和默温一起吃牡蛎：怀念诗人W.S.默温

和默温一起吃牡蛎：怀念诗人W.S.默温

凯文·杨/文，杨园/编译

当我想起W.S.默温，我就想起牡蛎。不是他写的牡蛎而是他吃牡蛎。2013年我见到他吃牡蛎，当时我带他去埃默里，作为我在那里举办的一个读书系列活动的一部分。这是他从第二故乡夏威夷来访问大陆的最后几次中的一次。

与其说他在朗读，不如说他参与了一场对话，在讲台上——实际上是短时间内站起来——我对他肃然起敬，与他具体说的什么比起来，我对他大方的举止记忆更深；他当时多少有些虚弱，但是仍然精神饱满。他的作品几乎相反：既坚固又有节奏，以最好的方式保持稳定，尽管有一种虚无在其中，一种澄清的朦胧。

于是，那些牡蛎：活动结束之后，我们一群人带他去亚特兰大一家很赞的餐厅后院吃了一顿美味的晚餐。在招待客人时，我经常为大家点菜——至少是开胃菜。默温点了一打牡蛎。当牡蛎们端上来的时候，他并没有虚情假意地递过来一个或做个姿态。很明显，这些牡蛎是他想要的，他坐在那里享用起来，他周围的其他人则开始分享菜肴（包括牡蛎）。这是一个知道自己喜欢什么，并有意得到它的人的那种有条不紊的、发自内心的快乐。他的诗可能会触及某些晦涩不明的东西，但他的味觉不会。

自然，在他的作品中，有许多令人愉快的秩序，而且说话整饬。他的诗歌对确定性感兴趣，或者，更明确一些，是对结尾很在意。听他在斯坦福大学读《我的忌日》（For the Anniversary of My Death）这首诗的经历一直伴随着我，十年前我就读过这首诗。这首诗有一种勇敢的表现，虽然不是炫耀；就像牡蛎，它是生的，带着海水的咸味，又嫩又滑。——“不知向什么屈从”。还有一些其他的惊奇进入了《纽约客》中，他在70年间在那儿发表了200多首诗。比如1967年的《归来》（Come Back）：“你在梦中回到我们中间，而我们不在这里/穿着浅色的衣服大笑着你跑下斜坡/跑到门口/敲了很长时间，心中奇怪。”他这一时期的作品感觉像是去除了外壳，因为他就是这么做的：抛弃并剔除1951年为他赢得耶鲁青年诗人奖（Yale Younger Poets Prize）的那种正式风格。（后来他担任这个奖项的评委。）在他那一代人中，他并不孤单——即使是在W.H.奥登的大胆之手挑选的其他耶鲁奖得主中，比如艾德里安·里奇（Adrienne Rich）和詹姆斯·怀特（James Wright）——从早期的恪守礼仪到一种开放、直接，而且往往是一种扩展而形成的政治。节拍和标点符号被抛弃，取而代之的是快速的换行和紧急的字，无论是“牛群”（The Herds）还是“死去的亚洲人”（The Asians Dying）。事实上，就像阿米里·巴拉卡（Amiri Baraka）和琼·乔丹（June Jordan）等其他不断发展的诗人的作品一样，形式正是政治发生的地方，与其说这一行诗是一个呼吸的单位，不如说它是一种屏息应对动荡时代的方式。

默温1967年的诗集《虱子》似乎在将变革作为一种必要的、人性的东西来召唤，大胆之极。这是现在我们可以从中学习的经验；它可能有助于我们在这种持续的紧张时刻写作。值得注意的是，他的一些不朽的作品来自于捕捉和赞美那些看似短暂的东西。最终，他会写一些他认为是永恒的东西，但不知怎的，却处于危险之中：鲸鱼、雨林、他心爱的岛屿家园。他能在一片树叶中发现一座森林。

他的《日出时找蘑菇》（Looking for Mushrooms at Sunrise）表达了这样一种专注却难以捉摸的赞美：

它们出现的地方我好像以前去过

我记得它们常常在那里出现，就像还记得

另一种生活

我现在还能走到哪里

去找我

我记得，当默温到斯坦福大学时，他访问德妮思·莱维托芙（Danise Levertov）的班，和我们交谈，看了几首我们写的诗。德妮思·莱维托芙的教学我很钦佩，你可以把她列入60年代转型和变革艺术家的名单上；她的转变，同时也是一种形式的转变，她写到“从来没有超越内容的揭示”。越战期间，莱维托芙曾与她的老朋友罗伯特·邓肯（Robert Duncan）就诗歌的功能进行过一场著名的争论，并最终与之决裂。她的诗作内容和诗学已经发生了变化，尤其是反战，而邓肯对“空虚空洞的口号”表示厌恶，声称“诗人的角色不是反对邪恶，而是想象邪恶”。当然，他们都是对的。从60年代末开始，默温通过创作一种时而愤怒时而内敛的诗歌，似乎在这两个看似不可调和的阵营中，找到了一种中间路线。他基本上是将他的方法大声喊出来。

作为一名读者，他也非常大方，而且几十年后我依然记得，他对我的一首诗非常友好。这首诗题为《撒网》（Casting），一首我和父亲一起捕鱼的诗，直到15年后，我父亲也已过世，它才出现在一本书中。他对这首诗说了一些善意的话，而且我认为他其实是对这首短诗提出了一些正确的警告，人们必须警惕，至少也要意识到一首诗可能产生的起伏节奏。这是一条很好的建议，但我并不会完全听从。因为他的作品已经教会了我一点：一个人必须按照自己听到的去写，不能害怕在纸上捕捉内在的声音，去拥有自己的那首歌。将之扩展到倾听其他声音，就像默温伟大的翻译，它提醒我们跨越语言和时间的自我联系。

默温一开始就进行翻译，他的《翻译选集》1969年面世，历时20年。在那本书的序言中，他写到了自己的局限性，而他自己也很清楚，这些局限性并不是真正的局限性。“除了英语，我真正精通的语言是罗曼语，尤其是法语和西班牙语。但我很久之前就忘记了大部分我学过的拉丁语，更近一些时候又忘记了大部分我懂的葡萄牙语；我的意大利语阅读（这是我所拥有的全部）从来都是费劲且意义含糊的。”但是他译的这些诗却一点都不费力且不含糊，也许是因为他明白，一种翻译必须变成一首英文新诗。不过，它们从来不会感觉像罗伯特·洛厄尔的“模仿”，意思是通过一种松散的翻译成为洛厄尔自己的诗歌版本。

当我开始写作我的第三本诗集《果冻卷：一曲蓝色布鲁斯》（Jelly Roll：a blues），我也阅读了大量西班牙语诗人，包括费德里科·加西亚·洛尔迦，他的作品是默温翻译的。洛尔迦在被法西斯分子杀害前对弗拉门戈的热爱和运用给了他灵感——拉尔夫·埃里森也看到了弗拉门戈和布鲁斯之间的联系。在他的翻译中，默温似乎知道这种联系的力量。他对巴勃罗·聂鲁达的《二十首情诗和一首绝望之歌》的诠释对我而言至今是一个图腾。我意识到，它的力量在很大程度上是通过默温听到聂鲁达而获得的，反之亦然：默温有一种通过翻译使作品驯服的方法，而不是像某些翻译作品那样，因处理过度而产生奇怪的皮鞋皮子擦痕或水果的瘀伤。“是离别的时刻，寒冷刺骨的时刻/黑夜把所有时间都固定在这一刻。”这是通过默温的聂鲁达。浪漫而目光凛冽。

默温是最后的浪漫主义者吗？他的作品颠覆了自己，几乎是一步一步瓦解了现代主义：从20世纪中期正式、略带超现实主义色彩的诗歌，他穿越时空，回到了标志着高度现代主义的不间断实验；以及将自然视为高尚的，几乎同于人类，就像英国浪漫主义者的作品一样；甚至在他晚年开始写法国史诗，灵感来自于他在法国南部农场70多年前的生活经历。自然，他是最“后现代”的艺术：摘下面具，发现的不只一张脸，还有一种精心制作的形式，让人感觉自然而广阔，即使我们意识到是一种技巧。我记得，在斯坦福的那堂课上，有人问他关于意象的问题，他动情地背诵了日本诗人小林一茶为他死去女儿而写的一首著名的俳句：“露水的世界是露珠的世界。然而，然而。”

默温在《纽约客》上发表的最后几首诗中有一首《与新闻为伴》（Living with the News）让人觉得特别幸运：

我能日复一日地习惯吗

一次一点，只要潮水

涨得越快，浪就越大

相依相存，打破记录

这不是我记忆中的世界

于是有一天我打开了

我包扎得小心翼翼的盒子

里面是一张我熟悉的脸

一小块一小块地盯着我

头版上没有提到

但在离房地产很近的地方

在每天都会发生的事情中

给这个碰巧是我的人

我能做什么，谁能告诉我

这是医生的回答

无尽的耐心永远不够

唯一的希望是成为阳光

这几十年的往事不仅是一部诗人自传，更是这样一种情形：一位诗人在一本杂志书页中的发展与渐进，如今我们不大可能再看到。愿他仍在树林中歌唱。

编者按：本文载于2019年3月20日的《纽约客》。作者凯文·杨，2017年成为《纽约客》的诗歌编辑。他也是纽约公共图书馆施恩伯格黑人文化研究中心的主任，今年4月将出版自己的最新诗集《褐色》（Brown）。

“我有病？但是我也有才啊！”｜大作家们的小怪癖

巴尔扎克每天要喝50杯咖啡；

纳博科夫喜欢在浴缸里思考和写作；

席勒写作时必须闻着腐烂苹果的气味；

杜鲁门·卡波特要躺着写作，是个离不开床跟沙发的人；

......

每个作家，多多少少都有自己的写作怪癖。如同我们读书、阅读时，都有自己喜欢的姿势。

对读者来说，作家是文字背后的上帝，文学世界的创造者。语言和句子具有多少魅力，它们背后的作家也便具有相应的神秘感。而在日常生活中，作家们又的确是一个再普通不过的人——说来有些矛盾，因为通常情况下，恰好是那些与常人不一样的怪癖，发生在某个作家或诗人的身上，反而让他们更平易近人，而不再是经典圣殿里的雕像。

这些小怪癖也许会出现在很多人的身上，但由于作家工作性质的不同，导致日常生活和作品间产生了奇妙的反差。而这些话题，也成为文学爱好者津津乐道的趣闻。最近出版的新书《怪作家》，就“暴露”了不少作家写作时的小怪癖。

本文整合｜宫子

原作者｜西莉亚·布鲁·约翰逊

早起写作

虽然写作的本质是一项不定时的创作行为，但大多数作家还是非常认真地对待自己的职业，都有着固定的工作时间表。他们并非打字员或抄写员，所谓的工作时间也有大量时间用于对着屏幕或白纸发呆、思考，等待着灵感的到来——当然，也不排除大仲马这种永远都不会停笔的劳模型作家。

大仲马没有固定的时间安排，但这意味着他几乎任何时间都在写作。他在今天经常被人诟病的一点是，大仲马的创作行为更像是开了一家小说工作室，有很多助理和合作者替他捉刀，有些署名为大仲马的作品，究竟是不是他本人创作都非常可疑。毕竟，按照10年创造70部小说、戏剧、非虚构，一生创作出300多卷作品的速度来看，仅凭大仲马一个人实在非常困难。但工作室的存在并不意味着他本人就是个不写作只冠名的幕后老板。

 大仲马

大仲马，因为两部长篇《基督山伯爵》和《三个火枪手》而成为小说富翁。他是个特别有商业头脑，而且很自恋的作家。他在豪宅的大门口刻下了一句经典语录：吾爱爱吾者。

根据各种不严格的数据统计和估算，在任何时代，大仲马都是写作速度和创作量最大的作家——除了创作《在路上》时短暂爆发的凯鲁亚克，其他人则可能直接被他拉开了一个档次。他最快的写作速度可以从一个打赌的故事中领略一二：他曾经和人打赌三天之内是否能写完一部小说的第一卷，结果在最后一天结束的时候，大仲马真的写完了第一卷，笔迹极为潦草，纸张上洒满了咖啡的污渍。

大量的出版计划让大仲马无时不刻不在写作，早晨起床后他的手里就抓着一支笔，吃饭的间隙写作，办差事的间隙也在写作。每天的工作时间都在16小时左右。这让他患上了失眠症。而医生给他开出的药方是每天买三个苹果：在凯旋门吃掉第一个，在奥赛码头吃掉第二个，在玛德莱娜广场吃掉第三个，最后步行回家。

这种治疗方案肯定没什么作用。身体的损害也让大仲马后期没有写出更好的作品。他本人则把这个责任推给了纸张——大仲马有个习惯，要用蓝色的纸写作，后来买不到，就只能用奶油色的纸做替代品。大仲马认为是纸张颜色的变化导致了作品质量的下降。

另一个在早晨写作的法国人是巴尔扎克。不过，不能用“起得早”来形容他，因为他根本就没有睡过觉。巴尔扎克的世界里根本没有昼夜交替这一说，他从晚上一直工作到白天，依靠咖啡保持精力。他坚信一句话：

“睡得太多会困扰人的心志，使其反应迟钝”。

《纽约客》曾经用夸张的手法拍摄过一个幽默短片：《巴尔扎克的咖啡》。在短片中，当巴尔扎克喝完第50杯咖啡时，上午才刚过十点。

大仲马和巴尔扎克都属于“昼夜不分”的类型。而在那些“昼夜分明”的作家里，有不少人也保持着清晨起床写作的习惯。弗兰纳里·奥康纳就是个非常严格的时间表执行者，当大学里的学生们还在睡觉的时候，她就已经坐在桌前写作；每天早晨按时写三小时，每次都会写三页。她一直把这个习惯保持了下去。

西尔维娅·普拉斯可能是起得最早的作家，每天凌晨四点起床——这种生活习惯，如果读过她的诗歌作品的话，应该不难想象。

托妮·莫里森和凯瑟琳·伯特则在五点钟起床。杰克·伦敦是少有的会早起的男性作家，起床时间也在五点钟左右。

尤朵拉·韦尔蒂也习惯早晨醒来后穿着睡衣写作。弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫的起床时间稍微晚一些，大概在每天早上九点进入工作室。其余早起的作家还包括雨果、纳博科夫、W.H.奥登、格雷厄姆·格林（都在六点钟左右起床），C.S.刘易斯、马尔克斯，毛姆则在九点到十点之间起床。

在所有作家里，对起床时间执行得最严格的要数英国作家安东尼·特罗洛普。他每天必须五点半起床。为了这个，他每年要支付五英镑，雇用一个专门唤醒他的仆人。

写作伴侣

光有工作时间还不够，作家们还得有理想（未必良好）的写作伴侣和写作环境。

这些习惯，就像巴尔扎克选择了咖啡一样。后人们永远不知道巴尔扎克一天究竟要喝多少杯咖啡，一般的资料显示在50杯左右（还必须是高浓度的优质咖啡豆），但这还没有算他在急切需要的时候直接口嚼咖啡豆的数量。伏尔泰也是个嗜喝咖啡的作家，比巴尔扎克少些，平均每天40杯。乔纳森·斯威夫特和亚历山大·蒲柏也是咖啡的忠实拥趸，然而，蒲柏总是喜欢在午夜的时候喝咖啡，他认为咖啡冒出的蒸气有助于治疗头疼，这让他经常在午夜的时候拉铃把仆人叫醒来给自己煮一杯咖啡，导致人们对这个住户充满怨怒。

英国人则比较喜欢喝茶，例如C.S.刘易斯和塞缪尔·约翰逊。后者曾经写文章捍卫茶叶在英国的流行，并且认为自己是一个“顽固的、无耻的饮茶者，在二十年的时间里，对饭菜兴趣不大，只对泡饮这种令人着迷的植物感兴趣，以至于烧水壶几乎没停下来”。

 塞缪尔·约翰逊

塞缪尔·约翰逊虽然喜欢“有品位地啜饮茶叶”，但他“对饭菜的兴趣”可能真的是不大。据说，约翰逊吃饭的时候特别“用力”，给人的感觉就像是恨不得连盘子一起啃掉。喜欢喝咖啡的巴尔扎克同样在饭桌上举止粗鲁，他喜欢大声咀嚼食物，大声说话，边吃饭边把嘴里的碎屑喷得到处都是。

除了咖啡、茶叶、香烟这些最常见的写作伴侣外，另外还有些作家会选择不一样的东西（或者什么都不选择，像托尔斯泰，不抽烟不喝酒不吃肉，做个严格控制激情的素食主义者）。

写下《瓦尔登湖》的梭罗据说是葡萄干面包的发明者，他在湖畔生活时用这种食物打发肚子。弗兰纳里·奥康纳喜欢在写作的时候吃香草威化饼。而短篇小说大师雷·布拉德伯里对冰淇淋十分钟爱，他还会拉上自己的编辑一起，在读校样的时候吃掉大量的冰淇淋。

写作工具

有了写作的伴侣，下一步要准备的则是写作工具。今天，写作者们的写作工具都差不多——一台电脑。人们都在键盘上敲击文字，其中的差异可能只在于电脑型号的不同。而在过去的时代里，作家们的写作工具可谓是五花八门。

大仲马要在蓝色的纸上写作，弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫则将紫色定为自己最喜爱的颜色，她写作时用的是紫色墨水，写情书时用的也是紫色纸张，出版长篇小说《友谊长廊》的时候，内文和装订皮革也统统选择了紫色。刘易斯·卡罗尔也用紫色墨水写作，但这并非出自个人爱好，他在牛津的基督学院教学的时候，就被要求使用紫色的墨水批改作业，后来他写小说的时候也就继承了这个习惯。

兰斯顿·休斯要用亮绿色的墨水写作。吉卜林则必须要用纯正的深黑色，浅了不行。

 兰斯顿·休斯的绿色手稿

 2018年果麦版《喧哗与骚动》

2018年果麦版《喧哗与骚动》采用了彩色油墨印刷，将不同视角的段落用颜色区别开来并附赠参照色卡。事实上，当《喧哗与骚动》第一次出版时，美国的出版社也和福克纳讨论过这个问题。不过因为成本太高，这个想法只能宣告破产。福克纳遗憾地表示，“希望出版业能进步到可以使用彩墨”。2012年，弗利欧书社终于发行了有着14个不同颜色的特别版。

纸张和墨水之外，作家们对写作的笔和具体场所也有所选择。

铅笔是不少作家心仪的写作工具，因为它可以随时擦除修改。美国作家海明威就保持着用铅笔写作的习惯，曾有传记作家说海明威每天早晨要削20根铅笔，后来海明威本人对这个说法进行辟谣——“也就用掉七支”。（铅笔之外，他的写作伴侣还包括家里的五十来只不同名字的猫和十几条狗）约翰·斯坦贝克的写作工具则要复杂一点，铅笔只是个开始。他的桌子上放着整整齐齐的十二根铅笔，用它们来完成初稿。因此，他的手指经常磨出茧，后来编辑送给他圆铅笔来替代六角形铅笔，才减少了这个痛苦。写出草稿后，他再把稿子念给口述录音机听，然后再听录音机的回放，再修改，再把修改过的稿子交给速记员……令人惊讶的是，这居然让斯坦贝克的写作速度越来越快。

杰克·伦敦为了能够写得更快，则选用一种钝钢笔。因为普通的钢笔会让伦敦的写作速度变慢，而钝钢笔可以让他不用担心笔尖面临的各种情况。他会用这种笔一直写作。每天早晨五点准时起床，但不下床，而是用线在脑袋上悬挂便条卡片，他就躺在床上用这些卡片写作。

写作“姿势”

杜鲁门·卡波特也要躺着写作，他甚至将自己称为“一个横向作家”。他几乎是个离不开床与沙发的人。

普鲁斯特和席勒都要在绝对密闭的环境中创作，他们会用帘子把房间遮挡得严严实实，不让一丝光透进来。普鲁斯特甚至不允许仆人随便开窗。而席勒的写作伴侣则是一堆烂苹果，他的桌子里有一个抽屉，里面全都是腐烂的苹果，据他的妻子所说，席勒有意如此，他离不开这种“芳香”，“没有它，他就没法生活或写作”。

 《柯莱特》电影剧照。

法国女作家柯莱特在写作时离不开自己养的法国斗牛犬。她会一只观察斗牛犬的毛，从里面抓出一只跳蚤，然后才能开始写作。

 劳伦斯

相比于柯莱特从狗毛里抓跳蚤，D.H.劳伦斯的怪癖则更加异常——如果传言是真的。据说劳伦斯经常会脱光衣服，爬到树上去。大多数劳伦斯研究者都将这个说法视为无稽之谈。但可以确定的是，劳伦斯对树有着非同一般的迷恋。他经常在喝醉酒后爬上树，给客人摘些东西。或者在清晨，跑到树荫底下，在膝盖上放一本便笺，寻找灵感。

夜间写作

在白天结束后，一批作家们开始休息，另一批作家则开始了“夜生活”。

鲜有人能做到像福克纳那样将工作时间与写作时间完美契合在一起，他找了份烧锅炉的工作，晚上一边值班一边写作，用他自己的话说，同一份工作，“挣两份钱”。（他在接受《巴黎评论》采访时说作家最理想的工作就是当个妓院老板，白天写作，晚上纵览人间百态。这个理想后来在他的文学后辈马尔克斯身上得以实践。）

大量的作家根本无法在工作和写作间协调时间，因此只能选择在安静的夜晚创作。卡夫卡是其中的典型，他经常从保险公司下班后写作到次日早晨，然后再拖着疲惫的身躯去上班。陀思妥耶夫斯基也习惯披着毯子在深夜创作。

在选择“夜生活”的作家中，罗伯特·弗罗斯特可谓是最矛盾的一个。也许，他选择在黑夜写作的原因只有一个，那就是他怕黑，所以在夜晚睡不着觉。这并非没有根据的猜测。弗罗斯特一直患有黑夜恐惧症，直到他十几岁的时候，还必须得在母亲的房间里睡觉。成年后，他也不敢在晚上走进自家大门，必须得有人陪着他，给他先把灯打开。他在诗歌中写道，“我时常盼望我们能有两个月亮”。

他的作息时间甚至影响了周围的物种——因为夜晚活动，上午睡觉，农舍里的奶牛都调整了自己的生理系统，把挤奶时间调整为正午和午夜。

 关于奶牛，弗罗斯特写过一首诗，The Cow in Apple Time

一天结束，作家们写了多少

不管在什么时间段，使用什么工具，以何种姿势写作，一天过去后，作家们总得交出一些成果。而他们的创作速度也可谓天差地别。

大仲马和巴尔扎克这类写作狂人的每日字数几乎无法计算，我们只知道他们一直在写作。凯鲁亚克用了三周不到的时间写完了长篇《在路上》，这个速度让卡波特嘲讽他“这不是写作，而是打字”，他在一张黏连而成的超长打字纸上完成了这项工作，当他把稿件拿给出版社的时候，编辑疑惑地问他这样的纸张该怎么裁剪、修改，凯鲁亚克一气之下直接拿起初稿走人。

 《天才捕手》

《天才捕手》是一部很优秀的电影，但里面有两处细节和现实中不太一样。第一点是托马斯·沃尔夫的身高，他的真实身高接近两米，绝对比电影里要高大得多，这导致他找不到合适的地方写作，所以只能站着在冰箱的顶上写东西。另外一处是他在嘲讽菲茨杰拉德的时候说自己每天能写4000字，事实上，托马斯·沃尔夫每天只能慢吞吞地写1800多字，在作家里面连中游都够不上，但他确实能把小说写得很长，而且每天不完成这些字数，就绝不停笔。

在写得快这方面，侦探小说家雷蒙德·钱德勒绝对是凯鲁亚克的支持者，他认为“我写得越快，就写得越好。如果我慢了，那就是我陷入困境了”。在这个信条的支持下，他每天能创作5000字。为读者留下大量作品的科幻作家阿西莫夫同样如此，他每天能写出4000多字，而且总是在身边配上两台打字机，如果其中一台坏掉，就马上换另外一台，绝对不浪费时间。

在这之下，每日创作3000字似乎是大多数作家的标配。其中包括威廉·戈尔丁、诺曼·梅勒、约翰·斯坦贝克等人。斯蒂芬·金和伍德豪斯则在2000字的速度上徘徊。在这项数据统计中，凡是超过每天两千字的，都可以称得上是写作飞快的作家（不过，诗人并不在这个讨论范围内）。

当然，也有作家走向了另外一个极端。乔伊斯是个勤奋的作家，他每天都用纸笔和放大镜工作，然后非常兴奋地宣布，自己在这一天极为多产地完成了——两个句子。多萝西·帕克也是如此，她经常写五个字，删七个字。

对这些作家来说，一天下来，写出负数，也不是没有可能......

 《怪作家》

作者：（美）西莉亚·布鲁·约翰逊

译者：宋宁刚

版本：广西师范大学出版社2019年2月

Walter Benjamin in Ibiza

In 1928, during an exchange with André Gide, Benjamin compared Gide’s thought to a fort, “vast in its overall structure, replete with protective ramparts and protruding bastions, and above all strict in its forms and perfect in its deliberate dialectical construction.” Was this a self-portrait of Benjamin himself?

Benjamin wrote that Gide had quoted Louis Antoine de Bougainville: “When we left the island, we called it Île du Salut” (Salvation Island). And Gide added that “it is only when we leave something that we name it.”



Tuesday morning, April 19, 1932. After an overnight crossing, the Barcelona-Ibiza ferry Ciudad de Valencia tied up at quayside. Benjamin disembarked from a third-class cabin and walked slowly and stiffly over to the friend who had come to the port to greet him.

Felix Noeggerath and Benjamin had first met fifteen years earlier, while taking classes on the Mayans and Aztecs along with Rainer Maria Rilke. A native of Berlin, Noeggerath had emigrated to San Antonio Bay, some fifteen kilometers from Ibiza Town, with his third wife, the beautiful Marietta, his son Hans Jakob, a philologist, and his daughter-in-law.



Noeggerath had Benjamin’s deep admiration as a doctor of philosophy, who was passionate about history, theology, mathematics, and linguistics. Benjamin did not hesitate to call him a genius, while in Noeggerath’s eyes Benjamin was the genius. But barely had these two geniuses found one another again when they discovered that the same crook had swindled them both—by renting a house on Ibiza that he did not own to Noeggerath and by occupying Benjamin’s flat in Berlin without paying the rent. Aside from the financial issue, Benjamin worried about his manuscripts, which the man might have taken with him when he fled. He considered going back to Berlin, but upcoming national socialist festivities dissuaded him.



On Ibiza, Benjamin stayed at first with the Noeggeraths. In the daytime he would attempt to escape the promiscuity and chatter there by losing himself in “the age-old beauty and solitude of the region.” He would rise at six or seven, swim in the sea, and gaze off into the distance. Then he would take refuge in the forest undergrowth. He read, scribbled, and sunbathed leaning against a tree trunk. In this way he spent many long days deprived of almost everything—of “electric light and butter, liquor and running water, flirting and reading the paper.”



Around two o’clock he would go back for lunch with his hosts and play cards or dominoes for a while before going to dawdle in the café. At nine in the evening, or ten thirty at the latest, he would retire to his room—a room that he shared with “three hundred flies”—and plunge into a book.

What did he read? For one thing, Trotsky’s autobiography, which took his breath away.

Subsequently he lived in a little house that he had to himself, and ate three meals a day, local cooking for which he paid 1.80 marks.



The island of Ibiza—or Eivissa—in the Spanish Balearic archipelago is an intact repository of a living antiquity without ruins or remains. An heir to Carthage and the Moors, Ibiza has preserved its Phoenician, Roman, and Arab heritages, despite Spanish hegemony. Ibiza is the most African of the Balearic Islands. Pottery and figurines of Ishtar, the dove goddess, and Ba’al, the goat god, are still made there just as they were two thousand years ago.



The Ibiza cathedral clock bore the inscription Ultima multis—“the last day for many.” This maxim made a strong impression on Benjamin.



The costume of the women consisted of a long-sleeved bodice covered by a shawl and a silk brocade dress pleated in the back, falling to the ankles and protected by a pinafore. Its billowing aspect could be explained by the fact that beneath it were at least ten underskirts.



Passing through the island, Albert Camus noted that “if the language of these places was in harmony with what resonated profoundly within me, it was not because it answered my questions but rather because it rendered them superfluous.”



On this “island of forgetfulness” the inhabitants themselves conceived and built their dwellings as “peasant palaces,” the legacy of an ancient Egyptian architecture. Benjamin was entranced by this architecture sans architects, by its sobriety, and by the way it bore witness to the relationship between the Ibicencos and their landscape. It was a vernacular style in which, “defying the shadows, the gleaming white of the walls dazzles you.”



And in the main room, chairs of an overwhelming simplicity were always carefully arranged—chairs which, according to Benjamin, “had much to tell.”



Unchanged for centuries, ignored by the rest of Europe, Ibiza began in the thirties to become a focus of interest for travelers and a place of refuge for others. In 1932, however, it was still bypassed by international trade and modernity in general, whose conveniences simply did not exist there. Benjamin had no complaints. For the time bei

Fuck The Vessel

Welcome to the depths of architectural cynicism

The Baffler

w o r d f a c t o r y

The Vessel is really a perfect name for the sixteen-story monument nestled in the midst of the now complete “neighborhood” (read: real estate scheme) of Hudson Yards, New York City. Designed by Thomas Heatherwick, one of architecture’s premier grifters, a man who should be banned internationally from using the term “parti,” the Vessel is composed of 154 flights of stairs, 2,500 steps, and 80 landings. Apparently the architect drew inspiration from an early experience with, to nobody’s surprise, an old staircase. The depth of architectural thinking at work here makes a kiddie-pool seem oceanic.

The Vessel is a structure that invites parody—it has already been likened to a giant shawarma, a beehive, a pine cone, a wastebasket. Apparently, there is to be a competition for a new name, as “The Vessel” was only supposed to be a temporary one. It really is the perfect name, however, not least because it implies a certain emptiness. One asks, though, what it is a vessel for?

The Vessel has already been likened to a giant shawarma, a beehive, a pine cone, a wastebasket.

It is a Vessel for the depths of architectural cynicism, of form without ideology and without substance: an architectural practice that puts the commodifiable image above all else, including the social good, aesthetic expression, and meaningful public space. It is a Vessel for the architecture of views, perhaps the hottest spatial commodity of all.

It is a Vessel for capital, for a real estate grift that can charge more for an already multi-million dollar apartment because it merely faces it. It is a Vessel for a so-called neighborhood that poorly masks its intention to build luxury assets for the criminally wealthy under the guise of investing in the city and “public space.” What is public space if not that land allocated (thanks to the generosity of our Real Estate overlords) to the city’s undeserving plebeians, who can interface with it in one of two ways: as consumers or interlopers, both allowed only to play from dawn ‘til dusk in the discarded shadows of the ultra-rich? Unlike a real neighborhood, which implies some kind of social collaboration or collective expression of belonging, Hudson Yards is a contrived place that was never meant for us. Because of this, the Vessel is also a Vessel for outrage like my own.

It is a Vessel for labor without purpose. The metaphor of the stairway to nowhere precludes a tiring climb to the top where one is expected to spend a few moments with a cell-phone, because at least a valedictory selfie rewards us with the feeling that we wasted time on a giant staircase for something—perhaps something contained in the Vessel. The Vessel valorizes work, the physical work of climbing, all while cloaking it in the rhetoric of enjoyment, as if going up stairs were a particularly ludic activity. The inclusion of an elevator that only stops on certain platforms is ludicrously provocative. The presence of the elevator implies a pressure for the abled-bodied to not use it, since by doing so one bypasses “the experience” of the Vessel, an experience of menial physical labor that aims to achieve the nebulous goal of attaining slightly different views of the city. Unlike the Eiffel Tower, to which the Vessel has been unfathomably compared, the Vessel is just tall enough to make you feel bad for not hiking up it. To climb the Eiffel Tower is equally pointless, but its sheer size makes taking the elevator the de facto, socially normalized experience. The elevators of the Vessel and their lackluster architectural integration belie the architectural profession’s view of accessibility as a code-enforced concession rather than an ethos, a moral right to architecture for all. By taking the elevator up the Vessel, you are both inviting the judgment of your peers who insist on hauling ass up sixteen stories and confirming its sheer pointlessness as a structure; for, unlike the Eiffel Tower, which has a restaurant and shop, there is nothing at the top other than a view of the Hudson and the sad promise of the repeat performance of laboring your way back down.

The Vessel betrays the fact that behind the glitzy, techno-urbanist facade of the Smart City™ lies the cold machinations of a police state.

The Vessel is a vessel for another type of labor: digital labor. Until a few days ago, after a moment of social media outrage, if you were to take a selfie or a photo at the Vessel, the Hudson Yards developers would own the rights to your content in perpetuity. (Now they have the right to circulate and use your media, but not to own it outright.) Regardless of these changes, by taking a selfie or photograph (an act that, to be fair, is perhaps the only true purpose of the Vessel), you are still doing the unpaid work of promotion and content creation for a developer conglomerate, regardless of your intent. By merely stepping foot in the complex, you waive your right to privacy and are ruthlessly surveilled by subtly hidden cameras. What is done with this footage can only be suspected, but it doesn’t stop our malevolent shawarma from serving as a convenient, yes, architectural vessel—not only for affective labor but also the dystopian world-building of surveillance capitalism itself. The Vessel betrays the fact that behind the glitzy, techno-urbanist facade of the Smart City™ lies the cold machinations of a police state. That architecture is used as live bait for these purposes is but one of many symptoms pointing to a field in a state of ethical decline.

The Vessel has invited nearly universal vitriol, even amongst the politest architecture critics. It is an object lesson teaching us that, in our neoliberal age of surveillance capitalism—an era where the human spirit is subjected to a regime of means testing and digital disruption, and a cynical view of the city as an engine of real estate prevails—architecture, quite frankly, sucks.

In Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment, Henri Lefebvre conceived of architecture as a specific level of social practice, on which the reality of everyday life emerges to suggest new, better possibilities. He writes:

There is no thought without a project, no project without exploration—through the imagination—of a possible, a future. . . . There is no social space without an unequally distributed stock of possibles. Not only is the real not separated from the possible but, in a sense, it is defined by it and, therefore, by a part of utopia.

In short, the Vessel is a vessel of its time, and its sheer shittiness as architecture and urbanism, itself a small part of the bigger tyranny of capitalism, at least invites us to dream of something, anything, better than this.

Measure

Measure

Literary Bad Sex

Laughing at awards for bad sex scenes in books, ultimately, offers no insights on what makes 'good sex'

Issue 71, 15th March 2019

Catherine Brown

| Head of the English Faculty at New College of the Humanities. She has written for Standpoint and the BBC.

2,394 words

Read time: approx. 12 mins

In Jonathan Coe’s 1992 anti-Thatcherite satire, What a Carve Up!, the Tory tabloid journalist Hilary Winshaw publishes a novel that boasts ‘Sex every forty pages’. By the standards set by EL James twenty years later, that is paltry. Ever since the 1960s, British publishers have been pressurising their authors to write sex in order to boost sales, presumably following the success of the novel that inaugurated that decade, the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover. By 1993, the British literary magazine Literary Review felt the need to create the ‘Bad Sex Awards’ in order ‘to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.’ Winners have included Melvyn Bragg (1993), Sebastian Faulks (1998), Tom Wolfe (2004), Norman Mailer (2007), Ben Okri (2014), and, most recently, James Frey in 2018.

At the risk of taking too-seriously an award of which the keynote is not seriousness, there are several problems involved in this that are worth considering. One is the implicit hypocrisy that the award has brought great publicity to its parent magazine because of the very fact – which the award ostensibly disparages – that sex sells. Indeed especially badly-written sex sells, hence the success of the Fifty Shades trilogy (‘I detonate around him, again and again, round and round, screaming loudly as my orgasm rips me apart, scorching through me like a wildfire, consuming everything.’ [Fifty Shades Freed]).

Then there is the fact that – since individuals’ sexual experiences are nothing if not mutually varied - one person’s literary bad sex may be another’s actually-quite-moving sex. The format of the awards ceremony itself – in which actors read out the short-listed passages, to reliable laughter from their audience – militates against any other reaction than ridicule. Yet I have on several occasions at these ceremonies found myself laughing with my face only.

Then there is the ambiguity of the adjective. What is meant by ‘bad’, we infer, is ‘aesthetically poor’. But it is striking that ‘bad sex’ – in the sense of the spectrum that covers disengaged sex, through unenjoyable sex, to coercive sex and rape – is relatively little featured in the shortlists. A scene containing rape is, by a common delicacy in the use of language, less likely to be described as a ‘sex scene’ than as a ‘rape scene’; therefore ‘bad sex’, as far as the awards are concerned, often means ‘rather good sex’. Pornography - in the sense of literature in which sex predominates - is formally excluded from the awards, but it is also marginalised from them in the sense in which D.H. Lawrence redefined the term in his 1926 essay ‘Pornography and Obscenity’: ‘even I would censor genuine pornography, rigorously […] you can recognize it by the insult it offers, invariably, to sex, and to the human spirit. Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it. This is unpardonable.’

___

"Alienation – which is not sex itself – rescues such passages from ridicule. This points to the fact that the Bad Sex Awards have what is intrinsically an easy target. Looked at from the outside, the physical actions of sex, and mental concentration involved in them, often seem absurd"

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The more ridiculed, the ‘better’ Lawrence’s own sex scenes have been, which is why Lady Chatterley’s Lover – of which an early draft title was Tenderness – has been so widely parodied.  Mervyn Griffith-Jones, Chief Prosecutor at the novel’s trial, held this passage up to ridicule: “‘Beauty! What beauty! A sudden little flame of new awareness went through her. […] The unspeakable beauty to the touch of the warm, living buttocks! The life within life, the sheer warm, potent loveliness. And the strange weight of the balls between his legs!’ Griffith-Jones is held up to history’s perpetual mockery as the man who asked his jury: ‘Is it a book you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’ But in other parts of his prosecution, the world has laughed with rather than at him, and parodies of the novel (such as the 1960 Lady Loverley’s Chatter) have been numerous. The world does not similarly laugh at ‘bad’ sex in Lawrence, such as Gerald’s consummation of his relationship with Gudrun in Women in Love: ‘He found in her an infinite relief. Into her he poured all his pent-up darkness and corrosive death, and he was whole again. […] And she, subject, received him as a vessel filled with his bitter potion of death. She had no power at this crisis to resist. The terrible frictional violence of death filled her […] But Gudrun lay wide awake, destroyed into perfect consciousness.’

Alienation – which is not sex itself – rescues such passages from ridicule. This points to the fact that the Bad Sex Awards have what is intrinsically an easy target. Looked at from the outside, the physical actions of sex, and mental concentration involved in them, often seem absurd – as any pre-pubescent finds when ‘the facts of life’ are explained to them (why would Mummy and Daddy want to do that?), and as Lady Chatterley finds during her one instance of alienated sex with Mellors, when ‘her spirit seemed to look on from the top of her head, and the butting of his haunches seemed ridiculous to her, and the sort of anxiety of his penis to come to its little evacuating crisis seemed farcical.’

This is the more acutely the case when one comes to sex cold, as at an awards ceremony, when graphic descriptions of sex blast out of nowhere into polite conversation, excised from the novels to which they belong. Yet to some extent this effect pertains even within the novels themselves. Thus literature mimics life – at least, life as understood as not being all about sex. As D.H. Lawrence wrote contra Freud in 1922: ‘All is not sex. And a sexual motive is not to be attributed to all human activities.’ And so one moves through one’s day, relatively unaroused. Then, suddenly, there it is. Its dominance can throw one off one’s professionalism, one’s dignity, one’s time-keeping, one’s ethics, and one’s readerly or narrative stride. Sex scenes can interrupt rudely, and can lower the dignity of a novel.

Unless the novel is comic, in which case it will embrace the ridiculousness of sex as viewed externally. Howard Jacobson’s 1983 debut Coming From Behind opens with Professor Sefton Goldberg having sex with a mature student on the floor of his office, thinking of nothing but the fact that he cannot remember whether or not he locked the door, and wishing that he might develop the faculty of sight out of his anus, which is currently facing that door. It is not sex, but anxiety, that is being described, and the reader’s laughter is safely channelled against the character and with the author rather than against them both. If a character is fully involved in sex, and if the narrative is not distanced from them, then it is safer to fade to black, as James Joyce does at the famous ending of Ulysses: ‘I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.’

When one tries to infer from the Bad Sex Awards shortlists what makes sex writing particularly bad, one finds oneself listing a series of mutually-contradictory qualities.

Characters’ concentration on sex risks bathos, yet their distraction from it risks the same: ‘She became aware of places in her that could only have been concealed there by a god with a sense of humour’ (Ben Okri). Metaphors are dangerous because they obtrude the extraneous into the intrinsically unmediated. They are either the objective correlative of highly-subjective emotion recollected by the author in tranquillity, or are shots in the dark in an attempt to move or arouse others. For a majority of actual readers, they will fail: ‘Her vaginal ratchet moved in concertina-like waves, slowly chugging my organ as a boa constrictor swallows its prey. Soon I was locked in, balls deep, ready to be ground down by the enamelled pepper mill within her’ (Major Victor Cornwall and Major Arthur St John Trevelyan).

Yet if inventive descriptions are bathetic, so are clichés: ‘Somewhere in the night a stray rocket went off’ (Okri). So too is straightforward description: ‘Moves up to kiss her strong nose, on one side, then the other […] He moves back down, till he is level with her breasts’ (Julian Gough). There is nothing ridiculous about either kissing a woman’s strong nose, or moving level with her breasts, but factual sex writing, as much as the imaginative, tends to produce in the reader that state of alienation to which all intimacy is ridiculous.

Attempts to overcome this by describing the subjectivity of someone who is involved in sexual experience tend not to work either - Joyce’s Molly Bloom being an honourable exception. This year’s winner, Katerina by James Frey, is no such exception:

‘I’m hard and deep inside her fucking her on the bathroom sink her tight little black dress still on her thong on the floor my pants at my knees our eyes locked, our hearts and souls and bodies locked.

Cum inside me.

Cum inside me.

Cum inside me.’

InJulian Gough's Connect, we read:

‘He kisses them. Teases a nipple with his lips. It’s so soft; and then, suddenly, hard.

Wow’

The final exclamation recalls the ejaculations of Anastasia’s consciousness that punctuate the Fifty Shades trilogy (‘Holy crap!’, ‘Holy shit!’, ‘Holy Moses!’). Yet in such situations, one does not think words – and that is where literature, intrinsically, has a problem.

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"Sex cannot take up a whole life, nor a whole novel. But passages such as this demonstrate that it is possible for language to render the joy of sex, even if it so much more easily conveys its failures and its ugliness."

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Evasive language, such as ‘her pleasure cave’ (Major Victor Cornwall and Major Arthur St John Trevelyan), and taboo language, such as ‘Cum’ (James Frey passim), fare as badly as each other with Bad Sex Awards audiences. D.H. Lawrence deliberately made his gamekeeper use four-letter words, in order to purge them - like sex itself - of their association with dirt. But in this he failed utterly. It was pointed out by Griffith-Jones that: ‘the word “fuck” or “fucking” occurs [in Lady Chatterley’s Lover] no less than thirty times. I have added them up, but I do not guarantee to have added them all up. “Cunt” fourteen times; “balls” thirteen times; “shit” and “arse” six times apiece; “cock” four times; “piss: three times, and so on.’ More than half a century later, Jed Mercurio, the writer-director with whom I worked on the latest, 2016 BBC1 adaptation of the novel, told me that at the BBC ‘Currently fuck is strongly discouraged and cunt is unacceptable. They count number of uses and proximity to programme start. Every use of fuck would have to be approved at Controller level’. Because these words remain as dirty as ever, their use in literature still feels contrived, aggressive, or naïve.

Michael Owen – novelist-protagonist of What a Carve Up! – discovers just how difficult it is to write sex when, on his editor’s advice, he sits down and tries to do so. He starts by writing a long list of words connected to sex, and then, when this fails, cracks open a bottle of wine and tries to go for spontaneity. He desperately rotates alternative settings, clothes and adverbs. Finally he thinks:

‘Oh, to hell with it.

she was panting with desire

            he was bursting from his pants

            she was wet between the thighs

            he was wet between the ears

            she was just about to come

            he didn’t know whether he was coming or going’

Coe knows what the problems are – but he also finds a solution. What a Carve Up! contains the single most moving literary description of sex I have read. Michael Owen does not write it in his capacity as a novelist; rather, he transcribes his dream of being in bed with the girl he loved as a child, Susan Clement:

‘the first thing I knew – almost fainting with the joy of it, the mazing, palpable reality – was that she was touching me, that I was touching her, that we were dovetailed, entangled, coiled like dreamy snakes. It seems that every part of my body was being touched by every part of her body, that from now on the entire world was to be apprehended only through touch, so that in the musty warmth of my bed, the curtained darkness of my bedroom, we could not but find ourselves starting to writhe gently, every movement, every tiny adjustment creating new waves of pleasure, until finally we were rocking back and forth, cradle-like, and then I couldn’t stand it any longer and had to stop.’

What this passage manages to do is to tread a number of very fine lines. It is both literal and metaphoric, physical and imaginative, as sex itself is; it is a ‘dream’ of ‘mazing, palpable reality’. It animates dead metaphors such as ‘dovetailed’ alongside cooperative live metaphors such as ‘snakes’. It connects physical delimitation (the ‘curtained darkness of my bedroom’) with the ‘entire world’. It allows the separateness of ‘I’ and ‘she’ whilst also uniting them as ‘we’. It points to sex’s possible outcome (the ‘cradle’). And it is reverent towards an experience that cannot be long supported, and is humble in its acknowledgment of the need for it to come to a stop. Sex cannot take up a whole life, nor a whole novel. But passages such as this demonstrate that it is possible for language to render the joy of sex, even if it so much more easily conveys its failures and its ugliness. The Good Sex Awards – showcasing examples such as this, however controversial they might prove – could provide a better service to writers, readers, and sexual beings than the existing Bad Sex Awards. I hereby propose as the first Chair of the Judges, Jonathan Coe; and let the prize itself be named for D.H. Lawrence.

Measure

Measure