is marked by an almost unrelieved braggadocio: No artist was more perfect, no warrior more brave, no lover more pleasing than the author, or so he would have us believe. Edward Gibbon’s autobiography, though elegantly written, is disappointing in its brevity. That of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, heavily striking the confessional note, might have been told in a booth to a priest. Ben Franklin’s autobiography is full of advice on how the rest of us should live. John Stuart Mill’s is astounding in its account of its author’s prodigiously early education, which began with his learning Greek under his father’s instruction at the age of three. Then there is Henry Adams’s autobiography, suffused with disappointment over his feeling out of joint with his times and the world’s not recognizing his true value. In Making It , Norman Podhoretz wrote an autobiography informed by a single message, which he termed a “dirty little secret,” namely that there is nothing wrong with ambition and that success, despite what leftist intellectuals might claim, is nothing to be ashamed of.

Please note that all of these are books written by men. Might it be that women lack the vanity required to write—or should I say “indulge in”—the literary act of autobiography? In Mary Beard’s Emperor of Rome , I recently read that Agrippina the Younger, the mother of Nero, wrote her autobiography, which has not survived, and which Mary Beard counts as “one of the great losses of all classical literature.” I wish that Jane Austen had written an autobiography, and so too George Eliot and Willa Cather. Perhaps these three women, great writers all, were too sensibly modest for autobiography, that least modest of all literary forms.

A utobiography can be the making or breaking of writers who attempt it. John Stuart Mill’s autobiography has gone a long way toward humanizing a writer whose other writings tend toward the coldly formal. Harold Laski wrote that Mill’s “ Autobiography , in the end the most imperishable of his writings, is a record as noble as any in our literature of consistent devotion to the public good.”

If Mill’s autobiography humanized him, the autobiography of the novelist Anthony Trollope did for him something approaching the reverse. In An Autobiography , Trollope disdains the notion of an author’s needing inspiration to write well. He reports that “there was no day on which it was my positive duty to write for the publishers, as it was my duty to write reports for the Post Office,” where he had a regular job. “I was free to be idle if I pleased. But as I had made up my mind to undertake this second profession [that of novelist], I found it to be expedient to bind myself by certain self-imposed laws.” Trollope recounts—emphasis here on “counts”—that as a novelist he averages forty pages per week, at 250 words per page. He writes: “There are those who would be ashamed to subject themselves to such a taskmaster, and who think that the man who works with his imagination should allow himself to wait till inspiration moves him. When I have heard such doctrine preached, I have hardly been able to repress my scorn.” Trollope then mentions that on the day after he finished his novel Doctor Thorne , he began writing his next novel, The Bertrams . For a long spell the literati refused to forgive Trollope for shearing inspiration away from the creation of literary art, for comparing the job of the novelist to a job at the post office. Only the splendid quality of his many novels eventually won him forgiveness and proper recognition.

A serious biography takes up what the world thinks of its subject, what his friends and family think of him, and—if the information is available in letters, diaries, journals, or interviews—what he thinks of himself. An autobiography is ultimately about the last question: what the author thinks of himself. Yet how many of us have sufficient self-knowledge to give a convincing answer? In her splendid novel Memoirs of Hadrian , Marguerite Yourcenar has Hadrian note: “When I seek deep within me for knowledge of myself what I find is obscure, internal, unformulated, and as secret as any complicity.” The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the scrupulously examined one is rare indeed.

My own life has not provided the richest fodder for autobiography. For one thing, it has not featured much in the way of drama. For another, good fortune has allowed me the freedom to do with my life much as I have wished. I have given my autobiography the title Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life , with the subtitle Especially If You’ve Had a Lucky Life . Now well along in its closing chapter, mine, I contend, has been thus far—here I pause to touch wood—a most lucky life.

My title derives from the story of Croesus, who ruled the country of Lydia from circa 585–547 b.c. , and who is perhaps today best known for the phrase “rich as Croesus.” The vastly wealthy Croesus thought himself the luckiest man on earth and asked confirmation of this from Solon, the wise Athenian, who told him that in fact the luckiest man on earth was another Athenian who had two sons in that year’s Olympics. When Croesus asked who was second luckiest, Solon cited another Greek who had a most happy family life. Croesus was displeased but not convinced by Solon’s answers. Years later he was captured by the Persian Cyrus, divested of his kingdom and his wealth, and set on a pyre to be burned alive, before which he was heard to exclaim that Solon had been right. The moral of the story is, of course: Never say you have had a lucky life until you know how your life ends.

I have known serious sadness in my life. I have undergone a divorce. I have become a member of that most dolorous of clubs, parents who have buried one of their children. Yet I have had much to be grateful for. In the final paragraph of a book I wrote some years ago on the subject of ambition, I noted that “We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, or the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing.” In all these realms, I lucked out. I was born to intelligent, kindly parents; at a time that, though I was drafted into the army, allowed me to miss being called up to fight in any wars; and in the largely unmitigated prosperity enjoyed by the world’s most interesting country, the United States of America.

Writing is a form of discovery. Yet can even writing ferret out the quality and meaning of one’s own life? Alexis de Tocqueville, the endlessly quotable Tocqueville, wrote: “The fate of individuals is still more hidden than that of peoples,” and “the destinies of individuals are often as uncertain as those of nations.” Fate, destiny, those two great tricksters, who knows what they have in store for one, even in the final days of one’s life? I, for example, as late as the age of eighteen, had never heard the word “intellectual.” If you had asked me what a man of letters was, I would have said a guy who works at the post office. Yet I have been destined to function as an intellectual for the better part of my adult life, and have more than once been called a man of letters. Fate, destiny, go figure!

T he first question that arises in writing one’s autobiography is what to include and what to exclude. Take, for starters, sex. In his nearly seven-hundred-page autobiography, Journeys of the Mind , the historian of late antiquity Peter Brown waits until page 581 to mention, in the most glancing way, that he is married. Forty or so pages later, the name of a second wife is mentioned. Whether he had children with either of these wives, we never learn. But then, Brown’s is a purely intellectual autobiography, concerned all but exclusively with the development of the author’s mind and those who influenced that development.

My autobiography, though less than half the length of Brown’s, allowed no such luxury of reticence. Sex, especially when I was an adolescent, was a central subject, close to a preoccupation. After all, boys—as I frequently instructed my beautiful granddaughter Annabelle when she was growing up—are brutes. I came of age BP, or Before the Pill, and consummated sex, known in that day as “going all the way,” was not then a serious possibility. Too much was at risk—pregnancy, loss of reputation—for middle-class girls. My friends and I turned to prostitution.

Apart from occasionally picking up streetwalkers on some of Chicago’s darker streets, prostitution for the most part meant trips of sixty or so miles to the bordellos of Braidwood or Kankakee, Illinois. The sex, costing $3, was less than perfunctory. (“Don’t bother to take off your socks or that sweater,” one was instructed.) What was entailed was less sensual pleasure than a rite of passage, of becoming a man, of “losing your cherry,” a phrase I have only recently learned means forgoing one’s innocence. We usually went on these trips in groups of five or six in one or another of our fathers’ cars. Much joking on the way up and even more on the way back. Along Chicago’s Outer Drive, which we took home in those days, there was a Dad’s Old Fashioned Root Beer sign that read, “Have you had it lately?,” which always got a good laugh.

I like to think of myself as a shy pornographer, or, perhaps better, a sly pornographer. By this I mean that in my fiction and where necessary in my essays I do not shy away from the subject of sex, only from the need to describe it in any of its lurid details. So I have done in my autobiography. On the subject of sex in my first marriage (of two), for example, I say merely, “I did not want my money back.” But, then, all sex, if one comes to think about it, is essentially comic, except of course one’s own.

On the inclusion-exclusion question, the next subject I had to consider was money, or my personal finances. Financially I have nothing to brag about. In my autobiography I do, though, occasionally give the exact salaries—none of them spectacular—of the jobs I’ve held. With some hesitation (lest it seem boasting) I mention that a book I wrote on the subject of snobbery earned, with its paperback sale, roughly half-a-million dollars. I fail to mention those of my books that earned paltry royalties, or, as I came to think of them, peasantries. In my autobiography, I contented myself with noting my good fortune in being able to earn enough money doing pretty much what I wished to do and ending up having acquired enough money not to worry overmuch about financial matters. Like the man said, a lucky life.

If I deal glancingly in my autobiography with sex and personal finances, I tried to take a pass on politics. My own political development is of little interest. I started out in my political life a fairly standard liberal—which in those days meant despising Richard Nixon—and have ended up today contemptuous of both our political parties: Tweedledum and Tweedledumber, as the critic Dwight Macdonald referred to them. Forgive the self-congratulatory note, but in politics I prefer to think myself a member in good standing of that third American political party, never alas on the ballot, the anti-BS party.

Of course, sometimes one needs to have a politics, if only to fight off the politics of others. Ours is a time when politics seems to be swamping all else: art, education, journalism, culture generally. I have had the dubious distinction of having been “canceled,” for what were thought my political views, and I write about this experience in my autobiography. I was fired from the editorship of Phi Beta Kappa’s quarterly magazine, the American Scholar —a job I had held for more than twenty years—because of my ostensibly conservative, I suppose I ought to make that “right-wing,” politics. My chief cancellers were two academic feminists and an African-American historian-biographer, who sat on the senate, or governing board, of Phi Beta Kappa.

T he official version given out by Phi Beta Kappa for my cancellation—in those days still known as a firing—was that the magazine was losing subscribers and needed to seek younger readers. Neither assertion was true, but both currently appear in the Wikipedia entry under my name. The New York Times also printed this “official” but untrue version of my cancellation. In fact, I was canceled because I had failed to run anything in the magazine about academic feminism or race, both subjects that had already been done to death elsewhere and that I thought cliché-ridden and hence of little interest for a magazine I specifically tried to keep apolitical. During my twenty-two years at the American Scholar , the name of no current United States president was mentioned. If anything resembling a theme emerged during my editorship, it was the preservation of the tradition of the liberal arts, a subject on which I was able to acquire contributions from Jacques Barzun, Paul Kristeller, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Frederick Crews, and others.

That I was fired not for anything I had done but for things I had failed to do is an indication of how far we had come in the realm of political correctness. I take up this topic in my autobiography, one theme of which is the vast changes that have taken place in American culture over my lifetime. A notable example is an essay on homosexuality that I wrote and published in Harper’s in 1970, a mere fifty-three years ago. The essay made the points that we still did not know much about the origin of male homosexuality, that there was much hypocrisy concerning the subject, that homosexuals were living under considerable social pressure and prejudice, and that given a choice, most people would prefer that their children not be homosexual. This, as I say, was in 1970, before the gay liberation movement had got underway in earnest. The essay attracted a vast number of letters in opposition, and a man named Merle Miller, who claimed I was calling for genocide of homosexuals, wrote a book based on the essay. Gore Vidal, never known for his temperate reasoning, claimed my argument was ad Hitlerum . (Vidal, after contracting Epstein-Barr virus late in life, claimed that “Joseph Epstein gave it to me.”) I have never reprinted the essay in any of my collections because I felt that it would stir up too much strong feeling. For what it is worth, I also happen to be pleased by the greater tolerance accorded homosexuality in the half century since my essay was published.

The larger point is that today neither Harper’s nor any other mainstream magazine would dare to publish that essay. Yet a few years after the essay was published, I was offered a job teaching in the English Department of Northwestern University, and the year after that, I was appointed editor of the American Scholar. Today, of course, neither job would have been available to me.

Do these matters—my cancellation from the American Scholar , my unearned reputation as a homophobe—come under the heading of self-justification? Perhaps so. But then, what better, or at least more convenient, place to attempt to justify oneself than in one’s autobiography?

Many changes have taken place in my lifetime, some for the better, some for the worse, some whose value cannot yet be known. I note, for example, if not the death then the attenuation of the extended family (nephews, nieces, cousins) in American life. Whereas much of my parents’ social life revolved around an extensive cousinage, I today have grandnephews and grandnieces living on both coasts whom I have never met and probably never shall. I imagine some of them one day being notified of my death and responding, “Really? [Pause] What’s for dinner?”

I take up in my autobiography what Philip Rieff called, in his book of this title, the Triumph of the Therapeutic, a development that has altered child-rearing, artistic creation, and much else in our culture. Although the doctrines of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and others are no longer taken as gospel, their secondary influence has conquered much of modern culture. My parents’ generation did not hold with therapeutic culture, which contends that the essentials of life are the achievement of self-esteem and individual happiness, replacing honor, courage, kindness, and generosity.

In my autobiography, I note that when my mother was depressed by her knowledge that she was dying of cancer, a friend suggested that there were support groups for people with terminal diseases, one of which might be helpful. I imagined telling my mother about such groups, and her response: “Let me see,” she is likely to have said. “You want me to go into a room with strangers, where I will listen to their problems and then I’ll tell them mine, and this will make me feel better.” Pause. “Is this the kind of idiot I’ve raised as a son?”

T hen there is digital culture, the verdict on which is not yet in. Digital culture has changed the way we read, think, make social connections, do business, and so much more. I write in my autobiography that in its consequences digital culture is up there with the printing press and the automobile. Its influence is still far from fully fathomed.

One of my challenges in writing my autobiography was to avoid seeming to brag about my quite modest accomplishments. In the Rhetoric , Aristotle writes: “Speaking at length about oneself, making false claims, taking the credit for what another has done, these are signs of boastfulness.” I tried not to lapse into boasting. Yet at one point I quote Jacques Barzun, in a letter to me, claiming that as a writer I am in the direct line of William Hazlitt, though in some ways better, for my task—that of finding the proper language to establish both intimacy and critical distance—is in the current day more difficult than in Hazlitt’s. At least I deliberately neglected to mention that, in response to my being fired from the American Scholar, Daniel Patrick Moynihan flew an American flag at half-mast over the Capitol, a flag he sent to me as a souvenir. Quoting others about my accomplishments, is this anything other than boasting by other means? I hope so, though even now I’m not altogether sure.

I have a certain pride in these modest accomplishments. Setting out in life, I never thought I should publish some thirty-odd books or have the good luck to continue writing well into my eighties. The question for me as an autobiographer was how to express that pride without preening. The most efficient way, of course, is never to write an autobiography.

Why, then, did I write mine? Although I have earlier characterized writing as a form of discovery, I did not, in writing my autobiography, expect to discover many radically new things about my character or the general lineaments of my life. Nor did I think that my life bore any lessons that were important to others. I had, and still have, little to confess; I have no hidden desire to be spanked by an NFL linebacker in a nun’s habit. A writer, a mere scribbler, I have led a largely spectatorial life, standing on the sidelines, glass of wine in hand, watching the circus pass before me.

Still, I wrote my autobiography, based in a loose way on Wordsworth’s notion that poetry arises from “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Writing it gave me an opportunity to review my life at the end of my life in a tranquil manner. I was able to note certain trends, parallels, and phenomena that have marked my life and set my destiny.

The first of these, as I remarked earlier, was the fortunate time in which I was born, namely the tail end of the Great Depression—to be specific, in 1937. Because of the Depression, people were having fewer children, and often having them later. (My mother was twenty-seven, my father thirty at my birth.) Born when it was, my generation, though subject to the draft—not, in my experience of it, a bad thing—danced between the wars: We were too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam. We were also children during World War II, the last war the country fully supported, which gave us a love of our country. Ours was a low-population generation, untroubled by the vagaries of college admissions or the trauma of rejection by the school of one’s choice. Colleges, in fact, wanted us.

Or consider parents, another fateful phenomenon over which one has no choice. To be born to thoughtless, or disagreeable, or depressed, or deeply neurotic parents cannot but substantially affect all one’s days. Having a father who is hugely successful in the world can be as dampening to the spirit as having a father who is a failure. And yet about all this one has no say. I have given the chapter on my parents the title “A Winning Ticket in the Parents Lottery,” for my own parents, though neither went to college, were thoughtful, honorable, and in no way psychologically crushing. They gave my younger brother and me the freedom to develop on our own; they never told me what schools to attend, what work to seek, whom or when to marry. I knew I was never at the center of my parents’ lives, yet I also knew I could count on them when I needed their support, which more than once I did, and they did not fail to come through. As I say, a winning ticket.

As one writes about one’s own life, certain themes are likely to emerge that hadn’t previously stood out so emphatically. In my case, one persistent motif is that of older boys, then older men, who have supported or aided me in various ways. A boy nearly two years older than I named Jack Libby saw to it that I wasn’t bullied or pushed around in a neighborhood where I was the youngest kid on the block. In high school, a boy to whom I have given the name Jeremy Klein taught me a thing or two about gambling and corruption generally. Later in life, men eight, nine, ten, even twenty or more years older than I promoted my career: Hilton Kramer in promoting my candidacy for the editorship of the American Scholar , Irving Howe in helping me get a teaching job (without an advanced degree) at Northwestern, John Gross in publishing me regularly on important subjects in the Times Literary Supplement , Edward Shils in ways too numerous to mention. Something there was about me, evidently, that was highly protégéable.

I  haven’t yet seen the index for my autobiography, but my guess is that it could have been name-ier. I failed, for example, to include my brief but pleasing friendship with Sol Linowitz. Sol was the chairman of Xerox, and later served the Johnson administration as ambassador to the Organization of American States. He also happened to be a reader of mine, and on my various trips to Washington I was often his guest at the F Street Club, a political lunch club where he reserved a private room in which we told each other jokes, chiefly Jewish jokes. I might also have added my six years as a member of the National Council of the National Endowment for the Arts, whose members included the actors Robert Stack and Celeste Holm, the Balanchine dancer Arthur Mitchell, Robert Joffrey, the soprano Renée Fleming, the novelist Toni Morrison, the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, the architect I. M. Pei, the painter Helen Frankenthaler, and other highly droppable names.

Confronting one’s regrets is another inescapable element in writing one’s autobiography. Ah, regrets: the red MG convertible one didn’t buy in one’s twenties, the elegant young Asian woman one should have asked to dinner, the year one failed to spend in Paris. The greater the number of one’s regrets, the grander their scope, the sadder, at its close, one’s life figures to be. I come out fairly well in the regrets ledger. I regret not having studied classics at university, and so today I cannot read ancient Greek. I regret not having been a better father to my sons. I regret not asking my mother more questions about her family and not telling my father what a good man I thought he was. As regrets go, these are not minor, yet neither have I found them to be crippling.

Then there is the matter of recognizing one’s quirks, or peculiar habits. A notable one of mine, acquired late in life, is to have become near to the reverse of a hypochondriac. I have not yet reached the stage of anosognosia, or the belief that one is well when one is ill—a stage, by the way, that Chekhov, himself a physician, seems to have attained. I take vitamins, get flu and Covid shots, and watch what I eat, but I try to steer clear of physicians. This tendency kicked in not long after my decades-long primary care physician retired. In his The Body: A Guide for Occupants , Bill Bryson defines good health as the health enjoyed by someone who hasn’t had a physical lately. The ancients made this point more directly, advising bene caca et declina medicos (translation on request) . For a variety of reasons, physicians of the current day are fond of sending patients for a multiplicity of tests: bone density tests, colonoscopies, biopsies, X-rays of all sorts, CT scans, MRIs, stopping only at SATs. I am not keen to discover ailments that don’t bother me. At the age of eighty-seven, I figure I am playing with house money, and I have no wish to upset the house by prodding my health in search of imperfections any more than is absolutely necessary.

The older one gets, unless one’s life is lived in pain or deepest regret, the more fortunate one feels. Not always, not everyone, I suppose. “The longer I live, the more I am inclined to the belief that this earth is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum,” said George Bernard Shaw, who lived to age ninety-four. Though the world seems to be in a hell of a shape just now, I nonetheless prefer to delay my exit for as long as I can. I like it here, continue to find much that is interesting and amusing, and have no wish to depart the planet.

Still, with advancing years I have found my interests narrowing. Not least among my waning interests is that in travel. I like my domestic routine too much to abandon it for foreign countries where the natives figure to be wearing Air Jordan shoes, Ralph Lauren shirts, and cargo pants. Magazines that I once looked forward to, many of which I have written for in the past, no longer contain much that I find worth reading. A former moviegoer, I haven’t been to a movie theater in at least a decade. The high price of concert and opera tickets has driven me away. The supposedly great American playwrights—Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee—have never seemed all that good to me, and I miss them not at all. If all this sounds like a complaint that the culture has deserted me, I don’t feel that it has. I can still listen to my beloved Mozart on discs, read Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Dickens, George Eliot, Willa Cather, and the other great novelists, watch the splendid movies of earlier days on Turner Classics and HBO—live, in other words, on the culture of the past.

“Vho needs dis?” Igor Stravinsky is supposed to have remarked when presented with some new phenomena of the avant-garde or other work in the realm of art without obvious benefit. “Vho needs dis?” is a question that occurred to me more than once or twice as I wrote my autobiography. All I can say is that those who read my autobiography will read of the life of a man lucky enough to have devoted the better part of his days to fitting words together into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into essays and stories on a wide variety of topics. Now in his autobiography all the sentences and paragraphs are about his own life. He hopes that these sentences are well made, these paragraphs have a point, and together they attain to a respectable truth quotient, containing no falsehoods whatsoever. He hopes that, on these modest grounds at least, his autobiography qualifies as worth reading.

Joseph Epstein  is author of  Gallimaufry , a collection of essays and reviews.

Image by  Museum Rotterdam on Wikimedia Commons , licensed via Creative Commons . Image cropped. 

Articles by Joseph Epstein

Want more articles like this one delivered directly to your inbox?

Sign up for our email newsletter now!