Mother's boy.(Borges: A Life)(Book Review)

Borges: A Life, by Edwin Williamson (Viking, 574 pp., $34.95)

THE Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), prolific master of the short burst, known for his poems, essays, and stories and for never having written a novel, was the founding father of magic realism and is widely thought of as the greatest Spanish-language writer since Cervantes. Borges is of course most famous for his fantasies with cosmic implications; among the best are "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," "The Library of Babel," "Three Versions of Judas," "The Zahir," "The Writing of the God," "The Aleph," "The Sect of the Thirty," "Undr," and "Blue Tigers." These stories reel and yaw with metaphysical uncertainty. All known pieties are up for grabs; gnostic strangeness abounds. In one story an ancient sect, now lost, worships Jesus and Judas equally, as reverent agents of the divine intention. In another a modern theologian discovers that the Word was made Flesh not in Jesus but in Judas, and that Christianity is the greatest coverup going. A20-centavo coin gives its possessor a fearsome intuition of the nature of God and Creation. A small stone contains the entire universe, visible at once in its full extent. Asingular copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica leads Borges to a world, most likely the product of human imagination, where the inhabitants understand time but have no concept of space.

Borges stands habitually poised somewhere between time and eternity, between the end of the universe and boundless space; he dwells upon the mystery of the infinite. No common explanation for or description of reality, however reasonable or deeply engrained in the culture, withstands the lethal radiance of Borges's imagination, which never forecloses any alternative to the conventional philosophical, scientific, or religious accounts. There can, however, be such a thing as too much imagination. If anything that can be thought of just might turn out to be true, but everything can be understood every possible way, as the world is made anew with each passing thought, then the prospect of ever discerning the truth amid this confusion grows increasingly unlikely the more one thinks. And Borges's mind swarmed with thoughts.

Edwin Williamson's astonishing Borges: A Life attempts to show that when Borges's mind roved through limitless vistas of time and space he was actually thinking about things very much of this world: especially family and romantic love. Williamson believes that Borges's failure at ordinary life turned him toward the harrowing metaphysical questions and that it perhaps explains the futility of his efforts to answer them.

Borges came of distinguished ancestry, but he despised his conquistador forebears as ignorant freebooters and reserved his admiration for those men who later fought for Latin American independence from Spain, soldiers and statesmen sworn to the noblest cause he knew. The Argentine national pageant was a family romance: The swords of heroes were displayed in the Borges home, and proud visages glowered from silver-framed portraits. Borges grew up adulating beyond measure men as bold and fierce as he was not. Williamson essentially devotes his biography to the psychic death-match between the sword of honor, carried by the ancestors who lived and died in purest dignity, and the dagger, sported by the compadrito or ruffian dandy who drank and whored and thieved and killed for nothing.

In Williamson's schematic but not unconvincing rendering, Borges's father wielded the dagger and his mother the sword. The elder Borges was no compadrito, but he did have a raffish side, and even went so far as to publish poetry and to dream of literary glory--unseemly in a man of irreproachable lineage. The mother was all respectability and social ambition. Williamson refers to her simply as Mother, no possessive necessary: She does all the possessing. A luncheon guest remembers her saying to the housekeeper, who asked her if she should pour Borges some wine, "El nino no toma vino"--the boy doesn't drink wine. Borges was pushing 60 at the time.

With the maternal sword thrust deep into his ...