Jorge Luis Borges: portrait of the teenage artist

The adolescent Borges emerges from the intimacy of the epistolary dialogue with a great friend, who will be the friend of his entire life, in “Borges, letters to Godel” (Emecé) of Alejandro Vaccaro, passionate biographer of Borgesauthor of numerous works, former president of SADE and current President of the El Libro Foundation,

Journalist: How did you find these letters?

Alejandro Vaccaro: In the early 90s I began working on a biography of Borges. I gathered everything that was known about him up to that point, what he told in reports and notes, the autobiography published by Norman Thomas Di Giovanni, which appeared for the first time in 1970 in The New Yorker. There I realized that nothing had really ever been investigated, that only what Borges told about his life had been repeated. So I decided to investigate.

Q: What was the first thing you discovered?

AV: That Borges was not called Jorge Luis. On the birth certificate he was registered as Jorge Francisco Isidoro. The name Luis, with which he signs his books, was only added in 1938, when his father died. When carrying out the succession trial, they realized this, and made an addendum to the birth certificate where it is said that Jorge Francisco Isidoro and Jorge Luis are the same person.

Q: When did you find Roberto Godel?

AV: In primary and secondary school archives, the Manuel Belgrano school, where Borges was only one year. Among his friends appears Roberto Godel, that fellow student that Emir Rodríguez Monegal highlights in his “Borges, a literary biography.” I went out in search of Godel. He had died, but his daughter, Graciela, showed us, and gave us copies of the letters that Borges sent to his father from Geneva, Lugano and Barcelona. A very rich treasure because for the first time it offers certain information about Borges between the ages of 14 and 19, where she talks to an accomplice about his tastes and interests.

Q.: Were Borges and Godel brought closer by the bullying they received at school?

AV: They were residents of the neighborhood and the only ones who went to Thames 2321 school dressed as if they were going to Eton College. Godel was a descendant of French and Desert Expeditionaries. Borges says “we shared the stigma of being well-off children in a neighborhood in the Buenos Aires suburbs. At Godel’s house and mine they made the mistake of sending us to school in collars, jackets and ties. We were the only ones like that in the entire school, they never forgave us and made us pay dearly.” Thus is born a friendship that, beyond distances, lasts a lifetime. Godel became a poet, Borges prefaced some of his books. He was also a doctor, and was the family doctor of Leonor Acevedo, Borges’ mother.

Q.: Do Borges’s literary tastes appear in the letters?

AV: At every moment, with books to put aside and others, for example; “Crime and Punishment” “the best novel I have read in my life”, so as not to stop reading them. There are surprises, such as the fervent recommendation of Rafael Barrett, a Spanish anarchist, whom he takes to be an Argentine writer, perhaps because he lived in Uruguay, Paraguay and Argentina. He describes him as a “free and bold spirit,” and asks Godel to run and buy “Looking at Life,” “a brilliant book whose reading has consoled me from the nonsense of other Argentine writers.”

Q: Do you comment on your interest in politics?

AV: It is 1917, and Borges is about to turn 18. He tells his friend that “some recent events give me hope, like the magnificent example of the Russian Revolution.” He wrote and published at that time the poems “Trenche”, “Russia” and “Gesta maximalista”, in praise of the Bolshevik feat. Youthful passions that he would later condemn absolutely.

Q: Do love affairs appear?

AV: Borges can stop to talk about what young German intellectuals think and write, and suddenly he says: “well, enough of politics!”, and begins to comment on the extraordinary ugliness of Swiss girls, full of freckles and very cheesy. He indicates that perhaps the lack of progress is the problem, his shyness with women. Or he pauses and asks Godel “And you, oh my brother, have nothing to tell me about the Great Topic?” You have already fallen in love with her, you have turned and turned in her bed thinking about her, you have prepared compliments that you have not dared to say, you have turned red when you see her. I fell in love with a very intelligent but rather ugly girl from Prague who studies with me at the Collége Calvin. Fortunately, she did not listen to me and the crisis did not last more than three months.” This is how he confides in Godel about affairs, encounters and disagreements with various women. Borges’s entire life was surrounded by unrequited love. His only true girlfriend was Concepción Guerrero, whom he met when he returned from Europe in 1921. The letters to Godel open to an unknown world of Borges, in a somewhat minor way, as does the extraordinary “Borges” by Bioy Casares, which As I have learned, it will soon have a much expanded version.

Q: What do you think these two works show?

AV: They have in common that they offer to enter into the intimacy of Borges. In the letters he writes at the stroke of his pen with all the sincerity in the world that the epistolary dialogue with a close friend offers. The letters let us know through screenshots of that unknown space of Borges that is his adolescence, and give clues to the process that a young man determined to be a writer lived through until he became a genius of universal literature.

Q: What are you doing now?

AV: In the publication of “Borges secret texts and false attributions”, a book where very varied texts are offered, from “Argentina, a wonderful country”, an advertising text that he wrote for a tourist brochure of the Varig aviation company, or the essay “Towards nothing” of 1921, as a counterpart are the false texts and comments that have been attributed to Borges.