最新書評:《最後的戀歌——瓊·狄恩傳記》
Loss, nostalgia for a vanished past and “the unspeakable peril of the everyday” represented by “swimming pools, high-tension wires, lye under the sink, aspirin in the medicine cabinet” — these are the themes that have animated Joan Didion’s work, since “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” established her as one of America’s most distinctive and acute literary voices almost five decades ago.
喪失、對逝去的時光的懷戀以及那些“司空見慣卻又難以說清的危險”（比如游泳池、高壓線、廚房水盆下存放的鹼性洗滌劑、藥櫃裏的阿司匹林等等）是瓊·狄恩作品的一貫主題，也是令其作品繪聲繪色、生命力持久的重要元素。自從50年前發表《緩緩走向伯利恆》(Slouching Towards Bethlehem)奠定了狄恩在美國文學的地位，這些主題一直賦予狄恩一個獨特敏銳的文學聲音。
All her fears about the precariousness of life were horribly realized in December 2003, when her daughter, Quintana Roo, went into a New York hospital with an apparent case of flu and was soon lying unconscious in an intensive care unit, suffering from pneumonia and septic shock; days later, her husband of 40 years, John Gregory Dunne, sat down for dinner and collapsed, dead from a massive heart attack. Quintana would die about a year and a half later at the age of 39.
她對於人生的重重險象及不穩定性的所有恐懼都在2003年12月不幸地兌現了：她的女兒，昆塔娜·璐，貌似患流感入住醫院，卻很快因肺炎及敗血性休克躺在ICU病房昏迷不醒；幾天後，她相濡以沫40年的丈夫格里高利·鄧恩在餐桌前坐下準備用晚餐時突然癱倒，死於大面積突發性心衰；一年半之後，昆塔娜也撒手人寰，時年只有39歲。
Ms. Didion, now 80, chronicled these events in two books — “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005), a shattering contemplation of loss and grief and sorrow, and “Blue Nights” (2011), a more elliptical meditation on her daughter’s life and death — much as she chronicled the rest of her life in her other work: her nervous collapses, her marital ups and downs, her anxieties, her illnesses, her craving for stability. In “The Last Love Song,” Tracy Daugherty — a fiction writer, and the author of critically acclaimed biographies of Donald Barthelme and Joseph Heller — unavoidably draws heavily upon Ms. Didion’s own writings while at the same time trying to draw distinctions between her real life and her literary persona, between her experiences as a daughter, writer, wife, and mother and what he astringently describes as her “working her brand.” He notes, for instance, that Ms. Didion wrote in “Blue Nights” about thinking of taking Quintana, then an infant, with her on assignment to Saigon, during the Vietnam War, implying that she was so unprepared to be a mother that the absurdity of such an undertaking never occurred to her. In fact, he writes, she was anything but clueless — “she was a steely professional, not about to let motherhood get in the way of her career.” What stopped her, Mr. Daugherty argues, was the simple fact that Quintana’s adoption had not yet been finalized and “she could not be transported out of state, much less out of the country.”
現年已經80高齡的狄恩用兩本書記錄了她所承受的巨大損失與悲慟——《奇思幻想的一年》(The Year of Magical Thinking，2005)，書中她直面喪夫之痛，對人生的失去與悲傷的反思直撼人心；《藍色的夜》(Blue Nights，2011)是對女兒的生與死更加委婉含蓄的沉思。一如她的其他作品，兩本書均對生活種種做了記錄：從神經崩潰，婚姻的起起落落，到焦慮、病痛，以及對穩定生活的渴望，面面俱到。 小說家特雷西·多爾蒂（曾寫過備受讚譽的唐納德·巴塞爾姆和約瑟夫·海勒傳記） 新近出版的《最後的戀歌》(The Last Love Song)無可避免地從狄恩自己的作品中提取了大量資料，同時又將生活中的狄恩與文壇上的狄恩區分開來，把她作爲女兒、作家、妻子、母親的多重角色以及多爾蒂所描述的狄恩的“自我品牌塑造”一一展現給讀者。雖然狄恩在《藍色的夜》中寫到自己曾打算帶上襁褓中的昆塔娜去西貢執行寫作任務，儘管當時正值越戰，這意味着她對於初爲人母毫無思想準備，絲毫沒有意識到帶着一個嬰兒奔赴戰場採訪的荒謬。多爾蒂卻指出，事實上，狄恩並非對於做母親的責任一無所知，“她是一個意志剛強的職業女性，不想讓母親的角色阻礙了她事業的發展”。多爾蒂認爲，最終使她沒能把昆塔娜帶到西貢的原因是領養手續沒有完成，“昆塔娜無法被帶出州，遑論帶出國”。
The Didion who emerges from “The Last Love Song” is both a frail, angst-ridden outsider and a shrewd Hollywood and New York insider; a vulnerable witness to history and a hardheaded survivor; a writer drawn to theatricality and extremes, and a woman who prizes order and control. Mr. Daugherty — who did not get Ms. Didion’s cooperation — does an agile job here of examining how his subject’s life illuminated the eras she traversed (and vice versa). He uses her experiences, much as Ms. Didion did, as an index of the cultural convulsions that rocked the country during the 1960s and ’70s, while at the same time, using her literary methods and musical sense of language to chart her peregrinations between California and New York, and her intellectual evolution over the years.
《最後的戀歌》呈現給我們的狄恩既是一個身體虛弱、充滿焦慮的局外人又是一個精明銳敏的好萊塢和紐約的圈內人；既是易受傷害的歷史見證人又是精明務實的倖存者；既是追逐戲劇性和極端事件的作家，又是珍視秩序與掌控的女人。多爾蒂先生並沒有得到狄恩的配合，但他對傳主一生的審視卻也機敏自如，使狄恩的人生與她所經歷的時代輝映成趣。他以狄恩的個人經歷作爲上世紀六七十年代美國文化大震盪的指數，同時又以狄恩的創作手法及富有樂感的語言記錄了她遊走於加州和紐約之間的經歷以及她心智上的發展。
There are a few tasteless and superfluous lapses into gossip in this book — in one case, he even notes that a source’s observations “should be taken with heavy pitchers of salt.” And Mr. Daugherty dances nervously (though not as nervously as Ms. Didion has) around the subject of Quintana’s emotional difficulties and alcoholism, quoting a close friend who says her depressions and drinking were “probably intertwined” with her final illness (acute pancreatitis, which Mr. Daugherty writes, is “usually caused in young people by prolonged drug or alcohol abuse”). For the most part, this thoughtful and ambitious biography remains focused on Ms. Didion’s writing, using her life to shed light on her highly autobiographical work. Mr. Daugherty reminds us of the pioneer past of Ms. Didion’s family — her mother was a descendant of Nancy Hardin Cornwall, who, with her husband, had followed the ill-fated Donner-Reed party west, but split from the group in Nevada — and how this indelibly shaped her vision of California, and how California, in turn, became, for her, a metaphor for the promises and betrayals of America.
書中也有幾處庸俗無聊的八卦閒話；有一處甚至多爾蒂自己都坦言可信度極低。對於昆塔娜的情感困擾和酗酒，多爾蒂和狄恩一樣都是小心翼翼地旁敲側擊（儘管他比狄恩女士更放開一些）。借用一位關係密切的狄恩家庭朋友的話，多爾蒂告訴我們，昆塔娜的抑鬱症和酗酒與她最終的病患——急性胰腺炎——很可能有着千絲萬縷的聯繫（年輕人的急性胰腺炎“大多與長期濫用毒品和酗酒有關”，多爾蒂指出）。總之，這是一部深思熟慮、內容豐富的傳記。它始終以狄恩的寫作生涯爲主線，探索了她的個人生活與她極富自傳色彩的作品如何相得益彰；同時也讓我們瞭解了狄恩家族的西部開拓者背景。她的母親是南希·哈丁·康沃爾(Nancy Hardin Cornwall, 1811-1886)的後代，康沃爾夫婦曾經跟隨時運不濟的唐納-瑞德大隊西遷，在內華達州與大隊分手；這一歷史背景奠定了狄恩的加州觀，同時對於狄恩，加州又成爲美利堅的希望與背叛的隱喻。
Over time, her nostalgia for a vanished frontier — the wagon-train mentality of its first settlers, the stoic individualism embodied by her beloved John Wayne — would mutate into something more ambivalent, an acknowledgment that selfishness and what she called a “mean scrambling for survival” had always lain beneath the romantic myths.
隨着時間的推移，她對逝去的那個邊疆的懷戀——早期開拓者的大篷車心態、以她所喜愛的約翰·韋恩爲代表的吃苦耐勞、堅忍不屈的個人主義——逐漸演變成某種矛盾的心理，一種認爲自我利益及“爲生存下去而搶奪”本就是浪漫傳奇之內涵的觀點。
Although readers may not agree with all of Mr. Daugherty’s assessments of individual Didion books, his biography evinces a deep appreciation of her skills and idiosyncrasies, and an understanding of how writers like Conrad, Hemingway and her college professor Mark Schorer (who sharpened her awareness of textual nuances and the use of point of view) helped her forge her singular style. Mr. Daugherty expertly dissects Ms. Didion’s preoccupation with narratives — not just with the techniques of storytelling but also with the subtexts undergirding the personal and political story lines mapped in her work.
讀者未必贊同多爾蒂先生對狄恩每部作品的評價，但他的傳記表現了對狄恩的寫作技巧和獨特風格的高度讚賞，揭示了康拉德、海明威等作家以及狄恩的大學教授馬克·紹爾如何影響鍛造了她的卓爾不凡的風格（是紹爾教授培養了狄恩對文字微妙差異和不同敘事視角的敏感）。多爾蒂先生詳盡地分析了狄恩對敘事的專注——不僅僅是她講故事的技巧，還有那些埋伏在字裏行間的個人的和歷史的故事線索。
At the same time, Mr. Daugherty tries to tease out correspondences between Ms. Didion’s life and those of the heroines in her novels — most notably, anxiety over troubled or wayward daughters, from the emotionally impaired Kate in “Play It as It Lays” to Marin, the fugitive radical, in “A Book of Common Prayer” to the drug-addicted Jessie in “Democracy.” He suggests that Ms. Didion and Mr. Dunne’s focus on their own careers and self-absorption as writers sometimes sidelined Quintana when she was little (she was frequently parked with Ms. Didion’s parents, when they were traveling); that the Hollywood scene she knew as a teenager fueled her penchant for medicating her anxieties with alcohol and drugs; and that Ms. Didion was often in denial about Quintana’s problems. He is tough on Ms. Didion as a parent but arguably no tougher than Ms. Didion has been on herself (in print and in interviews) about her shortcomings as a mother, who missed or misread clues to Quintana’s unhappiness and screened off her worst worries and fears.
多爾蒂先生還試圖挖掘出狄恩女士和她小說裏的女主人公的相應經歷，其中最明顯的就是對於任性的、有問題的女兒的擔心與焦慮——這樣的女兒遍佈其小說作品，如《順其自然》(Play It As It Lays)一書中有感情障礙的凱特；《祈禱書》(A Book of Common Prayer)裏逃亡的激進分子馬琳；《民主》（Democracy）中吸毒成性的傑茜等等。他認爲狄恩女士和鄧恩先生對事業的專注和各自寫作的全身心投入往往使他們忽略了年幼的女兒（狄恩夫婦旅行時常常把女兒留在父母家裏）； 十幾歲就近距離接觸好萊塢文化的經歷加劇了昆塔娜以酒精、毒品緩解焦慮的嗜好；而狄恩又常常拒絕承認女兒的問題。對於狄恩作爲母親的失職，對昆塔娜精神抑鬱的種種端倪視而不見或誤解，並一再屏蔽自己的擔心與恐懼，多爾蒂都毫不留情地揭示出來，但他並沒有比狄恩在書中或採訪中的自我評判更嚴苛。
After finishing “Blue Nights,” Mr. Daugherty reports, Ms. Didion felt increasingly “weary, listless,” less inclined to push herself, less invested in maintaining the momentum she’d once prized, uncertain whether she would write again. Even her commitment to the pioneer imperative of stoicism and survival, he writes, had begun to waver. He quotes her saying to a friend, “There’s something missing in survival as a reason for being, you know?”
寫完《藍色的夜》之後，多爾蒂寫道，狄恩女士越來越感到“疲憊，倦怠”，不再願意發憤圖強，不再有從前的動力，甚至不確定是否還會繼續寫作；連她一貫推崇與遵守的邊疆開拓者的堅韌不屈、頑強活下去的精神都開始動搖了。多爾蒂引用狄恩自己對朋友說的話：“活下去作爲存在的理由缺失了什麼東西，你懂嗎？”
