【英文文学】塞穆勒先生的行星 Mr. Sammler's Planet.docx

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1、【英文文学】塞穆勒先生的行星 Mr. Sammlers PlanetChapter 1Shortly after dawn, or what would have been dawn in a normal sky, Mr. Artur Sammler with his bushy eye took in the books and papers of his West Side bedroom and suspected strongly that they were the wrong books, the wrong papers. In a way it did not matter

2、much to a man of seventy-plus, and at leisure. You had to be a crank to insist on being right. Being right was largely a matter of explanations. Intellectual man had become an explaining creature. Fathers to children, wives to husbands, lecturers to listeners, experts to laymen, colleagues to collea

3、gues, doctors to patients, man to his own soul, explained. The roots of this, the causes of the other, the source of events, the history, the structure, the reasons why. For the most part, in one ear out the other. The soul wanted what it wanted. It had its own natural knowledge. It sat unhappily on

4、 superstructures of explanation, poor bird, not knowing which way to fly. The eye closed briefly. A Dutch drudgery, it occurred to Sammler, pumping and pumping to keep a few acres of dry ground. The invading sea being a metaphor for the multiplication of facts and sensations. The earth being an eart

5、h of ideas. He thought, since he had no job to wake up to, that he might give sleep a second chance to resolve certain difficulties imaginatively for himself, and pulled up the disconnected electric blanket with its internal sinews and lumps. The satin binding was nice to the finger tips. He was sti

6、ll drowsy, but not really inclined to sleep. Time to be conscious. He sat and plugged in the electric coil. Water had been prepared at bedtime. He liked to watch the changes of the ashen wires. They came to life with fury, throwing tiny sparks and sinking into red rigidity under the Pyrex laboratory

7、 flask. Deeper. Blenching. He had only one good eye. The left distinguished only light and shade. But the good eye was dark-bright, full of observation through the overhanging hairs of the brow as in some breeds of dog. For his height he had a small face. The combination made him conspicuous. His co

8、nspicuousness was on his mind; it worried him. For several days, Mr. Sammler returning on the customary bus late afternoons from the Forty-second Street Library had been watching a pickpocket at work. The man got on at Columbus Circle. The job, the crime, was done by Seventy-second Street. Mr. Samml

9、er if he had not been a tall straphanger would not with his one good eye have seen these things happening. But now he wondered whether he had not drawn too close, whether he had also been seen seeing. He wore smoked glasses, at all times protecting his vision, but he couldnt be taken for a blind man

10、. He didnt have the white cane, only a furled umbrella, British-style. Moreover, he didnt have the look of blindness. The pickpocket himself wore dark shades. He was a powerful Negro in a camels-hair coat, dressed with extraordinary elegance, as if by Mr. Fish of the West End, or Turnbull and Asser

11、of Jermyn Street. (Mr. Sammler knew his London.) The Negros perfect circles of gentian violet banded with lovely gold turned toward Sammler, but the face showed the effrontery of a big animal. Sammler was not timid, but he had had as much trouble in life as he wanted. A good deal of this, waiting fo

12、r assimilation, would never be accommodated. He suspected the criminal was aware that a tall old white man (passing as blind?) had observed, had seen the minutest details of his crimes. Staring down. As if watching open-heart surgery. And though he dissembled, deciding not to turn aside when the thi

13、ef looked at him, his elderly, his compact, civilized face colored strongly, the short hairs bristled, the lips and gums were stinging. He felt a constriction, a clutch of sickness at the base of the skull where the nerves, muscles, blood vessels were tightly interlaced. The breath of wartime Poland

14、 passing over the damaged tissuesthat nerve-spaghetti, as he thought of it. Buses were bearable, subways were killing. Must he give up the bus? He had not minded his own business as a man of seventy in New York should do. It was always Mr. Sammlers problem that he didnt know his proper age, didnt ap

15、preciate his situation, unprotected here by position, by privileges of remoteness made possible by an income of fifty thousand in New Yorkclub membership, taxis, doormen, guarded approaches. For him it was the buses, or the grinding subway, lunch at the automat. No cause for grave complaint, but his

16、 years as an “Englishman, two decades in London as correspondent for Warsaw papers and journals, had left him with attitudes not especially useful to a refugee in Manhattan. He had developed expressions suited to an Oxford common room; he had the face of a British Museum reader. Sammler as a schoolb

17、oy in Cracow before World War I fell in love with England. Most of that nonsense had been knocked out of him. He had reconsidered the whole question of Anglophilia, thinking skeptically about Salvador de Madariaga, Marco Praz, Andr Maurois and Colonel Bramble . He knew the phenomenon. Still, confron

18、ted by the elegant brute in the bus he had seen picking a pursethe purse still hung openhe adopted an English tone. A dry, a neat, a prim face declared that one had not crossed anyones boundary; one was satisfied with ones own business. But under the high armpits Mr. Sammler was intensely hot, wet;

19、hanging on his strap, sealed in by bodies, receiving their weight and laying his own on them as the fat tires took the giant curve at Seventy-second Street with a growl of flabby power. He didnt in fact appear to know his age, or at what point of life he stood. You could see that in his way of walki

20、ng. On the streets, he was tense, quick, erratically light and reckless, the elderly hair stirring on the back of his head. Crossing, he lifted the rolled umbrella high and pointed to show cars, buses, speeding trucks, and cabs bearing down on him the way he intended to go. They might run him over,

21、but he could not help his style of striding blind. With the pickpocket we were in an adjoining region of recklessness. He knew the man was working the Riverside bus. He had seen him picking purses, and he had reported it to the police. The police were not greatly interested in the report. It had mad

22、e Sammler feel like a fool to go immediately to a phone booth on Riverside Drive. Of course the phone was smashed. Most outdoor telephones were smashed, crippled. They were urinals, also. New York was getting worse than Naples or Salonika. It was like an Asian, an African town, from this standpoint.

23、 The opulent sections of the city were not immune. You opened a jeweled door into degradation, from hypercivilized Byzantine luxury straight into the state of nature, the barbarous world of color erupting from beneath. It might well be barbarous on either side of the jeweled door. Sexually, for exam

24、ple. The thing evidently, as Mr. Sammler was beginning to grasp, consisted in obtaining the privileges, and the free ways of barbarism, under the protection of civilized order, property rights, refined technological organization, and so on. Yes, that must be it. Mr. Sammler ground his coffee in a sq

25、uare box, cranking counterclockwise between long knees. To commonplace actions he brought a special pedantic awkwardness. In Poland, France, England, students, young gentlemen of his time, had been unacquainted with kitchens. Now he did things that cooks and maids had once done. He did them with a c

26、ertain priestly stiffness. Acknowledgment of social descent. Historical ruin. Transformation of society. It was beyond personal humbling. He had gotten over those ideas during the war in Polandutterly gotten over all that, especially the idiotic pain of losing class privileges . As well as he could

27、with one eye, he darned his own socks, sewed his buttons, scrubbed his own sink, winter-treated his woolens in the spring with a spray can. Of course there were ladies, his daughter, Shula, his niece (by marriage), Margotte Arkin, in whose apartment he lived. They did for him, when they thought of i

28、t. Sometimes they did a great deal, but not dependably, routinely. The routines he did himself. It was conceivably even part of his youthfulnessyouthfulness sustained with certain tremors. Sammler knew these tremors. It was amusingSammler noted in old women wearing textured tights, in old sexual men

29、, this quiver of vivacity with which they obeyed the sovereign youth-style. The powers are the powers .-overlords, kings, gods. And of course no one knew when to quit. No one made sober decent terms with death.The grounds in the little drawer of the mill he held above the flask. The red coil went de

30、eper, whiter, white. The kinks had tantrums. Beads of water flashed up. Individually, the pioneers gracefully went to the surface. Then they all seethed together. He poured in the grounds. in his cup, a lump . they all seethed together. He poured in the grounds. in his cup, a lump of sugar, a dusty

31、spoonful of Pream. In the night table he kept a bag of onion rolls from Zabars. They were in plastic, a transparent uterine bag fastened with a white plastic clip. The night table, copper- lined, formerly a humidor, kept things fresh. It had belonged to Margottes husband, Ussher Arkin. Arkin, killed

32、 three years ago in a plane crash, a good man, was missed, was regretted, mourned by Sammler. When he was invited by the widow to occupy a bedroom in the large apartment on West Ninetieth Street, Sammler asked to have Arkins humidor in his room. Sentimental herself, Margotte said, Of course, Uncle.

33、What a nice thought. You did love Ussher. Margotte was German, romantic. Sammler was something else. He was not even her uncle. She was the niece of his wife, who had died in Poland in 1940. His late wife. The widows late aunt. Wherever you looked, or tried to look, there were the late. It took some

34、 getting used to.Grapefruit juice he drank from a can with two triangular punctures kept on the window sill. The curtain parted as he reached and he looked out. Brownstones, balustrades, bay windows, wrought iron. Like stamps in an albumthe dun rose of buildings canceled by the heavy black of grille

35、s, of corrugated rainspouts. How very heavy human life was here, in forms of bourgeois solidity. Attempted permanence was sad. We were now flying to the moon. Did one have a right to private expectations, being like those bubbles in the flask? But then also people exaggerated the tragic accents of t

36、heir condition. They stressed too hard the disintegrated assurances; what formerly was believed, trusted, was now bitterly circled in black irony. The rejected bourgeois black of stability thus translated. That too was improper, incorrect. People justifying idleness, silliness, shallowness, distempe

37、r, lustturning former respectability inside out.Such was Sammlers eastward view, a soft asphalt belly rising, in which lay steaming sewer navels. Spalled sidewalks with clusters of ash cans. Brownstones. The yellow brick of elevator buildings like his own. Little copses of television antennas. Whipl

38、ike, graceful thrilling metal dendrites drawing images from the air, bringing brotherhood, communion to immured apartment people. Westward the Hudson came between Sammler and the great Spry Industries of New Jersey. These flashed their electric message through intervening night. SPRY. But then he wa

39、s half blind.In the bus he had been seeing well enough. He saw a crime committed. He reported it to the cops. They were not greatly shaken. He might then have stayed away from that particular bus, but instead he tried hard to repeat the experience. He went to Columbus Circle and hung about until he

40、saw his man again. Four fascinating times he had watched the thing done, the crime, the first afternoon staring down at the masculine hand that came from behind lifting the clasp and tipping the pocketbook lightly to make it fall open. Sammler saw a polished Negro forefinger without haste, with no c

41、riminal tremor, turning aside a plastic folder with Social Security or credit cards, emery sticks, a lipstick capsule, coral paper tissues, nipping open the catch of a change purseand there lay the green of money. Still at the same rate, the fingers took out the dollars. Then with the touch of a doc

42、tor on a patients belly the Negro moved back the slope leather, turned the gilded scallop catch. Sammler, feeling his head small, shrunk with strain, the teeth tensed, still was looking at the patent leather bag riding, picked, on the womans hip, finding that he was irritated with her. That she felt

43、 nothing. What an idiot) Going around with some kind of stupid mold in her skull. Zero instincts, no grasp of New York. While the man turned from her, broad-shouldered in the carvers-hair coat. The dark glasses, the original design by Christian Dior, a powerful throat banded by a tab collar and a ch

44、erry silk necktie spouting out. Under the African nose, a cropped mustache. Ever so slightly inclining toward him, Sammler believed he could smell French perfume from the breast of the camels-hair coat. Had the man noticed him then? Had he perhaps followed him home? Of this Sammler was not sure.He d

45、idnt give a damn for the glamour, the style, the art of criminals. They were no social heroes to him. He had had some talks on this very matter with one of his younger relations, Angela Gruner, the daughter of Dr. Arnold Gruner in New Rochelle, who had brought him over to the States in 1947, digging

46、 him out of the DP camp in Salzburg. Because Arnold (Elya) Gruner had Old World family feelings. And studying the lists of refugees in the Yiddish papers, he had found the names Artur and Shula Sammler. Angela, who was in Sammlers neighborhood several times a week because her psychiatrist was just a

47、round the corner, often stopped in for a visit. She was one of those handsome, passionate, rich girls who were always an important social and human category. A bad education. In literature, mostly French. At Sarah Lawrence College. And Mr. Sammler had to try hard to remember the Balzac he had read i

48、n Cracow in 1913. Vautrin the escaped criminal . From the hulks. Trompe-la-mort. No, he didnt have much use for the romance of the outlaw. Angela sent money to defense funds for black murderers and rapists. That was her business of course.However, Mr. Sammler had to admit that once he had seen the p

49、ickpocket at work he wanted very much to see the thing again. He didnt know why. It was a powerful event, and illicitlythat is, against his own stable principleshe craved a repetition. One detail of old readings he recalled without effort the moment in Crime and Punishment at which Raskolnikov brought down the ax on the bare head of the old woman, her thin gray-streaked grease-smeared hair, the rats-tall braid fastened by a broken horn comb on her nec