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In 1967, when he and Esther Zemborain de Torres Duggan first published
Introduccion a la literatura norteamericana, Borges at 68 had finally
come into his own. He and Samuel Beckett had shared the Formentor Prize
only 6 years earlier, and Borges' work was being translated into English
and other languages. Ficciones, probably his most famous single book,
had been published by Grove Press in the U.S. in 1962. In this little
guide book, not--as far as I know--currently in print in the U.S. (a
translation was published by the University Press of Kentucky in 1971),
Borges (by which designation I will henceforth signify both authors) is
interesting for what he doesn't say as well as for what he does.
 Some "standard" authors, for example, are notable by their
absence. Borges apparently had nothing he wanted to say about James
Russell Lowell or Oliver Wendell Holmes, although he is surprisingly kind
to Longfellow, whom most U.S. readers of poetry dismiss. Borges notes
this slight, and then goes on to cite Longfellow's "indefatigable" mental
activity, especially in regard to translation. He begins with two
authors whom I have never heard of, Jorge Manrique and Elias Tegner, but
also includes medieval troubadours, Snorri Sturluson's saga of the Norse
kings, and the Divine Comedy. This last Borges calls "una de las mejores
traducciones inglesas de la Divina comedia, enriquecida de curiosas
notas" ("one of the best English translations of the Divine Comedy,
enriched with curious notes.") His only evaluative statement of
Longfellow's own writings come in regard to the collection "Voices of the
Night." After mentioning how much admired these poems were by
Longfellow's contemporaries, Borges says that, today, "they leave the
impression of lacking only a final touching up"--which may be the
kindest thing an important author has written about Longfellow in
decades.
It goes almost without saying, I think, that Borges discusses
Whitman, Dickinson, Poe and Emerson, but U.S. readers may be surprised to
learn that, in a book of only 150 pages of fairly large print, Borges
also includes Henry Timrod and Sidney Lanier. He praises the former for
"fire and a classical sense of form" ("fuego y un sentido clasico de la
forma"); the latter for "beautiful stanzas." Borges also takes note of
Lanier's theories of prosody and his attack on Whitman, which I render
back into English as "Whitman supposes that because the meadows are vast,
the orgy is admirable, and because the Mississippi is extensive, every
American is a god." One need not, of course, "agree" with Lanier in
order to be tickled by his clever characterization which does, to be
sure, also give some sort of idea, even if a biased one, of Whitman's
leaps of argument. But does Borges quote Lanier's snipe because he
dislikes Whitman? Hardly. In the 5 pages Borges devotes to the poet, he
summarizes his life; explains the difference between Whitman, the person,
and Whitman, the character in the poetry; and even translates two short
passages into sonorous (at least to these American ears) Spanish. His
conclusion? That Whitman "sang as if from a dawn" ("canto come desde una
aurora.")
Also surprising (considering the presumed "post-modern" methods
of his own work) is Borges' attention to the "old-fashioned" business of
telling stories. His second chapter here, "Franklin, Cooper y los
historiadores", includes the historians William Prescott and Francis
Parkman, both of whom U.S. readers tend to consider "informational"
writers rather than "authors." In Prescott, however, it is precisely
what we might term the "creative" aspects of his work that Borges finds
notable--that Prescott saw the writing of history as a work of art, in
which drama mattered more than sociology. Prescott's narration of the
death of Pizarro, Borges says, is worthy of epic, and his books in
general, "owing to a certain romantic excess, read like good novels."
Both Prescott and Parkman, according to Borges, deserve to be called
great historians, and Borges points out as well that Parkman, though
comtemporaneous with Whitman, is in thought much closer to the Boston
Brahmins.
Even more revealing than Borges' focus on prose nonfiction is his
decision to treat genre fiction, specifically crime novels, science
fiction and the Western. Though elements related to the first two of
these genres make their way into Borges' own fiction, more academic
readers may not have been willing to concede that Borges had any serious
attachment to them. This book suggests otherwise. Borges exhibits a
confident familiarity with the writers discussed. Erle Stanley Gardner,
Ellery Queen, S. S. Van Dine and Dashiell Hammett are his choices for
inclusion among the crime novelists, of whom only Hammett has been
accorded some "serious" attention. Among the science fiction writers
discussed are Hugo Gernsback (for whom the Hugo Award is named), H. P.
Lovecraft (generally considered a "horror" writer in this country),
Robert Heinlein, A. E. Van Vogt, and Ray Bradbury. Of Heinlein's work,
Borges says it is primarily aimed at young people, although "Stranger in
a Strange Land" was published several years before this study was. The
social intentions of Bradbury's work are noted as are (via a reference to
Kingsley Amis's opinion) his sentimentality, literary skill and sense of
irony. Borges himself sees sadness at the heart of Bradbury's work.
Bradbury is, notably, one of the two youngest writers to be dealt with
(the other being Truman Capote, whose In Cold Blood was only a year old
when Introduccion was published, but which Borges discusses.)
Borges' look at the Western begins with a comparison between it
and the cowboy, on the one hand, and the gaucho and related Argentinian
literature, on the other. As Borges has it, though the cowboy and the
gaucho perform similar jobs, the literatures which grew up around each
are fundamentally different. The gaucho, unlike the cowboy, tends to
represent rebellion and crime; the cowboy, the triumph of good over evil,
which characteristic Borges attributes to the U.S.'s Protestant ethical
"preoccupation." Gauchos tend to have been tramps, he says, whereas a
cowboy might be a sheriff or landowner. Borges also finds it significant
that gaucho literature began almost as soon as Argentina's revolution
against Spain, while the Western didn't develop until the advent of the
dime novel in the second half of the 19th century. Of the multitude of
Western writers Borges treats only Zane Grey.
Borges does, of course, deal with the figures we tend as
Americans to consider our central writers: Melville, Emerson, Poe,
Thoreau, Dickinson and Twain in the nineteenth century; Frost, Faulkner,
Pound, Eliot and Hemingway in the 20th. But even as he considers these
writers, he constantly slips in others which we might not, some of whom
I've already mentioned. His chapter on "The Narrators," for example,
includes Hemingway, Lewis, Anderson and Faulkner, reasonably enough, but
also Dos Passos, Dreiser, Edna Ferber, O. Henry and Stephen Crane--whom
we, also reasonably enough, lock into the 19th century because of his
early death but who was, it should be noted, 9 years younger than O.
Henry, and only 3 years older than Frost. Likewise he does not neglect
Pound, Eliot and Frost, but also takes the time to look at e.e. cummings,
Vachel Lindsay, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee
Masters, an interesting sprawl of "Modern" writers. But Wallace Stevens
is nowhere to be found, nor are poets such as Robert Lowell and Randall
Jarrell, both of whom were perhaps at the height of their fame in 1967.
Nor does Elizabeth Bishop, whose long residence in Brazil might have been
of note to the Argentinian Borges, make an appearance.
Borges closes with a very brief chapter on the poetry of the
North American Indians, whom he refers to throughout the book, in a
fashion now terribly "incorrect" if translated into English, as "pieles
rojas."
This little Introduccion serves, for a norteamericano, two
valuable purposes: first, for those of us too long away from school, it
is a helpful educational survey, a reminder of authors we have forgotten
or never read; second, it performs the enlightening task of delivering
our literature to us from the outside, thus nudging us toward a
re-evaluation. Borges has nothing to gain or lose by his opinions of
U.S. authors--he is not part of a tradition which "owes" its "merits" to
the defense of one group of writers over another. And yes, I suppose,
the book fulfills a third function for those fascinated by Borges' more
creative work--it might well lead to new insights into the sources of
his still sometimes mysterious fictions.
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