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When I was a boy “discovering literature”, I used to think how wonderful it would be if every other person on the street were familiar with Proust and Joyce or T. E. Lawrence or Pasternak and Kafka. Later I learned how refractory to high culture the democratic masses were. Lincoln as a young frontiersman read Plutarch, Shakespeare and the Bible. But then he was Lincoln.
我還是個"探索文學"的少年時，就經常在想：要是大街上人人都熟悉普魯斯特和喬伊斯，熟悉T.E.勞倫斯，熟悉帕斯捷爾納克和卡夫卡，該有多好啊！后來才 知道，平民百姓對高雅文化有多排斥。雖說少年時代身居邊陲的林肯就在閱讀普魯塔克，、莎士比亞和《圣經》，但他畢竟是林肯。
Later when I was traveling in the Midwest by car, bus and train, I regularly visited small-town libraries and found that readers in Keokuk, Iowa, or Benton Harbor, Mich., were checking out Proust and Joyce and even Svevo and Andrei Biely. D. H. Lawrence was also a favorite. And sometimes I remembered that God was willing to spare Sodom for the sake of 10 of the righteous. Not that Keokuk was anything like wicked Sodom, or that Proust’s Charlus would have been tempted to settle in Benton Harbor, Mich. I seem to have had a persistent democratic desire to find evidences of high culture in the most unlikely places.
后來，我坐小車、巴士和火車在中西部旅行，經常走訪小鎮圖書館；發現在衣阿華州基奧卡克市，或者密歇根州本頓港市，讀者們借閱普魯斯特和喬伊斯的作品，甚 至還有斯維沃@和安德烈?別雷?的著作。D. H.勞倫斯的書也深受歡迎。有時我會想起上帝愿為十個義人而饒恕所多瑪城的故事^并非基奧卡克市和邪惡的所多瑪有何相似之處，也并非普魯斯特筆下的夏呂斯 ?想移居密西根州的本頓港，只不過我似乎一直有一種開明的想法，希望在最難覓高雅文化的地方找到高雅文化的證據。
For many decades now I have been a fiction writer, and from the first I was aware that mine was a questionable occupation. In the 1930’s an elderly neighbor in Chicago told me that he wrote fiction for the pulps. “The people on the block wonder why I don’t go to a job, and I’m seen puttering around, trimming the bushes or painting a fence instead of working in a factory. But I’m a writer. I sell to Argosy and Doc Savage,” he said with a certain gloom. “They wouldn’t call that a trade.” Probably he noticed that I was a bookish boy, likely to sympathize with him, and perhaps he was trying to warn me to avoid being unlike others. But it was too late for that.
至今，我已寫了幾十年小說，而且一開始就意識到，這是個頗有爭議的職業。20世紀30年代，芝加哥一位年長的鄰居告訴我，他給通俗雜志寫小說。"街坊鄰里 都納悶，為什么不去上班，卻見我游來蕩去，修剪修剪樹木，粉刷粉刷籬笆，就是不去工廠干活兒。可我是作家啊，稿子賣給《大商船》和《薩維奇醫生》⑦那些雜 志，"他說話時神情有些抑郁。"他們不會把這當作正事兒。"他很可能已經覺察到，我是個喜歡讀書的孩子，興許會與他產生共鳴，或者他想提醒我，不要與眾不 同，但這為時已晚。
From the first, too, I had been warned that the novel was at the point of death, that like the walled city or the crossbow, it was a thing of the past. And no one likes to be at odds with history. Oswald Spengler, one of the most widely read authors of the early 30’s, taught that our tired old civilization was very nearly finished. His advice to the young was to avoid literature and the arts and to embrace mechanization and become engineers.
一開始也有人告誡我，小說正頻臨死亡，猶如城郭或弓弩，已屬昨日之物。誰也不愿和歷史作對。奧斯瓦爾德?斯賓格勒*——30年代初擁有最廣泛讀者的作者之--曾教導我們，陳腐、古老的文明已幾近末路，建議年輕人避開文學和藝術，擁抱機械化，去當工程師。
