With last year's Borges and Me, by Jay Parini, about a road trip through Scotland with the great Argentine writer, excitement soon turned into suspicion. Parini's book reads more like invention than memoir of a period, the narrative smooth, without any sign of faltering memory fifty years after the events described. Suspicion mounted as it began to resemble a biopic, a film genre I generally don't care for: a book that wasn't written for the page, a book designed to be adapted. Script material. Pausing to read the biographical paragraph on the flap, I found that one of Parini's books was adapted into a movie. And the Afterword would confirm that Borges and Me had in fact began as a film project. I didn't wish to see Borges reduced to a string of "Oscar" moments. I didn't want him to get the David Foster Wallace treatment, a passing encounter inflated into life-altering, middling drama. I winced at a trailer forming in my head. You must...believe!
But, even before Borges steps onto the stage, I got caught up, enough to get past the book's deficiencies: the whiff of artificiality (and in one case, which I'll get to, I do emphasize "whiff"), Parini's occasionally trite reflections, the somewhat perfunctory use of his backstory. The tension is real. A young writer is uncertain about his future, desperate to avoid the war in Vietnam, just as desperate to escape home and mother. His answer is to continue his education abroad, in Scotland, though without much direction, draft notices and mother's letters chasing him there. Without irony, Parini might say things like: "I wanted to believe I had said something fresh, added something, however small, to the stock of English poetry." But he's also chummy, inviting. And he has a good ear for dialogue. I sat up with more interest once his friend and mentor, Alastair Reid, appears. He is no stiff. Which is to say his is a distinct voice, with its own notes of self-assurance and mischief. He's an older poet, a former assistant to Robert Graves, who offers to read Parini's poems and give suggestions. He's a translator, too. One of the writers he's translated is Jorge Luis Borges, who arrives in Scotland to experience the country as an assiduous student of its literature and history and to meet an editor of Anglo-Saxon riddles. But there's an emergency. Reid must leave for London and it falls on Parini to chauffeur the blind writer in his absence.
Parini has no idea who he is, a promising comic situation that also, it turns out, doubles as an opportunity for the natural development of a bond between the two, largely free of the barrier of mystique, a bond between blind man and guide, old man and young man, master and novice, haunted lover and aspiring lover. The book is part introduction, providing an overview of Borges's life through the course of their conversations, the major events and obsessions, part glimpse of the man in person. He recites poetry in Scottish as the inspiration strikes, relishes a verbal technique in English unavailable to the writer deploying Spanish, confesses, probes, provokes, and casually dazzles, constantly drawing from a lifetime of reading that amounts to a massive library located at the fore of his thoughts. Parini begins to realize, without even having read his work, that an exemplary, sagacious literary mind is clutching his arm, urging him to use his nascent poetic skills to create Scotland in words, for his benefit but also Parini's. The boldest stroke of the book, the best evidence of Parini's ear for dialogue, is that he successfully presents Borges's voice directly through much of their time together, the voice of a man as deeply read as anyone who's ever lived and whose first language isn't English. (Listening to a radio interview with Parini, I wasn't taken aback that he does a sort of Borges impression.)
"Tell me the truth about yourself," said Borges.
"I was unsure about my vocation. It's the only truth."
"How long have you been a priest?"
"Forty-two years and three months."
"So you persist! This is all we ask. You made a choice, and continued in the faith. Felicidades! The stream gabbles along. You are the burn, the blaze of water on the landscape, a blister of love. You remain true to the Word."
The priest shuddered, then smiled. "Thank you for saying this."
Borges reached for him, and the priest dipped his head forward. With his hands on the forehead of Father Burns, Borges intoned, "Si quaesieritis eum, invenietur a vobis; si autem dereliqueritis eum, derelinquet vos." If you don't abandon the spirit, the spirit will not abandon you. Borges had given the priest a blessing.
Parini doesn't adopt a pious tone in hindsight. Initially, he finds this whole business of acting as a guide a bothersome distraction. To him, Borges is just some writer, in odd tie and musty suit, eating a lot of bacon, licking books in a public library, and periodically making trouble, like when he suddenly steps out of the car into the rain and tumbles to the ground, causing him an injury that forces him to spend the night in the hospital. Reader gets both legend and ordinary, elderly, eccentric man.
That's the intent, anyway. However, reflecting on the book in the days after finishing, it occurred to me that a reader may think Parini, by repeatedly mentioning Borges's bathroom habits and making light of them, for instance, is indiscreet. A mental alarm belatedly went off: Parini, who's taken on the responsibility of portraying a real historical figure even if the book isn't strictly biography, may seem to display bad manners. Maybe he's even dirtying up his object of interest, a sweet man whose chief offense, based on the evidence here, is being a legendary writer.
Overall, Parini is undoubtedly paying tribute to Borges, the man and the writer. If he insists on including unpleasant facts of their encounter for rude laphs, I wouldn't object so long as he's being truthful and he holds himself to the same standard (and, you know, they're funny). Borges, after all, pays for their meals and lodging and treats Parini as an equal, which is partly why the young writer is slow to recognize his stature. During one scene, Parini shares a poem of his. When he's finished, Borges notes a common sentiment in it. Wounded, Parini says what he thinks Borges means: it's a cliché. But Borges isn't dismissing him. He clarifies: He's written the exact same poem.
Parini, however, doesn't quite do the same, airing plenty about Borges's sometimes crude or inconvenient personal habits (again, he's blind and in his 70s) without much recording any comparable shortcomings of his own in what is, after all, a personal story, what he describes as a "novelistic memoir." In this sense, it's one-sided. Parini temporarily leaves Borges to visit another writer in Orkney, taking a boat ride with a woman he's just met to get there. The water is too rough for him, he gets nauseous and vomits on himself. And he has no change of clothes. Consequently, for the rest of the trip, he reeks. Now, this is a one-time occurrence under conditions that anyone who wasn't born on the sea would react unfavorably to, not a habit, so it doesn't come close to how he's depicted Borges in his less flattering moments. Then Parini stretches credulity: The woman who's accompanied him makes no reference to his accident and, without Parini showering or cleaning his clothes, shares her bed with him. I've never claimed to be an expert in romance, but I have a feeling if I polled a thousand women who are sexually attracted to men, few would say they'd enthusiastically have sex with a man who (a) they've recently seen vomit on himself (b) hasn't changed out of the clothes he vomited upon, some evidence presumably still visible (c) smells like he's been "rolling around in the shit," as Borges sagely observes after the ladies's man Parini has supposedly had sex (and been a "good fuck" his first time, no less). Yes, there's more novel than memoir at work here, methinks. Another imbalance. The reason I enjoyed reading the book anyway, I suppose, is because I thought of Sherlock Holmes, who's so good he demonstrates it sometimes in spite of Watson.
Not long afterward, I rewatched the Netflix documentary about Michael Jordan and the rise of the Chicago Bulls, The Last Dance. Though popular, it has since been the target of a twofold backlash. There are those, from critics to Ken Burns, who've fairly expressed doubts about how evenhanded the documentary is, given that Jordan's production company was involved in the making. Or point to glaring omissions, such as the absence of any direct mention of his life as a father and husband or an examination of the economics and politics of the game. Verdict: Doesn't go far enough. Really, can't go far enough with the subject as a participant in its creation. Then there are former teammates like Scottie Pippen who go so far as to say it's an embarrassing portrayal of Jordan. Verdict: Too far!
The documentary falls short of greatness but I still find it impressive in its structure, handling a wealth of material, and highly entertaining through every one of its ten episodes, each nearly an hour. What's more, basketball fans are given the gift of a permanent joke about taking things personally. In the brief time I've spent delving deeper into the game, a lifelong fascination, I've already encountered some self-serving storytelling that bypasses anything awkward or questionable to preserve the brand and avoid "embarrassment" in a league that highly values "respect" - which makes for hardly a story at all. Michael Jordan could have approved the same kind of document. Instead, the filmmakers reveal something of the man. Several players admit that he was difficult to put up with. Steve Kerr tells a story about a time when Jordan, who was pushing him around during practice, finally punched him in the face. The skeptic might say: one of the most renowned sports figures ever, referred to as the "alpha-alpha," could too easily be forgiven or even applauded for being a bully. Then the bully, in the middle of addressing the accusation, pausing to absorb the uncomfortable thought that his teammates didn't much enjoy being on a team with him, nearly breaks down, turns his head from the camera. End of episode. Jordan doesn't embarrass himself in that moment, reacting emotionally to a touchy subject. He reveals, there and elsewhere, what should be common knowledge: He's human, not superhuman.
And that fallibility is precisely what some would prefer not to reveal.
Bolaño, living up to his own standard in The Savage Detectives, his celebrated total novel, what many consider one of his two masterworks, fictionalizes the "problems of a sexual nature" he once alluded to in an interview. Whether he's faithful to every particular doesn't matter. He knew very well how easy it is for someone, especially a writer, to self-mythologize and let people construct a monument. His choice is to knock it down by writing about a character named Belano who shares Bolaño's background and who once had a limp dick. (Borges to Parini on impotence: "I do not like this word.") Whether biography or autobiography, in fiction or outside it, an honest portrait inevitably includes embarrassing and shameful facts because they're indisputably part of any real life. To avoid them is to pretend they never happened and to sell a fantasy - an especially ignoble evasion if one reads about lives seeking the full scope and spends any time attacking and criticizing others.
Conscientious reading and dirt-seeking are incompatible. I didn't read about Parini's Borges or watch Michael Jordan for the insights of the grocery store tabloid. Nor did I blush. It's because autobiography and biography done right can also prepare the reader to face their own lapses, failings, bodily imperfections, and blots and to reflect on what part they play in the whole story.
Do not fear that I'm poised to conclude: Who am I to judge? Sounds so nice, so agreeable on the face of it. But I will judge a Capitol rioter. I will judge someone who blithely or irritably ignores the threat of the coronavirus and the measures taken to prevent its spread. I will judge a racist and a misogynist and an utter dope and many more accordingly. If these people refuse to be honest about who they are, I'll gladly remind them. In turn, I accept that I'll be judged for things I say and do. So we're absolutely clear: I advocate the cultivation of such discernment to keep evil at bay.
I will, however, conclude with Christopher Hitchens, whose estate, as of now, will not be cooperating with the writer of a biography and has discouraged others from doing so as well. I don't demand, of course, but I'd be among the first to read a scrupulous one should it ever come out, devouring a hundred pages per sitting. Knowing something of his feelings about the deeply personal aspect of biography, my sheer delight would probably induce him to heave a sigh. But he also didn't offer leniency and didn't expect it in return. In the meantime, I head to YouTube to enjoy a favorite Hitchens response, given near the end of his life, losing hair and weight as he was dying of cancer. It provides a clue for how he'd respond to an unscrupulous book on his life. A 60 Minutes interviewer reads him the words of a former friend: "self-serving, fat-assed, chain-smoking, drunken, opportunistic, cynical, contrarian." First Hitchens says: "Well, I don't know what's wrong with that." He came to regret the title of one of his books, Letters to a Young Contrarian, having acknowledged the rather obvious problems with contrarianism as a way of life. Yet here he is being the contrarian and cheerfully embracing it, momentarily perhaps. This part of his reply serves to communicate insouciance and helps mainly to buy time for the memorable second part: "Though he should see my ass now." If you're counting, that's a two-for-one, self-humor and swat.
