Mother's boy

National Review, Jan 31, 2005 by Algis Valiunas

Borges: A Life, by Edwin Williamson (Viking, 574 pp., $34.95)

THE Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), prolific master of the short burst, known for his poems, essays, and stories and for never having written a novel, was the founding father of magic realism and is widely thought of as the greatest Spanish-language writer since Cervantes. Borges is of course most famous for his fantasies with cosmic implications; among the best are "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," "The Library of Babel," "Three Versions of Judas," "The Zahir," "The Writing of the God," "The Aleph," "The Sect of the Thirty," "Undr," and "Blue Tigers." These stories reel and yaw with metaphysical uncertainty. All known pieties are up for grabs; gnostic strangeness abounds. In one story an ancient sect, now lost, worships Jesus and Judas equally, as reverent agents of the divine intention. In another a modern theologian discovers that the Word was made Flesh not in Jesus but in Judas, and that Christianity is the greatest coverup going. A20-centavo coin gives its possessor a fearsome intuition of the nature of God and Creation. A small stone contains the entire universe, visible at once in its full extent. Asingular copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica leads Borges to a world, most likely the product of human imagination, where the inhabitants understand time but have no concept of space.

Borges stands habitually poised somewhere between time and eternity, between the end of the universe and boundless space; he dwells upon the mystery of the infinite. No common explanation for or description of reality, however reasonable or deeply engrained in the culture, withstands the lethal radiance of Borges's imagination, which never forecloses any alternative to the conventional philosophical, scientific, or religious accounts. There can, however, be such a thing as too much imagination. If anything that can be thought of just might turn out to be true, but everything can be understood every possible way, as the world is made anew with each passing thought, then the prospect of ever discerning the truth amid this confusion grows increasingly unlikely the more one thinks. And Borges's mind swarmed with thoughts.

Edwin Williamson's astonishing Borges: A Life attempts to show that when Borges's mind roved through limitless vistas of time and space he was actually thinking about things very much of this world: especially family and romantic love. Williamson believes that Borges's failure at ordinary life turned him toward the harrowing metaphysical questions and that it perhaps explains the futility of his efforts to answer them.

Borges came of distinguished ancestry, but he despised his conquistador forebears as ignorant freebooters and reserved his admiration for those men who later fought for Latin American independence from Spain, soldiers and statesmen sworn to the noblest cause he knew. The Argentine national pageant was a family romance: The swords of heroes were displayed in the Borges home, and proud visages glowered from silver-framed portraits. Borges grew up adulating beyond measure men as bold and fierce as he was not. Williamson essentially devotes his biography to the psychic death-match between the sword of honor, carried by the ancestors who lived and died in purest dignity, and the dagger, sported by the compadrito or ruffian dandy who drank and whored and thieved and killed for nothing.

In Williamson's schematic but not unconvincing rendering, Borges's father wielded the dagger and his mother the sword. The elder Borges was no compadrito, but he did have a raffish side, and even went so far as to publish poetry and to dream of literary glory--unseemly in a man of irreproachable lineage. The mother was all respectability and social ambition. Williamson refers to her simply as Mother, no possessive necessary: She does all the possessing. A luncheon guest remembers her saying to the housekeeper, who asked her if she should pour Borges some wine, "El nino no toma vino"--the boy doesn't drink wine. Borges was pushing 60 at the time.

With the maternal sword thrust deep into his vitals, Borges in the pursuit of love staggered in mortal agony. None of the women Borges fell in love with over the course of more than 40 years met Mother's specifications; in her eyes they were common or bohemian or sluttish, and Borges would cringe and cower dutifully, turning his back on the women he wanted so, or driving them away with his mama's-boy antics. For years he reeked of sexual desperation. Broken romances brought him to the verge of suicide more than once. In his 60s, he married a widow whom he had courted fecklessly years before, and he was sure that he would live out his days in ecstasy; but she was an ordinary housewife, he an intellectual grandee, and the marriage was a disaster. He wound up leaving her for Maria Kodama, decades younger than he, with whom he found the love he had fumbled toward all his life.

At the heart of Williamson's account is a line from the philosopher F. H. Bradley that Borges chose as the epigraph to a 1928 book of essays: "For love unsatisfied the world is a mystery, a mystery which satisfied love appears to understand." Erotic distress translated into metaphysical consternation, and both found their way into Borges's writing. During most of his career Borges studiously avoided writing of love, at least directly; but, Williamson writes, this subject "haunted the work of his middle years and was encrypted in signs, symbols, and motifs virtually everywhere in his texts." Although Williamson's endless worrying at this theme turns into academic overkill, he clearly understands something essential about Borges's fiction. Moreover, Williamson elucidates why Borges abandoned the gorgeous love poetry of his hopeful youth and only really resumed writing poems in old age, when at last those youthful hopes were realized.