Borges: A Life (review)

Abstract

When he was fifty-six years old and blind as the result of a degenerative eye disease, author Jorge Luis Borges was appointed director of the National Library in Buenos Aires. "I speak of God's splendid irony in granting me at one time 800,000 books and darkness," he said. This could be the epigraph of both his writing and his life, which were full of late surprises and ironies. Little known outside Argentina and Spain well into his fifties, Borges eventually would become one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. Born in 1899, he was the great-grandson of a military hero in the struggle for South American independence. His father, a frustrated writer and lawyer of modest income, moved the family to a rough Italian-immigrant suburb of northern Buenos Aires. "Georgy," as he was called in his multilingual family, was taken out of school. His father's large library offered escape and nourished what ripened into a lifelong taste for books, including English and American literature. As Edwin Williamson's superb new biography shows, Borges's life, like his work, was a quiet pageant of paradox. He loved his sister, Norah, and both of his parents. They were a close family. Yet partly due to the eye condition, Borges remained dependent on his proud and often overbearing mother, Doña Leonor Acevedo de Borges, who seemed to grow younger and more capable as he grew older and more dependent on her. He would not be fully free to live his own life until she died in her ninety-ninth year. He worked as a minor functionary in a branch library well into middle age, his brief celebrity as a young poet long a thing of the past. At the same time that he was seemingly in decline and resigned to living a "small" life, he [End Page 228] was writing the stories that would make him famous. Borges's signature technique was to disguise them with insignificance, dealing with large subjects in ways that appeared almost to make a joke of the whole enterprise. Ultimately these brief and seemingly minor "fictions," as he called them, are full of wonder and amazement. At the same time he joined the fray of Argentinian politics as an intellectual opponent of dictator Juan Perón, a stance that became an important reason for his acceptance as a major writer. Casual readers of Borges will be surprised to learn how much politics defined the life and career of this writer of magical, seemingly otherworldly stories. Borges's involvement in literature was so passionate that in some ways it bent his life and fueled his neuroticism. He was intensely romantic in his attitude toward women, spending almost twenty years stubbornly devoted to Norah Lange, darling of the Buenos Aires literary set, long after she had rejected him. He proposed to Estela Campo in his mid-forties, but his physical timidity and snobbish mother eventually put her off, and she left town with an English lover. Still, the paradoxes and surprises awaited, as in his mid-seventies Borges fell deeply in love with Maria Kodama, a half-Japanese woman. Their mutual fascination with Scandinavian literature inspired them to travel to Iceland, where an old man said to be a Nordic pagan priest married them. Like so many events in the life of this man who claimed to have "never emerged from his father's library," this almost demands an exclamation mark. Williamson's biography weaves the connections between the writer's work and his surprise-filled life into a direct, well-organized, chronologically based story. Borges's blindness perversely fueled his late-life image as a timeless bard suspended in some imaginary, ideal literary universe. But this biography, which for now must become the standard biography of Borges, clearly demonstrates the opposite—that he was a flawed, passionate, sentimental, and ultimately brave man.