Pillow Books　枕邊書

Pillow Books

枕邊書

Clifton Fadiman

克里夫頓·費迪曼

作者簡介

克里夫頓·費迪曼（Clifton Fadiman，1904—1999），美國知名作家、編輯。他1925年畢業(yè)于哥倫比亞大學，畢業(yè)后在西蒙與舒斯特國際出版公司（Simon & Schuster）工作了10年，最終成為主編。此后10年間，他在《紐約客》（The New Yorker）書評版任職，并成為“每月一書”圖書俱樂部（Book of the Month Club）編輯。70年代，他在《蟋蟀雜志》（Cricket Magazine）上開辟了兒童書書評專欄，深受讀者喜愛。

本文首刊于1955年的《假日》（Holiday）雜志，后收入1955年出版的費迪曼作品集《一個人的舞會》（Party of One）。如果你亦是床頭閱讀的鐵桿粉絲，枕邊閑書數冊，睡前必品書香，那么，這篇令人忍俊不禁的幽默小品正適合伴你入夢。

Reading in bed, like other gentle customs of the pre-Tension Age, may be on the way out. Yet it is a minor art we should not willingly let die.

There are three schools. At one extreme are those who say, with Sir J. C. Squire, “The bedside book for me is the book that will longest keep me awake.”I suspect such literary night owls of being less avid of reading than fearful of sleeping, like the student Lia Hsun, who, according to Giles's Chinese Biographical Dictionary, “had a lighted twist of hemp arranged in such a way as to bum his hair if he began to nod from drowsiness.”They would do as well to stuff the pillow with a pair of spurs.

At a far remove from those who misuse books to keep themselves awake are those who misuse books to put themselves to sleep. When laudanum failed, the poet Coleridge was forced to administer something stronger—the blank-verse odes of his friend Southey. We have no Southeys today, but a dose of current historical romance might do as well, or a bitter ounce of novel by any of our young men who have reached the land of despair without bothering to pass through the intervening country of reflection.

I hold with neither the Benzedrine, nor the Second school. As for the first, to read the whole night through is to trespass upon nature. The dark hours belong to the unconscious, which has its own rights and privileges. To use the literary lockout against the unconscious is unfair to the dreamers' union. Hence the wise bed-reader, rendering unto Morpheus the things that are Morpheus', will shun any book that appears too interesting.

Nor, in my view, should a book be used merely as an opiate. Indeed, I do not understand how it can be. Dull books soothe only dull brains—a moderately healthy mind will be irritated rather than rested by a dull book. (This irritation is of a special kind; it is known as boredom, and no one need blush for it. He who boasts that he is never bored confesses himself half-dead, irritability being one of the marks of all living tissue.) But is this capacity to irritate through ennui really what we seek in a pillow book? I doubt it. Books that bore you into a kind of dull paralysis are committing mayhem on your mind. I avoid them as I do the man with total recall of his morning paper, the woman with total recall of her shopping day.

As a middle-of-the-roader I have found (nothing surprising about it) that the ideal book to read before sleep should neither bore nor excite.

Take newspapers, which tend to do both. Charles Lamb said, “Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.”I do not urge upon anyone my own reactionary notion, which is that the proper time to read a newspaper is when passing the newsstand. For me much daily journalism might as well be condensed to sky writing. But even if this extreme position be disallowed, there is something to be urged against the habit of reading newspapers before sleep—apart from the legacy of smudge they leave upon sheets, pillows and fingers. Preslumber reading should be a kind of small private devotion during which we beat a quiet retreat from the practical.

Now the newspaper is but the daily reiteration of the practical. It is the enemy of the settled mind, which is the province of those truly important concerns that are not practical at all, but speculative. The newspaper, with its unkillable obsession with the actual, is the systematic generator of worry. All newspaper readers furrow their brows. This may be a good thing during the active day, but to read the paper in bed is to open Pandora's box at the very moment when we are least able to deal with its contents. It is to fall asleep with a gadfly inside your skull.

There is a famous essay, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. In this essay Virginia Woolf attacked novelists like Wells, Bennett, and Galsworthy on the grounds that reading their books left one feeling incomplete, even frustrated. Such novels, she said, seemed to call for action on your part: reform the economic system, improve education, divorce your wife. I think Virginia Woolf thought up this pretty theory to camouflage the fact that she just didn't like novels so different from her own. However, applied more narrowly to bedside books, it makes fair sense.

The man of Wall Street should not take to bed the stock market quotations; the quiet counterpane is no proper field for raging bulls and bears. Problem novels (usually produced by problem children) should never companion your pillow; midnight is no hour to worry about the time being out of joint. Avoid political arguments that step upon your toes, whether the toes be Republican or Democratic. Await a more fitting hour than bedtime to scare yourself stiff with the latest volume on the atom bomb. Above all, put from you all reading matter that aims (like this essay) to persuade you of something or change you into a finer and more alert citizen. The state of a man comfortably tucked in bed is already kingly; it will not brook improvement. All books too close to our worn and fretted daily lives make dubious bedtime reading. Avoid the call to action.

In my own case I can think of two seeming exceptions to this rule. The first is travel books. The normal human being is made restless by such reading, and quite properly so. But I am of such rooted and stationary nature that I can enjoy the most seductive tales of gypsying without feeling any impulse to kick away the blanket and phone for reservations on the next plane to Rio. However, if I owned an itching foot, I would confine such unsettling reading to the non-horizontal hours. The second exception concerns my favorite bedtime pabulum, books about food and drink. For me there are few nobler experiences than to read myself almost to sleep over a classic like P. Morton Shand's A Book of Food or André Simon's Concise Encyclopaedia of Gastronomy or M. F. K. Fisher's Here Let Us Feast. I say almost to sleep, for of course such reading can have but one outcome—a 2 A. M. invasion of refrigerator and cellar. This would appear a flat contradiction of my rule: No calls to action. Yet the contradiction is apparent, not real. Such reading, it is true, maketh a full man, but a full man is a better sleeper, and so books on food and wine lead roundabout to sweet slumber.

In sum, for me the best bed books are those that deny the existence of tomorrow. To read in bed is to draw around us invisible, noiseless curtains. Then at last we are in a room of our own and are ready to burrow back, back, back to that private life of the imagination we all led as children and to whose secret satisfactions so many of us have mislaid the key. Not that the book need be “good.”Indeed, like another bedtime favorite of mine, science fiction (some of it), it can be pleasant trash. But, “good”or “bad,”it should act as a bridge, a middle term between the sharp fact of daily existence and the cloudy fact of the dream life. It must commit me to nothing, least of all to assent or contradiction. All the better if it be removed in some degree from my current time, my current place—life is too short for us to spend more than a few hours a day being up-to-date. Finally, it should not be in any way excessive, whether in humor or depth or even originality.

Nevertheless, if for you the World Almanac satisfies these conditions, then by all means bed yourself with the World Almanac. The books that do the job for me may quite well bore you to a catalepsy or infuriate you to a raging insomnia. The following paragraphs may therefore be of no use to you. On the other hand, they may.

Most intelligent bed-readers will get a not too stimulating pleasure from any well-conceived general anthology, such as Huntington Cairns's The Limits of Art or Somerset Maugham's more conventional Traveller's Library. Maugham's own tales, published complete in two stout volumes, The World Over and East and West, are perfect for the alcove. I like detective stories, if good, but must confess that most of the current crop read as if they had been punched out on an IBM machine. Sound collections, like those by Dorothy Sayers, of short whodunits are most satisfactory. E. C. Bentley's two detective novels and his handful of short stories have recently been put into a single volume, Trent's Case Book: a superior affair; and there is also available a Josephine Tey omnibus. Otherworldly tales (but they must stop just short of the gruesome) do nicely. The contrast between their shudders and one's own snug safety supplies a childish pleasure whose roots lie too deep for us to scorn them. Of anthologies of the weird there are dozens—Alexander Laing's The Haunted Omnibus and the Modern Library's Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural are among the better ones.

I like also to roam around in the General Catalogue of the Oxford University Press, a publication that costs you nothing and is rich with peculiar treasures. There is nothing quite like these endless book titles and brief descriptions to produce in the reader a gentle, serene amazement at the quantity of extraordinary matters, from Acrocephaly and Acrocephalosyndactyly to the Zla-ba-Bsam-,grub, that have engaged the minds of our fellow human beings. Here we find Galen's On Medical Experience, with this bit of useful information: “Since the original Greek text of this work was lost, except for two small fragments, this ninth-century Arabic translation is the earliest known complete version.”

Books about people who lived lives fantastically different from my own I have found excellent for the bedside. I like to read about the Middle Ages; you may prefer Polynesia or even more alien climes, such as William Faulkner's Southland. Books of popular science please me, but there are few writers today who have the liveliness and wit of Eddington, Jeans, and H. G. Wells. (Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us and Guy Murchie's Song of the Sky are delightful exceptions.) Nonacademic books about words and language are first-rate for me, but this may be a narrow professional interest.

As for novels, give me no profound Russians, no overlucid Frenchmen, no opaque Germans. Give me solid Englishmen of the nineteenth century or early twentieth—William De Morgan, Wilkie Collins, George Borrow, Charles Reade. (I omit Dickens and Thackeray as too obvious.) Above all give me Trollope, from whom I have received so much pleasure that I would willingly call him another St. Anthony; Trollope, who breaks through the time barrier and teleports the horizontal reader instantly to a divinely settled, comfortable, income-taxless vanished world. His half a hundred novels are good for five years of bedside reading. Of those who minister to the tired, night-welcoming mind, Trollope is king. He never fails to interest, but not too much; to soothe, but not too much. Trollope is the perfect novelist for the bedside.

床頭閱讀，就像“壓力時代”之前的其他好習慣一樣，或許正在逐漸消逝。但這是一門我們不愿眼睜睜看它逝去的藝術。

對此有三派觀點。第一派極端人士贊同J. C. 斯夸爾爵士1的說法：“對我來說，枕邊書是讓我保持清醒時間最長的書?！蔽也拢@些書呆子兼夜貓子不是讀書入迷，而是害怕睡覺，就像翟理斯2《中國人名大辭典》里的孫敬那樣“頭懸梁，以驅趕睡意”。往枕頭里塞一對馬刺，也能有同樣的效果。

與把書誤用作提神劑的人相反，有些人把書誤用作安眠藥。當鴉片酊失去效果時，詩人柯勒律治3不得不服用更強效的藥物——好友騷塞4的無韻抒情詩，來幫助自己入睡。當代沒有騷塞的無韻詩，卻有一堆歷史浪漫小說，以及從不自省、無病呻吟的年輕人所寫的苦情小說，它們都有同樣的催眠效果。

我既不贊成把書當作苯丙胺（一種提神劑），也不提倡第二派人的做法。至于第一派人，整夜讀書違背了自然法則。黑夜屬于睡眠，睡眠有其權利。用文學作品來抵抗睡眠，對于愛做夢的人來說不公平。因此，明智的床頭閱讀者會聽從夢神摩耳甫斯5的安排，避免閱讀太有趣的書。

在我看來，也不應該把書用作鴉片。事實上，我不理解書還能這么用。乏味的書只能撫慰遲鈍的大腦——對心智健康的人來說，乏味的書只會讓他們反感，而起不到安撫作用。（這是一種特殊的反感，即通常所說的厭倦。你無需為厭倦而臉紅。吹噓自己從不厭倦，就是承認自己“半死不活”，因為會反感是“活人”的標志之一。）但我們想從枕邊書中獲得的，難道是這種厭倦嗎？我表示懷疑。讓你思維麻痹的乏味書籍會對你的頭腦造成損害。我對待這類書，就像對待愛復述晨報內容的男人、愛回憶購物經歷的女人那樣，唯恐避之不及。

作為中間派，我發(fā)現最理想的睡前讀物應該既不乏味也不刺激。這個發(fā)現沒什么奇怪。

就拿兼具這兩點的報紙來說吧。查爾斯·蘭姆說過：“報紙總能激起人們的好奇，但放下后沒有人不覺得失望?！蔽覐牟粍袢私邮芪业姆磩佑^點——閱讀報紙的最佳時機是途經報攤時。在我看來，許多每日新聞最好精簡成空中文字6。但即使不接受這種極端思想，除了報紙留在被單、枕頭和手指上的污跡外，還有其他理由讓你放棄睡前讀報的習慣。睡前閱讀應該是一種小小的私人愛好。在此過程中，我們能享受遠離現實的寧靜。

如今，報紙只是每日現實的重復。有些人覺得真正值得關注的是毫不實際、純屬理論的事，報紙則會破壞他們安寧的心境。報紙永遠只迷戀現實，只會讓人陷入煩惱。所有讀報人都眉頭緊鎖。這在忙碌的白天或許是件好事，但在床頭讀報，就像在最沒有抵抗力的時刻打開潘多拉的盒子，就像是入睡時有只牛虻在腦袋里亂轉。

弗吉尼亞·伍爾芙7在名篇《貝內特先生與布朗夫人》中，攻擊了威爾斯、貝內特和高爾斯華綏等小說家，說讀他們的書讓人覺得生活殘缺，甚至感到沮喪。她說，那些小說似乎在號召讀者們自己行動起來——改革財政制度、提高教育水平、和妻子離婚。我認為，伍爾芙提出這套冠冕堂皇的理論只為掩蓋一個事實，即她不喜歡和自己作品風格迥異的小說。但用這個理論評判睡前讀物，卻不失為一條好標準。

華爾街的金融家不該把股市報價單帶到床上；安靜的睡床不適合談論火爆的牛市和低迷的熊市。問題小說（通常由問題兒童寫成）絕不該陪在你的枕邊；午夜不是擔心時局動蕩的好時光。無論你是屬于民主黨還是共和黨，都別在睡前進行政治討論。等到比睡前更合適的時候，再拿關于原子彈的最新著作把自己嚇呆吧?？偠灾灰菐в心康男缘淖x物（比如這篇文章），要說服你去做什么，或要把你變成更優(yōu)秀、更警醒的公民，就要把它拋開。舒舒服服躺在床上的人，已經擁有王者的尊貴，不需要任何的改善。過于貼近我們疲憊、焦躁的日常生活的書，或許都不適合睡前閱讀。要避免引起沖動。

就我自己來說，有兩種書似乎是例外。第一種是游記。普通人會被這類書弄得心神不定，而且很可能是這樣。但我天性沉穩(wěn)，就算讀最具誘惑力的吉卜賽式流浪故事，也不會沖動到一腳踢開毯子，打電話預訂下一個飛往里約熱內盧的航班機票。然而，如果我腳癢癢了，就絕不會在太陽下山后讀這種令人心神不寧的書。第二種例外涉及我最喜歡的睡前精神食糧——關于美酒佳肴的書。對我來說，閱讀P. 莫頓·尚德的《美食之書》，或是安德烈·西蒙的《簡明烹飪百科全書》，或是M. F. K. 費希爾的《在此共享盛宴》等經典作品，直到幾乎睡著，很少有比這更美妙的經歷了。我說“幾乎睡著”，是因為讀這種書只會有一個后果——凌晨2點鐘起床搜刮冰箱和酒窖。這看似和我的準則——避免引起沖動——有些矛盾。但矛盾是表象，實則不然。這種閱讀確實使人充實（肚子和腦袋都如此），充實者睡得更香。所以說，關于美酒佳肴的書兜了個圈子，最終會把你帶進甜美夢鄉(xiāng)。

總而言之，最好的枕邊書讓我忘記還有明天。在床上閱讀，就像在周遭拉起隱形無聲的窗簾。最后，我們待在自己的房間里，一路回溯到孩提時想象中的私人生活，找回孩提時那種秘密的滿足感——我們很多人早已遺失了通往彼方的鑰匙。那種書不必是“佳作”。的確，就像我喜歡的另一種睡前讀物，即某些科幻小說，它可以是令人愉快的垃圾文學。但無論是“佳作”還是“糟粕”，它都該起到橋梁的作用，一頭連著白天的鮮活現實，一頭連著夢中的朦朧世界。它必須什么也不向我要求，尤其不要我贊成或反對。如果它能讓我暫離所處時代、所處境地，那就更好了——生命短暫，我們沒時間一天花幾個小時追趕潮流。最后，它還不能太過幽默、太有深度或太具創(chuàng)意。

不過，如果對你來說《世界年鑒》符合這些要求，那就拿《世界年鑒》作床頭伴侶吧。適合我的書可能讓你厭煩透頂，或是惹得你惱怒失眠。因此，下面幾段話可能對你毫無用處，也可能對你有所助益。

最明智的床頭讀者，會在精心編著的通俗選集——如亨廷頓·凱恩斯的《藝術的極限》或薩默塞特·毛姆更大眾化的《旅行者的圖書館》之中享受溫和的樂趣。毛姆自己的故事，匯集成厚厚的兩卷本《世界的終結》和《東方與西方》，正是睡前閱讀的佳品。我喜歡偵探小說，但得是優(yōu)秀偵探小說才行。然而必須承認，如今的偵探小說，讀起來大多像是用IBM電腦批量生產的一樣。說到短篇偵探小說，多蘿西·塞耶斯等人的作品集最適合睡前讀。最近，E. C. 本特利的兩篇偵探小說和一些短篇故事匯成了一冊《特倫特探案集：高級案件》，約瑟芬·鐵伊也出了作品選集。睡前讀讀怪誕小說也不錯，但其中的恐怖片段最好點到即止。書中令人戰(zhàn)栗的內容和讀者暖和舒適的床鋪形成對比，帶給人一種孩子氣的歡樂。這種歡樂根深蒂固，沒有人能對此表示不屑。有很多怪誕小說選集，比如亞歷山大·萊恩的《鬧鬼的公共汽車》和現代文庫版的《恐怖與靈異故事集錦》都是較好的選擇。

我還喜歡瀏覽牛津大學出版社的總書目。這種出版物不用花錢買，而且富含奇珍異寶。沒有什么能像這些無窮無盡的書名和簡介一樣，讓你為有這么多奇事感到溫柔平和的驚喜。從Acrocephaly到Acrocephalosyndactyly再到Zla-ba-Bsam-，grub8，無不令人心醉神迷。從蓋倫9《醫(yī)學經驗》的簡介中，我們能找到一點有用信息：“由于希臘文原版已經散失，唯余兩份零散殘片，故9世紀的阿拉伯文譯本是本書現存最早的完整版?！?

我發(fā)現，如果書中人物和我的生活大相徑庭，那么此書將是絕佳睡前讀物。我喜歡關于中世紀的書；你或許青睞波利尼西亞或異國風物，比如威廉·?？思{10筆下的南部。流行的科學讀物同樣合我心意，但如今很少有作家的文字能像愛丁頓、金斯、H. G. 韋爾斯那樣生動風趣。（雷切爾·卡森的《我們周遭的大海》和蓋伊·默基的《天空之歌》算是兩個令人欣喜的例外。）關于語言文字的非學術書對我來說是一流的睡前讀物，但這或許是我狹窄的專業(yè)興趣使然。

至于小說，別讓我讀深奧的俄國小說、淺顯的法國小說、晦澀的德國小說，讓我讀19世紀或20世紀初可靠的英國小說吧，比如威廉·德摩根、威爾基·柯林斯、喬治·博羅、查爾斯·里德的作品。（我省略了狄更斯和薩克雷，因為很明顯他們會上榜。）我最喜歡的作家當屬特洛勒普11，他的作品帶給了我無盡歡樂，我真想稱他為另一位圣安東尼12。特洛勒普打破了時間的界限，將平躺的讀者瞬間傳送到一個神靈庇佑、舒適安寧、免所得稅的失落的世界。他寫下的50本小說，足足能讓人享受5年的睡前閱讀時光。在那些安撫疲憊心靈、伴你進入夢鄉(xiāng)的作者當中，特洛勒普可稱君王。他的書從來不乏趣味，卻不會讓人過于興奮；能讓你得到安慰，卻又是適可而止。說到睡前閱讀，特洛勒普是最完美的小說家。

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1．約翰·科林斯·斯夸爾爵士（Sir John Collings Squire，1884—1958），英國詩人，第一次世界大戰(zhàn)后極具影響力的文學編輯。

2．赫伯特·艾倫·翟理斯（Herbert Allen Giles，1845—1935），英國語言學家，劍橋大學第二任漢學教授。他編撰的《華英字典》影響了幾代外國學生。

3．塞繆爾·泰勒·柯勒律治（Samuel Taylor Coleridge，1772—1834），英國桂冠詩人和評論家，“湖畔派”浪漫詩人。

4．羅伯特·騷塞（Robert Southey，1774—1843），英國桂冠詩人，與華茲華斯和柯勒律治并稱三大“湖畔派詩人”。

5．摩耳甫斯（Morpheus），希臘神話中的夢神，擁有改變夢境的能力。當他拂動幽雅而美麗的羽翼時，人們便會安睡，在他的懷抱中休憩。

6．空中文字，指飛機拖曳的煙霧在空中寫成的文字，此處指新聞最好精簡到幾個字就能概括。

7．弗吉尼亞·伍爾芙（Virginia Woolf，1882—1941），英國女作家，意識流小說的代表人物，也是女性意識流小說家中成就最高的一位。

8．前兩詞為肢體畸形的兩種癥狀，后一詞為西藏瑜伽書的作者姓名，說明從A到Z都有怪詞出現。

9．蓋倫（Galen，129—200），被譽為僅次于希波克拉底的醫(yī)學權威。

10．威廉·卡斯伯特·?？思{（William Cuthbert Faulkner，1897—1962），美國文學家，1949年諾貝爾文學獎獲得者。

11．安東尼·特洛勒普（Anthony Trollope，1815—1882），英國小說家，代表作是六部系列小說組成的《巴塞特郡見聞錄》。

12．圣安東尼（St. Anthony），基督教圣徒，曠野隱修的始祖，許多教派都有紀念他的宗教節(jié)日。