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菲利普·罗斯访谈

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5月18日澳大利亚悉尼的作家大会上，曼布克评委会宣布美国作家菲利普·罗斯获得了第四届曼布克国际奖。曼布克国际奖是对作家一生成就的褒奖。也就是说，这个奖项是对罗斯50多年的创作生涯和成就的认可和赞扬。5月20日，罗斯接受了《电讯报》（The Telegraph）记者本杰明·泰勒（Benjamin Taylor）的专访。以下是专访的部分文字稿。《电讯报》原文配有相对完整的访谈视频。感兴趣者可以点击阅读原文，观看视频。

Philip Roth: I’m not caged in by reality

Benjamin Taylor Were you one of those people who knew from childhood that you wanted to be a writer?

Philip Roth I didn’t know what a writer was, but I knew what books were because I would go to the Blanche library in our neighbourhood [of Newark, New Jersey], following the example of my brother, who would come home with half a dozen books. They were kids’ books, books about sports, books about the sea. I learnt what an author was in college. I began to read in my second year. I had entered college thinking I would study law. And I assumed I would do that. I was taking constitutional history, political science. Then I discovered literature and I was overcome. I wrote college stories to start with, which were as weak as anyone’s college stories. A few years later I was drafted and went into the army. At night when I went back to my office job I started writing stories that were OK. So [becoming a writer] wasn’t something I knew about and even when I did do it I never thought about it that much. Even when I started writing properly, I didn’t think I would make a living. Very few did make a living, and very few make a living now. I thought I needed to get a job, so I decided to teach English so I could write for those four or five months in the summer. That was my plan. Then I won a prize, the National Book award, and got a Guggenheim Award and then I was on easy street.

BT How was your stint in the army?

PR Actually I didn’t mind it. It’s fun to learn how to shoot a machine gun. Or use a bayonet. I hurt my back and wound up in hospital for two months and then eventually got discharged. My back still troubles me off and on. It might have been interesting had I been [in the army] longer. But that stint was enough. I got the idea.

BT When did history as a theme come into your writing?

PR I suppose in the mid-Eighties when I wrote The Counterlife. I don’t know what happened. It’s not so much that history was important, but place became important. I wanted to see what people were like in different places. London for one, Israel for another, Prague for a third. So place entered in and history came after. Why? Because I had gotten to be 50 or 60 and I could now look back on my life with historical perspective. You can’t do that when you’re young. It’s a mixture, then, of getting older and being enlivened by certain places that I’d been to.

BT When did you take up these themes of recent books: the Korean war, in 2008’s Indignation; or the perils of polio, in last year’s Nemesis? Do you do a lot of research or are you simply remembering?

PR I do my remembering while I’m writing. I don’t usually turn to the books until I’ve got a first draft of my story. I don’t want to be caged in by reality, as it were. I want my imagination to go wherever it wants to go. If it’s outlandish then of course I’ll get rid of it. Then, two or three drafts in, I begin to read books. Take The Plot Against America (2004): there’s a cousin in the book, I can’t remember his name, and he loses a leg in the war. He sleeps in a room with young Philip and he has a stump. So I found someone with a stump and I talked to him about how he got on living with it. He let me touch it, which was amazing. I walked on his crutches. He was a terrific fella. You may not use what the person says to you, but it stimulates you in the right direction. It launches your imagination. Or when I wrote about a kosher butcher in one of my books, Indignation, you’d think it would be easier not to consult books! But I did, I found interesting books about kosher meat. I also went to a kosher butcher in Brooklyn, went in and walked around and talked to the guys. I had been to them as a kid but I didn’t remember what it smelled like.

BT Some of the historical books have brought you poignant letters, from readers enmeshed in the events, on subjects like polio or the Korean war and so on…

PR The best come from people who want to discuss the subject of the book. And very often they have lived in a similar milieu or been through a similar hardship. Most recently, because of the publication of Nemesis [set during the Newark polio outbreak of 1944], I had gotten three or four or five or six letters from polio victims. All from men about my age because polio stopped with vaccinations of people in 1955 in America. These guys had got polio before that, as youngsters. And they’re so heartfelt and so descriptive, they made me feel validated in what I wrote.

BT Nemesis is the most recent in a series of four short novels. Can you say something about them?

PR About 10 years ago, I began to think about short novels. I had read quite a few. Saul Bellow was alive then and Saul had written three or four interesting short novels near the end of his life and I asked him how he did it. And he did what Saul [usually] did – he laughed. So I started to [write one]. It’s strange. With short stories, you’re fighting with one hand behind your back. How do you get the punch, the knock-out punch, in a short book? I had to find out. Maybe I found out. Maybe I didn’t.

BT Which writers in particular shaped you?

PR There are some writers who have made an indelible impression. I don’t know if they shaped me as a writer, but they shaped me as a thinker and a reader and as a literary person. When I first started out, at school, I had been steeped in Henry James and there was an “influence”, not all for the good, and there was a tone I picked up from James, that didn’t suit me at all. But it’s there in Letting Go (1962).

Kafka made a strong impression on me. His serious comedies of guilt touched me. I think Bellow, of course, has been a major figure in my mind and imagination all my life as a writer. Saul was born in 1915, so he’s 18 years older than me. Therefore he was a figure of awe for me. When I got to Chicago in 1955 to go to grad school and I read Augie March, it was my guidebook to the city. It all seemed so glamorous to me, to be in the city that nourishes the sky. I read Bellow’s books as soon as they came out.

BT Has the theatre every tempted you as it tempted writers like Henry James?

PR In the middle Sixties the Ford Foundation had a programme to try to interest novelists and poets to write plays. I got a grant from them to try to write a play. No one has written worse plays than me. Maybe Henry James. I couldn’t figure it out. Maybe there is no way to figure it out. Maybe that’s why there are very few good plays. But I couldn’t figure it out. I couldn’t get anything that resembled my mind into the plays. I did that for two or three years and it didn’t work.

BT Among your exact contemporaries was John Updike, whose career runs alongside yours. You won the National Book award; he won the Rosenfeld award. You were often contrasted.

PR John has been dead for three years. And I slightly suspect that were he alive he would be sitting here in this chair [picking up the International Booker Prize], not me. He was a great American master, surely the greatest man of letters of his period in the second half of the 20th century. He was a brilliant writer. He could write any kind sentence imaginable. You just asked and he would give it to you. His two great books to my mind, although he wrote quite a few great books, are the last two Rabbit books: Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest. He is free as a bird. He can go anywhere. He can do any kind of comedy. Any kind of description. He was always free but in those two books he is the freest he’ll ever be

非凡的读者：哈罗德·布罗姆

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著作等身（经他一人之手的各种学术著作40余部）、集无数荣誉于一身的文学研究专家哈罗德·布罗姆（Harold Bloom）已经80高龄了。耄耋之年的布罗姆老人在推新作《影响的解剖：文学是一种生活方式》（The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way Life）。这是老人意在概括其一生的文学研究理念、纵横畅论文学精粹的鸿篇巨著。正如老人本人所言，这是他最后的天鹅之歌（virtual swan song）。所以这部作品肯定是文学研究者的必读书之一。

虽然我说得热闹，其实我只是看到了《纽约时报》上的一篇书评而已。这篇书评一方面简要概括了布罗姆先生研究生涯，同时扼要简介了布罗姆新书中的一些主要观点。有兴趣者，也可以点击后面这个文章标题来看看：“Harold Bloom:An Uncommon Reader”。

罗斯获颁布克国际奖

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5月18日，在澳大利亚悉尼作家大会的新闻发布会上，布克国际文学奖评审委员会宣布美国作家菲利普·罗斯获得了第四届布克国际文学奖。正如评委会主席里克·格科斯基所言：“五十多年来，菲利普·罗斯的书一直在刺激着读者的兴趣、激发着读者的思考、愉悦着读者的生活。这是一个庞大的读者群，而且还在不断扩大”。正式的颁奖仪式将于6月28日在伦敦举行。奖金是6万英镑。

布克国际文学奖每两年颁发一次。此前的三次分别颁给了伊斯迈尔·卡戴尔（Ismail Kadare，2005）、奇努阿·阿切贝（Chinua Achebe，2007）和爱丽丝·门罗（Alice Munro，2009）。

以下资料来自BBC NEWS:

Philip Roth wins the Man Booker International Prize

Philip Roth has been described as one of the most prolific and controversial writers in the world

US writer Philip Roth has been announced as the winner of the fourth Man Booker International Prize.

The award and £60,000 prize money is presented to a writer for their “achievement in fiction on the world stage”, organisers said.

Roth, 78, said: “This is a great honour and I’m delighted to receive it.”

His body of work includes the 1997 novel American Pastoral, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize. At 26, he wrote his first book Goodbye, Columbus.

‘Esteemed prize’

The announcement was made at a press conference in Australia, during the Sydney Writers’ Festival.

The award will be presented at a formal dinner in London on 28 June, however a spokeswoman said Roth would be unable to attend.

Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1933, Roth’s controversial 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint brought him worldwide attention for its graphic depiction of sexuality.

Time magazine included the work in a list of the best novels of the 20th century.

His 2000 book The Human Stain was adapted for the screen, starring Sir Anthony Hopkins and Oscar-winner Nicole Kidman.

The American author said he was grateful to the judges for awarding him the “esteemed prize”.

He added: “One of the particular pleasures I’ve had as a writer is to have my work read internationally despite all the heartaches of translation that that entails.

“I hope the prize will bring me to the attention of readers around the world who are not familiar with my work. This is a great honour and I’m delighted to receive it.”

The judging panel was chaired by writer, academic and rare-book dealer Dr Rick Gekoski.

“For more than 50 years Philip Roth’s books have stimulated, provoked and amused an enormous, and still expanding, audience,” he said.

“His imagination has not only recast our idea of Jewish identity, it has also reanimated fiction, and not just American fiction, generally.”

Gekoski was joined on the panel by writer and critic Carmen Callil and award-winning novelist Justin Cartwright.

In March British thriller writer John Le Carre asked judges to withdraw his name from the shortlist.

The author said he was “enormously flattered” but added: “I do not compete for literary prizes.”

His Dark Materials author Philip Pullman and Rohinton Mistry had also been up for the award.

The Man Booker International Prize, which is presented every two years, has previously been awarded to Ismail Kadare in 2005, Chinua Achebe in 2007 and Alice Munro in 2009.

In Praise of the American Short Story

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【按】这是一篇好文章。收藏在这里作为资料保存。当然，也希望我的那些喜欢文学的同学们看到。原文的地址，点这里。


April 5, 2009

In Praise of the American Short Story
By A. O. SCOTT

To call an American writer a master of the short story can be taken at best as faint praise, or at worst as an insult, akin to singling out an ambitious novelist’s journalism — or, God forbid, criticism — as her most notable accomplishment. The short story often looks like a minor or even vestigial literary form, redolent of M.F.A.-mill make-work and artistic caution. A good story may survive as classroom fodder or be appreciated as an interesting exercise, an étude rather than a sonata or a symphony.

A young writer who turns up at the office of an editor or literary agent with a volume of stories is all but guaranteed a chilly, pitying welcome. That kind of thing is just not commercial. Contrary examples like Raymond Carver, who wrote almost no piece of fiction longer than a dozen pages, tend to confirm the rule. Carver, who died too young in 1988, was praised for his reticence and verbal thrift. He was a great miniaturist whose work grew in an anxious, straitened era, whose virtues lay in going small and staying home. But the conventional wisdom in American letters has always been that size matters, that the big-game hunters and heavyweight fighters — take your pick of Hemingway-Mailer macho sports metaphors — go after the Great American Novel.

But this maximalist ideology may be completely wrong, or at least in serious need of revision. The great American writers of the 19th century, whose novels are now staples of the syllabus, all excelled in the short form. Herman Melville’s “Piazza Tales” are as lively and strange as “Moby-Dick”; Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tales and sketches are pithier than “The Scarlet Letter”; Henry James’s stories, supernatural and otherwise, show a gift for concision along with the master’s expected psychological acuity. And the first great American fiction writer, Edgar Allan Poe, secured his immortality by packing more sensation into a few pages than most of his contemporaries could manage in a volume.

The near-simultaneous appearance of three new literary biographies offers a powerful and concentrated challenge to the habit of undervaluing the short story. The subjects of these lives — Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever and Donald Barthelme — all produced longer work as well, but their reputations rest on shorter work. And this work, far from being minor, is among the most powerfully original American fiction produced in the second half of the 20th century.

Much of it, indeed, makes the novel look superfluous. The literary landscape of the 1950s and early ’60s was thick with Southern writers, Roman Catholic writers, writers who dabbled in the gothic and the absurd, but none came close to the blend of grotesque comedy, moral seriousness and steel-trap intellectual rigor that courses through O’Connor’s tales of wayward Southerners. And no sprawling, anguished epic of marital unhappiness or suburban malaise can match the insight and elegance of, say, “The Swimmer,” Cheever’s perfect parable of affluent anomie.

As for Barthelme, he not only brought the energies of the indigenous avant-garde to the pages of The New Yorker, but also somehow married high-powered experimentalism with middlebrow entertainment without betraying either. If the big, anti-realist novels of John Barth and Thomas Pynchon are giant machines — more than a little imposing, perhaps a little dangerous — Barthelme’s sketches are ingenious gadgets that rest comfortably in your hand, throwing out sparks and shocks.

Reading through their collected stories, you wonder if novels are even necessary. The imperial ambitions of a certain kind of swaggering, self-important American novel — to comprehend the totality of modern life, to limn the social, existential, sexual and political strivings of its citizens — start to seem misguided and buffoonish. More of life is glimpsed, and glimpsed more clearly, through Barthelme’s fragments, Cheever’s finely ground lenses or the pinhole camera of O’Connor’s crystalline prose.

Barthelme, Cheever and O’Connor were not exact contemporaries. (Cheever was born before World War I, O’Connor in 1925 and Barthelme in 1931, a year before John Updike and two years before Philip Roth.) They came up in very different social milieus and show no marked affinities of style or influence. Their biographers — Blake Bailey for Cheever, Brad Gooch for O’Connor and Tracy Daugherty in the case of Barthelme — dabble in psychological portraiture while attending to the vagaries of three distinct literary careers.

What their three subjects shared was the good fortune of writing at midcentury, when the institutions of print supported the flourishing of the short story as never before or since. There were mass-circulation magazines and more-exclusive journals that would pay writers for stories that readers would spend money to read. In addition to The New Yorker, there was Esquire and (a bit later) Playboy and a host of publications with “Review” in the title: Saturday, Partisan, Kenyon, American, Evergreen, some of which still publish. All of them fed a boom in short fiction that may not have been sufficiently appreciated at the time.

It is easy, perhaps irresistible, to wax nostalgic for those days. But if the golden age of American magazines is long gone, the short story itself has shown remarkable durability, and may even be poised for a resurgence. Wells Tower’s “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned” provides the most vivid recent example of the way a good story, or a solid collection of them, can do more than a novel to illuminate the textures of ordinary life and the possibilities of language. And the short story may provide a timely antidote to the cultural bloat of the past decade, when it often seemed that every novel needed to be 500 pages long and every movie had to last three hours — or four years, if it took the form of a cable series.

The new, post-print literary media are certainly amenable to brevity. The blog post and the tweet may be ephemeral rather than lapidary, but the culture in which they thrive is fed by a craving for more narrative and a demand for pith. And just as the iPod has killed the album, so the Kindle might, in time, spur a revival of the short story. If you can buy a single song for a dollar, why wouldn’t you spend that much on a handy, compact package of character, incident and linguistic invention? Why wouldn’t you collect dozens, or hundreds, into a personal anthology, a playlist of humor, pathos, mystery and surprise?

The death of the novel is yesterday’s news. The death of print may be tomorrow’s headline. But the great American short story is still being written, and awaits its readers.