AN English language biography of Borges should be of considerable interest, especially to those who in their youth had been bewitched by this strange Argentinian genius, but the opening pages of James Woodall's book don't inspire confidence. For instance, he sees nothing amiss in hazarding "I believe this to be the first biography in English since Borges died", when the most cursory of checks in any library would tell him one way or another. (It is).
He also bemoans the "scant material" available on Borges's early life and the "almost complete absence of letters", yet as the book progresses we find him failing to put the right questions to those intimates of Borges who consented to talk to him.
Most astonishingly, he can say of Borges's 1986 marriage to the much younger Maria Kodama: It is impossible to know if they had physical relations, other than by asking Maria Kodama directly." So why didn't he ask her directly? You or I may not have done so, but then we're not the biographer of her late husband. And it's not as if Mr Woodall didn't have the opportunity in his acknowledgments, he thanks her for "graciously" giving him her time on his two visits to Buenos Aires.
But really, what can you expect from a biographer who blithely declares that any reader seeking textual analysis in these 330 pages "will he disappointed", and who cheerfully admits that "if it seemed necessary to know more about Bishop Berkeley or Spinoza or Avicenna, none of whom I've read, then an encyclopaedia was reached for"?
So why did he bother with this book? Why write about a man whose "first sixty years were lived with a marked lack of the adventure you might expect of, or hope for, in a major writer living his next twenty five in the glare of world fame." (This could be the basis of a Borges story the writer who, in order to justify, his late renown, goes back in time and adds some spice to his early life).
So with no adventure in the writer's life and no textual analysis in the biographer's book, what's left? Not an awful lot, when you plough through it. Yes, a background is pieced together, and a sort of life, too. But, as Woodall has conceded, from a biographer's point of view, most of the life was uneventful. (And Borges himself didn't think it worthy of much elaboration: his friend and translator Norman Thomas; di Giovanni has revealed elsewhere that 25 years ago they tried to come up with a personal history and all they could manage was 60 pages.)
Anyway, what's important to know is already well known - most crucially, perhaps, the influence on the young, painfully insecure and sexually terrified Borges of a family to whom English literature was the only literature that mattered and from whom Borges developed a deep love of such seemingly marginal writers as Stevenson, Verne, Chesterton and Wells.
Mr Woodall is quite good on this early background and influence, but by dismissing textual analysis he unintentionally downgrades all that really matters about Borges his work. Thus there is no compelling reason offered why we should value Borges as a major writer; nor, conversely, is there any clue as to why he no longer seems the extraordinary writer that impressionable readers in the 1960s thought him when they first came across his work in the English language anthology, Labyrinths.
This last is pertinent, because Borges is not now the literary force he was reckoned to be when such American admirers as John Updike espoused his cause 30 years ago. Perhaps we've lost the taste for the mock academicism that doesn't manage to conceal its own rather and academicism (as in the famous story about the fictitious 20th century author who wrote two chapters of Don Quixote that, word for word, were the same as Cervantes. Very postmodernist, but what does it mean?). Or perhaps we're simply tired of the torrent of magic realism that spewed out from South America after his death and that was prefigured in the surreal flights of fancy that constitute most of his stories and many of his poems.
I don't really know, but what readers are likely to see in Borges now are fictional exercises that, though undeniably clever, are also meaningless a series of doodles down a literary cul de sac. You could say that, like Beckett, in the end Borges goes nowhere, but there's an essential difference the nowhere that Beckett goes is into death and oblivion, which is where we're all headed, while Borges merely retreats into linguistic conceits and sleights of mind. You have to be young to be bewitched by such elegant dead ends.
Oh, incidentally, though shy of asking Maria Kodama about her relationship with her husband. Mr Wood all can nonetheless declare that it "has to have been asexual". That's what I always say: go with your hunches.