高英第二册Lesson 5 - The Sad Young Man(4)

Joneses that it had become joyless, patterned, hypocritical, and sexually inadequate. These defects would disappear if only creative art were allowed to show the way to better things, but since the country was blind and deaf to everything save the glint and ring of the dollar, there was little remedy for the sensitive mind but to emigrate to Europe where \do things better.\By the time Civilization in the United States was published (1921), most of its contributors had taken their own advice and were Wing abroad, and many more of the artistic and would-be artistic had followed suit.

其时，真正的知识分子对此现象远远谈不上满意。他们原本所希望的是使美国成为一个对艺术和文化更为敏感，对物质利益不那么贪求，对标准化观念不那么轻易接受的国家。然而，他们的这种思想完全没有受到人们注意，而他们的行为却由于提供了一种已变得如同“扶轮国际午餐会”一样常规化的“波希米亚式”的生活模式，反倒助长了这种标准化观念。结果，他们从战场上归来时本已十分强烈地对自己国家不满的情绪，现在就变得更加忍无可忍了。于是，他们的笔尖下便喷射出愤怒的火花，猛烈抨击着美国社会中的唯物质主义以及他们所称的文化市侩习气。由“三十位知识分子”合撰、哈罗德·斯特恩斯编辑出版的一部颇为庄重地题名为《美国的文明》的重要著作，汇集的便是一些憎恶美国的敏感人士的抨击性言论。这部著作的中心主题是：在美国，杰出人才得不到重视，艺术事业无人理

解，大企业腐蚀败坏了整个社会。新闻事业沦为发财赚钱的工具，政治腐败，官场上充斥着庸才和骗子，而美国人的家庭生活也由于人们一心想着挣钱和与邻里斗富而变得索然无味，刻板单调，充满虚情假意。夫妻生活也缺乏鱼水之乐。本来只需让创造性艺术来指明通向美好生活的道路·以上这些缺憾就会自动消失的。可是，美国举国上下除了亮晶晶响当当的美金之外，对其他的一切都视而不见．充耳不闻。因此，对那些敏感的才俊之士来说，唯一的出路便只有移居欧洲，“那儿的情形要好一些”。《美国的文明》正式出版(1921)之时该书的撰稿人大多数已经接受自己的忠告寄居在国外了，还有许多别的艺术家和预备艺术家也纷纷步其后尘。

10 It was in their defiant, but generally short-lived, European expatriation that our leading writers of the Twenties learned to think of themselves, in the words of Gertrude Stein, as the \a movement in itself, the \generation\attitude nevertheless acted as a common denominator of the writing of the times. The war and the cynical power politics of Versailles had convinced these young men and women that spirituality was dead; they felt as stunned as John Andrews, the defeated aesthete In Dos Passos' Three Soldiers, as rootless as Hemingway's wandering alcoholics in The Sun Also Rises. Besides Stein, Dos Passos, and Hemingway, there were Lewis Mumford, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, Matthew

Josephson, d. Harold Stearns, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cumminss, Malcolm Cowley, and many other novelists, dramatists, poets, and critics who tried to find their souls in the Antibes and on the Left Bank, who directed sad and bitter blasts at their native land and who, almost to a man, drifted back within a few years out of sheer homesickness, to take up residence on coastal islands and in New England farmhouses and to produce works ripened by the tempering of an older, more sophisticated society.

正是在他们那抗争性的，而总的说来又是短暂的侨居欧洲期间，二十年代我国的那些主要作家开始认识到自己一一用格特鲁德．斯坦的话说一一就是所谓“迷惘的一代”。“迷惘的一代”本身虽不是一场什么文学运动，但那些“迷惘的一代”的作家的态度却是那个时代文学作品的共同特征。战争以及凡尔赛和约所表现出的犬儒主义的强权政治使这些青年男女们确信·精神世界已经不复存在了。他们就像多斯·帕索斯的《三个士兵》中的那个受挫的唯美主义者约翰·安德鲁斯一样感到茫然不知所措，又像海明威《太阳照样升起》中的流浪醉汉一样感到漂泊无依。除斯坦、多斯．帕索斯和海明威外，还有刘易斯·芒福德、埃兹拉·庞德、舍伍德．安德森、马修·约瑟夫森、J哈罗德斯特恩斯、TS?艾略特、E．E．卡明斯、马尔科姆考利，以及其他许多小说家、戏剧家、诗人和评论家，都曾在法国的昂蒂布和塞纳河左岸地区探索过自己的灵魂，都怀着满腔孤愤对自己的祖国进行过猛烈辛辣的抨击·而目．在几年之后，

纯粹出于思乡情切，几乎无一例外地又都漂洋过海，回到祖国，定居于沿海小岛上和新英格兰地区的农庄上，来创作他们由于在一个更古老、更复杂的社会里经受磨炼而变得成熟了的作品。

11 For actually the \rebellious, iconoclastic, experimental, often absurd, more often misdirected- but never \produced, in addition to the writers listed above, such figures as Eugene O'Neill, Edna St. Vincent Millay, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, Stephen Vincent Benét, Hart Crane, Thomas Wolfe, and innumerable others could never be written off as sterile ,even by itself in a moment of self-pity. The intellectuals of the Twenties, the \young men,\Scot Fitzgerald called them, cursed their luck but didn't die; escaped but voluntarily returned; flayed the Babbitts but loved their country, and in so doing gave the nation the liveliest, freshest, most stimulating writing in its literary experience.

实际上，所谓“迷惘的一代”根本不曾迷惘过。在一段时间里，他们曾有过惊愕、孤独无依的感觉，因而变得痛苦、尖刻，以致于反社会、反权威、好标新立异，其行为往往有些荒唐，更常常近于胡闹——但却从来“迷恫过”除上述那些作家外二十年代还产生出了诸如尤金·奥尼尔、埃德娜·St．文

森特。米莱、F．司各特．菲沃杰拉德、威廉福克纳、辛苑莱刘易斯、斯蒂分?文森特·贝尼特、哈特·克莱恩、托马斯·沃尔夫等以及一大批其他人才。因此，即便这十年充满怨艾自怜之声，也绝不能将其看作是荒芜的年代而一笔抹煞。二十年代的知识分子，也就是F司各特菲茨杰拉德所称的“悲哀的青年一代”，诅咒过自己的命运，但并没有消亡；他们曾试图逃避现实，但又自动回到现实中来；他们痛责美国社会的市侩，但对自己的祖国却又充满热爱。正是在这样的过程中，他们创作出了美国文学史上最富有生气、最令人耳目一新、最激动人心的文学作品。

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