A Beer with Borges

I can smell borges in my dreams, and i dream about him often. He reeks of age, with the mustiness, the sourness of years. And the odor gives off a peculiar sweetness, too, as if he has smoked ripe old tobacco in a pipe for many decades, although I suspect he didn't.

A writer of poems and brief, enigmatic stories, and provocative essays that were also stories, Borges moved easily between fact and fiction, and his wild inventions became truths. It was all fiction for him, as in the title of his most celebrated volume, Ficciones, first published in the early forties. Fiction means, in its Latin root-word, "shaping." And Borges was always shaping realities, even making them.

I called him Mr. Borges the first time we met, and he corrected me. "Just Borges, please."

He had been translated by Alastair Reid, the Scottish poet and essayist, who was my mentor and close friend during my seven years in Scotland. Alastair lived at Pilmour Cottage, on the edge of the Old Course in St. Andrews, with a view of the North Sea through his kitchen window. I had met him at the suggestion of my history tutor, Miss Anne Wright. When I told her that I wrote poetry, she said, "In which case you must meet Alastair."

She phoned him from her study in Hamilton Hall at the University of St. Andrews, where I had weekly tutorials with her in nineteenth-century British history. A stickler for facts, she had me recite the kings and queens again and again. "Get it right this time!" she would say. "The world is built upon facts!" It was arranged for me to meet Alastair at the Central Tavern, on Market Street, the following afternoon.

Standing at the bar, talking for two hours or more, Alastair and I became friends at once. He asked me to show him a few poems, and I happened to have a number of samples in my rucksack. After a quick perusal, he invited me to Pilmour for tea a few days later, suggesting that I bring a new poem in rough draft for him to "correct," as he put it. The term slightly unnerved me, as I didn't imagine I needed anyone's correction.

On the appointed day, I pedaled to his cottage along the West Sands on my bicycle, through a cold slantwise drizzle. Gingerly, I put my damp poem on his kitchen table, between mugs of tea and jam pots, and sat beside him. Not a word was exchanged between us as he crossed out words and added others, with a sharp pencil. He moved stanzas around. A fresh title was applied to the poem with a question mark.

"Go away and revise it," he said. "Come back tomorrow with a new version."

He understood my puzzlement and said, "Graves did the same for me. It's the only way to learn how to write." He told me that he had learned his craft sitting beside Robert Graves in Majorca, where he had gone to work as secretary to the older writer after he left university. He was translating, for Graves (who had the commission from Penguin), Lives of the Noble Caesars by Suetonius. The idea was that Alastair would provide a rough draft of the classic work, and Graves would "correct" his pages, day by day. He had himself, he said, winced to hear that word, "correct."

He watched with considerable awe, however, as Graves took the work that he had thought beyond reproach and improved it, crossing out gaudy adjectives while putting in stronger nouns, eliminating adverbs, finding stronger verbs. The passive voice disappeared almost completely, and the syntax strengthened. The inner music of each sentence emerged, and the pages sang.

"Borges is coming next week," said Alastair one day, in an admiring tone that surprised me, as he rarely seemed impressed by anyone. "He will be staying for a while. You will learn something."

I had never heard of Jorge Luis Borges, and could find nothing of his in the local bookstore. But soon the old writer appeared before me...