Calorie counts aside, the nutritiousness of the observations
was rich enough to justify the travel expenses of the nearly 100 members who
attended.
Poet/critic David Lehman keynoted the panel, summarizing the
contentiousness of the Big Three—the 60-year-old Pulitzer Prizes, the
40-year-old National Book Awards and the ten-year-old NBCC Citations. The
rhetoric unleashed by their ambiguous standards included William Gass’s
contention that the Pulitzer-givers had taken dead aim at mediocrity and almost
never missed.
Ah, yes, the awards we all love to hate—and still and all,
hate not to be loved. Lehman concluded his feisty warm-up by posing the
questions he hoped the panel and audience would engage: What is the rationale
for book awards? Do they help sell books? Do they change writers’ lives? Who
should be eligible? Is controversy inevitable (even useful)? And—asking that
the judges be judged—what did the panel think of the NBCC awards?
Pride of place on the panel went—as it should—to Richard
Rhodes whose The Making of the Atom Bomb took
the Triple Crown in 1987 for non-fiction. If ever a member doubted the
usefulness of the awards from the winner’s perspective, Rhodes put their minds
at ease.
In the five years he spent making the book, he said, he
didn’t think about awards. So he was truly surprised at the NBA nod. The
Pulitzer kept his phone off the hook, as old friends and current creditors
attempted to cash in on his new cachet.
He amused the jaded crowd with vignettes about a long
interview with the New York Times followed
by a telegraphic encounter with USA Today’s terse injunction, “How do you feel—in one sentence,”
followed by an equally succinct “Thanks.”
But Rhodes attested to how the prizes changed his life—from
20 years of catch-as-catch-can article writing in Kansas City to his new estate
in Cambridge as a fellow in the arms-control circles of both Harvard and MIT.
And don’t forget the attentiveness of book reviewers to his 1989 book on a
Kansas farm family of agricultural achievers with whom he slopped hogs for six
months. And all this from a book that’s hardly a best-seller, at 35,000 copies
sold.
But better than such megabucks was the new control he gained
over his own writing life, preparing to hunker down for a decade to do a
two-volume history of the 20th Century, with the empowerment of the
people through science and technology as the leitmotif.
Farrar Straus and Giroux vice president Helene Atwan
followed, expressing enthusiasm tempered by experience. She averred that the
publishing industry loved prizes, wished there were more of them—but also
wished they wielded a bigger impact. Surveying a dozen colleagues in the
publicity end of publishing, she found that prizes don’t automatically lead to
heartening sales booms.
But there have been memorable effects: the escalation of a
paperback auction price from $15,000 to $50,000 as the result of an NBCC
nomination, the positive impact of college paperback adoptions of prizewinners,
the Penguin paperback tour of Larry Heinemen’s Pecos Story, which was going nowhere until he got an award
mid-tour.
Washington Post book
critic Jonathan Yardley, designated cleanup hitter, argued that though the
prizes weren’t perfect and their methodologies could always be fine-tuned,
their net effect was one of gain for the book world, writer, reader and
publisher. The judging process is heir to all human failings—whim, prejudice,
fixation, dislike—but like democracy, though it may be a lousy system, it’s the
best we have.
Therefore he greeted the new L.A. Times award as a healthy portent, breaking the East Coast
monopoly in the prize-bestowing business. But he was restive about prizes being
awarded by large panels with no expertise in a subject like, say, poetry or
science—areas where he feels himself a rank amateur.
The free-for-all that followed settled scores, such as the
Pulitzers not having the guts to give Thomas Pynchon the prize in 1974, or
their feckless lack of judgment in awarding the Big P to Louis Bromfield’s Early
Autumn in a year that saw the publication
of The Sun Also Rises. With no
apologies to Richard Nixon, who would these book people have to kick around if
there were no Pulitzers?
Yardley reminisced with feeling about the pre-glitz days
when you could walk in off the street for $10 to the Lincoln Center or Carnegie
Hall for the awards ceremonies. Yet by 1983, the process had become a holy
mess, with 27 awards competing for media attention—and getting none.
The new and better ABA was patterned after the Booker Prize,
with a short list to build suspense for the media. Some people present cheered
for serious print coverage in “serious” media. Yet even here there were
anomalies: USA Today—the butt of choice
for most upwardly mobile newspaper readers—has one of the best book pages in
the country, with formidable judges like Guggenheiming Joel Connaroe reviewing
regularly.
Seriousness can be in the eye of the beholder. Dan Cryer of Newsday
repeated the problem of finding a
mechanism, say, for processing a dozen poets when most panel members don’t “do”
poetry any more.
Another publishing executive argued that NBCC might be
putting the horse before the cart by not attending to the 40-60 million
illiterates in the country. (Gregory Rabassa recently lamented that you could
put all America’s serious readers in one small state, and that one hour of Star
Wars research could fund remedial reading courses for 300 illiterates for a
year.) On the downside of his ups, Rhodes recounted his sadness at seeing a
woman in a bookstore flinch at the periodic table in his text and put his book
down for something more flappable.
Richard Rhodes praised Neil Sheehan’s book as the first one
to make sense for him of the Vietnam War. He wanted more books like this one
that changed out lives, not just runaway best-sellers. A member from the floor
chided the pubs for not unleashing ad blitzes to boom the prize winners. Atwan
replied that it wasn’t that simple: It cost too much to tout Sheehan’s hard
cover; better to wait for the paperback and boost that.
Talk turned to the composition of panels. Sci-fi writer Tom
Disch wondered aloud if three-person panels weren’t by definition a cabal. And
Carol Renzler told a minatory tale of her involvement in a five-person
telephone pane in which the manipulative maneuvers of the chair brought squirms
of disgust to the audience.
Liz Bennet of the Houston Post wondered about how one award affected another: Did
the Pulitzer affect the NBCC? No, said Lehman, because NBCC precedes the P. The
NBA does precede NBCC, but conscientious members keep their own counsel.
Larry Swindell of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (and formerly of the Inquirer) advised against conceiving the awards as being in
competition with each other. The NBA was instituted in 1949 after years of
simmering over the fiction and drama prizes of the Pulitzer.
Edward Giuletto had the last word: Cream rises to the top,
and we’re making an affirmation that books and ideas are important to the
American culture. Heh, the group seemed to exhale, after one hour and 25
minutes of palaver, “We’ll drink to that.” Which they did—at $20 a pop.
From Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, February 28, 1990
O FOR 5
Here are the National Book Critics Circle winners:
Fiction: Billy
Bathgate, by E.L. Doctorow
General Nonfiction: The
Broken Cord, by Michael Dorris
Biog./Autobiog.: The
First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt, by
Geoffrey C. Ward
Poetry: Transparent
Gestures, by Rodney Jones
Criticism: Not
by Fact Alone: Essays on the Writing and Reading of History, by
John Clive
And here’s who really should have won, says Patrick
Hazard:
Fiction: Spartina,
by John Casey
General Nonfiction: Barbarian
Sentiments, by William Pfaff
Biog./Autobiog.: Jazz
Cleopatra, by Phyllis Rose
Poetry: Collected
Poems, by Phillip Larkin
Criticim: Swing
Era, by Gunther Schiller
|
No comments:
Post a Comment