In 1929, that third book of essays won the Second Municipal Prize of three thousand pesos, which in those days was a lordly sum of money. I was, for one thing, to acquire with it a secondhand set of the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. For another, I was insured a year’s leisure and decided I would write a longish book on a wholly Argentine subject. My mother wanted me to write about any of three really worthwhile poets—Ascasubi, Almafuerte, or Lugones. I now wish I had. Instead, I chose to write about a nearly invisible popular poet, Evaristo Carriego. My mother and father pointed out that his poems were not good. “But he was a friend and neighbor of ours,” I said. “Well, if you think that qualifies him as the subject for a book, go ahead,” they said. Carriego was the man who discovered the literary possibilities of the run-down and ragged outskirts of the city—the Palermo of my boyhood. His career followed the same evolution as the tango— rollicking, daring, courageous at first, then turning sentimental. In 1912, at the age of twenty-nine, he died of tuberculosis, leaving behind a single volume of his work. I remember that a copy of it, inscribed to my father, was one of several Argentine books we had taken to Geneva and that I read and reread there. Around 1909, Carriego had dedicated a poem to my mother. Actually, he had written it in her album. In it, he spoke of me: “And may your son . . . go forth, led by the trusting wing of inspiration, to carry out the vintage of a new annunciation, which from lofty grapes will yield the wine of Song.” But when I began writing my book the same thing happened to me that happened to Carlyle as he wrote his Frederick the Great. The more I wrote, the less I cared about my hero. I had started out to do a straight biography, but on the way I became more and more interested in old-time Buenos Aires. Readers, of course, were not slow in finding out that the book hardly lived up to its title, Evaristo Carriego, and so it fell flat. When the second edition appeared twenty-five years later, in 1955, as the fourth volume of my “complete” works, I enlarged the book with several new chapters, one a “History of the Tango.” As a consequence of these additions, I feel Evaristo Carriego has been rounded out for the better.
Prisma (Prism), founded in 1921 and lasting two numbers, was the earliest of the magazines I edited. Our small ultraist group was eager to have a magazine of its own, but a real magazine was beyond our means. I had noticed billboard ads, and the thought came to me that we might similarly print a “mural magazine” and paste it up ourselves on the walls of buildings in different parts of town. Each issue was a large single sheet and contained a manifesto and some six or eight short, laconic poems, printed with plenty of white space around them, and a woodcut by my sister. We sallied forth at night—González Lanuza, Piñero, my cousin, and I—armed with pastepots and brushes provided by my mother, and, walking miles on end, slapped them up along Santa Fe, Callao, Entre Ríos, and Mexico Streets. Most of our handiwork was torn down by baffled readers almost at once, but luckily for us Alfredo Bianchi, of Nosotros, saw one of them and invited us to publish an ultraist anthology among the pages of his solid magazine. After Prisma, we went in for a six-page magazine, which was really just a single sheet printed on both sides and folded twice. This was the first Proa (Prow), and three numbers of it were published. Two years later, in 1924, came the second Proa. One afternoon, Brandán Caraffa, a young poet from Córdoba, came to see me at the Garden Hotel, where we were living upon return from our second European trip. He told me that Ricardo Güiraldes and Pablo Rojas Paz had decided to found a magazine that would represent the new literary generation, and that everyone had said that if that were its goal I could not possibly be left out. Naturally, I was flattered. That night, I went around to the Phoenix Hotel, where Güiraldes was staying. He greeted me with these words: “Brandán told me that the night before last all of you got together to found a magazine of young writers, and everyone said I couldn’t be left out.” At that moment, Rojas Paz came in and told us excitedly, “I’m quite flattered.” I broke in and said, “The night before last, the three of us got together and decided that in a magazine of new writers you couldn’t be left out.” Thanks to this innocent stratagem, Proa was born. Each one of us put in fifty pesos, which paid for an edition of three to five hundred copies with no misprints and on fine paper. But a year and a half and fifteen issues later, for lack of subscriptions and ads, we had to give it up.
These years were quite happy ones because they stood for many friendships. There were those of Norah Lange, Macedonio, Piñero, and my father. Behind our work was a sincerity; we felt we were renewing both prose and poetry. Of course, like all young men, I tried to be as unhappy as I could—a kind of Hamlet and Raskolnikov rolled into one. What we achieved was quite bad, but our comradeships endured.
In 1924, I found my way into two different literary sets. One, whose memory I still enjoy, was that of Ricardo Güiraldes, who was yet to write Don Segundo Sombra. Güiraldes was very generous to me. I would give him a quite clumsy poem and he would read between the lines and divine what I had been trying to say but what my literary incapacity had prevented me from saying. He would then speak of the poem to other people, who were baffled not to find these things in the text. The other set, which I rather regret, was that of the magazine Martín Fierro. I disliked what Martín Fierro stood for, which was the French idea that literature is being continually renewed—that Adam is reborn every morning, and also for the idea that, since Paris had literary cliques that wallowed in publicity and bickering, we should be up to date and do the same. One result of this was that a sham literary feud was cooked up in Buenos Aires—that between Florida and Boedo. Florida represented downtown and Boedo the proletariat. I’d have preferred to be in the Boedo group, since I was writing about the old Northside and slums, sadness, and sunsets. But I was informed by one of the two conspirators—they were Ernesto Palacio, of Florida, and Roberto Mariani, of Boedo—that I was already one of the Florida warriors and that it was too late for me to change. The whole thing was just a put-up job. Some writers belonged to both groups—Roberto Arlt and Nicolás Olivari, for example. This sham is now taken into serious consideration by “credulous universities.” But it was partly publicity, partly a boyish prank.
Linked to this time are the names of Silvina and Victoria Ocampo, of the poet Carlos Mastronardi, of Eduardo Mallea, and, not least, of Alejandro Xul-Solar. In a rough-andready way, it may be said that Xul, who was a mystic, a poet, and a painter, is our William Blake. I remember asking him on one particularly sultry afternoon about what he had done that stifling day. His answer was “Nothing whatever, except for founding twelve religions after lunch.” Xul was also a philologist and the inventor of two languages. One was a philosophical language after the manner of John Wilkins and the other a reformation of Spanish with many English, German, and Greek words thrown in. He came of Baltic and Italian stock. “Xul” was his version of “Schulz” and “Solar” of “Solari.” At this time, I also met Alfonso Reyes. He was the Mexican ambassador to Argentina, and used to invite me to dinner every Sunday at the embassy. I think of Reyes as the finest Spanish prose stylist of this century, and in my writing I learned a great deal about simplicity and directness from him.
Summing up this span of my life, I find myself completely out of sympathy with the priggish and rather dogmatic young man I then was. Those friends, however, are still very living and very close to me. In fact, they form a precious part of me. Friendship is, I think, the one redeeming Argentine passion.
Maturity
In the course of a lifetime devoted chiefly to books, I have read but few novels, and, in most cases, only a sense of duty has enabled me to find my way to their last page. At the same time, I have always been a reader and re-reader of short stories. Stevenson, Kipling, James, Conrad, Poe, Chesterton, the tales of Lane’s Arabian Nights, and certain stories by Hawthorne have been habits of mine since I can remember. The feeling that great novels like Don Quixote and Huckleberry Finn are virtually shapeless served to reinforce my taste for the short-story form, whose indispensable elements ar
e economy and a clearly stated beginning, middle, and end. As a writer, however, I thought for years that the short story was beyond my powers, and it was only after a long and roundabout series of timid experiments in narration that I sat down to write real stories.
It took me some six years, from 1927 to 1933, to go from that all too self-conscious sketch “Hombres pelearon” to my first outright short story, “Hombre de la esquina rosada” (Streetcorner Man). A friend of mine, don Nicolás Paredes, a former political boss and professional gambler of the Northside, had died, and I wanted to record something of his voice, his anecdotes, and his particular way of telling them. I slaved over my every page, sounding out each sentence and striving to phrase it in his exact tones. We were living out in Adrogué at the time and, because I knew my mother would heartily disapprove of the subject matter, I composed in secret over a period of several months. Originally titled “Hombres de las orillas” (Men from the Edge of Town), the story appeared in the Saturday supplement, which I was editing, of a yellow-press daily called Crítica. But out of shyness, and perhaps a feeling that the story was a bit beneath me, I signed it with a pen name—the name of one of my great-great grandfathers, Francisco Bustos. Although the story became popular to the point of embarrassment (today I only find it stagy and mannered and the characters bogus), I never regarded it as a starting point. It simply stands there as a kind of freak.
The real beginning of my career as a story writer starts with the series of sketches entitled Historia universal de la infamia (A Universal History of Infamy), which I contributed to the columns of Crítica in 1933 and 1934. The irony of this is that “Streetcorner Man” really was a story but that these sketches and several of the fictional pieces which followed them, and which very slowly led me to legitimate stories, were in the nature of hoaxes and pseudoessays. In my Universal History, I did not want to repeat what Marcel Schwob had done in his Imaginary Lives. He had invented biographies of real men about whom little or nothing is recorded. I, instead, read up on the lives of known persons and then deliberately varied and distorted them according to my own whims. For example, after reading Herbert Asbury’s The Gangs of New York, I set down my free version of Monk Eastman, the Jewish gunman, in flagrant contradiction of my chosen authority. I did the same for Billy the Kid, for John Murrel (whom I rechristened Lazarus Morell), for the Veiled Prophet of Khorassan, for the Tichborne Claimant, and for several others. I never thought of book publication. The pieces were meant for popular consumption in Crítica and were pointedly picturesque. I suppose now the secret value of those sketches— apart from the sheer pleasure the writing gave me—lay in the fact that they were narrative exercises. Since the general plots or circumstances were all given me, I had only to embroider sets of vivid variations.
My next story, “The Approach to al-Mu’tasim,” written in 1935, is both a hoax and a pseudo-essay. It purports to be a review of a book published originally in Bombay three years earlier. I endowed its fake second edition with a real publisher, Victor Gollancz, and a preface by a real writer, Dorothy L. Sayers. But the author and the book are entirely my own invention. I gave the plot and details of some chapters—borrowing from Kipling and working in the twelfth-century Persian mystic Farid ud-Din Attar—and then carefully pointed out its shortcomings. The story appeared the next year in a volume of my essays, Historia de la eternidad (A History of Eternity), buried at the back of the book together with an article on the “Art of Insult.” Those who read “The Approach to al-Mu’tasim” took it at face value, and one of my friends even ordered a copy from London. It was not until 1942 that I openly published it as a short story in my first story collection, El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Branching Paths). Perhaps I have been unfair to this story; it now seems to me to foreshadow and even to set the pattern for those tales that were somehow awaiting me, and upon which my reputation as a storyteller was to be based.
Along about 1937, I took my first regular full-time job. I had previously worked at small editing tasks. There was the Crítica supplement, which was a heavily and even gaudily illustrated entertainment sheet. There was El Hogar, a popular society weekly, to which, twice a month, I contributed a couple of literary pages on foreign books and authors. I had also written newsreel texts and had been editor of a pseudo-scientific magazine called Urbe, which was really a promotional organ of a privately owned Buenos Aires subway system. These had all been small-paying jobs, and I was long past the age when I should have begun contributing to our household upkeep. Now, through friends, I was given a very minor position as First Assistant in the Miguel Cané branch of the Municipal Library, out in a drab and dreary part of town to the southwest. While there were Second and Third Assistants below me, there were also a Director and First, Second, and Third Officials above me. I was paid two hundred and ten pesos a month and later went up to two hundred and forty. These were sums roughly equivalent to seventy or eighty American dollars.
At the library, we did very little work. There were some fifty of us doing what fifteen could easily have done. My particular job, shared with fifteen or twenty colleagues, was classifying and cataloging the library’s holdings, which until that time were uncatalogued. The collection, however, was so small that we knew where to find the books without the system, so the system, though laboriously carried out, was never needed or used. The first day, I worked honestly. On the next, some of my fellows took me aside to say that I couldn’t do this sort of thing because it showed them up. “Besides,” they argued, “as this cataloging has been planned to give us some semblance of work, you’ll put us out of our jobs.” I told them I had classified four hundred titles instead of their one hundred. “Well, if you keep that up,” they said, “the boss will be angry and won’t know what to do with us.” For the sake of realism, I was told that from then on I should do eighty-three books one day, ninety another, and one hundred and four the third.
I stuck out the library for about nine years. They were nine years of solid unhappiness. At work, the other men were interested in nothing but horse racing, soccer matches, and smutty stories. Once, a woman, one of the readers, was raped on her way to the ladies’ room. Everybody said such things were bound to happen, since the men’s and ladies’ rooms were adjoining. One day, two rather posh and well meaning friends—society ladies—came to see me at work. They phoned me a day or two later to say, “You may think it amusing to work in a place like that, but promise us you will find at least a nine-hundred-peso job before the month is out.” I gave them my word that I would. Ironically, at the time I was a fairly well-known writer—except at the library. I remember a fellow employee’s once noting in an encyclopedia the name of a certain Jorge Luis Borges—a fact that set him wondering at the coincidence of our identical names and birth dates. Now and then during these years, we municipal workers were rewarded with gifts of a two-pound package of maté to take home. Sometimes in the evening, as I walked the ten blocks to the tramline, my eyes would be filled with tears. These small gifts from above always underlined my menial and dismal existence.
A couple of hours each day, riding back and forth on the tram, I made my way through The Divine Comedy, helped as far as “Purgatory” by John Aitken Carlyle’s prose translation and then ascending the rest of the way on my own. I would do all my library work in the first hour and then steal away to the basement and pass the other five hours in reading or writing. I remember in this way rereading the six volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall and the many volumes of Vicente Fidel López’ History of the Argentine Republic. I read Léon Bloy, Claudel, Groussac, and Bernard Shaw. On holidays, I translated Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. At some point, I was moved up to the dizzying height of Third Official. One morning, my mother rang me up and I asked for leave to go home, arriving just in time to see my father die. He had undergone a long agony and was very impatient for his death.
It was on Christmas Eve of 1938—the same year my father died—that I had a severe accident. I was running up a s
tairway and suddenly felt something brush my scalp. I had grazed a freshly painted open casement window. In spite of first-aid treatment, the wound became poisoned, and for a period of a week or so I lay sleepless every night and had hallucinations and high fever. One evening, I lost the power of speech and had to be rushed to the hospital for an immediate operation. Septicemia had set in, and for a month I hovered, all unknowingly, between life and death. (Much later, I was to write about this in my story “The South.”) When I began to recover, I feared for my mental integrity. I remember that my mother wanted to read to me from a book I had just ordered, C. S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet, but for two or three nights I kept putting her off. At last, she prevailed, and after hearing a page or two I fell to crying. My mother asked me why the tears. “I’m crying because I understand,” I said. A bit later, I wondered whether I could ever write again. I had previously written quite a few poems and dozens of short reviews. I thought that if I tried to write a review now and failed, I’d be all through intellectually but that if I tried something I had never really done before and failed at that it wouldn’t be so bad and might even prepare me for the final revelation. I decided I would try to write a story. The result was “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote.”
“Pierre Menard,” like its forerunner “The Approach to al-Mu’tasim,” was still a halfway house between the essay and the true tale. But the achievement spurred me on. I next tried something more ambitious—“TIön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” about the discovery of a new world that finally replaces our present world. Both were published in Victoria Ocampo’s magazine Sur. I kept up my writing at the library. Though my colleagues thought of me as a traitor for not sharing their boisterous fun, I went on with work of my own in the basement, or, when the weather was warm, up on the flat roof. My Kafkian story “The Library of Babel” was meant as a nightmare version or magnification of that municipal library, and certain details in the text have no particular meaning. The numbers of books and shelves that I recorded in the story were literally what I had at my elbow. Clever critics have worried over those ciphers, and generously endowed them with mystic significance. “The Lottery in Babylon,” “Death and the Compass,” and “The Circular Ruins” were also written, in whole or part, while I played truant. These tales and others were to become The Garden of Branching Paths, a book expanded and retitled Ficciones in 1944. Ficciones and El Aleph (1949 and 1952), my second story collection, are, I suppose, my two major books.