Jorge Luis Borges and his ‘bitch’

When Jorge Luis Borges died in 1986, at the age of 87, he left behind 100-odd slender fictions and as many poems, but no novels. Compared with the blockbusting authors of our age, this was a small (if perfectly formed) output. Many of Borges’s glittering ficciones are mere ironic fragments, at best notebook jottings. To his detractors his work amounted to little more than a babble of sweet nothings. ‘Who is Jorge Luis Borges?’ Philip Larkin gruffly enquired. (Larkin had not seen Nic Roeg’s trippy film Perfomance, where Mick Jagger is shown reading the Argentine author in the bathtub.)

Born in Buenos Aires in 1899, Borges was acutely myopic as a child and in middle age he went blind. Inhabiting his own dark inner world, ‘Georgie’ led a bookish childhood haunted by dreams of Bengal tigers, gaucho knife-fighters, mirrors, masks, mazes and other exotica. From these juvenile imaginings he created the gems of laconic wit and invention contained in the volumes Ficciones and El Aleph, published in 1944 and 1949 respectively. Borges’s fame as a writer rests on these two lapidary story collections.

By the time the first English translation of his work appeared in 1948, the Perón dictatorship had taken hold in Argentina. With a half-English father, Borges was at heart a Johnsonian Tory, who scorned the Spanish-American tradition of the caudillo (strongman leader) and its crowd-pleasing populism. He made no secret of his aversion to Perónism, and for his troubles was demoted from assistant librarian to municipal poultry inspector. His patrician disdain for Eva Perón (‘a gold-digger’) would be matched three decades later by his Olympian verdict on the Falklands conflict: Britain and Argentina, he observed in 1982, were ‘like two bald men fighting over a comb’ (a plastic comb, he specified).

The first English-language biography of Borges, by James Woodall, came out in 1996 and gave a clear if rather sketchy account of the writer and his work.