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1、【国外英文文学】校园秘史Tartt, Donna - The Secret HistoryDonna TarttThe Secret HistoryFirst published in 1992For Bret Easton Ellis, whose generosity will never cease to warm my heart; and for Paul Edward Mc Gloin, muse and Maecenas, who is the dearest friend I will ever have in this world.I enquire now as to th
2、e genesis of a philologist and assert the following: 1.A young man cannot possibly know what Greeks and Romans are.2.He does not know whether he is suited for finding out about them.- FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, Unzeitgemdsse Betrachtungen Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling, and our
3、story shall be the education of our heroes.- PLATO, Republic, book ii PrologueThe snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation. Hed been dead for ten days before they found him, you know. It was one of the bigge
4、st manhunts in Vermont history - state troopers, the FBI, even an army helicopter; the college closed, the dye factory in Hampden shut down, people coming from New Hampshire, upstate New York, as far away as Boston.It is difficult to believe that Henrys modest plan could have worked so well despite
5、these unforeseen events. We hadnt intended to hide the body where it couldnt be found. In fact, we hadnt hidden it at all but had simply left it where it fell in hopes that some luckless passer-by would stumble over it before anyone even noticed he was missing. This was a tale that told itself simpl
6、y and well: the loose rocks, the body at the bottom of the ravine with a clean break in the neck, and the muddy skidmarks of dug-in heels pointing the way down; a hiking accident, no more, no less, and it might have been left at that, at quiet tears and a small funeral, had it not been for the snow
7、that fell that night; it covered him without a trace, and ten days later, when the thaw finally came, the state troopers and the FBI and the searchers from the town all saw that they had been walking back and forth over his body until the snow above it was packed down like ice.It is difficult to bel
8、ieve that such an uproar took place over an act for which I was partially responsible, even more difficult to believe I could have walked through it - the cameras, the uniforms, the black crowds sprinkled over Mount Cataract like ants in a sugar bowl - without incurring a blink of suspicion. But wal
9、king through it all was one thing; walking away, unfortunately, has proved to be quite another, and though once I thought I had left that ravine forever on an April afternoon long ago, now I am not so sure. Now the searchers have departed, and life has grown quiet around me, I have come to realize t
10、hat while for years I might have imagined myself to be somewhere else, in reality I have been there all the time: up at the top by the muddy wheel-ruts in the new grass, where the sky is dark over the shivering apple blossoms and the first chill of the snow that will fall that night is already in th
11、e air.What are you doing up here? said Bunny, surprised, when he found the four of us waiting for him.Why, looking for new ferns, said Henry.And after we stood whispering in the underbrush - one last look at the body and a last look round, no dropped keys, lost glasses, everybody got everything? - a
12、nd then started single file through the woods, I took one glance back through the saplings that leapt to close the path behind me. Though I remember the walk back and the first lonely flakes of snow that came drifting through the pines, remember piling gratefully into the car and starting down the r
13、oad like a family on vacation, with Henry driving clench-jawed through the potholes and the rest of us leaning over the seats and talking like children, though I remember only too well the long terrible night that lay ahead and the long terrible days and nights that followed, I have only to glance o
14、ver my shoulder for all those years to drop away and I see it behind me again, the ravine, rising all green and black through the saplings, a picture that will never leave me.I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I
15、will ever be able to tell.Book IChapter iDoes such a thing as the fatal flaw, that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didnt. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.A moi. Lhis
16、toire dune de mes folies.My name is Richard Papen. I am twenty-eight years old and I had never seen New England or Hampden College until I was nineteen. I am a Californian by birth and also, I have recently discovered, by nature. The last is something I admit only now, after the fact. Not that it ma
17、tters.I grew up in Piano, a small silicon village in the north. No sisters, no brothers. My father ran a gas station and my mother stayed at home until I got older and times got tighter and she went to work, answering phones in the office of one of the big chip factories outside San Jose.Piano. The
18、word conjures up drive-ins, tract homes, waves of heat rising from the blacktop. My years there created for me an expendable past, disposable as a plastic cup. Which I suppose was a very great gift, in a way. On leaving home I was able to fabricate a new and far more satisfying history, full of stri
19、king, simplistic environmental influences; a colorful past, easily accessible to strangers.The dazzle of this fictive childhood - full of swimming pools and orange groves and dissolute, charming show-biz parents has all but eclipsed the drab original. In fact, when I think about my real childhood I
20、am unable to recall much about it at all except a sad jumble of objects: the sneakers 1 wore year-round; coloring books and comics from the supermarket; little of interest, less of beauty. I was quiet, tall for my age, prone to freckles. I didnt have many friends but whether this was due to choice o
21、r circumstance I do not now know .1 did well in school, it seems, but not exceptionally well; I liked to read - Tom Swift, the Tolkien books - but also to watch television, which I did plenty of, lying on the carpet of our empty living room in the long dull afternoons after school.I honestly cant re
22、member much else about those years except a certain mood that permeated most of them, a melancholy feeling that I associate with watching The Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday nights. Sunday was a sad day - early to bed, school the next morning, I was constantly worried my homework was wrong - but
23、 as I watched the fireworks go off in the night sky, over the floodlit castles of Disneyland, I was consumed by a more general sense of dread, of imprisonment within the dreary round of school and home: circumstances which, to me at least, presented sound empirical argument for gloom. My father was
24、mean, and our house ugly, and my mother didnt pay much attention to me; my clothes were cheap and my haircut too short and no one at school seemed to like me that much; and since all this had been true for as long as I could remember, I felt things would doubtless continue in this depressing vein as
25、 far as I could foresee. In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.I suppose its not odd, then, that I have trouble reconciling my life to those of my friends, or at least to their lives as I perceive them to be. Charles and Camilla are orphans (how I longed to be a
26、n orphan when I was a child!) reared by grandmothers and great-aunts in a house in Virginia: a childhood I like to think about, with horses and rivers and sweet-gum trees. And Francis.His mother, when she had him, was only seventeen - a thinblooded, capricious girl with red hair and a rich daddy, wh
27、o ran off with the drummer for Vance Vane and his Musical Swains.She was home in three weeks, and the marriage was annulled in six; and, as Francis is fond of saying, the grandparents brought them up like brother and sister, him and his mother, brought them up in such a magnanimous style that even t
28、he gossips were impressed - English nannies and private schools, summers in Switzerland, winters in France. Consider even bluff old Bunny, if you would. Not a childhood of reefer coats and dancing lessons, any more than mine was. But an American childhood. Son of a Clemson football star turned banke
29、r. Four brothers, no sisters, in a big noisy house in the suburbs, with sailboats and tennis rackets and golden retrievers; summers on Cape Cod, boarding schools near Boston and tailgate picnics during football season; an upbringing vitally present in Bunny in every respect, from the way he shook yo
30、ur hand to the way he told a joke.I do not now nor did 1 ever have anything in common with any of them, nothing except a knowledge of Greek and the year of my life I spent in their company. And if love is a thing held in common, I suppose we had that in common, too, though I realize that might sound
31、 odd in light of the story I am about to tell.How to begin.After high school I went to a small college in my home town (my parents were opposed, as it had been made very plain that I was expected to help my father run his business, one of the many reasons I was in such an agony to escape) and, durin
32、g my two years there, I studied ancient Greek. This was due to no love for the language but because I was majoring in pre-med (money, you see, was the only way to improve my fortunes, doctors make a lot of money, quod erat demonstrandum) and my counselor had suggested I take a language to fulfill th
33、e humanities requirement; and, since the Greek classes happened to meet in the afternoon, I took Greek so I could sleep late on Mondays. It was an entirely random decision which, as you will see, turned out to be quite fateful.I did well at Greek, excelled in it, and I even won an award from the Cla
34、ssics department my last year. It was my favorite class because it was the only one held in a regular classroom no jars of cow hearts, no smell of formaldehyde, no cages full of screaming monkeys. Initially I had thought with hard work I could overcome a fundamental squeamishness and distaste for my
35、 subject, that perhaps with even harder work I could simulate something like a talent for it. But this was not the case. As the months went by I remained uninterested, if not downright sickened, by my study of biology; my grades were poor; I was held in contempt by teacher and classmate alike. In wh
36、at seemed even to me a doomed and Pyrrhic gesture, I switched to English literature without telling my parents. I felt that I was cutting my own throat by this, that I would certainly be very sorry, being still convinced that it was better to fail in a lucrative field than to thrive in one that my f
37、ather (who knew nothing of either finance or academia) had assured me was most unprofitable; one which would inevitably result in my hanging around the house for the rest of my life asking him for money; money which, he assured me forcefully, he had no intention of giving me.So I studied literature
38、and liked it better. But I didnt like home any better. I dont think I can explain the despair my surroundings inspired in me. Though I now suspect, given the circumstances and my disposition, I wouldve been unhappy anywhere, in Biarritz or Caracas or the Isle of Capri, I was then convinced that my u
39、nhappiness was indigenous to that place. Perhaps a part of it was. While to a certain extent Milton is right - the mind is its own place and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell and so forth - it is nonetheless clear that Piano was modeled less on Paradise than that other, more dolorous city. In high
40、 school I developed a habit of wandering through shopping malls after school, swaying through the bright, chill mezzanines until I was so dazed with consumer goods and product codes, with promenades and escalators, with mirrors and Muzak and noise and light, that a fuse would blow in my brain and al
41、l at once everything would become unintelligible: color without form, a babble of detached molecules. Then I would walk like a zombie to the parking lot and drive to the baseball field, where I wouldnt even get out of the car, just sit with my hands on the steering wheel and stare at the Cyclone fen
42、ce and the yellowed winter grass until the sun went down and it was too dark for me to see.Though I had a confused idea that my dissatisfaction was bohemian, vaguely Marxist in origin (when I was a teenager I made a fatuous show of socialism, mainly to irritate my father), I couldnt really begin to
43、understand it; and I would have been angry if someone had suggested that it was due to a strong Puritan streak in my nature, which was in fact the case. Not long ago I found this passage in an old notebook, written when I was eighteen or so: There is to me about this place a smell of rot, the smell
44、of rot that ripe fruit makes. Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death - those monstrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call miasma, defilement - been so brutal or been painted up to look so pretty; have so many people put so much faith in lies and mutability an
45、d death death death.This, I think, is pretty rough stuff. From the sound of it, had I stayed in California I might have ended up in a cult or at the very least practicing some weird dietary restriction. I remember reading about Pythagoras around this time, and finding some of his ideas curiously app
46、ealing - wearing white garments, for instance, or abstaining from foods which have a soul.But instead I wound up on the East Coast.I lit on Hampden by a trick of fate. One night, during a long Thanksgiving holiday of rainy weather, canned cranberries, ball games droning from the television, I went t
47、o my room after a fight with my parents (I cannot remember this particular fight, only that we always fought, about money and school) and was tearing through my closet trying to find my coat when out it flew: a brochure from Hampden College, Hampden, Vermont.It was two years old, this brochure. In h
48、igh school a lot of colleges had sent me things because I did well on my SATs, though unfortunately not well enough to warrant much in the way of scholarships, and this one 1 had kept in my Geometry book throughout my senior year.I dont know why it was in my closet. I suppose Id saved it because it
49、was so pretty. Senior year, I had spent dozens of hours studying the photographs as though if I stared at them long enough and longingly enough I would, by some sort of osmosis, be transported into their clear, pure silence. Even now I remember those pictures, like pictures in a storybook one loved as a child. Radiant meadows, mountains vaporous in the trembling distance; leaves a