There are at least 11 biographies of Jorge Luis Borges, three in English; do we need another? Yes, because since Emir Rodriguez Monegal's of 1978, an astonishing quantity of material -- letters, memoirs by contemporaries, new editions of early texts suppressed by Borges himself and new compilations of dispersed essays, stories and poems -- has materialized.
Edwin Williamson, after a nine-year exploration of Borgesean territory, has produced in "Borges: A Life" the best guide to the intertwined life and writings of the most important Spanish-language author of the 20th century. Williamson is a Hispanist, a respected Cervantes critic, but he also wrote "The Penguin History of Latin America." This immersion in history made him a perfect match for Borges (1899-1986), himself obsessed with Cervantes and saturated in history: Borges' maternal great-grandfather, Isidoro Suarez, led the cavalry charge at the battle of Junin on Aug. 6, 1824, that brought victory to Simon Bolivar in Peru and helped end Spanish domination in South America.
Borges' family history weighed on him. His mother, Leonor Rita Acevedo (1876-1975), was of pure criollo stock, meaning that both sides of her family originated in Spain but were part of the Argentine nation since its independence in 1810. Borges' father, Jorge Guillermo Borges (1874-1938), was different: The name Borges is Portuguese, perhaps Jewish, and was brought to Argentina by Borges' great-grandfather, the shadowy Francisco de Borges, a Portuguese navy officer who married a daughter of the important criollo Lafinur family in 1829.
Their son, Francisco, became a colonel during the civil wars that plagued Argentina through much of the 19th century. In 1871 he married an English woman, Frances "Fanny" Haslam, whose enterprising father had come to Argentina in the 1860s. After the colonel was killed in 1874, she moved to Buenos Aires, where she eked out a living taking in English-speaking lodgers. Her second son, Jorge Guillermo, was an unsuccessful lawyer and supplemented his scanty income teaching psychology.
Jorge Guillermo met Leonor Acevedo in early 1898; they fell madly in love and married that same year. She was ultra-Catholic, ultraconservative and snobbishly proud of her criollo lineage. Jorge Guillermo was a free-thinker, a skeptic, a skirt-chaser and half-English.
