Pillow Books 枕边书
Pillow Books
枕边书
Clifton Fadiman
克里夫顿·费迪曼
作者简介
克里夫顿·费迪曼（Clifton Fadiman，1904—1999），美国知名作家、编辑。他1925年毕业于哥伦比亚大学，毕业后在西蒙与舒斯特国际出版公司（Simon & Schuster）工作了10年，最终成为主编。此后10年间，他在《纽约客》（The New Yorker）书评版任职，并成为“每月一书”图书俱乐部（Book of the Month Club）编辑。70年代，他在《蟋蟀杂志》（Cricket Magazine）上开辟了儿童书书评专栏，深受读者喜爱。
本文首刊于1955年的《假日》（Holiday）杂志，后收入1955年出版的费迪曼作品集《一个人的舞会》（Party of One）。如果你亦是床头阅读的铁杆粉丝，枕边闲书数册，睡前必品书香，那么，这篇令人忍俊不禁的幽默小品正适合伴你入梦。
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.
床头阅读，就像“压力时代”之前的其他好习惯一样，或许正在逐渐消逝。但这是一门我们不愿眼睁睁看它逝去的艺术。
对此有三派观点。第一派极端人士赞同J. C. 斯夸尔爵士1的说法：“对我来说，枕边书是让我保持清醒时间最长的书。”我猜，这些书呆子兼夜猫子不是读书入迷，而是害怕睡觉，就像翟理斯2《中国人名大辞典》里的孙敬那样“头悬梁，以驱赶睡意”。往枕头里塞一对马刺，也能有同样的效果。
与把书误用作提神剂的人相反，有些人把书误用作安眠药。当鸦片酊失去效果时，诗人柯勒律治3不得不服用更强效的药物——好友骚塞4的无韵抒情诗，来帮助自己入睡。当代没有骚塞的无韵诗，却有一堆历史浪漫小说，以及从不自省、无病呻吟的年轻人所写的苦情小说，它们都有同样的催眠效果。
我既不赞成把书当作苯丙胺（一种提神剂），也不提倡第二派人的做法。至于第一派人，整夜读书违背了自然法则。黑夜属于睡眠，睡眠有其权利。用文学作品来抵抗睡眠，对于爱做梦的人来说不公平。因此，明智的床头阅读者会听从梦神摩耳甫斯5的安排，避免阅读太有趣的书。
在我看来，也不应该把书用作鸦片。事实上，我不理解书还能这么用。乏味的书只能抚慰迟钝的大脑——对心智健康的人来说，乏味的书只会让他们反感，而起不到安抚作用。（这是一种特殊的反感，即通常所说的厌倦。你无需为厌倦而脸红。吹嘘自己从不厌倦，就是承认自己“半死不活”，因为会反感是“活人”的标志之一。）但我们想从枕边书中获得的，难道是这种厌倦吗？我表示怀疑。让你思维麻痹的乏味书籍会对你的头脑造成损害。我对待这类书，就像对待爱复述晨报内容的男人、爱回忆购物经历的女人那样，唯恐避之不及。
作为中间派，我发现最理想的睡前读物应该既不乏味也不刺激。这个发现没什么奇怪。
就拿兼具这两点的报纸来说吧。查尔斯·兰姆说过：“报纸总能激起人们的好奇，但放下后没有人不觉得失望。”我从不劝人接受我的反动观点——阅读报纸的最佳时机是途经报摊时。在我看来，许多每日新闻最好精简成空中文字6。但即使不接受这种极端思想，除了报纸留在被单、枕头和手指上的污迹外，还有其他理由让你放弃睡前读报的习惯。睡前阅读应该是一种小小的私人爱好。在此过程中，我们能享受远离现实的宁静。
如今，报纸只是每日现实的重复。有些人觉得真正值得关注的是毫不实际、纯属理论的事，报纸则会破坏他们安宁的心境。报纸永远只迷恋现实，只会让人陷入烦恼。所有读报人都眉头紧锁。这在忙碌的白天或许是件好事，但在床头读报，就像在最没有抵抗力的时刻打开潘多拉的盒子，就像是入睡时有只牛虻在脑袋里乱转。
弗吉尼亚·伍尔芙7在名篇《贝内特先生与布朗夫人》中，攻击了威尔斯、贝内特和高尔斯华绥等小说家，说读他们的书让人觉得生活残缺，甚至感到沮丧。她说，那些小说似乎在号召读者们自己行动起来——改革财政制度、提高教育水平、和妻子离婚。我认为，伍尔芙提出这套冠冕堂皇的理论只为掩盖一个事实，即她不喜欢和自己作品风格迥异的小说。但用这个理论评判睡前读物，却不失为一条好标准。
华尔街的金融家不该把股市报价单带到床上；安静的睡床不适合谈论火爆的牛市和低迷的熊市。问题小说（通常由问题儿童写成）绝不该陪在你的枕边；午夜不是担心时局动荡的好时光。无论你是属于民主党还是共和党，都别在睡前进行政治讨论。等到比睡前更合适的时候，再拿关于原子弹的最新著作把自己吓呆吧。总而言之，只要是带有目的性的读物（比如这篇文章），要说服你去做什么，或要把你变成更优秀、更警醒的公民，就要把它抛开。舒舒服服躺在床上的人，已经拥有王者的尊贵，不需要任何的改善。过于贴近我们疲惫、焦躁的日常生活的书，或许都不适合睡前阅读。要避免引起冲动。
就我自己来说，有两种书似乎是例外。第一种是游记。普通人会被这类书弄得心神不定，而且很可能是这样。但我天性沉稳，就算读最具诱惑力的吉卜赛式流浪故事，也不会冲动到一脚踢开毯子，打电话预订下一个飞往里约热内卢的航班机票。然而，如果我脚痒痒了，就绝不会在太阳下山后读这种令人心神不宁的书。第二种例外涉及我最喜欢的睡前精神食粮——关于美酒佳肴的书。对我来说，阅读P. 莫顿·尚德的《美食之书》，或是安德烈·西蒙的《简明烹饪百科全书》，或是M. F. K. 费希尔的《在此共享盛宴》等经典作品，直到几乎睡着，很少有比这更美妙的经历了。我说“几乎睡着”，是因为读这种书只会有一个后果——凌晨2点钟起床搜刮冰箱和酒窖。这看似和我的准则——避免引起冲动——有些矛盾。但矛盾是表象，实则不然。这种阅读确实使人充实（肚子和脑袋都如此），充实者睡得更香。所以说，关于美酒佳肴的书兜了个圈子，最终会把你带进甜美梦乡。
总而言之，最好的枕边书让我忘记还有明天。在床上阅读，就像在周遭拉起隐形无声的窗帘。最后，我们待在自己的房间里，一路回溯到孩提时想象中的私人生活，找回孩提时那种秘密的满足感——我们很多人早已遗失了通往彼方的钥匙。那种书不必是“佳作”。的确，就像我喜欢的另一种睡前读物，即某些科幻小说，它可以是令人愉快的垃圾文学。但无论是“佳作”还是“糟粕”，它都该起到桥梁的作用，一头连着白天的鲜活现实，一头连着梦中的朦胧世界。它必须什么也不向我要求，尤其不要我赞成或反对。如果它能让我暂离所处时代、所处境地，那就更好了——生命短暂，我们没时间一天花几个小时追赶潮流。最后，它还不能太过幽默、太有深度或太具创意。
不过，如果对你来说《世界年鉴》符合这些要求，那就拿《世界年鉴》作床头伴侣吧。适合我的书可能让你厌烦透顶，或是惹得你恼怒失眠。因此，下面几段话可能对你毫无用处，也可能对你有所助益。
最明智的床头读者，会在精心编著的通俗选集——如亨廷顿·凯恩斯的《艺术的极限》或萨默塞特·毛姆更大众化的《旅行者的图书馆》之中享受温和的乐趣。毛姆自己的故事，汇集成厚厚的两卷本《世界的终结》和《东方与西方》，正是睡前阅读的佳品。我喜欢侦探小说，但得是优秀侦探小说才行。然而必须承认，如今的侦探小说，读起来大多像是用IBM电脑批量生产的一样。说到短篇侦探小说，多萝西·塞耶斯等人的作品集最适合睡前读。最近，E. C. 本特利的两篇侦探小说和一些短篇故事汇成了一册《特伦特探案集：高级案件》，约瑟芬·铁伊也出了作品选集。睡前读读怪诞小说也不错，但其中的恐怖片段最好点到即止。书中令人战栗的内容和读者暖和舒适的床铺形成对比，带给人一种孩子气的欢乐。这种欢乐根深蒂固，没有人能对此表示不屑。有很多怪诞小说选集，比如亚历山大·莱恩的《闹鬼的公共汽车》和现代文库版的《恐怖与灵异故事集锦》都是较好的选择。
我还喜欢浏览牛津大学出版社的总书目。这种出版物不用花钱买，而且富含奇珍异宝。没有什么能像这些无穷无尽的书名和简介一样，让你为有这么多奇事感到温柔平和的惊喜。从Acrocephaly到Acrocephalosyndactyly再到Zla-ba-Bsam-，grub8，无不令人心醉神迷。从盖伦9《医学经验》的简介中，我们能找到一点有用信息：“由于希腊文原版已经散失，唯余两份零散残片，故9世纪的阿拉伯文译本是本书现存最早的完整版。”
我发现，如果书中人物和我的生活大相径庭，那么此书将是绝佳睡前读物。我喜欢关于中世纪的书；你或许青睐波利尼西亚或异国风物，比如威廉·福克纳10笔下的南部。流行的科学读物同样合我心意，但如今很少有作家的文字能像爱丁顿、金斯、H. G. 韦尔斯那样生动风趣。（雷切尔·卡森的《我们周遭的大海》和盖伊·默基的《天空之歌》算是两个令人欣喜的例外。）关于语言文字的非学术书对我来说是一流的睡前读物，但这或许是我狭窄的专业兴趣使然。
至于小说，别让我读深奥的俄国小说、浅显的法国小说、晦涩的德国小说，让我读19世纪或20世纪初可靠的英国小说吧，比如威廉·德摩根、威尔基·柯林斯、乔治·博罗、查尔斯·里德的作品。（我省略了狄更斯和萨克雷，因为很明显他们会上榜。）我最喜欢的作家当属特洛勒普11，他的作品带给了我无尽欢乐，我真想称他为另一位圣安东尼12。特洛勒普打破了时间的界限，将平躺的读者瞬间传送到一个神灵庇佑、舒适安宁、免所得税的失落的世界。他写下的50本小说，足足能让人享受5年的睡前阅读时光。在那些安抚疲惫心灵、伴你进入梦乡的作者当中，特洛勒普可称君王。他的书从来不乏趣味，却不会让人过于兴奋；能让你得到安慰，却又是适可而止。说到睡前阅读，特洛勒普是最完美的小说家。
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1．约翰·科林斯·斯夸尔爵士（Sir John Collings Squire，1884—1958），英国诗人，第一次世界大战后极具影响力的文学编辑。
2．赫伯特·艾伦·翟理斯（Herbert Allen Giles，1845—1935），英国语言学家，剑桥大学第二任汉学教授。他编撰的《华英字典》影响了几代外国学生。
3．塞缪尔·泰勒·柯勒律治（Samuel Taylor Coleridge，1772—1834），英国桂冠诗人和评论家，“湖畔派”浪漫诗人。
4．罗伯特·骚塞（Robert Southey，1774—1843），英国桂冠诗人，与华兹华斯和柯勒律治并称三大“湖畔派诗人”。
5．摩耳甫斯（Morpheus），希腊神话中的梦神，拥有改变梦境的能力。当他拂动幽雅而美丽的羽翼时，人们便会安睡，在他的怀抱中休憩。
6．空中文字，指飞机拖曳的烟雾在空中写成的文字，此处指新闻最好精简到几个字就能概括。
7．弗吉尼亚·伍尔芙（Virginia Woolf，1882—1941），英国女作家，意识流小说的代表人物，也是女性意识流小说家中成就最高的一位。
8．前两词为肢体畸形的两种症状，后一词为西藏瑜伽书的作者姓名，说明从A到Z都有怪词出现。
9．盖伦（Galen，129—200），被誉为仅次于希波克拉底的医学权威。
10．威廉·卡斯伯特·福克纳（William Cuthbert Faulkner，1897—1962），美国文学家，1949年诺贝尔文学奖获得者。
11．安东尼·特洛勒普（Anthony Trollope，1815—1882），英国小说家，代表作是六部系列小说组成的《巴塞特郡见闻录》。
12．圣安东尼（St. Anthony），基督教圣徒，旷野隐修的始祖，许多教派都有纪念他的宗教节日。
