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Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions, edited by Eliot Weinberger (Viking). $40, hardcover; $17, paper; 547 pp.

Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, edited by Andrew Hurley (Viking). $40, hardcover; $16.95, paper; 565 pp.

Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems, edited by Alexander Coleman (Viking). $40, hardcover; $17.95, paper; 477 pp.

The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges became a cultural icon in avant-garde literary circles and on American college campuses in the 1960s. Borges's characteristic works were short "fictions," rarely more than a few pages, that described paradoxical realities bordering on the magical and traced labyrinthine flights of reason. The stories were often verbal equivalents of the drawings of M.C. Escher, also popular at the time, who used tricks of perspective to make stairs leading upwards suddenly transform into stairs going down, interiors seamlessly merge with exteriors, and other feats of optical illusion. Like Escher, Borges appealed to a wide segment of young people experimenting with drugs, sex, and alternative life styles because he seemed to undermine conventional reality. Also, it did not hurt that his "fictions" did not require long attention spans; for most readers in those days, it was enough to feel the thrill of disorientation.

Yet the writer who produced this remarkable body of work was the least bohemian of men and, unlike many of his admirers, fiercely intellectual. His family was comfortably middle-class, though not wealthy. The Argentine peso was so strong in Borges's teenage years that it was cheaper for them to live in Switzerland than in Buenos Aires. So they spent seven years in Europe before Borges turned 21, exposing him to a wide world of culture and literature. But except for one other brief European sojourn and a few excursions into the Argentinian countryside, Borges spent the next 40—very productive—years living quietly and frugally in his native Buenos Aires, mostly with his aging mother. He maintained such close daily contact with family and friends that he left behind almost no letters. Borges did not marry until late in life and, that notwithstanding, may have died a virgin. He did not even smoke or drink. It is one of the great modern cultural ironies that an author lionized by the most hedonistic generation in living memory described himself, quite accurately, as un ser victoriano ("a Victorian being").

All this was a far cry not only from the impression his writing gave the un aware, but also from the Borges who, in his seventies and eighties, gained international celebrity by receiving awards from all over North and South America, Europe, and the Middle East. Borges became one of the first literary jet-setters to lecture frequently around the globe. But until well past middle age, Borges not only lived quietly, he was so shy that he could not speak in public. His lectures were read by friends from prepared texts while Borges sat silently near the podium. In later years he overcame this phobia to good effect. The notoriety spurred him to reflect on the relationship between "Borges" the international figure and the private, real-life Borges. In some late texts, his characteristic paradoxes acquire an additional theme: the burden and mystery of the public "Borges" he must now carry around.

But even this eccentricity only begins to suggest the nature of a man who was an odd amalgam of several contradictory factors. Though born into an Argentinian family with deep political, military, and cultural roots in that nation, Borges's first spoken language was English, owing to the powerful influence of a British grandmother. Among family and friends, his nickname was "Georgie." The first novel he read was Huckleberry Finn; even more remarkably, Borges first encountered Cervantes's Don Quixote in English translation. And though he wrote in Spanish, his deepest literary loves were Chesterton, Stevenson, Kipling, Hopkins, Whitman (whom he first read in German), and Anglo-Saxon poetry. When Borges went blind in his late fifties—from an inherited disease that had also blinded his father—he loved to be read to in English.

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