Kenneth Lash met Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires in the winter of 1954-55. Lash, a Navy veteran of World War II, had done interesting things as editor of The Mexico Quarterly and was on a tour of Latin America funded by The Rockefeller Foundation. His instructions were to meet artists and writers.
Borges suffered under the Perón regime but was the only member of his circle not to have been imprisoned. After Borges signed a democratic manifesto, Perón promoted him to the exalted political post of inspector of poultry and rabbits at the municipal market.
Perón knew how to harass as well as persecute. For Borges, it was harassment of the kind that made a decent wage impossible. Borges, almost blind, was living in a tiny apartment with his elderly mother.
Lash said Borges never talked about his own work but could get carried away talking about Emerson.
Lash mentioned the famous demands that Borges made on his readers and then said this:
He requires a good reader, and company. But what he wants is what all people in the arts want: to find their own voice and have it responded to. What they’re talking about is secondary. They talk about whatever it is that excites them enough to get them talking.
That line struck me like an oracle when I read Lash’s essay 40 years ago. It still strikes me, although now I wonder whether it’s true: whether all artists could be said to want the same thing, whether that desire to communicate is what art is.
• Source: Kenneth Lash, “Borges and I”; The Iowa Review, 14(3), 1984, pp. 121-127. The quotation is on p. 126.
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