The Tragic View of Literary Prizes

(NATIONAL BOOK AWARD ACCEPTANCE STATEMENT, 1973)

       Literary prizes: yes, well.

       Chimera won half of the late lamented National Book Award in Fiction for 1972, from a half-hung jury with whose assorted literary tastes I was familiar from their own writings: Evan Connell, Leslie Fiedler, William Gass, Walker Percy, Jonathan Yardley. That the book was even among the nominees was gratifying, as had been the nominations of The Floating Opera in 1956 and Lost in the Funhouse in 1968. In those days, the NBA was the only U.S. fiction prize one took with some seriousness -- to the growing dissatisfaction of publishers and booksellers, who after 1979 withdrew their support from that award and replaced it with the less reputable American Book Awards. I did not for a moment expect Chimera to win.

       That it did, sort of, was therefore all the more fun. Shelly and I went down to New York from Boston University, where I was visiting-professoring that year, and having this time inquired in advance whether half-winners were expected to make half-statements, whole statements, or no statements,* I was able to pronounce in the Alice Tully Hall of Lincoln Center my sentiments on the matter of literary prizes and to use at last that dandy remark of Goethe's which I'd dug up for the Brandeis Award festivities seven years earlier and still remembered.

* See my undelivered statement "The Tragic View of Recognition," earlier on in this book.

       The only three really negative reviews of my Chimera novellas were in The New York Times book review, The New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker. Can this city be trying to tell me something?

       I shall not listen.

       Instead of thanking the fiction judges for discharging their unenviable task as responsibly as they could, I'm going to thank a number of fellow storytellers whose art has given me delight this year, whether or not their books were among the nominees. Most especially I thank the old magician of Montreux, Vladimir Nabokov, who should long since have won the Nobel Prize, and Donald Barthelme, who was good to begin with and gets better with each new book. Also the elder masters Eudora Welty and I. B. Singer, whose stories I've read and taught with pleasure over the years; and Ishmael Reed and John Gardner, truly formidable imaginations.

       Then there is my former Penn State office-mate Thomas Rogers, whose novel Confessions of a Child of the Century was among this year's distinguished nominees. Tom and I thought it amusing back in 1968 to be the first deskmates in literary history ever to be co-nominees for the same award: His Pursuit of Happiness and my Lost in the Funhouse both lost the NBA that year, to Jerzy Kosinski's Steps. That we were co-nominees again this year, we regard as pretty spooky. If it happens a third time, we're going to collaborate on a Pennsylvania-Dutch gothic thriller called The Verhexed and sweep the field together.

       Well. In a letter to the Duke of Weimar, Goethe wrote: "I am convinced that it is almost as immodest to refuse high distinction as stubbornly to pursue it." I agree, despite the famous capriciousness and ephemerality of such distinctions. We all share the Tragic View of Literary Prizes; yet it would be boring if there were none, and it is more agreeable to shrug them off having won them. A worthwhile literary prize, in my estimation, is one that on occasion will be awarded to a writer despite the fact that he or she deserves it. By this definition, the National Book Award in Fiction is a worthwhile literary prize; I'm pleased to accept it on behalf of Scheherazade, Pegasus, & Company, and the Chimera they still pursue.

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