老人可不是你想的那樣（上）
（圖自網路）
What Old Age is Really Like
老年到底是何種模樣？
By Ceridwen Dovey
錫里德韋·多維
Part 2
I started off thinking that, beyond the well-known examples of Saul Bellow (whose final novel, 「Ravelstein,」 was published when he was eighty-five), Thomas Mann (who died at the age of eighty, and who supposedly claimed that old age was the best time to be a writer), May Sarton (called 「America』s poet laureate of aging,」 who died at the age of eighty-three), and John Updike (who died at the age of seventy-six, and who, in his final story collection, has a narrator musing,「Approaching eighty I sometimes see myself from a little distance, as a man I know, but not intimately」),the pickings would be fairly slim. Bellow』s own biographer mused, after the publication of 「Ravelstein,」 「Who are the other great writers who have done anything like this in their eighties?」
我開始思索，除了那些眾所周知的範例如索爾·貝婁①（Saul Bellow）（八十五歲時出版了最後一部作品《拉維爾斯坦》（Ravelstein））、托馬斯·曼②（Thomas Mann）（在八十歲時去世，據傳他稱晚年是成為作家的最好時機）、梅·薩藤③（May Sarton）（賦有「滄桑版美國桂冠詩人」美譽，享年八十三歲）和約翰·厄普代克④（John Updike）（享年七十六歲，在他的最後一本故事集中，有這樣一段沉吟片語，「在快到八十歲時我時常會與自己保持一點距離，像對待一個認識卻不熟知的人那樣審視著我自己。」）之外，可供選擇的人屈指可數。在《拉維爾斯坦》出版後，貝婁專屬的傳記作者沉思道：「又有哪些在八十多歲還能做到像他這樣的偉大作家呢？」
索爾·貝婁
Saul Bellow
托馬斯·曼
Thomas Mann
梅·薩藤
May Sarton
約翰·厄普代克
John Updike
Frank Kermode summed up the problem: 「Those who have had actual experience of old age are likely to be dead or very tired or just reluctant to discuss the matter with clever young interlocutors.」 Philip Roth, for example, who is now eighty-two, decided to retire from writing at the age of seventy-eight, after the publication of his quartet of 「Nemeses」 novels, saying in an interview about fiction, 「I don』t want to read any more, write any more of it, I don』t even want to talk about it anymore … I』m tired of all that work. I』m in a different stage of my life.」
福蘭克·科莫德（Frank Kermode）歸納總結了這個問題：「那些經驗豐富的老者們很可能在與聰穎，年輕人們的交流過程中持著麻木、疲倦，或者是抗拒的態度。」比如，現已八十二歲高齡的菲利普·羅斯（Philip Roth）就曾打算在七十八歲時從寫作行業中退休。在《復仇者》（Nemeses）小說四部曲出版後，他在一次採訪中談及目前對小說的創作態度：「我再也不想讀，不想寫任何東西了，我甚至不想再談起這些事情…我對這些工作已經厭倦了。我正處於我人生的一個不同階段中。」
(圖自網路)
But if you dig deeper the vista opens up, the voices multiply. My little sample may be idiosyncratic, and biased in favor of eloquence—these are elderly writers, all over the age of seventy-five, who clearly still have their wits very much about them.Yet their take on old age can perhaps offset some of the delusions and fantasies of people like me, who have not yet lived it for themselves. Each of the following three authors is alive and still writing prolifically, and was gracious enough to answer a few questions from me by e-mail.
但若你拓寬視野，進一步深入思考。那麼我剛才舉的小例子可能就過於特殊並帶有點主觀偏向情感了——這些年長的作家們年齡全部超過七十五歲，無疑還都有著清晰的思維和睿智的頭腦。然而他們在老年階段所呈現的一切，也許正能填補我和那些尚未經歷老年生活的人對這一年齡段的理解和幻想。接下來的三位作者尚仍健在並且仍有豐富的作品產出，他們十分親切地用電子郵件回答了一些我提的出的問題。
(圖自網路)
The first is the British novelist Paul Bailey, who is seventy-eight, and who published his first novel, 「At the Jerusalem,」 at the age of thirty. It』s set in an institution for the elderly, and the main character, Faith, is a woman in her seventies, who Bailey says he purposefully did not make 「likeable or sympathetic,」 as he didn』t want her to be an object of pity. 「I can』t begin to tell youhow patronized and stereotyped the elderly were at that time:put-upon plaster saints were the dramatic order of the day,」 he told me. Critics wondered why a young man would choose to write about the elderly in his first novel, but Bailey says he took inspiration from two other first novels by young male writers, also focused on institutions of old age: Updike』s 「The Poorhouse Fair」 (1959) and William Trevor』s 「The Old Boys」 (1964). Bailey felt confident that his take on old age was grounded in real observation and experience, as his parents had been advanced in age when they had him, and he was later cared for by a much older couple. 「I grew up among people who were getting on in years, so old age was never a frightening surprise to me,」 he says. 「I didn』t regard pensioners as a race apart.」
第一位是英國小說家保羅·貝利（Paul Bailey），今年七十八歲，在他三十歲時出版了第一部小說《在耶路撒冷》（At the Jerusalem）。故事設定在一間老年福利院中，主人公是一位七十歲的女人，名叫費絲。貝利說他有意不把費絲寫成一個「受人喜愛或者是令人同情的」的角色，因為他不希望塑造一個被人可憐的對象。「我不會告訴你在那個年代人們對「老年」一詞的定義是多麼被輕視和固有化：那些對聖人們的調侃不過是每日為平淡生活里增添戲劇化的調味品罷了。」他告訴我。評論家想知道為什麼一位年輕人會選擇主要描寫老人們的故事來作為他第一部小說的故事內容，然而貝利說他是從另外兩位青年男性作者的處女作中得到的靈感，兩部作品都聚焦於發生在養老院的故事：厄普代克的「救濟院集市」（The Poorhouse Fair1959）和威廉·特雷弗⑤（William Trevor）的「老男孩」（The Old Boys1964）。貝利自信地認為他對老年人的呈現是以真實的觀察和經歷為基礎的，因為在他出生時父母年齡已偏高，後來他又被一對年紀更老的夫婦照料。「我在一群上了年紀的人中長大，所以對於終將迎來的老年我從未感到懼怕和意外。」他說，「我不會因為他們年歲已高並領著退休養老金就把他們當做另一個種族來看待。」
保羅·貝利
Paul Bailey
威廉·特雷弗
William Trevor
He remembers a mime class that he took when he was training to be an actor at London』s Central School, in the mid-nineteen-fifties. 「We had to pretend to be old. Most of the students elected to bend their heads down and shuffle their feet. None of the old people I knew, especially my forbidding grandmother, walked or moved in this manner. My classmates were succumbing to easy caricature.」 He doesn』t think much has changed today. 「More sentimental rubbish has been written about the 『plight of the elderly』 than I can bear to contemplate,」 he wrote in a preface to a Guardian article in which he selected his top ten narratives of old age. (He praises work by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Alice Munro, and Stefan Zweig; the readers』 comments to the article are a good resource for anybody looking for further recommendations). And sentimentality can be pernicious. In a Paris Review interview, the Nobel laureate KenzaburoOe, who is now eighty, mentioned Flannery O』Connor』s warning: 「She said that sentimentality is an attitude that does not confront reality squarely in the face. To feel sorry for handicapped people … is equivalent to hiding them.」
他想起1950年代中期，他在倫敦中心學校學習成為演員的時候，參加的一門模仿課。「我們需要假裝自己是一位老人。大多數學生選擇用彎腰低頭，蹣跚挪步的方式來表現。然而沒有一位我認識的老人是用這種狀態來走行動的，尤其是我那令人生畏的強悍祖母。同學們都在一味死板的模仿著諷刺漫畫里的固有形象。」他不認為如今情形就有所改善。「那些關於描寫「老年困境」的情緒垃圾壓得我喘不過氣.」他在《衛報》里的序言中，選擇了他眼中有關老年人的十佳故事。（他讚揚了艾薩克·巴什維斯·辛格⑥（Isaac Bashevis Singer）、艾麗絲·門羅⑦（Alice Munro）和斯蒂芬·茨威格⑧（Stefan Zweig）的作品。（若想進一步看到更多推薦作品，可以根據讀者對文章的評論看法來尋找資源。）並且多愁善感的情緒也會帶來負面的影響。在《巴黎評論》的雜誌採訪中，如今已經八十歲高齡的諾貝爾得主大江健三郎⑨（KenzaburoOe）提到了弗蘭納里·奧康納⑩（Flannery O』Connor）的警告：「她說多愁善感是一種不肯直面現實的態度。為殘疾人而感到惋惜……等同於將他們藏起來 。」
艾薩克·巴什維斯·辛格
Isaac Bashevis Singer
艾麗絲·門羅
Alice Munro
斯蒂芬·茨威格
Stefan Zweig
大江健三郎
弗蘭納里·奧康納
Flannery O』Connor
Bailey told me that he thinks some of the best depictions of old people 「can be found in books and plays that aren』t specifically concerned with people getting old,」 citing the memoirs of Sergei Aksakov, Maxim Gorky, and Leo Tolstoy, and the works of Balzac, Proust, Turgenev, Dickens, and Eliot, where the 「old wander in and out」—for example, the 「tender portrait」 of Wemmick』s Aged Parent, in 「Great Expectations.」
貝利告訴我他認為對於老年人最好的描述來自於「那些並不主要關注老年人的書籍和戲劇」，比如謝爾蓋·阿克薩科夫（Sergei Aksakov）、瑪克西姆·高爾基（Maxim Gorky）和列夫·托爾斯泰（Leo Tolstoy）的自傳，還有巴爾扎克（Balzac）、普魯斯特（Proust）、屠格涅夫（Turgenev）、狄更斯和艾略特的作品中那些「對晚年的描述」——例如《遠大前程》中威米克那年老父親的「親切形象」。
(圖自網路)
In 2011, Bailey published the novel 「Chapman』s Odyssey,」 in which an elderly male protagonist, lying ill in the hospital, is visited by people real and imagined: lovers, dead parents, characters from literature. It was inspired by Bailey』s own extended hospital stays, which he says he has come to enjoy 「in a perverse way」 because of the interesting people he meets there, 「like the man who covers his breakfast cereal with anchovy essence.」 Though the novel is about old age, he says he feels 「younger for having written it.」 He helped me pinpoint where I had perhaps gone wrong in my own imaginative attempt when he said,「I never, never thought I was tackling the 『problem』 of old age. It was never a fictional problem for me. It was just another aspect of being alive, and human.」
在2011年，貝利出版了一本名叫《查普曼的奇幻歷險》（Chapman』s Odyssey）的小說。在小說中，年老的男主角因疾病躺在醫院裡，被真實和想像出來的人所拜訪：愛人、已逝的父母和文學作品中的角色。此小說的創作靈感來自於貝利長期的住院生活。因為他在那遇到了許多有趣的人，「比如那個在早餐麥片上撒滿魚肝油的男人。」並開始「以一種反常的方式」享受那裡的生活。儘管這篇小說有關於老年人，但他完成這部作品時反而感到更年輕了。他的一番話也幫助並指出了我對於這方面存在主觀想像上的偏差，「我從未扭轉過什麼老年人面對的困境，我也從未把它當成一部虛擬構的故事書來看，這不過是人類另一種活著的樣子而已。」
(圖自網路)
The second writer who shared her thoughts with me is Fleur Adcock. If poetry, as Auden wrote, 「might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings,」 then the medium seems particularly suited to capturing the ambivalence of the old toward old age. The New Zealand-born British poet Adcock published her first collection when she was thirty, and she is now eighty-one. Like Lively, she says that old age began for her at the age of seventy, when she fell seriously ill for a period, though she says 「a more honest but less tidy answer might be that it has been a very gradual process, with old age retreating and advancing unpredictably over the years.」 She does remember feeling peculiar on realizing that, in her mid-seventies, she had outlived Yeats, whom she thought of as 「that iconic 『old poet,』 」 and who died at the age of seventy-three.
第二個與我分享自己想法的作者是芙勒·愛德科克（Fleur Adcock）。如果是像奧登寫的詩歌里那樣，「明確界定了這種百感交織的複雜情感」，那麼這種媒介就尤其適合去捕捉老年人對於自己老去這一過程的矛盾心態。出生於紐西蘭的英國詩人愛德科克在她三十歲時出版了第一部詩集，如今她已經八十一歲了。和萊弗利（Lively）相似，她認為自己在七十歲時才體會到真正老去這一滋味，在這段時間裡她感到十分不適。儘管她說「坦白但又繁瑣點來講，老去就是一個緩慢而又漸進的過程，你無法在這一過程中預知它是在加速還是減緩」。她回憶起自己七十五歲那年就意識到自己已經比享年七十三歲的葉芝——那位稱得上是心目中「老年詩人」的代表人物活得要久了，這種感覺很奇特。
芙勒·愛德科克
Fleur Adcock
In her recent collection 「Glass Wings」 (2013), the picture she paints of old age is utterly eye-opening. Her elderly speakers are comfortable with technology but use it in ways particular to their needs. In 「Match Girl,」 the speaker asks, of her little sister,
在她最近的一部詩集「玻璃之翅」（Glass Wings2013）中，她對於老年人的描寫令人大開眼界。她筆下的那些年邁吟誦者們在對當今科技感到滿意的同時卻又用一種特殊的方式來貼合他們的實際需求。在《相配的女孩》一詩中，講述者向她的妹妹發出了提問。
But how can someone younger than me
have osteoporosis, and sit
googling up a substance that might
help it, or give her phossy jaw?
但是一個年輕於我的人怎會
遭受骨質疏鬆症，並且坐著
尋找到一種物質，可能會
幫助她痊癒，或使她得到磷性頜骨壞死？
In 「Alumnae Notes,」 the speaker laments old school friends who have died or been lost to dementia, but then reasserts her connection to the present:
在《女校友記事》一詩中，講述者哀悼了一名已經去世或迷失在痴呆症中的舊時同校好友，但隨即又重申了她與現世的聯繫。
The class photos fade. But Marie and I,
face to face on Skype in full colour
and still far too animated to die,
can see we』ve not yet turned to sepia.
班級照片已經褪色。但瑪麗和我，
仍以彩色的模樣，在網路通信上面對面，
太過充滿生機而遠離死亡，
能看出我們尚未黯淡變黃。
In 「Mrs Baldwin,」 the speaker describes the 「muffled pang」 of envy that clutches her whenever she hears that someone has been given a diagnosis of cancer. In 「Having Sex with the Dead,」 the speaker remembers past lovers: 「The looks on their dead faces, as they plunge / into you, your hand circling a column / of one-time flesh and pulsing blood that now / has long been ash and dispersed chemicals.」
在《鮑爾溫太太》（Mrs Baldwin）中，講述者描繪了每當她得知什麼人被確診了癌症時，那緊攫她內心「壓抑折磨的」嫉妒。在《與死神做愛》（Having Sex with the Dead）中，講述人回憶起了過去的戀人：「在他們逝去面孔上的表情，在他們猛衝入你的時候，你的手環繞在舊時肉體上，曾是搏動的血液，如今已化為塵土和分解的化學物 。」
(圖自網路)
Adcock has known Jenny Joseph, the author of 「Warning,」 for many years, and says that Joseph is 「fed up」 with her iconic poem, written so long ago, when she was a young woman imagining old age (「When I am an old woman I shall wear purple / With a red hat which doesn』t go, and doesn』t suit me,」 the poem begins). Joseph is now in her mid-eighties, and still publishing poetry. A recent poem by her, 「A Patient Old Cripple,」 makes a beautiful counterpoint to the earlier, blustering tone of 「Warning」 with its final lines: 「I curse the world that blunders into me, and hurts / But know / Its bad fit is the best that we can do.」
愛德科克與《警告》（Warning）的作者珍妮·約瑟夫（Jenny Joseph）已經相識很多年了，她認為約瑟夫對她在多年以前，還是個年輕姑娘時想像老去生活時寫下的標誌性的詩句已經「忍無可忍」（詩句的開頭是這樣：「在我年老以後我會衣著紫色，戴著不與我相配的紅色帽子，」）。約瑟夫如今已是八十歲中旬，還在出版詩歌。最近她寫的一首名叫《耐心的老殘廢》（A Patient Old Cripple）的詩中，與早期形成了出色的呼應的，是最後幾句中以恐嚇的口吻作出的警告：「我詛咒這將我搞成一團糟的世界，使我受傷/但我知道/它的不適合就是我們能做到最好的了。」
（未完待續）
注釋：
①索爾·貝婁（Saul Bellow）1915-2005，美國作家，獲得1976年諾貝爾文學獎，代表作《奧吉 馬奇歷險記》、《洪堡的禮物》。
②托馬斯·曼（Thomas Mann）德國20世紀最有國際聲望的作家之一，代表作《死於威尼斯》，獲得1929年諾貝爾文學獎。
③梅·薩藤（May Sarton）美國頗有聲譽的日記體作家、小說家和詩人，代表作《獨居日記》、《海邊小屋》、《過去的痛》、《夢裡晴空》。
④約翰·厄普代克（John Updike），1932－2009，美國長篇小說、短篇小說作家、詩人。被公認為美國最優秀的小說家之一，代表作《兔子四部曲》《貝克三部曲》。
⑤威廉·特雷弗（William Trevor）愛爾蘭小說家、劇作家和短篇小說家。代表作《老男孩》（The Old Boys）和《寄宿房屋》（The Boarding House）。
⑥艾薩克·巴什維斯·辛格（Isaac Bashevis Singer）1904-1991，美國猶太作家，1978年獲諾貝爾獎，代表作《莊園》、《盧布林的魔術師》。
⑦艾麗絲·門羅（Alice Munro）加拿大女作家，被譽為「加拿大的契訶夫」。獲得2013年諾貝爾文學獎，代表作《快樂影子之舞》、《逃離》、《石城遠望》。
⑧斯蒂芬·茨威格（Stefan Zweig）奧地利著名作家、小說家、傳記作家。代表作《一個陌生女人的來信》《偉大的悲劇》《成功的秘訣》。
⑨大江健三郎（KenzaburoOe）日本著名小說家，1994年獲諾貝爾獎。代表作《廣島札記》。
⑩弗蘭納里·奧康納（Flannery O』Connor）1925– 1964，美國小說家、短篇小說作家和評論家，代表作《智血》、《暴力奪取》、《好人難尋》。
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