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Edwin Williamson’s biography of Borges is what its title claims to be — ‘a life’. Whether it is the ‘definitive biography’ (as Mario Vargas Llosa in a publicity blurb claims it to be) is something only time, unearthed documents and loosened tongues may prove. But ‘a life’ is two things — Borges’ own and Williamson’s version of it. In this last sense, Borges: A Life works with two major metaphors as instruments to cut their way through an overgrowth of unreliable information. ‘The Sword and the Dagger’ title of Part I stands for the inherited cult of courage — military and criminal — that a weakling growing up secluded in the family library tried to emulate through writing. Dante’s Commedia, with the poet’s adoration of an ever-elusive Beatrice, provides a recurrent simile for Borges’ string of unfulfilled romantic fantasies.
Williamson probes into Borges’ writings for the elaboration of biographical facts and, mostly, psychological hypotheses. Some interpretations are far-fetched, others prove far-reaching, really illuminating. Borges’ fumbling, distorted way of realising his father’s frustrated literary ambition is one of the latter — immediately apparent to anybody who has read El caudillo (1921), the senior Borges’ only attempt at a novel. It is given an additional twist by the episode first revealed in Emir Rodr
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