That could have been the subtitle of Williamson’s biography of Borges. The Irish writer Colm Tóibín, who knows Buenos Aires very well, explains the situation:
Borges, it is true, spent much of his life hanging out with women who would neither sleep with him nor marry him. The advantage for any biographer is that if you throw a stone in Buenos Aires you are likely to hit one of these women or their many descendants, or indeed their books of memoir. Since there is nothing much to do in the city, other than bang saucepans together as a protest against government policy, discussing Borges’s love life has become as popular as polo.
Of course, Tóibín is being facetious. There are a few more things to do in Buenos Aires.
The article by Tóibín in the London Review of Books is superb, providing a great overview of the life of Borges including the women in his life. Tóibín also talks about Borges’ friend the writer Bioy Casares, who was a notorious womanizer. As well as the women who were maids to Bioy and Borges. Interesting stuff.
If you think that you will never get around to actually reading the Williamson biography, then do read the Tóibín article which is much more than about the women of Borges. It’s the best single article on the life of Borges, written by one of the best contemporary writers today.
the fiction of Time destroyed,
free from love, from me.
desbaratada la ficción del Tiempo,
sin el amor, sin mi
…Borges, Anticipation of Love, Amorosa anticipación
December 5th, 2006 at 11:05 am
[…] Borges, who lived most of his life as a bachelor and shared an apartment with his mother, became easily infatuated with women. […]
December 11th, 2006 at 12:11 pm
Talking about the Women around the life of Jorge Luis Borges, you cannot miss to mention his only sister, Norah Borges. A famous painter and ironically the one who started writing before his brother! She always had an excellent relation with “Georgie” as she called him.
Her drawings appeared in the most important magazines of the 20´s. In 1923 the surrealist magazine French Manometre and in 1924 Martin Fierro published their paintings…
Their paintings emit the same tenderness that it reflected in her life. Its painting is fragant, she sometimes commented that “the painting has been invented to give joy to the painter and to the spectator”.
Norah lived immersed in an atmosphere of high culture.In 1928, definitively setteled in Buenos Aires, she married Guillermo de Torre, the Spanish literary critic and poet representative of the Generation of the ´27 and the Spanish vanguard. He belong to the same literary circle than Jorge Luis Borges while they all lived in Spain and then when they came back to their home town, Buenos Aires, they “brought” with them this literary movement.
Guillermo and Norah had 2 children, Luis and Miguel de Torre, the only descendants of the Borges family.
December 13th, 2006 at 8:31 pm
Thanks for adding the note about Norah Borges. I have too long neglected her in my discussions about her brother. I’m glad that you also mentioned her husband. I think many people don’t realized that he was one of the leading literary critics in the Spanish language.
December 14th, 2006 at 6:21 pm
My pleasure! Well, there is so much to talk about the background and life of the Borges and Torre family…There is so much culture, sensitivity, history and literature! Norah (her real name was Leonor Fanny) and Jorge Luis Borges lived for a long time in Europe (that is how Norah met Guillermo de Torre, in Spain), related to writers and artists such as Juan Ramon Jimenez, Ramon Gomez de la Serna, Picasso, Dalí, Miró among others…