A Reader on Reading

Then, on 9 May 1999, the critic Francisco Peregil published in the newspaper El País of Madrid the following revelation: “The real author of the apocryphal poem is an unknown American writer called Nadine Stair who published it in 1978, eight years before Borges died in Geneva, when she was 86.” The text (as a piece of turgid poetic prose) appeared in the periodical Family Circus of Louisville, Kentucky, on 27 March 1978 and has since appeared, in a number of different versions, in all sorts of different places, from the Reader’s Digest to printed T-shirts.

No doubt since the beginnings of literature, all manner of writings have been attributed to famous writers for a variety of reasons: as an honest intent to restore the paternity of a text, as a dishonest intent to lend it prestige, as a sly device to lend fame to the text’s attributor. Borges himself, in one of his most celebrated stories, “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote,” adds (ironically, of course) a further possibility to this list of intentions: to lend new life to a text, that is to say, a fresh reading, by considering it in a different and unexpected context. “To attribute The Imitation of Christ to Louis-Ferdinand Céline or to James Joyce,” Borges asks at the conclusion of the story, “is that not enough of a renewal for these tenuous spiritual admonitions?”

I am not certain that this is what the false attributors had in mind when they decided to blame Borges for El enigma de la calle Arcos or Nadine Stair’s poem. In any case, whatever his accusers’ intentions, Borges’s suggestion merits exploration, since it may lend to the notion of “fake” a positive connotation that we usually deny it.

On Christmas Eve 1938, Borges left his house to fetch his friend Emma Risso Platero. He had invited her to dinner and was bringing her a present, no doubt a book. Since the elevator was not working, he ran up the stairs, not noticing that one of the freshly painted casement windows had been left open. He felt something graze his forehead, but didn’t stop to investigate. When Rissa Platero opened the door, Borges realized, because of the look of horror on her face, that something was seriously wrong. He touched his forehead: it was bathed in blood. In spite of first-aid treatment, the wound became infected, and for a week he lay in bed, suffering from hallucinations and high fever. One night, he found he wasn’t able to speak: he was rushed to the hospital for an immediate operation, but septicemia had set in. For a month, the doctors thought that he might die. In his autobiography, dictated in English, Borges himself described the events, which later served as the basis for a short story, “The South.” He writes: “When I began to recover, I feared for my mental integrity. I remember that my mother wanted to read to me from a book that I had just ordered, C. S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet, but for two or three nights I kept putting her off. At last, she prevailed, and after hearing a page or two I fell to crying. My mother asked me why the tears. ‘I’m crying because I understand,’ I said. A bit later, I wondered whether I could ever write again. I had previously written quite a few poems and dozens of short reviews. I thought that if I tried to write a review now and failed, I’d be all through intellectually but that if I tried something I had never really done before and failed at that it wouldn’t be so bad and might even prepare me for the final revelation. I decided I would write a story. The result was “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote.”

“Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote” appeared in the issue of the magazine Sur of September 1939. In this story, which appeared in the guise of a memoir contributed to a Pierre Menard Festschrift of sorts, Borges describes the apocryphal Menard’s attempt to write Don Quixote again: not to copy it, not to effect a pastiche. “His admirable ambition,” Borges writes, “was to produce a few pages that would coincide—word by word and line by line — with those of Miguel de Cervantes.” The story was hugely successful. One literary gentleman friend congratulated him but remarked that the effort was somewhat useless, since any truly cultivated reader would know all those facts about Menard.