was stuck at home, having to settle for a kind of bleak exile.
As Elsa had announced, she was going to be in Cambridge on a honeymoon. She can’t have known a thing about the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry or about any of the previous incumbents of the chair.
The lectureship had been founded in 1925 in memory of Harvard’s first fine arts professor, who taught the subject from 1874 to 1898. The term poetry was interpreted in the widest sense to include musicians, painters, sculptors, and architects as well as poets, scholars, and writers. The incumbents are in residence throughout their tenure and are expected to deliver at least six lectures.
The series was inaugurated in 1926-27 by the venerable classicist Gilbert Murray. Among subsequent figures have been T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland, E.E. Cummings (who called his talks ‘nonlectures’ and warned from the outset that ‘I haven’t the remotest intention of posing as a lecturer.’), Herbert Read, Edwin Muir, Ben Shahn, Jorge Guillén, Pier Luigi Nervi, and Cecil Day Lewis. The 1940-41 lectures were delivered by Pedro Henríquez Ureña, the man who first drew Georgie and Elsa together, but it is unlikely that anyone would have brought this to Elsa’s attention.
Elsa found fault with the living quarters obtained for her by the university but soon located a flat to her liking in Concord Avenue. Borges had been provided with an office in Radcliffe’s Hilles Library, which he seldom used, and was offered the services of a secretary, John Murchison, an Anglo-Argentine graduate student.
In his lectures, Borges sat behind a table, stiff and upright, always insisting on having a glass of water in front of him, which he would reach out to touch to make sure it was the right distance from his hand. He refused to begin without it but rarely had recourse to it. Being blind he used no papers or notes. He had a large round pocket watch attached by a chain to his left lapel and would start by lifting the dial right up to his eye. That much he could make out. He knew he had to speak, hopefully without referring to the watch again, for at least fifty minutes.
He always dressed in a grey suit of a decidedly out-of-date cut. His necktie, which he referred to as ‘a trick tie’, was one of those ready-made affairs that he could clip together himself under his collar and not have to bother to knot. His stiffness and his old-fashioned clothes lent him an air of formality that he would not have been aware of. At the same time, unable to see or gauge his audience, he exuded unworldliness, vulnerability, and perhaps a hint of pathos. Everyone seemed to be aware that they were about to be addressed by a lone blind man. As he sat waiting while a technician tested and adjusted a microphone, Borges would cradle one of his hands in front of him into the palm of the other.
Then he would begin. His spoken English was very good. He might stutter occasionally out of nerves and he had a bit of a Scottish burr which required getting used to. He did not have a loud register and was not good at projecting his voice, but this only made people listen more attentively. Out of fear of missing a word, his audiences kept exceptionally quiet.
When his nerves settled he would toss out the odd crowd-pleaser so as to get his listeners to warm to him.‘Of course, I’m decidedly old-fashioned,’ he would say, and they would howl with delight. Here was a writer worshipped for being the last word in avant-garde and he was claiming just the opposite. He would mention and quote from writers nobody read any more – De Quincey, Wells, Stevenson, Chesterton – suddenly giving them, in his audience’s view, a new allure, a new promise. His reading had stopped around 1930 and he knew little or nothing of contemporary writers. This was another aspect of his appealing old-fashionedness – he made the past new, revisitable, and alive again.
It was uncanny how his tricks worked. His talks were simple, quite personal, and peppered with anecdotes (‘My memory carries me back to a certain evening some sixty years ago, to my father’s library in Buenos Aires’) and idiosyncrasies. He frequently went off on asides – etymologies were one of his favourites. On days when he felt unsure of himself or of his audience he laid on the self-deprecation and, tongue in cheek, would belittle his own literary creation, which he spoke of as ‘my so-called work’. Self-effacement was another of his tools. When he spoke of his life in writing, he would add, ‘or trying my hand at writing’. He was never relaxed behind his table, and the public saw this, which put them on his side.
He could charm with his bookishness and his harmless ‘out-of-the-way learning’, as he called it. He quoted Shakespeare or Keats or Wordsworth seemingly at will and would flatter his listeners with his undisguised partisanship. He relished speaking of ‘Literature – that is, English literature.’ He fascinated his audience with his keen interest in remote subjects like Old English and Old Norse.
At the same time, his talks were not without their flaws. He misquoted, sometimes over-indulged in the self-effacement department, and often jumped from one subject to another without providing adequate transitions. The public never noticed or seemed to care. They were in the presence of Borges.
The truth is that audiences flocked to his lectures. Whether at Harvard, or the Poetry Center of New York’s YM-YWHA, or countless classrooms across America, or the lowliest ill-lit, draughty, dilapidated auditorium of lost towns of his native pampa, Borges always packed them in. So many unexpected listeners turned up for his inaugural Norton lecture that the venue had to be shifted from the Fogg Museum and across Harvard Yard to the Sanders Theatre in rambling Memorial Hall.
Borges’s first talk at Harvard, entitled ‘The Riddle of Poetry’, was given on 24 October 1967. The series of six he called This Craft of Verse.
5. Meeting Borges and Setting Out with a Master
In the late autumn of 1967, while Borges was mentally preparing his third lecture and Georgie and Elsa were nursing their marital bliss, I innocently entered their lives.
It was all a matter of accidents, coincidences, and luck. I’d been reading bits of Latin American poets, got hooked on Borges, and decided to repair to Schoenhof’s foreign bookshop, in Harvard Square, for a copy of his collected poems in Spanish. When the clerk handed me the book he casually announced that Borges would be speaking there at Harvard the next week. I had no inkling Borges might be anywhere but in his own country.
I was in Memorial Hall that next week – it was 15 November – to hear his second Norton Lecture, a talk on ‘The Metaphor’. Borges’s spoken English immediately struck me, as did his views on his chosen subject. A week passed, and I sat down and wrote to him. My letter said that I was interested in producing a volume of his poems in English translation along the lines of the fifty poems from Jorge Guillén’s Cántico that I had published two years before. It was all a stab in the dark. I had no idea of the regard in which Borges held Guillén, nor had I any idea that Guillén’s daughter Teresa and wife Irene were attending Borges’s classes on Argentine writers.
Within a week I had a reply from John Murchison, Borges’s Harvard secretary, to tell me that Borges was pleased with my suggestion and ‘would be delighted to have you phone him at his home …’
A few days later I phoned. A woman answered, it was Elsa, but as I was unused to Argentine Spanish I thought hers was an Italian voice. She seemed to be speaking Italian when she called out, ‘Georgie’. This was my introduction to the accent and intonation of rapid-fire porteño Spanish.
Borges answered, I identified myself, and he was at once lively and interested. He spoke in a clipped voice, with an English accent, and asked me right off what edition of the poems I had. When
