“能否停止不靠谱行为，给菲利浦・罗斯一个诺奖？----趁他还没死？！”
----《给瑞典那帮老头子的一封公开信》，我今年见的竞选口号里最漂亮的一份(见附文)
（话说，媒体惯例是，颁奖前摇旗呐喊，颁奖后庆祝（较少）或悻悻吐槽。去年美国记者为罗斯抱不平时的话很经典，大概意思：罗斯哪儿配不起诺奖啦？31本书，77岁的年纪，如果你嫌他没像略萨VS马尔克斯那样拳击对方脸部，哼哼，别忘了，罗斯可也曾经差点把马拉默德开了瓢呀！）
话说，罗斯这个口号好在，换个名字，任何年份，都适用。随手举例：
“能不能给阿多尼斯一个诺奖----趁他还没死？”
“能不能给特朗斯特罗姆一个诺奖----趁他还没死？”
“能不能给麦卡锡一个诺奖----趁他还没死？”
“能不能给品钦一个诺奖----趁他还没死？”
“能不能给诺特博姆一个诺奖----趁他还没死？”
“能不能给莫迪阿诺一个诺奖----趁他还没死？”
……
……
……
……
如是，每年颁奖前后，无非是个“再不得他就死了”到“完了他死了也得不了了”的过程。前几年，我一直念略萨、罗斯、阿多尼斯再不得就死了，终于去年念到个略萨。但他这一得，也就意味着南美那帮人，这几年暂时别指望了----好比克洛德・西蒙当初拿奖，等于诺奖间接告诉格里耶别盼了，你被代表了。
说美国。
托妮・莫里森之后，美国近二十年没诺奖了。如果恶毒点儿掐指细算，莫里森代表黑人女性，布罗茨基是苏联裔，辛格生在波兰……这么一拨，真正出生在美国的男作者，最后一个拿诺奖是斯坦贝克----这都半个世纪了。美国本地男作者们简直都是没有人给他们写信的上校，天使望故乡。厄普代克老师等不起，仙逝了。留下的诸位，麦卡锡、欧茨、罗斯、欧茨、德利罗们，其实在拼一个：给他们哪个，余下几位就完蛋了。
前几天跟人聊，还在念麦卡锡把握大。哈罗德・布鲁姆当初说《血色子午线》是美国史上最强劲的小说之一，“甚至品钦的小说都压不过”，然后说麦卡锡是麦尔维尔和福克纳二合一。但后来细想，麦尔维尔如果现在活着，举《白鲸》去瑞典，老爷们未必喜欢；如果说够牛气就该得奖，以品钦之霸气外露横扫千军，早该得了----麦卡锡和品钦的写作劲势不大一样，但都有点悍，固然是把美国传统继往开来，但瑞典人好像就不喜欢这点。这么一想，罗斯的希望似乎比麦卡锡大一点儿。
（冷笑话：如果阿特伍德得奖，是不是就算顺便也代表了美国这批人了呢？）
村上春树和高银，这几年谈亚洲候选常被提起的二位。毕竟东亚自大江之后又十六七年了。作为半个村上粉，个人观点，村上近十五六年这些小说不及80年代的好看，但打《奇鸟行状录》之后，之前的思想形态隐喻快变成明喻了。近几年又是耶路撒冷奖，又谈核危机，加上之前《神的孩子都跳舞》的人文关怀，立场上根红苗正。所以还真不是不可能----虽然我觉得，他总还有哪哪不大对劲，再熬几年工龄吧。
勒克莱齐奥得奖后，图尔尼埃和莫迪阿诺这两位我不太敢指望了。诺特博姆、马格里斯这老两位按说也能拼一下，但近十年里七位欧洲圈的……瑞典人表示：咱自己的特朗斯特罗姆还没轮上呢。所以呢……还是回到敬爱的阿多尼斯。
诗和评论早都名动天下自不待言。贯通东西。中东北非阿拉伯圈儿的大拿。81岁了。我觉得今年对他来说，还有柄双刃剑式的东西：阿拉伯世界这几年风云变幻，对政治敏感的委员会很可能会趁此顺水推舟表表立场。阿多尼斯的诗纯粹优雅不说，自己近些年又算社会活动家奔走呼告和平，还算半个流亡诗人。很完美的得奖对象。
（如果阿多尼斯不得奖，我指望奥兹。一来是给以色列那儿一交代，二来我也算是亲眼见过活诺奖还问过话拿过签售本的人了……）
话说，每年这时候，都会有这么种话说：诺奖不重要；诺奖有偏见；诺奖就是安慰奖；诺奖给了一个就不给一圈儿；诺奖政治意味太重；某某人得不得诺奖根本无所谓。这些当然都有理。我也可以随便举一串例子证明，卡夫卡纳博科夫格林乔伊斯普鲁斯特博尔赫斯格里耶卡尔维诺亨利・詹姆斯契诃夫托尔斯泰伍尔芙里尔克庞德易卜生哈代瓦莱里反正20世纪没得奖的全明星队比得奖的全明星队还要劲爆，但那是另一回事了。这个奖重要不重要是否有偏见不是重点，他们自己对奖是否有无所谓其实也无关联。重点是，从任何标准看，阿多尼斯（及麦卡锡、奥兹、特朗斯特罗姆及其他老头子们）配得起这个奖。不能因为上到托尔斯泰、下到厄普代克这样的错失遗憾太多，就觉得遗憾和错过是常态。任何奖项都会充满挂一漏万式的遗憾，但如果遗憾能少一点，总会好一点的。
所以，还是回到那句话：给他们一个诺奖吧！----趁他们还没死。
附文：
An Open Letter to the Swedish Academy
Esteemed Members of the Swedish Academy:
Can we please stop the nonsense and give
Philip Roth
a Nobel Prize for Literature before he dies?
For your consideration, I present to you the Library of America edition of The American Trilogy, out just this week. The coincidence, I grant you, is a touch unseemly. One can’t help wondering if the board of the LOA chose this week to publish its handsome $40 omnibus edition of Roth’s three best-known late novels in the hope that you, the esteemed members of the Swedish Academy, would award him the Nobel Prize in Stockholm next week, allowing the LOA to bring in enough cash to float yet another edition of
Henry James’s
Desk Doodles. But don’t let that sway you. Just consider the work.
The opening of American Pastoral, the first book of the trilogy, with its effortless conjuring of the age of American innocence during the Second World War, is enough by itself to warrant at least a Nobel nomination. The book begins with an extended reverie about “steep-jawed…blue-eyed blond” Seymour Levov, star athlete of Newark’s tight-knit Jewish community, and a Jew who excels at all the things Jews of that era aren’t supposed to be good at: playing ball, being glamorous, loving themselves. By being “a boy as close to a goy as we were going to get,” Seymour Levov, nicknamed the Swede, offers his neighbors, only “a generation removed from the city’s old Prince Street ghetto,” a home-grown avatar in the fight against Hitler’s fascists in Europe.Yet in the eyes of the novel’s narrator, Roth’s alter ego, novelist Nathan Zuckerman, the Swede is a plaster saint, a bland, blond cipher. The Swede goes on to inherit the family’s Newark glove-making factory; marry a shiksa goddess, Dawn Dwyer, Miss New Jersey of 1949; and buy an old stone house in an upper-crust Gentile suburb. But in a deliciously funny scene, Zuckerman finds the grownup version of his childhood hero impenetrably dull:
I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface. What he had instead of a being, I thought, is blandness - the guy’s radiant with it. He has devised for himself an incognito, and the incognito has become him.
But Zuckerman is wrong. The Swede, like Coleman Silk from The Human Stain, the third book in the trilogy, bears a wounding secret. In Silk’s case, his secret is that he is not Jewish, as he pretends to be, but a black man passing for white. The Swede, on the other hand, has remained irreducibly himself, the great American sports god married to the beauty queen, but his daughter, now three generations removed from the ghetto and raised during the Vietnam War, has turned against everything her parents represent and, in a senseless act of antiwar protest, set off a bomb that kills a man at the local post office.
In The American Trilogy, Roth tackles the three great historical issues of his era - protest of the Vietnam War, the Communist blacklist, and racial discrimination - and in each case, he finds something profoundly original to say. In American Pastoral, Merry’s act of violence is not merely a treason against her nation, or even against her father, but an affront to the generations of Levovs who rose from poverty to respectability through hard work and pluck. In I Married a Communist, the second and weakest book in the trilogy, Roth nevertheless puts a face to devout Communist belief in the person of Iron Rinn, the six-foot-six actor who has made a name for himself playing
Abraham Lincoln
on the radio.
But for all the brilliance of Roth’s historical analysis, the real subject of these books isn’t American history, but the essential unknowableness of the human heart. Each of the three books is narrated by Zuckerman, who like Roth has retreated to a monastic life in rural New England following a failed marriage. In each case, Zuckerman befriends the book’s hero, makes a judgment about who that man is at his core, then learns that his original judgment is wrong. Thus the books are, in essence, love stories, in which Roth’s alter ago, desexed by prostate surgery that has rendered him impotent, is cast in the curiously feminine role of a lover who falls for a man and then has to write an entire book to figure out just who this man really is behind the mask he has built for himself.
In American Pastoral and The Human Stain, the unmasking carries special poignancy because we as readers, like Zuckerman, fall in love with the damaged, vulnerable man behind the mask. In American Pastoral, the Swede is a big, sweet American lunk who lacks the political and intellectual equipment to understand his daughter’s fury at the American war machine. Yet even after Merry’s bomb kills a man and she goes on the run, even after the Swede learns that she has joined the radical underground and built bombs that have killed more people, he still loves her. In a wrenching scene, he finds Merry living in a single rented room in the roughest part of post-riot Newark, literally starving herself as part of a crazed religious practice.
What he saw sitting before him was not a daughter, a woman or a girl; what he saw, in a scarecrow’s clothes, stick-skinny as a scarecrow, was the scantiest farmyard emblem of life, a travestied mock-up of a human being, so meager a likeness to a Levov it could have fooled only a bird.
The scene is made doubly painful by the fact that rich, capable Swede Levov can do nothing to help his daughter. He knows he should call the police, and some part of him knows this would probably save her, but he can’t do it. He is incapacitated by that most human of emotions: love.
In The Human Stain, Coleman Silk is undone by an even more human emotion: love of self. Silk is drummed out of his university job for uttering an unintended racial slur against two black students, and is too caught up in the lie he has been living for most of his adult life to save himself by telling the truth, which is that he was born black. Roth’s handling of Silk’s transition from a light-skinned black teenager to a swarthy Jewish professor of classics is a thing of beauty, but for all the power of those scenes, the book is finally less about race and Silk’s self-destructive mendacity than about the relationship between Zuckerman and his shifting understanding of who Silk is.
Silk actively romances Zuckerman - in one marvelous scene they dance together, these two impotent old men, Zuckerman with his surgical wounds, Silk who takes Viagra - but as Zuckerman begins to understand Silk’s secret, his love for him deepens. He admires Silk’s refusal to be held back by the accident of his skin color, but even more, Zuckerman loves Silk’s sheer human complexity, the fact that there is so much more to him than meets the eye.
This, for Roth, is the true human stain, that we are so much more than what people think they know about us. “For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they’ve got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to what is known,” he writes. “The truth about us is endless. As are the lies.” The Human Stain is set in 1998, when the
Monica Lewinsky
scandal nearly brought down
Bill Clinton’s
presidency, and Roth rails with great comic gusto at “the ecstasy of sanctimony” the scandal brought into public life that year. But Roth’s real beef with Clinton’s opponents is that they refused to let Clinton be a real man with human needs. “I myself dreamed of a mammoth banner,” he writes, “draped dadaistically like a Christo
wrapping from one end of the White House to the other, and bearing the legend A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE.”If I Married a Communist fails to match the other two books, it is because Iron Rinn, the being at whom Zuckerman directs his love, fails to be sufficiently complex to be fully human. I Married a Communist, which turns on a tell-all book by the hero’s actress ex-wife that ruins his life, came out shortly after Roth’s actress ex-wife,
Claire Bloom
, published her own tell-all book about Roth, Leaving a Doll’s House, and critics read I Married a Communist as Roth’s less-than-subtle response. Given the weaknesses of I Married a Communist, the critics may have a point. The novel is so consumed with its vitriolic attack upon Iron Rinn’s wife, Eve Frame, and her daughter, a professional musician named Sylphid (Bloom’s daughter, it is worth noting, is an opera singer) that it neglects to make Iron Rinn into the kind of multi-layered, vulnerable man worthy of Zuckerman’s love, much less that of his readers.
Which brings us to the biggest knocks against Philip Roth, and perhaps the reason you, the members of the Swedish Academy, have not already awarded Roth the honor he so plainly deserves. The charges are, to put the case bluntly, that Roth’s oeuvre is uneven, and that, moreover, he’s a sexist pig. And you know what? There’s something to both these charges. Roth has written some truly dreadful books, and in much of his lesser work, including the often puerile David Kepesh novels, a primary quest of the central character is to find a hole, any hole, into which to insert his wayward penis. Even in Roth’s greatest work, if there is an act of villainy afoot, you can bet a woman is at the root of it. I revere Philip Roth, but if I were a woman I wouldn’t get within a hundred miles of the man.
But you, my esteemed friends, must see past all that, not because Roth’s personal failings don’t affect the work, since they plainly do, or even because we must take the good with the bad, but because, in Roth’s case, the good is inseparable from the bad. A more reasonable man would have known better than to follow his actress ex-wife’s tell-all book with a bilious, score-settling novel about an actress who ruins her husband’s reputation with a tell-all book. But then a more reasonable writer, one who actually cared what we thought, would never have dared, as a white Jewish man, to write a novel about a black man who passes as a white Jewish man. A more reasonable writer never would have written, in 1969, a novel like Portnoy’s Complaint about a “cunt crazy” young Jewish guy who beats off into raw liver that his mother later serves for dinner.
The case for Roth’s candidacy for a Nobel Prize isn’t that he’s a nice guy; it is that he’s a genius, and in Roth’s case, his genius lies in his audacity. Audacity doesn’t play nice. It isn’t politically correct. The peculiar power of audacity lies in its willingness to break rules, trample taboos, shake us awake - and, yes, sometimes, piss us off mightily. Audacity without intelligence begets mindless spectacle, but Philip Roth is the smartest living writer in America, and his work, good and bad, brilliant and puerile, is among the best this country has ever produced.
If Philip Roth doesn’t deserve the Nobel Prize, no one does.
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