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2009-05-03 21:00
高级英语
Lesson 9. Mark Twain
---Mirror of America
Noel Grove
Most Americans remember
Mark Twain as the father of Huck Finn's idyllic
cruise through eternal boyhood and Tom
Sawyer's endless summer of
freedom and
adventure. In-deed, this nation's best-loved
author was
every bit as ad-venturous,
patriotic, romantic, and humorous as anyone
has ever imagined. I found another
Twain as well
–
one who grew
cynical,
bitter, saddened by the
profound personal tragedies life dealt him, a
man who became obsessed with the
frailties of the human race, who saw
clearly ahead a black wall of night.
Tramp printer,
river pilot , Confederate guerrilla, prospector,
starry-eyed optimist, acid-tongued
cynic: The man who became Mark Twain
was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens and
he ranged across the nation for
more
than a third of his life, digesting the new
American experience
before sharing it
with the world as writer and lecturer. He adopted
his
pen name from the cry heard in his
steamboat days, signaling two fathoms
(12 feet) of water -- a navigable
depth. His popularity is attested by
the fact that more than a score of his
books remain in print, and
translations
are still read around the world.
The geographic core, in
Twain's early years, was the great valley of
the Mississippi River, main artery of
transportation in the young
nation's
heart. Keelboats
，
flatboats
, and large rafts carried the
first
major commerce. Lumber, corn, tobacco, wheat, and
furs moved
downstream to the delta
country; sugar, molasses , cotton, and whiskey
traveled north. In the 1850's, before
the climax of westward expansion,
the
vast basin drained three-quarters of the settled
United States.
Young Mark Twain entered that world in
1857 as a cub pilot on a
steamboat. The
cast of characters set before him in his new
profession
was rich and varied a cosmos
. He participated abundantly in this life,
listening to pilothouse talk of feuds ,
piracies, lynchings ,medicine
shows,
and savage waterside slums. All would resurface in
his books,
together with the colorful
language that he soaked up with a memory that
seemed phonographic
Steamboat decks teemed not
only with the main current of pioneering
humanity, but its flotsam of hustlers,
gamblers, and thugs as well. From
them
all Mark Twain gained a keen perception of the
human race, of the
difference between
what people claim to be and what they really are.
His
four and a half year s in the
steamboat trade marked the real beginning
of his education, and the most lasting
part of it. In later life Twain
acknowledged that the river had
acquainted him with every possible type
of human nature. Those
acquaintanceships strengthened all his writing,
but he never wrote better than when he
wrote of the people a-long the
great
stream.
When
railroads began drying up the demand for steam-
boat pilots and
the Civil War halted
commerce, Mark Twain left the river country. He
tried soldiering for two weeks with a
motleyband of Confederate
guerrillas
who diligently avoided contact with the enemy.
Twain quit
after deciding,
invented retreating.
He went west by stagecoach
and succumbed to the epidemic of gold and
silver fever in Nevada's Washoe region.
For eight months he flirted with
the
colossal wealth available to the lucky and the
persistent, and was
rebuffed . Broke
and discouraged, he accepted a job as reporter
with the
Virginia City Territorial
Enterprise, to literature's enduring gratitude.
From the
discouragement of his mining failures, Mark Twain
began
digging his way to regional fame
as a newspaper reporter and humorist.
The instant riches of a mining strike
would not be his in the reporting
trade, but for making money, his pen
would prove mightier than his
pickax.
In the spring of 1864, less than two years after
joining the
Territorial Enterprise, he
boarded the stagecoach for San Francisco,
then and now a hotbed of hopeful young
writers.
Mark
Twain honed and experimented with his new writing
muscles, but
he had to leave the city
for a while because of some scathing columns he
wrote. Attacks on the city government,
concerning such issues as
mistreatment
of Chinese, so angered officials that he fled to
the
goldfields in the Sacramento
Valley. His descriptions of the
rough-
country settlers there ring
familiarly in modern world accustomed to
trend setting on the West Coast.
–
for
all the
slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained slothsstayed at
home... It was
that population that
gave to California a name for getting up
astounding
enterprises and rushing them
through with a magnificent dash and daring
and a recklessness of cost or
consequences, which she bears unto this
day
–
and when
she projects a new surprise, the grave world
smiles as
usual, and says 'Well, that
is California all over. '
In the dreary winter of 1864-65 in
Angels Camp, he kept a notebook.
Scattered among notationsabout the
weather and the tedious mining-camp
meals lies an entry noting a story he
had heard that day
–
an
entry
that would determine his course
forever:
–
bet stranger $$50
–
stranger had no frog, and
C. got him one
–
in
the meantime stranger filled C. 's frog
full of shot and he couldn't
jump. The
stranger's frog won.
story was printed
in newspapers across the United States and became
known as
national reputation
was now well established as
the Pacific
slope.
Two year
s later the opportunity came for him to take a
distinctly
American look at the Old
World. In New York City the steamship Quaker
City prepared to sail on a pleasure
cruise to Europe and the Holy Land.
For
the first time, a sizablegroup of United States
citizens planned to
journey as tourists
-- a milestone , of sorts, in a country's
development. Twain was assigned to
accompany them, as correspondent
工
for a California newspaper.
If readers expected the usual glowing
travelogue , they were sorely
surprised.
Unimpressed by the Sultan of
Turkey, for example, he reported, “...
one could set a trap anywhere and catch
a dozen abler men in a night.”
Casually
he debunked revered artists and art treasures, and
took unholy
verbalshots at the Holy
Land. Back home, more newspapers began printing
his articles. America laughed with him.
Upon his return to the States
the book
version of his travels, The Innocents Abroad,
became an instant
best-seller.
At the age of
36 Twain settled in Hartford, Connecticut. His
best
books were published while he
lived there.
As
early as 1870 Twain had experimented with a story
about the
boyhood adventures of a lad
he named Billy Rogers. Two years later, he
changed the name to Tom, and began
shaping his adventures into a stage
play. Not until 1874 did the story
begin developing in ear nest. After
publication in 1876, Tom Sawyer quickly
became a classic tale of
American
boyhood. Tom's mischievousdaring, ingenuity , and
the sweet
innocence of his affection
for Becky Thatcher are almost as sure to be
studied in American schools to-day as
is the Declaration of Independence.
Mark Twain's own
declaration of independence came from another
character. Six chapters into Tom
Sawyer, he drags in
pariah of the
village, Huckleberry Finn, son of the town
drunkard.
Fleeing a respectable life
with the puritanical Widow Douglas, Huck
protests to his friend, Tom Sawyer:
it don't work, Tom. It ain't for me ...
The widder eats by a bell; she
goes to
bed by a bell; she gits up by a bell
–
everything's so awful
reg'lar a body can't stand
it.
Nine years
after Tom Sawyer swept the nation, Huck was given
a life
of his own, in a book often
consider ed the best ever written about
Americans. His raft flight down the
Mississippi with a runaway slave
presents a moving panorama for
exploration of American society.
On the river, and
especially with Huck Finn, Twain found the
ultimate expression of escape from the
pace he lived by and often
deplored,
from life's regularities and the energy-sapping
clamorfor
success.
Mark Twain suggested that
an ingredient was missing in the American
ambition when he said:
we
might be, if we would only lay ourselves on the
shelf occasionally
and renew our
edges.
Personal
tragedy haunted his entire life, in the deaths of
loved
ones: his father, dying of
pneumonia when Sam was 12; his brother Henry,
killed by a steamboat explosion; the
death of his son, Langdon, at 19
months. His eldest daughter, Susy, died
of spinal meningitis , Mrs.
Clemens
succumbed to a heart attack in Florence, and
youngest daughter.,
Jean, an epileptic,
drowned in an upstairs bathtub .
Bitterness fed on the man
who had made the world laugh. The
moralizing of his earlier writing had
been well padded with humor. Now
the
gloves came off with biting satire. He pretended
to praise the U. S.
military for the
massacre of 600 Philippine Moros in the bowl of a
volcanic, crater . In The Mysterious
Stranger, he insisted that man drop
his
religious illusions and depend upon himself, not
Providence, to make
a better world.
The last of his
own illusions seemed to have crumbled near the
end.
Dictating his autobiography late
in life, he commented with a crushing
sense of despair on men's final release
from earthly struggles:
they vanish
from a world where they were of no consequence;
where they
achieved nothing; where they
were a mistake and a failure and a
foolishness; where they have left no
sign that they had existed
–
a
world which will lament them a day
and for-
get them forever.”
第九课
马克
&S226;
吐温——美国的一面镜子
(
节选
)
诺埃尔
&S226;
格罗夫
在大多数美国人的心目中，马克
&S
226;
吐温是位伟大作家，他描写了哈克
&S226;
费
恩永恒的童年时代中充满诗情画意的旅程和汤姆
&S226;
索亚在漫长的夏日里自由自
在历险探奇的故事
。的确，这位美国最受人喜爱的作家的探索精神、爱国热情、浪
漫气质及幽默笔调都达到
了登峰造极的程度。但我发现还有另一个不同的马克
&S226;
吐温——一个由于深受人生悲剧的打击而变得愤世嫉俗、尖酸刻薄的马克
&S226;
吐温，一个为人类品质上的弱点而忧心忡忡、明显地看到前途是一片黑暗的
人。