琼·狄迪恩，美国随笔作家、小说家。1934年出生于加利福尼亚的萨克拉门托市，1956年从加州大学伯克利分校毕业，之后一直担任《时尚》杂志的特写编辑，直到1963年。著有《向伯利恒跋涉》《白色影集》《我来自何方》《迈阿密》等作品。加利福尼亚的文化背景、生活方式以及地理环境成为她写作的重要土壤。 标题：她毕生最不需要的事 The Last Thing She Needed 作者：伊恩·彭曼 Ian Penman 翻译：羽桐 思怡 City Journal 授权发布 最近，我为何总是反复见到这幅琼·狄迪恩（Joan Didion）的肖像呢？在最近我见到的的三篇介绍评论中，两篇都以这张肖像为封面图片。现在又一次见到它：冰冷完美的黑白照片，在特雷西·道格赫特（Tracy Daugherty)为她撰写的大型传记的封面上。它甚至出现在这一季流行的手提包的一整面上（另外一面写着“神奇的思想者”，这是最不像描述狄迪恩的词汇了，即使它的确在某种程度上使用了她最新的标题）。这是不是回应了某一种诉求？是不是有什么悬而未决的事情？
如果要承认特雷西·道格赫特的《最后的情歌》当中有一点是我所欣赏的：那就是在封面的这张图片中能够再次看到狄迪恩手中的香烟仍然完好无损，仍然可以（至少在回忆中）污染着加利福尼亚曾经清新的空气。讽刺的是，也许这张照片如此受欢迎的原因，正是因为人们无法从中确定它是在哪一年拍的：人们无法从照片中的女人身上立刻辨认出任何特别具有时代性的东西。狄迪恩看上去并非是特别典型的六七十年代的样子。她没有那种不统一的时髦感，也没有尴尬到吓人的卷发，或是沉重的民族珠宝、紫色的金框眼镜。这个女人完全用另一种视觉语言来表现自己：冷静，疏离，泰然自若。（打扮考究的，我想，大概是时尚杂志偏爱的用词）在 Celine 的营销广告所使用的一张近照中，狄迪恩看起来正是个81岁的女人了，更值得注意的是（我猜时尚人士同样对这个感兴趣）她如今依然带着一种日本禅宗式的冷酷，如同她与吉姆·莫里森约会的时代一样：仍然简约，消瘦，很“古典”。事实上，狄迪恩的照片当中很少会有非常明显的时代印记。不是狄迪恩粉丝的人们（当然，有这样的人存在）可能会说这是一张充满脆弱和自我戏谑的照片，就像她自己的报道中提到的那样：对她而言，她的照片将会送去哪里，她在为谁写传，或者当下是哪一年都不重要——这些故事总出现在相同的环境中，不带狄迪恩本人的任何信号。
事实上，如果冷静回顾书架上的这些书的话，我们会发现狄迪恩的三个不同阶段：1968-79年调查性报道的成名阶段；从《萨尔瓦多》到政治小说；还有近期更加凄苦的个人创作阶段。在每一个阶段中，都反映了她对于——我们可以说是政治，或者最好说是她对于公共事务中的各种说辞的判断——态度都是非常不同的。她的一篇蒙太奇式的文章《好公民》有一段很长的结尾段，暂时界定出了“后六十年代”的明确分界点和政治领域普遍的困境：时至今日，这篇文章依然可以原封不动的被剪贴过来重新刊发。她指出了普通人日常生活当中的挣扎与那些一心争取选票的政客们华而不实的、关于“问题与解决”的说辞之间日益扩大的差距。政客们企图掩饰真正的问题（尤其当问题完全是经济上的而不是容易解决、有着分歧性的“文化”问题），并且提出十分抽象的“有希望”的解决方案。这也许最先解释了为什么许多公民都感到如此愤怒但又同事非常冷漠。我怀疑现在的狄迪恩也许会说现在与七十年代之间唯一真正的区别就在于太多的媒体报道让自己被那些不得罪人的、喋喋不休地“问题与解决”所利用。 研究狄迪恩的作品如何和其时代发生关系是文学传记作家道格赫特（Daugherty）主要的兴趣。道格赫特自称是“把文学传记当作是文化史来写”。但狄迪恩本人难道不是已经做了这种“文化历史”的工作而且还做得十分巧妙吗？她以自己的方式挖掘隐藏在历史文本背后的情绪，而不是仅仅略过那些口号和陈词滥调。而道格赫特却陷入一种典型的“文化历史”模式写作中：“从‘大门乐队’中得到启示，战后生育高潮中出生的婴儿们哭喊道‘我们想要整个世界，现在就要！’狄迪恩感到既震惊又着迷。” 琼·狄迪恩传记《最后的情歌》，特雷西·道格赫特著 道格赫特似乎两种方式都想使用：在一篇非常重要的前言中，他声称不会成为那种肮脏的传记作者，挖掘那些“料”。但是根本上说，所有的传记作家都是好管闲事的人。每当道格赫特清高的想法同马利布的海潮一道退去，我们立刻就一头跌入了狄迪恩和邓恩的家庭生活（而后者的家庭成员似乎更值得挖掘，多米尼克和格里芬）。这种“更加关注作品而非绯闻”的说法实在是非常奇怪。现在到底还有谁会读那些传统的文学评论呢？而且，狄迪恩本人会适合或是吸引怎样的文学评论呢? 她作品中的遣词造句已经非常精明：报道，自传，政治评论，语义分析和随笔。事实上，狄迪恩已经对我们讲述了许多有关她生活的事情了，这让人怀疑一本有关她的传记是否真的还有必要。 实际上道格赫特没有从狄迪恩那里获得一点帮助，也几乎没怎么见过她的家人和亲密的朋友，这就让事情变得更加复杂了。（这本书里我最喜欢的一句来自伊芙·芭比茨——洛杉矶卓越的场景制作人，但是与狄迪恩的作品只有一点点联系。）如果你想知道为什么狄迪恩与邓恩的婚姻在六十年代末期产生了一些危机的话，我们恐怕没有更明智的选择了。不过我们确实可以找到狄迪恩在马利布时去哪里参加晚宴，又是在哪里找到那些漂亮的兰花。在这里，高贵的文学评论家道格赫特与宏大刺激的传记作者道格赫特之间似乎产生了内在的冲突。我们看到太多家庭内部的场景了，尤其是在洛杉矶时代：琼经常光顾的市场是什么，她参加那些丰盛的晚宴时喜欢在菜单上点什么，她的书房配色怎样。有时，道格赫特的书让人觉得是由一个和别人打赌戏仿《人物》杂志上名人的略传（婚姻，家庭装饰，菜单，孩子）的人创作的。 有时，道格赫特不敢触及狄迪恩在洛杉矶的其他社会关系网络是怎样的，但无论如何邓恩夫妇都没办法真正获胜。如果他们表现得像清高的艺术家一样，他们就被认为幼稚无可救药得不可救药；如果他们加入了作家联盟或是联系了律师以确保他们的努力得到了应有的报酬，他们就成了一心追求利益的保守者。当狄迪恩邓恩夫妇成功合作创作出了激动人心的剧本，1976年由芭芭拉·史翠珊主演的电影《巨星诞生》，并且因为他们后续的剧本相关工作得到合适的报酬时，道格赫特便如此总结道：“这部电影最终赚了六千六百万美元，这使得势利的知识分子们有个不错的发薪日了。”（说什么？“势利的知识分子”两个词从何而来？嫉妒？反清高主义？还是仅仅是一种文学评论家的愤怒？） 琼·狄迪恩和其同为作家的丈夫约翰·格雷戈里·邓恩 我们看不到任何狄迪恩真正的丑闻，有的只是道格赫特所写的无穷无尽的文章，仿佛深植于狄迪恩每日的“我”当中（“复制她精神与情感上的韵律”，在他看来是这样）。他尝试通过模仿她的写作来回应、或者模仿她的情感——或者至少利用看似相同地写作技巧，比如许多的留白，随机斜体和简洁有力的独句成段。他利用独属于道格赫特自己的手段——无数的感叹号所形成的风暴效应——有效地推动了这项隐秘的任务。 这有点像是创意写作基础教学：“她作品的形态——破碎、参差不齐——暗示了当代环境的混乱。”也许吧。破碎？当然，这是追求时尚。参差不齐？值得怀疑。在她作品达到巅峰时期，她的文章是尖锐的，但同样有一种炫目轻快的音乐韵律。（猜谜游戏：如果狄迪恩是一名作曲家，她会成为谁？兰迪·纽曼？沃伦·泽文？罗珊娜·卡什？莫顿·费尔德曼？）狄迪恩“马赛克”式的作品风格只不过是因为它们太过精准，外表坚硬，并且狄迪恩太过投入。狄迪恩则向我们展示了当这种风格陷入一种简单的条件反射时会发生什么，这一种并没有被他熟练掌握的方法。我认为狄迪恩的风格比道格赫特对此单一维度的应用要更加奇怪和难以捉摸。就好像是好莱坞所使用的移动变焦镜头在文学世界里的应用，似乎在同时地飞快拉近或推远。在狄迪恩的自传，《我来自何方》中，我们能够看到这样的效果有着完美的体现：看似聚焦于标准的个人资料（家庭，童年，故乡），实际上伴随着整个当代加利福尼亚的全景展开，以及大量的社会经济问题。 狄迪恩在这种报告文学中越发地关注语言本身，以及她如何感觉到语言如何完全地贬值成为一种社交货币。所有这些明知的不真实——自找的咒语，品牌塑造的广告词，以及广告宣传中的承诺——它们已经开始听起来非常相似。里根时代的流行词，CIA谈话，经济学家的数据，秘密交易，都在每日混乱的谈话之下——它们全都在小说《民主》和《他最不需要的》当中有所体现：一种催眠状态，像是重复每日的话语直到这种停滞状态烟消云散，每个相关的人彼此分离。 在《最后的情歌》的开头，有一个很好的部分，描写狄迪恩1956-66年在Vogue杂志为艾琳·塔尔梅工作的细节。还有一段更加私密化的学徒期——师从嗜酒如命、梅勒式怀旧的作家，在曼哈顿四处游荡的诺尔·帕尔门托。帕尔门托也曾经指导过狄迪恩的未婚夫，约翰·乔治·邓恩，并且最终介绍两人相识。狄迪恩从 Vougue 和塔尔梅，以及那些严苛的标题写作工作中，学到了自主编辑的能力，学会删去不必要的东西，在有限的空间及形态当中尽可能有创造性地写作。（塔尔梅说：“我们写得很长，发表得却很短，这使得琼学会了写作。”）她从帕尔门托那里得到了什么，我们难以归纳。也许是让我们再次复习了这难以界定的政治：“帕尔门托痛骂《国家》杂志中的右翼分子，转过头来又会对《国家评论》杂志中的左翼分子做同样的事……然后在《君子》杂志当中同时吹捧两方。” 从写作上来说，狄迪恩因为其“标志性”的著作（这大概是表达与那幅照片相同意思的文字）——1968年的《向伯利恒跋涉》和1979年的《白色影集》这两部无拘无束的作品而被人们熟知：一个骄傲且目标明确的年轻记者，有幸生活在一个着实激动人心的时代：曼森和莫里森，尼克松和里根，“黑豹”和派蒂·赫斯特以及女性解放运动。但这也许不是狄迪恩漫长的职业生涯中最有趣的时刻，道格赫特对于她同样精彩的“中年时期”（对于我们中的一部分人来说）给予了同等的重视——《民主》、《他最不需要的》《我从何处来》；关于迈阿密和萨尔瓦多幽灵一般的报道，加上《亨利之后》当中收集的一些文章。 当道格赫特再次使用那种狡黠隐秘的腔调，问题就出现了，仿佛他知道他写作对象走每一步路的时候在想什么。他开始谈及到狄迪恩的养女金塔纳·罗在其短暂而问题重重的一生中的污点时，在伦理上让我感到有些不自在。这和道格赫特高傲宣称的目的——追寻狄迪恩的作品与更广泛的时代精神的交汇点——尴尬地不相匹配。最后我们看到的却是一本用非常尖锐、傲慢，平淡却令人不快的方式，表达了部分正确内容的书。
可耻的是，一本本该有趣的书一直在描写从《周六晚间邮报》上长篇文章的时代直到今天每日更新博客的时代之路：那个时代与现在媒体、政治的巨大差异，以及狄迪恩的作品时如何跨越了所有这些改变。某一个艺术时代有时突然被后来的某一代人密切关注，这种情况常常发生。现在看来，这似乎就是发生在像是狄迪恩和帕蒂·史密斯身上的情况：一大批年轻女追随这种生活方式的榜样，追求他们充满希望、任性的开端，以及寡淡的、历经悲伤的结局。 还有那张照片，也许狄迪恩正在获得一个异乎寻常的年轻的读者群还有另一个原因：也许狄迪恩创造的怪异的、半虚构的洛杉矶有什么东西打动了那些第一崇拜的大明星是拉娜·德尔·雷（Lana Del Ray）的孩子们？比如，是不在是德尔·雷的《High By The Beach》MV中能够看到狄迪恩小说中的一些元素，或是它的场景就仿佛是从狄迪恩许久以前的文章中走出来的呢？“沿着未出租办公室的白茫茫的窗户蜿蜒流下，平滑的海岸岩壁，加剧了最典型的圣莫妮卡效应。慵懒荒芜的氛围，暗示着此地不过已经成为繁华殆尽的证明……”不知是否有可能，好莱坞重拍新版的《顺其自然》，请德尔·雷来做她的荧幕首秀。也许会给圣徒琼本人一个配角，比如一个老心理医师，一个许久以前举足轻重的人物，当然最重要的是——一个安静端庄的幸存者。 Why do I keep seeing this one image of Joan Didion so often recently? I’ve seen it crown twoout of three recent profiles or reviews, and here it is again, in all its icy monochrome perfection, on the front of Tracy Daugherty’s outsize biography. It was even splashed across one side of a season’s briefly fashionable tote bag(the other side proclaiming MAGICAL THINKER, which seemed tome a most un-Didion-like phrase, even if it did sort of recycle one ofher most recent titles). Is there some kind of demand being responded to here? Is there something in the air? One thing I will say straight off in favor of Tracy Daugherty’s The Last Love Song: it’s nice to see that the cover image comes complete with Didion’s 1970s cigarette intact, allowed (in memory, at least) to foul the pristine California air once again. Probably one of the reasons this photo is so popular is that, hypothetically, you can’t be sure what year it was taken: the woman in the image isn’t instantly identifiable with any particular time frame. Didion isn’t excessively sixties- or seventies-looking. She isn’t incoherently à la mode: no embarrassing fright perm or heavy ethnic jewelry or purple granny glasses.This is a woman versed in some other visual language entirely—cool, remote,poised. (Soigné, I think, is the preferred fashion-mag word.) In a more recent photo used for a Celine marketing campaign, Didion looks like the 81-year-old woman she now is; what’s more notable (and also what I’d guessfashion people like about it) is that her “look” now is as Zen -cool as it was in her hanging-with-Jim-Morrison days: still minimal, pared back, “classic.” Rare, in fact, is the picture of Didion that seems at all cruelly date-stamped. Non-fans of Didion (apparently, they do exist) might say this is of a piece with what they find weak and self-parodic in her reportage: that it often didn’t appear to matter where she was sent, or whom she profiled, or what year it was—the story always emerged in the same airy,detached Didion semaphore. In fact, a sober trip back through the books on the shelf reveals at least three discrete Didion periods: the name-making investigative reportage of 1968–79; the nonpareil arc linking Salvador to Political Fictions; and her recent more-ruefully personal work, each of which reflects a markedly differentattitude to—well, we can call it politics, or better say her sense of what’s at stake in the various narratives of public life. There’s a long closing paragraph in her montage-essay “Good Citizens” that provisionally sketches a distinct post-sixties slump and general bafflement at both ends of the political spectrum: it might be snipped out and reprinted, as is, today. She identifies a widening gap between the everyday struggles of ordinary people and the empty language of “problems and solutions” used by slick, vote-grabbing politicos, who tend to gloss over real problems (especially if said problems are stubbornly economic rather than handily and divisively “cultural”) and offer abstractly “hopeful” solutions. That might begin to explain why many citizens feel so angry but also so deeply apathetic. I suspect that present-day Didion would claim that the only real difference between now and 1970 is that way too large a segment of the reporting media have let themselves be co-optedinto the same anodyne, distracting chatter of “problems and solutions.” Precisely how Didion’s work relates to its time is one of the declared interests of literary biographer Daugherty (previous subjects: Joseph Heller, Donald Barthelme). Daugherty writes what he calls “literary biography as cultural history.” But didn‘t Didion herself already do the “cultural history” thing—and rather well? In her own way, she pitched down into the deep moods and hidden textures of history, rather than just skimming off slogans and clichés. Here, on the otherhand, is Daugherty in characteristic “cultural history” mode: “Taking their cue from The Doors, the baby boomers shouted, ‘We want the world and we want it now!’ Didion was intrigued and appalled.” Daugherty seems to want it both ways: in a rather precious preface, he claims not to be the sort of grubby biographer who goes for the “dish.” But any biographer is almost by definition a very nosey fellow, and once Daugherty’s high-minded thoughts have drifted out with the Malibu tide, we soon plunge headlong into the home life of Didion and Dunne (and the latter’s even more dish-worthy family members, Dominick and Griffin). It’s pretty odd, this notion of being less concerned with gossip than with The Work. Who on earth still reads conventional Lit Crit nowadays? And what kind of Lit Crit might Didion herself suit or attract? Her work is already a canny merger of idioms: reportage, memoir, political rhetoric, semantic analysis, essayistic reflection. In fact, Didion has already told us so much about her life, it makes you wonder whether a biography was really necessary. Things are further complicated by the fact that Daugherty got zero help from Didion and very little face time with any of her family or close friends. (My favorite lines inthe book all came from Eve Babitz—Los Angeles scene-maker extraordinaire, but someone with only the most tangential relation to Didion’s work.) If you want to know why the Didion-Dunne marriage went a bit rocky around the end of the sixties, you’re left not much wiser. But we do find out where 1970s Malibu Didion went for dinner-party staples and gorgeous orchids. There seems to be an internal struggle going on here between Daugherty the noble literary critic and Daugherty the author of a big, glamorous biography. We get too much domestic scene-setting, especially during the Los Angeles years: what markets Joan frequents; her fall-back menu for dishy dinner parties; the color scheme of herwriting room. At times, Daugherty’s book reads like it was written by someonewho’s accepted a bet to do a noir parody of the kind of celebrity profile (marriage, décor, menus, children) you might find in People magazine. Sometimes, Daugherty quails at how other-worldly Didion’s networking Los Angeles life has become, but Didion-Dunne can’t win. If they act like artists, they’re held up as hopeless naifs; if they join a writer’s union or engage a lawyer to make sure they get proper recompense for their hard work, they’re reactionary breadheads! When the Didion-Dunne scriptwriting partnership manages to come out of the nerve-shredding trial of the 1976 Barbra Streisand vehicle A Star Is Born with proper payment for all their successive script treatments, Daugherty sumsup thusly: “The movie went on to earn over $66 million, a percentage of which made a nice payday for the snobby intellectuals.” (Say what? Where did those last two words leap from! Envy? Reverse snobbism? Or is this just Lit Critflip?) If we don’t get any real Didion dirt, what we do get are endless pages of Daugherty writing as if located deep inside Didion’s diurnal “I”(“reproducing her mental and emotional rhythms,” as he sees it). He tries toecho or simulate her sensibility by writing like her—or at least, by deploying similar-seeming stylistic devices like much white space, random italics, and punchy one-line paragraphs. He effectively blows this undercover mission with what proves to be something of a Daugherty trademark—a positive blizzard of fizzy exclamation marks. It all feels a bit Creative Writing 101: “The shape of her writing—fragmented, jagged—suggested the chaos of contemporary circumstances.” Well, maybe. Fragmented? Sure, after a fashion. Jagged? Arguable. At its highwire best, her prose is prickly, but also possessed of a gorgeous, lilting, musical rhythm. (Parlorgame: if Joan Didion were an LP, who would it be by? Randy Newman? Warren Zevon? Roseanne Cash? Morton Feldman?) Didion‘s mosaic style works only because it’s so tough-shelled, precise,worked-on. Daugherty shows what happens when such a style lapses into mere reflextic, a not so expertly wielded mannerism. I think Didion’s style is stranger and more elusive than Daugherty’s one-dimensional take on it. It’s like the literary equivalent of one of those Hollywood “dolly zoom” shots, seeming towhoosh in and shudder out at one and the same time. In Didion‘s “memoir,” Where I Was From, we get this in full effect: what seems to be a focusing-in on standard personal data (family, childhood, hometown) is accompanied by a panning-out to take in contemporary California and a whole raft of socio-economic problems. Increasingly, Didion’s core concern in such reportage is with language itself and how she feels it’s become utterly devalued as social currency. All the confident duplicities—self-help mantras, rebranding jingles, campaign promises—and how eerily similar they’ve begun to sound.Buzzwords in the air during the Reagan presidency; CIA-speak; economist data;shadowy deals, just under the skein of everyday discourse—they’re all there infiction like Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted: a trance -like repetition of everyday speech till its moorings begin to fray and untie and unmoor everyone involved. One good sectionearly on in The Last Love Song details the young Didion’s 1956–66 tenureat Vogue under Allene Talmey and a more personal apprenticeship with the hard-drinking, Maileresque writer and roué-about-Manhattan, Noel Parmentel. Parmentel also mentored Didion‘shusband-to-be, John Gregory Dunne, and eventually introduced the couple. What Didion got from Vogue/Talmey and the “demanding” work of caption-writing, was an education in self-editing, learning what to leave out,writing as creatively limited space and shape. (Talmey: “We wrote long and published short and by doing that Joan learned to write.”) What she got from Parmentel is harder to summarize; but it’s perhaps telling that we once again brush up against hard-to-place politics: “In print, [Parmentel] savaged the right in the pages of The Nation, would turn around and do the same tothe left in National Review . . . and blasted both sides in Esquire.” Writing-wise, the“iconic” Didion (the textual parallel to that photo) is generally taken to be her freewheeling work in 1968’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem and 1979’s The White Album: a stiff-backed, quietly purposive young reporter given the gift of truly exciting times: Mansonand Morrison, Nixon and Reagan, the Panthers and Patti Hearst and Women’s Lib.But this may not be the most interesting moment in Didion’s long career, and it is to Daugherty’s credit that he gives equal consideration to her (for some of us) equally fascinating “middle period”—Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted; Where I Was From; the spectral reportage of Miami and Salvador, plus some of the essays collected in After Henry. The problem here comes when Daugherty slips back into the slyly confidential tone of one who was there, and knows what his subject was thinking every step of the way. It certainly made me feel a bit ethically queasy when he began to linger over every shiver and blot in the short and apparently troubled life of Didion’s adoptive daughter, Quintana Roo. This sits uneasily with Daugherty’s loftily stated aim of tracing the intersection between Didion’s work and the wider zeitgeist of the day. We end up with a book that manages to say some of the right things, but in a rather shrill and patronizing and often just plain icky way. The shame of it is that an interesting book remains to be written about the road travelled fromthe days of long Saturday Evening Post pieces to today’s daily updated-insider blogs: the yawning difference between media and politics then and now, and how Didion’s work has traversed all these changes. It often happens that an artistic era suddenly comes into intense focus for the generation that comes of age following it. And this is what currently seems to behappening with figures like Didion and with Patti Smith: certainly a lot of younger women seem to identify with the example of such lives, with their hopeful, headstrong beginnings, as well as with their stoic, grief-burnished final acts.
As well as that photo, there may be another reason that Didion is getting play with a younger-than-usual readership: could there be something about Didion’s eerie,semi-fictional Los Angeles that strikes a chord with kids whose first big popmusic crush is Lana Del Rey? Is it pushing things to see something of Didion’s haunted fiction in the video for Del Rey‘s “High By The Beach,” for instance, and a set that could have stepped right out of a long-ago Didion essay? “It streamed down the blank windows of unleased offices, loosened the soft coastal cliffs and heightened the most characteristic Santa Monica effect, that air of dispirited abandon which suggests that the place survives only as illustration of a boom gone bankrupt . . . .” What chance a Hollywood remake of Play It As It Lays, with Del Rey making her bigscreen debut . . . and perhaps with a cameo for Saint Joan herself, as a wise old psychotherapist, a long-ago mover and shaker, and—most of all—a quietly dignified survivor. - End- 本文经 City Journal 授权翻译 编辑｜miu 单读出品，转载请先至后台询问 无条件欢迎分享转发朋友圈 长按识别图中二维码，或点击【阅读原文】下载单读 App（如果曾经下载过旧版单读 App 的用户，请卸载后重新下载）。 |
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