Mirror Images (Alberto Manguel)

In fact and fiction, Alberto Manguel plays masterfully with doppelgangers.

J.S. Porter

In his treasure trove of surprise and delight, A History of Reading, the Argentinian-Canadian reader and writer Alberto Manguel quotes Robert Louis Stevenson as saying that the classic writers “with whom we make enforced and often painful acquaintanceship at school … pass into the blood and become native in the memory.” Manguel’s ongoing dialogue with Jorge Luis Borges since his adolescent years has passed into his blood and memory.

Manguel talks about his reading aloud to the blind Borges on at least three occasions: briefly about six years ago in “Borges in Love” from his essay collection, Into the Looking-Glass Wood, briefly about eight years ago in A History of Reading, and at length in his new book With Borges.

In A History of Reading, Manguel writes: “One afternoon … Borges came to the bookstore accompanied by his eighty-eight-year old mother … He was almost completely blind … and he would pass a hand over the shelves as if his fingers could see the titles. He was looking for books to help him study Anglo-Saxon … he asked me if I was busy in the evenings because he needed (he said this very apologetically) someone to read to him … I said I would.” [“Borges in Love” says “I accepted, unaware of the privilege.”] “Over the next two years I read to Borges, as did many other fortunate and casual acquaintances.”

In an interview with Clark M. Zlotchew in 1984 published in Jorge Luis Borges: Conversations, Borges describes his being read to: “Someone comes to visit me, and I ask him or her to read to me.” He makes no mention of Manguel, or anyone else, as one of his readers. As Manguel notes in A History of Reading, “Borges chose the book, Borges stopped me or asked me to continue, Borges interrupted to comment, Borges allowed the words to come to him. I was invisible.”

Borges’s book selections often entailed 19th-century Americans such as Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain (poets Whitman and Dickinson too) and the century-straddling colossus Henry James. The last time Manguel read to Borges, he read James’s story “The Jolly Corner.” Borges also adored the Victorian and Edwardian cadences of England, hence Manguel would often read (what Borges called his re-reading) Kipling, Chesterton, Thomas De Quincey and Robert Louis Stevenson.

About Stevenson, in a 1982 interview with Donald Yates, Borges said, “I am always going back to Robert Louis Stevenson … I admire everything in Stevenson. I admire the man, I admire the work, I admire his courage. I don’t think he wrote a single indifferent or despicable line.”

Called to read, Alberto Manguel in A History of Reading remembers being “led by the maid through a curtained entrance” to Borges who offered a “soft hand outstretched.” He remembers sitting in an armchair, with Borges sitting “expectantly on the couch.” He remembers the “slightly asthmatic voice” that would ask “Shall we choose Kipling tonight? Eh?”

In his latest book, With Borges, the size of your hand and perfect for a pocket, Manguel remembers things with a different emphasis. He drops the asthmatic voice, the expectant waiting on the couch and the “Eh?” at the end of the question about Kipling. The sentence reads, “Well, shall we read Kipling tonight?”

He fleshes in details about time and place: “For several years, from 1964 to 1968, I was fortunate enough to be among the many who read to Jorge Luis Borges. I worked after school in an Anglo-German bookstore of Buenos Aires, Pygmalion, where Borges was a frequent customer.” He gives an account of the proprietor, Miss Lili Lebach, “a German woman who had escaped the Nazi horrors.” He informs the reader that he was 16 at the time, a member of a fraternity of readers “whose identities are rarely known to one another but who collectively hold the memory of one of the world’s great readers.”

The tone of With Borges (I prefer the original title of Reading to Borges) is one of poignancy and loss. Manguel felt himself ill equipped to remember all that he ought to have remembered. (To tweak Henry James a little: a youth is someone on whom almost everything is lost.) He constructs “a memory of a memory of a memory.” He did not take notes at the time. The older man writing the memoir of his reading experience to a blind seer is too honest to alter the 16 year old’s inadequacy, to fatten or elongate a certain paucity into plenitude. He notes the boy’s lacks and regrets them. There is a good deal of the Portuguese word saudade in With Borges, a longing and hunger for what might have been. And yet the book is not sentimental or nostalgic; it is much too unflinching for that.

There are times in Manguel’s memoir when the boundary between biography and autobiography blurs. Boswell slips into Rousseau. “For Borges, the core of reality lay in books; reading books, writing books, talking about books.” Manguel, too, has books as the core of his reality. He, too, is a reader and writer (my word order is deliberate here), a translator and compiler, and, in a very Borgesian twist, a maker of books about books and stories about stories. For both the elder and the younger man from Argentina, one suspects that “reading is a form of pantheism.”

One suspects, too, that when Manguel as a young man moved to Canada he found more “monotheists” than “pantheists,” more readers of a particular genre or school or author than eclectic “bookivores” like himself and Borges. Manguel seems to read and write more for pleasure than edification. Joy is at the heart of his work. Reading and writing are affairs of the whole body, and the one form of lovemaking does not differ much from the other. Both are aspects of an imaginative and sensual intelligence.

Books have at least two lives: what they are in themselves and what they lead to. With Borges is a beautiful remembrance of one of the seminal makers of literature in the 20th century, and it leads one back to Borges’s work, particularly to his public lectures Seven Nights and This Craft of Verse, both delivered from memory. Borges, says Manguel, would rehearse his lectures “until every hesitancy, every apparent search for the right word, every happy turn of phrase [was] soundly rooted in his mind.”

Manguel on occasion, like Borges, plays the roles of historian, biographer and critic. He may have been too young to appreciate the literary time bomb put in his lap as a boy, but over a lifetime the explosive has continued to detonate in his consciousness. Like his mentor, he writes fictional stories based on fact ( Stevenson under the Palm Trees ) and essays with fictional flavours (his essay on Che Guevera in Into the Looking-Glass Wood, where he notes that the CIA agent in charge of Che’s body “suddenly began to suffer from asthma, as if he had inherited the dead man’s malady”). Like the fox, he knows many things. Like a centaur, he has many parts.

In a critique published in The Observer on Eliot Weinberger’s arrangement of Jorge Luis Borges—The Total Library: Non-Fiction 1922–86, Manguel makes the case for the porous borders of Borges’s work. “Borges,” he writes, “strove to write from the point of view of the reader for whom the academic divisions into fiction, non-fiction and poetry … are merely prejudices or conventions. He used these terminological assumptions to tell essays to the tune of ‘once upon a time’, to disguise stories as reviews or essays and to compose poems that were essay-like explorations or stories in sonnet form.” Like teacher, like student?

Manguel goes on to ask, “To what genre do texts such as ‘The Wall and the Books’, ‘Borges and I’ … ‘Ars Poetica’ belong? Who can place into genre words like “Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that tears me apart, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire’?” Are these lines fiction, nonfiction or poetry? Manguel queries.

Borges builds his imaginative universe around books and libraries, tigers and peacocks, circles and ruins, labryrinths, dreams and mirrors. In the Yates interview, he makes this arresting comment on mirrors: “Mirrors give you the sense of the double. They give the Scottish wraith. When a man sees himself, according to Scottish superstition, he is about to die. His real self comes to fetch him back. Then you have in German the Doppelganger, the man who walks at our side and with ourselves.”

Did the dead Borges in heaven’s library somehow get hold of a copy of Manguel’s book on Stevenson? That would be another Manguelian tale: how a famous blind and dead reader comes to read (even write) the work of his former reader.

At times, Manguel’s life as a reader and writer seems to be an extension of Borges, as if two lives are necessary to complete the passions and interests of one person’s existence. Where their souls mate is in their fondness for the vast and the minute, for histories and footnotes. Manguel, both in his essay “Borges in Love” and in his novella Stevenson under the Palm Trees, quotes from a Borges favourite, Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, that “men are liv’d over again” in a “revived self.” Alberto Manguel has a Borgesian imagination: the universe is a book. When you open a page, you open a world.

In his Dictionary of Imaginary Places—a very Borgesian book in its sweep across time and space and its love of fantasy coupled with the arcane and the esoteric—under the entry “Babel,” Manguel borrows details from Borges’s story “The Library of Babel,” and broadens them. Babel’s library houses “everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, a faithful catalogue of the library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the true story of every man’s death, the translation of every book in all languages. Generation after generation of librarians wander through the library in an attempt to find the Book.”

In Stevenson under the Palm Trees, Manguel writes “the true story” of one man’s death—sort of. He takes basic facts: Stevenson did spend his last years in Samoa, and died there of consumption; he was nicknamed Tusitala, “the teller of tales,” by the Samoans; he knew a Mr. Baker; his wife Fanny did quarrel with him about his writing; and, in pique, he did throw an early draft of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the fire. Into this pool of fact, Manguel throws the stones of fiction. He has a mysterious stranger appear on the island, he has Stevenson fall in love (infatuation at least) with a native girl, he has inexplicable crimes occur, he starts a fire, he has Stevenson working on the manuscript of what appears to be Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—a narrative he is living as well as writing. (In fact, Stevenson’s masterpiece was written some years before his settling in Samoa.)

The character Stevenson may vow “Death to the optic nerve,” but Manguel vows to keep his eyes open. The language of the novella is lush in image: “In the evening, when the villagers would go down to the sea to bathe, splashing in the waves with the children, the women’s thick black tangled hair opened like anemones in the water, while the hibiscus which they wore behind the ears would drift away around them, like fiery islands.”

Throughout the narrative, Manguel contrasts the North and the South, the cold and grey of Edinburgh with the heat and green of Samoa: “[Stevenson] sometimes felt that he needed, in a physical sense, the edge of frosty cold and black rain, and the dour look of the Edinburgh stones, grey with a tinge of pink, like the rotting corpse of a mouse” more than Samoa’s yard-covering papayas with “the bright yellow skin turning dark, the fruit opening its many folds and exposing its sensuous, fleshy inside, smelling of saliva.” Manguel contrasts the religious Mr. Baker with the aesthetic Stevenson, the one story of Baker’s Bible with the many stories of Stevenson’s literary imagination. Out of these contrasts, and others, Manguel fashions a detective story, a favourite Borgesian genre.

Manguel’s novella is part factual biography and part fictional biography, with a very Borgesian touch. Manguel takes the author of a novel about split identity and makes him into a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde himself. Stevenson lives the life that he dreams and creates through his writing. He is forced to confront his fictional creation as himself.

There are, of course, many models of doubleness and the doppelganger prior to Stevenson, and many after him. One thinks of Hans Christian Andersen’s story “The Shadow,” about a man whose shadow becomes a separate character from its owner and commits crimes that horrify the owner. Dostoevsky’s The Double also comes to mind, as does Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer,” in which a captain takes aboard, and protects, a man very like himself. I would argue, too, that Shakespeare in Othello plays on doubleness. He makes the white man Iago the dark libidinous underside of the noble black man Othello; they are two parts of a single personality, perhaps. In the Shakespearean pun, white is foul and black is fair.

In both the unadorned With Borges and the imagistically rich Stevenson under the Palm Trees, the writing has the beauty and cadence of classical prose. The sentences dispense with frivolous and unnecessary descriptions and adjectives. The words have the strength and rightness of carefully chiselled stone. The books are small, like a Barbara Hepworth stringed sculpture, but their power and presence are no less imposing than a Henry Moore bronze.

Toward the end of his Reading Pictures, Alberto Manguel presciently interrogates himself about what is missing from his book : “like all my other books, this one seems to be made up essentially of missing pages.” He catalogues what is missing: all the pictures he might have written about and did not. Yet, in his little books on Borges and Stevenson, in their fierce determination not to be exhaustive, not to tell all, paradoxically, nothing seems missing. They say the small—a man looks back on a boy’s encounter with a literary giant, a historical figure is made into a dream of his own imagination—they shun the large. Their smallness, their austerity, seem perfect.

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• Published in The Literary Review of Canada, May 2004

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