The New Criterion

The publication of the Charles Eliot Norton lectures given by Jorge Luis Borges at Harvard in 1967 is an unusual, as well as a belated, event. Those who heard him recall that, as a public speaker, Borges was never an assured or dominating presence, but he was still a strangely haunting and magnetic figure on the stage. It must be remembered that he was educated at home and had the most fragile contacts with the outside world well into adulthood. A stutter from childhood, sometimes heard even in his old age, complicated matters. There was always a sense of hesitancy, even when he made his most rotund affirmations. Sometimes this could lead to exasperation. The poet Alastair Reid, during a public interview, said to his face, “Borges, you use humility like a club!” Often, his sentences would end with a querulous “no?”—as if asking for affirmation by the hearer. And there was the matter of his Scottish burr, learned in his Buenos Aires infancy from his Scots nanny.

In any case, understatement was the essence of his aesthetic program—touching the hem of the garment, as Robert Frost once put it. Fragments, the minor genres and authors, a line or a strophe here and there: these were all he needed to weave his incantatory spell. But Borges only gradually emerged from his shell, slowly becoming a public figure first in Argentina and then in the world at large. He started “working” at age thirty-seven as first assistant in a dusty local library, a post which he occupied until the arrival of the Peronist regime in 1946. Summary dismissal ensued, with a crystalline justification: “Well, you were on the side of the Allies—what do you expect?” Gradually, both as a professor at the University of Buenos Aires and a much sought-after lecturer on literature in the late Forties and Fifties, Borges was able to supplement the increasingly meager family income.

But he was not yet Borges, the international idol. That came in 1961 when a phalanx of six avant-garde publishers, including Grove Press in New York, created the Prix Formentor, designed to reward a relatively unrecognized author and to “bring the author’s work to the attention of the largest possible international audience.” Borges shared the prize with Samuel Beckett. An invitation to visit the University of Texas ensued, and the Norton Lectures at Harvard were offered, enabling Borges to spend some seven months in Cambridge in 1967, in the company of his mother, the redoubtable Doña Leonor de Acevedo de Borges.

By then, he was legally blind, as was his father before him at the same age—his was the fifth recorded generation in his family to have extremely poor eyesight. He dictated, his mother and a host of friends read to him aloud, and his astonishing memory was a recompense until the end. Thus, This Craft of Verse, the Norton Lectures, comes to us not as the tardy publication of a manuscript but rather via transcription and annotation of the tape recordings made at that time, assiduously executed by Professor Calin-Andrei Mihailescu of the University of Western Ontario. The six lectures range over both poetry and prose: “The riddle of poetry,” “The metaphor,” “The telling of the tale,” “Word-music and translation,” “Thought and poetry,” “A poet’s creed.” They make for delightful, “easy” reading, but on a most elementary level, given the occasion. The phrase “I thought of this only three or four days ago, when I was pondering this lecture” is either revealing or embarrassing. In principle, there is nothing inherently wrong with making these musings available to the public. Borges loved to submit himself to innumerable interviews, unrevised by himself, which have now found themselves in bound volumes.