In Alberto Manguel’s office as director of the National Library of Argentina, a poster for Dante’s seventh centenary and a bust of the poet, a photograph of Jorge Luis Borges, a large blue and white flag, and a small green plastic dinosaur immediately catch my attention. “That was a present from my son,” the Argentine-Canadian writer tells me. Bibliophile, cultural nomad, teacher, translator, editor, essayist, novelist, anthologist, critic, multilingual polymath, cultural facilitator, and, above all, reader: the layers of Manguel’s seventy years are evoked in the gleaming eyes behind his glasses. “Because its name is Albertosaurus and its skeleton was found in the Canadian province of Alberta,” he continues before sitting down in a large armchair. He offers me the other, and we start to talk.
* * *
We are in an institution that everyone links with Borges. How does your experience as director of the National Library help you to understand the master?
These are only two connected facts in that universal constellation where everything is connected. Borges was the symbolic director of the library; a universal director, a universal librarian who represented not just the National Library of Argentina, but the Library in all its facets. Now, naturally, the National Library, as an institution of stone and steel and paper and ink, implies extra-literary obligations, needs, and functions. Borges was a symbol of the literary, and literature is divided into a Before and an After Borges. One cannot write in Spanish or in any other language without feeling his presence, either consciously or unconsciously. Texts like “Pierre Menard…” change forever one’s notion of what writing and reading mean. My mission is located in another, completely different field, that is administration pure and simple. I gave up my career as a writer and, to an extent, as a reader, when I took on the post of director of the National Library at the end of 2015, and became the person responsible for removing obstacles to the work of the eight-hundred-plus individuals who work here. Do you know Café Müller, the ballet by the great German choreographer Pina Bausch? Do you remember that it’s about a woman who is dancing and another character who is removing the chairs from her path so she doesn’t stumble? Well, I am that second person.
In With Borges, your book of memoirs, you relate Borges’s work as a librarian to yours as a bookseller, because he used to visit the bookshop where you worked after he left this library’s previous headquarters. Apart from meeting Borges, what else did that first experience as a bookseller bring you?
I worked in the Pigmalion Bookshop, where we sold books in English and German, when I was fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen. I went to school in the afternoon. And Borges went there to buy his books, and one day he asked me to go to his house and read to him, as so many other people did. I already knew that I wanted to live among books, I realized that the world was revealed to me through books and that the world then confirmed or provided an imperfect version of what books had shown me. Borges taught me two basic lessons. The first was not to worry about the expectations of the adult world, which wanted me to be a doctor, engineer, or lawyer—I come from a family of lawyers—and to accept my destiny among books. The second concerns writing. Borges wanted me to read him the stories he thought were almost perfect, particularly by Kipling, but also by Chesterton and Stevenson, because he wanted to revisit them before starting to write new stories of his own. He had stopped writing when he became blind, and, ten years later, in the mid-sixties, he decided to write again. He wanted to see how they were put together. Let’s remember that for Borges there is an important word, a word the Anglo-Saxons used to call a poet: the “maker.” For Borges, writing was manual work, a form of engineering; then he would dissect the text, interrupting my reading after one or two sentences to observe how words were combined, what words had been chosen, what tense was being used, how one sentence was reflected in the next. That second lesson, a lesson connected to writing, was that one must be familiar with the art in order to write. The English have the word “craft” to denote the artisanry of a text. Until then I had believed literature was emotional, philosophical, and adventurous. Borges taught me to worry about how that text was constructed before thinking about the emotion I wanted to communicate. As if my relationship with people to that point had been through what they said, their physical appearance, and suddenly they were telling me: no, no, watch how they breathe, how they walk, how their bones are structured.
But what did you learn in the bookshop, apart from what Borges taught you?
When I started, the owner told me: as you know nothing about bookshops, the first thing you must do is to find out what a bookshop contains and where those contents are located. That’s something booksellers today have forgotten: they go to the computer. When one asks, “Do you have Don Quixote?”’ they ask who the book is by and look for it on the computer, and if the computer says it is in stock, they ask the computer which shelf it is on. We didn’t have a computer, we had to learn the cartography of the place. First, she gave me a featherduster to remove the dust… That was all I did for a year. And she told me, “When you see a book that interests you, take it and read it.” She expected me to bring it back, but I often kept it… because you need to know what you are selling. Then she taught me that a bookseller must know the space, the inhabitants of that space, and how to talk about and recommend what it contains.
Which bookshops do you go to in Buenos Aires?
I go to bookshops—because I never buy books on Amazon—where I can have a conversation, where the bookseller, with a taste I may or may not share, talks about books. For example, my favourite bookshop here in Buenos Aires is called Guadalquivir, because the booksellers know what’s there and have their personal passions and sometimes I respond to them and sometimes I don’t, and sometimes I buy the books they recommend and sometimes I don’t, but that’s what it’s all about—a site for readers’ passions—and that’s what I learned in Pigmalion.
Do any of the Buenos Aires bookshops from your adolescence survive today?
The bookshops I visited no longer exist. The Santa Fe bookshop, which I liked a lot, has become something much more commercial. The bookshops I was familiar with, like Atlántida, no longer exist, but there are many excellent new bookshops. Eterna Cadencia is an extremely good one. Then there are all the second-hand bookshops on Avenida Corrientes, and above all the Ávila bookshop, opposite my old school, the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, and there’s also a bookshop I’ve just discovered in a horrible, underground space, on Florida by Córdoba, that’s called Memorias del Subsuelo—Memories from Underground—an extraordinary place for second-hand books, where you can find all sorts.
You have also lived in Paris, Milan, Tahiti, England, Toronto, Calgary, and New York. What were your bookshops in those places?
The world’s great bookshops are small bookshops. In each country, in each city, I have my favourite shops where I always return. In Madrid, the Antonio Machado, but I also really like the second-hand bookshops, one on Calle del Prado and another near Plaza de la Ópera. What matters always is that relationship with the bookseller. And there is an important distinction between bookshops for new books and those for second-hand books. I prefer the second-hand ones, I like books that have a biography, I like to discover old friends and find works connected to the books I already know. Obviously, you always find astonishing things in new books, particularly in the area of the essay, the literary essay that has come into prominence recently, and I adore those unexpected essays on the history of hair, or books on public transport, unexpected stuff like that. It’s true that bookshops have disappeared from many places. New York, which was a city of bookshops, has endured a genuine extinction, although a few survive as relics of bygone times. This has an impact on a city’s intellectual life, on conversations, and changes the way one thinks. In Madrid, Buenos Aires, or Paris, you see people holding books. In New York, people are always holding their iPhone and I find that disturbing. Not that I think that virtual reading is evil, but it is quite different. The equivalent of that intellectual desert in the world of transport would be Los Angeles, where one never walks, and goes everywhere by car: a city where one never walks is a city of ghosts.
You have lived in several cities and continents, you write regularly, as far as I know, in Spanish, English, and French, and read in Portuguese, German, and Italian. You are, then, an “extra-territorial” writer, in terms of George Steiner’s famous epithet… Do you feel you belong to a tradition of travelling writers?
I don’t think of myself as a travelling writer, but as a traveller who writes, a traveller by necessity, because I really don’t want to change places, but I’m always fated to leave one place where I am happy to seek out another. If I had to find a genealogy for activities, it would be that of readers who have resigned themselves to write. All my books come from my reading. As Borges said, let others praise the books they have written, he praised the books he had read. That is a statement which defines me. If I were told I can’t write any more I would be much less upset than if I were told I couldn’t read any more. If I couldn’t read any more, I would feel I was dead.
So why did you take on the responsibility of managing the National Library, which prevents you from being able to continue writing and reading? Why did you make that sacrifice?
I think we have certain obligations and that each one of us knows what they are. I owe my vocation to the National School in Buenos Aires. I had one year at university, after six in high school, but they were so excellent I decided not to continue. They gave me the foundations for what I did afterwards. I read because of what I learned at that school, I write because of what I learned there. I have very few ideas that come from after my period at school. So I feel I owe a huge intellectual debt to the National School in Buenos Aires, where I was fortunate to have teachers like Enrique Pezzoni or Corina Corchon and many others, a debt to the city of Buenos Aires, and then there was the rather absurd coincidence that I met Borges when he was working as director of the National Library, when it was located in Calle México. The fact that I should come to fill, just over half a century later—and I say this both brazenly and shamefacedly—the position held by Borges, seemed like the inevitable twist in the plot of a bad novel in which the reader doesn’t believe such coincidences were possible.
Moreover, you had never worked as a librarian…
Indeed, that would be the third twist. I have lived my entire life among books, I have thought about books, I have meditated upon libraries and bookshops and the act of reading, but I have never been a librarian, and I thought I was being given an opportunity to go into the kitchen after writing hundreds of recipes, that I was finally getting to sink my hands into the dough. I very quickly realized that I wasn’t, that I wasn’t going to be a librarian, that one cannot learn how to be a librarian without studying for a degree in librarianship, but that I could help those who were engaged in that task. At thirty I’d have had more than enough energy for such a task. I’ve just reached seventy, and physically I feel I don’t have the energy to carry on for much longer, because this is a job that requires a mental and physical presence from early to late. I am in the library from 6:30 a.m., and what with official dinners and all the rest, I don’t go to bed until midnight. Seven days a week, with all the travelling and constant problems; I mean, a library isn’t a place where you only do one thing. Every quarter of an hour I have to solve a problem, related to electrical fittings, the purchase of books, customs red tape, trade-union issues, personal problems, there are 850 employees, a sick child, a divorce, the design of an exhibition, administrative matters, lectures, workshops, digitalization, in short… Every quarter of an hour there’s a different problem, and although I have a wonderful team, it is exhausting. Although I’d like to end my days in the library, to be found one afternoon, on the floor in this office, I think I shall continue in this position as long as I have the energy to do what I have to do properly.
One part of your biography that intrigued me was the period you spent as director of the Library. The other that intrigues me a lot are the years you spent in Tahiti. What was your life like there?
As you know, our sense of geographical spaces is always imaginary. Places exist as places we have been told about, physical reality acts to dissuade us that a place was as we were told. I was working in a bookshop in Paris that a publisher had opened. I was twenty-four, twenty-five, and had just married. Then, as a result of a problem I couldn’t resolve with that publisher, I decided to leave the job, before I’d found another. On almost my last day in that bookshop someone came to buy books who lived and worked in Tahiti, for a French publishing house, and with the barefaced cheek one only has when young, I asked him “You wouldn’t by any chance want an editor in Tahiti?” and he replied, “Well, it just so happens that I do, we should talk.” Then we went for a coffee and by the time we’d emptied our cups he had offered me a job at the other end of the world. I went home and told my wife we should look for Tahiti on a map, because we were going there in a couple of weeks, and we packed our cases. The places we visit as tourists and those same places when we live there, are very different. Tahiti is very beautiful, especially the islands that surround the main island, Morea; but, for example, if one lives in the capital, works in the capital, you discover that things are very expensive, because everything is imported, and, what’s more, if you are working all day, you don’t have the time to go to the beach (and I’m not interested in sport, I didn’t go diving or such like). The climate is tropically humid, everything sticks to your skin, insects bite, books get covered in damp…
So… we can rule out any possibility of adventures?
I had no adventures in Tahiti. I worked in an office of Éditions du Pacifique as I might have been working in an office of… I don’t know… Anywhere in the world, with the added difficulty that we lived there before the electronic age, so we had to make books written in France, edited in France, and then printed in Japan, where it was cheaper to print, in an onerous, drawn-out process. You had to write lots of letters. We had telex, but we mainly worked with snail mail. It was rather routine work that I did for five years: first we spent two years there, then I returned to France for a year, and then we returned to Tahiti with two daughters who were practically brought up on the beach. When that period came to an end, in 1982, the publisher moved to San Francisco and I had the opportunity to choose between San Francisco, going to Japan—where they’d offered me a post, because they knew me—or to try to start a new career, a new life in Canada. My book The Dictionary of Imaginary Places had been very successful in Canada, as had been the anthology I put together on fantastic literature, the house was Lester & Orpen Dennys and the publisher, Louise Dennys, asked me if I would like to live there. And I thought, well, if I want to have a career as a writer perhaps it would be a good idea to establish ourselves in a country that wasn’t at the other end of the world and surrounded by sea. And so we went to Canada. That was when an adventure began. My wife was pregnant with our third child, when we travelled via Argentina, where my sister had married a few weeks before the Falklands War. My ex-wife is English and our daughters had been born in England. They took my Argentine passport away. They couldn’t leave, I couldn’t leave, and we had to travel to Uruguay clandestinely and from there we flew to England. However, they wouldn’t let me enter the country where my son was about to be born, because I was an enemy. Finally, after a long time, I was given a compassionate visa, as they called it, and I arrived just in time for my son’s birth. And we went from there to Canada.
In your last book, Packing My Library, you talk about the process of saying goodbye to your library of 40,000 books and your house in France, a library that’s now in boxes, in storage. Did you record it photographically? Do you dream of it? Do you know what will happen to it in the future?
Well, there are photos friends took of the library when it was being packed. Yes, I dream about it, all the time, constantly. It has replaced all the other paradises in my dreams and I always return to that library, that garden, and my dog. The definition of paradise relates to the places one loses and my dreams show that, in my case, that place was my paradise. I had never had and will never have a house that is so peaceful, with so much space to think in and with all my books together, that are now in storage in Montreal. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to put them on shelves again, before I die. There are projects with institutions in the United States and Canada, that could perhaps give them a home, but nothing’s agreed and I have little expectation it will happen before I die. I have defined it as a library of the history of reading, because that is at its heart.
Why did you have to leave that house, with its fabulous library?
For bureaucratic reasons. I’d rather not go into that… But I had to fight French bureaucracy for two or three years and then I said, no, I don’t want to spend the rest of my life doing this. At some point in 2005 or 2006 I made some declarations in France against Sarkozy, simply saying that everything he was doing was heading in a dangerous direction, although it was being limited by the French democratic state. In Argentina, before the military dictatorship, we’d also thought that the extreme right-wing shift would be stopped by the country’s democratic structure. And it didn’t turn out that way. And then, I added, that one could never be sure a democratic institution would be robust enough to resist the onslaught of a right-wing movement. Apparently some local politician from Sarkozy’s party, in the town where I lived, felt highly offended by that and he persecuted me bureaucratically, which is the worst form of bureaucracy, trying to catch me out, and I had to employ lawyers, and it started to cost a fortune. At one point—you’ll find this amusing, as a reader, but it was horrific—they asked me to justify the cost of every one of the 35,000 volumes in my library at that time, and the place of purchase, with documentary proof. I soon surrendered. I said no, we sold the house, our hearts were crushed, we packed the books, and here I am.
In Packing My Library you say that you now better understand Don Quixote: when they destroyed his library, he lost interest in returning home…
That’s right, or rather, he felt that he carried his library within himself, and that’s how he could exist in the world. I now “exist” in the world through my mental library. It’s not the same, but it works.
In the book you mention some important sections of your personal library, like the one devoted to gay studies. Homosexuality and feminism, I’ve read, are two of the axes of the National Library in this new era. How does the section you have in your personal library regarding books on homosexuality relate to the later project in the public domain?
The personal and national library are quite different. In my personal library the main sections were organized by language, by the language in which the book had originally been written. Then, it contained everything, essay, fiction, poetry, and theatre. In the Spanish literary section there were even Russian translations of Don Quixote. Then there were special sections, like cookbooks, dictionaries, etymological books, books on the Don Juan tradition… Another section was gay and lesbian literature, a bit of erotic literature, and essays about the body. I am very interested in our obsession with labels: we cannot think outside the vocabulary of labels, even though we know that labels are reductive and distort what we want to know. It isn’t the same to label Hemingway’s story “The Killers” crime fiction, American classics, or men’s literature. You know… I became interested in how gay or lesbian is defined via a label, and then my partner, Craig Stephenson, and I put together a gay anthology we deliberately called In Another Part of the Forest: An Anthology of Male Gay Fiction and that included stories about homosexual men written by all kinds of writers, male and female. I’m interested in that subject from a personal perspective. But the National Library is something else. I want the National Library to represent all this society’s inhabitants. So we are going to open a centre of documentation of aboriginal peoples, of the original inhabitants, in order to re-catalogue all the material we have. We are also ordering and extending the gay, lesbian, and transsexual section, expressly so there is documentation in the National Library for those who want to find information on the subject.
In a small book published by Sexto Piso, Para cada tiempo hay un libro (“There is a book for every moment”), you say: “From the era of Gilgamesh, writers have always complained about the meanness of readers and the greediness of publishers. Yet every writer finds in the course of his career noteworthy readers and generous publishers.” In your case, who were those readers and those publishers?
Fortunately, I’ve had many. My first generous reader was the novelist Marta Lynch, who was the mother of a schoolmate of mine at the National School. Her son took her some very bad pieces I’d written, the first stories I wrote, at the age of fifteen, and she sent me a letter, and she was a well-known novelist, a beautiful letter I have kept, on blue notepaper, commenting on my stories and encouraging me… It ended on this note: “I congratulate you and pity you.” I have also had many generous publishers. I’d like to single out Valeria Ciompi, we’re friends now, she was my second publisher, but she became my main publisher in Spanish, and helped me a lot. It is thanks to her that I have a presence in our language. Moreover, the Alianza Editorial books are so beautiful. You only have to see the wonders they did with the layout of the Spanish edition of Packing My Library.
I would say that your most ambitious books are A History of Reading and Curiosity, both published in Spanish by Alianza. In both we find a style that is simultaneously precise and readable, slightly academic and very engaging. How did you forge that style? How did you come to what is generally called “a voice”?
There was a collection of books that enchanted me when I was a child, “Classics for Children,” with titles like Treasure Island, Black Beauty… And each volume carried an introduction by a woman, May Lamberton Becker, which always had the same title, “How this book was written.” And I loved it because it provided all the necessary biographical and bibliographical information, but in a tone as if she were talking to a friend. I think that the conversation with the reader must be an intelligent conversation, a conversation in which one always imagines the reader is more intelligent, and one tries to say things as straightforwardly as possible. A Canadian, a publisher of mine, Barbara Moon, once gave me some marvellous advice, “When you are writing, imagine a small reader is perched on your shoulder, who can see what you are writing and asks you ‘and why are you telling me this, I’m not your mama.’” It’s very important not to confuse the first-person singular with the first singular person. I present myself as a character, like so many writers, so the reader trusts me. The Divine Comedy would be very different if Dante wasn’t the main character. I am not the Alberto Manguel who inhabits my books, I select a few opinions, some of the ideas of Alberto Manguel, and put them in first person. Nobody is interested in what I’m thinking every minute of the day, what I eat or what I do.
The National Library was the venue for the final event in Dante 2018, a project led by the Argentine teacher Pablo Maurette, who resides in the United States, which has led thousands of people to read The Divine Comedy in the first hundred days of this year…
It was really wonderful. I didn’t expect it to reverberate so widely. It was very interesting and moving to see so many people reading Dante thanks to social media.
Apart from teaching and writing books, you have devoted yourself professionally above all to journalism and publishing. What advice would you give young people who are thinking of following a similar path?
Borges told me that if I wanted to devote myself to literature, I shouldn’t teach, be a journalist, or a publisher. But one has to live on something and we can’t all write bestsellers.
That was strange advice from Borges, because he devoted his whole life to publishing and wrote for several magazines…
If you want to be an arts journalist, I would recommend you find a medium with a recognizable style—nowadays it could be a virtual publication—write an article in that style, send it in, and cross your fingers. But you must realize at the same time that you have to write hundreds of articles to make a living that way. The Times Literary Supplement pays some £50 for an article that may take weeks to write. Babelia in Spain, pays 300 euros. If, on the other hand, you want to go into publishing, my advice is to befriend a publisher.
As one clearly sees in Fantasies of the Library, the MIT Press book edited by Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin, the latest tendency in library theory is the defence of the collaborative dimension and the presence in libraries of curators and mediators. That is, libraries have been invaded or infected (fortunately so, in my opinion) by contemporary art. What do you think of those ideas? Does the National Library support them?
It depends. One part of a public library’s activities is the area of activities and exhibitions, and that’s where curators and mediators play a role. But it’s only the “visible” tip of the iceberg: the invisible part (which is much larger) is its technical activity: digitization, cataloguing, conservation etc.
In fact, it is a return to the ideas already partly formulated by Aby Warburg. In The Library at Night he devotes a chapter to “The library as mind,” where he says his library is ruled by a kind of “poetic composition.” Is every individual library poetry or chaos and every public library prose or order?
Every library has something of both.
When Borges was director, the librarian school was born. What is the most important thing a librarian must defend?
The very existence of the library. If a library exists, if a library works as it should, everything else will more or less flow.
You say in Packing My Library that it is essential not to forget that a national library doesn’t belong to the capital, but to the country. In Bogotá I spoke to Consuelo Gaitán, the director of the National Library of Colombia, about precisely that point: she is convinced that it is necessary to weave and strengthen the network that unites all the libraries in Colombia, whatever their size, in rural centres and cities. But there Medellín acts as a balance to the capital. Buenos Aires, on the other hand, has no rival. How is decentralization working?
Provincial libraries also have their weight in our country. The one in Salta, for example, is outstanding. But we are working to strengthen them even more, to give them greater visibility and scope for activities.
Do you know if the project of creating a library in the Lighthouse at the End of the World on Tierra del Fuego is now a reality? What book must it absolutely have?
I hope it is created, I am very interested in that project, but I’m not sure it will happen. Of course, the book it must really have is the Jules Verne novel The Lighthouse at the End of the World. But a lot will depend on the identity they want to give that library, whether it is a library for everyone, a library for the inhabitants of the Falkland Islands, or a symbolic library enmeshed in Argentine-English politics… And the Library at the End of the World already exists, in Ushuaia, which is worth visiting, if only because of its name. It has a very good collection of travel writing.
Finally, forgive me if I ask you the same question you have been asked so often: was it exciting to be given the Formentor Prize knowing it had been previously awarded to Borges?
Every prize brings some joy and some embarrassment. Kafka said he had a recurrent nightmare, that he was in class and his teacher was praising him and someone kept coming in and saying, “He’s an idiot!” “He’s a liar!” I live in fear that some intelligent reader will say: “But that is absurd!” That reader could be me, when I saw myself usurping a prize that should have been given to forty thousand other writers I prefer. But at the same time one can’t have the arrogance to turn it down. Borges said that modesty is the worst form of pride. So then, I am delighted, but I am hugely aware of the difference—it’s almost a joke—of what begins with Borges and Beckett and finishes with Alberto Manguel. At least I was on the jury this year and we have put right last year’s error with Mircea Ca˘rta˘rescu, who I do really believe is as good as Borges and Beckett.