"Last Night", by James Sauter, translated by Zhang Huiwen, Hainan Publishing House, January 2022 edition, 78.00 yuan.
Twilight, by James Sauter, translated by Lei Yun, Hainan Publishing House, January 2022 edition, 78.00 yuan.
□ Gu Lili
The use of "slow" to describe the work of american writer James Sauter is about appropriate. He lived to be 90 years old, and his life was full of words, and he wrote only a few works. Not only that, but his novels are also slow, sometimes like poetry, sometimes like movies, with a kind of tranquility that looks down on the world. This is thanks to his experiences as a young man. In the 1940s, he was a pilot, often looking down on the earth from a height of several thousand meters. The scenery that floated on the distant horizon always brought him a rare calm.
It's just that apparent calm was never Sauter's pursuit. From the short stories "Last Night" and "Twilight" to the long masterpiece "Light Years", he has the same kind of people active in his pen: they are in the "deep waters of the slow flow of married life", they have a passion for art, but they are trapped in reality, and they can neither easily let go of the past nor see the future clearly. In day-to-day life, they expect to be different, but in fact, life does not bring them extra surprises. It's like people going to middle age. It is too far away from youth, it is too early to talk about old age, so I can't go up and down, and I hang myself in mid-air impartially.
Or rather, it's also a flight to some extent. It seems that as soon as they fly into the sky, they will make a complete reckoning with the earth under their feet. However, liquidation is not easy. At the very least, Sauter's characters are always too indecisive and do not have the courage to break with the past. Such a setting is very much like Richard Yates's novel. Remember Aibo in "Revolutionary Road", she wanted to move to Paris, but failed to do so. Yates certainly had no intention of continuing her new life in Europe, but when it came to Twilight, Sauter gave his answer unequivocally.
In America Express, Allen and Frank are a pair of lawyers who have just passed the initial stages of their careers and have a smooth career. At this point, a client named Mrs. Christie told them that her life was "a disappointment." The stupid marriage not only did not bring her the slightest pleasure, but trapped her firmly in it. But she didn't know that the two men in front of her, like her, were victims of a failed marriage. Soon after, the two went to Europe together. However, the trip did not solve their confusion, only a sigh of "Europe makes me depressed".
That's right, repression. This is also the key word to describe "Last Night" and "Twilight". Obviously, it is not Europe that is far away, but life in the immediate future. There's a story in Last Night called Platinum. There is a perfect wedding in the story, and the protagonists of the wedding are Sally and Brian. Years later, Brian finally cheated. In the face of his wife's questioning, he moved out his own words, "Ordinary life is just everyone playing their own role, but we are higher than that kind of life." The question is, where will there be any higher levels of life? This is nothing more than a trick of self-deception.
The so-called "good marriage" that everyone envies is more like a false proposition like a fake exchange. In "Fun", Leslie is experiencing the seven-year itch of married life. After the initial sweetness, she finally understood that life is not actually "fun". As she was about to join the bachelor's club, she remembered the day she had just married, when the sun was shining and the air was fresh. "The squirrel's head flew down the tall trunk, and the wonderful and thick tail curled up, hidden on the invisible side of the tree." Unfortunately, the beautiful and quiet countryside scenery did not last long, let alone save her crumbling marriage, and everything could only be judged by time.
Time is precisely the most important element of Sauter's novel. Many times, when the "darkest hour" of life comes uninvited, his characters always involuntarily return to the past and find comfort in the past. For example, "Twenty Minutes". In the story, Jane Varley, who lives in a remote mountainous area of Illinois, goes out alone and accidentally falls off his horse. For the next 20 minutes, the story turns on the memory mode. As she searched for help, she recalled the first half of her life: the old dog she had adopted, her father who loved riding horses, her romantic first love, and her cheating husband. In this way, the past comes to mind one after another, like a film with the theme of life. But no one knows if she was ultimately rescued, as Sauter didn't give a definitive answer.
To be sure, she, like most of Shol's characters, has reached a crossroads of fate. At this time, the past has become the past, the future has not yet come, and they can rely on nothing but the present. However, as Sauter puts it, time is never omnipotent, "it lasts for years, decades, and finally rushes by", bringing us similar fragmentation. This is undoubtedly cruel. But we can't blame Sauter for being too sober. He describes himself as a "battle against mediocrity." This means that if he does not describe all this as life is, his writing will lose its meaning. Therefore, he must put aside all sweet illusions and go straight to the heart of ordinary life.
In "Bangkok", a man and woman who once fell in love with Hollis and Carol reunite many years later. After a brief conversation, they find that they are no longer fellow travelers: Hollis, who has a family, gives his love to his six-year-old daughter; the single Carol is willing to be like Gauguin, wandering, defining his life on the road. It's hard to say which of the two lives is better or worse, but that's life. So what about the real Sauter? Take a look at his novel. In Movie, Peter Lang is a screenwriter. An executive at a film company told him that life was colored and that "color is real."
He couldn't understand the meaning of this sentence. He often felt like a poor student with big dreams, but he ran into walls everywhere, "and his life has hardly changed from beginning to end." As he wrote, "Today is a sunny day." It rained yesterday and it was overcast until the evening, as was the day before yesterday." Similarly, there is an unknown little writer in The Road to Denial. He had thinning hair and poorly dressed, but he didn't regret his choice. He was well aware of what writing meant: "There is a great, ultimate glory that will come upon some people, touching them in obscurity, reshaping their lives, even though they are left untouched in their own time." I don't know if Sauter felt this "ultimate glory", but he did.
In the turbulent 1960s, he did not write about the turbulent political situation, did not write about the passionate youth, but did not hesitate to choose to be loyal to himself. Many times, he is like a bird cruising the sky, always bowing his head, looking at the scenery on the distant horizon, writing similar scenes of life. It's like a sketch, with countless backs passing through it, connecting Sauter's small world. Often, frustrated, they think they have found a "real life", only to realize that they have nothing: they have a seemingly stable career, they live on a salary all day long, "their world has no light, and they don't know what's on it." And those impulses to walk away, those romantics of the wind and snow, after the passage of time, like the scenery flashing by the porthole of an airplane, have become the memories of last night. By this time, the long bright daylight had come to an end, and what awaited them was another dark and frosty twilight.