This same year, under the auspices of Edward Larocque Tinker, I was invited as Visiting Professor to the University of Texas. It was my first physical encounter with America. In a sense, because of my reading, I had always been there, and yet how strange it seemed when in Austin I heard ditch diggers who worked on campus speaking in English, a language I had until then always thought of as being denied that class of people. America, in fact, had taken on such mythic proportions in my mind that I was sincerely amazed to find there such commonplace things as weeds, mud, puddles, dirt roads, flies, and stray dogs. Though at times we fell into homesickness, I know now that my mother—who accompanied me—and I grew to love Texas. She, who always loathed football, even rejoiced over our victory when the Longhorns defeated the neighboring Bears. At the University, when I finished one class I was giving in Argentine literature, I would sit in on another as a student of Saxon verse under Dr. Rudolph Willard. My days were full. I found American students, unlike the run of students in the Argentine, far more interested in their subjects than in their grades. I tried to interest people in Ascasubi and Lugones, but they stubbornly questioned and interviewed me about my own output. I spent as much time as I could with Ramón Martínez López, who, as a philologist, shared my passion for etymologies and taught me many things. During those six months in the States, we traveled widely, and I lectured at universities from coast to coast. I saw New Mexico, San Francisco, New York, New England, Washington. I found America the friendliest, most forgiving, and most generous nation I had ever visited. We South Americans tend to think in terms of convenience, whereas people in the United States approach things ethically. This— amateur Protestant that I am—I admired above all. It even helped me overlook skyscrapers, paper bags, television, plastics, and the unholy jungle of gadgets.
My second American trip came in 1967, when I held the Charles Eliot Norton Chair of Poetry at Harvard, and lectured to well-wishing audiences on “This Craft of Verse.” I spent seven months in Cambridge, also teaching a course on Argentine writers and traveling all over New England, where most things American, including the West, seem to have been invented. I made numerous literary pilgrimages—to Hawthorne’s haunts in Salem, to Emerson’s in Concord, to Melville’s in New Bedford, to Emily Dickinson’s in Amherst, and to Longfellow’s around the corner from where I lived. Friends seemed to multiply in Cambridge: Jorge Guillén, John Murchison, Juan Marichal, Raimundo Lida, Héctor Ingrao, and a Persian physicist who had worked out a theory of spherical time that I do not quite understand but hope someday to plagiarize—Farid Hushfar. I also met writers like Robert Fitzgerald, John Updike, and the late Dudley Fitts. I availed myself of chances to see new parts of the continent: Iowa, where I found my native pampa awaiting me; Chicago, recalling Carl Sandburg; Missouri; Maryland; Virginia. At the end of my stay, I was greatly honored to have my poems read at the Y.M.H.A. Poetry Center in New York, with several of my translators reading and a number of poets in the audience. I owe a third trip to the United States, in November of 1969, to my two benefactors at the University of Oklahoma, Lowell Dunham and Ivar Ivask, who invited me to give talks there and called together a group of scholars to comment on, and enrich, my work. Ivask made me a gift of a fish-shaped Finnish dagger—rather alien to the tradition of the old Palermo of my boyhood.
Looking back on this past decade, I seem to have been quite a wanderer. In 1963, thanks to Neil MacKay of the British Council in Buenos Aires, I was able to visit England and Scotland. There, too, again in my mother’s company, I made my pilgrimages: to London, so teeming with literary memories; to Lichfield and Dr. Johnson; to Manchester and De Quincey; to Rye and Henry James; to the Lake Country; to Edinburgh. I visited my grandmother’s birthplace in Hanley, one of the Five Towns—Arnold Bennett country. Scotland and Yorkshire I think of as among the loveliest places on earth. Somewhere in the Scottish hills and glens I recaptured a strange sense of loneliness and bleakness that I had known before; it took me some time to trace this feeling back to the far-flung wastes of Patagonia. A few years later, this time in the company of María Esther Vázquez, I made another European trip. In England, we stayed with the late Herbert Read in his fine rambling house out on the moors. He took us to Yorkminster, where he showed us some ancient Danish swords in the Viking Yorkshire room of the museum. I later wrote a sonnet to one of the swords, and just before his death Sir Herbert corrected and bettered my original title, suggesting, instead of “To a Sword in York,” “To a Sword in Yorkminster.” We later went to Stockholm, invited by my Swedish publisher, Bonnier, and by the Argentine ambassador. Stockholm and Copenhagen I count among the most unforgettable cities I have seen, like San Francisco, New York, Edinburgh, Santiago de Compostela, and Geneva.
Early in 1969, invited by the Israeli government, I spent ten very exciting days in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. I brought home with me the conviction of having been in the oldest and the youngest of nations, of having come from a very living, vigilant land back to a half-asleep nook of the world. Since my Genevan days, I had always been interested in Jewish culture, thinking of it as an integral element of our so-called Western civilization, and during the Israeli-Arab war of a few years back I found myself taking immediate sides. While the outcome was still uncertain, I wrote a poem on the battle. A week after, I wrote another on the victory. Israel was, of course, still an armed camp at the time of my visit. There, along the shores of Galilee, I kept recalling these lines from Shakespeare:
Over whose acres walk’d those blessed feet, Which, fourteen hundred years ago, were nail’d, For our advantage, on the bitter cross.
Now, despite my years, I still think of the many stones I have left unturned, and of others I would like to turn again. I hope yet to see Mormon Utah, to which I was introduced as a boy by Mark Twain’s Roughing It and by the first book of the Sherlock Holmes saga, A Study in Scarlet. Another daydream of mine is a pilgrimage to Iceland, and another still to return again to Texas and to Scotland.
At seventy-one, I am still hard at work and brimming with plans. Last year I wrote a new book of poems, Elogio de la sombra (In Praise of Darkness). It was my first entirely new volume since 1960, and these were also my first poems since 1929 written with a book in mind. My main concern in this work, running through several of its pieces, is of an ethical nature, irrespective of any religious or antireligious bias. “Darkness” in the title stands for both blindness and death. To finish Elogio, I worked every morning, dictating at the National Library. By the time I ended, I had set up a comfortable routine—so comfortable that I kept it up and began writing tales. These, my first stories since 1953, I published this year. The collection is called El informe de Brodie (Doctor Brodie’s Report). It is a set of modest experiments in straightforward storytelling, and is the book I have often spoken about in the past five years. Recently, I completed the script of a film to be called Los otros (The Others). Its plot is my own; the writing was done together with Adolfo Bioy-Casares and the young Argentine director Hugo Santiago. My afternoons now are usually given over to a long-range and cherished project: for nearly the past three years, I have been lucky to have my own translator at my side, and together we are bringing out some ten or twelve volumes of my work in English, a language I am unworthy to handle, a language I often wish had been my birthright.
I intend now to begin a new book, a series of personal— not scholarly—essays on Dante, Ariosto, and medieval northern subjects. I want also to set down a book of informal, outspoken opinions, whims, reflections, and private heresies. After that, who knows? I still have a number of stories, heard or invented, that I want to tell. At present, I am finishing a long tale called “The Congress.” Despite its Kafkian title, I hope it will turn out more in the line of Chesterton. The setting is Argentine and Uruguayan. For twenty years, I have been boring my friends with the raw plot. Finally, I came to see that no further elaboration was needed. I have another project that has been pending for an even longer period of time—that of revising and perhaps rewrit
ing my father’s novel The Caudillo, as he asked me to years ago. We had gone as far as discussing many of the problems; I like to think of the undertaking as a continued dialogue and a very real collaboration.
People have been unaccountably good to me. I have no enemies, and if certain persons have masqueraded as such, they’ve been far too good-natured to have ever pained me. Anytime I read something written against me, I not only share the sentiment but feel I could do the job far better myself. Perhaps I should advise would-be enemies to send me their grievances beforehand, with full assurance that they will receive my every aid and support. I have even secretly longed to write, under a pen name, a merciless tirade against myself. Ah, the unvarnished truths I harbor! At my age, one should be aware of one’s limits, and this knowledge may make for happiness. When I was young, I thought of literature as a game of skillful and surprising variations; now that I have found my own voice, I feel that tinkering and tampering neither greatly improve nor greatly spoil my drafts. This, of course, is a sin against one of the main tendencies of letters in this century—the vanity of overwriting—which led a man like Joyce into publishing expensive fragments, showily entitled “Work in Progress.” I suppose my best work is over. This gives me a certain quiet satisfaction and ease. And yet I do not feel I have written myself out. In a way, youthfulness seems closer to me today than when I was a young man. I no longer regard happiness as unattainable; once, long ago, I did. Now I know that it may occur at any moment but that it should never be sought after. As to failure or fame, they are quite irrelevant and I never bother about them. What I’m out for now is peace, the enjoyment of thinking and of friendship, and, though it may be too ambitious, a sense of loving and of being loved.
Commentaries
— With Norman Thomas di Giovanni
The Aleph
What eternity is to time, the Aleph is to space. In eternity, all time—past, present, and future—coexists simultaneously. In the Aleph, the sum total of the spatial universe is to be found in a tiny shining sphere barely over an inch across. When I wrote my story, I recalled Wells’s dictum that in a tale of the fantastic, if the story is to be acceptable to the mind of the reader, only one fantastic element should be allowed at a time. For example, though Wells wrote a book about the invasion of Earth by Martians, and another book about a single invisible man in England, he was far too wise to attempt a novel about an invasion of our planet by an army of invisible men. Thinking of the Aleph as a thing of wonder, I placed it in as drab a setting as I could imagine—a small cellar in a nondescript house in an unfashionable quarter of Buenos Aires. In the world of the Arabian Nights, such things as magic lamps and rings are left lying about and nobody cares; in our skeptical world, we have to tidy up any alarming or out-of-the-way element. Thus, at the end of “The Aleph,” the house has to be pulled down and the shining sphere destroyed with it.
Once, in Madrid, a journalist asked me whether Buenos Aires actually possessed an Aleph. I nearly yielded to temptation and said yes, but a friend broke in and pointed out that were such an object to exist it would not only be the most famous thing in the world but would renew our whole conception of time, astronomy, mathematics, and space. “Ah,” said the journalist, “so the entire thing is your own invention. I thought it was true because you gave the name of the street.” I did not dare tell him that the naming of streets is not much of a feat.
My chief problem in writing the story lay in what Walt Whitman had very successfully achieved—the setting down of a limited catalog of endless things. The task, as is evident, is impossible, for such chaotic enumeration can only be simulated, and every apparently haphazard element has to be linked to its neighbor either by secret association or by contrast.
“The Aleph” has been praised by readers for its variety of elements: the fantastic, the satiric, the autobiographical, and the pathetic. I wonder whether our modern worship of complexity is not wrong, however. I wonder whether a short story should be so ambitious. Critics, going even further, have detected Beatrice Portinari in Beatriz Viterbo, Dante in Daneri, and the descent into hell in the descent into the cellar. I am, of course, duly grateful for these unlooked-for gifts.
Beatriz Viterbo really existed and I was very much and hopelessly in love with her. I wrote my story after her death. Carlos Argentino Daneri is a friend of mine, still living, who to this day has never suspected he is in the story. The verses are a parody of his verse. Daneri’s speech on the other hand is not an exaggeration but a fair rendering. The Argentine Academy of Letters is the habitat of such specimens.
Streetcorner Man
As already stated as far back as 1935 in the foreword to Historia universal de la infamia, this story was written under the triple influence of Stevenson, G. K. Chesterton, and Josef von Sternberg’s unforgettable gangster films. My aim was to recapture the atmosphere of the outer slums of Buenos Aires some fifty years ago. At the same time, I wanted the story to be vividly and persistently visual, and to unfold with a kind of pattern or symmetry. The characters appear on the scene like actors and make set speeches, deliberately unlike the unstudied and careless manner of everyday life. Francisco Real knocks twice at the same door: the first time to swagger in and challenge his man, the second time to die. Another example of this symmetry is the high window, out of which first goes the knife and later the body. All this is sheer choreography. The fact that this story was later made into a ballet, a movie, and a stage play corroborates this. But strangely enough, Argentine readers have always felt the story to be realistic. Some eager young men once asked me if I had actually witnessed the scene. I knew very well when I wrote the story that things could never have happened in that stagy and even operatic way, but I suppose I was indulging in a bit of wishful thinking. All Argentines are fond of an imaginary heroic and mythic past, especially as applied to hoodlums and pimps.
The voice used throughout the story is supposed to be oral, but the sentences are really those of a written work. They are unbroken and complete, while in real life Argentines rarely finish a sentence; the moment they feel the hearer has caught what they are aiming at, they just break off. The language of “Streetcorner Man” is partly a conventionalized slang, or dialect, of Buenos Aires called lunfardo. This language is primarily a device of the writers of sainetes and tango lyrics. It has, as to be expected, been canonized by several glossaries, by an Academy of Lunfardo, and by the Argentine Academy of Letters. As a matter of fact, lunfardo is barely used by the people it is credited to. Once taxed by fellow journalists for his utter ignorance of lunfardo, Roberto Arlt, the novelist of Buenos Aires lowlife, said, “I’m afraid I’ve spent all my life in the outer slums among common people and toughs and so never had time to study such a thing.”
The “esquina rosada” of the Spanish title means pink, or rose-colored, corner. It refers to the painted walls of the Streetcorner almacenes, which a long time ago were both groceries and saloons, where men drank and played cards. These corners were often painted other vivid colors, such as green, purple, or blue, and stood out in an otherwise drab city. For me the esquina rosada symbolizes a particular kind of life. It has nothing whatever to do, as some adventurous translator has supposed, with the red lamp that hung outside Julia’s dance hall. Such an establishment would be called a “Farol Colorado,” which is close to the term “red-light district” In a way, the American “drugstore cowboy” would be something of a latter-day “hombre de la esquina rosada.”
The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim
The idea that a man may be many men is, of course, a literary commonplace. This is usually understood in an ethical way (William Wilson, Jekyll and Hyde, and so on) or in terms of heredity (Hawthorne, Zola). In “The Approach to al-Mu’tasim” the concept undergoes certain modifications. There, I think of men being incessantly changed by each man they talk to and perhaps by each book they read. Thus I arrived at the tale of a kind of saint who spreads circles of diminishing splendor all around him, and is finally discovered by someb
ody who divines him through these many far-flung echoes of his influence. Since this plot is something of an allegory, it led me quite naturally to an Eastern setting. I do my best to be indebted to Kipling; India, as we are aware, stands for almost countless multitudes.
I knew only too well that this delicate work lay far beyond my powers. I therefore plotted the piece as a literary hoax, rather after the example of Sartor Resartus. Years after the story was published, I found out that Henry James had attempted a similar scheme in his novel The Sacred Fount, and had failed through sheer inability to keep his characters distinguishable.
As to Farid ud-Din Attar, I am afraid my knowledge of his famous poem can be reduced to FitzGerald’s A bird’s-eye view of Faríd-Uddín Attar’s Bird-parliament, to Browne’s Literary History of Persia, and to a few handbooks on Sufism. Silvina Ocampo, by the way, composed a very fine poem based on Attar’s book.
The Circular Ruins
The ontological argument, the claim that Something or Someone could be its own cause—its causa sui—as the Schoolmen and Spinoza have it, has always seemed to me a mere juggling of words, a violence done to language. In my opinion, a speech implies a speaker and a dream, a dreamer; this, of course, leads to the concept of an endless series of speakers and dreamers, an infinite regress, and may be what lies at the root of my story.
Naturally, when I wrote it, I never thought of the story in these abstract terms. In a pair of sonnets on chess, written years afterward, I took up the same idea. The chessmen do not know they are guided by a player; the player does not know he is guided by a god; the god does not know what other gods are guiding him. Several years ago, during a one-day visit to Lubbock, in the Texas panhandle, a girl asked me whether in writing another poem, “The Golem,” I had been consciously rewriting “The Circular Ruins.” The answer was no, but I thanked her for revealing this unsuspected affinity to me. In fact, it amazed me to have traveled hundreds of miles to come upon this piece of news about myself out on the edge of the desert.