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LORNA SCOTT
FOX GEORGIE
& ELSA 200pp.
Friday Project. £16.99 (US $28.99). 978 0 00
752437 2 Published:
10 September 2014
Elsa Astete
Millán and Jorge Lius Borges, 1968 Photograph: © Charles H.
Phllips/Time Life
Pictures/Getty Images We hope you
enjoy this free piece from the TLS, which is available every Thursday
in print
and via the TLS app. This week’s issue also features Ilan Pappé’s
universal
tales, the 71st Venice Film festival, natural historians in the Age of
Enlightenment, Richard Crashaw’s arousing religious poetry – and much
more. When a widow
of fifty-seven marries a respected writer pushing seventy, you might
expect
them to know what they’re doing – even if the match was brokered by the
groom’s
doting mother. In the case of Elsa Astete Millán and Jorge Luis
“Georgie”
Borges, you’d be wrong. Their relationship lasted three miserable years
to
1970, when the author of this book mobilized a lawyer for Borges and
helped him
to secretly prepare a separation (divorce being forbidden in Argentina)
before
bundling him out of the conjugal flat on an early flight to the
provinces the
day the writ was sprung on the unsuspecting spouse, whom Georgie hadn’t
the
guts to face. Luckily Elsa was not too upset, apparently busy making
out with
her cousin Olga, and she managed to snaffle the contents of their joint
bank
account before he got back. This sorry
tale is framed by Norman Thomas di Giovanni as an exploration of
“synecdoche”:
“can a marriage of only a few years’ duration reveal a man’s whole
life?” Di
Giovanni certainly had a ringside seat in those few years. The young
American
writer and translator met the newlyweds in 1967 at Harvard, where
Borges (who
had come to international notice after sharing the first Prix
International
with Samuel Beckett in 1961) was giving the Charles Eliot Norton poetry
lectures. Di Giovanni pitched the idea of editing a collection of his
poetry in
English. Their association was so satisfactory that it continued in
Buenos
Aires, where they translated other early works together. Di Giovanni
also
encouraged Borges to write new poems and stories, which he funnelled
straight
into the New Yorker, while finding a publisher for the new collection,
Doctor
Brodie’s Report; indeed, he is justly credited with rebooting the
elderly
writer’s career and consolidating his cult status abroad. Borges
granted him 50 per cent of the rights over their joint output. However,
after
the master’s death in 1986 his second wife, María Kodama, rescinded
this
contract and commissioned new translations, from Andrew Hurley. There
have been
many lawsuits in the intervening decades, and di Giovanni, apparently
powerless
to reprint and even post his versions online, remains understandably
bitter
(see his website). Opinions are divided on the relative merits of
Hurley and di
Giovanni, but the irreducible fact is that the latter’s work was done
with
Borges, whose English was pretty good, and this alone makes them of
historic
value. Di Giovanni
says nothing about that controversy here. He simply lets it transpire
that
Borges could hardly have a thought without him (condensing some of the
ground
covered in The Lesson of the Master, 2003), while his sturdy arm in the
street
forms a parallel theme. Borges’s blindness is not actually mentioned
until page
thirty-six, so that his helplessness may at first baffle readers
unaware of his
condition – and such readers must be envisaged by the author, since he
introduces his subject as “the celebrated Argentine poet and
storyteller Jorge
Luis Borges”. The oversight makes the circumstances of the marriage
seem even
odder than they were. Why on earth can’t he go to Harvard on his own,
such readers
may wonder; why is the ancient mother seeking a “suitable person” to
replace
her as a travelling companion? One possible bluestocking is discarded;
“Georgie
needed someone older”. A trusty wife, in fact. Borges and his mother
later
blamed each other for the choice of a blowsy old flame of his from the
1920s
with no interest in books. What Elsa wanted, she bursts out to di
Giovanni at
one point, was sex – and Borges was impotent. This
inappropriate wife, who didn’t speak English and in her unhappiness
took to
pocketing people’s bibelots and toiletries, rapidly got them both
shunned by
Harvard society. Borges seemed bewildered and lonely: “‘No one came to
visit’,
he told me, and after a while he asked if I could come to work with him
on
Sundays”. The new friend is soon sitting beside him to guide his
performances
on the podium, and standing beside him in the loo to guide “him and his
stream
in the right direction”; indeed, going for an “Old Norse” inside and
outside
the proper place is a recurrent motif, and several urinary accidents
are
reported in ghastly detail. No doubt
such intimacies respond to the author’s stated desire to fill the gap
left by
other biographies. Georgie & Elsa is “unapologetically” about
“Borges the
man”, “the missing Borges who will not be found in the library”. Edwin
Williamson’s Borges: A Life (2004) was widely derided for its Freudian
literalness in linking the poet’s every line to erotic hope or
disappointment;
di Giovanni’s method is more observational, but equally beside the
point, for,
of all writers, Borges was most himself inside an infinite symbolic
Library –
or just the gloomy National Library of which he was the symbolic
director.
There wasn’t much else to admire, by this account, so why bother
seeking him
outside of it? Ostensibly
on Borges’s side against the increasingly desperate Elsa, di Giovanni
always
manages to make Borges look bad Ostensibly
on Borges’s side against the increasingly desperate Elsa, di Giovanni
always
manages to make Borges look bad. Sometimes claiming surprise, more
often as if
relaying some innocent memory, he gives us a Borges who is racist,
classist,
disloyal, prurient, ghoulish and cowardly. On occasion he ticks him
off, as on
the occasion when Borges emphatically does not want to receive a French
historian: “When he had
calmed down a bit, I said, ‘What was that all about? Didn’t you do a
book of
interviews with him?’ ‘Well, he
made me say unfriendly things about my family,’ Borges said. ‘Made you
say? Did you say those things or not?’ Borges went
sheepish. ‘Well, yes, but I never thought the book would make its way
back to Buenos
Aires.’ ” Borges is
slyly mean about Elsa, while concealing the full extent of the tension
between
them. Early on, when she’s still trying to make it work, “‘She kept
asking me
to dedicate a poem to her,’ Borges once said . . . . ‘In the end I
found it
easier just to be done with it . . . . It took me all of ten minutes to
write.’
The last had been uttered with a sneer”. Di Giovanni makes cruder fun
of Elsa,
dwelling on her vulgarity and greed (though she introduces her fur
coats to him
rather wittily: “‘This is Walt Whitman. And this is Edgar Allan Poe.
And this
one is Nathaniel Hawthorne.’ . . . Each of these literary garments
represented
a fee she had collected in the US for one of Georgie’s lectures”). She
makes
such dreadful scenes in private that Georgie’s abject terror before his
last
night preceding the escape triggers a bizarre, gory digression on the
Oxford
martyrs. And yet one senses that she was a cheerful, warm-hearted soul
quite
out of her depth, reacting in twisted ways to marital misery and
constant
humiliation from social and intellectual snobs. At the end, di Giovanni
suddenly asks us not to think too badly of the woman he has taken such
pains to
trash: “After all, it was Georgie who chose her”. Well, sort
of. María Kodama doesn’t exist in this book, but it’s well known that
Borges
was already in love with her when he was bullied into taking a
carer-wife. As
the marriage foundered, their relationship deepened; the hope that she
might
reciprocate was a decisive factor the day Borges poured out all his
woes to di
Giovanni, and sat back for him to handle the separation. So if Georgie
&
Elsa purports to be “the untold story”, it’s certainly not the whole
one. His
eleventh-hour indulgence for Elsa contrasts with di Giovanni’s verdict
on
Borges himself. As if fearing he has been too subtle, in the final
chapter he
takes the gloves right off. While “it cannot be denied that Borges
wrote an
impeccable prose”, this was entirely due to the “accident of birth”
that made
him write as if in English. While his great fiction was parsimonious,
he also
“wasted his time on an inordinate amount of hackwork”, notably an
“appalling
series of booklets” with female collaborators whom he “abused . . .
with
mocking accounts of . . . their shortcomings”. “He seemed trapped in
his male
superiority.” He turned on classic writers he’d once admired, and was
ungenerous with his contemporaries. His self-deprecation “was one of
his tricks
to win over the public”; “he used his blindness for whatever end it
served him”,
and relied on his vaunted esotericism to “exempt him from displaying
any
interest in the real world”. He was “not untainted by various forms of
. . .
posturing”: belying the mild-mannered bookishness, he glorified
violence. His
anti-Peronism was really a “soft, safe option”, and besides, his own
class was
to blame for Peronism – the poor were “invisible” to him and his kind.
He was a
hypocrite: “‘But I thought the medal [from Pinochet] was a gift of the
Chilean
people’”. Worse, “I
believe his personal ethics to have been grossly deficient”. His lies
started
small and became “knots and tangles of dishonesty” until he believed
them
himself. “It was another of his perversities that Borges relished the
fact that
his lies created confusion.” Finally, “even his attachment to the
Argentine
needs examining”. He never truly knew the country or its people, beyond
the
nicer enclaves of Buenos Aires. In closing,
Norman Thomas di Giovanni repeats his lofty synecdoche question and
answers
yes, with an air of self-evidence. Yet he has failed to demonstrate
anything
but his own lack of style. Even if Borges was the louse described, his
marriage
seems merely a sad and rather comic human mess. Here’s a more relevant
question: can mistreatment by the Borges estate explain a man’s whole
book? Lorna Scott
Fox is a translator, editor and journalist. |
