Loss, nostalgia for a vanished past and “the unspeakable peril of the everyday” represented by “swimming pools, high-tension wires, lye under the sink, aspirin in the medicine cabinet” — these are the themes that have animated Joan Didion’s work, since “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” established her as one of America’s most distinctive and acute literary voices almost five decades ago.

丧失、对逝去的时光的怀恋以及那些“司空见惯却又难以说清的危险”（比如游泳池、高压线、厨房水盆下存放的碱性洗涤剂、药柜里的阿司匹林等等）是琼·狄恩作品的一贯主题，也是令其作品绘声绘色、生命力持久的重要元素。自从50年前发表《缓缓走向伯利恒》(Slouching Towards Bethlehem)奠定了狄恩在美国文学的地位，这些主题一直赋予狄恩一个独特敏锐的文学声音。

All her fears about the precariousness of life were horribly realized in December 2003, when her daughter, Quintana Roo, went into a New York hospital with an apparent case of flu and was soon lying unconscious in an intensive care unit, suffering from pneumonia and septic shock; days later, her husband of 40 years, John Gregory Dunne, sat down for dinner and collapsed, dead from a massive heart attack. Quintana would die about a year and a half later at the age of 39.

她对于人生的重重险象及不稳定性的所有恐惧都在2003年12月不幸地兑现了：她的女儿，昆塔娜·璐，貌似患流感入住医院，却很快因肺炎及败血性休克躺在ICU病房昏迷不醒；几天后，她相濡以沫40年的丈夫格里高利·邓恩在餐桌前坐下准备用晚餐时突然瘫倒，死于大面积突发性心衰；一年半之后，昆塔娜也撒手人寰，时年只有39岁。

Ms. Didion, now 80, chronicled these events in two books — “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005), a shattering contemplation of loss and grief and sorrow, and “Blue Nights” (2011), a more elliptical meditation on her daughter’s life and death — much as she chronicled the rest of her life in her other work: her nervous collapses, her marital ups and downs, her anxieties, her illnesses, her craving for stability. In “The Last Love Song,” Tracy Daugherty — a fiction writer, and the author of critically acclaimed biographies of Donald Barthelme and Joseph Heller — unavoidably draws heavily upon Ms. Didion’s own writings while at the same time trying to draw distinctions between her real life and her literary persona, between her experiences as a daughter, writer, wife, and mother and what he astringently describes as her “working her brand.” He notes, for instance, that Ms. Didion wrote in “Blue Nights” about thinking of taking Quintana, then an infant, with her on assignment to Saigon, during the Vietnam War, implying that she was so unprepared to be a mother that the absurdity of such an undertaking never occurred to her. In fact, he writes, she was anything but clueless — “she was a steely professional, not about to let motherhood get in the way of her career.” What stopped her, Mr. Daugherty argues, was the simple fact that Quintana’s adoption had not yet been finalized and “she could not be transported out of state, much less out of the country.”

现年已经80高龄的狄恩用两本书记录了她所承受的巨大损失与悲恸——《奇思幻想的一年》(The Year of Magical Thinking，2005)，书中她直面丧夫之痛，对人生的失去与悲伤的反思直撼人心；《蓝色的夜》(Blue Nights，2011)是对女儿的生与死更加委婉含蓄的沉思。一如她的其他作品，两本书均对生活种种做了记录：从神经崩溃，婚姻的起起落落，到焦虑、病痛，以及对稳定生活的渴望，面面俱到。 小说家特雷西·多尔蒂（曾写过备受赞誉的唐纳德·巴塞尔姆和约瑟夫·海勒传记） 新近出版的《最后的恋歌》(The Last Love Song)无可避免地从狄恩自己的作品中提取了大量资料，同时又将生活中的狄恩与文坛上的狄恩区分开来，把她作为女儿、作家、妻子、母亲的多重角色以及多尔蒂所描述的狄恩的“自我品牌塑造”一一展现给读者。虽然狄恩在《蓝色的夜》中写到自己曾打算带上襁褓中的昆塔娜去西贡执行写作任务，尽管当时正值越战，这意味着她对于初为人母毫无思想准备，丝毫没有意识到带着一个婴儿奔赴战场采访的荒谬。多尔蒂却指出，事实上，狄恩并非对于做母亲的责任一无所知，“她是一个意志刚强的职业女性，不想让母亲的角色阻碍了她事业的发展”。多尔蒂认为，最终使她没能把昆塔娜带到西贡的原因是领养手续没有完成，“昆塔娜无法被带出州，遑论带出国”。

The Didion who emerges from “The Last Love Song” is both a frail, angst-ridden outsider and a shrewd Hollywood and New York insider; a vulnerable witness to history and a hardheaded survivor; a writer drawn to theatricality and extremes, and a woman who prizes order and control. Mr. Daugherty — who did not get Ms. Didion’s cooperation — does an agile job here of examining how his subject’s life illuminated the eras she traversed (and vice versa). He uses her experiences, much as Ms. Didion did, as an index of the cultural convulsions that rocked the country during the 1960s and ’70s, while at the same time, using her literary methods and musical sense of language to chart her peregrinations between California and New York, and her intellectual evolution over the years.

《最后的恋歌》呈现给我们的狄恩既是一个身体虚弱、充满焦虑的局外人又是一个精明锐敏的好莱坞和纽约的圈内人；既是易受伤害的历史见证人又是精明务实的幸存者；既是追逐戏剧性和极端事件的作家，又是珍视秩序与掌控的女人。多尔蒂先生并没有得到狄恩的配合，但他对传主一生的审视却也机敏自如，使狄恩的人生与她所经历的时代辉映成趣。他以狄恩的个人经历作为上世纪六七十年代美国文化大震荡的指数，同时又以狄恩的创作手法及富有乐感的语言记录了她游走于加州和纽约之间的经历以及她心智上的发展。

There are a few tasteless and superfluous lapses into gossip in this book — in one case, he even notes that a source’s observations “should be taken with heavy pitchers of salt.” And Mr. Daugherty dances nervously (though not as nervously as Ms. Didion has) around the subject of Quintana’s emotional difficulties and alcoholism, quoting a close friend who says her depressions and drinking were “probably intertwined” with her final illness (acute pancreatitis, which Mr. Daugherty writes, is “usually caused in young people by prolonged drug or alcohol abuse”). For the most part, this thoughtful and ambitious biography remains focused on Ms. Didion’s writing, using her life to shed light on her highly autobiographical work. Mr. Daugherty reminds us of the pioneer past of Ms. Didion’s family — her mother was a descendant of Nancy Hardin Cornwall, who, with her husband, had followed the ill-fated Donner-Reed party west, but split from the group in Nevada — and how this indelibly shaped her vision of California, and how California, in turn, became, for her, a metaphor for the promises and betrayals of America.

书中也有几处庸俗无聊的八卦闲话；有一处甚至多尔蒂自己都坦言可信度极低。对于昆塔娜的情感困扰和酗酒，多尔蒂和狄恩一样都是小心翼翼地旁敲侧击（尽管他比狄恩女士更放开一些）。借用一位关系密切的狄恩家庭朋友的话，多尔蒂告诉我们，昆塔娜的抑郁症和酗酒与她最终的病患——急性胰腺炎——很可能有着千丝万缕的联系（年轻人的急性胰腺炎“大多与长期滥用毒品和酗酒有关”，多尔蒂指出）。总之，这是一部深思熟虑、内容丰富的传记。它始终以狄恩的写作生涯为主线，探索了她的个人生活与她极富自传色彩的作品如何相得益彰；同时也让我们了解了狄恩家族的西部开拓者背景。她的母亲是南希·哈丁·康沃尔(Nancy Hardin Cornwall, 1811-1886)的后代，康沃尔夫妇曾经跟随时运不济的唐纳-瑞德大队西迁，在内华达州与大队分手；这一历史背景奠定了狄恩的加州观，同时对于狄恩，加州又成为美利坚的希望与背叛的隐喻。

Over time, her nostalgia for a vanished frontier — the wagon-train mentality of its first settlers, the stoic individualism embodied by her beloved John Wayne — would mutate into something more ambivalent, an acknowledgment that selfishness and what she called a “mean scrambling for survival” had always lain beneath the romantic myths.

随着时间的推移，她对逝去的那个边疆的怀恋——早期开拓者的大篷车心态、以她所喜爱的约翰·韦恩为代表的吃苦耐劳、坚忍不屈的个人主义——逐渐演变成某种矛盾的心理，一种认为自我利益及“为生存下去而抢夺”本就是浪漫传奇之内涵的观点。

Although readers may not agree with all of Mr. Daugherty’s assessments of individual Didion books, his biography evinces a deep appreciation of her skills and idiosyncrasies, and an understanding of how writers like Conrad, Hemingway and her college professor Mark Schorer (who sharpened her awareness of textual nuances and the use of point of view) helped her forge her singular style. Mr. Daugherty expertly dissects Ms. Didion’s preoccupation with narratives — not just with the techniques of storytelling but also with the subtexts undergirding the personal and political story lines mapped in her work.

读者未必赞同多尔蒂先生对狄恩每部作品的评价，但他的传记表现了对狄恩的写作技巧和独特风格的高度赞赏，揭示了康拉德、海明威等作家以及狄恩的大学教授马克·绍尔如何影响锻造了她的卓尔不凡的风格（是绍尔教授培养了狄恩对文字微妙差异和不同叙事视角的敏感）。多尔蒂先生详尽地分析了狄恩对叙事的专注——不仅仅是她讲故事的技巧，还有那些埋伏在字里行间的个人的和历史的故事线索。

At the same time, Mr. Daugherty tries to tease out correspondences between Ms. Didion’s life and those of the heroines in her novels — most notably, anxiety over troubled or wayward daughters, from the emotionally impaired Kate in “Play It as It Lays” to Marin, the fugitive radical, in “A Book of Common Prayer” to the drug-addicted Jessie in “Democracy.” He suggests that Ms. Didion and Mr. Dunne’s focus on their own careers and self-absorption as writers sometimes sidelined Quintana when she was little (she was frequently parked with Ms. Didion’s parents, when they were traveling); that the Hollywood scene she knew as a teenager fueled her penchant for medicating her anxieties with alcohol and drugs; and that Ms. Didion was often in denial about Quintana’s problems. He is tough on Ms. Didion as a parent but arguably no tougher than Ms. Didion has been on herself (in print and in interviews) about her shortcomings as a mother, who missed or misread clues to Quintana’s unhappiness and screened off her worst worries and fears.

多尔蒂先生还试图挖掘出狄恩女士和她小说里的女主人公的相应经历，其中最明显的就是对于任性的、有问题的女儿的担心与焦虑——这样的女儿遍布其小说作品，如《顺其自然》(Play It As It Lays)一书中有感情障碍的凯特；《祈祷书》(A Book of Common Prayer)里逃亡的激进分子马琳；《民主》（Democracy）中吸毒成性的杰茜等等。他认为狄恩女士和邓恩先生对事业的专注和各自写作的全身心投入往往使他们忽略了年幼的女儿（狄恩夫妇旅行时常常把女儿留在父母家里）； 十几岁就近距离接触好莱坞文化的经历加剧了昆塔娜以酒精、毒品缓解焦虑的嗜好；而狄恩又常常拒绝承认女儿的问题。对于狄恩作为母亲的失职，对昆塔娜精神抑郁的种种端倪视而不见或误解，并一再屏蔽自己的担心与恐惧，多尔蒂都毫不留情地揭示出来，但他并没有比狄恩在书中或采访中的自我评判更严苛。

After finishing “Blue Nights,” Mr. Daugherty reports, Ms. Didion felt increasingly “weary, listless,” less inclined to push herself, less invested in maintaining the momentum she’d once prized, uncertain whether she would write again. Even her commitment to the pioneer imperative of stoicism and survival, he writes, had begun to waver. He quotes her saying to a friend, “There’s something missing in survival as a reason for being, you know?”

写完《蓝色的夜》之后，多尔蒂写道，狄恩女士越来越感到“疲惫，倦怠”，不再愿意发愤图强，不再有从前的动力，甚至不确定是否还会继续写作；连她一贯推崇与遵守的边疆开拓者的坚韧不屈、顽强活下去的精神都开始动摇了。多尔蒂引用狄恩自己对朋友说的话：“活下去作为存在的理由缺失了什么东西，你懂吗？”