Tag Archives: American Literature

卡森·麦卡勒斯谈爱情

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Carson McCullers Talks about Love（卡森·麦卡勒斯谈爱情）是一部正在上演的音乐剧。由苏珊娜·维嘉（Suzanne Vega）创作并担当主演。表达了对于美国南方哥特小说创作的代表人物卡森·麦卡勒斯的热爱和敬仰。

Carson McCullers

苏珊娜·维嘉的卡森·麦卡勒斯情结只是因为大约30年前的一次偶然：那个时候的苏珊娜在书店看到了一本麦卡勒斯传记。她当时并没有去购买阅读这本书。但是封面给她留下了深刻的印象。据说因为她们长得非常像。从此，她对麦卡勒斯的热爱日渐加深，成了麦卡勒斯的忠实拥趸。她反复阅读了卡森·麦卡勒斯的《心灵是孤独的捕手》（The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter）、《婚礼成员》（The Member of the Wedding）等等。她的很多歌曲灵感都来源于麦卡勒斯的作品。而要为麦卡勒斯创作一部音乐剧的设想也在她的头脑里盘旋了20多年了。现在，她的愿望终于实现。

根据苏珊娜·维嘉的介绍，音乐剧Carson McCullers Talks about Love（卡森·麦卡勒斯谈爱情）的全部歌词都来源于卡森·麦卡勒斯的小说。

Suzanne Vega

苏珊娜·维嘉是美国著名的词曲作家、歌唱家。曾经7次获得格莱美奖提名，已经销售了700多万张唱片。

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【书评转载】亚瑟的悲剧

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近两周来，小说《亚瑟的悲剧》（Tragedy of Arthur）的受关注度极高。以下是来自《纽约时报》的书评文章：

Fake Memoir With Bogus Shakespeare

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Author of Tragedy of Arthur

“The Tragedy of Arthur” is a novel about the discovery of what is reputed to be a lost Shakespeare play, and with it Arthur Phillips has found the perfect vehicle for his cerebral talents: his ingenuity; his bright, elastic prose; and, most notably, his penchant for pastiche — for pouring his copious literary gifts into old vessels and reinventing familiar genres.

Mr. Phillips’s earlier novels, of course, testified to these gifts, though they also tended to point up his reluctance to delve convincingly into the inner lives of his characters. His much talked-about first novel “Prague” — about young Americans in Europe — was filled with echoes of Nabokov and James. “The Egyptologist” worked variations on old Hollywood mummy movies and H. Rider Haggard stories. “Angelica” gussied up the Victorian ghost story with some postmodern pyrotechnics. And “The Song Is You” read like a mash-up of “Sleepless in Seattle” and a cheesy stalker movie.

With “The Tragedy of Arthur” Mr. Phillips has created a wonderfully tricky Chinese puzzle box of a novel that is as entertaining as it is brainy. If its characters are a little emotionally predictable, we don’t mind all that much: we’re more interested in seeing how the author cuts and sands his puzzle pieces, assembles them into a pretty contraption and then inserts lots of mirrors and false bottoms.

Mr. Phillips — who, in addition to writing, has been a child actor, a jazz musician and a five-time “Jeopardy!” champion — begins this complicated enterprise by cunningly creating a frame story to explain the finding of the lost Shakespeare play “The Tragedy of Arthur” in which, he, Arthur Phillips, author of four novels, is a central player.

In a lengthy fake memoir that is supposed to be the “Introduction” to this Shakespeare play, Mr. Phillips pretends to be a fictional version of himself, recounting the story of how his con-man father — who is also named Arthur and who is serving jail time for forgery — came to give him “a quarto edition, dated 1597” of the lost play and how that play came to be authenticated by assorted forensic and scholarly experts and published, here, in these pages, by Random House.

The narrator — that is, the fictional Arthur Phillips — has an intense love-hate relationship with his father. He feels his dad repeatedly abandoned him and his twin sister, Dana, during their childhood because he could not resist committing petty crimes that kept getting him sent to jail. At the same time young Arthur hungers after his absent father’s approval: he wants his Shakespeare-loving father to ratify his own creative efforts as a writer.

In recounting the tale of his fictional namesake Mr. Phillips does a clever job of orchestrating well-known Shakespearian themes, like the contingency of reason and love; the rift between appearance and reality; and twins and doubles and confused identities. He makes questions of legitimacy (which percolate through the history plays) and authenticity (which underlies Shakespeare authorship debates) central to this novel.

Mr. Phillips depicts the fictional Arthur’s father, Arthur Sr., as a phony and pretender — as a sort of combination of the con-man father in Geoffrey Wolff’s memoir “The Duke of Deception” and one of the charming, prodigal fathers in John le Carré’s fiction.

Arthur Sr. has served jail time for things like forging fake grocery store coupons and scratch-off tickets for the New York Lottery. When his children were young, he even enlisted their help in creating phony crop circles as a prank. Why? “To astonish,” his son explains. “To add to the world’s store of precious possibility. To set the record crooked once and for all, so that someone’s life (some stranger’s) was not without wonder. It almost seems like a charitable act, if you subtract his ego.”

Given his father’s suspect history, why would the narrator believe for a second that “The Tragedy of Arthur” is the real thing? After all, the play is oddly filled with echoes of Phillips family history, including a dog with the same name as Arthur Sr.’s onetime pet.

Why would young Arthur lend his own reputation as a writer to another one of his father’s scams? The novel suggests hypotheses of widely varying plausibility: that for once in his life Arthur Sr. is telling the truth and has in fact stumbled across that rare and amazing thing — a new Shakespeare play, which he stole from the library of a wealthy man who didn’t know what he owned; that Arthur Sr. found a fake Shakespeare play and embellished it with some of his own imaginative embroiderings and then reprinted it on old paper with old ink; that young Arthur has himself written this phony play and pretended that his father gave it to him in order to inflate his father’s legend of shamelessness and manipulation.

How good a job does the real Mr. Phillips do of faking an early (and not very good) Shakespeare play? Well, let’s just say it’s hard to imagine that the fictional Arthur Phillips or the fictional Random House managed to find experts who would give the play their stamp of approval. The whole production feels truncated and rushed, and it’s filled with labored, lumpy poetry. On the other hand, we are supposed to suspect that “The Tragedy of Arthur” (or to be more precise, “The Most Excellent and Tragical Historie of Arthur, King of Britain”) is a fake Shakespeare play written by a Shakespeare-loving con man. So its actual quality is sort of beside the point.

Not only does Mr. Phillips have a lot of fun concocting this play, borrowing a little from “Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2,” “Henry V,” “Hamlet” and even “Macbeth” along the way, but also in writing “The Tragedy of Arthur” — the book we hold in our hands, not the play within it — he’s constructed a sly, spirited novel that deftly showcases his own versatility and shiny literary panache.

【书评转载】The Paris Wife

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以下书评文章转自《华盛顿邮报》：

Paula McLain’s ‘The Paris Wife’: A novel about Hemingway’s first wife

By Donna Rifkind （a writer in Los Angeles）

Paula McLain’s historical novel about Ernest Hemingway’s first marriage has been climbing up the best-seller lists as steadily as reviewers have been dismissing it. The Los Angeles Times called the book “a Hallmark version” of Hemingway’s Paris years, hampered by “pedestrian writing and overpowering sentiment.” The New York Times concurred, calling Hemingway’s wife Hadley “a stodgy bore” and McLain’s prose cliche-ridden and plodding. So who’s right: enthusiastic book-buying audiences or unsympathetic critics?

Score one for the consumers. “The Paris Wife” is a richer and more provocative book than many reviewers have acknowledged. What they call cliches are simply conventions that all historical novels share, including Nancy Horan’s “Loving Frank,” the acclaimed best seller that McLain’s book superficially resembles. And “The Paris Wife” is a more ambitious effort than just a Hallmark version of Americans in Paris. It’s an imaginative homage to Hadley Richardson Hemingway, whose quiet support helped her young husband become a writer, and it gives readers a chance to see the person Hemingway aspired to be before fame turned him into something else.

Building her fictional but scrupulously true-to-life narration around many source materials, including two full-length biographies of Hadley as well as Hemingway’s posthumous memoir, “A Moveable Feast,” McLain begins by dramatizing how damaged Ernest and Hadley were by the time they met in Chicago in 1920. Hadley’s father had killed himself in their St. Louis home when she was 13, a grim foreshadowing of Ernest’s father’s suicide and, decades later, Ernest’s own. She had also mourned the deaths of a beloved older sister and her mother.

Ernest, who had been seriously wounded in Italy during the Great War while a teenager, was suffering from the shaking nightmares and depression that today we call post-traumatic stress disorder and was then known as shell shock. This early brush with death had a profound influence on much of Hemingway’s future behavior and on all the fiction he wrote. McLain is right to underscore it, along with Hadley’s abundant sympathy for his suffering, with compassionate sensitivity.

Ernest and Hadley were down when they met, but they weren’t out. He was 21 and burning to be a writer. She was 28 and yearning to be a wife. They fell hard for each other. If the novel’s beginning sections stumble over a few expository bumps (Hadley: “What do you mean to do?” Ernest: “Make literary history, I guess.”), the narrative finds its flow a few months after the couple’s wedding, when they make their way to Paris. Hadley’s impressions of the city — dirty, war-shocked, tawdry and raw — stand out against Ernest’s instantaneous delight, though in time she came to appreciate “the oddity and the splendor.”

There was no doubt that here, on the cheap, Ernest was able to make Paris his informal university. Here he could learn from working-class Parisians as well as expatriate intellectuals, many of whom — notably Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein — served as mentors who helped him forge a blazingly new way to write fiction. He could study the Cezannes at the Musee du Luxembourg, figuring out how to translate the depths of their purity into language. And he could devote long, arduous hours to writing in cafes and garrets, knowing that Hadley, who hoped for his success as fervently as if it were her own, would be waiting for him soothingly at home.

Like all perfect setups, this one would not last. The tale of its ruin is familiar, but it gains freshness from Hadley’s point of view. With his first flush of literary notoriety, Ernest cast off his mentors, alienating them with a self-sabotaging viciousness that became a lifelong habit. At the same time, his social circle widened to include a recklessly modern new crowd, including Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Duff Twysden — the model for Lady Brett Ashley in “The Sun Also Rises” — and Sara and Gerald Murphy. Their high-life bohemianism threatened Hadley, who was by now happily if squarely encumbered with a baby son. Then, in a still-sickening betrayal, Ernest engineered an exit from his marriage by conducting a prolonged, open affair with Hadley’s friend Pauline Pfeiffer, the perilously chic Vogue staffer who became the second of his four wives.

McLain writes about Hadley’s pain during the death throes of her marriage with a terrible delicacy, suitable for this modest, steadfast woman who was nobody’s fool. (It’s clear that the author knows plenty about abandonment: Her 2003 memoir, “Like Family,” is a scorchingly frank reminiscence of growing up in foster homes in the 1970s.) At a low point, when Ernest, Hadley and Pauline are vacationing together in southern France, Hadley takes note of their three bicycles on a rock path. “You could see just how thin each kickstand was under the weight of the heavy frame, and how they were poised to fall like dominoes or the skeletons of elephants,” she says. Hemingway fans will not fail to remember the haunting image in his story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” when death approaches “in pairs, on bicycles, and moved absolutely silently on the pavements.”

Fame turned Hemingway into a self-crafted legend, an archetype and finally a parody. He was, as Joseph Epstein wrote in The Washington Post in 1970, “the first of the American writers we came to know too well.” Part of McLain’s accomplishment in this origin story is to make us look again at the Paris husband behind the Paris wife; not at the mythical swaggering Papa, but at the young, death-consumed writer who became a poet of death, who invented a new language to bring it to life, and whose brute emotional literary power will not be dismissed.

Give Me Your Heart

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Give Me Your Heart应该是美国作家乔伊斯·卡罗尔·欧茨最新短篇小说集了吧。这位超级多产的当代作家所涉猎的题材也是非常广泛。这个集子里所收录的是作者创作的神秘和悬疑小说。颇能代表南方哥特小说的风格特色。以下是《纽约时报》上的一篇书评介绍。感兴趣者不妨一读：

Reckless Abandon

By ANDREA THOMPSON

In this story collection, Joyce Carol Oates, master of the American gothic, revisits territory she has long claimed as her own, a fictional realm where mild-mannered men turn into monsters and the maternal embrace is more often crushing than comforting. Her effusive, exclamatory prose can be — and has been — mocked, but there’s little doubt that Oates is a well-practiced storyteller. Too well practiced, perhaps: the impact of these precisely turned tales of violation and violence tends to be more mechanical than visceral.

Part of the problem is thematic. In story after story, a woman is childless (read frigid and controlling) or has given birth to a nasty piece of work. Girls are vulnerable, hurt by their fathers, looking for acceptance; and, in turn, they are murdered, transformed into objects of obsession or driven crazy. A woman’s bodily integrity is breached by rape or by pregnancy, by relinquishing her virginity or by nursing an infant.

“You entered my virginal body, you took from me my innocence, my youth, my very soul,” writes the woman at the center of the title story, which takes the form of a letter to the man who deflowered her 23 years earlier. Her rage remains fresh, yet there’s little sense of emerging danger or keen insight in her insistent narration. Instead, the story’s menace depends on typography, as if italics might turn overboiled sentences into something creepy rather than clichéd: “I have forgotten nothing . . . . While you, to your fatal disadvantage, have forgotten almost everything.”

Negligent, absent fathers disorient their daughters. In “Strip Poker” and “Nowhere,” fathers have been imprisoned for assault; in “Smother,” an emotionally distant father and an anxious mother cause a woman named Alva to recollect, or imagine, that they murdered her sister. Men and women engage in ceaseless warfare. “You did not love a man who didn’t inspire fear, though you might fear a man — many men — whom you did not love,” thinks a character in “The Spill.” In “Nowhere,” a teenage girl feels “weak with desire for the man, unless it was fear.”

Oates does deploy some original twists and suggestions of ambiguity, assets that emerge most forcefully in “Smother,” which is split between the fractured memories of Alva and the more collected viewpoint of her mother, Lydia, as she meets a pair of detectives in order to rebut Alva’s allegations. Initially, this device leads the reader to sympathize with Lydia: she’s a well-respected professor, Alva an itinerant artist’s model with a history of drug problems. Here and there, though, a destabilizing note emerges: the collection of pills in Lydia’s medicine cabinet, her deeply ambivalent feelings about motherhood. The story is wonderfully executed, and left tantalizingly unresolved.

Unfortunately, these moments are fleeting. Instead, one is struck by Oates’s infelicitous images and repetitions. Some are clearly meant to be resonant: the quarry at Sparta, the blue-collar town in upstate New York that makes regular appearances in her fiction, pops up several times, easy shorthand for downtrodden lives. But is there some deeper meaning to the fact that in three stories men are pointedly noted to have bands of fat settling around otherwise slender waists?

It’s disheartening, then, that the story that fits this collection’s pattern least, “Vena Cava,” also feels the most cynical. Here a grievously injured veteran returns from his third tour of combat duty in the “War Against Terror” feeling less than human. His body is filled with life-sustaining machinery and his hometown seems like a movie set — soon enough, a horror film. But as this sadly predictable story grinds to its conclusion, the response it engenders isn’t suspense or even a queasy disquiet; it’s a desire to get a desperate man’s cold march to a gory end over as quickly as possible.

Andrea Thompson is a freelance editor and writer.