Elisabeth Borgese is in every sense a child of high culture. She is the youngest daughter of Thomas Mann, one of the giants of 20th-century literature. The late poet W.H. Auden was her brother-in-law. She has been an accomplished pianist and playwright. Her protean interests range from feminism—her 1964 Ascent of Woman remains a classic—to international law. She was one of the first fellows at Robert Hutchins' cerebral Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. She is fluent in English, German and Italian, and can read and write French, Spanish and Serbo-Croatian. These days, however, on a rocky promontory on Nova Scotia's barren seacoast, she is focusing her formidable energies not on the highest, most refined expressions of life but on some of the lowest—such as seaweed.
"Human beings are returning to the sea as the whales and penguins did," says Borgese, 62. "It used to be a hostile element but now it is an important part of human life and economy." Borgese is one of the world's leading exponents of aquaculture, the husbanding and cultivation of fish and marine plants within the seas that cover 70 percent of the planet. Although more than half of all humans are malnourished, as Borgese points out in her new book, Seafarm: The Story of Aquaculture, less than four percent of the world's food comes from the ocean. Increasing that harvest, Borgese concedes, will not be easy: "Most people don't even know the word 'aquaculture.' They think I mean 'acupuncture.' "
Someday, Borgese believes, such marine species as carp, catfish, milk-fish and eels will be among the world's essential foodstuffs. She points out that aquaculture is simply more efficient than animal husbandry: A dollar raises twice as much fish as beef, one man-hour three times as much fish as pork. "People will have to learn to eat fish," she says. "We are still in a hunting mentality. We need to make sea farmers out of hunters." As her admirers point out, Borgese seems up to the daunting task. "She's very active and very influential," says Paul Fye, president of the prestigious Woods Hole (Mass.) Oceanographic Institution. "She's also a realist."
Typically, Borgese is putting her own philosophy into action in her weathered A-frame overlooking Dogwood Cove, some 12 miles south of Halifax, the site of Dalhousie University where she is teaching international ocean affairs. At home she and a marine biologist friend hope to raise freshwater rainbow trout in a pen in the saltwater cove. But their experiment in aquaculture got off to a discouraging start. Before the first 100 trout could be transferred to the cove, they died in a tub because the water was too high in nitrogen. Borgese vows to try again.
Her simply furnished house is awash with sun and salt spray. Outside, seals bask on a large rock; inside, Elisabeth wards off the morning chill by stoking her wood-burning stove. The rusticity ends at her garret-like workroom. On the desk is an electronic typewriter, surrounded by manuscript pages. Nearby stands a baby grand piano. The shelves contain several volumes of the Tagebücher, or journals, written by her father, who inspired what Elisabeth calls "the family vice" of writing.
Among Borgese's earliest memories are those of her father and the sea. Every summer Mann and his wife, Katia, took their children—Elisabeth was the fifth of three girls and three boys—from their home in Munich to the Baltic, North or Mediterranean Sea. "It was very important to him," she remembers. By the time her father won the Nobel Prize in 1929 for such masterpieces as Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain, Elisabeth was 11 and "couldn't help noticing he was very famous. He was the center of our life. We couldn't make noise. We grew up with a sense of the enormous importance of art, literature and politics. It was all around us."
Wanting to be a musician, Elisabeth studied piano and cello but was dissuaded by her parents' low expectations. "I was disturbed that I was a girl," she remembers. "It was a handicap reinforced by both parents, who were male chauvinists. I was told women can't be musicians."
As for literature, she recalls, "We were all expected by our teachers, quite unreasonably, to write the best compositions. But never at home, never by my father. He did not try to persuade any of us to become writers."
Mann, who was nearly 43 when Elisabeth was born, had a special place in his heart for her. In 1925 he published Disorder and Early Sorrow, a moving short story about paternal love in which a dashing young man charms a 5-year-old girl named Ellie at a party. Late in the evening, Mann writes, "the girl's father tries to catch up his little sweetheart as she passes and draw her to him. But Ellie eludes him, almost peevishly; her dear [father] is nothing to her now. She braces her little arms against his chest and turns her face away with a persecuted look. Then escapes to follow her fancy once more. [He] feels an involuntary twinge. Uppermost in his heart is hatred for this party, with its power to intoxicate and estrange his darling child. His love for her—that not quite disinterested, not quite unexceptional love of his—is easily wounded. He wears a mechanical smile, but his eyes have clouded."
"The little girl was me," Borgese confirms with a laugh. "I fell in love with a university student who was a friend of my older brother and sister. Since I was only 5, it didn't indicate any separation, really, but a kind of touching jealousy on the part of a father who wasn't quite able to cope with the situation."
The family encountered far more serious problems with the rise of Nazism. "My mother saw early on that if Hitler came to power, we'd have to leave," Elisabeth recalls. "My father was making speeches and being attacked by the Nazis. But he was less pessimistic. He couldn't believe Germany would go that way. When it happened, he thought it would be over in six weeks."
In 1933 the Mann family fled, first to Switzerland and five years later to the U.S. and Princeton University, where Thomas was a guest lecturer. That same year, at the age of 20, Elisabeth met Professor Giuseppe Antonio Borgese of the University of Chicago, an expatriate Italian antifascist and a longtime intellectual hero. He was 36 years older, yet Elisabeth found herself brazenly asking him to marry her. "To my surprise, he accepted." When they were married in Princeton, W.H. Auden wrote a festive poem for the ceremony. (Auden, a homosexual, had married Elisabeth's older sister Erika in order to provide her with a British passport.) Elisabeth moved to Chicago, where she became an American citizen, studied music and math, and bore two daughters. (Angelica, now 39, teaches physics and math at a scientific lyceum in Florence, Italy, and Dominica, 36, teaches and does research in cell biology at the University of Milan.) At the same time Elisabeth was attracted to international politics; in 1945 the Borgeses and University of Chicago Chancellor Robert Hutchins organized a group of international scholars who began to frame a "World Constitution."
In 1952 her husband moved to Florence to teach. Within months he was dead of a cerebral hemorrhage, leaving Elisabeth a widow at 34. "To make a living," she remained in Italy and assumed the editorship of two intellectual quarterlies. Though she wrote only one short story in her father's lifetime, Elisabeth blossomed after his death at 80 in 1955. She eventually published two plays and more than 20 short stories. Her Ascent of Woman, a pioneering feminist study, was overshadowed by a simultaneous work—Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. Borgese's next book, The Language Barrier, explored man-animal communications. Researching it, she taught her English setter Arlecchino to tap out with his nose some 60 two-to-four-letter words on a specially built typewriter. More recently Borgese used similar techniques—which depend heavily on hamburger rewards—to teach her current dogs to play classical music on a 15-key organ; one, Arlette, has played a selection from Tannhäuser over Radio-Canada. By 1964 Elisabeth was on the board of editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica.
While at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara in the mid-'60s, Borgese became intrigued with global sea management. "A new law of the sea," as she explains, "could be a model for a new world order." In 1967 she organized a series of meetings that culminated in the famous 1970 Pacem in Maribus conference in Malta. At about the same time she began participating in meetings that led to the convening of UNCLOS (United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea). Borgese attended the UNCLOS meeting in Geneva last month, which approved a draft of a treaty expected to be ratified next year. "I am pleased with the progress that has been made," she says of the draft, which contains many of her ideas. "It will provide a totally new order for the oceans."
From her background and studies, and from helping to found Malta's International Ocean Institute, Borgese in 1976 published The Drama of the Oceans. A best-seller—120,000 copies in 13 languages—it was a passionate warning against man's thoughtless plundering. "We must save our oceans if we are to save ourselves," she wrote.
Today only three of Thomas Mann's children are alive. Elisabeth's older brother Klaus, an author and editor, died in 1949. The youngest, Michael, a professor of German literature at Berkeley, died in 1977. Erika, a journalist, author and lecturer, died in 1969. Their mother, Katia, died earlier this year in Switzerland at 96. Elisabeth's brother Golo, 71, a historian, has returned to Germany, and Monika, 70, an author, lives on Capri.
Elisabeth resists the thought of slowing down because of age. Her travels are extensive—to Malta, to a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution seminar this month, and to the Red Sea at year's end to join a sea-mining expedition. When she's at her beloved Nova Scotia home ("The next time I move, it will be to the grave"), she habitually rises before dawn to cram in as much work as possible before her five English setters stir.
Since 1963 Borgese has restricted her own diet to vegetables (one favorite snack is a kind of seaweed parmigiana) and, of course, fish. With the Atlantic at her doorstep, she sails, swims and snorkels—"I love it, but I always drink half the ocean."
Borgese is hard at work on her next book, The Mines of Neptune, about extracting minerals from the sea. It will keep alive her vision of what she calls "Planet Ocean, a cooperative society that considers man part of nature, not an overlord. Fifteen years ago it would have sounded Utopian, but a lot of things are now happening. I don't want to sound too high-flown," she says, "but pessimism becomes self-fulfilling prophecy. It is necessary to muster optimism, or you can't act."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
