海明威如何成为了著名作家海明威

Ernest Hemingway was not only a commanding figure in 20th-century literature, but he was also a pack rat. He saved even his old passports and used bullfight tickets, leaving behind one of the longest paper trails of any author.

欧内斯特·海明威(Ernest Hemingway)不仅是20世纪文坛中一位举足轻重的人物，同时也是个收集狂。他就连旧护照和斗牛比赛票根也要留着，因此在身后留下了庞大的书面资料，在作家当中堪称数一数二。

So how is it possible that “Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars,” which opens on Friday at the Morgan Library & Museum, is the first major museum exhibition devoted² to Hemingway and his work? It could be simply that no one thought of it before. Most of Hemingway’s papers are at the John. F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. After Hemingway’s death in 1961, President Kennedy, a fan, helped his widow, Mary, get into Cuba and retrieve³ many of his belongings⁴ there. Partly in gratitude⁵, she later donated Hemingway’s archive to the new presidential library. But the Kennedy Library, where this exhibition will travel in March, is not accustomed, as the Morgan is, to putting on big crowd-pleasing shows.

“欧内斯特·海明威：两次世界大战之间”(Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars)将于周五在摩根图书馆与博物馆(Morgan Library & Museum)开展，人们不禁奇怪，之前怎么根本就没有关于海明威及其作品的大型博物馆展览呢？答案可能只是的确没有人想到吧。海明威的大多数文件都保存在波士顿的约翰·F·肯尼迪总统图书馆与博物馆(John. F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum)。海明威于1961年去世后，崇拜他的肯尼迪总统帮助他的遗孀玛丽到古巴取回许多遗物。部分是为了表示感谢，玛丽后来把海明威的资料捐献给了新落成的肯尼迪总统图书馆。但是肯尼迪图书馆并不像摩根图书馆这样擅长举办人们喜闻乐见的大型展览（本展览亦将于明年3月来到肯尼迪图书馆）。

Even at the Morgan, Hemingway was something of an afterthought. Declan Kiely, the museum’s head of literary and historical manuscripts and the show’s curator, said recently that he and Patrick Milliman, the director of communications, began idly talking about Hemingway in 2010, after concluding that an exhibition about J. D. Salinger, who had just died, was probably not feasible. The Hemingway exhibition, mounted on walls that have been painted tropical blue to suggest his years in Key West and in Cuba, takes him all the way from high school (where one of his classmates described him as “egotistical, dogmatic and somewhat obnoxious”) to roughly 1950, when he turns up as a self-caricature in Lillian Ross’s famous New Yorker profile. But the largest and most interesting section focuses on the ’20s, Hemingway’s Paris years, and reveals a writer we might have been in danger of forgetting: Hemingway before he became Hemingway.

即便是在摩根，海明威展也并非优先考虑。博物馆文学与历史手稿部门的负责人、本次展览的策展人迪克兰·基利(Declan Kiely)前不久说，2010年，他和博物馆的公关主管帕特里克·米利曼(Patrick Milliman)聊起，为当时刚刚去世不久的J·D·塞林格(J. D. Salinger)做一次展览似乎不太现实，然后他们才随口聊起了海明威。在这次海明威展上，墙壁被漆成颇具热带风情的蓝色，象征着他在基韦斯特与古巴度过的岁月，展品从他的中学时光（有个同学形容当时的他“任性、固执，有点讨人厌”）一直来到20世纪50年代，那时他的形象已经成了莉莉安·罗斯(Lillian Ross)在《纽约客》发表的那篇著名报道中的自我讽刺形象。但展览中最重头也是最有趣的部分集中在20世纪20年代，海明威的巴黎岁月，它揭示出一位我们有可能会忘记的作家——成为著名作家之前的海明威。

The exhibition does not fail to include pictures of the bearded, macho, Hem¹, the storied hunter and fisherman. He’s shown posing with some kudu he has just shot in Africa and on the bridge of his beloved fishing yacht, the Pilar, with Carlos Gutiérrez, the fisherman who became the model for “The Old Man and the Sea.”

展览中也有不少照片，展示那个留大胡子，富于男性气概的“海姆”，那个传奇的猎手和渔夫。一张照片是他在非洲与自己猎杀的大羚羊的合影，还有一张是他在自己最心爱的钓鱼艇“皮拉尔”上，与渔夫卡洛斯·古铁雷兹(Carlos Gutiérrez)的合影，此人正是《老人与海》(The Old Man and the Sea)中老渔夫的原型。

But the first photo the viewer sees is a big blowup of a handsome, clean-shaven, 19-year-old standing⁶ on crutches⁷. This is from the summer of 1918, when Hemingway was recovering from shrapnel wounds at the Red Cross hospital in Milan and trying to turn his wartime experiences into fiction. For the first time, he tried out the Nick Adams persona. The manuscript is at the Morgan, scrawled⁸ in pencil on Red Cross stationery⁹.

但展览上的第一张照片是一张放大照，19岁的海明威相貌英俊，面庞光洁，拄着双拐。照片摄于1918年的夏天，海明威在“一战”中身受枪伤，正在米兰红十字医院中休养，试着把自己的战时经历写成小说。当时他第一次在小说中使用“尼克·亚当斯”(Nick Adams)这个角色。手稿也在这次摩根的展览中展出，用铅笔写在红十字医院的信纸上。

Perhaps because of the famous “For Whom the Bell Tolls¹⁰” jacket photo (also at the Morgan), which shows Hemingway bent¹¹ over a Royal portable, or because of the cleanness and sparseness¹² of his prose, we tend to think of him as someone who wrote on the typewriter. But the evidence at this exhibition suggests that, in the early days anyway, he often wrote in pencil, mostly in cheap notebooks but sometimes on whatever paper came to hand. The first draft of the short story “Soldier’s Home” is written on sheets he appears to have swiped from a telegraph office. The impression you get is of a young writer seized by inspiration and sometimes barreling ahead without an entirely¹³ clear sense of where he is going.

或许是因为海明威在《丧钟为谁而鸣》(For Whom the Bell Tolls)一书封套上用皇家手提打字机打字的照片太有名了（这张照片也出现在摩根展上），又或者是因为他的文风简洁明快，我们都觉得他肯定是用打字机写作的人。但这次展览上的展品却表明，他早期经常用铅笔写作，经常是写在廉价的笔记本上，有时也写在手头的任何纸张上。他的短篇小说《士兵之家》(Soldier’s Home)的第一稿写在显然是从电报局偷回来的纸片上。你会觉得这是一个被灵感火花抓住的年轻作家，有时一气呵成地飞快写下去，几乎不清楚自己究竟在写什么。

He began the original draft of his first novel, “The Sun Also Rises,” which he finished in just nine weeks during the summer of 1925, on loose sheets and then switched over to notebooks. It wasn’t until the end of the third notebook that he wrote a chapter outline on the back cover (which also records his travel expenses and his daily word counts, something Hemingway kept careful track of), and some of the pages on display show him slashing¹⁴ out not just words and sentences but whole passages as he writes. “Writing it first in pencil gives you one-third more chance to improve it,” Hemingway wrote later in an Esquire article. “That is .333, which is a damned good average for a hitter.”

他的第一部小说《太阳照常升起》(The Sun Also Rises)是1925年夏天花九个星期写完的，初稿写在活页纸上，后来又在笔记本上写。直到写完第三个本子，他才开始在本子封底上写章节大纲（这页封底上还记录了他的旅费与每天说了几个单词，海明威有时候会细心地去数），本子里有几页显示他不仅大刀阔斧地删掉字句，有时整段都会删掉。“先用铅笔写，这样你就多了1/3的修改机会，”海明威后来在给《Esquire》杂志的文章中写道。“这就是.333，对于击球手来说是个极好的平均数。”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (some of whose correspondence with Hemingway, beginning that year, is also on view) famously urged him to cut the first two chapters of “The Sun Also Rises,” complaining about the “elephantine facetiousness¹⁵” of the beginning, and Hemingway obliged, getting rid of a clunky opening that now seems almost “meta”: “This is a story about a lady. Her name is Lady Ashley and when the story begins she is living in Paris and it is Spring. That should be a good setting for a romantic but highly moral story.” In 1929, in a nine-page penciled critique, Fitzgerald also suggested numerous revisions for “A Farewell to Arms.” Hemingway took some of these, but less graciously, and soon afterward¹⁶ his friendship with Fitzgerald came to an end. At the bottom of Fitzgerald’s letter he wrote: “Kiss my ass/E.H.”

F·斯科特·菲茨杰拉德是经常与海明威书信来往的人之一，他们的通信正是从这一年开始，它们也在这次展览中展出。菲茨杰拉德曾经建议海明威把《太阳照常升起》的前两章删掉，说它们作为小说开头有种“笨拙的滑稽”，这件事非常著名。而海明威也照办了，删去了笨重的，现在看来近乎“庞大”的开头：“这是关于一个女人的故事，她的名字就叫做阿什莉小姐，故事开头时，她住在巴黎，当时正是春天。这样的环境更适合浪漫故事而不是道德感极强的故事。”1929年，菲茨杰拉德用铅笔写来长达九页的评论，对《永别了，武器》(A Farewell to Arms)提出大量修改意见。海明威采纳了其中一些，但并不那么有风度，不久后他和菲茨杰拉德的友谊也走到了尽头。在菲茨杰拉德的来信末尾，海明威写道：“亲我的屁股/E.H.”。

The papers at the Morgan show a Hemingway who is not always sure of himself. There are running lists of stories he kept fiddling¹⁷ with, including one with his own evaluations¹⁸: “Tour de force,” “Pretty good,” “Maybe good.” And there are lists and lists of possible titles, including the 45 he considered for “Farewell” (among the discards, thank goodness, were “Sorrow for Pleasure,” “The Carnal Education” and “Every Night and All”).

摩根展上的文件表明，海明威并不总是那么自信。他列了很多单子，上面是他一直在修改的短篇小说，旁边还有他自己的评语：“杰作”，“不错”，“也许还行”。还有无数给小说起的名字，比如他光是为《永别了，武器》就想了45个名字（被放弃的名字中包括“欢娱的悔恨”、“肉体教育”和“每个夜晚与一切”，真是谢天谢地）。

Hemingway also tried 47 different endings for that novel. Those on view at the Morgan include the so-called “Nada” ending (“That is all there is to the story. Catherine died and you will die and that is all I can promise you”) and the only slightly more hopeful one suggested by Fitzgerald, in which the world “kills the very good and very gentle and the very brave impartially¹⁹. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

海明威还为这部小说写了47个不同的结尾。摩根展中有一个被称为“虚无”的结局（“故事就是这样的，凯瑟琳死了，你也会死，我只能说这么多”），还有一个稍微带点希望色彩的结局，是菲茨杰拉德建议的，在这个结局里，“世界一视同仁地杀死那些好人、温柔的人与勇敢的人。如果这三种你都不是，它当然也会杀掉你，不过不会特别着急。”

In display case after display case, you see Hemingway during his Paris years inventing and reinventing himself, discovering as he goes along just what kind of writer he wants to be. In a moving 1925 letter to his parents, who refused to read “In Our Time,” his second story collection, he writes: “You see I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across — not just to depict²⁰ life — or criticize it — but to actually make it alive. So that when you have read something by me you actually experience the thing. You cant²¹ do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful.” As the years go by, he also puts on weight, grows a mustache (seen in a Man Ray photograph) and for some unfathomable reason poses for an oil painting as “Kid Balzac,” a challenger ready to knock out the great 19th-century realist.

走过一个又一个展柜，你可以看到海明威在巴黎是如何一再重新塑造自己，渐渐发现自己希望成为什么样的作家。他的父母不愿读他的第二本短篇小说集《在我们的时代里》(In Our Time)，1925年，他在一封感人的信中对他们说：“你们看，我试着为我全部的小说注入真实生活的感觉——不是去描写生活或是批判生活——而是让它真的活起来。这样当你们读到我写的东西时，你们就可以真的体验到那些事物。要做到这一点，就得把坏的、丑的东西也放进去，就像把美好的东西放进去一样。” 几年后，他发了福，留起了胡子（正如曼·雷[Man Ray]的照片所示），由于某些无法了解的原因，他还为一幅名叫《少年巴尔扎克》(Kid Balzac)的油画当模特，在这幅画中，巴尔扎克被塑造成一个冲击伟大的19世纪现实主义文学的挑战者形象。

By the time the Second World War broke out, Hemingway had solidified²² — fossilized even — into the iconic figure we now remember: Papa. Even J. D. Salinger calls him this, in a 1946 letter written while Salinger is in an Army psychiatric hospital, in which he says of the war that a 1944 meeting with Hemingway in Paris was “the only helpful minutes of the whole business.” Hemingway, often drinking and despondent²³, didn’t know it, but his best work was behind him by then, though there is perhaps an inkling of diminished expectation in a July 1949 letter he wrote to the screenwriter and novelist Peter Viertel that ends: “I don’t know any place left in the states where it’s the kind of wild I like.”

“二战”爆发期间，海明威的形象已经固定下来——而且像化石一般坚不可摧——就是那个我们如今熟悉的“爸爸”(Papa)的符号形象。就连J·D·塞林格都这么称呼他，1946年，塞林格在一家陆军精神病院给他写信，说在这场战争中，1944年在巴黎见到海明威是“整件事中唯一充满希望的时刻。”海明威经常喝酒，陷入沮丧，他不知道这封信，但当时他最好的作品正呼之欲出。1949年7月，他给编剧和小说家彼得·维尔特尔(Peter Viertel)的信以这样一句话结尾：“美国已经没有我喜欢的旷野。”这或许流露出了一丝小小的迹象。

A blustery, cranky Hemingway appears in 1949 when aboard the Pilar he grabs an old fishing diary and begins scrawling²⁴ an angry letter to Harold Ross, the editor of The New Yorker (whom he addresses as “Mister Harold”), complaining about Alfred Kazin’s review of “Across the River and Into the Trees,” not, in truth, a very good book. Kazim or Kasim, or whatever his name is, Hemingway tells Ross, can take his review and shove it you know where, and he will supply the grease. As Hemingway gets angrier and angrier his pencil almost goes through the paper, and then, as suddenly as it struck, the squall passes. The letter was never sent.

1949年，一个爱吵闹，怪脾气的海明威登上“皮拉尔”的甲班，他拿过一本老旧的打渔日志，开始愤怒地给《纽约客》的编辑哈罗德·罗斯(Harold Ross)写信，称他为“哈罗德先生”，抱怨阿尔弗莱德·卡津(Alfred Kazin)评价《过河入林》(Across the River and Into the Trees)不算一本好书。海明威告诉罗斯：卡津还是卡辛，不管这人叫什么，可以拿上他的评论塞进自己的某个器官，他会帮他上油的。海明威愈写愈气，铅笔快要戳穿纸背，然而愤怒来得快去得也快，这封信从来没有被寄出去。

A more endearing writer is the one who reveals himself in a series of uncharacteristically shy wartime letters to Mary Welsh, who would become his fourth wife. In one, he apologizes for not knowing enough adjectives. In another, in a sort of stream-of-consciousness vision of intimacy²⁵ apparently²⁶ written in darkness while he is traveling with the infantry²⁷ as a war correspondent, he says: “It would be lovely to be in bed now, legs close and all held tight and lip like when you’ve pulled the pin from a grenade and let the handle ease up under your hand.”

在致第四任妻子玛丽·威尔士(Mary Welsh)的战时信件中，这位作家显得可亲可爱得多，这些信少有的羞涩，展示出他的自我。在一封信中，他道歉说自己不怎么会用形容词。另一封信有点像亲昵的意识流，显然是他在做战地记者随步兵行军时，在黑暗中写的，他写道：“现在能上床就好了，腿紧紧合在一起，嘴唇也是，你把引信从手榴弹里拔出来，用你的手爱抚手柄。”