1955年胡適 (1955.1.2)與張愛玲通信，參考本BLOG "憶胡適之"。胡先生很仔細讀過張著《秧歌》，可能沒看過《赤地之戀》。
胡先生在讀完 《秧歌》後致張愛玲：
書名大可題作《餓》字，---寫得真細緻、忠厚，可以說是寫到了"平淡而近自然"的境界。齊邦媛的《千年之淚》就是採用胡適之先生 (齊女士那代已經稱呼胡適之先生為胡適先生)的評語來介紹《秧歌》的"餓"字，那些地方寫寫得真細緻、哪人忠厚......
2015.5.15 林培瑞 (Perry Link) 在《紐約書評》發表《赤地之戀》英文本的《導論》的摘要版。Adapted from Perry Link’s introduction to Eileen Chang’s Naked Earth, to be published on June 16 by New York Review Books.
適之先生的加圈似是兩用的，有時候是好句子加圈，有時候是語氣加重，像西方文字下面加杠子。講到加杠子，二０、三０年代的標點，起初都是人地名左測加 一行直線，很醒目，不知道後來為什麼廢除了，我一直惋惜。又不像別國文字可以大寫。這封信上仍舊是月香。書名是左側加一行曲線，後來通用引語號。適之先生 用了引語號，後來又忘了，仍用一行曲線。在我看來都是“五四”那時代的痕跡，“不勝低迴”。
我第二封信的底稿也交那位朋友收著，所以僥幸還在：
適之先生： 收 到您 的信，真高興到極點，實在是非常大的榮幸。最使我感謝的是您把《秧歌》看得那樣仔細。您指出76頁敘沙明往事那一段可刪，確是應當刪。那整個的 一章是勉強添補出來的。至於為什麼要添，那原因說起來很複雜。最初我也就是因為《秧歌》這故事太平淡，不合我國讀者的口味——尤其是東南亞的讀者——所以 發奮要用英文寫它。這對於我是加倍的困難，因為以前從來沒有用英文寫過東西，所以著實下了一番苦功。寫完之後，只有現在的三分之二。寄去給代理人，嫌太 短，認為這麼短的長篇小說沒有人肯出版。所以我又添出第一二兩章(原文是從第三章月香回鄉開始的)，敘王同志過去歷史的一章，殺豬的一章。最後一章後來也 補寫過，譯成中文的時候沒來得及加進去。 160頁譚大娘自稱八十一歲，205頁又說她六十八歲，那是因為她向兵士哀告的時候信口胡說，也就像叫化子總是說“家裏有八十歲老娘”一樣。我應當在書中解釋一下的。
您問起這裏的批評界對《秧歌》的反應。有過兩篇批評，都是由反共方面著眼，對於故事本身並不怎樣注意。我 寄了五本《秧歌》來。別的作品我本來不想寄來的，因為實在是壞——絕對不是客氣話，實在是壞。但是您既然問起，我還是寄了來，您隨便翻翻，看不下去 就丟了。一本小說集，是十年前寫的，去年在香港再版。散文集《流言》也是以前寫的，我這次離開上海的時候很匆促，一本也沒帶，這是香港的盜印本，印得非常 惡劣。還有一本《赤地之戀》，是在《秧歌》以後寫的。因為要顧到東南亞一般讀者的興味，自已很不滿意。而銷路雖然不像《秧歌》那樣慘，也並不自己見得好。我發現遷就的事情往往是這樣。 《醒世姻緣》和《海上花》一個寫得濃，一個寫得淡，但是同樣是最好的寫實的作品。我常常替它們不平，總覺得它們 應當是世界名著。《海上花》雖然不是沒 有缺陷的，像《紅樓夢》沒有寫完也未始不是一個缺陷。缺陷的性質雖然不同，但無論如何，都不是完整的作品。我一直有一個志願，希望將來能把《海上花》和 《醒世姻緣》譯成英文。裏面對白的語氣非常難譯，但是也並不是絕對不能譯的。我本來不想在這裏提起的，因為您或者會擔憂，覺得我把事情看得太容易了，會糟 蹋了原著。但是我不過是有這樣一個願望，眼前我還是想多寫一點東西。如果有一天我真打算實行的話，一定會先譯半回寄了來，讓您看行不行。祝近好
張愛玲 二月廿日
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/may/15/china-language-game-eileen-chang/
Mao’s China: The Language Game
It can be embarrassing for a China scholar like me to read Eileen Chang’s pellucid prose, written more than sixty years ago, on the early years of the People’s Republic of China. How many cudgels to the head did I need before arriving at comparable clarity? My disillusioning first trip to China in 1973? My reading of the devastating journalism of Liu Binyan in 1980? Observation of bald lies in action at the Tiananmen massacre in 1989 and in the imprisonment of a Nobel Peace laureate in more recent times? Did I need all of this to catch up to where Chang was in 1954 in her understanding of how things worked in Communist China, beneath the blankets of jargon? In graduate school I did not take Chang’sNaked Earth (published in Chinese in 1954 and translated by Chang into English in 1956) and its sister novel, The Rice-Sprout Song (also published in 1954 and translated by Chang into English in 1955), very seriously. People said the works had an anti-Communist bias. How silly.
In Naked Earth, Chang shows how the linguistic grid of a Communist land-reform campaign descends on a village like a giant cookie cutter. There are Poor Farmers, Middling Farmers, Landlords, Bad Elements, and more. When actual life doesn’t fit the prescriptions, so much the worse for actual life. Make it fit. A “cadre” (a technical term for a functionary in the Communist system) complains that the farmers have “always been backward… . All they ever see is the bit of material advantage right in front of them.” This leaves them “afraid to be active.” Perhaps they don’t want to be active? No, answers the organization, they are reticent only because they fear “the revenge of the Remnant Feudal Forces.” When finally coaxed to complain, they sometimes—oops!—complain about the cadres, not the Landlords.
Eventually the farmers, like everyone else, figure out that their personal interests depend on correct verbal performance. There are certain things you are supposed to say and certain ways you are supposed to say them. “Tell the truth!” is a command that you recite your lies correctly. An unimpeachable exterior becomes everyone’s goal.
In this novel, Chang was turning her attention to the years 1949 to 1953 and writing about parts of China—agricultural villages, a Communist newspaper office, soldiers in the Korean War—that were new to her. She is best known in the West for her stories from the 1940s, finely translated by Karen Kingsbury and collected in Love in a Fallen City. These earlier stories are delightful for their evocative language, psychological insight, moral acuity, and close observation of Chang’s own social milieu, the Chinese urban elite. Given her background, one might ask how she could make this transition as smoothly as she did.
Certainly her skill in imagining the private thoughts of people as they interact, so expertly honed in her earlier fiction, continues to serve her well in Naked Earth andThe Rice-Sprout Song. In addition she seems, like George Orwell, to have almost a sixth sense for immediate comprehension of what an authoritarian political system will do to human beings in daily life. She looks past the grand political system itself and focuses instead on the lives of people—how they feel and behave as they adapt to what the system forces upon them.
Still, readers may wonder how Chang could know about land reform in the Chinese countryside or about the Korean War without firsthand experience of those events. Perhaps sensing a need to address this question, Chang writes in prefaces to both The Rice-Sprout Song and Naked Earth that the novels are based on true stories. (She had never offered similar assurances about her earlier stories.) Chang did travel to rural China, at least briefly, in the years immediately before and after 1949, but most of the material for her novels seems to have come from secondhand accounts or from published sources. “Self-criticisms” by officials and descriptions of famines had appeared, after being combed for political correctness, in the state-run press. Chang could read past the propaganda overlay and infer what had actually happened.
She also appears to have learned from The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River, the Chinese writer and Communist Party member Ding Ling’s Party-approved long novel (published in 1948 and winner of the Stalin Prize in 1951) about land reform in Communist-held areas in the 1940s. The Chinese literary scholar Zhang Qianfen has noted a broad range of “intertextuality” between Sanggan River and Naked Earth on questions that range from how farmers wash their hands to what public “struggle sessions” look like. The main difference is that Ding Ling feels a continual need to invent “model behavior,” while Chang does not.
In Naked Earth, one young woman suffers a torrid criticism session, ends it with a self-denunciation, and then steals away to weep in solitude. Someone discovers her and accuses her of “only pretending to accept criticism.” Thinking quickly, she explains that, no, hers are tears of gratitude: “Everybody was so concerned about me, so enthusiastic in helping me to make Progress.” Does her explanation pass muster? Yes, but less because it is credible than because it reinforces the exterior mask that says “I submit to the organization.” To the powers that be, that demonstration is more important than what she actually thinks.
Over time, the need to maintain a correct exterior turns public political language into a kind of chess game. You make moves in order to get what you want, and you avoid bad moves that would bring punishment. During the Three-Anti campaign in 1951, when nearly all Communist cadres are scrutinized for corruption, waste, or bureaucratism, Ko Shan, a Party member and newspaper manager in public but a “tubercular nymphomaniac” (in C. T. Hsia’s apt phrase) in private, is forced onto a stage for self-criticism:
I have nothing to say in my own defense. I feel very much ashamed that even now—after so many years spent in the very nucleus of the struggle—even now there still exist in my con- sciousness certain bad traits of the petit-bourgeois. I have this Tendency toward Freedom and Looseness. And then when I fought in the guerillas I got into the Guerilla Style of behavior. Ever since then I’ve found it hard to Regularize my life. Now the matter of man-woman relations. My starting point was comradely love. But, it has gone out of bounds and has led to Obscure Behavior.
The crowd who is listening to her is aware that her oration is only a series of chess moves aimed at minimizing punishment. There is prurient interest, though, in the question of the illicit lovers. People heckle her to name them. Trapped before the Masses, Ko Shan needs to betray at least one lover, but which one? Liu Ch’üan, the young protagonist of Naked Earth, whom Ko Shan has recently seduced (despite their difference in age), is in the crowd listening and is terrified that he will be named.
“It’s Chang Li,” Ko Shan finally says, choosing not to name Liu. Chang is a slick official whom the reader already knows to be contemptible. We feel relief that Ko Shan, however cynical, retains at least enough humanity to protect the naïve Liu.
But no, it turns out. When Liu later visits Ko Shan’s house to thank her, she explains that, “I mentioned Chang instead of you because I could trust him not to get me into a bigger mess than what I am in already. Which is more than I can say for you.” She had named Chang because he was better at manipulating the language game, that’s all. It had simply been another chess move on her part. Liu then asks her why Chang, who was also present at the meeting, had not shouted out “Liu Ch’üan too!” in order to split the blame. Could it be that Chang, for his part, had a bit of humanity somewhere inside him?
“What good would that do him?” Ko Shan responds. He would “just make an enemy without making things any easier for himself.” Chang, too, had made a cold chess move, and nothing more.
Eileen Chang’s acute observation of political language in China in the early 1950s reveals patterns that have persisted ever since. Maoist extremism has passed, but it remains true that an incorrect word-performance in public can be costly to a person’s interests, and it is still the case that one person can earn credit by reporting the misstatements of another. When Liu volunteers to fight in Korea (escaping the political cauldron of Shanghai), he notices that he feels watched even after moving abroad. He “wondered if anybody who had lived under Communist rule could ever feel unwatched again.” And indeed, in 2015 Chinese graduate students in California still keep nonstandard political views under wraps when speaking in the company of other Chinese students. Only among well-trusted friends does one venture to “live in truth,” in Václav Havel’s phrase. In the early 1950s Liu and his girlfriend Su Nan inhabit “the cozy little igloo of their love, made of ice but warm and homey within.” Today, the igloos are not so frozen to the ground, but are still there.
The distinguished journalist Dai Qing has suggested that the Communist Party failed to buy off Chang, even with lures like “member of the Political Consultative Conference or Vice Chair of the National People’s Congress.” I cannot vouch that such offers to Chang were made, but Dai Qing, who grew up in the family of Marshal Ye Jianying, who was a confederate of Mao Zedong, has considerable credibility on such topics. What we do know is that Chang accepted a grant from the United States Information Service (USIS) to write The Rice-Sprout Song and Naked Earth after she left China in 1952. This fact has been widely noted, and its significance sometimes exaggerated. It is far-fetched to imagine that the USIS distorted Chang’s writing. She is too powerful a writer for that—too “immune from being tricked,” in Dai Qing’s phrase. Indeed there is irony in the fact that the US government still has not collected what it paid for: Its understanding of the language and politics of Chinese communism still lags far behind what Chang offered it sixty years ago.
If nothing else, the beauty of Chang’s writing makes it hard to view as anyone’s propaganda. After a rain squall on a dusty loess plateau, trees “were still sniffling and shedding big tears.” At a nearby river, “Long wisps of yellow mud trailed sluggishly in the current, like half-beaten egg-yolk…” On the whole, Naked Earth has less of this than Chang’s 1940s novellas do, but it would be a mistake to view this change as a compromise with USIS style. Chang has matured in this novel to a sparser naturalism, to a plane where “the shimmer of the unsaid,” in Marianne Moore’s phrase, can say even more than brilliant metaphor does.
Near the end of Naked Earth, Liu Ch’üan reflects that “As long as one man like him remained alive and out of jail, the men who ruled China would never be safe. They’re afraid, too, he thought, afraid of the people they rule by fear.” Had Liu foreseen that in 2015 those “men who ruled China” would still be spending hundreds of billions of yuan annually on “stability maintenance”? Chang seems even to anticipate the paradoxical connection between communism and luxury that has emerged recently in China. After normal human values have shriveled, only material scales remain, and in Naked Earth, we see already how officials in the regime have begun to take this route: villas, banquets, concubines. Chang died in 1995; how surprised would she be to see the stupendous wealth of the Communist super-elite today?
Adapted from Perry Link’s introduction to Eileen Chang’s Naked Earth, to be published on June 16 by New York Review Books.
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