在Amazon找书，看到精装本的The Story of Art降价了，比平装本还便宜，于是订了一本——十多年前从香港带回一个平装本，也是第16版。此书1950年初版，1995年第16版，每年都在重印——顺便搭一本赠品，是Sherwood Anderson的《俄亥俄温斯堡》（Winesburg, Ohio）。我以前不知道其人其书，选它只是因为选不出其他了。没想到这位“老舍”也是大家，广告说他是海明威心目中的大师。

《不列颠百科》对他的介绍是

who strongly influenced American writing between World Wars I and II, particularly the technique of the short story. His writing had an impact on such notable writers as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, both of whom owe the first publication of their books to his efforts. His prose style, based on everyday speech and derived from the experimental writing of Gertrude Stein, was markedly influential on the early Hemingway—who parodied it cruelly in Torrents of Spring (1926) to make a clean break and become his own man. (Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite. Chicago:  Encyclopædia Britannica, 2011.)

其中提到的Gertrude Stein或许名气更大，她跟Henry James学心理学，后来移居法国，与兄弟收藏当代画家的画，毕加索为她画过肖像。她住在巴黎，她的家是沙龙，海外美国作家——“垮掉的一代”（Lost Generation）就是她给起的名字——在那儿聚会，而海明威和这位老舍先生就在其中。她说过一句很有气魄的话：Einstein was the creative philosophic mind of the century, and I have been the creative literary mind of the century.

老舍的这本小书，描写了俄亥俄小城Winesburg的怪异（Grotesque）生活。有中译本叫《小城畸人》，不知是否恰当——庄子说，“畸人者，畸于人而侔于天。”“侔”就是“齐”，与“畸”相对。可见，“畸人”是特异之人，未必等于“怪诞之人”。

作者假装说见过一个怪老头儿写的“怪异故事”（The Book of Grotesque——Edgar Allan Poe早就写过系列Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque，二者大概是不同的），留下了很深的印象，凭它理解了很多人和事。他总结那书的中心思想是：世界年轻时有很多思想，但没有真理。真理是人自己造的，每个真理都是很多模糊思想的杂烩（each truth was a composite of a great many vague thoughts）。

老头儿认为，真理会令人变得古怪。如果谁把一个真理据为己有，照着它去生活，那真理也就成了谬误。（the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.）