Bold biographies of legendary artists.

AuthorMujica, Barbara
PositionBorges: A Life - Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life - My Life with Pablo Neruda - Francisco Goya: A Life - Brief Article - Book Review

Borges: A Life, by Edwin Williamson. New York: Viking, 2004.

With the publication of Stephen Greenblatt's monumental life of Shakespeare, Will in the World, this is becoming the decade of the biography. One after the other, biographies of the giants of Western culture have appeared--Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, Borges, Neruda, Goya--enabling us to know better some of the leaders who have helped to shape our world. Edwin Williamson's Borges: A Life is one of the most fascinating of these biographies.

Best known as a writer of short stories, essays, and poetry of profound metaphysical reach, Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) was also a complex and intensely emotional human being. Scholars tend to portray him as a blind bard of staggering intellect, a man concerned with universalities, with timeless ideals. And yet, as Williamson shows, Borges was also a political man, a man in context, a man deeply touched by relationships. Drawing on Borges's writing as well as on first-rate research, Williamson attempts to humanize Borges: "from this biographical study," he writes, "there emerges a fuller, more human, more richly faceted Borges than the anemic bibliophile of legend would suggest." Borges himself cultivated that image of the "anemic bibliophile," sometimes rejecting the notion that he actually had a biography. However, Williamson constructs his study on the notion that much of Borges's writing is, in fact, autobiographical.

An Oxford professor, Williamson pieces together testimonies, correspondence, and fragments of information from Borges's writing to produce an image of a sensitive, shy man whose quest for love is at the core of his creativity. For Williamson, a frustrated love relationship and unsettling sex life are primary elements in Borges's story. In 1926, Borges had "discovered a new poetic order capable of reaching beyond the coteries of the avant-garde and speaking to his countrymen as a whole." His criollismo, criticized at the time by the avant-garde as absurdly nostalgic, drew on traditional Argentine themes and was meeting with increased approval among young writers. He was still a timid, stammering young man, but his literary success, together with the attention of his lovely young muse, Norah Lange, was giving iron a degree of self-confidence. Norah was a published poet and known as Borges's protegee. She accompanied Borges to parties and at one of them fell in love with Oliverio Girondo, a man whom Borges disliked both on literary and personal grounds. Norah's subsequent rejection of Borges had nearly disastrous consequences, plunging the young writer into a severe depression characterized by nightmares and insomnia. In fact, the episode brought him to the brink of suicide. This early failure, according to Williamson, colored the rest of Borges's life and much of his writing. In the chapters that follow, the biographer explores Borges's search for romance, his brief marriage, and the satisfying love relationship of his later years.

Another key issue is Borges's conflictive feelings for his father. According to a well-known story, Borges's father took him to a brothel for his sexual initiation, but Borges failed in the attempt. For Williamson, this was a traumatic incident in the life of the young Borges, and he explores in depth the psychoanalytic ramifications of the father-son relationship. Other important themes in the book are Borges's participation in Argentine politics (in particular, his fierce anti-Peronism), his evolving attitude toward religion, and, of course, his involvement in literary life.

Williamson has written a brilliant, readable, and thoroughly absorbing biography. Both Borges scholars and general readers will find a lot to love in this book.

Pablo...

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