BORGES AND ME
An Encounter
By Jay Parini
This is a memoir about writers: a young poet, his middle-aged mentor and, at the story’s pale bright center, a 71-year-old wizard of language. Wishing to escape the draft and possible deployment to Vietnam (the year is 1970), as well as his suffocating family in Pennsylvania, the young narrator, Jay Parini, enrolls in a doctoral program at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
He arrives in a funk, unsure of his direction and with his mother’s anxious voice of caution echoing unpleasantly in his mind. Good fortune strikes, however, in the form of a friendship with the writer Alastair Reid. Reid combines a Scot’s sternness with a beatnik’s anti-bourgeois cheer. He is an excellent host who regales his guests with hearty stews, wine and hash-laced brownies. He is also the translator of the Argentine poet, essayist and story writer Jorge Luis Borges, who, as it happens, will soon be coming to stay with him in St. Andrews.
When Borges appears, near blind and dressed in a lumpy brown suit and tie (the modest uniform of a middle-class librarian and writer, he once explained), the memoir takes flight. He happily devours Reid’s brownies and, under their intoxicating influence, swings his cane at the North Sea like a benign Arthurian sword that holds the key to life’s mysteries and riddles. In his presence, the mundane disappears and reality explodes with new meaning. Though Borges is at the height of his fame, Parini has never heard of him and is slow to succumb to the charm of his eccentricities.
When a family emergency summons Reid to London, he asks Parini to look after Borges until he returns. Brimming with energy, Borges proposes they take a road trip through the Highlands. Parini will supply transportation and play the part of his companion’s eyes, describing what he sees. Borges has never been to Scotland, but his knowledge of its history and literature is profound. “Just to read a map of the Highlands is to recite poetry,” he says. He has taught himself Anglo-Saxon and knows the ancient epics by heart. Their vocabulary of hard real things — “sword,” “seed,” “shield,” “wood” — entrances him, and he has spent a lifetime bending Spanish to that tactile linguistic ideal.
Parini, for his part, is annoyed at the prospect of this garrulous, “self-obsessed” old man distracting him from the girl he has a crush on and his doctoral research. This resistance is a fine narrative stroke. It allows him to recreate their encounter as an inconvenience rather than a privilege. A callow poet, hungry for guidance, is cluelessly alone with one of the most formidable writers of the 20th century; his task is to open his eyes and discover the blind man’s brilliance. Parini wonderfully describes Borges as he experiences him, free of reverence or awe.
What follows is an entertaining journey in Parini’s sputtering used car. Their trip in the Highlands becomes a tour through Borges’s singular world. His speech is a reflection of his innermost mind and there is an odd purity about his unstoppable need to communicate what he thinks and feels. Language provides an infinite (and holy) landscape of association, not only because it names the world but because it is the means through which we can extract truth from it.
When Parini recites a poem he has written about romantic longing, Borges says: “One often reads … this sentiment. It’s common, but not any less painful for its very ordinary pain.” Parini is stung, but Borges hasn’t meant to belittle him. “Dear boy,” he adds, “I have written the same poem. This exact poem.” He insists that Parini read his short story “Pierre Menard,” about “a man who rewrites ‘Don Quixote,’ word for word,” believing he is writing it for the first time. “In doing so, he liberates the idea of originality from the prison house of Romanticism. Every word is original in the mouth, in the fresh context of what is uttered. In its own time and space.”
This is the crux of Borges’s philosophy of literature. The cult of individual genius is an illusion. Poetry is circular: Each one of us repeats the emotions and experiences of those who came before, whether we know we’re doing it or not. In casual conversation, he recites passages from Auden, Shakespeare, Milton, Anglo-Saxon and South American epics, as if they were written in one book by a single author. He seems to pluck his interweaving associations from the air, like someone catching a fly in his hand. When asked if he believes in angels, Borges says: “I believe in everything, dear boy. It is the secret of life.” He then explains that the meaning of “belief” in Anglo-Saxon (gelefen) is “to hold dearly.”
Sometimes his gelefen is taken to wild extremes. During a thunderstorm in the Cairngorm Mountains, Borges abruptly exits the car, wanders away like Lear and falls down a slope, injuring his head badly enough to spend the night in a nearby cottage hospital. At Loch Ness, he stands in their rickety rowboat and, waving his cane, recites the “Song of Creation” from “Beowulf,” capsizing the boat and dumping himself and Parini in the water. After Parini drags him through the cold lake to safety, Borges explains that he had been singing to Nessie, the monster of the lake, who, like Grendel, and the poor blind monster in all of us, abhors light, human fellowship and song.
A delightful aspect of this portrait is Borges’s complete lack of snobbishness. He is curious about everyone they meet, offering himself openly. This generosity extends to Parini, whom he treats as an equal, grateful for his companionship and unbothered by the young man’s ignorance of his work. He often is able to intuit Parini’s youthful insecurities and fears.
This reminiscence by Parini, who is now a prolific novelist, biographer and poet, brings Borges more sharply to life than any account I’ve read or heard. (I met Borges in Buenos Aires a few years after the events of this book.) In this sense, the memoir is an important contribution to the biography of a major writer. The bond that Borges and Parini forge during their improbable journey is moving, with its unexpected moments of confession and shared fragility. Some scenes, remembered 50 years after the fact, may read like set pieces, some conversations may seem too neatly composed, but the spirit of Borges rings true. Fans may notice that his conversation is peppered with quotes from his essays and wonder if Parini has placed lifted passages in his subject’s mouth. But this was how Borges talked: There was little separation between what he had read, lived and written himself.
For readers who already admire Borges, this memoir will be a delicious treat. For those who have yet to read him, Parini provides the perfect entry point to a writer who altered the way many think of literature.
August 18, 2020 at 04:00PM
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A Road Trip With One of the 20th Century’s Greatest Writers - The New York Times
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