Saving a Fish From Drowning
Norman Thomas di Giovanni, Georgie & Elsa: Jorge Luis Borges and His Wife: The Untold Story
HarperCollins, 200pp, £16.99, ISBN 9780007524372
reviewed by Alexis Forss
‘If fiction is imagined as a globe,’ wrote Martin Amis, ‘with realism at its equatorial belt, then Borges occupies a spectral citadel in the North Pole.’ If we were to add to Amis’s cosmology a twin planet of non-fiction then its lodestar would guide us to an arctic athenaeum housing Speak, Memory and The Executioner’s Song, and in some derelict shack amidst the slop of the tropics’ fuggiest swampland we would find the shabby and misbegotten Georgie & Elsa. If this is indeed ‘the book that all lovers of Borges have longed for,’ as Paul Theroux’s dust jacket quote alleges, then it must be for reasons that are aleatoric, unforeseen, and more authentically Borgesian than anything to be found within. What is most interesting here is the experience of reading a book unmistakeably conceived in the Flaubertian spirit of biography as revenge on behalf of its subject, and coming to the surreal and dislocating conclusion that its author has succeeded only in providing succour and comfort to those who, like VS Pritchett, objected to the liberties Borges took with the form of life. For all his good intentions – like a child that pulls a fish out of water to save it from drowning – what Norman Thomas di Giovanni wrestles from out of the labyrinth is an image of his erstwhile mentor and collaborator that is both lowering to the spirit and inconsequential to the fiction.
In 1967 the 68-year-old Jose Luis Borges married Elsa Astete Millán, a widow 11 years his junior. The marriage lasted less than three years and was dissolved by mutual consent. In his capacity as translator and amanuensis, di Giovanni bore witness to the unhappy union and counselled Borges through the divorce. Proffering his memoir as a corrective to the paucity of coverage that the regrettable period has received in previous biographies, di Giovanni believes that he is resolving an egregious lacuna in our understanding of the author of Ficciones and El Aleph (the English translation of the latter was his initiative and labour). ‘Synecdoche, a part standing for the whole’ as he pretentiously introduces and justifies the book, before quoting Borges himself: ‘Any life, no matter how long or complex it may be, is made up essentially of a single moment – the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.’ Never mind that the line isn’t one of Borges’ best, that di Giovanni describes it as ‘the kind of incisive and highly literary statement typical of him’ braces us for what is to follow: 259 pages of imprecise sycophancy, limp qualifiers, and drippy platitudes. But the enterprise’s most catastrophic misprision is its fundamental misconception of the nature of Borges’ fiction and what strata of biographical data might be germane to its understanding. Consider the following passage, taking place in 1970 before the initiation of divorce proceedings:
Di Giovanni’s numerous solecisms converge here: the maudlin rhetorical flourishes, the clichéd locutions, the awkward chumminess, the stilted conversational rhythms, and the skimpy context. But most unforgivable is how the true pathos eludes him: it lies not in the clumsy and fallacious irony of life imitating art, but in seeing the blinded Borges so browbeaten as to seem to think so. Where is the scholastic ardour and panoptic coolness that once sustained him? Di Giovanni has to work hard to justify his synecdoche, and what I think he’s attempting to do is make some sort of debauched anti-muse out of Elsa, as if the eight year-old Beatrice had grown up to become a truly loathsome mediocrity and petit bourgeois. It’s not enough that the marriage issued in three years of misery, hostility, neglect and distrust: those three years must also be the slow decay of youth’s lost dream of love, the whirligig of Time bringing His revenge upon Eros. But even if that’s the case, then so what? While he succeeds (through persistence and volubility rather than artfulness) in mounting the case that Elsa was an astonishingly unpleasant human being – uncouth, materialistic, manipulative, and devoid of imagination – di Giovanni cannot convince us that she is in any way worthy of our attention. We can see that already on the first page: ‘Borges’s ultimate fame as a writer is based on a mere thirty-four stories written between 1933 and 1953.’ Then why should we be interested? All that the woman imperilled, it emerges, were di Giovanni’s own labours to tether himself to the master’s posterity. He is welcome to his footnote.
At the conclusion of the sublime story Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote (1939), Borges proposed a way to enrich the hesitant and rudimentary art of reading: the technique is one of deliberate anachronism and erroneous attributions, and would fill the dullest books with adventure. ‘Would not the attributing of The Imitation of Christ to Louis Ferdinand Céline or James Joyce be a sufficient renovation of its tenuous spiritual counsels?’ (Anthony Bonner’s translation.) And wouldn’t the opportunistic di Giovanni and the bonsai Borges of his rendering find the dignity that eludes them if they’d been conjured by Nabokov or Beckett in burlesque of Pale Fire or Endgame? Anyway, most writers behove no biography: the same work that invites the attention is composed in solitude, and it is precisely in that solitude that the would-be examined life is at its most vivid and intense. ‘Life’ as others understand it – that mephitic swarm of detours and distractions – threatens the sine qua non of the writer’s, and it is precisely to this that Borges’ fiction is inimical. What some see as a taking of liberties with the form of life is a reiteration of Nietzsche’s counsel the deepest pathos is still aesthetic play. You cannot quote Borges’ fiction to circumscribe his life, that quiet and desperate mess of frustration, enfeeblement, and political naïveté. The fiction refers only to itself, can only lead us deeper into the labyrinth. We were best to let Borges rest therein.
In 1967 the 68-year-old Jose Luis Borges married Elsa Astete Millán, a widow 11 years his junior. The marriage lasted less than three years and was dissolved by mutual consent. In his capacity as translator and amanuensis, di Giovanni bore witness to the unhappy union and counselled Borges through the divorce. Proffering his memoir as a corrective to the paucity of coverage that the regrettable period has received in previous biographies, di Giovanni believes that he is resolving an egregious lacuna in our understanding of the author of Ficciones and El Aleph (the English translation of the latter was his initiative and labour). ‘Synecdoche, a part standing for the whole’ as he pretentiously introduces and justifies the book, before quoting Borges himself: ‘Any life, no matter how long or complex it may be, is made up essentially of a single moment – the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.’ Never mind that the line isn’t one of Borges’ best, that di Giovanni describes it as ‘the kind of incisive and highly literary statement typical of him’ braces us for what is to follow: 259 pages of imprecise sycophancy, limp qualifiers, and drippy platitudes. But the enterprise’s most catastrophic misprision is its fundamental misconception of the nature of Borges’ fiction and what strata of biographical data might be germane to its understanding. Consider the following passage, taking place in 1970 before the initiation of divorce proceedings:
Elsa, Elsa, Elsa. As mentioned, I had neither spoken to nor laid eyes upon her since we parted in New York. But I was becoming frantic about the way that even at a distance she kept interrupting our work. One morning back in Cambridge when his misery concerning his wife was written all over his face, I had asked Borges why on earth he’d married her.
He went pensive, searching for an adequate answer. After a longish pause he said, ‘We had known each other when we were young. Then decades passed without our seeing any more of each other. A few years ago we met again. I thought here we are meeting again. This is destiny.’
‘You mean you were thinking of cyclical time and the eternal return,’ I said. These were two complicated philosophical concepts that had long intrigued Borges.
‘Yes, that’s it,’ Borges said.
‘But, Borges,’ I told him, ‘don’t you see that you’ve fallen into one of your own literary traps?’
‘Yes, I suppose I have,’ he said sadly.
Di Giovanni’s numerous solecisms converge here: the maudlin rhetorical flourishes, the clichéd locutions, the awkward chumminess, the stilted conversational rhythms, and the skimpy context. But most unforgivable is how the true pathos eludes him: it lies not in the clumsy and fallacious irony of life imitating art, but in seeing the blinded Borges so browbeaten as to seem to think so. Where is the scholastic ardour and panoptic coolness that once sustained him? Di Giovanni has to work hard to justify his synecdoche, and what I think he’s attempting to do is make some sort of debauched anti-muse out of Elsa, as if the eight year-old Beatrice had grown up to become a truly loathsome mediocrity and petit bourgeois. It’s not enough that the marriage issued in three years of misery, hostility, neglect and distrust: those three years must also be the slow decay of youth’s lost dream of love, the whirligig of Time bringing His revenge upon Eros. But even if that’s the case, then so what? While he succeeds (through persistence and volubility rather than artfulness) in mounting the case that Elsa was an astonishingly unpleasant human being – uncouth, materialistic, manipulative, and devoid of imagination – di Giovanni cannot convince us that she is in any way worthy of our attention. We can see that already on the first page: ‘Borges’s ultimate fame as a writer is based on a mere thirty-four stories written between 1933 and 1953.’ Then why should we be interested? All that the woman imperilled, it emerges, were di Giovanni’s own labours to tether himself to the master’s posterity. He is welcome to his footnote.
At the conclusion of the sublime story Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote (1939), Borges proposed a way to enrich the hesitant and rudimentary art of reading: the technique is one of deliberate anachronism and erroneous attributions, and would fill the dullest books with adventure. ‘Would not the attributing of The Imitation of Christ to Louis Ferdinand Céline or James Joyce be a sufficient renovation of its tenuous spiritual counsels?’ (Anthony Bonner’s translation.) And wouldn’t the opportunistic di Giovanni and the bonsai Borges of his rendering find the dignity that eludes them if they’d been conjured by Nabokov or Beckett in burlesque of Pale Fire or Endgame? Anyway, most writers behove no biography: the same work that invites the attention is composed in solitude, and it is precisely in that solitude that the would-be examined life is at its most vivid and intense. ‘Life’ as others understand it – that mephitic swarm of detours and distractions – threatens the sine qua non of the writer’s, and it is precisely to this that Borges’ fiction is inimical. What some see as a taking of liberties with the form of life is a reiteration of Nietzsche’s counsel the deepest pathos is still aesthetic play. You cannot quote Borges’ fiction to circumscribe his life, that quiet and desperate mess of frustration, enfeeblement, and political naïveté. The fiction refers only to itself, can only lead us deeper into the labyrinth. We were best to let Borges rest therein.