The Tragic View of Recognition

(BRANDEIS AWARD STATEMENT, 1966)

       Literary prizes: another innocence to lose.

       In 1966, the year Giles Goat-Boy appeared, I was given what the Brandeis University Arts Award Commission called a "citation in fiction." The term suggests a legal summons; for the reasons set forth below, I decided not to defy it. Besides, the main award of the evening was being presented to Eudora Welly, a writer I admired but had never met. Therefore I hired the requisite black-tie regalia and went to New York City for the awards ceremony. En route I composed my maiden acceptance statement: the statement, it will be seen, of a writer attempting for the first time in his career to write short stories.

       In the event, I was disabused of yet a further innocence: Big-prize winners are expected to speak, but those who are merely cited merely stand and get cited and then sit down and then go Home and return their rented costumes. I take the present occasion to clear my throat and thank the Brandeis people, belatedly, for citing me.

       Not counting Cracker Jacks, this is the first prize of any sort I've won.

       It is tempting therefore to decline it at once, like Jean-Paul Sartre the Nobel, especially if one has rather enjoyed being what they call underground. Late or soon, that is whither we must all repair; take it from me, it is not so bad down there. My aspiration was to become a giant truffle, or one of those stones I used to strike with my spade in my salad garden in the Alleghenies: stones that seem like nothing much until you set about to dig them and find that they go to the bottom of the world. Indeed, that they are the bottom of the world.

       Bedrock.

       I happen to believe, though, what Goethe remarked to the Duke of Weimar: that refusing a distinction can be as immodest as chasing after it. Speaking as a Master of Arts in the field of Innocence, I suspect that when it is artificially preserved it sours into arrested development, and that what began as healthy privacy congeals into reclusive crankhood. This is the Tragic View of Recognition.

       For these reasons, it is especially pleasing to share literary honors with Eudora Welty, who has preserved her balance nicely on the line between public and private property, and whose fiction I have often taught and been taught by. My own preference from the first has been the novel --

              O, the novel,

       With its great galumphing grace,

       Amazing as a whale.

But the number of whales required to constitute a surfeit is perhaps not vast. When we read the beautiful brief writings of Franz Kafka, of Jorge Luis Borges, of Eudora Welty, we realize the continuing viability and appeal of small narratives that delight the ear and can be held whole in the mind's eye like poems. Miss Welty has made some of the best in our American literature. I thank you kindly for honoring me; I congratulate you heartily for honoring her.

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