Concerning an Untold Fragment in the Life of Borges

What follows is a tantalizing account which sorely needed to be made available to the English-speaking community. In a further entry I will refer to further evidence about Borges' familiarity with the Necronomicon presented by Rodolfo Martínez and Aelfwine, and to a surprising correlation between one of Borges' greatest stories and an Alhazredic passage. For now, I leave you with the following piece

Concerning an Untold Fragment in the Life of Borges 

José A. Oliver

Now that a hundred years have passed since the birth of Jorge Luis Borges, I believe it is of utmost interest that the honorable members of the Lodge T .... whom I am addressing today know what the Argentine writer himself entrusted to me a long time ago: a terrifying secret that may change the way the world conceives ​​him. 

I met Jorge Luis Borges around 1919, on a trip I made to Switzerland as I pursued an anthropological investigation. There, the so-called group of ultraist artists gathered to talk and read their works. I made contact with Borges almost by chance, at the National Library. I still remember as if it were yesterday how we coincided in the occult sciences section upon a sunny noon in the Cantonese winter. I was looking for a rare specimen of Fray Eulogius's Rex Caldei, a manuscript I had heard about very recently from a professor in Boston. I distinctly remember his striking figure against the light, on one of the wooden tables, poring through an old black leather-bound volume. Before I realized it, we had spent the whole afternoon talking about Dr. Dee, Count Kauphman, Blavatsky and various theosophical doctrines. In the days that followed, we developed a great friendship. We strolled through the streets of Geneva, conversing in perfect English; we continued to attend those ultraist gatherings, which seemed to matter less and less. Shortly afterward, he announced to me that he had to leave for Buenos Aires, where he fervently invited me to visit him. 

Jorge Luis Borges, a frequent lodger at Ulthar and great friend of elder Atal.

I returned to the Arkham faculty, from where I maintained a long and pleasant epistolary communication with him. For years we wrote to each other, and I learned about his studies on Coleridge, about his fascination with Wells, Schopenhauer, and so many others. At the same time, I told him about my devotion to texts in Sanskrit and the ancient Polynesian civilizations.
In a letter dated 1937 he told me that he had started working in a library (from which he would be dismissed in 1946 by the Perón government) and, marginally, he narrated the passing of HP Lovecraft.  I did not then know the work of the writer from Providence; the truth is that he was yet not known to the world. I remember Borges writing in that letter:

That Howard was, to a certain extent, like me. Behind those science-fiction stories, so beautifully written, was a man concerned with time, with Eternity. Yes, James, for might a mind unconcerned with Eternity, with the bleak vertigo of the aeons, hope to capture that terror which, for being so ancient, is even feared by time itself? Who could conceive without a hint of dizziness, the horrible and confirmed presence of that which is older than time? (1)

It was clear that Borges felt captivated by Lovecraft and soon, as he notified me, he devoted himself to his study, although, as the vast body of work which he bequeathed to us testifies, he did not notify anyone of this pursuit except his closest friends. I know, however, that for a certain time he was occupied in finding real traces of books like the Book of Eibon or the De Vermis Mysteriis, which were cited in the works of Lovecraft. 

In the following years I barely had contact with him. In a few scarce letters he informed me (around 1944) that a certain eye infection he suffered was aggravating and that he had finished Ficciones, one of his masterpieces, which contains a text which sheds light upon everything I intend to tell. Concerning said book, Borges told me:

Read it well, James, read it well, because in it there is something much more real than it seems... 

In this short story, included in Ficciones, we are told how an order is in possession of a great secret, which is never made explicit in the whole story. What did Borges intend to tell me with that? What strange secret concerning that community and concerning himself had he concealed and at the same time wanted to reveal? 

(The description of the unnamed story can only refer 

to "The Sect of the Phoenix" -better translated as "The Cult of the Phoenix", 

the name of which has been borrowed in vastly different instances by the likes of 

Colin Wilson and J.K. Rowling. Here in audiobook -LGAbbadie)

In May 1950, shortly after having published El Aleph, he wrote to me:

I am in pursuit after a volume that, if its existence is true, would change my entire outlook. I've been looking for years, when, apparently, I had it within hand’s reach. I will tell you about it eventually.

These are years in which his prestige is increasing, in contrast to the bitterness he suffers at home. Few letters come from him. Until 1955. 

On that year, with the fall of General Perón, he was appointed director of the National Library. Shortly afterward he wrote to me: 

Friend James, you cannot imagine the discovery I have made. As director of the National Library, I am allowed access to the weirdest and strangest volumes in our collection. Well here in the second basement, beyond several locked doors which the same key (mine) opened, after innumerable corridors of tomes that sleep the sleep of the just, I came upon a locked closet that my key also opened. And it was there, James. Just as he said, just as the bookseller from La mandragore de Paris testified, it merely was not at the university of Buenos Aires. The Necronomicon. An incredible and inexplicable volume. Yes, James, that's when I glimpsed the bottom of the well of human wisdom. It was a very old edition, perhaps dating from the XIVth Century, in Spanish, but without the name of the amanuensis, almost complete, except for the end... 

In that letter Borges seemed completely out of his mind. I tried, over the next few weeks, to phone him to talk to him and calm him down, but it was impossible to locate him. I got letters from Bioy Casares communicating Borges' embarrassment. It seemed that his discovery had upset him. It was hardly surprising. In that cellar, Borges found that, suddenly, all that barely glimpsed, perhaps feared, fantasy world became (as in one of those Cortazarian nightmares) reality, that the terms of idea and world were reversed and negated. 

At the end of that year, I received a letter from him. In it he was much calmer and level-headed. Finally, he told me:

It is all over, with my blindness. My vision is now null; I depend on my mother and my friends. The Necronomicon has shown me terrible things, I do not want to know anything else about it. From now on I will never mention it or even mention its existence.

Since then, until his death and beyond, I have always wondered what Borges saw in the Necronomicon and what he read. And that ambiguous phrase, " It is all over, with my blindness", so strangely punctuated for a perfect connoisseur of language like him? Did the Necronomicon definitely seal Borges's blindness? Was it a divine mercy that it would worsen in such circumstances? Or perhaps Borges himself had caused that blindness, as if he were a decadent Oedipus, to escape the threat of that book? I certainly do not know. And Borges never agreed to clarify it in later letters.
Perhaps the most lucid mind that this century has given us was one of the most silently tortured. Now that one hundred years have passed since his birth and he left us so long ago, I believe that this episode of his life can serve us all to value and understand him a little more.

(James W. Queen, School of Anthropology, Miskatonic University, Arkham, Massachusetts). 

(1) This fragment and the rest such quotes correspond to the volume I have in preparation: Borges. Unpublished correspondence, 1921-1956. I must here, as in the future prologue to this work, express my thanks to his widow Maria Kodama for the permission she has given me for the publication of these letters. 

Published in the literary magazine "La bolsa de pipas". Mallorca, July 2001. No. 25.
(For subscriptions to the magazine: romanigue@eresmas.com or calling 971 610144). 

Translated by Luis G. Abbadie from De un fragmento no narrado de la vida de Borges with great aid from Google Translate - hey, this takes up a lot of time!