2022年高级口译阅读：逝去的影像

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　　Visions of a vanishing world

　　The death of J. D. Salinger last Wednesday understandably brought a great

　　deal of what Holden Caulfield called "that David Copperfield kind of crap" about

　　the author: "where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my

　　parents were occupied and all before they had me." Salinger himself was a great

　　story: the brilliant young artist who writes a classic and then disappears into

　　the woods of New Hampshire for decades. No more David Copperfield kind of crap

　　for him.

　　Another literary death last week received less attention, but the life and

　　work of Louis Auchincloss speak as much to us as Salinger’s. A lawyer and

　　prolific author, Auchincloss, born in 1917, grew up in houses in Manhattan, on

　　Long Island, and in Bar Harbor, Maine. The family traveled from house to house

　　with its chauffeur (singular) and its servants (very much plural). He studied at

　　Groton and Yale and the University of Virginia law school. He was a wonderful

　　storyteller, but he was the shrewdest of observers and listeners, too. He seemed

　　to know everybody’s secrets, or at least the secrets of everybody who lived on

　　the Upper East Side. Tall and forbidding—or forbidding until he cracked a joke,

　　or found something amusing, at which point he would break into a smile of epic

　　proportions—Auchincloss wrote of a vanishing milieu of Eastern privilege: of

　　prep schools and discreet lawyers and quiet clubs where the chairs were

　　comfortable and the martinis cold.

　　Salinger will endure much longer and will be read more widely than

　　Auchincloss, who will be viewed in death in much the same way he was in life: as

　　an interesting novelist of manners. As Auchincloss himself noted in interviews,

　　he was not remotely as accomplished as Edith Wharton, in whose wake he worked,

　　but he was nevertheless an artist to be taken seriously as a chronicler of a

　　certain sphere of life at a certain time. Not a bad fate, that: it is, in fact,

　　the most virtually any writer could hope for, and which only a tiny number

　　achieve. Auchincloss is to New York in the 20th century what Trollope is to

　　English clerical life in the 19th: a writer who must be read to understand the

　　ethos of a lost world, but whose essential subject matter—the heart and its

　　discontents—transcends time and place.

　　What is most interesting about Auchincloss, is not the elegance of the

　　lives he chronicled but the complexities, the unfulfilled ambitions, the

　　restless hearts of his characters. In Auchincloss’s novels (and in The Catcher

　　in the Rye), little is what it seems to be. The exterior appears solid and

　　secure. But the interior is a constantly roiling emotional battlefield. Glib

　　analysis was insufficient to the problems of the heart Auchincloss was

　　surveying. His 1974 memoir, A Writer’s Capital,should be required reading for

　　anyone interested in the craft. It is a book that manages to be honest and

　　personal without being self-indulgent. He writes of his mother’s anxiety about

　　breaking the conventions of her caste, a reluctance dictated by fear.

　　"Fear of what?" Auchincloss recalled. "It is hard to describe. Fear of a

　　grading system in which one started with a handicap. Fear of not coming up to

　　some kind of scratch. Fear of being measured in the balance and found

　　wanting."

　　Like many of his works, Auchincloss’s Rector is in part about the tragic

　　nature of lives that at first glance appear immune to tragedy. Who can feel

　　sorry for a headmaster who laments that his school produces more stockbrokers

　　than priests or public servants? Auchincloss’s answer is that his readers should

　　care, for the specialized disappointments and frustrations of the well

　　established are particular expressions of the universal truth that life is never

　　precisely what we want it to be, no matter how many houses one has.

　　词句笔记：

　　forbidding：形容人神情严肃的，不苟言笑的

　　crack a joke：讲笑话，开玩笑

　　ethos：社会思潮，普遍信仰

　　in the wake of：紧紧跟随

　　例句：In the wake of the removal of this forest for cultivation is a desolate,

　　bare, and rocky eroded land.

　　开垦土地而砍伐森林所留下的迹象是一片荒芜,裸露和岩石被侵蚀的土地。

　　be immune to：不受……影响的

　　例句： the tragic nature of lives that at first glance appear immune to

　　tragedy

　　第一眼看上去似乎与悲剧绝缘的真正悲剧性的生活

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