Borges in Geneva, 1914–1918

The role occupied by Jorge Guillermo Borges in the education and orientation of his son Jorge Luis, born on August 24, 1899, cannot be overstated. He made a series of decisions that determined the path that the young Borges would move along during the first two decades of his life when, with much encouragement, he prepared himself for a career as a writer. In 1901 the father moved his family from downtown Buenos Aires to the outskirts of the city, and thus he effectively assured that most of his son’s boyhood would be spent in an almost cloistered space, the fenced-in home he had built in Palermo, an outlying neighborhood that was rough and to some degree even dangerous.

Georgie, as his son was definitively named by his English grandmother, had inherited a condition called retinitis pigmentosa. The affliction can be traced back through four previous generations of the family, and in Georgie’s case, it rendered him myopic at an early age; everything beyond a short distance before him appeared somewhat indistinct. But what he could see clearly were words. His father and grandmother encouraged his passion for reading, and he soon developed an enduring preference for English texts. Georgie thus compensated for the relative vagueness of his surroundings by centering his attention on books—absorbing the words and the images that accompanied them, and the very feel and smell of books.

Jorge had also decided to withhold Georgie and his younger sister Norah from public schooling, instead hiring an English-speaking governess to give them private lessons. In part this decision may have been the result of the father’s then fashionable Spencerian inclination to question the authority of public institutions. Or it may have been owing to the family’s concern over the childhood diseases that periodically coursed through the local schools. Most likely both reasons were involved in the decision to keep the Borges children at home.

Around 1909, however, Jorge changed his mind and enrolled both his children in neighborhood schools. Predictably, with his head now full of mythology, novels of chivalry, Huckleberry Finn, Wells’s moon visitors, and the Arabian Nights, Georgie found himself something of a square peg in a round hole. His unsophisticated schoolmates were hard-pressed to understand what he was talking about most of the time, and so inevitably there were some difficult moments.

Yet the young student prevailed and, although his grades were undistinguished, he eventually moved on to the Colegio Nacional. There he enjoyed a high-school level education in a somewhat less rugged milieu that better suited his upbringing. Yet after little more than a year his academic career was once again interrupted when Jorge Guillermo withdrew him from classes, presumably to allow him to continue learning on his own without direction from others. Years later, Borges would point out to me that this was just the first of several occasions when his father determined that his schooling was interfering with his education.

Now the time had arrived for another big decision. Jorge’s vision was failing to the point where he could no longer carry out his duties as a teacher of psychology at Buenos Aires’s Institute of Modern Languages nor those of his administrative position within the Argentine court system. Consequently, after negotiating his retirement from these two posts he decided to make plans in early 1914 to pack up the family and set out for an indefinite sojourn in Europe. The reasons for this move are not entirely clear. He may have heard about a celebrated eye surgeon named Auguste Colombe in Geneva, Switzerland, who might possibly be able to perform surgery to restore his vision. And again, Jorge might well have decided simply to enjoy the charms of Europe—while his remaining sight allowed it—in the company of his wife, Leonor Acevedo. His own English-speaking mother, Fanny Haslam, would not accompany the travelers. Leonor’s widowed mother, Leonor Suárez, would instead be included in the trip abroad and would tend to Georgie and Norah when their parents were absent.

In February of 1914...