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LETTER FROM A CAMPAIGN TRAIN, by Richard Rovere

理查德·罗维尔作为竞选列车的一名观察者，以马克·吐温式的笔触描绘了自己的所见所闻，并从文章一开始就对杜威和杜鲁门的竞选旅行，行事风格，和演讲效果等等进行了一番比较，诙谐生动，又有点漫不经心，应该很是《纽约客》本来的风格。结尾处他笔调轻轻一扬，抒写了几段还算切题的反思; 其实仔细想来以上读到的这三篇短文，里面的景象确实都很美国，而尤属这一篇最像电影《纳什维尔》里的那个美国。

• The dope on Mr. High, as I got it from Hagerty, is that he is travelling with Dewey not as an author but as a former clergyman. His function, I was told, is to advise Dewey on the religious implications of political issues and on the political implications of religious issues.
• The favorite beverage in the club cars on the Truman train, when I was on it, was the Kentucky bourbon highball, before, during, and after meals. I don’t recall seeing a single cocktail served. Highballs are often seen on the Dewey train, but Martinis and Manhattans are more in vogue. The principal diversion on the Truman train was poker, generally seven-card stud. At least two games were always in progress. If any poker is played on the Dewey train, it is played behind closed compartment doors. There are, however, several spirited bridge games going on all the time.
• Office-seeking is a great leveller. Most men who engage in it are sooner or later forced to abandon themselves to the ancient practices of audience-flattering, enemy-vilifying, name-remembering, moon-promising, and the like.
• … … the fact is that reason is outraged not only by the speeches of the candidates but by the very idea of this travelling up and down the country to make them. I have been unable to find, on the Dewey train, the Truman train, or anywhere else, a single impartial and responsible observer of national affairs who is willing to defend the thesis that this tearing around will affect the electoral vote in even one state.

SYMBOL OF ALL WE POSSESS, by Lillian Ross

莉莉安·罗斯的这篇“美国小姐”选美比赛实录也是《纳什维尔》般的人物群像大杂烩，她没有在刻意用力地表达什么，而是把所有想说的都埋在场景和人物对话中；我个人更喜欢昨天的两篇，更有纵深。

• The contest was called the Miss America Pageant. The fifty-two competitors went into it seeking, beyond the prizes, great decisions. Exactly what was decided, they are still trying to find out.
• Frank told Miss Nalepa that a photograph of her taken from the rear had come out fine. “Wanda has a perfect back,” he said to me. “I’m getting this picture printed in the National Chiropractic Journal. I’m a chiropractor.”
• Miss New York State, preceded by Hap Brander’s string band a float proclaiming the merits of Fralinger’s Salt Water Taffy, got a big hand from the audience. Most of the other contestants merely sat and smilied, but she stood and waved and and laughed and shouted and seemed to be having the time of her life.
• It worked. Miss Michigan decided to stay in Atlantic City. Everybody appeared to enjoy the party, and everybody made a determined effort to be Miss Congeniality.
• Miss New York State said that most of the girls had trouble getting their breakfast down but that she had had orange juice, bacon and eggs, toast, marmalade, and tea. “I wasn’t going to sit there and let all that good food go,” she said. She didn’t know whether she had made a favorable impression on the judges. “I told Conrad Thibault I had never heard of him,” she said. “He didn’t seem to like that.”

onlook: 旁观; leveller: 均染剂; chiropractor: 按摩师; chaperone: 伴侣; elocution: 演讲术; congenial: 投机

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PART THREE: POST WAR

路易斯·米南德（哈佛大学教授）对主讲战后的第三章的介绍。他重点提到了《纽约客》在二战期间新招募的专栏作家们，如埃德蒙·威尔逊，莉莉安·罗斯，理查德·罗维尔等。他们既是杂志转型的亲历者，也是这一转变的创造者。

• In common with New Yorker artists like Helen Hokinson and Peter Arno, Ross was brilliant at taking the air out of stuffed shirts, a spieces of which Hollywood has its share. Her method was just to let self-important people talk. All she usually had to do was write down what they said.
• A magazine that was identified by its name and its tone with America’s most cosmopolitan city, a place that, more than any other withe the possible exception of Hollywood, had flourished thanks to the influx of European artists and thinkers in the 1930 and ’40s, was nicely positioned to reflect back to its readers their new sense of themselves as citizens of the world.

hypochondriacal: 疑; parochial: 教区; insouciance: 漫不经心; giddy: 头晕

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HIROSHIMA, by John Hersey

早在翻开本书之时就已名声在外的约翰·赫西的名篇《广岛》，读完由衷地折服，这实在是新闻写作的极致了。不过，像广岛核爆这样的事件，在泱泱历史中，又会能有几次；由于电脑上仍是纽约时间，一个小时的时差让我读到中间的时候甚至产生了时钟在倒转的幻觉；笔锋收尾的最后三页，完美到我甚至想要全部将它们摘抄在这里（当然最终只节了三段），我想到了柴静《看见》中讲双城的那篇，我想到了《一一》的结尾，当然全文阅读的过程中我脑海里也总是会浮现出《广岛之恋》里的黑白影像，以及阿伦·雷奈的另一部反战杰作《夜与雾》。

• A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition — a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one streetcar instead of the next — that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives  and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time, none of them knew anything.
• At fifty, he was healthy, convivial, and calm, and he was pleased to pass the evenings drinking whiskey with friends, always sensibly and for the sake of conversation. Before the war, he had affected brands imported from Scotland and America; now he was perfectly satisfied with the best Japanese brand, Suntory.
• He had slept uneasily all night and had wakened an hour earlier than usual, and, feeling sluggish and slightly feverish, had debated whether to go to the hospital at all; his sense of duty finally forced him to go, and he had started out on an earlier train than he took most mornings.
• While fetching the cloth, she noticed her sewing machine; she went back in for it and dragged it out. Obviously, she could not carry it with her, so she unthinkingly plunged her symbol of livelihood into the receptacle which for weeks had been her symbol of safety — the cement tank of water in front of her house, of the type every household had been ordered to construct against a possible fire raid.
• Tugged here and there in his stockinged feet, bewildered by the numbers, staggered by so much raw flesh, Dr. Sasaki lost all sense of profession and stopped working as a skillful surgeon and s sympathetic man; he became an automaton, mechanically wiping, daubing, winding, wiping, daubing, winding.
• When he picked himself up, he saw Mr. Fukai running away. Father Kleinsorge shouted to a dozen soldiers, who were standing by the bridge, to stop him … … So Father Kleinsorge just requested the soldiers to take care of Mr. Fukai. They said they would, but the little, broken man got away from them, and the last the priests could see of him, he was running back toward the fire.
• The team fought the fire for more than two hours, and gradually defeated the flames. As Mr. Tanimoto’s men worked, the frightened people in the park pressed closer and closer to the river, and finally the mob began to force some of the unfortunates who were on the very bank into the water. Among those driven into the water and drowned were Mrs. Matsumoto, of the Methodist School, and her daughter.
• Mr. Tanimoto had seen during the day, he surmised that the barracks had been badly damaged by whatever it was that had hit Hiroshima. He knew he hadn’t a chance of finding Mrs. Kamai’s husband, even if he searched, but he wanted to humor her. “I’ll try,” he said.
• Mr. Tanimoto found about twenty men and women on the sandpit. He drove the boat onto the bank and urged them to get aboard. They did not move and he realized that they were too weak to lift themselves. He reached down and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge, glove-like pieces. He was so sickened by this that he had to sit down for a moment. Then he got out into the water, and though a small man, lifted several of the men and women, who were naked, into his boat.
• Dr. Sasaki had not looked outside the hospital all day; the scene inside was so terrible and so compelling that it had not occurred to him to ask any questions about what had happened beyond the windows and doors … … Early in the day, he thought for the first time of his mother at their country home in Mukaihara, thirty miles from town. He usually went home every night. He was afraid she would think he was dead.
• “That may be right from a medical standpoint — ” Mr. Tanimoto began, but then he looked out across the field, where the many dead lay close and intimate with those who were still living, and he turned away without finishing his sentence, angry now with himself. He didn’t know what to do; he had promised some of the dying people in the park that he would bring them medical aid. They might die feeling cheated.
• A little before noon, he saw a Japanese woman handing something out. Soon she came to him and said in a kindly voice, “These are tea leaves. Chew them, young man, and you won’t feel thirsty.” The woman’s gentleness mad Father Kleinsorge suddenly want to cry. For weeks, he had been feeling oppressed by the hatred of foreigners that the Japanese seemed increasingly to show, and he had been uneasy even with his Japanese friends.
• Once, he tried to suggest that perhaps it was time to cremate the baby, but Mrs. Kamai only held it tighter. He began to keep away from her, but whenever he looked at her, she was staring at him and her eyes asked the same question. He tried to escape her glance by keeping his back turned to her as much as possible.
• He put riddles to them. He asked, “What is the cleverest animal in the world?”, and after the thirteen-year-old girl had guessed the ape, the elephant, the horse, he said,” No, it must be the hippopotamus,” because in Japanese that animal is kaba, the reverse of baka, stupid. He told Bible stories, beginning, in the order of things, with the Creation. He showed them a scrapbook of snapshots taken in Europe. Nevertheless, they cried most of the time for their mother.
• A doctor who did not know much about these strange manifestations — Father Kleinsorge was one of a handful of atomic patients who had reached Tokyo — came to see him, and to the patient’s face he was most encouraging. “You’ll be out of here in two weeks,” he said. But when the doctor got out in the corridor, he said to the Mother Superior, “He’ll die. All these bomb people die — you’ll see. They go along for a couple of weeks and then they die.”
• One day, the young man who had lent her his translation of de Maupassant at Hatsukaichi came to visit her; he told her that he was going to Kyushu but that when he came back, he would like to see her again. She didn’t care. Her leg had been so swollen and painful all along that the doctor had not even tried to set the fractures, and though an X-ray taken in November showed that the bones were mending, she could see under the sheet that her left leg was nearly three inches shorter than her right and that her left foot was turning inward. She thought often of the man to whom she had been engaged. Someone told her he was back from overseas. She wondered what he had heard about her injuries that made him stay away.
• Father Kleinsorge was finding it hard, as Dr. Fujii had suggested he would, to be cautious and to take his naps. He went out every day on foot to call on Japanese Catholics and prospective converts. As the months went by, he grew more and more tired. In June, he read an article in the Hiroshima Chugoku warning survivors against working too hard — but what could he do?
• A year after the bomb was dropped, Miss Sasaki was a cripple; Mrs. Nakamura was destitute; Father Kleinsorge was back in the hospital; Dr. Sasaki was not capable of the work he once could do; Dr. Fujii had lost the thirty-room hospital it took him many years to acquire, and had no prospects of rebuilding it; Mr. Tanimoto’s church had been ruined and he no longer had his exceptional vitality. The lives of these six people, who were among the luckiest in Hiroshima, would never be the same. Whet they thought of their experiences and of the use of the atomic bomb was, of course, not unanimous. One feeling they did seem to share, however, was a curious kind of elated community spirit, something like that of the Londoners after their blitz — a pride in the way they and their fellow-survivors had stood up to a dreadful ordeal.
• A surprising number of the people of Hiroshima remained more or less indifferent about the ethics of using the bomb. Possibly they were too terrified by it to want to think about it at all. Not many of them even bothered to find out much what it was like. Mrs. Nakamura’s conception of it — and awe of it — was typical. “The atom bomb,” she would say when asked about it, “is the size of a matchbox. The heat of it was six thousand times that of the sun. It exploded in the air. There is some radium in it. I don’t know just how it works, but when the radium is put together, it explodes.” As for the use of the bomb, she would say, “It was war and we had to expect it.” And then she would add, “Shikata ga nai,” a Japanese expression as common as, and corresponding to, the Russian word “nichevo“: “It can’t be helped. Oh, well. Too bad.” Dr. Fujii said approximately the same thing about the use of the bomb to Father Kleinsorge one evening, in German: “Da ist nicht zu machen. There’s nothing to be done about it.”
• It would be impossible to say what horrors were embedded in the minds of the children who lived through the day of the bombing in Hiroshima. On the surface their recollections, months after disaster, were of an exhilarating adventure. Toshio Nakamura, who was ten at the time of the bombing, was soon able to talk freely, even gaily, about the experience, and a few weeks before the anniversary he wrote the following matter-of-fact essay for his teacher at Nobori-cho Primary School: “The day before the bomb, I went for a swim. In the morning, I was eating peanuts. I saw a light. I was knocked to little sister’s sleeping place. When we were saved, I could only see as far as the tram. My mother and I started to pack our things. The neighbors were walking around burned and bleeding. Hataya-san told me to run away with her. I said I wanted to wait for my mother. We went to the park. A whirlwind came. At night a gas tank burned and I saw the reflection in the river. We stayed in the park one night. Next day I went to Taiko Bridge and met my girl friends Kikuki and Murakami. They were looking for their mothers. But Kukuki’s mother was wounded and Murakami’s mother, alas, was dead.”

volition: 意志; reconnaissance: 承认; rayon: 射线; dugout: 味道; prefecture: 府; allotment: 配股; convivial: 用户友好; frail: 脆弱; miasma: 瘴气; receptacle: 容器; lieu: 地方; scorch: 烧焦; destitute: 贫困; alas: 唉

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PART TWO: AMERICAN SCENES

A NOTE BY JILL LEPORE

吉尔·雷波尔的一篇序语，她也是哈佛大学的历史系教授，文章没有什么特别出彩的地方。值得一提的是，2012年被爆出的著名主持人扎卡里亚剽窃事件，被抄的就是吉尔·雷波尔在《纽约客》上的文章。

• The war changed The New Yorker by making it more accountable to world affairs, but also by making it differently accountable to what was happening in the United States, including places like a singularity hideous courthouse in South Carolina.

NOTES AND COMMENT, by E.B.White

E.B.怀特略带有炫技效果地回答了 Writer’s War Board“什么是民主”这一问题。

• Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.

THE OLD HOUSE AT HOME, by Joseph Mitchell

约瑟夫·米切尔这篇关于麦克索利酒吧（纽约最古老的爱尔兰酒吧）风物志十分精彩，他擅于长篇大段地细致刻画，笔下的人物诙谐生动，栩栩如生；从主讲二战的第一章走出，来到圣马克地带的这家十分接地气的酒馆里，“美国风情”为主题的第二章扑鼻而来；这家酒吧一直很有名，出现在不少绘画中，也成为了很多电影的取景地。

• Sometimes, in the afternoon, if the weather was good, he would shuffle into the bar, a sallow, disenchanted old man, and sit in the Peter Cooper chair with his knotty hands limp in his lap. Four hours he would sit and stare at the painting of Old John. The customers were sure he was getting ready to die, but when he came in they would say, “You looking chipper today, Billy boy,” or something like that.
• Technically, Kelly is a truck-driver, but he always says business is slow in his line. Once, for a brief period, he took a job as night clerk in a funeral parlor in Brooklyn, quitting because a corpse spoke to him. “This dead guy told me to take my had off indoors,” Kelly says. In one way or another, death pops up repeatedly in Kelly’s talk. Each morning, Mullins, the bartender, asks him how he feels. If he doesn’t feel so good, he says, “I’m dead, but I just won’t lie still.”
• Kelly likes the Sloan painting but prefers a golden, corpulent nude which Old John hung in the back room many years ago, right beside Peter Cooper’s portrait. To a stranger, attracted to the saloon by a Sloan painting, Kelly will say, “Hey, Mac, if you want to see some real art, go look at the naked lady in the back room.” The nude is stretched out on a couch and is playing with a parrot; the painting is a copy, probably done by a Cooper Union student, of Gustave Courbet’s La Femme au Perroquet. Kelly always translates this for strangers. “It’s French,” he says learnedly. “It means ‘Duh Goil and duh Polly.'”
• The fare in McSorley’s is plain, cheap, and well cooked. Mike’s specialties are goulash, frankfurters and sauerkraut, and hamburgers blanketed with fried onions. He scribbles his menu in chalk on a slate which hangs in the barroom and consistently misspells four dishes out of five … … Mike refers to food as “she.” For example, if a customer complains that the goulash is not as good as it was last Wednesday, he says, “No matter how not as good she is, she’s good enough for you.”

OPERA IN GREENVILLE, by Rebecca West

如果说约瑟夫·米切尔让人有些欲罢不能的是他绵长到难以切割（做摘抄和读书笔记之用）的大段描写的话，丽贝卡·韦斯特则落笔更加精准，锐利，直接，她在本篇里的开头，寥寥几段就把南方小镇格林维尔生动地刻画了出来；然而读着读着你会发现这篇法庭纪实是非常沉重的，四十年代，南方，种族主义，南北对抗等冰冰冷的事实摆在你眼前；丽贝卡·韦斯特也是纽伦堡大审判封面文章的作者，该篇收录在本书第三章中。

• Greenville was as hot as the cities that lie on the Spanish plains, as Seville and Cordoba. But in those cities the people do not live a modern life, they do not work too grimly, and they sleep in the afternoons; here they keep the same commercial hours as in New York, and practice the hard efficiency that is the price this age asks for money.
• Behind the defendants and their families sat something under two hundred of such white citizens of Greenville as could find the time to attend the trial, which was held during working hours. Some were drawn from the men of the town who are too old or too sick to work, or who do not enjoy work and use Court House as a club, sitting on the steps, chewing and smoking and looking down on Main Street through the hot, dancing air, when the weather is right for that, and going inside when it is better there. They were joined by a certain number of men and women who did not like the idea of people being taken out of jail and murdered, and by others who liked the idea quite well.
• The jury entered. One juror was smiling; one was looking desperately ashamed; the others looked stolid and secretive, as they had done all through the trial. They handed slips on which they had recorded their verdicts to the clerk of the court, who handed them to the Judge. He read them through himself, and a flush spread over his face.
• There could not be no more pathetic scene than these taxi-drivers and their wives, the deprived children of difficult history, who were rejoicing at a salvation that was actually a deliverance to danger. They had been saved from the electric chair and from prison by men who had conducted their defense without taking a minute off to state or imply that even if a man is a murderer one must not murder him and that murder is foul.

clarinet: 单簧管; cleave: 劈开; motley: 杂色; surly: 阴沉; tenement: 房屋; memorabilia: 大事记; pewter: 锡; snicker: 暗笑; gamy: 荤腥气; epithet: 称号; learnedly: 博学; rickety: 摇摇晃晃; goulash: 炖牛肉; sauerkraut: 酸菜; barnacle: 藤壶; lynching: 私刑; mutilated: 肢解; stolid: 慢性子; deliverance: 救出

(The 40s: The Story of a Decade, by The New Yorker Magazine)

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INTRODUCTION

现任《纽约客》总编辑大卫·瑞姆尼克撰文回忆了杂志的创办人哈罗德·罗斯，以及在罗斯领导下的1940年代《纽约客》的转型和蜕变。时代与人文在历史空间的交汇，娓娓动人。看本雅明的时候正值《布达佩斯大饭店》，看这本书的时候又正一直在听《货币战争》，里面的各种权谋和政治，反倒让我在读完这篇序言之后格外感到清新；这本书厚达近700页，一时不知道该如何下手；《纽约客》杂志的标志性字体叫 Irvin。

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PART ONE: THE WAR

A NOTE BY GEORGE PACKER

乔治·派克从撰稿人利布林在巴黎蒙马特一家餐厅享受火鱼美餐起笔，生动地讲述了二战的暴发是如何改变了《纽约客》的口味和“去政治性”，以及杂志里的每一个人。他说，《纽约客》在战争年代里从不讲什么政治大道理，而是从记者身边的人和事出发，去记述他们看到和听到的。征兵不断，很多人写到一半便被调至前线，很多文章甚至分不清是记者还是士兵所写；1946年8月31日的那一期只有一篇文章：Hiroshima。

• The war opened The New Yorker to the wider world. Without changing beyond recognition, it became a more serious magazine; without sounding like Time or The New Republic, it became political. It rediscovered places it already knew, perhaps a little too well (London, Paris, Hell’s Kitchen), and it discovered places that it had never imagined (Tunisia, the Marianas Islands).
• Hersey’s method of re-creating the destruction of the city through the fate of six individuals produced a daring new form of journalism, modeled on fiction. It portrayed civilians in America’s hated enemy, Japan, for the first time as human beings.

NOTES AND COMMENT, by E.B.White

E.B.怀特在二战爆发的第二天（1939年9月2日）写下这篇简短的笔记，急促的笔调让人愈发呼吸加速，战争加速的只是人的恐惧，而不是热血沸腾。

• The world, on this Sunday morning, seems pleasingly unreal. We’ve been reading that short story of Tomlinson’s called “Illusion:1915,” which begins on a summer day in France when the bees were in the limes. But this is Illusion 1939, this radio sandwich on which we chew, two bars of music with an ominous voice in between. And the advertiser, still breaking through: “Have you acquired the safety habit?” Moscow is calling New York. Hello, New York. Let me whisper I love you. They are removing the pictures from the museums. There was a time when the mere nonexistence of war was enough. Not any more. The world is in the odd position of being intellectually opposed to war, spiritually committed to it … … Let me whisper I love you while we are dancing and the lights are low.

PARIS POSTSCRIPT, by A.J.Liebling

A.J.利布林以类似日记的方式，详实记述了1940年5月11日德军入侵荷兰比利时至6月10日法国政府撤离巴黎这一个月间自己在巴黎城的生活和所见所闻。说是生活，因为其中描绘的人和事再生活化不过，一对儿子在前线的老夫妻，酒店的侍应，饭馆经理，卖玫瑰花的店主，还有新闻发布会上的政府官员，全景呈现了巴黎还未被侵占时人们的生活和心理状态。这篇文章发表在八月份，利布林什么时候写下的这些倒并不清楚，真的是纪实还是追忆，我们不得而知。他笔触中的淡淡怅惘让人感触颇深。

• Confidence was a duty. The advertising department of the Magasins du Louvre discovered another duty for France. The store’s slogan was “Madame, it is your duty to be elegant!” “They shall not pass” was considered vieux jeu and hysterical. The optimistic do-nothingism of the Chamberlain and Daladier regimes was, for millions of people, the new patriotism.
• One staff officer later told me, “Weygand’s ideas are so old-fashioned that they have become modern again. He is just what we need.” Strategically, the two men cancelled each other, but politically they were a perfect team … … However, we were cheerful on the evening we heard about the appointments. The German advance was apparently slowing down, and all of us thought that Weygand might arrange a counterattack soon. A week earlier we had been expecting victories. Now we were cheered by a slightly slower tempo of disaster.
• Paris reminded me of that conversational commonplace you hear when someone has died: “Why, I saw him a couple of days ago and he looked perfectly well.” Paris looked perfectly well, but I wondered if it might not be better for a city in such danger to show some agitation. Perhaps Paris was dying.
• The rouget tasted too much as good rouget always had; the black-browed proprietor was too normally solicitous; even in the full bosom and strong legs of the waitress there was the assurance that this life in Paris would never end. Faith in France was now purely a mystique; a good dinner was our profane form of communion.
• The countryside, hot and rich and somnolent, and the family, sitting on the lawn after a chicken dinner, mad me think of Sundays on Long Island. It was as if no war had ever been. We sat around in lawn chairs, fighting against drowsiness, talking unintently, resisting the efforts of one woman to get up a game like charades … … We talked of the Skoda tanks, built according to French designs in Czecho-Slovakia, that were now ripping the French army apart.
• On the way I stopped at a florist shop and bought some fine pink roses. The woman in the shop said that shipments from the provinces were irregular, but that fortunately the crisis came at a season when the Paris suburbs were producing plenty of flowers. “We have more goods than purchasers,” she said, laughing.
• “You remember when John Lloyd stopped Provoust last night and invited him to the Wednesday luncheon?” he asked. Yes, I remembered. “Well,” he said, “Provoust was in a hurry because he was leaving for Tours in a few minutes.” I said maybe we had better leave too, and we did.

SURVIVAL, by John Hersey

约翰·赫西记述了PT-109艇长（也是后来的总统）肯尼迪和其他十名船员在被船被击沉之后七天七夜艰苦的逃生过程。

• It took over five hours to reach the island. Water lapped into Kennedy’s mouth through his clenched teeth, and he swallowed a lot. The salt water cut into McMahon’s awful burns, but he did not complain. Every few minutes, when Kennedy stopped to rest, taking the strap out of his mouth and holding it in his hand, McMahon would simply say, “How far do we have to go?” Kennedy would reply, “We’re doing good.” Then he would ask, “How do you feel, Mac?” McMahon always answered, “I’m O.K., Mr. Kennedy. How about you?”
• In the middle of the night it rained, and someone suggested moving into the underbrush and licking water off the leaves. Ross and McMahon kept contact at first by touching feet as they licked. Somehow they got separated, and being uncertain whether there were any Japs on the island, they became frightened. McMahon, trying to make his way back to the beach, bumped into someone and froze. It turned out to be Johnston, licking leaves on his own.
• The natives put Kennedy in the bottom of their canoe and covered him with sacking and palm fronds, in case Japanese planes should buzz them. The long trip was fun for the natives. They stopped once to try to grab a turtle, and laughed at the sport they were having. Thirty Japanese planes went over low toward Rendova, and the natives waved and shouted gaily. They rowed with a strange rhythm, pounding paddles on the gunwales between strokes. At last they reached a censored place.

THE SUSPENDED DRAWING ROOM, by S.N.Behrman

这是本章中第二篇来自伦敦的报导，因为我注意到了表示“伦敦大轰炸”的 Blitz一词。我 wiki了执行轰炸行动的德方空军首领也是纽伦堡大审中的重量级人物赫尔曼·戈林。从审判实录到最后的诀别与服药自尽，令人唏嘘; S.N.贝尔曼是美国一位剧作家兼《纽约客》撰稿人，他的伦敦之行很明显带有访问性质，那时已是1945年1月，战争结束的曙光就在眼前。此时，伦敦人民已在黑暗中，炮火轰炸中，防空洞的躲避中度过了五年，贝尔曼虽不是亲历者，但这一切他都看在眼里。战火对伦敦人的生活尤其是心理状态造成了难以逆转的影响；与专业记者相比，贝尔曼的落笔更加感性。

• The nonchalance about bombs is general throughout England. A lady who drives a lorry to blitzed areas told me that she is never in the least frightened, no matter what happens, while she is driving, nor does she flinch no matter what gruesome charges she has to carry. It is only when she is lying in bed that she is frightened, and then more at the sirens than at the explosions, because, she imagines, the former are anticipation, the latter faits accomplis.
• I never discussed an air raid with anyone in London except taxi drivers and chauffeurs. No one else will talk about them. Three or four lines in the papers will tell you that several bombs fell the day before in Southern England, but that is all.
• We finally left the deep shelter. My companion wanted me to see still another type of shelter. I begged off. I simply couldn’t stand one more. I was aware that the people in them had been standing them for over five years.

D DAY, IWO JIMA, by John Lardner

约翰·拉德纳是硫磺岛战役的随军记者，他还原了登陆过程和战役前半段的经过，在艰难行进的过程中，他提到最多的是密密麻麻的枪林弹雨，和不成比例的美军海军士兵倒下的尸体。

• It seems to take about twenty minutes under shellfire to adjust your nerves and evolve a working formula by which you can make progress and gauge, very roughly, the nearness of hits and the pattern of fire.
• Lee and I, by agreement, finally left our gear in a trench near the shore and worked our way up the beach in the wake of Wornham and his men. There were Marines on all sides of us doing the same thing. Each man had a different method of progress.
• Looking around, I had the leisure for the first time to think what a miserable piece of real estate Iwo Jima is. Later, when I had seen nearly all the island, I knew that there were no extenuating features. This place where thousands of men of two nations have been killed or wounded in less than three weeks’ time has no water, few birds, no butterflies, no discernible animal life — nothing but sand and clay, humpbacked hills, stunted trees, knife-edged kuna grass in which mites who carry scrub typhus live, and a steady, dusty wind.

portend: 预兆; vigil: 守夜; furlough: 放假; brood: 窝; proprietor: 老板; lash: 睫毛; petunia: 矮牵牛; artillery: 火炮; cartridge: 盒式磁带; bosom: 怀; squelch: 哗啦哗啦的; litany: 一连串; bombardment: 轰炸; tant pis: 好吧; gaily: 华丽地; battalion: 营; dame: 淑女; amphibious: 水陆两用; paroxysm: 发作; faits accomplis: 既成事实; tabernacle: 窝棚;

通常来说，一本非虚构类作品读到三分之二处，所需的养分就吸收的差不多了——至少我是这样。这个时候，读者的惰性会在与作者的立意的较量中渐渐开始占据上风，把剩余的三分之一读完，难免有种让结局圆满的强迫症在作祟。《The Daemon Knows》的最后一位是哈特·克莱恩，布鲁姆最钟爱的美国作家之一，全书第二长的个人篇幅也在于此。我有意把这一段落搁置下来，等到对前文有更深的理解之后再去读。回到前面提到的说法，如果把读书比作沿着一条大河顺流而下，那么这条河的下游阶段在冲开宽广的平原的同时，也逐渐分叉形成一条条支流，彼此间的联系不再那么紧密。我想，这也是因为我们读者的想法逐渐与作者的本意开始交织，互搏，思路也因而愈发自信，分散。

这应是有某种事物发展的普遍规律在主导着。且不提文学，绘画等各艺术门类的发展，从经典到现代，这只看不见的手从握拳到张开，也正像一株枝叶不断延伸的大树一样，从一枝独秀到郁郁葱葱。布鲁姆在书中，也不止一次提到了这时间和事物发展本身的无形力量。在比较两位诗人史蒂文斯和 T.S.艾略特的时候他说，When I was younger, this difference between Stevens and Eliot seemed temperamental and a question of taste. In old age, it becomes a question of remaining time, since I teach, read, and write now against the clock. 史蒂文斯和惠特曼一样，经常把死亡和不朽作为诗歌的主题，八十四岁的布鲁姆尤其喜欢他在生命最后二十年所写的作品，想必这背后也是时间和年华的力量。

史蒂文斯的诗歌是高深的，布鲁姆说自从1955年第一次讲授他以来，每一年都会在和学生的讨论中得到新的感受和收获。和弗罗斯特不一样，史蒂文斯的作品以长诗居多，而布鲁姆也认为，跟短诗相比，长诗在时光长河里的每一次洗涤都更会焕发出新的光泽。对《秋天的极光》，他这样说，I recite the poem frequently to myself, either silently or aloud, depending on whether I am alone. Possession by memory changes your relation to a poem, longer poem in particular. A sense comes of being inside The Auroras of Autumn, of internalizing its drama within the self.

史蒂文斯在他六十八岁的时候创作了《秋天的极光》，这首诗的开头出奇得冷静和克制，布鲁姆认为全诗中的紧张和由年老而带来的迫切感都被有意压制住了，因而凸显出一种张力，难怪每年读它的时候都会提炼出新的情绪和灵感，也像布鲁姆自己说的 Live with Stevens’s poetry long enough and you can get a sense of somehow dwelling inside particular poems. 全诗是以“这是……”来开头的：

This is where the serpent lives, the bodiless / His head is air. Beneath his tip at night / Eyes open and fix on us in every sky.

Or is this another wriggling out of the egg / Another image at the end of the cave / Another bodiless for the body’s slough?

This is where the serpent lives. This is his nest / These fields, these hills, these tinted distances / And the pines above and along and beside the sea.

与惠特曼不同的是，史蒂文斯的诗中很少出现“我”字，在需要 “I” 的地方他通常代以 “one“，但这也形成了史蒂文斯诗中独特的自我观念。他生前是一直在康州哈特福德的一家保险公司工作，写诗只是他下班后的“副业”和个人兴趣。也有人说他有一段完整但并不美好的婚姻，因此诗歌中的他更是以自己一个人的姿态出现。布鲁姆说，In a curious way, Stevens was what Goethe asserted himself to be: “the genius of happiness and astonishment.” … … No one else in American poetic tradition, Whitman and Dickinson included, expresses so well that solitary and inward glory few of us can share with others.

理解了这一点，也就可以进一步体会史蒂文斯诗歌与惠特曼之间的微妙关系。后者的生命观，生死观是宏大的，包容万物的，同样也是接近你和我的，而史蒂文斯则稍稍收起了这番太过张扬的宏大，以另一种其实并不逊于甚至某种程度上更优于惠特曼表现力的方式来歌唱自我，歌唱崇高，歌唱作者所谓的 Daemon。布鲁姆在这里援引了一首《致罗马的一位老哲学家》，它是史蒂文斯写给西班牙裔美国哲学家-诗人乔治·桑塔亚那的（哲学家一年后去世，诗人也三年后逝世），他说，it refines the American elegiac mode that Whitman invented in The Sleepers and the Sea-Drift dirges and then perfected in his Lilacs threnody for Abraham Lincoln. The Whitmanian accents haunt Stevens’s poem, though their daemonic enlargements are tempered by Stevens’s wariness of engulfment by a precursor who seems always in the American sunrise. 在这首诗的中段，你能够清楚地读到这种个人身上的光芒：

The bed, the books, the chair, the moving nuns / The candle as it evades the sight, these are / The sources of happiness in the shape of Rome / A shape within the ancient circles of shapes / And these beneath the shadow of a shape

In a confusion on bed and books, a portent / On the chair, a moving transparence on the nuns / A light on the candle tearing against the wick / To join a hovering excellence, to escape / From fire and be part only of that of which

Fire is the symbol: the celestial possible / Speak to your pillow as is it was yourself / Be orator but with an accurate tongue / And without eloquence, O, half-asleep / Of the pity that is the memorial of this room.

最后一句，在半梦半醒中，用毫不夸大而精确的语言，去诉说这个房间的记忆和遗憾。结合上前面的蜡烛意象，一位暮年老者戚戚悲凉然而又无比睿智高大的形象立即浮现在眼前了。八十四岁的布鲁姆在此刻读到七十二岁的史蒂文斯写给八十七岁的桑塔亚那的诗句，心里的波澜一定是溢于言表。

布鲁姆在书里还全文讲解了另一首著名的挽诗《石棺里的猫头鹰》，史蒂文斯在最后告诉世人，“这是现代死亡的神话”，“这是死亡自身的最高影像”，而“这”究竟是什么呢？诗人在结尾处写道：

It is a child that sings itself to sleep / The mind, among the creatures that it makes / The people, those by which it lives and dies.

死生亦大矣。我们尚不知老之将至，远未到真正参透生死的年龄。惠特曼诗中，死亡是母亲，是大海，而在这里，一位七十岁的老者将她比作孩童，我相信是要付出更多伤怀和勇气的。

翻开二十世纪的篇章，你会读着读着发现作者本人和书中的主角们开始有了不经意间的交集。一九四九年，十九岁的哈罗德·布鲁姆第一次来到纽黑文和耶鲁大学，在那里他第一次也是唯一一次见到了诗人华莱士·史蒂文斯。那是一次小规模的诗歌朗诵会，年已七旬的史蒂文斯读的是 An Ordinary Evening in New Haven 选段，之后的酒会上他们两人还有过一段短暂的交谈，准确地说是史蒂文斯在早已慌措失神的布鲁姆面前讲了足足二十分钟雪莱。

布鲁姆也见过弗罗斯特两次。那是在他三十岁的时候，而罗伯特·弗罗斯特已经八十六岁，风烛残年。老人的出现让当时正在授课的布鲁姆既敬畏又不安。弗罗斯特还做了一个简短的演讲，他提到四位他最景仰的美国人：华盛顿，杰斐逊，林肯，和爱默生。是的，三位总统和一位文学家。而布鲁姆在讲弗罗斯特的篇幅中，提及最多的也正是爱默生。

相信我们认识弗罗斯特也是在课堂上。如果对初中语文课本还有印象，我们应该还会记得弗罗斯特有一首诗叫《未选择的路》，与普希金的《假如生活欺骗了你》一同并列在一篇选学课文中。诗句中具体是什么实在记不起了，我也不觉得当时对它有什么特别的感觉，很平实，没有那般刻意保持着距离的深沉。而事实证明这也正是弗罗斯特在大部分人眼中的形象。

前文介绍过的惠特曼，艾米丽·狄金森，无疑都是璀璨的星辰，他们诗句中直抵人心的力量和感召力都会让人在第一次阅读的时候就眼前一亮。弗罗斯特则完完全全是另一类诗人。你在读他的时候，并没有感到如同惠特曼那样好像他在朝你的方向走来，也不会像狄金森似的隐约在不远处有个冷若冰霜的女子吸引着你的目光，弗罗斯特就静静地朝着你看着他的方向缓步离去，消失在“未选择的路”里。弗罗斯特自己也说，I owe more to Emerson than anyone else for troubled thoughts about freedom. Freedom is nothing but departure.

布鲁姆一上来介绍的是弗罗斯特在大萧条时期所作的《泥泞时节的两个流浪工》。开头的第二节是这样写的：

Good blocks of oak it was I split / As large around as the chopping block / And every piece I squarely hit / Fell splinterless as a cloven rock.

The blows that a life of self-control / Spares to strike for the common good / That day, giving a loose to my soul / I spent on the unimportant wood.

这就是弗罗斯特，很低调，也似懂非懂地在喃喃自语。“我那天只是劈着渺小的木柴，为了灵魂的解放”。布鲁姆自己也说不清楚，这劈木柴和“公共事业”和“灵魂的解放”到底有什么直接关系。在这首《泥泞时节的两个流浪工》里，弗罗斯特通过劈柴延伸到了兴趣和需求的不可兼得，也表达了自己想要将两者结合在一起的美好愿望。是的，只是美好愿望，而不是决然的欢呼和呐喊。

弗罗斯特的诗中会超出寻常比例地堆叠各种意象，在让人摸不着头脑的同时却又悄悄地把主题塞到其中几句中间，这种缺失了某种精巧的手法也恰恰去除了多余的粉饰，全诗因此而有种神秘而独特的魅力。布鲁姆引用了一段大卫·布罗姆维奇的评述：It may help at first to think of Frost’s poem as a kind of riddle. At some level he knew all along that he was occupied with another version of Wordsworth’s poem, but part of his “fooling” with the reader was to withhold his definitive clue until the middle of the poem, when many other pieces had fallen into place.

布鲁姆所指的弗罗斯特与爱默生的相像之处，在于他们的命运观。爱默生曾说，The originals are not original. 这里所指的是人类在争取自由的过程中对自身命运的态度。布鲁姆说，For both Emerson and Frost, the pre-Socratic formula held: Ethos is the daemon, character is fate, so everything that happens to you is what you always were and are … … There are no accidents; love your fate, because there is little alternative, if any. 弗罗斯特的诗句里的确能读到这种类似“宿命”的感受，而这与惠特曼和狄金森的诗歌是大为不同的。比如这首《鸟儿的歌唱再也不似从前》，它是一首十四行诗，这里只引用后十句：

Her tone of meaning but without the words / Admittedly an eloquence so soft / Could only have had an influence on birds / When call or laughter carried it aloft.

Be that as may be, she was in their song / Moreever her voice upon their voices crossed / Had now persisted in the woods so long / That probably it would never be lost.

Never again would birds’ song be the same / And to do that to birds was why she came.

一言以蔽之，在惠特曼和狄金森的诗句里你是看不到这么多 “may be” 和 “probably” 的。而这种语言上的歧义和矛盾的姿态，也正是弗罗斯特命运观的最好写照。Frost … … accepts again what happens as the working out of character into event, of choice fated and loved as such, without regrets. Frost’s largeness is not so much in the enigma of his reservations as in his full acceptance of contingencies so far within us as to hedge any drive toward freeing choice.

还有不得不提也是布鲁姆认为弗罗斯特身上最有意思的一点，即他诗中反复出现的“白色”意象。在我看来这指的是那神秘却又晃眼的事物的本来面目，也是布鲁姆反复说到的 the Lucretian way things are，而有些吊诡的是，这难以名状的“空白”或“白色”，其实也正是我们双眼和内心的化身。Frost knows, with Emerson, that the ruin or blank we see when we look upon nature is in our own eyes. 这种“空白”或“白色”，在很多其他文学作品中都能看到，梅尔维尔《白鲸》中伊什梅尔对“恐怖的白色”的思考，艾米丽·狄金森诗中借“空白”作比消逝的爱人，放弃，和死亡，史蒂文斯的名作《秋天的极光》，诗人走在黄昏时分的沙滩上，极光下眼前全部化成了“白色”。弗罗斯特在那首神秘的《只一次，便成真》里面，在我看来也十分轻盈并恰到好处地把这“白色”与事物的本质以及我们双眼中似真似幻的影像捏合在一起，别有一番深邃和趣味：

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs / Always wrong to the light, so never seeing / Deeper down in the well than where the water / Gives me back in a shining surface picture

Me myself in the summer heaven godlike / Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs / Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb / I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture

Through the picture, a something white, uncertain / Something more of the depths – and then I lost it / Water came to rebuke the too clear water / One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple / Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom

Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness? / Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

看来，“白色”既不完全是抽象的“真实”，也不是具体的“一片石英”，而是一种更为不可确知但我们又有机会亲眼所见（只一次）的“某物”。如果我们把这“某物”与弗罗斯特所诗化的命运的偶然性，以及他诗中大量实物意象背后巧藏的几分蕴意联想在一起，一定会不再那么困惑。就好比布鲁姆最喜欢的《指路》结尾处说的那样：

Here are your waters and your watering place / Drink and be whole again beyond any confusion.

如果我们能从布鲁姆对霍桑的评述里读出一种恰到好处的距离感的话，那么他在讲亨利·詹姆斯和马克·吐温时，则摆出了鲜明得多的立场。不夸张地说，这两位几乎是同一时期的小说家在布鲁姆眼里，一个是亲生的，一个至多是后娘养的——布鲁姆喜欢的是前者。他不止一次重复过，詹姆斯在早年对惠特曼有过毫无洞见的评价；他也不是不知道，詹姆斯笔下伊莎贝尔·阿切尔跟其他更伟大的美国文学作品（如《红字》《草叶集》《白鲸》《哈克贝利费恩历险记》等）相比还是有些距离。但这些，并不妨碍老人家对他的喜爱：My own love for the novels of Henry James … …  does not blind me to the still-greater literary power of Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy.

而马克·吐温在他面前的形象则完全相反。布鲁姆承认他在文学上的成就，并认为凭借《哈克贝利费恩历险记》这部作品，马克·吐温即便仍然不及莎翁和托尔斯泰，但也足以比肩狄更斯和巴尔扎克这样的小说巨匠。然而，这等褒奖是再冷淡不过了，他自己也说 “agree in a limited way”。跳开布鲁姆的个人喜好，从本书的立意出发，如此的偏颇并不难理解，他解释道：Huck’s longed-for “freedom” is not natural. Freedom for both Mark Twain and his daemon Huck Finn is the freedom of the storyteller, partly alienated from society and from nature.

我也因此很庆幸作者把亨利·詹姆斯与马克·吐温放在前后脚（即便不在同一章）来介绍，明白了他对后者是如何的不满意，也就多少读懂了他喜欢前者的是什么。

直到现在，亨利·詹姆斯这个名字在我耳边还是个略带神秘感和现代色彩的符号，我也很想从国内的书架上抽出梁文道那本《我执》，看看他当时都说了些什么。我仍记得，书中与《一位女士的画像》并列的，还有海洋作家康拉德，托马斯·曼的《威尼斯之死》，帕慕克笔下的《伊斯坦布尔》，还有卡尔维诺《看不见的城市》等等。不难发现，如果你硬是要把把马克·吐温或是菲茨杰拉德置于他们中间，一定会感到哪里有点不和谐。其他美国作家呢，塞林格也许气质上贴近，但《麦田里的守望者》实在是太有名，所以依然不甚完美。这个角落，果然就是留给亨利·詹姆斯的。

我在读《我执》前后陆续猎取了《伊斯坦布尔》《看不见的城市》，但路过书店好几回，一直没有把《一位女士的画像》带回家，怕是篇幅太长的缘故。而布鲁姆早在他的少年时期就已经看过这本书，他说，对伊莎贝尔·阿切尔的爱慕和其他先前读到的女性角色很不同，“seemed outside the sphere of sexual desire”，在她身上和海丝特·白兰一样，同样能看到坚定和爱默生式的自立精神。把这两位女主角作比是不无道理的，甚至在情节上，伊莎贝尔最终出人意料地返回罗马，回到丈夫奥斯蒙德身边，与海丝特在女儿出嫁后又回到所有苦难的根源地波士顿如出一辙。布鲁姆对这样的安排也不是一开始就读懂了：For years I resented James’s sly genius for making Osmond the ultimate fate of the magnificent Isabel, but in old age I have come to accept the Shakespearean rightness of Isabel’s great error about life. 我承认我对布鲁姆后续的论述也是一知半解，当老人家不禁发问 why would James compose parables in which marvelous women must descend to mate? 我就更有点糊涂。但至少可以说，伊莎贝尔身上发生的无疑比海丝特更具悲剧性：Isabel’s story touches tragic dignity. 而这悲剧般的尊严，或许指的正是作者讲的，I cannot think of a woman in Shakespeare who does not marry down.

在写作手法上，亨利·詹姆斯也比他的前辈（霍桑）和同辈（马克·吐温）更具现代性。布鲁姆在讲马克·吐温时开篇就说道，之所以把他放到《The Daemon Knows》里面来，也是因为需要找一位能够在十九至二十世纪与其他“国民作家”——如雨果，托尔斯泰，狄更斯，普希金等——相媲及的美国文学人物，而这个人不会是惠特曼，梅尔维尔，亨利·詹姆斯，史蒂文斯，哈特·克莱恩甚至福克纳。对他们来说，易卜生，乔伊斯，普鲁斯特，卡夫卡等才是更好的参照。这里的界线再明显不过了。而我们所谓的现代性，在詹姆斯身上可以总结成一种称为 “ellipsis” 的写作手法：Ellipsis, the art of leaving things out, transmits from late Shakespeare to final James. 布鲁姆认为莎士比亚的悲喜剧《暴风雨》这一手法的最好典范，而在詹姆斯的另一部小说《鸽之翼》中体现得最为明显：The plotlessness of The Tempest, where almost nothing happens while everything is implied, is a model for the meaningful absences of Milly. 米莉是《鸽之翼》中的灵魂人物，然而在这部长达十卷的长篇中，她既没有在开头的两卷中出现，也没有在结尾处高调离场，但是，她的气息却始终环绕在其他书中人物和我们读者周围不曾离去。作者是这样形容米莉的，She surrounds like an aura no matter how firmly James delineates her conditions and circumstances. Orphaned, wealthy, doomed, marked for victimization, she nevertheless triumphs over what ought to have obliterated her acute consciousness … … We know Milly far less overtly than we do Kate Croy, and its intimations that kindle wonder radiate from the doomed American heiress, whereas Kate deepens perpetually without surprising us. 

米莉的原型是詹姆斯的表妹米妮·坦普尔，她英年早逝，对詹姆斯的性格和后来的文学创作有极大的影响：Certainly Minny Temple haunted James throughout his long life. His affectionate memory of her is an instance of his singular power of appreciation, in Walter Pater’s sense: to liberate even the deepest sorrow of his experience into the freedom of art. 当然，作者也指出，这里的 freedom of art 并不是小说中人物的自由，或者更准确地说，并不是小说人物在我们眼中所谓的自由。伊莎贝尔最终回到了奥斯蒙德身边，不是我们想要看到的；天真单纯的米莉在病痛中去世，也不是我们想要看到的。但实际上，（套一句俗话）这也许就是牺牲了自我成全了艺术吧。我又回想起布鲁姆对马克·吐温笔下哈克贝利费恩追求自由的评价，感觉现在比第一次读要多明白了一些。Wings at last is the Milly Theale Passion, another scripture of Emerson’s American Religion, akin to Song of Myself, Moby-Dick, Walden, The Scarlet Letter, the poems of Emily Dickinson. 布鲁姆经常用这样的列举来支撑他的观点，每当他在其中提到了艾米丽·狄金森，我总要下意识地停下来掂量一下其中的分量。

身为写小说的，詹姆斯的文笔也是极佳的，布鲁姆在书中摘选的段落，均珠圆玉润，引人入胜，故事的节奏和人物的刻画对影成双。在引用了一整段伊莎贝尔探望临终的表兄拉尔夫之后，布鲁姆这样说道，I have quoted all of this because it is the great set piece of the novel and a Jamesian triumph of pace, proportion, diction, and profound compassion. The perfect rightness of the mutual tact that is a mode of love is exquisitely rendered. 后来马克·吐温的章节中（可怜，又是马克·吐温！），一句看似侧面否定詹姆斯的评述里，我还是一眼就读出了老人家对其的喜爱：There is no American Shakespeare or Chaucer, though Whitman comes closest and Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, and Hart Crane approach Walt’s splendor. The scope of Henry James’s writing — fiction, travel, criticism, memoir — astonishes, and invariably his work is superb, yet Tolstoy, Dickens and Balzac have a Shakespearean immediacy that James lacks. 这真是——我知道你不是最好的，但我就是愿意把笔墨都花在你身上——般的真爱。

《The Daemon Knows》从第三章开始无疑进入了蜜月期，一方面你对布鲁姆的主要论调已大致了然于胸，另一方面，作者笔下的人物也开始明亮鲜活起来，不再是像前面四位（惠特曼，梅尔维尔，爱默生，狄金森）那样，感觉多少与自己的认知水平不处于同一个时代。霍桑，亨利·詹姆斯，马克·吐温，罗伯特·弗罗斯特，后两者是我们最耳熟能详的，然而布鲁姆花在他们身上的笔墨也是最少的。这个大部分时候都还很严肃认真的老头也坦承，把他们俩列入到本书之中，是费了一番很大决心。布鲁姆不喜欢有些“通俗”和“流行”的马克·吐温和弗罗斯特，但这种不喜欢又与他对 T.S.艾略特的厌恶不一样。在讲史蒂文斯和艾略特的第五章末尾，老人家毫不客气地总结道：We do not read only as aesthetes — though we should — but also as responsible men and women. By that standard, Eliot, despite his daemonic gift, is unacceptable once and for all time.

由此也不难理解了，为什么回过头来你会对写霍桑和亨利·詹姆斯的第三章爱不释手。虽然这两人都不是布鲁姆最推崇的美国作家（惠特曼和哈特·克莱恩），但在他们身上，我们既看不到类似对马克·吐温和弗罗斯特那样的不喜欢，也看不到对艾略特的厌恶——一种积极而又健康的情绪蔓延在字里行间。这或许也是写文学评论的最佳状态吧。而这种最佳状态，竟又与我们读者和作者间磨合至恰到好处的感觉悄然相遇，实在是不可多得的幸事。

另外值得一提的是，十二位布鲁姆笔下的恶魔，六位诗人，六位“非诗人”（实在不觉得爱默生能算是小说家），两两一组的编排中，本章是唯一一处由两位小说家组成（除史蒂文斯和艾略特一章外，另外四章均为一位诗人和一位“非诗人”）。在这里我并不想把自己的阅读经历一般化，但我相信，大多数人对小说的接触频率和程度是远大于诗歌的。我个人没有读过《红字》，在上了大学之后才从梁文道口中知道亨利·詹姆斯这个名字，但这并不影响我去理解和体会布鲁姆对这两人的评述。

言归正传，霍桑和亨利·詹姆斯，事实上这两人并不处于一个时代，也并不能归为同一类小说家。活到六十岁的霍桑在1864年逝世的时候，詹姆斯才年仅21岁。酷爱写文学评论并一直笔耕不辍的后者在他36岁时还发表了一本名为《霍桑》的集子，然而，里面的观点布鲁姆怕是一点也不敢苟同，他打趣道，His book Hawthorne (1879) reveals something about Henry James while displaying little insight into his prime American precursor. 

在布鲁姆看来，霍桑和詹姆斯最伟大同时也是最相似的一点在于他们笔下刻画的美国女性形象——《红字》中的海丝特·白兰和《一位女士的画像》中的伊莎贝尔·阿切尔。她们坚强，理想，性格饱满，具备作者所谓 “American High Romance” 的一切特质。而弥足珍贵的是，美国（男）作家作品中这样的女性形象其实并不多：Except for Hawthorne and James, American male novelists have not been able to represent American women with the force and vivacity that have marked the English tradition … … In our century, the women portrayed by Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald are generally less vivid than the men, with a few significant exceptions. 书中的海丝特·白兰生活在殖民地时期的新英格兰，一个恪守清教伦理还远未如今天一般开放的早期美国，宗法和社会对于女性追求个人身心自由和解放的压抑，与她身上的红字一起，成了套在白兰心中无法挣脱开的枷锁。然而令人略感意外的是，主人翁在这样的屈辱和重负中并没有走向幻灭，霍桑最终让她平静地“存活”了下来。白兰在抗争命运的过程中所体现和付诸实践的善恶观念，同样被牢牢地束缚在压制她和造成她如此命运的道德伦理框架之中。布鲁姆说，白兰并不是一个女版的（梅尔维尔《白鲸》中的）阿哈船长，她没有 dying in Promethean and Gnostic defiance of a tyrannical universe, darting a final harpoon into the sanctified flesh of a merely demiurgical creation. Instead, Hester submits, but only in part, and with sublime trust in the coming revelation of a woman yet to be.

这也恰恰是白兰的伟大以及霍桑的高明之处。至少在布鲁姆眼中，那些指责白兰本质上是自我欺骗和她不一致的道德观的人们都是愚蠢可笑的。他承认，She cannot hold together her incompatible impulses, yet she survives an outrageously dreadful societal and erotic context that ought to have driven her either to madness or to suicide. It is absurd for any reader not to learn from her, while speculating again as to the sources of her extraordinary strength of being. 《红字》讲的是一个悲剧故事，但并不是一部悲剧作品，浪漫主义的霍桑其实不在讲述一个与命运抗争但却最终落败并沦为命运玩偶的失败者，他笔下的白兰有自己的主见和信念，从侧面同样体现了爱默生所述的自立精神和美国信仰。There is more to Hester than the storyteller is willing to unfold. 从小说中，我们清楚地看到霍桑对整个美国新教社会在追求自主和尊严的过程中对女性性解放的水火不容的清醒和失望，但正如布鲁姆所说，白兰以自己的方式，比读者甚至比霍桑本人还要坚决地去拥护和捍卫一种更高的浪漫和信仰，不遗余力地 working out toward an impossible integration but toward a stance prophetic of something evermore to be, the possible sublimity of a changed relationship between men and women. 美国自立精神的撰述人爱默生，没有明目张胆地把自己的主张延伸到性别层面，而在布鲁姆看来，甚至连近代的女权运动者们，在思想上也没有上升到和海丝特·白兰一样的高度。他大胆地指出，It may even be that the current literary feminism is destined to become our new or newest Puritanism, imposing uniform ideals upon intellectual women, by again refusing any alliance between their sexuality and their potential antinomianism. 也难怪布鲁姆在一开篇就说，如果我们要为美国新教精神挑选一位“国民女神”，那她非海丝特·白兰莫属。She is larger than her book.

布鲁姆讲述《红字》的四五页篇幅里，罕见地没有引用哪怕一句原文，但却倾注了十足的情感，字字珠玑，毫不迟疑。我认为这也是这本《The Daemon Knows》在开篇惠特曼的几个段落后的又一个高潮。

（无正文）

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19. On Painting, or Sign and Mark

• The first fundamental difference is to be seen in the fact that the sign is imprinted; the mark, by contrast, emerges. This indicates that the sphere of the mark is that of a medium. Whereas the absolute sign does not appear predominantly on living beings but rather is also impressed on inanimate buildings, trees, and so forth, the mark appears principally on living beings. The opposition between and absolute mark does not exist, for the mark is always absolute and in its appearing is similar to nothing else.
• It is especially striking that, turning up as it does on the living, the mark is so often linked to guilt or innocence; indeed, even where the mark appears on the lifeless, it is often a warning sign of guilt … … The sign, however, appears not infrequently as something that distinguishes a person, and this opposition between sign and mark likewise seems to belong to the metaphysical order.
• But on the other hand, the picture may be connected with something that it is not — that is to say, something that is not a mark — and indeed this connection is achieved by naming the picture. This relation to what the picture is named after, the relation to what transcends the mark, is created by the composition. This is the entry of a higher power into the medium of the mark — a power that, once there, remains in the state of neutrality, which is to say that it does not use any aspect of the graphic to explode the mark but finds its place within the mark without exploding it, because even though it is immeasurably higher than the mark, it is not hostile toward it but related to it.

confer: 授予

25. Some Remarks on Folk Art

• If we ask ourselves what “art” in the modern sense means to folk art on the one hand and to kitsch on the other, the answer would be: all folk art draws the human being into itself.
• As we stand in front of a painting by Titian or Monet, we never feel the urge to pull out our watch and set it by the position of the sun in the picture. But in the case of picture in children’s books, or in Utrillo’s paintings, which really do recuperate the primitive, we might easily get such an urge. This means that we find ourselves in a situation of the kind we are used to, and it is not so much that we compare the position of the sun with our watch as that we use the watch to compare this position of the sun with an earlier one.
• In reality, the world is full of masks; we do not suspect the extent to which even the most unpretentious pieces of furniture used to be masks, too. Wearing a mask, man looks out on the situation and builds up his figures within it. To hand over these masks to us, and to form the space and the figure of our fate within it — this is what folk art approaches us with. Only from this vintage point can we say clearly and fundamentally what distinguishes it from actual “art”, in the narrower sense. Art teach us to see into things. Folk art and kitsch allow us to see outward from within things.

26. Chinese Paintings at the Bibliotheque Nationale

• Here is a fact that is at once of utmost importance and somewhat strange in the eyes of Europeans: the link that has been revealed between the thought of a Valery, who says that Leonardo da Vinci “takes painting as his philosophy,” and the synthetic view of the universe which is characteristic of the painter-philosophers of China.
• An essential feature of the image is that it incorporates something eternal. This eternal quality expresses itself in the fixity and stability of the stroke, but it is also manifest, more subtly, thanks to the fact that the image embodies something that is fluid and ever-changing. It is from this blending of the fixed and the mutable that Chinese painting derives all its meaning.

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IV. PHOTOGRAPHY

• First, and most generally, Benjamin links the emergence of a photograph’s image-world to the way in which photographs — like film and other photo-based media — make possible for us the experience of the “optical unconscious.” … … To put this another way, in the optical unconscious the world presents itself to the photographic apparatus in an aspect different from any it could ever present to the unaided human senses.
• But the optical unconscious clearly entails much more than the revelation of physical and temporal aspects of nature through the use of specific techniques … … They [commodities] are man-made objects that appear to have supernatural or magic powers and as such wield power over humans: commodities have a debilitating effect upon the human perceptual apparatus and intellect … … The photograph aids, in other words, in the process of the disenchantment of the world as it makes visible the effects of magic — unreason — upon human nature and human social interaction.
• The image produced by the camera have a “shock effect” that “paralyzes the associative mechanisms in the beholder.” Benjamin here derives a set of claims from what is most often ascribed to photography as its sole capacity: the ability to capture things “as they are” and in so doing to replicate the apparently fixed, immutable quality of the world in a fixed and immutable sensory apparatus in the beholder.

28. Little History of Photography

• Details of structure, cellular tissue, with which technology and medicine are normally concerned — all this is, in its origins, more closely related to the camera than is the emotionally evocative landscape or the soulful portrait. Yet at the same time, photography reveals in this material physiognomic aspects, image worlds, which dwell in the smallest things — meaningful yet covert enough to find a hiding place in waking dreams, but which, enlarged and available for formulation, make the difference between technology and magic visible as a thoroughly historical variable.
• The peeling away of the object’s shell, the destruction of the aura, is the signature of a perception whose sense for all that is the same in the world has grown to the point where even the singular, unique, is divested of its uniqueness — by means of its reproduction.
• As Brecht says: “The situation is complicated by the fact that less than ever does the mere ‘reproduction of reality’ say anything about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or the AEG reveals next to nothing about these institutions. Actual reality has slipped into the functional. The reification of human relations — the factory, say — means that they are no longer explicit … … We must credit the Surrealists with having trained the pioneers of such photographic construction.

physiognomic: 地貌; covert: 隐蔽; reification: 物化; culprit:罪魁祸首; augur: 吉兆

29. Letters from Paris (2)

• The theory of painting has split off from painting itself to become a special field of art criticism. Underlying this division of labor is the collapse of the solidarity which once existed between painting and public affairs. Courbet was perhaps the last painter gave answers to problems touching on areas other painting.
• Courbet’s special position was that he was the last who could attempt to surpass photography. Later painters tried to evade it — first and foremost the Impressionists … … The proof was seen around the turn of the century, when photography, in turn, tried to emulate the Impressionists.

guild: 公会; argot: 隐语

30. Review of Freund’s Photographie en France au dix-neuvieme siecle

• “Photography’s claim to be an art was raised precisely by those who were turning photography into a business”. In other words, photography’s claim to be an art is contemporaneous with its emergence as a commodity. This is consistent with the influence which photography, as a technique of reproduction, had on art itself. It isolated art from the patron, delivering it up to the anonymous market and its demand.
• “The greater a writer is,” Plekhanov wrote in his polemic against Lanson, “the more strongly and clearly the character of his work depends on the character of his time, or in other words: the less the element which might be called the ‘personal’ can be found in his works.”

patron: 顾客; polemical: 争论的

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V. FILM

• The shock-quality of the montage in certain types of filmic image-sequences is crucial for Benjamin because, on the one hand, in their refusal of facile continuity, they correspond to a collective, distracted model of reception that serves as an alternative to the individual absorption and contemplation characteristic of the bourgeoisie’s cult of art.
• … he [Benjamin] argues that concentration on the auratic work enables only the viewer’s absorption into the work, while distraction enables members of the massed audience to absorb the work into themselves. In a telling fragment from The Arcades Project, Benjamin characterizes this active appropriation of the work by the mass audience as a making present of something past: “The true method of making things present is to represent them in our space (not to represent ourselves in their space) … … We don’t displace our being into theirs; they step into our life.”

(The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, by Walter Benjamin)

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I. THE PRODUCTION, REPRODUCTION, AND RECEPTION OF THE WORK OF ART

• ” [Riegl] Man is, however, not solely a being who takes in impressions through the senses — he is not only passive — but also a desiring — that is, active — being, who will interpret the world as it reveals itself to his desire (which changes according to race, place, and time).” Works of art — or rather details within the work of art — are thus the clearest source of a very particular kind of historical information. They encode not just the character of the artistic production of the age, but the character of parallel features of the society: its religion, philosophy, ethical structure, and institutions.

1. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility

• … … whereas the authentic work retains its full authority in the face of a reproduction made by hand, which it generally brands a forgery, this is not the case with technological reproduction … … First, technological reproduction is more independent of the original than is manual reproduction … … Second, technological reproduction can place the copy of the original in situations which the original itself cannot attain. Above all, it enables the original to meet the recipient halfway … … The cathedral leaves its site to be received in the studio of an art lover; the choral work performed in an auditorium or in the open air is enjoyed in a private room.
• … … for the first time in world history, technological reproducibility emancipates the work of art from its parasitic subservience to ritual. To an ever-increasing degree, the work reproduced becomes the reproduction of a work designed for reproducibility … … as soon as the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applied to artistic production, the whole social function of art is revolutionized. Instead of being founded on ritual, it is based on a different practice: politics.
• Art history might be seen as the working out of a tension between two polarities [artwork cult value and its exhibition value] within the artwork itself … … With the emancipation of specific artistic practices from the service of ritual, the opportunities for exhibiting their products increase.
• The state of their [Greek] technology compelled the Greeks to produce eternal values in their art … … Undoubtedly, our position lies at the opposite pole from that of the Greeks. Never before have artworks been technologically reproducible to such a degree and in such quantities as today … … The film is therefore the artwork most capable of improvement. And this capacity is linked to its radical renunciation of eternal value.
• … … the intervention in a performance by a body of experts is also characteristic … … of all test performances. The entire process of film production is determined, in fact, by such intervention … … The film actor performs not in front of an audience but in front of an apparatus … … To accomplish it is to preserve one’s humanity in the face of the apparatus. Interest in this performance is widespread. For the majority of city dwellers, throughout the workday in offices and factories, have to relinquish their humanity in the face of an apparatus. In the evening these same masses fill the cinemas, to witness the film actor taking revenge on their behalf not only by asserting his humanity against the apparatus, but by placing that apparatus in the service of his triumph.
• The magician maintains the natural distance between himself and the person treated; more precisely, he reduces it slightly by laying on his hands, but increases it greatly by his authority. The surgeon does exactly the reverse … … Magician is to surgeon as painter is to cinematographer. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, whereas the cinematographer penetrates deeply into its tissues.

prognostic: 预后; lithography: 石刻; elk: 麋鹿; countenance:面容; terra cotta: 兵马俑; hieroglyph: 象形文字; inkling: 暗示; clandestinely: 秘密

2. Theory of Distraction

• Just as the art of the Greeks was geared toward lasting, so the art of the present is geared toward becoming worn out. This may happen in two different ways: through consignment of the artwork to fashion or through the work’s refunctioning in politics.

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III. PAINTING AND GRAPHICS

18. Painting and the Graphic Arts

• We might say that there are two sections through the substance of the world: the longitudinal section of painting and the transverse section of certain graphic works. The longitudinal section seems representational — it somehow contains things; the transverse section seems symbolic — it contains signs.

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V. WALLACE STEVENS and T. S. ELIOT

• Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Margaret Fuller, and Dickinson do not take as daemon “the exquisite errors of time.” Their genius is to possess and be possessed not by a sense of their own design but by the quest for the face they had “before the world was made” (Yeats).
• In a curious way, Stevens was what Goethe asserted himself to be: “the genius of happiness and astonishment.” … … No one else in American poetic tradition, Whitman and Dickinson included, expresses so well that solitary and inward glory few of us can share with others.
• Emily Dickinson follows Shakespeare in thinking by and through metaphor, while Whitman and Stevens tend to evade even figurative cognition through an intransitive eros.
• Whitman is perplexed and perplexing on the idea of immortality; at his most impressive he conveys the insight that we will survive only in the loving memories of our families, comrades, readers. Stevens shared this mature vision, … …

countenance: 面容; riposte: 还击; sarcophagus: 石棺; jubilance: 欢呼; epiphany: 顿悟

塔拉普萨的星群

石棺里的猫头鹰

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THE AURORAS OF AUTUMN

• I recite the poem frequently to myself, either silently or aloud, depending on whether I am alone. Possession by memory changes your relation to a poem, longer poems in particular. A sense comes of being inside The Auroras of Autumn, of internalizing its drama within self.
• The Whitmanian accents haunt Stevens’s poem, though their daemonic enlargements are tempered by Stevens’s wariness of engulfment by a precursor who seems always in the American sunrise.
• Swerving from Whitmaninan enlargement into a narrowing of perspective, the unbelieving Stevens sings for the skeptical Santayana … … This is the sublime Stevens I love best, who speaks for the solitude at the center of American being. If you deprecate this is solipsism, then recall Wittgenstein … … : What the solipsist says is wrong but what he means is right.
• Stevens, like D.H.Lawrence, never writes less than superbly when roused by the sun, in this also following Whitman. From start to end, his work is a solar litany.
• Live with Stevens’s poetry long enough and you can get a sense of somehow dwelling inside particular poems.

divulge: 泄露; travail: 劬劳; engulfment: 吞没; wariness: 谨慎; amber: 琥珀; depricate: 贬值; positivist: 实证; smitten: 重拳出击; litany: 一连串; rhapsody: 狂想曲

秋天的极光

致罗马的一位老哲学家

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FOUR QUARTETS

• Fundamentally, what divides the two poets was spiritual: Eliot longed to believe in the incarnation, while Stevens sought some last remnant of personal nobility, of a possible wisdom.
• When I was younger, this difference between Stevens and Eliot seemed temperamental and a question of taste. In old age, it becomes a question or remaining time, since I teach, read, and write now against the clock.
• Neither Eliot nor Stevens, two remarkably intelligent minds, possessed cognitive originality, a rare quality in major poets: Dante, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, and only a few others had it. Eliot turned to mystics and contemplates and to F.H.Bradley for cognitive guidance. Stevens tended to employ Nietzsche and William James, who were not congenial to Eliot.
• Notoriously, Stevens almost always avoids the Whitmanian capital letter “I” and replaces it by “one.”
• Many thousands of admirable students have taught me more than I could impart to them. One admonition I tend to give them is: Learn to say of a poet and a poem that she and it touch upon permanence, and we should recognize this. And yet the freedom of reading well permits saying: Despite this achieved splendor, what is most humane in me just does not allow more than a cold admiration. Stevens has helped me to live my life, while Eliot brings out the worst in me.

incarnation: 化身; remnant: 残余; apotheosis: 神化; idolatry: 偶像崇拜; congenial: 投机

东科克

小吉丁

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VI. WILLIAM FAULKNER and HART CRANE

WILLIAM FAULKNER

• Most of the American writers studied in this book start with a recognition of the god or daemon within themselves and compose through moving outward: … … On the other side, Twain, Eliot, and Faulkner begin in the outside world and only gradually encounter inside themselves an affirmation of their outward vision.
• Like Balzac and Dickens, Faulkner peopled his own cosmos. All three need to be absorbed as seers of The Human Comedy but also as tacticians of individual dooms. More than with Hawthorne and Henry James, we do Faulkner violence when we isolate a single narrative and weigh it by itself.

misogynist: 厌恶; doom: 厄运; seer: 先见者

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AS I LAY DYING: DARL

• I confess that Faulkner’s sympathetic yet dispassionate view of Addie hovers outside my ken, but I admire his stoic acceptance. The book astonishes by its veritable apocalypse of fire and flood, heroism and madness, drive beyond the pleasure principle, and its uncanny fusion of farce and pathos. Faulkner, here more than in his other books, bruises the limits of his language in a zest to say what cannot be said, and to see what cannot be seen.

veritable: 名副其实; farce: 闹剧; bruise: 挫伤; zest: 热情

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SANCTUARY: POPEYE

• Faulkner himself did not see anyone in Sanctuary as evil: For him, even Popeye is “another lost human being.” All of the protagonists — Temple, Horace, Popeye, Goodwin, Ruby — end in a condition of total emotional indifference, a despair so total that to name it apathy or nihilism seems inadequate … … This is Faulkner’s art, that we do care.

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LIGHT IN AUGUST: JOE CHRITSMAS

• Except for  As I Lay Dying, I take Light in August to be Faulkner’s finest aesthetic achievement … … The sagas of Joe Christmas, Hightower, and Lena are separate stories, and the links between them are minor. But narrative power sustains all three recitals, and each is aided by juxtaposition with the others. The existence of Joe Christmas is a continuous nightmare, while Hightower dwells in an unreal dream, and Lena moves on like the natural process she both exemplifies and enhances.
• Indeed Light in August is the book of Joe Christmas; and yet whenever I recall it, I think first of Lena. Her relevance to the book has been questioned but not by any deep reader of Faulkner. Her serene presence contributes to what can be termed Faulkner’s “ecstasy of the ordinary,” curious moments that are secular epiphanies.

mores: 习俗; epiphany: 顿悟

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IV. MARK TWAIN and ROBERT FROST

THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN

• If our literature has produced a single work of universal appeal, popular, and elitist, it must be the story of Huck Finn. There are only a few dissenters … … I do not adhere to this school but agree in a limited way: Huck’s longed-for “freedom” is not natural. Freedom for both Mark Twain and his daemon Huck Finn is the freedom of the storyteller, partly alienated from society and from nature.
• With a Shakespearean detachment, Huck records much of what he sees and hears while saying little in response … … Defining Huck’s character is difficult, in part because he is not a quester striving to attain a goal. Cox sensibly emphasizes that Huck’s journey is “a flight from tyranny, not a flight toward freedom.”
• Twain’s one full-length masterwork is a comedy only because it concludes insouciantly. Of no genre, Twain’s book of the daemon has been creatively misread by Sherwood Anderson and Hemingway, Fitzgerald and J.D.Salinger. To different degrees, they interpreted it as a parable of their own inception and as nostalgia for a lost American dream.

insouciantly: 漫不经心

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PUDD’NHEAD WILSON

• There is no American Shakespeare or Chaucer, though Whitman comes closest and Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, and Hart Crane approach Walt’s splendor. The scope of Henry James’s writing — fiction, travel, criticism, memoir — astonishes, and invariably his work is superb, yet Tolstoy, Dickens and Balzac have a Shakespearean immediacy that James lacks. Anna Karenina and Pierre, Uriah Heep and Fagin, Vautrin and Goriot, convey an illusion of actual existence so richly textured that even Isabel Archer seems insubstantial in their company. Mark Twain’s triumph in his one great book places him in the company of Dickens and Balzac, though not of Shakespeare and Tolstoy.

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ROBERT FROST

• Frost principal legacies from Emerson were the double consciousness and the incessant struggle between freedom and fate. For both Emerson and Frost, the pre-Socratic formula held: Ethos is the daemon, character is fate, so everything that happens to you is what you always were and are … … Richard Poirier … … argued with me that my preference for Stevens and Whitman showed a refusal to take choice as being overdetermined.

queasy: 想吐

泥泞时节的两个流浪工

丝绸帐篷

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A WITNESS TREE

• Uneasiness at elegy is another quality Frost shares with Emerson. Both distrusted mourning for reasons both temperamental and imaginative, related to their shared faith in the double consciousness and in their Ananke, or amor fati.
• Frost’s largeness is not so much in the enigma of his reservations as in his full acceptance of  contingencies so far within us as to hedge any drive toward freeing choice.

recalcitrance: 顽抗; contingency: 偶然性

它的极限

用心良苦的种子

鸟儿的歌唱再也不似从前

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NORTH OF BOSTON

• The marriage of two people whose surnames are White and Frost engendered in one of the strongest of American poets both awareness and wariness of the trope of blank whiteness he encountered in Emerson, Melville, Dickinson, and his Key West crony Wallace Stevens.
• The daemon dwells in Frost’s desert places and composes the poem for him; Frost knows, with Emerson, that the ruin or blank we see when look upon nature is in our own eyes.

摘苹果之后

只一次，便成真

荒漠之地

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DIRECTIVE

• Frost was a profoundly pagan poet, and Directive invites its elite readers to a communion with fatal Ananke, the god of contingencies and overdeterminations. This is a cold and clean communion, promising only a Lucretian clarity, a difficult acceptance of the way things are.

monosyllabic: 单音; parataxis: 意合; saturnine: 阴沉的; libation: 奠; pagan: 异教徒

指路

艾米莉·狄金森是本书十二位“恶魔”中唯一一位女性，她在生前几乎过着隐士一般的生活，死后人们通过她的千余篇诗稿才开始惊诧于这名女子的才华。如果你翻开《The Daemon Knows》的目录，想一扫作者是如何选章编排的，你会发现只有 Emily Dickinson 一人的名字下面没有任何其他子标题和章节名称，是布鲁姆想说的能说的不多所以不必划分章节，还是他想说的能说的太多了以至于难以概括成简单的几个词汇。

我估摸着还是前者的可能性更大一点。布鲁姆一上来自己就坦白了：The long experience of teaching Dickinson has been sublimely exhausting: She is the most rewardingly difficult of American poets. 据他的一位导师回忆，每一次布鲁姆讲完狄金森，都会头疼不已。然而作者自己也承认，尽管如此，他如今每一次讲完狄金森后心灵上的震动，和他六十年前第一次授她的课没什么两样。

天才的定义有许多，每个人也有每个人的喜好，但我们仍然可以大胆地拍着胸脯说，狄金森是美国文学史上一位不折不扣的异类。这种感觉不需要通过读太多她的诗来证明，短短四五篇下来，你的感受就会十分强烈了。她的诗句通常都很短，毫不拖泥带水，而且段落间经常会附着短破折号，好像乐谱上的延长音符一样，定眼一看又觉得纸面上的短句是不是会随着这一缕缕横线飞跃起来。尤其是在受过惠特曼诗篇的熏陶之后，狄金森无疑能给你带来一股别样的清爽，甚至有点瑟瑟发抖的凉气。

狄金森的诗句里带有一种鬼魅的诗意——如果我们依然称其是一种诗意的话（诗歌当然无须一定要有诗意）。布鲁姆在评论她的名篇《有那么一道斜光》时说到，全篇用的都是现在时态，可你感受到的却是彻头彻尾的过去。这种幻觉在莎士比亚中也会读到，他说，Shakespeare dramatizes presence, fullness of being now. Of all lyric poets in the language, Dickinson is closest to him. Pathos is the daemon, and personality creates itself through theatricality. 

狄金森和莎士比亚之间可以作比的远不止这些，在她的诗句中能读到和莎翁一样的对自我的拷问，然而需要留心的是，狄金森的诗歌却全不是关于她自己的——这与惠特曼的完全以自我为诗并高声歌唱自我大相径庭。而想必狄金森文字力量也正来自于此。她对自己的字句有着不由分说和确凿而有力的自信，她不会去考虑更别说去迎合读者的想法。我们也很难从她的生平经历去附会和推断出些什么，狄金森的个人生活极为神秘，从她的书信里，很难找到额外的线索，你甚至会以为和诗句中的那个“我”（如果她确曾出现在自己的诗里的话）是两个人。所有的这些，与莎士比亚又是何等的相似。

也难怪总是头疼的布鲁姆这样劝我们：The first principle of confronting and reading Dickinson is akin to what Whitman forces us to accept his poetry: self-conscious, self-affirmative aggressivity against Western literary tradition. Dickinson conceals her furious vitalism beneath a mask of elegant good manners and modesty, but that clearly belies her actual stance of energetic self-reliance. I would argue that she goes beyond Whitman in her aggressive assertion of her own poetic authority and accomplishment. 

说句玩笑话，都说惠特曼把他的手放在你手上的时候，你便成为了他的诗。如果狄金森也做出同样的举动（当然我想这几乎不可能），不好意思，你还是你，她还是她。布鲁姆也说，狄金森和惠特曼，这两位美国最伟大的诗人，都成功抵达了 “the place of the daemon”，但是，他们是从两个全然不同的大门走进去的。

八十四岁的布鲁姆在摘选和品读狄金森的时候一定是饱含深情的。文中多次提到了他已逝去的故友，字里行间充满了岁月和淡淡伤悲。我想，如果布鲁姆是要借这本《The Daemon Knows》来给自己的八十年岁画一个坐标的话，那么上述这种情怀被搁放在讲狄金森的这一章中无疑是再好不过了。她诗句中“你是你，我是我”的那般距离感，在这里倒成了最好的感情容器。布鲁姆说，As losses accumulate, I return often to Dickinson, not for consolation but plainly to propound the costs that confirm aesthetic contemplation. 而作为一位经常拿死亡和不朽作主题的诗者（另一位是惠特曼），布鲁姆把狄金森（而非惠特曼）当作是和他一样看清了什么才是死亡的那个知心人。Love is stronger than death in the Song of Songs; Dickinson is more wistful. She does not entertain anything like Henry James’s fascination with ghostly phenomena, and she shares Emerson’s rejection: “Other world! there is no other world. Here or nowhere is the whole fact.”

作者在一大段穿插了艾略特，叶芝和爱默生的议论中不经意间提到了一位叫 Robert Warren 的好友，他们是忘年之交，通过诗歌和书信相识，而祖孙三代依然保持着联系。布鲁姆说从他身上学到了时光的真正涵义。我个人觉得，这段不长却又深情满满的文字，是本书目前为止所有类似追忆中最精彩的一段。在结尾处布鲁姆是这么说的：

I learned from “Red” Warren as I have from only a few others — Gershom Scholem, M.H. Abrams, Fredrick Pottle — a distrust of my own daemon, or, rather, the necessity of standing apart from it without repudiating the energies upon which I relied. We learned face-to-face, kindled by immediacy. Reading Dickinson yields a similar gnosis.

读一本厚书就像在巨流河中航行，漫长的旅程，时而湍流激荡，险滩密布，时而宽广平坦，柳暗花明。随着布鲁姆的笔触在这十二位文学巨匠中游走，其感受与此别无二致。如果说第一章的惠特曼和梅尔维尔是这条河流的上游——两岸峻岩陡峭，山石林立，河面波涛翻涌，生生不息——的话，接下来的爱默生和艾米莉·狄金森无疑是将这激荡和生命力引向空旷的幽谷，天地之间，坦坦荡荡，不见古人和来者。说老实话，读这两人的第二章不是段愉悦的经历，一位文语晦涩，思辨深邃，一位清新高冷，厉如闪电，（都不是好惹的，也都不是好懂的）。我几乎是只用了一个下午就把这两人匆匆扫完，头也不回地去下一章拜访霍桑和亨利·詹姆斯了。梅奥万豪酒店的地下一层，人眼稀松，不见天日，冷气也比别处足了许多，我耐不住的莫不就是这阴抑与清冷。好在（能开始说人话的）霍桑和詹姆斯终于把我领出了这空山幽谷——正巧我也转移到地面，卡勒旅馆入口处的鹿城咖啡，人来人往——我读到布鲁姆用诗人史蒂文斯《秋天的极光》中一句 “The house will crumble and the books will burn” 品评霍桑短篇《威克菲尔德》和新英格兰区的古宅时，眼前顿然一片坦途，水波悠远平静，远方，似乎还有模糊的村庄牛羊。

先说爱默生，我更愿意称其为思想家而非作家，因为他传世的议论文实在是太多了。事实上，爱默生比前两位（惠特曼，梅尔维尔）都要年长，梅尔维尔常去爱默生在纽约的讲座（尽管文学上梅氏溯源于莎士比亚），惠特曼的文学传统也受到了后者很大的影响（布鲁姆称其比爱默生还要爱默生），而爱默生本人，就如他自己所说，an endless seeker, with no Past at my back，是一个不折不扣的哲学和思辨大师。一开始我还奇怪为什么布鲁姆要把这位前辈屈尊在第二章，既然如此重要，何不开篇就谈？老人家自然有他自己的考虑，但我读到此刻也不难理解了，要真把他列在开头，怕是这本书的读者会少许多。

简单来说，作者笔下的 American Religion，或者我们所谓美国精神，可以用爱默生的一篇名作的题目一言以蔽之：Self Reliance，自立。在本书中，这种自立不仅是文学渊源上的，也是思想上和哲学上的。在惠特曼和梅尔维尔出现之前，沿袭自荷马以来就建立的欧洲文学传统是每一位作家和诗人的必由之路，作者说，Shelley, as classical as Goethe, had the triple burden of anxiety of influence from Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth. A High Romantic English poet joins Homeric tradition not by choice but by contingencies of lasting and personal ambitions. 而自惠特曼，梅尔维尔，和爱默生始，美国文学与欧洲文学的这种关系开始打破和改变，Emersonian American self-reliance is daemonic, as are American self-influence and American self-overhearing. Does that depart from the Shakespearean paradigm of influence and overhearing? 答案是肯定的。而这种自立带有明显的“恶魔性”，不需要借助上帝和神职人员的指示，Neither strangers nor exiles, they celebrate what is most familiar and near at hand … … After Emerson, American makers themselves daemonize.

从哲学上的角度来看，这种自立也可以看作是爱默生将“欧式崇高”的 “vast and awesome” 内化为自我和内心的力量：The Longinian-Burkean-Kantian Sublime can be judged as an excursion into the psychological origins of aesthetic magnificence … … Emerson radically internalized the European Sublime by attaching it to “the God within” the American self.

在讨论《论自立》的一节中，布鲁姆的大段文字里还有一个主角——尼采，（用作者的话说）his rueful disciple, who loved Emerson while never quite grasping him（尼采都没完全搞懂的人就更提不起我的兴致了）. 作者论及意义/意思的来源，并说到爱默生和尼采一样，都是意义/意思的转述者而非创造者（如荷马，柏拉图，丹特，乔叟，莎士比亚，塞万提斯等），他们 “define limits and possibilities for transmitting meanings and then transmitting them into wisdoms.” 在作者看来，爱默生实用地认为根基从来就不存在，而常识才是一切天才的源头。从来就没有权威，而所谓的权威（authority）只不过是一种身份（authorship）罢了。惠特曼在《自我之歌》中的那句 “I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end, But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.” 也是这层含义的一个读本。

作者最后说道，Our experience of God, if you travel to the realms of American Religionists, as I did when younger, has little to do with European theology and instead renews ancient shamanisms, Gnostic heresies, and assorted Enthusiasms, Emersonian Orphism included. I have listened to Pentecostals, Independent Baptists, and wild churches of the unchurched, and I heard again and again that these women and men were uncreated and so could not perish. I was told that many in solitude had talked and walked with the resurrected Jesus. In their highest moments, these women and men were a vision. Face-to-face I experienced no skepticism but was overwhelmed by immediacy. I do not think these people would have recognized the names of Emerson and Whitman, but they seemed closer to those American prophets than I could ever be.

在布鲁姆眼中，所有后世的美国诗人身上都多少有爱默生的影子，小说家则不尽然。但是，如果不通过爱默生的视角，你也会很难理解霍桑，梅尔维尔和亨利·詹姆斯笔下的主人翁们的命运和他们所做出的选择。

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• He [Hawthorne] is an American High Romantic, akin to Emerson, Melville, and Whitman, and not at all a neo-orthodox ancestor of T.S.Eliot. He celebrates the sexual vitality of women as a potentially saving force, tragically curtailed by male inadequacy and social restraint. “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is a … … and expresses Hawthorne’s subtle despair at the prolongation of patriarchal society.
• Though akin to Whitman’s eroticizing of Emersonianism, Hawthorne’s swerve was very different. Whitman was an Epicurean materialist, while Hawthorne remained a low transcendentalist in some aspects, including Emerson’s American Religion of self-reliance. Hester Prynne exemplifies one version of that faithless faith, and Henry Jame’s Isabel Archer will attain another. Both heroines secularize what might be called the American Will, which Hester manifests by remaining in New England rather than joining her daughter, Pearl, in Europe.

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THE SCARLET LETTER

• Except for Hawthorne and James, American male novelists have not been able to represent American women with the force and vivacity that have marked the English tradition, from … … In our century, the women portrayed by Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald are generally less vivid than the men, with a few significant exceptions.
• The extraordinary Hawthronean imagination, wandering between mimetic realism and High Romance, has given us an overwhelming personality and puzzling moral character in the sensual and tragic Hester, who is at once the ideal object of Hawthorne’s desire and a troubled projection of Hawthorne’s authorial subjectivity, cast out from him but never definitely. Strong writers of romance are both subject and object of their own quests, and there is a profound sense in which Hester is as much a representation of Hawthrone’s deep inwardness as Clarissa is Richardson’s vision of his inmost self.
• We sense the movement of sexual power into an antinomian context, but Hawthorne partly evades us such a movement in Hester. He will not let her prophesy and will not quite prophesy for her. This makes the book spiritually irritating to some readers, particularly at the present time, but undoubtedly helps create its aesthetic strength, since the reader becomes convinced that there is more to Hester than the storyteller is willing to unfold. We want her to say more, to do more, and yet we understand the appropriateness of the way the book both arouses such desires and refuses to gratify them.
• I begin to doubt that any American novelist, female or male, is going to create a character who transcends Hester Prynne as a representation of the irreconcilable demands placed upon an American woman, even in an age supposedly no longer Puritan. Feminism, in its latest phase, struggles with the lasting residuum of Puritan values while remaining deeply contaminated by them. It may even be that current literary feminism is destined to become our new or newest Puritanism, imposing uniform ideals upon intellectual women, by again refusing any alliance between their sexuality and their potential antinomianism.

Hebraic: 希伯来; antinomian: 反律法主义; recoil: 后坐力; residuum: 渣油; gratify: 放纵

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THE MARBLE FAUN

• Too much of the romance is a clumsy guidebook to the history, art, and architecture of a city profoundly alien to Hawthorne and to his American protagonists Hilda and Kenyon.

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HENRY JAMES

• The acknowledged master of American prose fiction composed his critical essays and reviews intrepidly but perhaps not always wisely. His book Hawthorne (1879) reveals something about Henry James while displaying little insight into his prime American precursor.

altar: 坛; ruse: 谋略; parody: 滑稽模仿

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THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY

• Like many socially awkward small boys of the 1930s, my first love affairs were with the heroines of novels … … As a nine-year-old, I wept when Marty South cut off her long hair, and I experienced exultance when Hardy celebrated Eustacia Vye as his Queen of Night. Falling in love with Isabel Archer a few years later, in adolescence, was very different, since unlike Marty, Eustacia, and the Brangwen sisters, James’s wonderful heroine seemed outside the sphere of sexual desire.
• I have quoted all of this because it is the great set piece if the novel and a Jamesian triumph of pace, proportion, diction, and profound compassion. The perfect rightness of the mutual tact that is a mode of love is exquisitely rendered. Here, at least, Isabel’s story touches tragic dignity.

wept: 哭泣

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THE WINGS OF THE DOVE

• Ellipsis, the art of leaving things out, transmits from late Shakespeare to the final James. We know Milly far less overtly than we do Kate Croy, … … The plotlessness of The Tempest, where almost nothing happens while everything is implied, is a model for the meaningful absences of Milly … …
• Wings at last is the Milly Theale Passion, another scripture of Emerson’s American Religion, akin of Song of Myself, Moby-Dick, Walden, The Scarlet Letter, the poems of Emily Dickinson. Wings also raises the burden of our common life to a daemonic sublimity.

hideous: 狰狞; nadir: 最低点; incarnate: 体现; maelstrom: 漩涡

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• There are a squadron of Emersons, but I take the founder of American Orphism to be the Central Waldo, father of Walt the American Adam.
• I interpret daemonization as the poet’s breakthrough into a highly individual counter-sublime, thus preferring possession by an inner drive to a debilitating struggle with the already said.

optative: 如意的; squadron: 队; chrestomathy: 读本; metonymy: 换喻; wryly: 挖苦; debilitate: 衰弱

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ESSAYS

• What shall wisdom be found? The poets, harboring great unwisdoms, comfort and console even when they do not enlighten. Nietzsche may have thought they kept us from perishing of the truth, Hamlet’s truth of annihilation. On that account, poetry lies against time and time’s definitive “it was.” Emerson, speaking for American hope, urged otherwise, exalting the newness.
• For me, Emerson is the foundation of the American will to know the self and its drive for sublimity. The American poets who (to me) matter most are all Emersonians of one kine or another: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, … … Our greatest creators of prose fiction were not Emersonians, yet the protagonists of Hawthorne, Melville, and Henry James frequently are beyond your understanding if we do not see Hester Prynne, Captain Ahab, and Isabel Archer as self-reliant questers.

exalt: 捧; rueful: 怜悯的

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EMILY DICKINSON

• Tone or stance is Dickinson’s strength, as it is Whitman’s, yet Walt — an American, one of the roughs — centers his poems upon himself, as the Amherst visionary would not. Always she is self-assertive, self-reliant, self-radiant. And yet Whitmanian advertisements-for-myself are antithetical to her experiment in renunciation. Like her only American poetic rival, she is joined to what Yeats in Per Amica Silentia Lunae called “the place of the daemon”, but she enters it through another gate.
• Melville and Dickinson (strange coupling) are the most Shakespearean of our classic American writers. Shakespeare’s capacious heart (in Hamlet’s sense of mind) provided room enough for two great imaginations so diverse that they touch at no point … … Jay Leyda, who logged both novelist and poet, remarked to me that Melville had a cinematic sense of Shakespeare, while Dickinson comprehended him lyrically.
• I learned from “Red” Warren as I have from only a few others — Gershom Scholem, M.H. Abrams, Fredrick Pottle — a distrust of my own daemon, or, rather, the necessity of standing apart from it without repudiating the energies upon which I relied. We learned face-to-face, kindled by immediacy. Reading Dickinson yields a similar gnosis.
• The long experience of teaching Dickinson has been sublimely exhausting: She is the most rewardingly difficult of American poets.
• Like Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson is a dangerous influence. Between them, they can threaten to take up all the space for an American poetry of blinding originality.
• Nietzsche’s maxim that every free spirit must unfold itself in fighting applies to her as it does to Emerson and Melville. She surpasses even the strongest of her American contemporaries in self-reliance.
• Of the major American poets, Dickinson is the least tendentious. Like Shakespeare, she has no design upon her readers.
• There is no formula that can encompass Dickinson: After Shakespeare’s, here is one of the most capacious poet’s consciousness in the language.

ardent: 热心; wayfaring: 行路人; slant:倾斜; octave: 八度; toil: 辛劳; demarcation: 划界; capacious: 开阔; immediacy: 直接; wistful: 怅惘; tendentious: 倾向性; salience: 突出

那里有一道斜光

我无法获取的色彩—最美

最具生命力的戏剧表演

灵魂对它自己

因为我不能停步等待死亡

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III. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE and HENRY JAMES

TALES AND SKETCHES

• Women and men in their eighties are not given to unexpected passions or violent elopements … … Each time I reread and teach “Wakerfield,” I limp through our large New England shingle house (late nineteenth century) and try to envision it occupied only by my wife. I stare at the innumerable bookcases and murmur the Stevensian tag from The Auroras of Autumn: “The house will crumble and the books will burn.”

ransack: 洗劫; ambush: 伏击; nincompoop: 笨人; elopement: 私奔

《The Daemon Knows》洋洋洒洒五百页，讲述惠特曼和梅尔维尔的第一章就占到了一百五十页之多，不难理解这两人是布鲁姆用来给全书立论的基石。还记得他在前言里说到，He [Hart Crane] seems now the last transcendentalist poet of the American Sublime and the absolute conclusion to daemonic tradition in our literature. American poetry did not end with him, yet something glorious may have departed that cannot be renewed. 哈特·克莱恩是布鲁姆的最爱之一，也是本书十二位恶魔中的最后一位（与威廉·福克纳对组），在作者眼中，美国文学的光辉和某种崇高与传统在克莱恩之后即画上了句点。而这崇高与光辉，（我仍在研习过程中），便始于惠特曼和梅尔维尔。

What is the American Sublime and how does it differ from British and Continental instances? Simplistically, the sublime in literature has been associated with peak experiences that render a secular version of theophany: a sense of something interfused that transforms a natural moment, landscape, action, or countenance. 简单来说，（也借我粗浅的理解），布鲁姆在这里歌颂的是美国独有的以超验主义为核心的个人精神。超验主义强调人与上帝之间的直接交流，它无需借助神职人员，也无需借助仪式和道具，强调人的主观能动性，在模糊了人性与神性边界的同时，也极大地解放了人的视野和潜能。这种思想很大程度上塑造了当今的美国，成为了美国精神中重要的一部分。作者用 Daemon 来为本书命题，讲的也正是这一点：Except for T.S. Eliot, none of my twelve believed in God or the gods, and when they spoke of “Nature” they meant the American Adam. An Emersonian vision, the American Adam is the God-Man of the New World. He is self-created, and if he ever fell it was in the act of initial creation. Whet lies beyond the human for nearly all of these writers is the daemon, who is described and defined throughout this book. 

到底这恶魔的实质是什么，我还没有完整地领悟到，现在只知它指代的是上帝的反面。读完首章，尤其是占据了其中绝大多数（一百二十页）的惠特曼，也不难理解为什么他是这群恶魔的旗帜了。惠特曼是布鲁姆另一位最喜爱的作家，的确，经过这几天的粗读，我确实能感受到惠特曼诗句中强大的感召力和治愈心灵的力量。在段落间，布鲁姆常常会重复惠特曼《自我之歌》中的这两节：

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean, But I shall be good health to you nevertheless, And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, Missing me one place search another, I stop some where waiting for you.

是这样，惠特曼在《自我之歌》的结尾处为我们真情描摹了那个 real Me 的样子，正在读诗的我们，虽然与他未曾谋面，也在眼前看到一个真切而坚实的背影，他就站在不远处的山间鼓舞来者前行。惠特曼的诗篇在南北战争后对美国影响很大，布鲁姆不止一次提到这点，而且，他还以自己的亲身感受作例。老人家今年已经八十四了，经受过不少伤病的折磨与煎熬，在难以入眠的黑夜里，他会情不自禁地背诵起读过的诗篇：Unable to rise out of bed for months, desperate for self-help, chanting much out of Whitman, particularly Song of Myself and the Sea-Drift and Lilacs elegies, has given me more than the illusion of consolidation and recovery. Walt calls this “retrievements out of the night” and persuades me that for once the poet is the man and I have become his poem.

年老的人爱怀旧，布鲁姆在讲解惠特曼的时候，常常会不经意间带入已经很久远的往事。诗句里提到了十一月，老人家也打趣道自己此刻正在十一月的纽黑文伏案写作。诗句里讲到初生的婴儿，老人家也追忆了自己第一个孩子降生的时刻。又比如说到对文学的热爱，布鲁姆又不着边际地讲起了大半个世纪前的孩提时代：Literary love has more to do with Plato or Saint Augustine than with Homer or the Bible … … My earliest memory of a similar experience goes back to an afternoon when I was seven or eight, playing in the snow with other children. I cannot recall the name of the little girl who suddenly caught my spirit, yet in the semi-awakefulness just before dawn, three-quarters of a century later, I sometimes see her face again with startled vividness, framed in the hood of her winter jacket. 我想，这应该也是布鲁姆对于惠特曼其人其诗的切身所感吧。有种模糊又纯粹的东西，总会在某个时候生动地浮现在眼前，正像惠特曼说的，“在某个地方等着你”。

我十分同意作者的一点是，惠特曼的魅力不仅仅在于其感召和治愈，同时，他从不以先知和预言家身份化身在我们眼前。看上去，他虽然形象高大，吟唱着海洋，死亡，和大地，命题宏大，但却又时刻与我们心手相连。也许这就是所谓的人与上帝间的直接交流吧。惠特曼在1856年版《草叶集》开头写下了如下经典名句，布鲁姆称其为 sudden gift of addressing the reader with an astonishing directness：

Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem.

惠特曼的美学力量完全是从个人角度出发的，它无关乎历史，无关乎神灵，只关乎我们每个人自己。而且，Walt is always passing us by, waiting somewhere up ahead. 我们会感觉到他在就在我们身旁，吟唱诗篇，而不是在高高处俯瞰众生。这种亲近，丝毫没有影响到他情感和力量的表达，因为惠特曼永远在我们前方不远处。

作者把惠特曼和梅尔维尔的比较，浓缩成了鲁克里娅（古罗马贞女）和诺斯替教（真知派）的比较。这个比方我还远未吃透，用布鲁姆自己的例子来说，[Lucretian] Whitman, ghostly father alike of Stevens and of Eliot, gloried that now and always he could send forth sunrise from himself，而反面的梅尔维尔，则正如其《白鲸》中主人公阿哈船长所言，“I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.” 同样是歌颂美国的人文精神，梅尔维尔作品中表现的如普罗米修斯般对自由的执着与追求，震撼人心，但布鲁姆更欣赏的是惠特曼的表现方法。这在如下两段话里可见一斑：Prophets do not heal; they exacerbate. I reread and teach Moby-Dick to uncover and appreciate the sublimity and the danger of American Promethean heroism. But several prolonged times when close to death, I have recited Whitman to myself as medicine. 还有这段：American Religionists, when I questioned them, frequently said that falling in love was affirming again Christ’s love for each of them. In such a labyrinth of idealizations I get lost, lacking the thread that might lead to an escape. Yet if our night journey is to meet an exit, we need the poet of our climate to cut it for us. Whitman stops somewhere waiting for us.

从文本的角度，惠特曼的字句也是极富魅力的。布鲁姆以《两头鹰的嬉戏》为例，给我们讲解了诗人是如何恋于使用不及物动词，并指出，在读诗的过程中秉持这种“不及物状态”才是上佳的。他说，Any strong poem, whether by Hopkins or Yeats, Bishop or Ashbery, eludes our drive to objectify it. 《两头鹰的嬉戏》是首短诗，只有十行，不到百字，五分之一都是动词，而它们几乎全为不及物。也就是说，诗中嬉戏的那两头鹰，羽翼翻飞间并没有明确指向确定的物体和方向，但通读下来，我们的感受却再具体不过。也许这与中国美学中的“留白”有着异曲同工之妙吧，往往在无所指的时候，我们才能领悟得更深，更远。而这种不及物和“留白”，也精妙地在诗者与读者间划了一段距离，引导我们看到更真挚的内在。距离不仅产生美，也会带来真实吧。布鲁姆说，We do not think of Walt as we recite this poem: What it celebrates and sings is not “myself” but the Lucretian way things are. 我依旧说不好这所谓鲁克里娅贞女式事物的内在具体为何物，但我知道，它的确是我们每个人在不懈追求自由和解放的过程中，心底里所需要的那部分安稳和温暖。

布鲁姆认为，伟大的文学应是一场盛宴而非历史本身，尤其在诗歌这种文体中，很多闪光的语句是很难从历史宏大视角去读解的。其实惠特曼也不精于此，他并不是一个通过让读者去认识和认知来传递伟大讯息的诗人，His still-undervalued art abides in nuance, indirection, gesture, subtle evasiveness, insinuation, ineluctable modalities of the visible, the signature of all things that he summons to us to come and see. 

惠特曼的诗篇往往还有惊艳的开头，这也是粗略读罢我很喜欢的一点。在这首《从这永不停息地摇摆着的摇蓝里》中，二十二行的铺陈——荒沙，原野，神秘的树影，悲鸣的小鸟——才引出吟诗者“我”，绵长悠远，舒展动人。《从巴门诺克开始》也当仁不让，经过了十三行的辗转，达科他的森林，尼亚加拉瀑布，慷慨好施的密苏里河 …… 我们才抵达 “Solitary, singing in the West, I strike up for a New World” 这强有力的呼喊。另一首《当我与生命之海一起退潮时》，“秋日的傍晚”，“沉思”和“向南凝望”的“我”出场之前，三句 As 和两句 Where 勾勒出了巴门诺克海岸上的卷卷浪潮和嘶嘶水声，让人身临其境。而悼念林肯总统的《曾忆丁香满庭时》的第二三节，在歌唱黑夜，歌唱星辰，歌唱盛开的花朵，歌唱每一片都是奇迹的叶子之后，惠特曼举重若轻地“折下带着花朵的一小枝”紫丁香，暗指巨星陨落，斯人已逝，唱出了极致的安详与深沉。

也罢，是时候再来重温这句惠特曼对读者说的话了：Whoever you are, I fear you are walking the walk of dreams … … Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem. 我们还远未活到布鲁姆的年岁和高度，但一样可以体会，他问到如下字句时的心境：Who else has pursued me as Walt pursues?

八十四岁的老人自问自答来着：Shakespeare, whether in sonnets or onstatge, lets it be. Like Hamlet, he does not need our love.

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WHEN LILACS LAST IN THE DOORYARD BLOOM’D

• Like so many of the major elegies in poetic tradition, Lilacs hymns not only its ostensible subject, Present Abraham Lincoln, but also the possible waning of the poet’s own imaginative powers.
• The tallying chant is whole Lilacs, and the full-voiced closing pragmatically redefines the tally for us as being at once celebration and lament. The image of Whtman’s voice thus fuses freedom and death, a death, though, that is Walt’s own invention, indistinguishable from the night and the mothering sea.

lilac: 紫丁香; threnody: 悲歌; castration: 阉割

惠特曼：当紫丁香最近在庭园中开放的时候

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MOBY-DICK

• His [Whitman] aesthetic strength is personal, whether he celebrates or laments divisions in the self. And his healing power, his greatest gift, is contrary to prophecy. Prophets do not heal; they exacerbate. I reread and teach Moby-Dick to uncover and appreciate the sublimity and the danger of American Promethean heroism. But several prolonged times when close to death, I have recited Whitman to myself as medicine.

tripartite: 三方; epitome: 缩影; harpoon: 鱼叉; consonance: 合音; inexorable: 残酷; fright: 惊骇

第一章：海市蜃楼

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II. RALPH WALDO EMERSON and EMILY DICKINSON

JOURNALS

• In Whitman and Hart Crane, Christopher Columbus is the tragic precursor who first encounters America-as-daemon. Anyone who has sailed the North Atlantic, even in the late 1940s, will recognize the relief of reaching the American shore after many days and nights floating across an abyss of space and time.
• The American difference that constitutes our sublime breaks from English and Continental models by an askesis of the psyche, isolating the daemonic element that exalts seeing at the expense of our awareness of other selves. A profound solipsism ensues, though oddly marked by a more open rhetoric. Whitman is the greatest instance of such a figure of capable imagination, proclaiming as he does his total incorporation of what was, is, or can be, while celebrating a more concealed inwardness than even those of Melville, Hawthorne, … … Hart Crane, tragically the most Orphic of American poets, is the fascinating exception, as his letters and friends testify. Like John Keats, he had a truer sense of other selves than most of us can attain. From the start, Crane knew his doom, in the mode of a Faulknerian hero.

creeds: 信条; solipsism: 唯我主义; Orphic: 俄耳甫斯

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LEAVES OF GRASS | 1856

• Crossing Brooklyn Ferry is an ineluctably subtle modality of the visible edging toward making the visible a little hard to see.

ineluctably: 不可避免; modality: 情态; praxis: 现实; emulsion:乳胶; tonality: 调; epicureanism: 享乐主义

过布鲁克林渡口

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LEAVES OF GRASS | 1860

• Stevens, defensively wary of his prime American forerunner, cannot enter the elegy season without evoking Walt’s words out of the sea. Powerful as is the press of Whitman, his effect is enhanced, upon Stevens and ourselves, by his secure place in the hidden tradition of one of Western poetry’s salient themes: the power of the poet’s mind over a universe of death.
• A few years ago I gathered a volume of “last poems” (Till I End My Song), from Spencer to our moment, and noted that strong poems are composed against death, though against dying. That Lucretian distinction is vital to Walt, who followed Epicurus through the tutelage of Fanny Wright.
• Ethos was the daemon for the ancient Greeks, but in Shakespeare’s invention of the human, as in that of his American followers, pathos is the daemon, the hidden driver potential of awakened personality.

tutelage: 监护; ethos: 可信; pathos: 情感; cadences: 韵律; agon: 斗争; bard: 诗人; lineage: 血统; dirge: 挽歌;

齐维斯特的秩序观念（史蒂文斯）

當我與生命之海一起退潮時（惠特曼）

从巴门诺克开始

挂满青苔的橡树

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I. WALT WHITMAN and HERMAN MELVILLE

FOURGROUNDING THE GIANTS

• Perhaps all that Whitman shared with Shakespeare, Goethe, and Henrik Ibsen was an implicit insight that the self was a necessary fiction, an illusion so desired that leaves of grass would sprout from the barren rock of being.
• Walt, confronted by sunrise, now and always could send forth sunrise from himself. Melville, opposing titan, would strike at and through the sun as another pasteboard mask. Moby-Dick is our national counter-sublime and Leaves of Grass the American Sublime, incarnated in a book that is also a man.
• Captain Ahab’s vaunt — “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me” —  marks the difference between the Lucretian Whitman and the Gnostic Melville.

apotheosis: 神化; bequeathed: 遗赠; promiscuous; 淫乱; cavalcade: 行列; inscrutable: 高深莫测; hyperbole: 夸张; tamed: 驯服; conquistadores: 征服者; Lucretian: 鲁克里娅（古罗马的贞女）; Gnostic: 诺斯替教（真知派）; pagan: 异教徒; vaunt: 夸; incarnated: 化身

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AN INTRODUCTION

• The greatest literature is more a pageant than a history. I rather wish us to see it as a baroque dramatic celebration, spectacular alike for its pomp and its covert achieved anxiety, a mystery play with the disciplined imagination as dying god.
• I have learned to shrug off historicist overdeterminations, because they cannot account for aesthetic and cognitive splendors. Their contextualizations blur more than they illuminate. Yet as readers, writers, and teachers, our authentic context is the myriad countrymen and -women who live in a daily reality that is mostly not at all our own.
• Any strong poem, whether by Hopkins or Yeats, Bishop or Ashbery, eludes our drive to objectify it, and Whitman is no more ill-assorted than his compeers.
• No poem, Paul Valery remarked, is ever finished. Rather, the poet abandons it.
• We do not think of Walt as we recite this poem: What it celebrates and sings is not “myself” but the Lucretian way things are, though implicit magnificence remains its burden.
• Valery and Stevens help form my critical mind, and yet the presence of Walt Whitman overwhelms me, possesses me, as only a few others — Dante, Shakespeare, Milton — consistently flood my entire being.
• Inevitable phrasing — my criterion for the highest poetry —  is a difficult matter for criticism to expound upon, since “inevitable” here is itself a trope dependent on aesthetic experience.

pageant: 盛会; pomp: 盛况; tempest: 暴风雨; myriad: 无数的; opiate: 鸦片; intransitive: 不及物; elude: 躲避; vault: 拱顶; fecund: 丰饶的; oxymoronic: 自相矛盾; trope: 比喻; expound: 阐述

两头鹰的嬉戏（惠特曼/作 韩晶宇/译）

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OUT OF THE CRADLE ENDLESS ROCKING

惠特曼：从这永不停息地摇摆着的摇蓝里（殷宝书译）

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LEAVES OF GRASS | 1855

• “It is not every day,” Stevens remarked, “that the world arranges itself into a poem.” Whitman wanted that daily transformation, even though he could not bring it about. No man, no woman, can live in a continuous secular epiphany, though it is the enabling fiction that made possible Song of Myself.

phantasmagoria: 千变万化的风; synecdoche: 提喻法

惠特曼：自我之歌

收拾衣物准备启程之际，我专门跑了一趟 Union Square 的 Barnes & Noble 和 Strand。在临行前才挑书，为的就是让灵感的碰撞最接近真实的想法。而之所以要去两所书店，也是刻意能让自己在诗性和理性之间架好平衡。如果书单里全是 T.S.艾略特，乔姆斯基，沃纳·赫尔佐格之流，那我真是太性情用事。毕竟，我不是要去荒岛上聊过余生，接下来我还有生活需要照顾。

于是，我带的五本书里面，少不了一本畅销的经济学读物。

短短一个小时时间，能在这两个书店里同时捕捉到的封面，不会多。哈罗德·布鲁姆成了这其中脱颖而出的唯一一位。他的新作《The Daemon Knows》，估计在每一家店的热门书架上都会很显眼。素白的封面，美国国旗的红蓝二色注着作者和书的名字，底端的 Harold Bloom 字体更大一些，用的是蓝色，很有智慧的光芒。

这本书在我脑海里装了有段时间了，我知道它是关于一本美国文学的评论巨著，里面择选了十二位作家，洋洋六章，两两一对，相互对照着写。这种写法本身就有点意思，毕竟文学不是党派也不是竞技，彼此间很难有“对手”的说法，比较更多是区域上和时代上的。所以，我很期待布鲁姆会在这些比较中说些什么。

一直以来没有把此书收入囊中，很大的一个原因在于，我自己并没有怎么涉猎过美国文学。在我们称之为经典的那个年代里，美国作家是不如欧洲作家名字那么耀眼的。惭愧的是，布鲁姆列数的十二个人里面，有三个人我真是完全没有耳闻。如果你对美国作家的概念也就停留在海明威，塞林格，杰克·伦敦等人上面，我打赌你不认识的名字还要更多。

让我欣喜的是里面有 T.S.艾略特。我一本艾略特都没有读过，而且他的著作有哪些，你要是问我估计也答不上来。大概，是这个人的名字本身就很讨喜吧。通过缩写字母让人记住全名的本就不多，整个NBA，J.J.雷迪克和 J.R.史密斯怕是最有名的两位。文学是个稍微严肃点的地方，我想学者教授们应该都不大会愿意用缩写来直呼前辈。因此，艾略特就有了这份独特的可爱。

我曾在某高大上商城曾看到一个叫做 The Elder Statesman 的设计牌子，里面的一件小羊毛衫就价格不菲，后来每天刷网页也等不到一丝折扣。这是题外话，然而当时让我眼前一亮的在于，The Elder Statesman 其实是艾略特写的一部剧的名字。自那以后，我便同时对这个牌子和艾略特本人开始另眼相看。

写这段文的时候我正读完《The Daemon Knows》的短序 “Why These Twelve ?” ，布鲁姆娓娓叙述了自己为什么写这样一部书的想法，悠缓的文字在我眼前似乎推开了几扇明窗，指向此时还未知道的答案。我还没有翻开哪怕第一章去应验作者说的话，所以也不愿去援引和点评什么。如果非要摘一句就拿它好了：

Poems, novels, stories, plays matter only if we matter.

也借此良言，坐迎明窗前的夏天。

 

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sublime: 崇高; juxtaposition: 并列; progeny: 子孙; theophany: 神的出现; contingency: 偶然性; transcendentalist: 先验论;