哪位美國作家最應該立傳

Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. This week, Thomas Mallon and Ayana Mathis on authors whose life stories should be told.

每週的書擋專欄(Bookends)都會有兩位作家談論有關書籍的話題。這周托馬斯·馬隆(Thomas Mallon)和阿雅娜·馬蒂斯(Ayana Mathis)討論哪位作家值得立傳。

By Thomas Mallon

托馬斯·馬隆：

Any biography requires raw material, and archivally, Tom Wolfe seems to be a man in full.

任何傳記都需要素材，而從素材的角度講，湯姆·沃爾夫(Tom Wolfe)簡直是無所不有。

Back in September The New York Times carried news about a coming biography of Jonathan Franzen. The item surprised some readers because of the writer’s relative youth and mostly quiet personal life. A public rebuke from Oprah is not nothing, but that alone won’t make for a biography “crowded with incident,” as Lady Bracknell would put it.

去年9月，《紐約時報》曾報道喬納森·弗蘭岑(Jonathan Franzen)的傳記即將面世。這本書讓一些讀者吃驚不已，因爲這位作家相對年輕，個人生活大體上也平淡無奇。儘管歐普拉對本書的批評非同小可，但僅此也不足以讓這本傳記如同王爾德《誠實的重要性》劇中人物布拉克奈爾夫人所說的那樣，“爭議不斷。”

A more likely living candidate for the full life-and-works treatment might be Tom Wolfe, still young in his subjects and style, but at 84 getting up there in years. True, one could say, as with Franzen, that this writer has put most of his exclamation points onto the page, not off it. A biographer of Wolfe will be reporting on an unscarifying boyhood; a late but long marriage; apparently amiable children; a domestic tranquillity that has supported immersive research and long intervals between hefty volumes. Even so, several aspects of the author’s long career make him ripe for scrutiny beyond the modest critical studies he’s prompted up to now.

另外一位尚健在，而且其生平和作品或許值得大書特書的作家是湯姆·沃爾夫。他的寫作主題和風格仍舊矯健，但84歲的他已經不年輕了。也許我們可以說，他如同弗蘭岑一樣，人生最可圈可點之處在於他的作品，而不是個人生活。沃爾夫的傳記作家會寫到如下這些：不顯山不露水的少年時代；晚婚但白頭偕老；與子女們關係融洽；家庭和諧，令他能夠全身心投入於研究寫作，並且花長時間醞釀鴻篇鉅製。儘管如此，他漫長寫作生涯的某些方面仍夠提供了豐富的素材，能夠讓傳記作家突破目前關於沃爾夫的平淡的批評研究，進行更深層次的探討。

Wolfe has been both in sync with his times — a key figure in the New Journalism that became the dominant mode of chronicling them — as well as a figure apart: His conservative inclinations alone distinguish him from most American writers of his generation. Well into midcareer he shifted away from nonfiction, glossing his first novel, “The Bonfire of the Vanities” (1987), with a thumping manifesto titled “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast” (1989). That essay planted Wolfe’s flag on the social and realist turf he believed the novel had long since foolishly abandoned. He had made enemies before — an essay called “Tiny Mummies!,” back in 1965, appalled stalwarts at The New Yorker — and his bumptious, commercially successful move toward fiction renewed his foes’ animus and increased their ranks. I remember John Updike flashing me a relieved smile the night Wolfe’s second novel lost the National Book Award in 1998; two years later Wolfe numbered Updike one of the “Three Stooges” who had failed to appreciate him. It’s hard to have a biography without misbehavior; it’s almost impossible to have one without feuds.

一方面，沃爾夫與他所處的時代步調一致——他是“新新聞主義”的核心人物之一，後者也成爲他記錄自己的時代的首要風格；另一方面，他又特立獨行。單是他的保守傾向就令他與同時代的多數美國作家格格不入。在寫作生涯中後期，他從非虛構作品轉向虛構，繼首部小說《虛榮的篝火》(The Bonfire of the Vanities, 1987)之後，又在《潛隨10億隻腳的動物》(Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast ,1989)一文中發出擲地有聲的宣言。這篇隨筆讓沃爾夫躋身於社會和現實主義陣營，他則在此文中批評美國小說界早已愚蠢地背棄了現實主義傳統。沃爾夫此前已經樹敵不少——他早在1965年發表的一篇題爲《袖珍木乃伊！》(Tiny Mummies!)的文章已經令《紐約客》雜誌的大腕作家們震怒不已。而他大張旗鼓進軍小說，並且在商業上頗爲成功，再次激起這種敵視情緒，並且讓更多的人加入了批評他的陣營。我還記得在1998年，當沃爾夫的第二部小說在角逐“國家圖書獎”功虧一簣之際，約翰·厄普代克(John Updike)向我展露了如釋重負的微笑；兩年之後，沃爾夫則還以顏色，稱厄普代克爲有眼無珠、未能欣賞他的作品的“三個傻瓜”之一。如果沒有出格言行，很難寫出一本傳記；而如果沒有宿怨，就乾脆不可能有傳記。

The editor of this life story will be hoping people want to buy it. Fortunately, Wolfe has the kind of public branding and recognition (the white suits haven’t hurt) that one associates more with the oft-televised writers born in the mid-1920s, less than a decade before he was — Vidal, Capote, Mailer, Baldwin, Buckley; excellent biographical subjects all. Wolfe has fans: I can recall a Washington arts function some years ago at which a Supreme Court justice waited to greet the novelist almost as if he were a costumed superhero who’d arrived on the floor of Comic Con. Few writers have cemented phrases into the national lingo, but Wolfe has done that with several: “radical chic,” “pushing the envelope,” “social X-rays,” “masters of the universe.”

這部傳記的編輯會希望讀者對它趨之若鶩。幸運的是，沃爾夫與那些經常出現在電視上、生於1920年代中期的著名作家——包括戈爾·維達(Gore Vidal)、杜魯門·卡波蒂(Truman Capote)、諾曼·梅勒(Norman Mailer)、詹姆斯·鮑德溫(James Baldwin)和威廉·F·巴克利(William F Buckley)等人，他們都是絕佳的傳主——具有類似的公衆品牌和知名度（他標誌性的白色西裝也增色不少）。沃爾夫有大批擁躉：我記得多年前在華盛頓一個文藝界聚會上，一位最高法院法官等待迎接他，就好像動漫粉絲們在國際動漫展上迎接身穿制服的超級英雄一樣。沒有幾位作家能像他一樣把文學語言引入全民的日常會話，比如radical chic（“與激進派人物交往的時尚”）、pushing the envelope（“挑戰極限”）、social X-rays（“社交X光”）、masters of the universe（“時空的主宰”）等等。

Any biography requires raw material, and archivally Wolfe seems to be a man in full. The New York Public Library has lately paid more than $2 million for a collection of the writer’s papers said to contain, along with notebooks and manuscripts, over 10,000 letters. The senders and recipients prove Wolfe a busy, connected creature, a figure in the sort of social tapestry he considers to be the novel’s real business.

任何傳記都需要素材，而從素材的角度講，湯姆·沃爾夫簡直是無所不有。最近，紐約公共圖書館以200多萬美元購入了一批他的文件，據稱包括筆記本、手稿和一萬多封信件。信件的收發人顯示沃爾夫的社交生活異常活躍豐富，就是他自己的小說熱衷於描寫的那種社交人物。

I greet the announcement of new fiction by lower-key, ultimately greater artists — let’s say William Trevor or Alice Munro — with a different, if no less keen, sort of pleasure. But I feel no urgent desire for a biography of either one of them. They’ve earned their privacy through a kind of exquisite circumscription, the deep, career-long exploration of individual psychologies in remote precincts. Wolfe, by contrast, has looked for life above the fold and at high decibel levels — on the frantic trading floor, in clamorous courthouses, amid the roar of rockets and racecars. It makes sense for his own life to wind up as a chronicle with an index.

每當那些低調但又不失偉大的作家——例如威廉·特里弗(William Trevor)和愛麗絲·門羅(Alice Munro)有新著問世，我都會頗爲欣慰，但這是一種不同的愉悅感：如果有人爲上述兩位作家立傳，我可沒什麼興趣讀。他們早已通過微妙的自我定位，通過多年來在陌生領域的對個人心理的深刻探索，贏得了他們的隱私權。而沃爾夫則不同，他熱衷於描寫名利場，在那些萬衆矚目的喧囂場景中探究人生——混亂忙碌的股票交易大廳、人聲鼎沸的法庭，噪音震耳欲聾的火箭發射場和賽車場等等。所以，他自己的人生成爲一部精心編撰的歷史，也不足爲奇。

Thomas Mallon’s eight novels include “Henry and Clara,” “Bandbox,” “Fellow Travelers” and “Watergate,” a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has also published nonfiction about plagiarism (“Stolen Words”), diaries (“A Book of One’s Own”), letters (“Yours Ever”) and the Kennedy assassination (“Mrs. Paine’s Garage”), as well as two books of essays. His work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and other publications. A recipient of the Vursell prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, for distinguished prose style, he is currently professor of English at George Washington University.

託瑪斯·馬隆的八部小說包括《亨利與克拉拉》(Henry and Clara)《同途旅人》(Fellow Travelers)和《水門》(Watergate)，後者入圍國際筆會/福克納獎最終候選名單。他的非虛構作品還包括關於抄襲的文章《被盜的文字》(Stolen Words)，日記《自己的一本書》(A Book of One’s Own)和關於刺殺肯尼迪事件的文章《佩恩夫人的車庫》(Mrs. Paine’s Garage)，另外還有兩本散文合集。他的作品曾發表在《紐約客》、《大西洋月刊》等期刊上。他曾獲得美國藝術暨文學學會表彰優秀散文風格的Vursell獎。他目前在喬治·華盛頓大學擔任英文教授。

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By Ayana Mathis

阿雅娜·馬蒂斯：

Albert Murray was a man of great accomplishments and not nearly the renown he ought to have had.

阿爾伯特·穆瑞(Albert Murray)的卓越成就和他的名氣不成正比。

You may not have heard of Albert Murray. You might not own any of his 12 books or have sat in on any of his lectures at Columbia or Emory University. You may have entirely missed the life and work of an inimitable novelist, cultural critic, and jazz and blues scholar — I certainly did.

你可能沒有聽說過阿爾伯特·穆瑞；他的12本著作，你可能一本也沒有買過；他在哥倫比亞和埃默裏大學的講座，你可能一次也沒去聽。你可能完全錯過了一位獨特的小說家、文化評論家、爵士樂和藍調研究者的生活和作品——就跟我一樣。

Albert Murray died at 97 on Aug. 18, 2013. He was a man of great accomplishments and not nearly the renown he ought to have had. Which isn’t to say he was obscure; the people who knew Murray loved him. They loved him so much that his memorial service was held at Jazz at Lincoln Center, which he helped found alongside Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch. Judith Jamison, the former artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, was there, along with Crouch and Henry Louis Gates Jr. Not to mention the publishing luminaries Sonny Mehta and Erroll McDonald. And, in the jazz-funeral style Murray deserved, Marsalis ended the memorial by marching his band out of the auditorium playing “Didn’t He Ramble.”

阿爾伯特·穆瑞於2013年8月去世，享年97歲。他成就卓越，卻並沒有與之匹配的名聲。這倒並不是說他默默無名——認識他的人都非常喜歡他。出於對他的喜愛，親朋好友們在林肯中心的爵士廳爲他舉辦了追悼會。而這一演出場所是穆瑞和溫頓·馬沙利斯（Wynton Marsalis，小號演奏家，林肯中心爵士樂團藝術總監——譯註）還有斯坦利·克勞奇（Stanley Crouch，詩人、爵士樂評家）一起促成創建的。出席追悼會的有“阿爾文·艾麗美國現代舞團”的前藝術總監朱迪斯·傑米森(Judith Jamison)、克勞奇和小亨利·路易斯·蓋茨（Henry Louis Gates Jr.，哈佛大學教授，美國黑人問題研究專家—譯註），當然還有索尼·梅塔(Sonny Mehta)和艾洛爾·麥克唐納德(Erroll McDonald)這樣的出版界名流。 追悼會由馬沙利斯帶領他的樂隊演奏着《他到處遊逛》(Didn’t He Ramble)走出演奏大廳而收場。穆瑞的一生完全配得上這個爵士味十足的追悼會。

Here is a crash course in Murray: He was the author of a memoir, four novels, several books about the blues that are at once scholarly and down-homey, and a few volumes of cultural criticism. Ah, yes, and a collection of poetry that includes a poem about William Faulkner I’d dare anyone to top. Ralph Ellison was a dear friend of his. The painter Romare Bearden was a friend, too. Murray and Bearden entered into an artistic collaboration that yielded Bearden’s series “The Block,” inspired by the view from Murray’s balcony in Harlem. Murray hung out with James Baldwin in Paris in the 1950s. He was the co-writer of Count Basie’s autobiography. The National Book Critics Circle gave him a lifetime achievement award in 1997. Duke Ellington called him “the unsquarest man I know.” During his college days, he spent a night at Ma Rainey’s house; in his memoir, “South to a Very Old Place,” he describes sleeping in her “red-velvet-draped, tenderloin-gothic, incense-sultry sickroom.”

穆瑞的生平簡介如下：他寫了一部回憶錄，四部小說，幾部關於藍調音樂的既富於學術價值而又平易近人的著作，還有幾本文化評論的作品。對了，他還出版過一本詩集，裏面有一首關於威廉·福克納(William Faulkner)的詩，我敢打賭沒有任何人能夠超越。拉爾夫·埃裏森（Ralph Ellison, 美國當代黑人作家）和畫家羅米爾·比爾登(Romare Bearden)都是他的好朋友。 穆瑞在哈萊姆住處的陽臺景觀是比爾登《街區》系列的靈感來源——這可以說是兩位好友之間的一次藝術合作。穆瑞在50年代的巴黎還和詹姆斯·鮑德溫過從甚密。他是“貝西伯爵”（William James "Count" Basie 爵士音樂家——譯註）自傳的合著者。美國國家書評圈在1997年授予他終身成就獎。艾靈頓公爵說他是“我所認識的人中最特立獨行的”。上大學的時候，穆瑞在芮妮大媽（Ma Rainey, 美國藍調歌手，被譽爲“藍調之母”——譯註）的家中度過一晚。在他的回憶錄《向南重遊舊地》(South to a Very Old Place)中，他描述了睡在她“紅絲絨窗簾遮擋，瀰漫着厚重香薰的病房，這哥特風格房間有着牛裏脊般的質感”。

Murray didn’t publish his first book until he was in his 50s, and then he spent the rest of his life making up for lost time. That first book, “The Omni-Americans,” argued for a wider conception of American identity that acknowledged the centrality and profundity of black culture. Murray maintained that America is so mingled as to be “a mulatto culture” (a startling reappropriation of the term). His ideas struck some as too integrationist and earned Murray more than a few enemies. But as Henry Louis Gates Jr. points out in “King of Cats,” his 1996 New Yorker profile of Murray, “in Murray’s hands, integration wasn’t an act of accommodation but an act of introjection.”

穆瑞直到50多歲纔出版了他的第一本書。這之後他著作不斷，像是在彌補之前的沉寂。在這第一本書《綜合美國人》(The Omni-Americans)中，穆瑞提出，美國身份的概念應該更加寬泛，這一概念應該正視黑人文化的中心地位和深度。穆瑞堅稱美國種族混雜，是一個“黑白混血文化”（穆瑞令人吃驚地重新使用了“黑白混血文化”這一說法）。他的觀點在一些人看來過於強調融合，從而爲他招致了不少敵人。而小亨利·路易·蓋茨在1996年爲《紐約客》撰寫的題爲《貓王》的穆瑞人物特寫中指出，“在穆瑞筆下，融合並不是適應外界，而是一種不自覺地把外面的東西拿來爲我所用的過程。”

Visionary though he was, Murray wasn’t right about everything — and certainly his polemics against the likes of Richard Wright and James Baldwin rightfully stuck in more than a few craws — but his work reveals a nuanced and agile thinker, and his prose is transcendent. When it comes to the blues, Murray’s expertise is undeniable. With characteristic brio, his seminal “Stomping the Blues” explores that music as the African-American idiom through which the spirit, mood and variety of black experience finds expression.

儘管頗有遠見，穆瑞並不總是正確的。他與理查德·懷特(Richard Wright)、詹姆斯·鮑德溫(James Baldwin)和其他一些人的論戰觸怒了不少人，而對此他並不能爲自己開脫。但是他的作品細緻入微，思維敏捷。他的文字也極爲精妙。在談論藍調音樂時，誰都不能否認穆瑞的專業知識。在他影響深遠的《頓足藍調》(Stomping the Blues)中，穆瑞以特有的生動筆觸探討了藍調音樂和“頓足”這一美國黑人俚語之間的關係，而兩者都充分表達了黑人生活的神髓和多樣性。

I’ve saved my favorite for last: Murray’s first novel, “Train Whistle Guitar,” an autobiographical coming-of-age story set in his native Alabama. His style was heavily influenced by the language of the South and by the jazz and blues he loved. His sentences dive and soar, they vibrate with word play and hum with lyricism.

我把我最喜愛的留到了最後。穆瑞的第一本小說《火車，口哨，吉他》(Train Whistle Guitar)是一步自傳性質的成長小說。故事發生在他的家鄉阿拉巴馬州。他的文風很大程度上受到了美國南方語言和他所喜愛的爵士樂和藍調的影響。他的句子跌宕起伏，充滿了文字遊戲，讀起來就像歌詞那樣韻律有致。

Murray had a phrase he used often in his work: “the also and the also.” He used this as shorthand for the relatedness of things, and the complexities — and challenges — in that relatedness. He used it to evoke the multivalence of cultural memory, of blues and jazz music and of American identity itself. Murray seems more relevant now than ever. If this isn’t a moment in which we could all benefit from an encounter with a little “also and also,” I don’t know what is.

在他的作品中，穆瑞常用“諸如此類”這一短語來概括事物之間的關聯性，以及關聯性之中的複雜和質疑。他用這一短語來描述文化記憶，藍調和爵士樂以及美國身份本身的多種意義。這樣看來，穆瑞的思想在現在意義尤其相關。在這個時節點，我們所有人都能從穆瑞的“諸如此類”之中獲利。

Ayana Mathis is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a recipient of the 2014-15 New York Public Library’s Cullman Center Fellowship. “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie,” her first novel, was a New York Times Bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, one of NPR’s Best Books of 2013 and was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as the second selection for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0. Ayana taught Creative Writing at The Writer’s Foundry MFA Program at St. Joseph’s College, Brooklyn. She is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

阿雅娜·馬蒂斯畢業於艾奧瓦大學作家坊，獲得過2014-2015年紐約公共圖書館Cullman中心獎金。她的第一部小說《海蒂的12個部落》(The Twelve Tribes of Hattie)曾登上《紐約時報》暢銷書榜單，獲得《紐約時報》年度優秀圖書獎，美國公共廣播電臺2013最佳圖書獎，並登上歐普拉·溫弗雷(Oprah Winfrey)的“歐普拉圖書俱樂部2.0”圖書榜單。她在布魯克林聖約瑟夫學院作家培訓MFA班教授創意寫作，並擔任艾奧瓦大學作家坊的英文與創意寫作副教授。