He was a "grossly underrated writer";
He is also a writer with a very modern heroic temperament;
Susan Sontag once said that he was "a particularly satisfying writer" for those who would derive pleasure or even addiction from reading;
He uses one sentence and he breaks your heart. He's James Souter.
Today I would like to share an article by Zhang Huiwen, the translator of James Sauter's short story collection "Last Night" produced by the Republic. Through the translator's connection and resonance with the book, we will also meet this "forgotten hero of contemporary American literature" again.
Lust that has to be suppressed, but cannot but be released
Text/Zhang Huiwen
01.
"What makes it different is that tone,
As if it were written out of shadows"
One day in the late summer of 2018, I was wandering around a bookstore in Concord, Massachusetts, and stumbled upon this collection of novels. Shortly before that, The country had just published James Souter's novel "Lightyear", which caused a big boom in the literary circle. So when I noticed that it was Sauter's book, I couldn't help but pick it up and flip through it for a while. I read a few passages from the first "Comet", one or two paragraphs from the last "Last Night", and finally turned to "Arlington"... It's a process of going from feeling good to being attracted to getting better. The scene was a bit like a passage from the novel "Give" in this collection:
I was standing in a bookstore in Greenwich Village, stunned. I remember that afternoon, gloomy and quiet, and I remember myself, almost immersed in the ordinary feeling of things, the recognition of the depth of life (I can't find any other words), but above all, the carnival of those continuous verses. It is an aria, jagged and unending. What sets it apart is the tone, as if it were written out of shadows.
Of course, what these novels give me is not a "carnival of verses", but rather a feeling that sinks, as if slowly condensing, and you will eventually sink into such a depth - facing your own heart. "What makes it different is the tone, as if it had been written out of the shadows"—a phrase that is an accurate description of how I felt reading.
Before talking about this collection of novels, it may be necessary to briefly introduce the American writer who is not so "famous" to the reader. The novelist is not a recorder of his own life, but his education, his experiences, the places where he lived, etc., affect his vision, thinking, and aesthetics, and this influence will eventually be refracted into his work in some way.
James Souter was born in New York in 1925 and was originally named James Arnold Horowitz. His father, George Horowitz, was a businessman who graduated from The Military Academy at West Point. Growing up in Manhattan, James, a well-to-do upper-middle-class kid, was well educated, attended The Horrace Mann School, a prestigious private school in New York, and at the urging of his father, he eventually chose West Point before joining the Air Force as a brilliant fighter pilot. James was involved in the Korean War, and after the war was sent to air bases in Germany and France, and his life in Europe greatly affected him. He kept a large number of notes about life at that time, and in later interviews he mentioned that whenever he looked at them, it was like going back to Europe, back to France.
James Sauter
From many of James's novels, we can see the influence of European culture, especially French culture. For example, "A Game once a Pastime" takes France as the background of the entire story, and "Lightyear" also has a clip involving Europe. In The Last Night, the father of Platinum, Brian, takes his daughter to Paris and realizes at some point the fatal "flaw" in his perfect life; in Fun, Jane places her fantasy romance in the context of Venice:
It was the trip she had always dreamed of, and they would go in the winter because there weren't many tourists there in the winter. They would have stayed in a room on the canal with his shirt, shoes, half a bottle... She didn't bother to think about what it was, some sort of Italian wine bar, and maybe a few books. At night, the breath of the Adriatic wafted in through the window, and she would wake up early, before dawn, to see him sleeping next to her, breathing softly.
James never hid his "European complex" (which is no stranger to us, from Henry James to Hemingway to Sauter, we can see the influence of old Europe on American artists), and his favorite cities are european cities, and France is his "secular mecca".
02.
Doubt, waver, and thwart from time to time
But the heroism that still persists
In 1956, James Arnold Horowitz published his first novel, The Hunter, using the pseudonym James Sauter ever since. In an interview with The New Yorker, he explained the reason for the name change: partly to avoid criticism from the army he worked for, and partly to obscure his Jewish identity, because he did not want to be "another Jewish writer in New York." The second reason can be linked to a characteristic of James Sauter's writing: he is almost deliberately avoiding topicality. In the United States at that time, the identity of a "Jewish writer" meant precisely topicality and more attention. There has always been a social tendency in american literary criticism, or political high eyebrows, that is, they have a strong preference for "big" literature that involves social issues such as race, gender, and class.
In the case of Nabokov, no matter how many beautiful, fanciful novels he has written before, his protagonists and stories that lack ideological critical attitudes have not attracted widespread attention. Without lolita, which later became shocking and topical, even artists like Nabokov would have been more or less overlooked.
The film adaptation of the first novel, The Hunter, earned Sauter a lucrative income, allowing him to leave the army in 1957 to write full-time. Since the 1960s, Souter has been involved in the film industry, writing a series of film scripts. But Whether it's his Hollywood experience or his novels about the military and flight, Sauter doesn't pay much attention to them. From The Hunter to the final novel, All That Is (published in 2013), Sauter's major works in life include six novels, a memoir, and two collections of short stories (Twilight in 1988 and Last Night in 2005). As a long-lived writer, he is not at all prolific.
At the time of Sauter's death, a memorial article published in the New York Times called him "a writer of writers" and "sold very little and praised very high", which is also the consensus of the American novel community. Souter received much of the praise from fellow writers, including Richard Ford, Reynolds Price, Jupa Rahili... One of the adjectives that writers often use when talking about Sauter is "undervalued." "Grossly underrated writer" – this may be a compliment that makes the author himself feel helpless.
Sauter is not the kind of person who is indifferent to fame, on the contrary, he is eager for fame, and he is quite disappointed that his work does not sell well, he once said: "Unless there is enough sales, you can't get into the ranks of important writers." "We don't have to portray him as a classical hero who ideally fights alone. If he has a heroic temperament, it is also modern heroism, an ability to doubt, waver, and frustration from time to time, but eventually persevere. This heroism is reflected in the fact that he values the path to "fame" more than the reputation he desires. Faced with a strong penchant for mainstream literature, Sauter chose another path, one that was quiet but also remote. It is generally believed that in addition to the "absence of the times" in his works, writing too little and writing too slowly is another reason why Sauter is not popular.
In Sauter's time, too many big things happened: the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the affirmative action movement, the moon landing... I don't know if Sauter himself cares about the times, but he obviously doesn't want to discuss these things in the novel. What catches the eye and sparks a big media debate never becomes the subject of Sauter's novels, but at most it is skimmed by in the chatter of his fictional characters.
The charm of Sauter's novel is not the kind of charm similar to that of a journalistic or sociological work, but only a pure artistic charm, derived from the refined language, the poetic style, the theme of closeness to the flesh and human nature. What I have never quite understood is why, for some readers and critics, this theme of flesh and humanity can be relegated to "small" or "narrow", because this kind of thing is more permanent than the changing and fleeting times. Interestingly, after the publication of Sauer's memoir, Burning Days, in 1997, one of the criticisms the writer received was that he was too understated for his experience of the Korean War, that is, some critics were still angry because they could not read his indictments and reflections on the war.
Some critics saw the influence of Hemingway and Henry Miller in Sauter's novels, but Sauter told his biographer William Dovey that the writers who had the greatest influence on him were André Gide and Thomas Wolfe (another American writer with close ties to Europe). At least in terms of theme and character choice, Souter's choice is far less dazzling than Hemingway and Miller's. The plight of middle-class life, which lacks sharp pain and twists and turns, no matter how sensitive and delicate the language is used, is not attractive enough for many people. Sauter seemed to have a premonition of this. At the time, he and his family settled in Hudson Bay on the outskirts of New York, but had a small room in Greenwich Village, where artists gathered, and wrote there. He felt that he was at a disadvantage compared to other artists. He described it this way: "I live in the suburbs. I have a wife, children, all the belongings list... Even when I'm in the city, it's hard to believe what interesting work I'm doing. ”
Sauter considers his most important novels to be "A Game, a Pastime" published in 1967 and "Lightyear" published in 1975. And with his harshness on himself, he felt that only "A Game once a Pastime" was close to the standard he had set. Instead, his two collections of short stories won him a Faulkner Literary Prize and a Faulkner Literary Prize nomination. It's no accident that Sauter's carefully honed artistic style may be just right for the short story genre. It's hard to imagine paving the way with gemstones, but carving a delicate piece of jewelry with gemstones would be perfect.
A Game once a Pastime & Lightyear
03.
With just one sentence,
It's heartbreaking enough
The novels in the collection "Last Night" are very condensed and exquisite, each of which reflects the glitter of different aspects of life, but each one touches the dark and soft depths of human nature: the lust that has to be suppressed but cannot be released, the attachment to youth and the beautiful flesh that represents the desire and vitality of life, loss and loneliness... If one takes the "simplified" criterion of literature by a certain section of the reader today, it can be said that each of these ten stories deals with the theme of infidelity or betrayal. But each one tells us through a sincere, nuanced description that everything is far from simple. One of the simplest questions is: Who exactly "betrayed"? Is it someone else or yourself? If you say that being loyal to yourself will betray others? Once we enter the depths of human nature, once we are faithful to human nature itself, we will find that the most noteworthy thing is not betrayal itself, but what causes betrayal, and how betrayal changes a person's life and its spiritual world... Sauter knows this well: the good novel itself is a mockery and rebellion against "simplification."
"Last Night"
By James Sauter, translated by Zhang Huiwen
One of the things that struck me about the book was the repetition of the theme: a sincere, focused, and profound attempt to write about the struggle, release, and disillusionment of lust (which is full of questions about married life). Here, there is both the complete honesty of a man, the attachment of a twilight man to the passing years, and the writer's understanding, tolerance and sympathy for the weaknesses of human nature. Lust is a complex contradiction, it is dark and soft, tenacious and fragile, when it erupts like fireworks, but it is extremely easy to break and disillusioned, it is quite shameless but it seems to be faithful to nature. And when something is sincere enough, it seems blameless. In "Platinum", there is a description of Brian, who has a crush on the young woman Pamela and cheated on her:
In those days, the desire was so deep that his legs were weak, but in his own home, he did not show any unnatural performance... He came home with that forbidden joy, the forbidden but unparalleled joy, hugging his wife, playing with the children, or reading for them. Forbidden love satisfied all his unfilled desires, and he came from one person to another with a pure heart.
The astonishing thing about this passage is that it writes a touching side of betrayal of purity. In the usual impression, the betrayer is complex, cunning, and has a hatred for the family... In any case, these adjectives have nothing to do with "purity." And Souter presents another truth: betrayal satisfies and delights the betrayer, and he becomes almost purer, with more love, and therefore closer to his family.
The truth here is moving. But sometimes, the truth is also cruel. In Palm Court, Arthur is a calm, shrewd man, single, but remembers a woman he loves dearly— Nolin. Twenty years later, he was again given the missed opportunity that he had always cherished, but when they met again, he found that he could not accept Norine's old age at all. On the phone call when the two agreed to meet, Nolin was still the nolin who made Arthur excited, and he claimed to feel her at once—she was complete, but the fact that ultimately decided the outcome was so simple: "It's hard to believe that she's twenty years older." She was getting fat, and you could tell from her face. And she used to be the most beautiful girl. ”
The protagonists of Sauter's novels are usually middle-class people who are as well-educated as he is, but they are clearly not the middle class that is full of ambition, but the middle class that is suspicious of life and restless in a stable life. They usually have a happy family, and they are sensitive, dissatisfied, attached to good things, and often betray marriage and family because of lust. In the end, although still subject to the order of life, they chose to persist in other ways to rebel within.
In Comet, Philip argues with his wife and others about emotional "cheating", and finally stubbornly defends his betrayal. In Giving, "I" had to terminate my relationship with my same-sex lover because of my wife's persecution. On the surface, "I" failed, but the spiritual betrayal never ended:
I hid some of his photographs and, of course, his poems. Like the women who will never be able to marry the man they love, I will follow him far behind...
The protagonists in these novels are deeply attached to their "mistakes" and insist on their "mistakes", as if that "mistake" is the most beautiful thing in their memory.
Sauter's novels use fairly simple words, but these words are in some strange combination, with extraordinary expressiveness, and their sense of picture and tone is particularly enviable. The sense of picture in Sauter's novel is more like that of a movie than a painting, which has to do with his experience in Hollywood. His novels often have effects similar to those caused by scene switching, perspective changes, and camera progression in movies. Therefore, his scenes and figures are easily developed and imaged in people's consciousness, and at the same time, this spiritual mirror image has a flowing sense of beauty. The depiction of scenes in Sauter's novels is no longer the usual explanation of the environment in which the characters are active or the lubrication between the plots, but it has the function of the picture in the film: the meaning of the picture lies in the picture itself.
Sauter's short stories do not have the stacked arrangement of objects and pictures in the long "Lightyear", the laying out of poetic language, and a strong sense of style, but these short stories have a more streamlined and restrained elegance. Its language has all the advantages that the best concise language has: density due to condensation, silent penetration, a wonderful sense of balance. Density constitutes the kind of gravity that grabs you and calms you down; penetration goes straight into you without any warning, which is perhaps what the American writer Michael Deda put it: "James Souter can be heartbreaking with just one sentence." "As for the sense of balance, that is the secret of all genres, when the language is even and balanced, the style no longer has any abrupt lumps, achieving the overall natural fluency." But precisely because it eliminates the sense of abruptness, including the abruptness of the showmanship and the sensational abruptness of the show, the sense of balance is the advantage that is most easily overlooked by the less knowledgeable reader, because its function is not to "show", but to smooth out what should not be displayed and violate the harmony and balance in the aesthetic sense.
I think this technique is very similar to the flying technique that Souter is most familiar with: it needs to be balanced and fluid in an environment full of mutations and movements. Both require the same intuition and talent. Also, Sorter's language is less American, less native, and he has a little bit of something else that I think is something that comes from European cultural and lifestyle influences. Souter's style is different from Philip Rose's fervent complaints, from John Cheever's American sarcasm, and from Raymond Carver's over-bony American minimalism... There is a kind of elegance in James Souter's simplicity, a cold and careless elegance.
Of these novels, the eponymous "Last Night" is perhaps the most gloomy and uncomfortable of all. The title "Last Night" is, in a sense, also the "last night" of the novel's wife Mariette who decides to euthanize herself due to cancer, and the last night that husband Walter expected to spend with his wife, Maritel. But the next morning, when Maritel, who failed to "succeed" in dying, went downstairs to meet her cheating husband and friend Suzanne, the past "last night" in a sense became the last night of the relationship between Walter and Marlett with a sense of trust, and the last night of Walter and Suzanne's lover's relationship.
What impressed me the most was the extremely short Arlington. The protagonist of the novel is a soldier who has sinned and lost his reputation because of his wife, and through a funeral he attended and some sporadic memories, the novel touches on lust, honor, friendship, sinking, death... In the end, in Arlington Cemetery, a symbol of the highest honor of the military, the betrayer, ashamed, chose to be "loyal" to his wife and stand alone on the side of the loser:
Finally, when they all stood up, hands on their chests, Newell stood alone on the other side, saluting firmly, loyally, like a fool as always.
In the face of death and honor, the stubborn stupidity of a loser also has a certain sense of solemnity, a certain tragedy of defeat. This novel of only about four thousand words is cold, solemn, and profound, and for me it is a perfect short story.
Zhang Huiwen
April 24, 2020 in Boston