While his father’s example offered him a bookish future and literary ambitions, Borges’s mother’s legacy was more ambiguous and difficult and perhaps more powerful. She was acutely conscious of her family’s history and status in Argentina. She was pure criollo, of Spanish descent born in South America, descended from the early settlers, men involved in the creation of an independent Argentina. Her grandfather led the cavalry charge at the battle of Junin in 1824, the second last battle in the liberation of South America. Later, after the battle of Ayacucho, he was promoted to the rank of colonel by Simon Bolivar. The heroic deeds done by members of her family made her proud, and she spoke of them constantly.
From his mother, Borges heard a great deal about old glories and fame that had faded, with the implication that he somehow could restore the family to its former level of importance. ‘As most of my people had been soldiers,’ he wrote, ‘and I knew I would never be, I felt ashamed, quite early, to be a bookish kind of person and not a man of action.’ Yet the presence of his ancestors’ swords in the house and their lives as men of action obsessed him all his life. He wrote about knife fights and daggers and swords with a relish that only the truly sedentary can feel: ‘In a desk drawer, among rough drafts and letters, the dagger endlessly dreams its simple tiger’s dream, and, grasping it, the hand comes alive because the metal comes alive, sensing in every touch the killer for whom it was wrought.’
Borges’s grandfather on his father’s side was also a colonel who fought in battles. He married an Englishwoman, Fanny Haslam, leaving her a widow with two sons three years after their marriage, when he was shot in one of the many internal feuds that beset Argentine affairs. (‘The bullet which shot dead Francisco Borges’ is mentioned in ‘Things’, one of Borges’s best poems.) Fanny and her sons spoke English at home; Fanny ran the household as though they were in England. Borges was attached to his grandmother; her version of England was as influential as his mother’s account of the family’s former splendour. Fanny travelled to Europe with the Borges family and lived close to them in Buenos Aires until her death in 1935, at the age of ninety-three.
The Buenos Aires that Borges loved and celebrated was not the new, rich city teeming with immigrants from the south of Italy or from Galicia. It was the old city of the criollos that his mother had known, and the area around Palermo in the north of the city, down on its luck, where his father built a house beside Fanny Haslam’s house and where Jorge Luis and his sister, Norah, were brought up. Close to Palermo was open countryside. A city both half imagined and half built (‘Only one thing was missing — the street had no other side’) replaced in Borges’s imagination ‘the greedy streets/jostling with crowds and traffic’. He and his sister did not play with children who were rough. Since his mother had contempt for the new rich of the city and no time for the new immigrants, it was easier to keep the children secluded.
Borges was taught to read Spanish by his mother and English by his grandmother. Later, an English tutor was employed. Once Borges could read he was free, even though he was sickly and solitary. ‘If I were asked to name the chief event in my life,’ he wrote, ‘I should say my father’s library.’ He did not go to school until he was eleven. He must have been a strange sight, small, bookish, precocious, full of stories about heroic ancestors. He was bullied by other boys from the beginning until he was withdrawn from the school. ‘One of his recurrent nightmares as an adult,’ Williamson writes, ‘was of being tormented by dwarfs and little boys.’ Three years later he was sent to secondary school, but not for long. In 1913 his father decided to take the family to Europe the following year and educate the children in Geneva, where he could be treated by a famous doctor for an eye disease from which he suffered.
Thus, early in 1914, the Borges family rented out their property in Buenos Aires and began wandering in Europe. Like the James family, they would be dragged by a restless father from city to city, from hotel to rented quarters. As with William and Henry James, this life apart from his peers would be the making of Borges as an artist, though it would mean that his life, when he later returned to Argentina, would be more complicated. Once more, school in Europe was a nightmare since he did not speak the same language as his classmates; once more, as his ability to read French improved, he found that the only comfort available was in books. He read Carlyle in English, and soon began to read philosophy in German. In 1917, when he was eighteen, he began a friendship with someone his own age, Maurice Abramowicz, who also loved books and poetry. It was the first of many such sustaining literary friendships.
The Borges family spent the war years in Switzerland; once the war was over they moved to Spain: first to Barcelona, then to Majorca, then to Seville and Madrid. Jorge Luis was writing poetry and allying himself with any young Spanish avant-garde writers he could find. The group with which he became involved in Seville and Madrid was called the Ultraista movement. They were close in aims and style to the Imagists, and influenced by the work and personalities of Apollinaire and Marinetti. Borges loved staying up all night talking books and poetry, sitting in cafes and walking the streets. Madrid, where the family stayed for two months, was a perfect site for this; Borges got to know many of the leading young Spanish poets there. When he left Madrid to go back to Majorca with his family, he had young literary men in Madrid and in Geneva to write to regularly, sending new poems and letters of hope and despair about the work he was attempting. ‘I lack a goal,’ he wrote to Abramowicz, ‘or rather I have too many goals before me. I think I’m sunk, and won’t be able to salvage more than two or three metaphors from the wreckage.’
In 1921, after an absence of seven years, the family returned to Buenos Aires. Borges had very little formal education, no qualifications and no friends. He walked the streets of the Palermo district where he had grown up, and then began to explore other parts of the city, until the city itself became the subject of his first book of poems:
He was an exile in his own country. He wrote to a friend in Spain: ‘Don’t abandon me in this exile of mine, which is overrun by arrivistes, by correct youths lacking any mental equipment, and by decorative young ladies.’ Once more, however, he found a kindred spirit, a friend of his father’s called Macedonio Fernandez, who met with friends on a Saturday night in a cafe to discuss matters such as ‘the uses of metaphor or the inexistence of the self’. In these first months in Buenos Aires, as his father promised and then postponed a return to Europe, Borges also began to write philosophical essays with titles like ‘The Nothingness of Personality’ and ‘The Blue Sky Is Sky and Is Blue’. Soon, he became involved in a number of literary magazines.
In July 1923 the Borges family, complete with Fanny Haslam, set sail for Europe again, spending a year wandering in England, France, Switzerland and the Iberian Peninsula. Borges renewed friendships in Madrid. Williamson in his biography is ‘virtually certain’ that Borges met Lorca on this visit, but it is absolutely certain in any case that he read Lorca’s work and paid real attention to his efforts at blending folk poetry with the most modern techniques.
What Lorca was doing became for Borges and his friends in Argentina, as it would for writers in every country on the periphery, a working-out of a serious dilemma: whether to adopt a full European Modernist identity or to describe Argentina (or Trinidad, or Ireland) in all its colour and exotic variety to the world. If the second choice were to be taken in Argentina, there was a useful example: a long narrative poem, using a great deal of dialect, by Jose Hernandez called
