When my middle son returned to the Naval Academy last summer, he left behind Borges’ The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Melville House, 2013). I found it in his room and read it a few evenings ago. Borges was a prodigious interviewee who regularly returns to a handful of themes, including this: “I think of myself primarily as a reader, then also a writer, but that’s more or less irrelevant. I think I’m a good reader . . .” This is fanciful but probably true. It sounds like Chesterton, who frequently toyed with paradox and was among Borges’ literary heroes. “When I think of my boyhood,” he continues, “I think in terms of the books I read.” His poem “A Reader” (trans. Norman Thomas di Giovanni) begins: “Let others boast of the pages they have written, / I take pride in those I have read.”
I remember when The New
Yorker in September 1970, the start of my freshman year in college, published
his “Autobiographical Notes.” I had been reading the available translations of
Borges for several years and, like many American readers, grabbed anything by
him I could find. The same was true for Nabokov. Both were polymathic exotics,
never quite domesticated, and reliable pleasure-givers. Borges writes in “Autobiographical
Notes”: “If I were asked to name the chief event in my life, I should say my
father's library. In fact, sometimes I think I have never strayed outside that
library.” In Speak, Memory, Nabokov celebrates his father’s well-stocked,
multilingual library in Russia: “My
father's library . . . taught me to appreciate authentic poetry.”
The fashion-minded will
label Borges and Nabokov “proto-postmodernists” or similar gibberish. My
initial attraction to both was rooted in their bookishness. I loved, and still
love, tracking allusions. But if that were their only attraction, I would
have worn them out a long time ago. Borges writes in “A Reader”:
“A young man, sitting down
to read, takes on
himself an exact
discipline,
bookworming his way to
exact knowledge.”
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