Reading to Borges
I was listening to Paul Theroux read Jorge Luis Borges’s story “The Gospel According to Mark” and was surprised to discover that Theroux had been one of Borges’s readers. “I was taking the trip that I wrote about in The Old Patagonian Express,” he says,
I ended up in Buenos Aires. We had the same publisher, and I told him that Borges was my hero. He said, “Oh, well, he’d love to see you. He’s blind, of course, and he needs to be read to. You can be his reader.” So I went to his apartment. There was a white cat, I remember, sleeping on his lap. I read to him. He loved Kipling, and Chesterton, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Wrong Box.
Theroux then adds that he appreciated Borges’s sense of humor, which he describes as “self-effacing.”
It is an odd anecdote, not so much from Theroux’s perspective but from the publisher’s. It’s hard not to think of him sitting in his Buenos Aires office taking every odd opportunity to offer to visiting writers the chance to read to Borges himself. “Just behind this curtain, ladies and gentlemen, you, too, can read to Argentina’s greatest living writer!” Who could pass up such a chance?
Theroux makes much more of his meeting with Borges in The Old Patagonian Express. There he recounts Borges extolling the virtues of New England and Austin, Texas, scoffing at Canada, preaching about race and history and politics, divining writers and their writing, laughing at Jesus. Borges is such a raconteur in the book that Theroux excuses the detail of his transcription by noting the old man’s blindness was the perfect disguise for the fact he was taking copious notes. Despite concluding Borges was “almost angelic,” in Theroux’s hands younger Borges is actually more like a whirlwind.
Of course, Borges already had readers, including his mother and occasional boys whom he conscripted. Alberto Manguel read to him for two years and has written at length about it in With Borges and A History of Reading. I haven’t read the former (Scott Esposito has a nice review), but in the latter Manguel, too, recalls reading Kipling and Stevenson as well as a dozen other writers and their works, and he fondly remembers Borges’s humor. Manguel says that Borges would frequently interrupt him to comment on the line he just read, compare the text to another, or take a note on the end pages. He writes:
The experience felt like a sort of happy captivity. I was enthralled not so much by the texts he was making me discover (many of which eventually became my own favourites) as by his comments, which were vastly but unobtrusively erudite, very funny, sometimes cruel, almost always indispensable. I felt I was the unique owner of a carefully annotated edition, compiled for my exclusive sake. Of course, I wasn’t; I (like many others) was simply his notebook, an aide-mémoire which the blind man required in order to assemble his ideas. I was more than willing to be used.
I wonder how many others can boast, like Theroux and Manguel, that they read to Borges? I have found reference to and the names of a few:
- A commenter on Esposito’s blog says that an acquaintance of his found Borges overbearing when reading to him.
- Waldemar Verdugo read to him, and there is photographic evidence.
- Last (for now) but certainly not least: Mick Jagger may have read to Borges, too.
Just as fascinating as who read to Borges is the question of who claims to have read to Borges but lied about it? For example, I don’t think John Moss ever did, but he did publish a brief essay titled “Reading to Borges” in Danielle Schaub’s Reading Writers Reading. He’s using the act of reading as a metaphor, not as a lie, but surely Borges’s fame has inspired one or another literary groupie to make the boast.
I’m sure more anecdotes could be turned up in Spanish-language searches.
