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b i o g r a p h y k e v i n j ac k s on Borges & I Georgie & Elsa: Jorge Luis Borges and His Wife – The Untold Story By Norman Thomas di Giovanni (The Friday Project 259pp £16.99) For rather a short book (259 pages of large print and generous spacing), Norman Thomas di Giovanni’s odd memoir of Jorge Luis Borges includes a surprisingly large number of pages devoted to urination. On page 57, the great Argentinian writer is caught short just before arriving back at his flat: ‘He let go with an almighty flow and splash of piss that echoed loudly in the empty stairwell … “That’s all right,” he said, “they’ll think it was some cat.”’ On page 149: ‘Urine was gushing in a heavy stream down his legs inside his trousers and squishing over the sides of his shoes. He made it to the urinal, but by this time his socks and shoes and tweed trousers were urine-soaked.’ On page 228, the accident happens on a plane: ‘I noticed … a plastic bag for air sickness. I grabbed it and held it open for Borges to use. When he finished there I was, sitting with a warm bag of piss in my hands.’ For good measure, di Giovanni also notes the ‘overpowering stench of feline urine’ left by the cats whose job was to assassinate the mice that ran riot in Borges’s place of work, the National Library in Buenos Aires. To invoke an old music hall maxim: ‘I do not wish to know that, kindly leave the stage.’ Borges, born in 1899, was quite an old man in the period covered by Georgie & Elsa – 1967 to 1970 – and it is well known that chaps of advanced years tend to suffer from unruly bladders. Most biographers of the elderly male prefer to gloss over this regrettable fact – Boswell is tactfully silent on the subject of Johnson’s micturation and biographies of, say, Churchill, Mandela, Gandhi, Newton, Tolstoy and other remarkable gentleman of ripe years have often been similarly discreet. Is this, perhaps, because the urgent need for a pee tells us nothing of their singular lives, save that they shared in our common human weakness? The only detail worth knowing about Borges’s frequent embarrassments is that he referred to a pee by the euphemism ‘an Old Norse’. Ever the Anglophile, Borges grew more and more interested in the family relationships between English and the ancient languages of the cold North. The subtitle of di Giovanni’s book brags of an ‘untold story’. Well, some stories are untold because they have been suppressed and some because they are too lacking in significance to be worth telling. Unwary souls might buy this volume in the hope of shocking revelations – that Borges was, let ’s say, actually a woman, or a CIA agent, or an alien from a distant constellation. In fact, the untold story pretty much boils down to this: late in life, Borges, known as ‘Georgie’ to his family, made the mistake of marrying a younger woman, Elsa Millán. Everyone agreed that she was utterly ghastly: uninterested in anything about Borges save his money, wildly spendthrift, philistine, loud, rude, bullying and light-fingered. The marriage made him very unhappy and three years later they divorced. As young people say: end of. The translator of a good deal of Borges’s poetry and fiction, di Giovanni witnessed this sad period in Borges’s declining years. He clearly admired, and continues to admire, the grand old man’s writing, and refers to one set of poems as ‘moving … with a wonderful freshness and energy about them’. Less convincingly, he also stresses the closeness of the friendship that grew from their collaborations. Perhaps this was so, but the tone of di Giovanni’s reminiscences is hardly Boswellian in its warmth or respectfulness. Subscribe now Only £35 for a year’s subscription to Call 020 8683 7151 or visit www.literaryreview.co.uk At various points, di Giovanni refers to Borges as ‘posturing’, ‘incredibly callow’, ‘ghoulish’, ‘sniffy’ and a ‘consummate gossiper’. He also depicts his subject as a snob, a racist (‘I don’t know what it was about black people, but he did have an aversion to them’) and a serial liar. The Borges of these pages is shown to be sexually impotent, selfish, occasionally ridiculous (he challenged radical student hecklers to duel with him) and, above all, weak and dithering. Borges’s mother, we learn, said of him, ‘The trouble is, Georgie no tiene carácter.’ Di Giovanni quibbles with Borges’s scholarship, too, recalling an occasion when they were discussing Macbeth: ‘Strangely, he misunderstood the words “making the green one red.” He once said to me, “Look, di Giovanni, Shakespeare has personified the sea.” Borges was reading it, “making the Green One red.”’ Indeed he was, and plenty of intelligent theatre directors have also chosen to favour that common interpretation. Little of this spiteful matter makes for pleasant reading, so it is probably just as well that the book is padded here and there with documents from other hands: seven pages of briefing from a divorce lawyer, five from Borges’s list of marital woes and a large chunk from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (by far the best prose in the book) about the executions of Latimer and Ridley, included to explain a single remark made by Borges during his divorce. This whiffs not only of roasting flesh but of desperation as well. As is often the case with snide biographies, Georgie & Elsa inspires sympathy for the victim and sends one back to the thing about Borges that receives scant attention in its pages but is in the end what matters about him: his writing. I closed di Giovanni’s book and then reread with enjoyment the old Penguin Modern Classics edition of Labyrinths, that delight of my adolescence; then I sought out some unfamiliar essays from his collection The Total Library, including a beautiful and moving sequence of short pieces on Dante. It felt like taking a pleasantly cleansing bath. As a translator, di Giovanni no doubt served Borges well. As his biographer, frankly, he is taking the piss. To order this book for £13.59, see the Literary Review Bookshop on page 15 Literary Review | m a y 2 0 1 4 8
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b i o g r a p h y b r i a n d i l l on Radical Will Susan Sontag By Jerome Boyd Maunsell (Reaktion 214pp £10.95) Ten years after her death, the question of Susan Sontag’s standing as a critic and novelist remains as vexed as it was in her life, but for more dismaying reasons. In her last decades it seemed, with some exceptions (notably the reflections on images of atrocity in Regarding the Pain of Others), that Sontag had squandered the hard, sleek brilliance of her early criticism in grand inflated verities. But now we’re also asked to accept the relatively trivial point that behind her cosmopolitan élan and erudition, she was, well, not very nice. And worse, that the strenuous literary self-invention, careerist fretting and personal animus on show in her diaries (two volumes of which have appeared since her death) prove nothing less than what her detractors had always claimed: Sontag was a charlatan, gussying banalities in avant-garde togs, shrugging on and off the philosophical or political garb of her intellectual betters. In fact the diaries, and now this short but instructive biography, prove the opposite, or at least make a more generous case. Above all, Sontag was a writer – with all the longing, doubt, envy and occasional sabotage of her own talent that implies. I can’t be alone in thinking she seems more, not less, of a sympathetic character now that we know how much energy she put into constructing a persona called Susan Sontag, then playing the role with panache. (Some of that energy, it seems, derived from a decadeslong speed habit.) As Jerome Boyd Maunsell puts it, she spent much of her youth ‘scolding herself, training herself, consoling herself ’ in order to become the writer she imagined. But the disquiet never seemed to diminish. In 1970, with the great essays on silence, camp and style already behind her, she declared in her diary: ‘I think I am ready to learn to write.’ And late in her career she still regretted that she had not won consistent respect for her fiction. Boyd Maunsell does not dwell excessively on the possible origins of Sontag’s anxious ambition; its results are far more interesting. But it seems clear that the early loss of a parent – her father, a fur trader, died in China when she was five – had the common enough outcome of exaggerating her attractions to rigour and risk alike, so that she shuttled always between conflicting desires for liberation and constraint. When she was ten she dug a hole six feet deep in the back yard, covered it with planks and sat Sontag: acts of self-persuasion in it – ‘my cell’, ‘my study’, ‘my grave’. She was already a prodigious reader, compiling lists of words and metaphors for later use. There was a well-mythologised meeting with Thomas Mann at some point in her teens. Aged 17 she knew she was mostly attracted to women, but in a ‘rash act of selfpersuasion’ she married Philip Rieff, a young instructor at the University of Chicago. ‘I lost a decade,’ Sontag later said of her marriage. It was not quite true: she and Rieff were intellectual intimates, if not in the long run equals; Boyd Maunsell is pretty sure that she may be found working up her aphoristic voice in the pages of her husband’s 1959 book Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (Sontag sometimes claimed to have written the whole thing). In other words, during those years – which included study at Harvard, teaching at Columbia and a transformative period in Paris in the late 1950s – she was essentially in training, emerging in the next decade as an assured essayist. She contrived a style that was pointed, quick and supple; her arguments, as Boyd Maunsell cannily points out, were ‘often unharnessed to quotation’. When acclaim arrived in the mid1960s – notably on the back of ‘Notes on “Camp”’, published in the Partisan Review and feted in Time – the young critic and tyro egotist didn’t exactly baulk. But she would soon look back at her greatest essays with a surprising amount of regret. This is the core of Boyd Maunsell’s account. Having become the sort of writer that she had aspired to be, Sontag longed to be another, and slowly grew depressed and petulant when it proved impossible. Her first book, The Benefactor (1962), had been a novel and for a time it seemed that she might combine the roles of radical critic and experimental novelist in a way that was rare in postwar American letters. But the dismal reception of her novel Death Kit in 1967 set a certain tone; her fiction was frequently dismissed as sententious, clunky and essayistic. Sontag longed for the freedom apparently enjoyed by friends such as Elizabeth Hardwick and Roland Barthes – writers for whom, perhaps, the distinction between essay and novel simply didn’t matter as much. This svelte account of Sontag’s life accelerates after the late 1970s, when she published her last great book, Illness as Metaphor. (There is a final volume of diaries to come, and a more comprehensive biography from Benjamin Moser.) She suffered writer’s block and even financial hardship in the 1980s, but was saved and to some extent salved by the success of her big realist novel, The Volcano Lover, in 1992. As an essayist, however, her voice had stiffened into ex cathedra conceit. While she wrote authoritative late pieces on the likes of Sebald and Walser, she suffered the common fate of the critical firebrand: to become a mere apologist for culture instead of its anatomist or even instigator. For a time, though, she had lived up to her own dictum: ‘Ideally, one should be able to pay attention to everything.’ To order this book for £8.76, see the Literary Review Bookshop on page 15 m a y 2 0 1 4 | Literary Review 9

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b i o g r a p h y k e v i n j ac k s on

Borges & I Georgie & Elsa: Jorge Luis Borges and His Wife – The Untold Story

By Norman Thomas di Giovanni

(The Friday Project 259pp £16.99)

For rather a short book (259 pages of large print and generous spacing), Norman Thomas di Giovanni’s odd memoir of Jorge Luis Borges includes a surprisingly large number of pages devoted to urination. On page 57, the great Argentinian writer is caught short just before arriving back at his flat: ‘He let go with an almighty flow and splash of piss that echoed loudly in the empty stairwell … “That’s all right,” he said, “they’ll think it was some cat.”’ On page 149: ‘Urine was gushing in a heavy stream down his legs inside his trousers and squishing over the sides of his shoes. He made it to the urinal, but by this time his socks and shoes and tweed trousers were urine-soaked.’

On page 228, the accident happens on a plane: ‘I noticed … a plastic bag for air sickness. I grabbed it and held it open for Borges to use. When he finished there I was, sitting with a warm bag of piss in my hands.’ For good measure, di Giovanni also notes the ‘overpowering stench of feline urine’ left by the cats whose job was to assassinate the mice that ran riot in Borges’s place of work, the National Library in Buenos Aires. To invoke an old music hall maxim: ‘I do not wish to know that, kindly leave the stage.’

Borges, born in 1899, was quite an old man in the period covered by Georgie & Elsa – 1967 to 1970 – and it is well known that chaps of advanced years tend to suffer from unruly bladders. Most biographers of the elderly male prefer to gloss over this regrettable fact – Boswell is tactfully silent on the subject of Johnson’s micturation and biographies of, say, Churchill, Mandela, Gandhi, Newton, Tolstoy and other remarkable gentleman of ripe years have often been similarly discreet. Is this, perhaps, because the urgent need for a pee tells us nothing of their singular lives, save that they shared in our common human weakness? The only detail worth knowing about Borges’s frequent embarrassments is that he referred to a pee by the euphemism ‘an Old Norse’. Ever the Anglophile, Borges grew more and more interested in the family relationships between English and the ancient languages of the cold North.

The subtitle of di Giovanni’s book brags of an ‘untold story’. Well, some stories are untold because they have been suppressed and some because they are too lacking in significance to be worth telling. Unwary souls might buy this volume in the hope of shocking revelations – that Borges was, let ’s say, actually a woman, or a CIA agent, or an alien from a distant constellation. In fact, the untold story pretty much boils down to this: late in life, Borges, known as ‘Georgie’ to his family, made the mistake of marrying a younger woman, Elsa Millán. Everyone agreed that she was utterly ghastly: uninterested in anything about Borges save his money, wildly spendthrift, philistine, loud, rude, bullying and light-fingered. The marriage made him very unhappy and three years later they divorced. As young people say: end of.

The translator of a good deal of Borges’s poetry and fiction, di Giovanni witnessed this sad period in Borges’s declining years. He clearly admired, and continues to admire, the grand old man’s writing, and refers to one set of poems as ‘moving … with a wonderful freshness and energy about them’. Less convincingly, he also stresses the closeness of the friendship that grew from their collaborations. Perhaps this was so, but the tone of di Giovanni’s reminiscences is hardly Boswellian in its warmth or respectfulness.

Subscribe now Only £35 for a year’s subscription to

Call 020 8683 7151 or visit www.literaryreview.co.uk

At various points, di Giovanni refers to Borges as ‘posturing’, ‘incredibly callow’, ‘ghoulish’, ‘sniffy’ and a ‘consummate gossiper’. He also depicts his subject as a snob, a racist (‘I don’t know what it was about black people, but he did have an aversion to them’) and a serial liar. The Borges of these pages is shown to be sexually impotent, selfish, occasionally ridiculous (he challenged radical student hecklers to duel with him) and, above all, weak and dithering. Borges’s mother, we learn, said of him, ‘The trouble is, Georgie no tiene carácter.’ Di Giovanni quibbles with Borges’s scholarship, too, recalling an occasion when they were discussing Macbeth: ‘Strangely, he misunderstood the words “making the green one red.” He once said to me, “Look, di Giovanni, Shakespeare has personified the sea.” Borges was reading it, “making the Green One red.”’ Indeed he was, and plenty of intelligent theatre directors have also chosen to favour that common interpretation.

Little of this spiteful matter makes for pleasant reading, so it is probably just as well that the book is padded here and there with documents from other hands: seven pages of briefing from a divorce lawyer, five from Borges’s list of marital woes and a large chunk from Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (by far the best prose in the book) about the executions of Latimer and Ridley, included to explain a single remark made by Borges during his divorce. This whiffs not only of roasting flesh but of desperation as well.

As is often the case with snide biographies, Georgie & Elsa inspires sympathy for the victim and sends one back to the thing about Borges that receives scant attention in its pages but is in the end what matters about him: his writing. I closed di Giovanni’s book and then reread with enjoyment the old Penguin Modern Classics edition of Labyrinths, that delight of my adolescence; then I sought out some unfamiliar essays from his collection The Total Library, including a beautiful and moving sequence of short pieces on Dante. It felt like taking a pleasantly cleansing bath. As a translator, di Giovanni no doubt served Borges well. As his biographer, frankly, he is taking the piss. To order this book for £13.59, see the Literary Review Bookshop on page 15

Literary Review | m a y 2 0 1 4 8

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