耶茨啊，耶茨……

2009-09-28 08:51:54 　　来自: luke (bittersweet)
A Tragic Honesty的评论   

　　花了几个月工夫，终于看完了这本厚达613页的传记，没办法，只能佩服一下自己。要不是因为爱耶茨，谁会啃完这样一本书呢。
　　
　　1999年，为耶茨鸣不平的小说家Stewart O'Nan曾感叹看不到近期有可能出版耶茨传记，然而仅过三年，Blake Bailey所著的耶茨传记《悲剧性的诚实——理查德·耶茨的生平与作品》就出版了。无可否认，这本书继承了英美传记写作的优良传统，是部厚实之作。作为第一部耶茨传记，它大有“毕其功于一役”的样子。作者最大限度占有资料，尽可能多地采访了跟耶茨有交往的人。写作态度上尽可能客观，又不失同情心。这本书在资料丰富、感情流露、作品分析等方面，肯定不会让喜欢耶茨的读者失望。
　　
　　我读了后，仿佛也过完了耶茨并不精彩（精彩得从哪个方面看，当然他留下的文学财富令人赞佩）而且难熬的一生，越看心情越沉重，尤其看到最后，耶茨去世前不久，重病缠身，自知去日无多，计划中的小说（《Uncertain Times》）无力完成，自己的文学声名一直局限在小圈子里，似乎给几个女儿也留不下什么东西。这天晚上，他坐在沙发上读自己的成名作《革命之路》第一章，哭得唏里哗啦的（cried like a baby）。读至此，也让我顿生苍凉之感。耶茨年满六十后还在为生计犯愁，66岁于贫病交加中死去，之前一段时间在阿拉巴马州（他不喜欢的南方）一所大学教书，完成《Uncertain Times》和回到纽约成了他未竟的心愿，所谓文人固穷，谓耶茨乎？
　　
　　2008年，电影《革命之路》上映后，出版界迎来了不大不小的“耶茨热”，他的几本书全部再版，就连在国内，他最优秀的三本书也已引进（《革命之路》已出，《十一种孤独》、《复活节游行》待出），我希望这一切，耶茨都知道。
　　
　　如果我有他人之才，大可以写篇长文来介绍这位杰出而落寞的作家，可惜……于是只能以读书笔记的形式记下点滴：
　　
　　***耶茨的一生，是写作的一生，他在写作上精益求精，多以自身经历为本，所以他的写作，也是苦苦在探索自己的灵魂。耶茨的一生，是贫穷的一生，也是酗酒和进进出出精神病院的一生，令人同情，也令人惋惜。另外他长期也是烟不离手，平均每天四包烟。
　　***耶茨没上过大学，虽然后来担任过多间大学的教职，但未上大学，是他心头的一个结，在他的作品中也有所流露。
　　***耶茨在世时，一直渴望在《纽约客》上发表短篇小说，但一直没有成功。只是在其去世多年后的2001年，《纽约客》才刊登了一篇《运河》。
　　***耶茨的骨灰一直存放在女儿莎朗的地下室里，《纽约客》终于发表耶茨的短篇后，莎朗轻轻拍了拍爸爸的骨灰盒，说：“好样的，爸爸！”
　　***耶茨在文学界最好的朋友一为短篇小说家安德烈·杜布伊斯，一为黑色幽默小说家库尔特·冯内古特，对他都是惺惺相惜。耶茨去世后，两人分别在波士顿和纽约为他举行了追思会。
　　
　　……………………
　　
　　摘抄：
　　
　　P8 耶茨的母亲对他有较大影响
　　And one of the essential truths of Yates's childhood – of his whole life, perhaps – is that he loved and admired his mother at least as much as he later claimed to despise her. She was a source of pain he never could evade, though writing about her helped.
　　
　　P17 讲耶茨的人生观
　　As a young man he discovered Flaubert, and Dookie (耶茨的母亲) became his foremost Emma; his sens of her, and hence humanity, proved vital to his bleakly deterministic world view. As he explained in a 1972 interview, his characters “all rush around trying to do their best – trying to live well, within their known or unknown limitations, doing what they can't help doing, ultimately and inevitably failing because they can't help being the people they are. That's what brings on the calamity at the end.”
　　
　　P75 冯内古特谈到战争对作家的影响，耶茨也参加过二战。
　　“People don't recover from a war. There's a fatalism that he picked up as a soldier. Enlisted men are surprisingly indifferent to survial. Death doesn't matter much.”
　　
　　P108 《了不起的盖茨比》对耶茨影响极大
　　But it was the work that ultimately mattered, and for Yates The Great Gatsby was holt writ. Encountering the novel for the first time was, quite simply, the definitive milestone of his apprenticeship, without which he might well have found something else to do with his life: Gatsby, Yates declared, was his “formal introduction to the craft.”
　　
　　P242 耶茨给一个想写作的朋友提建议：
　　“Don't worry if it comes slowly, or if you speed whole days staring at the wall…You must expect to produce a certain amount of bad stuff before it starts getting good. Stay loose: don't let your high critical standards choke you up and constrict you before you start.”
　　
　　P324 关于耶茨对菲利浦·罗斯的看法：
　　In those days Yates thought Roth “condescended” to his characters – that is, made them into so many foolish stereotypes. “I though Philip Roth was vastly overrated for years until I read Portnoy's Complaint, ” he told Ploughshares; “then I forgave him everything including his millions of dollars.”
　　
　　P333另一位著名短篇小说家杜波依斯对耶茨的评价。八卦一下：在爱荷华市时，杜波依斯的妻子（不知道有最后有没有离婚）甚至跟离婚后的耶茨有了一段情，这短暂影响了杜波依斯跟耶茨的关系，但是他们的友谊还是恢复了。
　　“Richard Yates is one of our great writers with too few readers, and no matter how many readers he finally ends up with, they will still be too few, unless there are hundreds of thousands in the most nations of the world. ”
　　
　　P369 耶茨和冯尼格一直惺惺相惜：
　　In his Ploushares interview, Yates made a point of exonerating Vonnegut from the charge that he was one of the detested “post-realist”: “The difference is that therer's real fictional meat in his best work, despite the surface flippancy of his style – real suffering, real passions, real humor…When I hear kids today mentions him in the same breath with some silly clown like Richard Brautigan it drives me up the wall. ” Vonnegut, in turn, thought Revolutionary road was “one of the best books by a member of [his] generations, ” on over the years nobody was more instrumental in promoting Yates's reputation.
　　
　　P408 《革命之路》在美国再版时，冯尼格又提供了一句评论：“（那个）时代的《了不起的盖茨比》。”
　　Moreover, his famous friend Vonnegut had provided a blurb in which he called the novel “The Great Gatsbyof [its] time”: “All the time I praise books I don't give a shit about,” he wrote Yates,“This is a sicknes of mine. I thank you for the opportunity to do something healthy for a change – to boom one of the best books of our generations.”
　　
　　P418 耶茨有段时间戒酒，但是因为评论了一本关于酒鬼的小说而重新喝上了
　　Yates agreed to review a Delacorte novel for the New York Times Book Review – Something called The Morning After, by Jack B. Weiner. All Yates know at the outset was that the book was about a drunk, and by the tiime he finished it Yates was a drunk again, too.
　　
　　P448 Work is its own reward as ever, not least because it was the best way to avoid dwelling on life.
　　
　　P496 卡佛与耶茨的交往：
　　A somewhat younger author who also favored such themes – indeed was indebted to Yates in a number of ways and modest enough to admit it – visisted Boston that summer. “I wanted to tell you again how pleased I was to meet you and to be able to spend a few hours with you, ” Raymond Carver wrote. “You've been one of my heroes since I first read Revolutionary Road and was just stopped dead in my tracks with admiration. ” Carver has presented Yates with a copy of his first collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, and now enclosed a second, Furious Seasons, with the diffident caveat that Yates read only four of the stories therein (he listed them). “Don't take any of this, please, as an obligation of any sort, ” he added. It's unknown whether the two ever met again.
　　
　　P517 耶茨一次不成功的朗诵会（无人出现）
　　That winter he was invited to give a reading at the University of Massachsetts (Boston), but not a single person showed up. He sat in the silent lecture hall while his two sponsors gazed at their watches; finally Yates suggested they adjourn to a bar. He didn’t seem particularly surprised.
　　
　　P550 《复活节游行》出版后，冯内古特致信耶茨
　　“You are one hell of a good writer,” wrote Vonnegut, to whom the book was dedicated, “and the best reporter I know of big messages in small gestures and events. Your most striking contribution to American literature, though,…is your harrowingly honest inventory of the meager resources available to middle-class mediocrities.
　　
　　P573 伍迪·艾伦也喜欢耶茨，曾想改编耶茨的电影
　　Then a few years later Braudy was watching Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters when she notices Yates's novel mentioned in one scene: “That's my favorate book!”she blurted out in the theater. She was so enthused that she wrote Woody Allen a letter praising both the movie and his taste in fiction; Allen replied that he knew little about Yates but loved his “clean prose and way of telling a story.” That same year, in fact, Allen had remarked in the New Yorker Times that he loved books about the “problems and strengths of women”, and therefore “couldn't wait to get [his] hands on …the Richard Yates novel, The Easter Parade.”