BORGES
edited by Daniel Martino
Destino Ediciones €60, 1,663 pages

Jorge Luis Borges’s works of fiction could be squeezed into a single volume, yet he remains one of the 20th century’s most revered writers. Cited as a key influence by authors such as Paul Auster, Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk, his bookish and elliptical short stories, collected in titles such as Fictions and The Aleph, made him a beacon of postmodern narrative.

The Argentinian writer was famously reserved. Biographers trying to decipher his personal relationships have often been trounced. It is easy, then, to understand the excitement generated by the appearance of Borges, a selection from the diaries of his closest friend, fellow writer Adolfo Bioy Casares. Published posthumously in Spain (Bioy died in 1999), the work has been compared by its editor to James Boswell’s Life of Johnson. The comparison is not unwarranted. Bioy began keeping his diary in 1947, after editing an anthology of Samuel Johnson’s work. He aspired to become Borges’ Boswell, chronicler of the great man’s life and recorder of his every utterance.

Bioy had a privileged vantage point. Not only were the men friends (the most common diary entry is “Borges came for lunch”), but they were also literary accomplices who spent their time together reading, writing (they penned stories under the name Bustos Domecq), planning and editing collections, drafting prologues, translating classics, inventing erudite references and searching for the origins of obscure words and sayings.

Over more than 40 years, Bioy assiduously transcribed Borges’ opinions on topics including communism (”People like it because it provides them with a group of friends”), poetry (”It is more important, for a poet, to appear wise than to appear intelligent”), the US (”no one in the United States knows anything”), and women (”perhaps because they lack imagination . . . [they] volunteer information about themselves which does not evoke stimulating images”).

This extraordinary volume sheds light on Borges’ omnivorous intellect while exposing his unbridled snobbery. He was a man of forceful, though inconsistent, opinions: Shakespeare is the most overrated writer, Joyce’s books are idiotic but keep literary critics employed, anyone who admires Baudelaire is an imbecile. Borges is especially astringent about his compatriots: “poets should avoid two pitfalls: the temptation of being modern, and the temptation of being Argentine”.

It is not through his highbrow witticisms but through his unguarded comments that we learn most about him. His uneasy relationship with women is exposed when, propositioned by a lady friend, he asks: “So you don’t find me repugnant?”

Many of his reported opinions will confirm the view that he was a racist: “I am not anti-Semite, but the fact that everywhere the most varied cultures have persecuted Jews is an argument against them.” He was, in any case, an equal-opportunity supremacist: “I was asked if I liked Brazil. I said no, because the country is full of negroes. They didn’t like that at all. One can’t say anything against negroes. Their only merit is to have been mistreated and that, as Bernard Shaw remarked, is no merit.”

Bioy was not entirely uncritical. “Borges does not realise, it seems, that he never stops talking,” he writes after his friend complains about a garrulous woman. On the flurry of honorary degrees Borges accepted in late life, he remarks: “I understand that to forget his terrible blind man’s solitude (which he cannot fill by reading and writing) he agrees to be part of those somewhat absurd events.” He was hurt by Borges’ lack of kindness towards Silvina Ocampo, Bioy’s wife. “It is sad, if one views life as a story, that a friendship such as ours should break up in the last few pages.” Borges himself was aware that “to many people today I am an old fool, who happens to be a famous writer”. Despite their disagreements, Bioy remained loyal. Upon hearing about his death on June 14, 1986, Bioy described the melancholy of taking “my first steps in a world without Borges”. He was overwhelmed by “the feeling that despite having seen so little of him recently I had not lost the habit of thinking: ‘I must tell him about this.’”

The book is a remarkable glimpse into an equally remarkable literary friendship. It is, perhaps, as close as one can get to Borges the writer and, especially, to Borges the man.