Borges and LowellSir, – Though the mistake may well be Bioy Casares’s, may I be allowed to correct a matter of record in David Gallagher’s account of relations between Jorge Luis Borges and Robert Lowell (June 29)? Lowell did indeed meet Borges in Buenos Aires in 1962. He spent a pleasant hour in the Borges apartment, was served tea, did take off his jacket but not his shoes, dutifully admired the Légion d’Honneur which Borges lovingly displayed, and rambled somewhat incoherently about “great men”, among whom he may have tossed the name of Fidel Castro. He said nothing about women he cared to bed. I know, because I spent almost every hour of every day with Cal (Lowell) during his unhappy stay in that city, and it was I who accom-panied him to visit Borges, with whom I had, on previous visits, had many long conversations.
Cal had been on a high since arriving in Belem a few weeks before. He suffered from an extreme form of manic-depression, and by the time he arrived in Buenos Aires, the mania was fuelled by a daily dosage of double vodka martinis, often a half-dozen at a session. Dishevelled he was: sometimes from climbing equestrian statues and kissing the monuments to Argentina’s great men, sometimes expatiating on the city’s huge banks, which he took to be cathedrals, often enough groping – or seeking to grope – any female he met. Eventually, he locked himself into his room with a lady who had accompanied Rafael Alberti. The management eventually broke the door to Cal’s room down, a Doctor O’Neill was summoned, and it took four burly men to wrestle poor Cal into a straitjacket. It fell to me to commit him and to stay by his side, at his request whistling Brandenburg concerti to him, while he was strapped to his bed, until an American friend and patron kindly took him home to the United States.
The most likely explanation of Bioy’s gossip is that Borges, whom I saw again twice in those weeks, passed on what I told him about Cal’s stay, his visit to the Casa Rosada (where he engagingly told the US Cultural Attaché that he must be an imposter because he was not “cultured” at all), and the disastrous denouement in our hotel rooms.
I saw Borges in London on the same visit Gallagher cites, in 1972, and he asked courteously about Lowell, talked at length about G. K. Chesterton, and was otherwise as affable as I always found him. The letter to Elizabeth Hardwick, cited by Gallagher, presumably dates from after Borges’s Harvard visit, for when in Buenos Aires, he had only just read his first Borges story, and saw him only that once.
KEITH BOTSFORD
Aptdo 29, Cahuita 7032, Costa Rica.
Reagan revisited
Sir, – Edward N. Luttwak’s review of The Reagan Diaries and Gary L. McDowell’s review of other books about Ronald Reagan (July 27) perpetuate the myth that Reagan was one of the greatest American presidents along with Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. A critical examination of Reagan’s record indicates otherwise.
His foreign policy and personal diplomacy are supposedly the principal reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, many scholars argue that the Soviet empire was falling apart before Reagan and that he had little or no role in ending the Cold War. George F. Kennan, the former ambassador to the Soviet Union and father of the theory of containment, debunks the importance of outside forces in the Soviet break-up. He writes, “the suggestion that any United States administration had the power to influence decisively the course of a tremendous domestic political upheaval in another great country on another side of the globe is simply childish”. He contends that the extreme militarization of American policy strengthened hard-liners in the Soviet Union. “Thus the general effect of [Reagan’s] Cold War extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union.”
Reagan’s action or inaction during the Iran–Contra affair warranted impeachment. The indicted and convicted criminal in his administration, eg, Oliver North, John Poindexter and Caspar Weinberger, are testimony at best to his total incompetence and at worst to his knowing participation in criminal activities. Despite his cowboy swagger, he did nothing to avenge the massacre of 241 US Marines in Lebanon that occurred on his watch. The so-called war against Grenada was an embarrassment. His scoffing at supposed welfare queens was cruel. His voodoo economics was a disaster but because of him, supply-siders are still taken seriously by Republican policy-makers. His anti-labour practices and policies, as highlighted by his handling of the air traffic controller strike, accelerated the decline of labour union power which continues to this day. His most damaging lasting legacy is his oft-repeated canard that government is the problem, not the solution. In effect, he tried to repeal the New Deal and bring the country back to the days of robber barons. Reagan was hardly a great president.
SYLVAN GOLLIN
4077 Olive Hill Drive, Claremont, California 91711.
Sir, – In response to Edward N. Luttwak’s review of The Reagan Diaries, I would like to set the record straight by pointing out that HarperCollins will in fact publish the complete, unabridged diaries in October 2008, which will be annotated by Douglas Brinkley. The un-abridged edition will consist of three volumes, along with an extensive glossary, and will surely stand as the definitive and comprehensive edition for historians and scholars of the presidency. This is made clear by Brinkley in the abridged edition that Luttwak reviewed.
TIM DUGGAN
HarperCollins, 10 East 53rd Street, New York 10022.
Rules of English
Sir, – If J. C. knows many foreign speakers who struggle to understand the vast majority of native speakers of English who don’t follow the arbitrary prescriptive “rules” he likes so much – and oddly equates with eloquence – perhaps something is wrong with the way English is taught as a foreign language (NB, July 27). We are (as J. C. would say) reminded of Brecht’s suggestion after the 1953 uprising in Berlin: the government should dissolve the people and elect a new one. And if these poor foreigners really can’t handle the greengrocers apos’trophe, they must be a little dim. A shame, as J. C. clearly consorts with some awfully clever British chappies. But it still might help him to actually, boldly read some professional linguists: even he couldn’t not learn nuffink from them.
IAN MACKENZIE
École de traduction et d’interprétation, 40 Boulevard du Pont-d’Arve, Geneva.
Ramuz
Sir, – Sam Taylor shouldn’t decorate his translations from the French with his own colourful inaccuracies (August 3). Daniel Mornet’s “quip” about Ramuz – “Qu’il rentre dans l’obscurité dont il n’aurait jamais dû sortir” – does not mean “Perhaps he should just crawl back into the obscurity he ought never to have left”; “Qu’il rentre” is a simple imperative, with no “perhaps” about it, no “just”, and no crawling. At most “rentre dans” could carry the sense “sink back into”, but I would offer a less “amusing”, more flatly dismissive sense: “Let him return to the obscurity from which he ought never to have emerged”.
DANIEL KARLIN
School of English, University of Sheffield.
‘A Lover’s Complaint’
Sir, – Brian Vickers calls my questions “rhetorical” (Letters, August 3). They are not. His theory that “A Lover’s Complaint” was composed by John Davies of Hereford, though based on stylistic analysis, genuinely requires him to consider what external circumstances could have produced such an extraordinary misattribution. Of course “thousands of poems” circulated in manuscript during this period. But none of Shakespeare’s unpublished ones appears to have done so before 1609, nor any by Davies. Some poets, such as Donne, used manuscript circulation as their form of publication, but Shakespeare and Davies were not poets of this kind. Nor did Davies elsewhere show any interest in writing “female complaint”, a genre in which Shakespeare excelled both in dramatic and non-dramatic verse.
My point about Vickers’s dislike of the “Complaint” was not that this is the reason for his banishment of the poem “from the canon”, but that his compulsion to be scathing about it muddies the waters. The methods by which he seeks to “de-attribute” the poem are quasi-scientific. But by making his personal evaluation of the poem so clear he weakens his own case. If the poem is as bad as he says, should we care who wrote it? That, too, is not a rhetorical question.
KATHERINE DUNCAN-JONES
24 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford.
Sir, – Brian Vickers misrepresents me (Letters, August 3). The point is not just that Autolycus is a thief, as he was for all classical authors from Homer onwards, but that he is a linen thief. “My traffic is sheets; when the kite builds, look to lesser linen.” The thief whom Martial likens to Autolycus at 8.59 takes napkins, mantles and cloaks. Professor Vickers may well be right to argue that the poet who used Martial 4.22 for “A Lover’s Complaint” was not Shakespeare but John Davies of Hereford. All I objected to was the confidence of his assertion (July 13) that Martial was an author unfamiliar to Shakespeare.
In my letter (July 20), I drew attention to a lecture by F. W. Clayton which shows that Shakespeare had read a lot more Latin authors than just Ovid. I can now report that some copies are still available from the Department of Classics and Ancient History, Amory Building, University of Exeter, Exeter EX4 4RJ.
T. P. WISEMAN
22 Hillcrest Park, Exeter.
Unreadable Balzac
Sir, – As Adrian Tahourdin correctly observes in his entertaining review of Pierre Bayard’s Comment parler des livres qu’on n’a pas lus? (July 20), Les Marguerites, the collection of poems that Lucien Chardon has composed in Balzac’s Illusions perdues, is a “book [that] doesn’t exist”.
Not that this should prevent us making a (partial) judgement on it: Balzac quotes four of the sonnets. Talking about them is complicated by the fact that they were written for Balzac by three of his friends: Charles Lesailly, Delphine de Girardin and Théophile Gautier.
PETER COGMAN
141 Bellemoor Road, Shirley, Southampton.
Wallace Sayre
Sir, – Though “an obscure professor” to Robert Segal (Letters, July 27), Wallace Sayre was a wise and much-admired Professor of Government at Columbia University, where a chair has been named for him.
HAROLD ORLANS
4821 Montgomery Lane, No. 702 Bethesda, Maryland 20814.
