xxi, 689 p., [16] p. of plates : ill., ports., geneal. table ; 25 cm
附註
Includes bibliographical references (p. [579]-585) and index
內容
Part One: A Long Apprenticeship - The Author as Journalist (1905-1936) -- Chapter 1: Beginnings -- Chapter 2: A Budapest Childhood -- Chapter 3: Rise, Jew, Rise -- Chapter 4: Zionist -- Chapter 5: A Runaway and a Fugitive -- Chapter 6: First Steps in Journalism -- Chapter 7: Hello To Berlin -- Chapter 8: In the Gale of History -- Chapter 9: Red Days -- Chapter 10: Anti-Fascist Crusader -- Chapter 11: Marking Time -- Chapter 12: Prisoner of Franco -- Chapter 13: Turning Point -- Part Two: Fame and Infamy - The Author as Novelist (1936-1946) -- Chapter 14: The God That Failed -- Chapter 15: No New Certainties -- Chapter 16: Darkness Visible -- Chapter 17: Scum of the Earth -- Chapter 18: Darkness Unveiled -- Chapter 19: In Crumpled Battledress -- Chapter 20: The Novelists Temptations -- Chapter 21: Identity Crisis -- Chapter 22: Commissar or Yogi? -- Chapter 23: Return to Palestine -- Chapter 24: Welsh Interlude -- Chapter 25: The Logic of the Ice Age -- Part Three: Lost Illusions - The Author Activist (1946-1959) -- Chapter 26: Adventures among the Existentialists -- Chapter 27: French Lessons -- Chapter 28: Discovering America -- Chapter 29: Farewell to Zionism -- Chapter 30: A Married Man -- Chapter 31: To the Barricades -- Chapter 32: The Congress for Cultural Freedom -- Chapter 33: Back to the USA -- Chapter 34: Politically Unreliable -- Chapter 35: The Language of Destiny -- Chapter 36: The Phantom Chase -- Chapter 37: I Killed Her -- Chapter 38: Cassandra Grows Hoarse -- Chapter 39: Matters of Life and Death -- Part Four: Astride the Two Cultures - The Author as Polymath (1959-1983) -- Chapter 40: Cosmic Reporter -- Chapter 41: The Squire of Alpbach -- Chapter 42: Retreat From Rationalism? -- Chapter 43: A Naive and Skeptical Disposition -- Chapter 44: Seeking a Cure -- Chapter 45: Wunderkind -- Chapter 46: Chance Governs All -- Chapter 47: The Koestler Problem -- Chapter 48: An Easy Way of Dying
摘要
The first authorized biography of one of the most influential and controversial intellectuals of the twentieth century, based on new research and full access to its subject's papers. Best known as the creator of the classic anti-Communist novel Darkness at Noon, Koestler is here revealed as a man whose personal life was as astonishing as his literary accomplishments. The young Hungarian Jew whose experience of anti-Semitism and devotion to Zionism provoked him to move to Palestine; the foreign correspondent who risked his life from the North Pole to Franco's Spain; the committed Communist for whom the brutal truth of Stalin's show trials inspired the angry novel that became an instant classic in 1940; the escape from occupied France by joining the Foreign Legion and his bluffing his way illegally to England, where his controversial 1943 novel Arrival and Departure was the first to portray Hitler's Final Solution. Scammell also gives a full account of the author's voluminous writings, making the case that the autobiographies and essays are fit to stand beside Darkness at Noon as works of lasting literary value.--From publisher description
--- Paperback: 752 pages Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (June 5, 1990) Language: EnglishAmazon.com: The Act of Creation (Arkana) (9780140191912): Arthur ...While the study of psychology has offered little in the way of explaining the creative process, Koestler examines the idea that we are at our most creative when rational thought is suspended--for example, in dreams and trancelike states. All who read The Act of Creation will find it a compelling and illuminating book.
Koestler probes "bisociative" thinking--creativity and the new perceptions offered us by creative activity. An area of psychology that is often neglected, ...Show synopsisKoestler probes "bisociative" thinking--creativity and the new perceptions offered us by creative activity. An area of psychology that is often neglected, creativity is, according to Koestler, often suppressed by the daily near-automatic routine of our lives. He offers the suggestion that it is when our rational thought is suspended that we are at our most creative--in dreams and trances, when our minds are open to unexpected insight.
現在談另外一位游思俊博士。我2008年寫書時在網路上找一下，知道他可能還在AT&T服務，但願如此。 我在他讀博士時曾託他COPY一本創意學經典 Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler 。這本書人多知道 ，現在市面上竟還在賣1990年的企鵝板，不過可能很少人讀它。台灣國內只有吳靜吉博士曾介紹過此書。我們熟悉的 R. Ackoff在{解決問題的藝術}一書中說，他女兒認為研究創造力的，以此書最佳，不過 Ackoff 在該書坦承，他沒看過他。
還有更多朱自清與葉公超請教英詩韻律等..... 4月8日《朱自清日記》：“讀公超《從印像到評價》，甚清楚。錢鍾書《論東坡賦》一文，論宋代精神在理智與批評，尚佳，餘亦多恆語，不若其《論中國詩》也。”按《論東坡賦》是指他的英文論文Su Tong Po's Literary Background and His Prose-Poetry。錢鍾書用外文寫過若干文章，比較地不甚為人所知。 6月19日《朱自清日記》：“晚與蔣（夢麟）談錢鍾書事，殊未暢所欲言，余說話思想太慢，故總不能恰當也。公超後亦為錢進言，均無效。蓋校方不欲加聘新人也。”按這裡談起的當是錢鍾書的幾位老師想請他回清華大學教書，而此事未得學校當局的同意。我所見過的幾種錢鍾書傳均未涉及此事，而朱的日記卻為此提供了重要的線索。
讀馭聰的文章每令人想起中世紀時拉丁讚美詩裏一句答唱：Media vita in morte sumus。死似乎是我們亡友生時最親切的題目，是他最愛玩味的意境。
"Media vita in morte sumus ; quem quaerimus adjutorem, nisi te Domine, qui pro peccatis nostris juste irasceris? Sancte Deus, sancte fortis, sancte et misericors Salvator, amarae morti ne tradas nos."
"In the midst of life we are in death: of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, O Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased? Yet, O Lord God most holy, O Lord most mighty, O holy and most merciful Saviour, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death."
[IN COMBINATION OR WITH MODIFIER] Television programmes, magazine, books, etc. that are regarded as emphasizing the sensuous or sensational aspects of a non-sexual subject and stimulating a compulsive interest in their audience: 在電視節目，雜誌，書籍等，就"非性"之主題，強調其感性和煽情方面，來刺激他們的觀眾的必看之注意力。
從以上已可看出，本書的論題複雜眾多，但作者自言，《惡人》的「核心問題」與上述者在性質上迥然不同：「但若說本書有一個核心問題，其性質乃非常不同。那就是：我給各位說書中故事的用意何在？各位聽它們的用意何在？這至今仍是困擾我最甚的問題。」簡言之，這就是「人權書寫的吊詭」的問題：「人權書寫」的目的一方面是教育讀者同情心，但另一方面又極可能會流為一種「人權色情」（human rights pornography，一種從看八卦獲得的快感），以及讓讀者在付出同情心之後滿足於這種付出，不思進一步的行動：「也許，對著小說好好哭過一場以後，我們的感情便會燃燒殆盡，可以不用在真實世界付出同情。也許，這樣流過淚之後，我們便會覺得我們的付出盡已足夠，覺得我們的慈悲自我形象已獲得充分印證，無須做更多以達到人格均衡。」作者與此相關的另一個擔憂是：「我從展開這專案的一開始便受到這一類的憂慮縈繞。我聽見一些聲音在我腦袋裡悄悄說話：這些人（指日本老兵）在戰爭期間擁有神般的力量。他們單憑說一句話便可以予生或予死，而他們的受害者賤箭如草芥。現在，事隔多年以後，你卻把同樣大的權力重新賦予他們。有好長一段時間，這些聲音老是在我腦子裡嗡嗡響，讓我什麼都寫不出來。」
……另一方面，倘若我們不維持「他者化邪惡」（the otherness of evil）的意識，又會失去做出關鍵哲學區分的能力。我們會感覺某些行為抗拒理解和牴觸人性並不僅僅是感覺，而且還是一種範疇性區分的指標。如果不能把那些震撼我們良知的行為歸為一類，我們的道德語言將會變得非常貧乏。我們有需要把這些行為歸為另一類，既是為了尊重我們情感所包含的真理價值，也是為了尊重倖存者與死者。
Judi Dench in the film Iris, in which she plays the novelist Iris Murdoch, who struggled with dementia in later life.
Prolific novelist and moral philosopher Iris Murdoch died on this day in 1999. Her fiction was interested in the types of people who "commit sins, fall in love, say prayers or join the Communist Party"
Iris Murdoch, who would be ninety-six today, thrilled to paintings of every stripe, but she was compelled by one work in particular: “Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas.”
From The Sea, the Sea: The sea which lies before me as I write glows rather than sparkles in the bland May sunshine. With the tide turning, it leans quietly against the land, almost unflecked by ripples or by foam. Near to the horizon it is a luxurious purple, spotted with regular lines of emerald green. At the horizon it is indigo. Near to the shore, where my view is framed by rising heaps of humpy yellow rock, there is a band of lighter green, icy and pure, less radiant, opaque however, not transparent. We are in the north, and the bright sunshine cannot penetrate the sea. Where the gentle water taps the rocks there is still a surface skin of colour. The cloudless sky is very pale at the indigo horizon which it lightly pencils in with silver. Its blue gains towards the zenith and vibrates there. But the sky looks cold, even the sun looks cold. – Iris Murdoch (Penguin; $15.00)
Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms Dirge, a song of lamentation in mourning for someone's death; or a poem in the form of such a song, and usually less elaborate than anelegy. An ancient genre employed by Pindar in Greek and notably by Propertius in Latin. The dirge also occurs in English, most famously in the ariel's song 'Full fathom five thy father lies' in Shakespear's The Tempest.
我抄這段，才恍然大悟梁兄翻譯的大海，大海之作者的先生John Bayley所寫的《輓歌》（Elegy for Iris，有天下文化出版社譯本），實在有典故，都沒被翻譯和導讀人點破，因為Iris酷愛莎士比亞的Tempest。
*** 我抄的沒錯。英國文學中當然有許多人寫dirges，莎士比亞作品中的，只不過是較為出名。據M. H.Abram的The Glossary of Literature Terms，挽歌（dirge）不同於哀歌（elegy—hc:我們或聽過Thomas Gray 於1751年寫的Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard，The New Penguin Book of English Verse，p.484；美國總統甘迺迪遇刺後，名詩人Auden寫Elegy，由斯特拉文斯基譜曲）的地方，是挽歌較短、較不茍形式、並且，通常挽歌可配曲唱。除了前引的莎士比亞之「海下長眠」，還可舉William Collins的 A Somg From Shakespeare's Cymbeline.
February 9, 1999
OBITUARY
Iris Murdoch, Novelist and Philosopher, Is Dead
By RICHARD NICHOLLS
The Associated Press
Dame Iris Murdoch in London, 1998.
ris Murdoch, a prodigiously inventive and idiosyncratic British writer whose 26 novels offered lively plots, complex characters and intellectual speculation, died yesterday at a nursing home in Oxford, England. She was 79 and had Alzheimer's disease. Her struggle with Alzheimer's was documented recently in ''Elegy for Iris,'' a memoir by her husband, the critic and novelist John Bayley, who was at her bedside when she died. Miss Murdoch's first novel was published in 1954 and in a career that lasted for more than four decades, her fiction received many honors, including the Booker Prize for ''The Sea, the Sea,'' the Whitbread Literary Award for Fiction for ''The Sacred and Profane Love Machine'' and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for ''The Black Prince.'' Although she was made a Dame of the British Empire, she rarely garnered the attention given to gaudier contemporaries. She spent much of her career quietly teaching and writing, away from lecture tours, prize committees and television appearances. Along with novels, she produced a half a dozen works on philosophy, several plays, critical writing on literature and modern ideas and poetry. Miss Murdoch had a background in philosophy -- she knew and wrote about Jean-Paul Sartre, studied with Ludwig Wittgenstein and was a lecturer in philosophy at Oxford University -- and her fiction grappled with such questions as the nature of good and evil. This led many who knew her work superficially to assume that her novels were philosophical explorations of the origins of morality and behavior and too esoteric or intellectually rigorous for a general audience. In fact, many of Miss Murdoch's novels are exuberantly melodramatic, offering bemused records of romantic or erotic follies, as well as more somber battles between individuals representing moral good and its opposite. Her characters, drawn largely from the middle class, are described with loving exactitude and in such depth that their struggles to define what it means to live a good life take on dramatic force. In Books, Happiness And Moral Lessons Far from viewing fiction as another and lesser way of dealing with philosophical questions, Miss Murdoch argued that literature was meant ''to be grasped by enjoyment,'' and that the art of the tale was ''a fundamental form of thought'' in its own right. The ideal reader, she told one interviewer, was ''someone who likes a jolly good yarn and enjoys thinking about the book as well, about the moral issues.'' In another interview she went further, asserting that good art offers ''uncontaminated'' happiness that also teaches ''how to look at the world and to understand it; it makes everything far more interesting.'' Her belief in literature had its inception in her happy and book-filled childhood. Jean Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin on July 15, 1919, the only child of British and Irish parents. When she was a year old her family moved to London, where her father, Wills John Hughes Murdoch, joined the civil service. In interviews she remembered that as a child she had existed ''in a perfect trinity of love.'' Her mother, the former Irene Alice Richardson, who had trained as an opera singer, was a ''beautiful, lively, witty woman with a happy temperament.'' Her father began discussing books with her early on and encouraged her to read widely. She progressed rapidly from Lewis Carroll (one of her favorites) and Robert Louis Stevenson to more adult fare. Her great pleasure in reading, and her early attempts to write stories led to the conviction, which she formed as a child, that she would become a writer. She attended boarding school in Bristol, and in 1938 entered Somerville College, a women's college at Oxford, where she studied the classics, ancient history and philosophy. She graduated with honors in 1942 and immediately took a job with the Treasury. In 1944 she began working for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, which helped Europeans displaced by World War II. The somber experiences of the war had a profound impact on her thinking. Close friends died while in service, and her work, often on the front lines, with poor and elderly refugees was hard but instructive. If her childhood had been mostly idyllic, there was, she later noted, at least one shadow falling across her memories of those years: her family members were largely ''wanderers,'' cut off from their Irish relations and their roots. Working with refugees led her to reflect further on the place of the exile in modern society, as well as on the sources of evil, raising questions that she would pursue in many novels. After leaving the United Nations, Miss Murdoch took up further study in philosophy at Cambridge University, where she worked with Wittgenstein. While she expressed no lasting allegiance to his school of thought, she said her studies with him spurred her development as a writer. In 1948 she became a fellow and tutor at St. Anne's College at Oxford, where she remained for 15 years as a lecturer in philosophy. It was a particularly heady time for anyone concerned with the study and application of philosophical thought; new schools of philosophy were contending for primacy and often combative works were being produced to define these emerging disciplines. Miss Murdoch had met Sartre, the most visible proponent of existentialism, while working with refugees in Belgium. Existentialism, with its focus on individual will, appealed to her, but she found its emphasis on the primacy of the self disturbing. Her first published work, ''Sartre: Romantic Rationalist'' (1953), was a serious, clear explanation of existentialism and its place in contemporary thought. While it was balanced, it was not uncritical: Miss Murdoch felt that existentialism encouraged an almost hermetic focus on the self, ignoring the corrosive implications of such a perspective on society. Her study paid special attention to Sartre's fiction. She had already written and discarded several novels, but now she had become absorbed with how fiction expressed ideas and the ways fiction and ideas could best be blended. ''Under the Net,'' her first published novel, appeared to generally positive reviews. It focused on the picaresque adventures of a free-spirited Irishman making the rounds of some of the more raffish areas of London and Paris. A reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement said the work seemed to announce the emergence of ''a brilliant talent.'' The novel signaled the beginning of an industrious and prolific career. Miss Murdoch published, on average, a novel every two years for the next four decades. Her work, while varied in setting and tone, rarely moved far from several central preoccupations and themes. She first encountered existentialist writings while working with refugees, and she drew deeply from her fascination with those experiences in her second novel, ''Flight From the Enchanter'' (1956). It concerns the well-intentioned, conventionally liberal Rose Keep, who attempts to offer solace to two Polish brothers, refugees from the war. Her efforts founder because she cannot see the brothers as something more than symbols of displaced, wounded humanity. Revisiting Themes Of Pure Love The double-edged nature of love figures often in Miss Murdoch's fiction. True love, she asserted in the essay ''The Sublime and the Good,'' was perhaps the best way to overcome isolation and the absorption with one's crippled and constricted self. ''Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real,'' she argued. Many of the figures in her fourth novel, ''The Bell'' (1958), are crippled by their inability to clearly see, and thus to truly love, those around them. ''The Bell'' reached a new level of sophistication for Miss Murdoch, displaying elements that would become hallmarks of her fiction: effortless shifting between the grim and the humorous; deft marshaling of a large, varied cast of characters and numerous subplots, and creation of fables or myths that could suggest the struggle between true and diminished forms of love. In many of Miss Murdoch's novels, romantic disasters, suicides and even murder are set in motion by a character who is brilliant and ferociously self-absorbed. Such figures, usually men, often go beyond egotism into evil. In ''A Fairly Honorable Defeat'' (1970), a biologist who helps create biological weapons sets out to destroy those around him. But goodness, Miss Murdoch suggests, while imperiled, is also resilient. In ''The Sacred and Profane Love Machine'' (1974), the only character who comes close to true altruism is destroyed. But the novel suggests that her death may have opened the hearts of those around her to a better, more responsible life. ''The Sea, the Sea'' (1978), which received the Booker Prize, is considered one of Miss Murdoch's best novels. Its protagonist, a retired theatrical director trying to win back his first love, is not so much evil as simply self-absorbed and dangerously certain of his limited view of the world. ''A Severed Head'' (1961) was a black farce about infidelity, incest and violence. Storytelling And Large Truths Miss Murdoch was always balancing the demands of storytelling with the more urgent need to examine how the truth of a fleeting life reflected the larger, permanent truths of existence. ''The Red and the Green'' charts the fates of two friends who find themselves on opposite sides during Ireland's 1916 Easter rebellion against British rule. ''The Nice and the Good'' follows the efforts of a decent man to uncover the reasons for a colleague's suicide and extricate himself from the seamy web of blackmail and the occult that he uncovers. ''Italian Girl'' traces the struggle of a young man to liberate himself from the corrosive effects of family secrets and a shallow, destructive image of love. The tension generated by this iconoclastic approach to fiction has made Murdoch's novels unique and controversial. Her fiction takes a distinctive vigor and texture from its combination of the usual elements of a tale with a sustained, sophisticated inquiry into such concepts as the defining characteristics of goodness, the nature of morality, the place of faith in everyday life and the conflict between spiritual and carnal love. When most other writers were content to dwell on the heated specifics of individual lives or to simply offer a catalogue of society's ills, Miss Murdoch dared to suggest that fiction should be a means of dealing with life's largest and most basic issues and a way to learn about moral behavior. This quest ''for a passion beyond any center of self,'' as David Bromwich wrote in The New York Times Book Review, made her fiction unlike that of any other contemporary Western writer. It also let her in for both considerable acclaim and criticism. Harold Bloom, while praising her ''formidable combination of intellectual drive and storytelling exuberance'' in a review of her novel ''The Good Apprentice'' in The Times, and noting her ''mastery'' in ''representing the maelstrom of falling in love,'' also found that her narrative voice often lacked authority, ''being too qualified and fussy.'' Anthony Burgess, while noting the highly original ''synthesis of the traditional and revolutionary'' in her work and praising her talent for creating stories that were ''both thoroughly realistic yet at the same time loaded with symbols,'' also argued in his 1967 book ''The Novel Now'' that her characters were too often ''caught up in a purely intellectual pattern.'' In a memorable phrase, he contended that, while Miss Murdoch had a rare ability ''to dredge that world of the strange and mysterious'' that rested ''on the boundary of the ordinary,'' her work rarely offered a convincing portrait of the more common realms of life. In a body of work so large, both admirers and critics were bound to find material to advance their arguments, and this was true as well in her later novels, such as ''The Message to the Planet'' (1989) and ''The Green Knight'' (1994). But neither criticism nor praise seemed much to affect her. She said that she never read her reviews. She rarely read modern writers, preferring the British and European novelists of the 19th century (Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky), with whom she felt an affinity, describing them as ''moralistic writers who portray the complexity of morality and the difficulty of being good.'' She lived for many years in the small village of Steeple Aston, near Oxford, in a house crowded with books and paintings. The quiet life there, and in the house in Oxford to which she moved in 1986, has been described memorably by her husband, an Oxford don, in ''Elegy for Iris,'' his memoir of their lives together. John Bayley fell in love with Iris Murdoch when he was in his late 20's and she was in her early 30's; she passed his window on a bicycle. ''I indulged the momentary fantasy that nothing had ever happened to her; that she was simply bicycling about, waiting for me to arrive,'' he wrote. ''She was not a woman with a past or an unknown present.'' They were married in 1956; he is her only close survivor. The novelist Mary Gordon, reviewing ''Elegy for Iris'' in The Times, touched on their relationship. ''Radical privacy, sealing compartments of her life off from each other, was always a condition of Iris Murdoch's selfhood, and anyone who married her had to deal with that. From the beginning, she had friendships that she kept from Bayley, and love affairs that he was meant to understand had nothing to do with him. There are some hints that this was not always easy, but Bayley rose to the challenge.'' Ms. Gordon then quotes Mr. Bayley's memoir: ''In early days, I always thought it would be vulgar -- as well as not my place -- to give any indications of jealousy, but she knew when it was there, and she soothed it just by being the self she always was with me, which I soon knew to be wholly and entirely different from any way that she was with other people.'' Slipping Into A Baffling Darkness In 1995 Miss Murdoch told an interviewer that she was experiencing severe writer's block, noting that the struggle to write had left her in ''a hard, dark place.'' In 1996, Mr. Bayley announced that she had Alzheimer's disease, which she had suffered for five years by the time she died. Her final three weeks were spent in a nursing home. If ''Elegy for Iris'' offers a moving evocation of a great love story, it also provides a grim record of watching the personality of a loved one gradually dwindle under the burden of fear, bafflement and grief. She was, Miss Murdoch confided to one of her friends, ''sailing into the darkness.'' Mr. Bayley's descriptions of his struggle to understand his wife's suffering, to find ways to ameliorate it and to come to grips with the physical demands of his new responsibilities and to understand the conflicting emotions aroused in him by the experience are exact, penetrating and unsparing. Miss Murdoch became like ''a very nice 3-year-old,'' her husband said, and she needed to be fed, bathed and changed. The note on which the book concludes, however, is one of reconciliation, and of a painfully won serenity. ''Every day,'' Mr. Bayley wrote of their lives together in Miss Murdoch's last years, ''we are physically closer. . . . She is not sailing into the dark. The voyage is over, and under the dark escort of Alzheimer's, she has arrived somewhere. So have I.''
Letter to Raymond Queneau, October 29, 1949, Text below. Click to enlarge.
To Raymond Queneau.
St Anne’s Society
Oxford
[29 October 1949]
I know you are very busy but may I nevertheless point out that I haven’t had a letter from you since (I think) July. I know too that I didn’t write for a long time, but I am hoping that you are not cross with me. Vous ne m’en voulez pas?
I am doing quite a lot of work too—apart from teaching, I mean, which doesn’t count. I hope to get this thesis organised soon. Something on meaning, based chez Hegel, bringing in Sartre, refuting Ryle. (Ryle is the reigning professor here. His book on Mind,1 just published, summarises the post-Wittgensteinian empiricism which is British philosophy at present. I’ll send you a copy.) [. . .]
What’s doing in Paris about peace? I suppose the PC [Le Parti Communiste Français (PCF)] is organising conferences and so on. But does it extend beyond Communist circles? (Does Sartre lend himself to any such organisation?) Here, regrettably, peace is regarded as a Communist racket. Everyone seems to be becoming madder and madder.
Write to me soon, dear Queneau. Ever affectionately yours I
*
Letter to Raymond Queneau, March 1951. Text below. Click to enlarge.
To Raymond Queneau.
St Anne’s Society, Oxford [13 March 1951]
I notice with surprise and distress that I have owed you a letter since December 28th. Anyway, that is the date inscribed on what I take to be your last letter, now before me. I can’t remember that I have written to you since then, though I did get round to sending you Auden’s Romantic Iconography which stern colleagues here say is an irresponsible and unscholarly piece of work. […]
Everything has been mild hell here since I last wrote and before that too. A beastly term: I was lecturing, for the first time, an alarming experience (on ‘Meanings, Descriptions and Thoughts’). Before that I was bothered about trying to marry somebody, but it didn’t come off. Just as well maybe. If I could only stop thinking about marriage maybe I’d get some work done.
If I could see a means of doing it I’d slip over from philosophy into English literature—but this is difficult, probably impossible. (I might take a chair of philosophy at Bloemfontein or Tasmania and there I could do anything I suppose.) Next year I shall console myself by lecturing on imagination. (I’d like to work on Marxism too, particularly as no one here seems to understand this or care.) When I shall write a novel again I don’t know and this after all is the only important thing.
I doubt if I’ll get across the Channel this year. Short of cash. I’d love to see you (this is always a large part of the point of going abroad). But when I do see you I usually come away with the sad feeling that I haven’t communicated with you as I would have wished. However I don’t resign myself to non-communication, here or anywhere.
I’ll write again sooner I hope than last time. Raymond dear, as always, much love
A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf (1929). “This essay examines the question of whether a woman is capable of producing work on par with Shakespeare. Woolf asserts that ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.'”
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1949). “A major work of feminist philosophy, the book is a survey of the treatment of women throughout history.”
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963). “Friedan examines what she calls ‘the problem that has no name’ – the general sense of malaise among women in the 1950s and 1960s.”
Les Guérillères by Monique Wittig (1969). “An imagining of an actual war of the sexes in which women warriors are equipped with knives and guns.”
The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970). “Greer makes the argument that women have been cut off from their sexuality through (a male conceived) consumer society-produced notion of the ‘normal’ woman.”
Sexual Politics by Kate Millett (1970). “Based on her PhD dissertation, Millett’s book discusses the role patriarchy (in the political sense) plays in sexual relations. To make her argument, she (unfavorably) explores the work of D.H Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Sigmund Freud, among others.”
Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde (1984). “In this collection of essays and speeches, Lorde addresses sexism, racism, black lesbians, and more.”
The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (1990). “Wolf explores “normative standards of beauty” which undermine women politically and psychologically and are propagated by the fashion, beauty, and advertising industries.”
Gender Trouble by Judith Butler (1990). “Influential in feminist and queer theory, this book introduces the concept of ‘gender performativity’ which essentially means, your behavior creates your gender.”
Feminism is for everybody by bell hooks (2000). “Hooks focuses on the intersection of gender, race, and the sociopolitical.”
Scenes from Provincial Life (2011) ISBN 1-84655-485-3. An edited single volume of Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life, Youth: Scenes from Provincial Life II, and Summertime.
"How kind he is and how he loves us, and yet I was able to think so badly of him!" --from "Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth" by Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy’s earliest published work, the trilogy Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, was written when he was in his twenties, offering a tantalizing first glimpse of the literary talents that would come to fruition in his later masterpieces. Chronicling the experiences of a wealthy landowner’s son as he grows up and becomes aware of the world and his place in it, these three short novels were only loosely inspired by Tolstoy’s own memories. In old age he condemned the work as “an awkward mixture of fact and fiction,” but the imaginative powers that enabled him to capture so vividly the universal emotions and sensations of childhood have enthralled generations of readers. We are blessed to have, alongside the mature writer of Anna Karenina and War and Peace and the revolutionary mystic of the later years, the young Tolstoy who wrote these elegiac tales. In their sensitivity to nature and their evocations of fugitive feelings, they reveal his genius in all its untroubled early splendor. READ an excerpt here:http://knopfdoubleday.com/…/17…/childhood-boyhood-and-youth/
「照片和名字是不同的，照片更活生生。」J. M. Coetzee 小說《緩慢的人》(Slowman)，梁永安譯，台北：天培，2009，頁55
前陣子「談一下utopian的反義字（antonyms）「反面烏托邦」dystopian，它在18世紀末即有，此 字的前置"dys＋"為'BAD'＋(U)TOPIA。根據WordNet Dictionary ，它的意思和例子如下： Definition: [adj] as bad as can be; characterized by human misery; "AIDS is one of the dystopian harbingers of the global villages"- Susan Sontag
去年諾貝爾獎頒給Coetzee時說《恥》/《恥辱》這本小說： "In the dystopian novel Disgrace, David Lurie does not achieve creativity and freedom until, stripped of all dignity, he is afflicted by his own shame and history's disgrace. In this work, Coetzee summarises his themes: race and gender, ownership and violence, and the moral and political complicity of everyone in that borderland where the languages of liberation and reconciliation carry no meaning."」
For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well. On Thursday afternoons he drives to Green Point. Punctually at two p.m. he presses the buzzer at the entrance to Windsor Mansions, speaks his name, and enters. Waiting for him at the door of No. 113 is Soraya. He goes straight through to the bedroom, which is pleasant-smelling and softly lit, and undresses. Soraya emerges from the bathroom, drops her robe, slides into bed beside him. `Have you missed me?' she asks. `I miss you all the time,' he replies. He strokes her honey-brown body, unmarked by the sun; he stretches her out, kisses her breasts; they make love.
Soraya is tall and slim, with long black hair and dark, liquid eyes. Technically he is old enough to be her father; but then, technically, one can be a father at twelve. He has been on her books for over a year; he finds her entirely satisfactory. In the desert of the week Thursday has become an oasis of luxe et volupté.
B版本：「索拉婭身材高挑姚纖長，一頭長長的烏髮，一對水汪汪的深色眼睛。從年齡上，他足足以做她的父親，可真要從年齡上說，十二歲也可以當父親了。他成為她的顧客已經有一年多時間了，而且覺得她令人心滿意足。在荒蕪的一周裡，星期四成了一塊luxe et volupte*的綠洲。」 *法語：奢侈與肉慾。
He has a shrewd idea of how prostitutes speak among themselves about the men who frequent them, the older men in particular. They tell stories, they laugh, but they shudder too, as one shudders at a cockroach in a washbasin in the middle of the night. Soon, daintily, maliciously, he will be shuddered over. It is a fate he cannot escape.
*** 「她那有紅色肩帶的束腰上衣胸前，別了一枚小小的銅質證章， 上有一幅頭盔臂鎧，以及「苦盡」（註 10）的銘文。」（柯慈（J. M. Coetzee，1940~）＜少年時＞（Youth）鄭明萱譯，台北：時報，2004） 10 PER ARDUA通常以「苦盡甘來」（per ardua at astra）名之，直譯為吃盡辛苦而到達碰到星星的高度。
正確為：PER ARDUA AD ASTRA（艱難ヲ経テ星ヘ）」. Per ardua ad astra ad 「～へ」 astra 「天体、星座」 astrum i,n per 「～を越えて」 aspera 「荒い、でこぼこの、危険な」 asper era,erum,adj ardua 「険しい」 arduus a,um adj "Ad astra per aspera"は、カンザス州の標語らしい
（RAF（王立空軍）のバッジに記されたモットーより）.. http://www.raf.mod.uk/history/hrafmotto.html . The Royal Air Force Motto " Per Ardua ad Astra" Shortly after this, two junior officers were walking from the Officers' Mess at Farnborough to Cody's Shed on Laffan Plain. As they walked, they discussed the problem of the motto and one of them, JS Yule, mentioned the phrase "Sicictar ad Astra", from the Virgilian texts. He then expanded on this with the phrase "Per Ardua ad Astra", which he translated as, "Through Struggles to the Stars". Colonel Sykes approved of this as the motto and forwarded it to the War Office. It was then submitted to the King, who approved its adoption. *** 「多年以後，中年得獎作者的柯慈，在諾貝爾獎的晚宴上， 向逝去多年的母親呼喊：「媽咪，我得獎了！」 ──母親，我得獎不就是為你而得嗎？── 他終究還是回到了母親的愛裡去了──他再怎麼也逃脫不了的牽絆──正如他要回到南非。」（＜譯後＞◎文／鄭明萱） 「他終究還是回到了母親的愛裡去了──他再怎麼也逃脫不了的牽絆──正如他要回到南非。」這是「鄭」解，hc讀不出此義來。 "Mommy, Mommy, I won a prize!" "That's wonderful, my dear. Now eat your carrots before they get cold." http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/2003/coetzee-speech-e.html
******
Foe is a 1986 novel by South African-born Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee. Woven around the existing plot of Robinson Crusoe, Foe is written from the perspective of Susan Barton, a castaway who landed on the same island inhabited by "Cruso" and Friday as their adventures were already underway. Like Robinson Crusoe, it is a frame story, unfolded as Barton's narrative while in England attempting to convince the writer Daniel Foe to help transform her tale into popular fiction. Focused primarily on themes of language and power, the novel was the subject of criticism in South Africa, where it was regarded as politically irrelevant on its release. Coetzee revisited the composition of Robinson Crusoein 2003 in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
When Coetzee was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature, he revisited the theme of composition as self-definition in his acceptance speech, entitled "He and his Man".[14] Coetzee, who had lectured in character before, narrated a situation in which an elderly Crusoe quietly living in Bristol becomes the ambivalent muse of Defoe. According to The Guardian, this act of composition "write[s] "Defoe into existence, rather than the other way around."[14] Although Crusoe is the narrator of the piece, Coetzee indicated he did not know whether Crusoe or Defoe represented him in the lecture.[14] By contrast, he clearly identified himself with Barton inFoe: "the unsuccessful author—worse authoress."[15]
Herman Melville’s Omoo was first published on this day in 1847. This was the second of Melville’s novels — a sequel to Typee and so a second “Peep at Polynesian Life.” Both books were popular, though both provoked criticism from those who thought them salacious, or too complimentary of the islanders and too critical of the white man.
"War being the greatest of evils, all its accessories necessarily partake of the same character." --from "Omoo"
D. H. Lawrence visited Tahiti on his travels in search of somewhere non-British to live. In his "Critical Studies in Classic American Literature" (1923), Lawrence discusses Typee, Omoo (published on this day in 1847), and Herman Melville’s attraction to the South Seas:
"Never man instinctively hated human life, our human life, as we have it, more than Melville did. And never was a man so passionately filled with the sense of vastness and mystery of life which is non-human. He was mad to look over our horizons. Anywhere, anywhere out of our world. To get away. To get away, out! To get away, out of our life. To cross a horizon into another life. No matter what life, so long as it is another life. Away, away from humanity. To the sea. The naked salt, elemental sea. To go to sea, to escape humanity."
At the end of the chapter, Lawrence chastises Melville for coming back to prim New England, to be boxed in by family, career and a false civilization. The essay concludes with Lawrence admitting that he is talking as much about himself as Melville:
"Melville was, at the core, a mystic and an idealist. Perhaps, so am I. And he stuck to his ideal guns. I abandon mine. He was a mystic who raved because the old ideal guns shot havoc. The guns of the 'noble spirit'. Of 'ideal love'. I say, let the old guns rot. Get new ones, and shoot straight."
"Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance." --from "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (1853) by Herman Melville
Herman Melville (1819-91) brought as much genius to the smaller-scale literary forms as he did to the full-blown novel: his poems and the short stories and novellas collected in this volume reveal a deftness and a delicacy of touch that is in some ways even more impressive than the massive, tectonic passions of Moby-Dick. In a story like "Bartleby, the Scrivener" -- one of the very few perfect representatives of the form in the English language -- he displayed an unflinching precision and insight and empathy in his depiction of the drastically alienated inner life of the title character. In "Benito Cereno," he addressed the great racial dilemmas of the nineteenth century with a profound, almost surreal imaginative clarity. And in Billy, Budd, Sailor, the masterpiece of his last years, he fused the knowledge and craft gained from a lifetime's magnificent work into a pure, stark, flawlessly composed tale of innocence betrayed and destroyed. Melville is justly honored for the epic sweep of his mind, but his lyricism, his skill in rendering the minute, the particular, the local, was equally sublime.
Reginald Jeeves is a fictional character in the short stories and novels of P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975), being the valet of Bertie Wooster (Bertram Wilberforce...
----- 頁585 Herman Melville 1819-91 作品Omoo 最好附原文. 原作者引用的是下句黑體字 (紅字未翻譯)
CHAPTER LVII.
THE SECOND HUNT IN THE MOUNTAINS
FAIR dawned, over the hills of Martair, the jocund morning of our hunt.
頁7 漢譯完全
But does not Alfred Wallace relate in his famous book on the Malay Archipelago how, amongst the Aru Islanders, he discovered in an old and naked savage with a sooty skin a peculiar resemblance to a dear friend at home?
“Othello is about many different kinds of love: it’s about the light, beautiful side of love, and it’s about the twisted, darker side of love, and it’s about how, if you flip the emotional coin, love can make you do terrible things.” -- James Earl Jones from "Living with Shakespeare: Essays by Writers, Actors, and Directors" Edited by Susannah Carson
談到 "Othello"，整理點資料：
在2005年的SU：近讀些Allan Bloom談「政治、詩與莎士比亞」等，更覺得必須圍勦威尼斯（「一座色彩斑爛的美麗城市」）才行。【】 ---- Bloom, Allan Shakespeare\'s Politics. With Harry V. Jaffa. 160 p. 5-1/4 x 8 1964 /Fall 1996 日譯本：Shakespeare's Politics. (1966/1981) (with Harry V. Jaffa). 『シェイクスピアの政治学』松岡啓子 訳，信山社出版，2005 目錄：TABLE OF CONTENTS 1: Introduction: Political Philosophy and Poetry 2: On Christian and Jew: The Merchant of Venice 3: Cosmopolitan Man and the Political Community: Othello 4: The Morality of the Pagan Hero: Julius Caesar 5: The Limits of Politics: King Lear, Act I, Scene i Harry V. Jaffa Acknowledgments Index ----W. Edwards Deming Principles for Transformation of Western Management Chapter 2, Out of the Crisis
Chapter 17 Theory of Variances “How poor are they that have not patience!” Iago to Roderigo in Shakespeare’s Othello, Act 111, Scene iii. A.
---- The title is taken from from Act III, Scene 3, lines 347--354 of Shakespeare's Othello, where Othello says: O, now for ever Farewell the tranquil mind! farewell content! Farewell the plumed troop, and the big wars That make ambition virtue! O, farewell! Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump, The spirit-stirring drum, th'ear-piercing fife, The royal banner, and all quality, Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war! 這段，梁實秋的翻譯比較按部就班：永別了安寧的心境；永別了滿足；永別了使野心成為美德的羽軍和大戰！啊！永別了！永別了嘶鳴的戰馬，銳聲的喇叭，助威的顰鼓，刺耳的軍笛，威風凜凜的大纛，以及光榮戰爭中的一切璀爍壯麗的鋪張！ 朱生豪的翻譯比較簡麗：永別了，安寧的心緒！永別了，平和的幸福！永別了！威武的大軍，激發壯志的戰爭！啊！永別了！永別了，長嘶的駿馬，銳利的號角，驚魂的顰鼓，刺耳的橫笛、莊嚴的大旗和一切戰陣上的威儀！ …..」
歷史之構成，是在時間長河中某地之人或某些人在某地所呈現之具體事物和抽象思想，概言之，包含人、地、事。如果臺灣史研究採取「屬地主義」，即是在臺灣這塊土地上曾有過的種種人所發生的事，那麼1603年陳第寫的《東番記》當是外人對臺灣平埔族最早直接觀察所作的紀錄。20多年後，荷蘭傳教士甘治士（Rev. George Candidius）也對同一主題作了記載。早期臺灣這塊土地主人的圖像，在這兩份原始紀錄所呈現的異同透露什麼歷史信息，是值得考察的課題。
前近代臺灣史的論述以地方誌的形式呈現為大宗。清帝國官修方誌有既定的規範，其體例往往透露統治者對臺灣的興趣所在和看法，不同時期所修的方誌綜合起來便構成對臺灣的歷史認識。近代以前臺灣方誌以清修為大宗，但荷蘭Francois Valentijn的《新舊東印度誌》（Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indien）已有關於福爾摩沙的地誌記載，可見方誌呈現的統治觀點有其根本共同性。
歷史的書寫雖然沒人敢說絕對的公正客觀，但相對性是絕對存在的，至少像耶穌會士馮秉正（Father de Mailla）18世紀初期對臺灣的記述，應該是比較客觀的吧。19世紀西方旅行者或探險家所觀察的臺灣，雖被中國民族主義貼上帝國主義標籤，他們筆下的臺灣會比統治者遠離事實嗎？這些來臺久暫不一的觀察拼湊成的歷史圖像，是否如Lambert van der Aalsvoort的資料彙編《福爾摩沙見聞錄》，用「風中之葉」體現臺灣不能自主的命運？
“A Synopsis of Works on Ancient Chinese History Published in Taiwan, 1982-1987, ” Early China 14 (1989)，據〈近五年來臺灣地區中國上古史研究書目簡介〉翻譯，《漢學研究通訊》7.1 (1988)：1-7。
“The City-State in Ancient China,” Studies in Chinese and Western Classical Civilizations—Essays in Honour of Prof. Lin Zhi-chun on his 90th Birthday（《中西古典文明研究——慶祝林志純教授90華誕論文集》）（吉林人民出版社，1999），頁425-441。
“The ‘Animal Style’ Revisited, Translated and edited by Roderick Whitfield and Wang Tao,” Exploring China’s Past: New Discoveries and Studies in Archaeology and Art (London: Saffron, 1999), pp. 137-149.
信報月刊專訪節錄： 著名漢學家閔福德（Prof. John Minford）接受本刊專訪時直言，香港年輕人對廣東話的態度，令他震驚。「我請學生用廣東話念詩，他們都念得很快，彷彿感到羞家——學校的教育令他們以為廣東話是次等語言。於是我對年輕人說：不是這樣，請慢慢念，樂在其中、自豪地朗讀，因為廣東話很動聽，是珍貴的中國文化。」
著名漢學家閔福德（Prof. John Minford）接受本刊專訪時直言，香港年輕人對廣東話的態度，令他震驚。「我請學生用廣東話念詩，他們都念得很快，彷彿感到羞家——學校的教育令他們以為廣東話是次等語言。於是我對年輕人說：不是這樣，請慢慢念，樂在其中、自豪地朗讀，因為廣東話很動聽，是珍貴的中國文化。」
廣東話與港人身份認同密不可分，本身也具文化價值。閔福德對香港不陌生，八十年代起在澳紐、中港台的大學教中國文學和翻譯，前前後後在港生活15年，分別於理大、嶺大、港大和中大翻譯系任教，曾翻譯多部香港文學作品。他能聽懂粵語，認為是中文的一種美麗形態（a beautiful form of Chinese）。「也斯每次朗讀自己的作品，都是用廣東話。他認為廣東話是動人的語言，也接近古韻，我很同意。用廣東話念唐詩會押韻，非常悅耳。」
Wang Gungwu, CBE (simplified Chinese: 王赓武; traditional Chinese: 王賡武; pinyin: Wáng Gēng Wǔ; born 9 October 1930)[1] is a prominent Australian historian of Asia.[2] Anglo-Chinese Encounters since 1800: war, trade, science and governance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
The architect of modern science—Sir Isaac Newton—died on March 31st 1727. He left behind a voluminous trove of papers, yet the Newton that emerges from these manuscripts is far from a rational practitioner of cold and pure reason
Isaac Newton was born in Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, England on this day in 1642.
"Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things." --Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton was born in a stone farmhouse in 1642, fatherless and unwanted by his mother. When he died in London in 1727 he was so renowned he was given a state funeral—an unheard-of honor for a subject whose achievements were in the realm of the intellect. During the years he was an irascible presence at Trinity College, Cambridge, Newton imagined properties of nature and gave them names—mass, gravity, velocity—things our science now takes for granted. Inspired by Aristotle, spurred on by Galileo’s discoveries and the philosophy of Descartes, Newton grasped the intangible and dared to take its measure, a leap of the mind unparalleled in his generation. James Gleick, the author of Chaos and Genius, and one of the most acclaimed science writers of his generation, brings the reader into Newton’s reclusive life and provides startlingly clear explanations of the concepts that changed forever our perception of bodies, rest, and motion—ideas so basic to the twenty-first century, it can truly be said: We are all Newtonians. READ an excerpt here:http://knopfdoubleday.com/book/60766/isaac-newton/
【格雷安葛林，與媒體這一行】 我喜愛的英國作家格雷安葛林，在他的早年自傳《小說家的人生》裡，寫了一段有趣往事，他年輕時，曾在《諾丁罕報》擔任夜班編輯，當時編輯部的娛樂，就是每晚合資賭足球，贏者要請大家吃薯條。 葛林在書中描述，他手氣好，常贏了錢，到當地的Fish and chips小店買炸薯條，他注意到，店老闆只用《諾丁罕報》包薯條，從不用另一份報紙《諾丁罕衛報》，「因為衛報是很受尊崇的報紙」。 此處的《諾丁罕衛報》，並非當前的《衛報The Guardian》（前身為《曼徹斯特衛報》），但這個小故事，可作當前媒體困境的一則註解。....... +++++ 黃芳田《小說家的人生》A Sort of Life的譯文當然很可靠 缺撼是第220頁對 Lord Rochester's Monkey (1939) By Graham Greene 這本書，標點符號錯誤。
John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester, was born on April 1st 1647. A poet and courtier, he was the favourite of Charles II whose wit, lasciviousness and serious intellectual interests he shared
出版商是看 A Sort of Life 之後，才知道Graham Greene1939年寫這奇(詩)人奇事。
我在2005年貼過一文:
Rochester's most famous verse concerned King Charles II, his great friend. In reply to his jest that:
"He never said a foolish thing, nor ever did a wise one",
Charles is reputed to have said:
"That is true -- for my words are my own, but my actions are those of my ministers."
mien
Bearing or manner, especially as it reveals an inner state of mind: "He was a Vietnam veteran with a haunted mien" (James Traub).
An appearance or aspect.
[Alteration (influenced by French mine, appearance) of Middle English demeine, demeanor, from Old French, from demener , to behave. See demean1.] ━━ n.n. - 風采, 樣子, 態度日本語 (Japanese)風采(ふうさい), 態度. n. - 物腰, 態度, 風采 Français (French)mine, expression
Pepys' Diary: Wednesday 4 April 1660 The King: O, prisca fides! What can these be? Rochester: The love of wine and women. The King: God bless your majesty!" new. Hhomeboy on Sun 6 Apr 2003, ...
Sober in govt….continued: One of the better exchanges between Rochester and The King: "Rochester:Were I in your Majesty's place I would not govern at all. The King: How then? Rochester: I would send for my good Lord Rochester and command him to govern. The King: But the singular modesty of that nobleman- Rochester: He would certainly conform himself to your Majesty's bright example. How gloriously would the two grand social virtues flourish under his auspices! The King: O, prisca fides! What can these be? Rochester: The love of wine and women. The King: God bless your majesty!"
crest The Family Motto is: "PRISCA FIDES" this translates to "Ancient Trust" and can be traced to John Glassford Tobacco Lord. ...
ip·so fac·to (ĭp'sō făk'tō) adv. By the fact itself; by that very fact: An alien, ipso facto, has no right to a U.S. passport. [New Latin ipsō factō : Latin ipsō, ablative of ipse, itself + Latin factō, ablative of factum , fact.]
September 15, 1974
A Martyr to Sin
By WALTER CLEMONS
LORD ROCHESTER'S MONKEYBy Graham Greene.
n the best known portrait of John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, a pet monkey proffers a tattered page ripped from one of his master's books. The Earl, resplendent in silks, coolly awards the beast a laurel crown. "Were I...,"Rochester wrote, "a spirit free, to choose for my own share/ what sort of flesh and blood I pleas'd to wear,/ I'd be a dog, a monkey or a bear,/ Or any thing but that vain animal/ Who is so proud of being rational." For more than two centuries Rochester's notoriety as the wildest of "the merry gang" of wits who converged at Charles II's court during the 1660's overshadowed his reputation as a poet. The poetry- skeptical, parodistic, obscene and scathing- was a rediscovery of the 1920's, though John Hayward's 1926 Nonesuch edition escaped prosecution only by being limited to 1,050 copies. A scholarly biography by Vivian de Sola Pinto (1935; revised as "Enthusiast in Wit," 1962) usefully related Rochester's libertinism to Hobbesian materialism- specifically to Hobbes's doctrine that sensory experience was the only philosophical reality. Pinto pitched his claims high: "If Milton is the great poet of belief in the 17th century, Rochester is the great poet of unbelief." Professor Pinto's book hadn't yet appeared when Graham Greene, an unsuccessful novelist in his twenties, wrote a biography of Rochester 40 years ago. It was turned down "without hesitation" by his publisher, Greene told us in his 1971 autobiography, "and I was too uncertain of myself to send it elsewhere." The typescript has now been retrieved from the University of Texas library, minimally revised and elaborately packaged by George Rainbird Ltd. of London in the format of Nancy Mitford's "The Sun King" and Angus Wilson's "The World of Charles Dickens." "Lord Rochester's Monkey," it turns out, is Greene's best early work- a writer's book about a writer, with the vibrations of affinity we feel in Henry James's "Hawthorne" or John Berryman's "Stephen Crane."Greene, who had drawn the title of his first novel from Sir Thomas Browne- "There's another man within me that's angry with me"- responded to the discord between Cavalier and Puritan in Rochester's character, the extremities of debauchery and disgust, his personal elegance and appetite for squalor, the acrid blend of bawdry and moral fervor in his verses. Rochester lived with extraordinary velocity. Son of a Cavalier general who had followed Charles II into exile, and of a strong willed Puritan mother, he presented himself at court at 17- "graceful, tho' tall and slender," according to an early account, "his mien and shape having something extremely engaging; and for his mind, it discovered charms not to be withstood." The next year he was in the Tower for having tried to abduct the heiress Elizabeth Mallet, whose guardians aimed to auction her in marriage to a higher bidder. Freed, he redeemed himself by bravery with the fleet against the Dutch, returned to be sworn a Gentleman of the King's Bedchamber and to elope with Elizabeth Mallet, this time successfully, when he was 19. Of the tradition that he "was very barbarous to his own lady, tho' so very fine a woman,"Greene observes that "infidelity was the full extent of his barbarity. A love story... may have lain hidden between these two young, witty and unhappy people." As he veered between country and court, Rochester's inconstancy seems to have tormented him. More than one letter to his wife is filled with tender regret: "I myself have a sense of what the methods of my life seem so utterly to contradict..." Rochester told the historian Gibert Burnet that "for five years together he was continually drunk; not all the while under the visible effect of it." He was repeatedly banished- and as often recalled- by the King he scurrilously lampooned. Drink made him "extravagantly pleasant"; it also led to disgraces like the smashing of the royal sundial and the brawl at Epsom in which his friend Mr. Downes was killed. Greene plausibly links the most famous of Rochester's masquerades to the aftermath of the Epsom affray: he vanished from London and a mysterious Dr. Alexander Bendo- astrologer, diviner of dreams, dispenser of beauty aids and cures for women's diseases- set up shop on Tower Hill. "Dr. Bendo's" advertisement is one of the most dazzling virtuoso pieces of 17th-century prose. In its impromptu rush of quackery and Biblical cadences, its promises of marvels and its teasing challenge to distinguish the counterfeit from the real. Greene astutely notes "the cracks in the universe of Hobbes, the disturbing doubts in his disbelief, which may have been in Rochester's mind even in the midst of his masquerade, so riddled is the broadsheet with half truths." Dating his poems is a snare, but Rochester's Songs and his best satires- "A Ramble in St. James's Park," the "Satyr Against Reason and Mankind,""A Letter from Artemisia in the Town to Chloe in the Country,""The Maim'd Debauchee"- all seem to have been written before he turned 29. Thereafter "an embittered and thoughtful man who would die in 1680 of old age at 33," he seldom appeared at court. In his last year he debated theology with the Anglican Gilbert Burnet and underwent a religious conversion, the authenticity of which was impugned when Burnet published his account of it but which Greene, like Vivian de Sola Pinto, believes to have been genuine. "The hand of God touched him," Burnet wrote- "but,"Greene characteristically adds, "it did not touch him through the rational arguments of a cleric. If God appeared at the end, it was the sudden secret appearance of a thief... without reason, an act of grace." Rochester is thus the earliest of Graham Greene's black sheep heroes, far more powerfully drawn than the protagonists of the novels Greene was writing at this time ("The Man Within,""Rumour at Nightfall,""The Name of Action"). Facets of Rochester's character will reappear in the dangerous Pinky in "Brighton Rock," the whisky priest, the remorseful husband in "The Heart of the Matter," the God-thwarted amorist in "The End of the Affair." At Rochester's funeral the chaplain preached an unusual sermon: "He seemed to affect something singular and paradoxical in his impieties, as well as in his writings, above the reach and thought of other men... Nay, so confirmed was he in sin, that he oftentimes almost died a martyr for it." "Lord Rochester's Monkey," with a bibliography containing no item more recent than 1931, is going to catch hell from some scholars. Greene gracefully acknowledges Pinto's work ("I have no wish to rewrite my biography at Professor Pinto's expense") and sideswipes David M. Vieth's 1968 "The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester" (Yale University Press): "As Mr. Vieth admits the attribution to a great many poems depends on subjective judgment, and out ears often differ... Rochester's poems from his death on became more indecent with every year, and I have the impression that Mr. Vieth is inclined to prefer the hotter versions." But 40 years' work on the dating and ascription of Rochester's writings (by Pinto, John Harold Wilson, James Thorpe, Frank H. Ellis, Vieth and others) has left Greene in a number of unprotected positions. Four out of five verse citations on a single page, during a discussion of Rochester's marriage, are now pretty reliably believed not to be Rochester's. Misdating a letter blunts its fine edge of sarcasm: when Rochester wrote, "My passion for living is so increased that I omit no care of myself... The King, who knows me to be a very ill-natured man, will not think it an easy matter for me to die, now I live chiefly out of spite," it now appears he was not referring to the false report of his death in 1678 but to the King's premature appointment, three years earlier, of Rochester's successor to the lifetime post of the Ranger of Woodstock Park. When Rochester wonders at the enmity of the Duchess of Portsmouth, Greene remarks, "He had forgotten 'Portsmouth's Mirror'" -a poem containing allusions to events after his death. These lapses disfigure the book but cannot wreck it. Greene's intuition of character yields insights that academic caution might prohibit. He is at his keenest in a chapter on Elizabeth Barry, the London actress who bore Rochester a daughter remembered in his will. Her fellow players despaired of her; she had "not a musical ear" and could not master the declamatory tragedy-queen style. Undertaking her training on a bet, Rochester"caused her to enter into the meaning of every sentiment... and adapt her whole behavior to the situations of the characters." (Professor Pinto loses his head and tells us "we can see here the beginnings of a new art of the theatre that was to culminate in the naturalistic drama of Ibsen, Shaw and Chekov.") Mrs. Barry became one of the great actresses of her time, unequalled in the art of exciting pity, Colley Cibber said. And notorious offstage, Greene adds, for her combination of immorality and coldness. Thirty-four undated letters to "slattern Betty Barry" exist in print, though not in manuscript. Greene shifts these into a pattern of his own, speculating that she inspired the famous lyric "An age in her embraces past/ Would seem a winter's day"- with its piercing observation that while pleasure may be mistaken for true love, "pain can ne'er deceive." It is a convincing feat of historical imagination. Greene's claim for his Rochester is justified: "So complex a character can be 'dramatized' (in James's sense) in more ways than one. The longer I worked on his life the more living he became to me."
Walter Clemons is an editor of Newsweek.
side・swipesideswipe (REMARK) noun [C] a remark attacking something or someone made while talking about something else: During her lecture on her discoveries, she made/took several sideswipes at the management. ━━ n., v.横なぐり（する）; ことのついでの非難.sideswipe (HIT) Show phoneticsverb [T] to hit on the side: The motorcycle turned the corner too quickly, and sideswiped a car coming towards it.
at the expense of sb (ALSO at sb's expense) making another person look foolish: Would you stop making jokes at my expense? cadence n.（詩の）リズム; （声の）抑揚; 【楽】終止法. rang・er ━━ n.歩き回る人; 騎馬パトロール隊員; 〔米〕 森林警備隊員; 〔英〕 御料林監視官; 〔米〕 （普通R-） 特別奇襲隊員; 〔英〕 ガールスカウト(Girl Guides)の最年長組の少女. ranger oneself （結婚などで）身を固める; 味方する ((with)). ━━ n.賭(か)け（金，の対象）; 有力候補; 期待に添うもの; 〔話〕 予想; 意見. one's best bet 最も確実なこと. hedge [cover] one's bets 2度賭けをする. ━━ v.（～(・ted); -tt-） 賭ける ((on, against)). bet one's boots [bottom dollar, shirt] on (that) 〔話〕 …を確信する, 間違いなく…だと思う. I ('ll) bet 〔話〕 間違いない; 〔反語〕 ほんとかなあ. You bet! 〔俗〕 きっと; 〔米俗〕 どう致しまして. You bet? きっとか.
"Naked she lay, claspt in my longing Arms, I fill'd with Love, and she all over Charms, Both equally inspir'd with eager fire, Melting through kindness, flaming in desire; With Arms, Legs, Lips, close clinging to embrace, She clips me to her Breast, and sucks me to her Face. The nimble Tongue (Love's lesser Lightning) plaid Within my Mouth, and to my thoughts convey'd Swift Orders, that I should prepare to throw The All dissolving Thunderbolt below. My flutt'ring Soul, sprung with the pointed Kiss, Hangs hov'ring o're her Balmy Lips of Bliss." --from "The Imperfect Enjoyment" (1680) by John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647 - 1680)
----- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkhamstead
Famous people born in Berkhamsted include the novelist Graham Greene (1904–1991), whose father was headmaster of Berkhamsted School, which Greene attended. One of Greene's novels, The Human Factor, set there and mentions several places in the town, including Kings Road and Berkhamsted Common. In his autobiography, Greene wrote that he has been moulded in a special way "through Berkhamsted". Greene's life and works are celebrated annually during the last weekend in September with a festival organised by the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust.[40]
Henry Graham Greene died in Vevey, Switzerland on this day in 1991 (aged 86).
"Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and the simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and corrupt." --from "The Human Factor" (1978) by Graham Greene
Graham Greene’s passion for moral complexity and his stylistic aplomb were perfectly suited to the cat-and mouse game of the spy novel, a genre he practically invented and to which he periodically returned while fashioning one of the twentieth century’s longest, most triumphant literary careers. Written late in his life, The Human Factor displays his gift for suspense at its most refined level, and his understanding of the physical and spiritual vulnerability of the individual at its deepest.
小說家的人生 A Sort of Life
類別： 文學小說 叢書系列：藍小說 作者：格雷安‧葛林 Graham Greene 譯者：黃芳田 出版社：時報文化 出版日期：2006年
在 六十六年的人生歲月裡，我花在虛構人物與真實男女身上的光陰幾乎一樣多。說真的，雖然我很幸運擁有為數眾多的朋友，但卻不記得任何朋友的趣聞軼事，不管他 們是名人還是惡名昭彰的人──我能依稀記得的故事就是我寫過的那些故事。 那麼我紀錄這些往事點滴卻又為何呢？這就跟造就我成為小說家的動機差不多：渴望把紊亂的經歷理出一點頭緒來，同時也出於深切的好奇心。據那些神學家教導 說，除非我們多少學會先愛自己，否則無法去愛別人，而好奇心也是初始於家裡的。──引自格雷安葛林所著《小說家的人生》 (A Sort of Life,1971)
Graham Green was born into a veritable tribe of Greenes - six children, eventually, and sic cousins - based in Berkhamstead at the public school where his father was headmaster. In A SORT OF LIFE Greene recalls schooldays and Oxford, adolescent encounters with psychoanalysis and Russian roulette, his marriage and conversion to Catholicism, and how he rashly resigned from The Times when his first novel, THE MAN WITHIN was published in 1929. A SORT OF LIFE, like its companion volume, WAYS OF ESCAPE, combines reticence with candour and reveals, brilliantly and compellingly, the genesis of a life lived and an art obsessed by 'the dangerous edge of things. . the narrow boundary between lovalty and disloyalty, between fidelity and infidelity, the mind's contradictions, the paradox one carries within oneself'. --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.
There are people with whom one immediately feels a rapport, the certainty that one will know them forever. So it was with Elisabeth Dennys, who has died aged 84, as she stood in the doorway of her Sussex house one morning in the autumn of 1988. She was in her mid-seventies, but could have been far younger: tall, slim, with that smile and blue, exophthalmic eyes characteristic of the Greene family.
I was visiting to look at her brother Graham's papers for an edition of his letters to the press. We talked about many things, and the files of Greene's papers spread across the floor. Pepper, my dog, had no idea of the value which Greene's handwriting conferred on them; it seemed that they were spread about for her comfort, and she promptly sat down. I was mortified, but Elisabeth beamed - her smile was magical, and it charmed people across the generations.
It was a shock, a few months later, to hear that she had suffered a stroke at the wheel of her car. One cannot imagine anything worse than the condition which she endured for 10 years after that. Able only to utter a few sounds, and unable to walk or to move one arm, she had an initial despair, but - as throughout her life - she regained a certain serenity. Her brother Graham's great friend, Yvonne Cloetta, maintains that he never got over the shock of her stroke, and that his own health deteriorated from then on.
Not only Graham's death in 1991 did she survive, but also that of her husband, Rodney, in 1993, after he too had suffered a stroke: he would manage to get from his wheelchair to bed each night and a nurse tucked them up together.
Born in Berkhamsted, Elisabeth was one of six children, several of whom became eminent in the diverse but overlapping worlds of fiction, broadcasting, climbing, medicine and the secret service. Ten years younger than Graham, she enjoyed an at first necessarily remote relationship with him.
Being the youngest, she became imbued with a certain power of observation and empathy: quietly, she was the rock on which many lives depended. After going to school at Downe House and taking a secretarial course, she joined MI6 at Bletchley in November 1938, and worked for Captain Cuthbert Bowlby until he became head of Middle East secret intelligence in Cairo, where she rejoined him in the autumn of 1941. On the convoy out, she and other women had to lock in his cabin the ship's libidinous skipper. Not that there was any doubting her passionate nature: as her great friend Rozanne Colchester, another MI6 wife, has said, Elisabeth was extremely attractive to men, and attracted by them.
Meanwhile, at Bletchley she had met the man, Rodney Dennys, who would become her husband after his great escape from under Nazi noses in Holland.
Unrecorded by Graham Greene's biographers is the fact that Elisabeth was in close contact with him again by the late-1930s. As Yvonne Cloetta records, he told her "il serait tombe amoureux de cette belle jeune femme seduisante si elle n'avait ete sa propre soeur." hewouldfall in love withthis beautiful youngseductivewomanif she had notbeenhis own sister
She was responsible for the SIS engaging him and - more problematically - Malcolm Muggeridge as an unlikely double-act across Africa. Greene later dedicated The Human Factor to her, "who cannot deny some responsibility". As for his Sierra Leone experience, this brought him the material for his first big-selling novel, The Heart Of The Matter, and worldwide fame.
Elisabeth's war years were spent between Cairo and Algiers. She and Cuthbert Bowlby worked on evacuation plans for Cairo, and her letters to her mother were used by Michael Ondaatje as background for The English Patient. Her meeting again with Rodney Dennys was the stuff of romance. She had gone on a jaunt to an out-of-bounds section of desert by the Suez Canal and faced prosecution, from which he saved her: he pointed out that those who had reported her were also off-limits. In 1944 they began a very happy marriage.
Elisabeth, and the children who soon followed, travelled with Dennys from one MI6 posting to another - in Egypt, Turkey and Paris. In what seemed a surprising career move to some, Rodney left the secret service in 1957 to pursue a passion for heraldry, in the College of Arms. He and Elisabeth found and renovated a house which overlooks the Sussex Downs. As their children (a son and two daughters, who survive her) left, Elisabeth went through a low phase. She had hopes of writing fiction set in Tudor times, but it would not work. In the summer of 1975, Graham Greene's secretary retired, and, in an inspired move, he suggested that Elisabeth take on the job.
The routine of his work in Antibes, Capri and Paris depended upon somebody to field the myriad inquiries and demands upon his time. Their minds were in perfect harmony, as she could tell what would attract him. He either taped letters for typing onto signed paper or dictated urgent ones over the telephone: concise, witty and masterly.
Shortly before his death, Graham Greene arranged for his annotated library and manuscripts to be sold to help the family pay for the young carers who looked after Elisabeth at home. These were invariably from Australia or New Zealand, and travelling in Europe: they fell under her great charm - often returning for another spell. There was one exception: on his last visit to England, Greene stayed at a bed-and-breakfast place nearby, and, as he thought, would put a more severe-minded person at her ease with tales of his smoking opium in Saigon: with no idea who he was, she wondered what sort of household this could be, and soon left.
A cherished memory is of Elisabeth ringing up after she had heard that Pepper had died. I could not really understand what she was saying. That did not matter. Her spirit had always transcended words. In her work and her life, she never pushed herself forward, but her great kindness was built upon true strength and determination. No biographer can understand the brother she loved dearly without taking account of their relationship. Yvonne Cloetta gets it exactly right: she was struck by the similarity of their facial expressions, pleasant but firm, "avec une pointe d'ironie toujours presente. La complicite - pour ne pas dire la connivance - entre eux etait si flagrante qu'elle ne pouvait echapper a personne. Leur finesse d'esprit intuitive et discrete rendait les discours inutiles et superflus. Ils se comprenaient a mi-mots."
"witha touch of ironyalwayspresentthecomplicity-. if nottheconnivance-betweenthem wasso obviousthatno onecouldescapetheirfinesseintuitiveand discreetspiritmadeunnecessaryandsuperfluousTheytalk.. isincludedinmid-word. "
「他雖極崇拜哥德，但他卻為達到哥德所稱縣羨的『不慌不輟』（Ohne Hart, Ohne Rast） 的境地，這也如但丁吟"Io fei gibertto a me de le mie case"（我把我的廂房當做我的一架刑枷。HC案：原義大利文拼錯，HC已改正之。）一樣地未能達到這種境地。」（《一知半解及其他》，第97頁，林語堂先生翻譯）
基本上，他賣文買書，許多德文、英文的原版，讀到好的一定想引入或譯介，甚至於包括從《風月傳》法譯本轉譯成英文的The Breeze in the Moonlight（（舊曆6月３日）。「摩亞的《過去記》裡，很有幾篇好小說，打算譯一點出來…….」（舊曆6月12日；hc案：尚未查《達夫所譯短篇集》，提到的這本書Memoirs of My Dead Life, by George Moore，幾年前有整本翻譯本。）
當時懂得翻譯好東西的人不多，所以他發現商務印書館《小說雜誌》書目中有Morrison, Arthur（1863–1945, English novelist）的 Tales of Mean Street (1894)竟然被林紓翻譯出來，「終不敢相信這是真的」，這「狗嘴裡吐人言」（舊曆２月４日）。 ── 附錄： hc剪輯網路資料：【郁達夫] 1911年起開始創作舊體詩，並向報刊投稿。1913年赴日本留學，1922年畢業于東京帝國大學經濟部。期間廣泛涉獵了中外文學和哲學著作。1923年起在北京大學、武昌師範大學等校任教。1927年8月退出創造社。1928年與魯迅合編《奔流》月刊，並主編《大眾文藝》。1938年底赴新加坡，從事報刊編輯和抗日救亡工作。1942年流亡到蘇門答臘，1945年日本投降後被日本憲兵秘密殺害。1952年，中央人民政府追認為"為民族解放殉難的烈士"，並在他的家鄉建亭紀念。1928年起，郁達夫陸續自編《達夫全集》出版，其後還有《達夫自選集》、《屐痕處處》、《達夫日記》、《達夫遊記》、《閒書》、《郁達夫詩詞抄》、《郁達夫文集》，以及《達夫所譯短篇集》等。郁達夫的創作風格獨特，成就卓著，尤以小說和散文最為著稱，影響廣泛。其中以短篇小說《沉淪》、《採石礬》、《春風沉醉的晚上》、《薄奠》、《遲桂花》，中篇小說《迷羊》，《她是一個弱女子》和《出奔》等最為著名。 ─── Morrison, Arthur 1863–1945, English novelist. A journalist, he worked on the National Observer for William Ernest Henley. His stories of life in the London slums include Tales of Mean Street (1894), A Child of the Jago (1896), and A Hole in the Wall (1902). He was also the author of a series of detective stories.（The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001.）
“How can one resist the controls of this vast society without turning into a nihilist, avoiding the absurdity of empty rebellion? I have asked, Are there other, more good-natured forms of resistance and free choice? And I suppose that, like most Americans, I have involuntarily favored the more comforting or melioristic side of the question.”
* * * * * (University of Chicago Photographic Archive, apf7-00065, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library)
Saul Bellow was born a hundred years ago today. He was a serial adulterer, a negligent father and a surprisingly lacklustre public speaker. But he was also a good friend to many literary luminaries such as Ralph Ellison, Bernard Malamud and John Berryman, and a “famed noticer” who channelled his gimlet-eyed observations to create enduring, innovative, award-winning fiction. http://econ.st/1S3CUTl
10年前，我詳細評過Saul Bellow的最後一本小說。
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow 中國有譯本，也選入Saul Bellow文集 (約10冊)。 The 100 best novels: No 73 – The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)
"I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city — and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent."
"Everybody knows there is no fineness or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining."
--from "The Adventures of Augie March" (1953) by Saul Bellow
Much of The Adventures of Augie March takes place during the Great Depression, but far from being a chronicle of deprivation, the first of Saul Bellow’s string of masterpieces testifies to the explosive richness of life when it is lived at high risk and in tumultuous social circumstances. In a brawling Chicago of crooks, con artists, second-story men, extravagant dreamers, snappy dressers, and cold-eyed pragmatists, Augie March undergoes his sentimental education—an education that, though imbued with reality, will take him into realms progressively stranger, more marvelous, more filled with indecipherable meaning. The Adventures of Augie March is the product of an elegant and skeptical mind on which nothing is lost, and of an appetite for the look and feel of things that is both enormous and passionate. The result of these varying felicities is a novel that is immediate, strikingly unpredictable, authentic, and convincing. READ an excerpt here: http://knopfdoubleday.com/…/…/the-adventures-of-augie-march/
In the long-running hunt to identify the great American novel, Saul Bellow’s picaresque third book frequently hits the mark. Robert McCrum explains why
Monday 9 February 2015 05.45 GMT From the get-go – “I am an American, Chicago-born” – this turbo-charged masterpiece declares itself to be a heavyweight contender; and for some,The Adventures of Augie March is a knockout. Delmore Schwartz called it “a new kind of book”. Forget Huckleberry Finn (nodded at in the title); forgetGatsby; even forget Catcher in the Rye. This, says Martin Amis, one of many writers under Bellow’s spell, is “the Great American Novel. Search no further”. Well, maybe.
In retrospect, both JD Salinger (no 72 in this series) and Saul Bellow, who declared their originality at the beginning of the 1950s, stand head-and-shoulders above a rising generation of young contenders, from Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal to Kurt Vonnegut, and James Salter. No question: the great American postwar fiction boom starts here.
Augie March opens in 1920s Chicago during the Great Depression. Augie is “the by-blow of a travelling man”, and his adventures, loosely patterned after Bellow’s experience, are picaresque. This odyssey, in Bellow’s own words, traces “a widening spiral that begins in the parish, ghetto, slum and spreads into the greater world”, much as his own life did. Augie finds his feet through his engagement with a kind of America that had not been run to earth in fiction before. A sequence of brilliant set pieces narrates the footloose Augie’s upward drift. He becomes a butler, a shoe salesman, a paint-seller, a dog-groomer and a book thief, even a trades union shop steward.
He also revels, like Dickens, in some memorable characters – Augie’s Jewish mother; Einhorn, the fixer and surrogate father – and some seductive women: Sophie Geratis, Thea Fenchel (and her eagle, Caligula), and finally, Stella, whom Augie will marry. It’s a long book, some 500 pages. “It takes some of us a long time,” says Augie, “to find out what the price is of being in nature, and what the facts are about your tenure.” Quite so.
Augie enlists in the merchant marine during the second world war. When his ship, the Sam MacManus, is torpedoed, Augie experiences a long quasi-surreal episode on board a lifeboat in which he confronts matters of life and death in the company of Basteshaw, a weirdo. In the end, with persistent questions about identity and reality unresolved, Augie, the “travelling man”, declares himself to be “a sort of Columbus”, one who discovered a new world but who may himself be a flop. “Which,” as Bellow jokes in a brilliant closing line, “doesn’t prove there was no America”. A Note on the Text
Saul Bellow published his first novel, Dangling Man in 1944, followed by The Victim (1947) – two works of fiction that reflect his marginal status as a Canadian Jew living in the US – but did not find his true voice as a novelist until he wrote The Adventures of Augie March. Later, looking back, he recalled: “I was turned on like a fire hydrant in summer.” He had begun to write the novel in Paris, having won a Guggenheim fellowship. According to his first biographer, James Atlas, from whom he became estranged, Bellow found the spectacle of water flooding down a Parisian street to be the inspiration for the “cascade of prose” that gushed after his famous opening line: “I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that sombre city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way…”
He was, he said, revelling in “the relief of turning away from mandarin English and putting my own accents into the language. My earlier books had been straight and respectable. But in Augie March I wanted to invent a new sort of American sentence. Something like a fusion between colloquialism and elegance.” Philip Roth, who would sometimes struggle with Bellow’s influence, noted that this new style “combined literary complexity with conversational ease”. It was, like many literary innovations, from Mark Twain onwards, a high-low hybrid, and linked, in Roth’s words, “the idiom of the academy with the idiom of the streets (not all streets – certain streets)”.
The great, unfulfilled, hope of American fiction in the 1930s, Delmore Schwartz, put this explicitly: “For the first time in fiction America’s social mobility has been transformed into a spiritual energy which is not doomed to flight, renunciation, exile, denunciation, the agonised hyper-intelligence of Henry James, or the hysterical cheering of Walter Whitman.” Other critics, notably James Wood, have celebrated something equally universal – “the beauty of this writing, its music, its high lyricism, its firm but luxurious pleasure in language itself”. Advertisement
The Adventures of Augie March encountered only one serious pre-publication critique (from Bellow’s British editor, John Lehmann, the celebrated founder of Penguin New Writing). The upshot of this clash was Bellow’s determination to prevail. And he did. Augie March spoke directly to the new postwar generation, and would go on to influence writers as various as Cormac McCarthy, Martin Amis, Jonathan Safran Foer and Joseph Heller.
Bellow’s third novel was published by the Viking Press in 1953. In 1976 he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature, which identified this book as an important “novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age…” Three more from Saul Bellow
------ Henderson the Rain King (1959); Herzog (1964); Mr Sammler’s Planet (1970).
ris Murdoch, a prodigiously inventive and idiosyncratic British writer whose 26 novels offered lively plots, complex characters and intellectual speculation, died yesterday at a nursing home in Oxford, England. She was 79 and had Alzheimer's disease. Her struggle with Alzheimer's was documented recently in ''Elegy for Iris,'' a memoir by her husband, the critic and novelist John Bayley, who was at her bedside when she died. 
長久的快樂。漢˙焦延壽˙易林˙卷十一˙夬之頤：
雲物備故，
韓非子˙功名：
n the best known portrait of John Wilmot, Second Earl of 
