Borges and Me

 

I picked this book up at Schiphol Airport on a wayward flight that took me from Hamburg to Lyon via Amsterdam. I had just finished reading Martin Amis’ The Zone of Interest and I was promised something lighter: the road trip of a young man (Jay Parini) and an ancient writer (Jorge Luis Borges). The setting is the Scottish highlands, though first we meet a mature J. Parini, now a successful writer living in Vermont (1986). Memories of his life-changing time studying at St Andrews in Scotland surface when Parini hears of the great author’s death. He casually mentions his youthful journals, which presumably lie behind the details and anecdotes in the account. The blurb at the back describes Borges and Me as a “classic road novel, based on true events”. Most of it rings true; though the brief affair with the Nordic Ailith on the remote Orkney Islands reads like wishful thinking.

The story proper begins in 1970. New Yorker Parini has escaped the draft by relocating to St Andrews in Scotland to study for his PhD. He is young, naïve, and quoting Walden (“to live deliberately …”). This he admits writing on the front page of his journal, indicative of the tone is of quaint amusement at one’s young self. Amid a selection of dour Scots, Parini meets the beautiful and unavailable Bella Law, and a mentor-poet named Alastair Read. (Read is a real-life poet who translated Borges). https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/alastair-reid

Read is a characterised as a wise bohemian who listens to Parini’s tale of unrequited love for Bella and offers worldly advice. Bella is an intelligent young woman who presides over the Poetry Society with more sense than wildness; she is boyfriended; Parini’s case seems hopeless. Amid scenes of light-hearted misery and bad verse, Read asks Parini to take Borges on a tour of the highlands, since Read has been called to London to attend a sick great-uncle. And so the highland adventure begins.

Borges’ blindness and verbosity means that reader follows both Borges’ external and internal journeys (he travels freely in the past and through literature). Parini is his eyes and so the reader also experiences the Scotland in front of his eyes. When Borges says “I shall write King Lear soon, you know” one imagines the labyrinth universe in which Shakespeare and the Argentine are interchangeable and the expressions of wild old age could come from either bard. The conversation weaves easily between literature (when Parini mentions a golden eagle, Borges recalls Homer) and the past (living in Switzerland as a boy, and a young girl named Emilie – kissing her was “the singular event of my second decade” [p.155]).

Comic moments include their sharing a double-bed in a B&B where Borges needs to visit the bathroom in the night – located in the room of the elderly female host! There are accidents, like the pair falling into Loch Ness from a rowboat while Borges stands to recite lines from Beowulf. And there are occasional moments of moving insight, like Borges blessing a Priest for his faithfulness, his hands on the head of Father Burns:

Tears rinsed the man’s cheekbones. And I thought these were my tears, too. He wept for me, and for all those who engage, or fail to engage, with the spirit that courses through us, throughout the universe. Exactly how we deal with our souls was at this moment the only question I thought worth asking (p. 182).

Like a good road novel, Parini is a changed young man when he returns to Edinburgh with this charge. Initially there is evidence of new confidence with Bella – the account ends with him walking towards her “into the quivering water” as the surf rose and crashed (p. 296). In the Afterword, Parini admits to some of his novelistic techniques, as a kind of “palimpsest, a text written over another text” (p. 298). The double insight here is to the careful workings of a young mind, as seen from mature age, and the wild thoughts of Borges, always in touch with the universe beyond the ordinary limitations of age.