Jay Parini - Borges and Me: An Encounter

O NE J UNE MORNING in 1986, at my farmhouse in Vermont, I stepped from bed as the sun had only just lifted an eyebrow over the Green Mountains: always a coveted moment in my day, when I lean into beginnings, thinking about the work ahead of mein this case, a novel about the last days of Tolstoy that had begun to glimmer at the edges of my conscious mind. My wife and children were still asleep, and I couldnt help but look at them fondly. How could I resist these sweet little boys who drove me nuts at times, as children must do, as its their job? Or a bright, affectionate wife who didnt seem to mind my occasional flights of idiocy, offering a rueful smile at times, sometimes a deep laugh? This bounty felt undeserved and probably was. With a sense of gratitude, even amazement, I made my way downstairs into the country kitchen, where I brewed a strong cup of Irish Breakfast tea for myself before going into my study at the other end of the house.

As I often did before settling at the stained trestle table that still anchors my study, I turned on the radio to catch the headlines, tuning in to the BBC on a shortwave radio that my old friend and mentor, Alastair Reid, had recently given to me as a gift for my thirty-eighth birthday. When the newscaster read the days top stories, I was stunned to hear that Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentine writer who blended fact and fiction in a peerless sequence of narratives that defied all boundaries and set off the Boom in Latin American literature, had died in Geneva at the age of eighty-six. He was a man of many stories, the announcer said. As a writer, he explored the most idiosyncratic spaces in the human experience, a lover of labyrinths and mirrors, a shapeshifting writer who could never be defined.

Memories surfaced now. I had met Borges when I was a graduate student many years before, in Scotland, and traveled with him from St. Andrews to the Highlands and back. Our encounter lasted only a week or so, but it forced a shift in me, a change of perspective, hitting me at just the right time. And all I knew for sure was that my way of being in the world was never quite the same after Borges.

Standing at the window, I looked into the garden below at a bed of Oriental poppies, the blood-bright cheeks of the flowers turning toward me. Did they notice my stinging eyes? I thought so, and stepped away from the window. Im not someone who cries easily, but I wept that day. Weeping as much for myself as for Borges, remembering the callow, overly serious, shy, and often terrified fellow I was when we met, trying to weigh this against the man Id become, still wondering what on earth had happened to me in Scotland some fifteen years before.

In 1970, having just graduated from Lafayette College and moved (briefly, I hoped) back in with my parents in Scranton, Pennsylvania, I saw two choices: stay at home, where my mother would chop off my balls, or go to Vietnam, where theyd be blown off by a landmine. A third choice, less apparent at first but finally obvious, was to leave the United States altogether, getting as far away as possible. The place that called to me was a small town on the East Neuk of Fife, in Scotland.

St. Andrews had already provided me with a much-needed escape and given me a feeling of vocation, as Id studied there for my junior year abroad. During a memorable year, Id made friends easily, much to my surprise, mixing with Scottish and English students, befriending a handful of Continental students, too. The lectures I attended were often appealingflorid rhetorical performances of a kind unfamiliar to meand Id learned a good deal, especially from intense one-on-one tutorials with a range of eccentric but erudite teachers. (One of them held tutorials at his ramshackle flat, where his wife served us tea wearing a face mask as she was sensitive to germs.)

Most important, in Scotland Id begun to write, recording my daily life in a journal, which I hoped (mentally cribbing a phrase from Robert Lowell) would shimmer with the grace of accuracy. No detail seemed too inconsequential to record, and I often filled pages with quotations from things Id read or recorded snippets of conversation Id overheard in tea shops or pubs. I also began to write my own poems. They were imitative and unmemorable, as one might expect, but this was a thrilling turn. Id decidedfor reasons based on no demonstrable talent or experienceto make a profession of writing.