The 1960 National Book Awards:

...Answer: You write Moby Dick—or, for that matter, Goodbye, Columbus...

...During this second agon, the authors of recent non-prize-winning books were introduced one by one, rising in the midst of noisy inattention to be described from cards provided by the publicity departments of their various publishers and read aloud by a large female semi-literate, who alternately tried to hush the hubbub and to stir enthusiasm for the few writers whose names she recognized—chiefly Allen Drury...

...cited in the Esquire article, while the audience snickered with delight...

...This I might have told Roth, but, like so much else, it remained unsaid...

...For a while he maintained what seemed to me precisely the right tone, the tone of one participating in a degrading experience for his soul’s sake but disengaging from it even as he participated...

...he needs to be told he is worthy as well as successful...

...On March 23 the judges stood firm once more, giving Robert Lowell the poetry prize, Philip Roth the fiction prize, and Richard Ellman the non-fiction award for his James Joyce biography...

...His passion remained to me a little baffling throughout, though I was prepared to believe that it must be somehow pertinent to his own deepest concerns, more pertinent than he was able to make it seem...

...But my depressed novelist friend only smiled more and more depressingly, wagging his head as if to say, “I know...

...Twice spoken on our planet, and I still don’t understand it...

...I had rather relished Cowley’s grudging admission that mine was the most ambitious study of American literature since Vernon L. Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought, and that people would be discussing it for months...

...I was glad that he had won the prize and the most important thing at the moment seemed getting the first drink...

...And I, creature of vanity, barely resisted quoting from a letter Cowley had written me while in the process of reading my book, in which he had called it “stimulating, new and extremely valuable...

...When the writer says yes, he is already beginning to lie,” Roth quoted with a scorn that tickled his listeners, and he went on to comment, “This pronouncement was made at the first Esquire symposium, and I read yesterday that it was deemed worthy of repetition at the second...

...It scarcely matters whether the rumor was true or not...

...We hate to face up to these things, but after all...

...he should never testify, make statements or issue manifestos—except against testimony, statements and manifestos...

...but he moved in an after-dinner atmosphere which no writer could breathe and live, though Mason W. Gross...

...Still bleary from a long plane ride that had borne him from Rome to New York, and full of an article in Esquire that some stewardess had thrust into his hand, he came out swinging—a little wildly maybe, but swinging all the same...

...I myself had agreed, at my publisher’s behest, to appear at the hour of torment which followed...

...As if that would have proved anything but the discrepancy between private opinion and public expression, between what the canny reviewer feels, and what he considers it expedient to say on the front page of the Times...

...If such pressures were applied this time, however, they did little good...

...The authors present ranged from Drury to John Barth, from Perle Mesta to Oscar Williams, from Amy Vanderbilt to Ayn Rand...

...Surely no more than a handful of readers were inspired to buy Wright Morris’ The Field of Vision the year (my year...

...Not long ago there was a rumor, which reached as far as Missoula, Montana, that three widely publicized and eminently saleable novelists had sent a letter to the presiding committee when Malamud won the fiction award, deploring the trend toward giving prizes to “coterie writers” rather than those with a “national audience...

...Richard Ellman rose to quarrel, not like a poet with language and himself, but like a critic with other critics, defending the long biography, the fat, documented book...

...but after the coffee ran out (a terrible presage of what would happen later to the scotch and bourbon), all token appreciation was drowned out in the buzz of consternation...

...The writer, he insisted, should refuse to act out the role of the writer for an audience that prefers his public performances to his books...

...Myself a middle-aged something-or-other, on vacation from Montana, and unable to visit New York without seeming to revisit my youth, I found myself hesitating between a shudder of triumphant pleasure and a heaving from the stomach at the thought that my own dearest values had become those of a self-congratulatory “New Establishment...

...Bound together by the comic limitations of our language (the single word “writer” had to do for all their mutually repellent variety, and the single word “book” for the products of their mutually exclusive ambitions), they averted their eyes from each other, preferring to stare at their coffee cups or the flushed announcer or the occasional movie starlet present...

...Everyone present knows he is participating in an occasion which represents both a reproach to the Pulitzer Prizes (philistine, unimaginative—awarded by judges permitted to indulge their timidity in secret) and the tribute which Commerce pays to Art...

...Gross addressed himself with considerable rhetorical skill to the contention that writers should avoid dullness and platitudes...

...Even Ayn Rand’s mad glare could scare up no more than a ripple of recognition, while poor Allen Drury, doomed to win nothing better than a Pulitzer Prize, could not even muster a respectable hand to console him...

...President of Rutgers, seemed to flourish in it at the same time that he discreetly deplored it...

...The presiding committee has in a way recognized the failure of its original hopes by giving the successful authors $1,000 prizes rather than the plaques and promises of imminent sales which were the sole rewards at first...

...Such a contention is itself, of course, among the duller platitudes, and Gross did not succeed in redeeming it...

...with the polite and patient hostility of a particularly ill-matched pair on their golden wedding anniversary...

...it won the prize for fiction...

...After my (fortunately) almost inaudible introduction, I myself was greeted only by an editor to whom I owed an article and a melancholy young novelist (unforgivably ignored when not brutally mis-reviewed), who remarked in a morosely friendly way that he had heard Malcolm Cowley was about to give my Love and Death “a pasting” in the New York Times Book Review...

...It was not the chairman’s intention, I suppose, to dissolve the occasion in the cliches of after-dinner remarks...

...If he had known it, he would also have known the answer to his rhetorical question about the “pronouncement” which so baffled him: “Once you leave the symposium, what do you do with it...

...The whole affair should have stopped when he finished, for his remarks continue to resonate, to be felt as a reproach not only to what preceded and followed it there, but to what I write now...

...There was some scattered applause at first for one or another author...

...and they regarded each other, when they could not help it...

...Yet, as I sat waiting for the speeches of acceptance to begin and watched the faces and badges of the out-of-town reviewers—who settled creakily into chairs about me, longing” for the cocktail party to follow where it would be possible to blend into the camaraderie of a quick, public drunk—I knew that in a certain sense things were really still all right, that the ceremonies were as much a revenge as a tribute: the public’s, the reviewers’, the publishers’ final revenge on the author...

...But Roth, former student and one-time teacher of literature, apparently did not know this...

...I know...

...Actually, the “pronouncement” had been made not twice, but at least three times, Herman Melville having anticipated both Esquire symposia when he wrote to Hawthorne, “For all men who say yes lie...

...Nelson Algren, always quick to seize occasions for sullenness, and perhaps especially aggrieved because he was honored before there was cash involved, has publicly offered his plaque for sale—with no takers...

...And before they had been permitted to stand in turn at the rostrum, alone between their judges and their audience, they had been forced to undergo an hour-long inquisition—at which Ellman had been congratulated for resisting the impulse to interpret Joyce (he had, he thought, interpreted him), and Lowell had been called on to explain a sentence in the speech he had not yet delivered (he passed...

...Originally conceived and still subsidized by the publishers themselves, the National Book Awards are presented with the publishers of the winning books conspicuously unmentioned, by judges presumably immune to pressure (I was one myself in 1957) and forced to sit behind the winners at the ceremonies, like the school board at a commencement...

...It was Philip Roth who completed the picture by quarreling with the audience, as was appropriate to the occasion...

...Robert Lowell, obviously shaken and ill at ease, managed very quietly the shortest of the speeches: a small poem, in effect, self-contained as an egg and almost embarrassingly honest—so direct that a listener could not remember it in words, only feel it again as an experience later...

...The list is a little like the table of contents of Commentary or the Partisan Review, all old friends, which is to say, middle-aged ex-avant-gardists, their youngest emulator and behind them the ghost of Joyce and early 20th-century Ex-perimentalism...

...if a letter has not yet been sent, it will be next year, or the next, or the next...

...What could the poor writers do in such a context without seeming ungrateful for the sacrifices made and the money spent on their behalf...

...It is his own conscience that concerns him, not the collective conscience of the American publishing world...

...But he ended fighting not the prize-giving and the prize-givers so much as certain other writers (one of them me...

...The non-winners, however, have proved even less happy than he, though for the most unhappy of them $1,000 one way or another would make little difference...

...After all, we were waiting, were we not, for the three chosen victims to perform their gratitude and embarrassment, to amuse or bore us...

...Whatever remote hope of profit may have inspired the founders of the awards, whatever dreams of upping sales as the result of newspaper publicity, have long since been abandoned...

...It is, indeed, the kind of writer who ordinarily cashes in on movie contracts, million-copy paperback reprints, digests, etc., who squawks the loudest at being passed over in favor of some comparatively unknown author like Morris or Bernard Malamud or Ralph Ellison...