NEW YORK LETTER
The Literary Elite and their Electors
By M. L. ROSENTHAL
TT would be nice if we Americans had some- thing—apart from Presidential campaigns, I mean—to match the glorious idiocy of the elec- tion of Oxford's 'professors' of poetry. We do have 'poets-in-residence' in our universities, but unfortunately they are quietly and intelligently chosen by knowledgeable folk. One handicap is that we have nothing comparable to the Oxonian prejudice against studying literature of this cen- tury, and therefore no incentive to turn the choice of a distinguished literary man to give a series of lectures into a Marx Brothers carnival. Our literary mob-scenes are therefore too few and far between. The last really wonderful one was occasioned by the award of the first Bollingen Prize in Poetry to Ezra Pound in 1949. The money for this prize came from a private foundation, but it was administered by the Fellows in American Letters of the Library of Congress (including such figures as Auden, Tate, Lowell and Eliot) and therefore took on official governmental sanction. The Saturday Review of Literature experienced such apoplexy that it very nearly came to life, ringing statements were made in all quarters, the Library of Congress dropped the Bollingen award into the merciful hands of Yale University, and the Pisan Cantos (for which the prize had been awarded) continued to be beautiful, 'controversial' and largely unread.
On a narrower, more local stage, things are, of course, always different. The halls of Academe still reverberate with those semi- apocryphal tales of how Dylan arrived too drunk to do anything but have ten more drinks, how he had to be carried into the lecture-hall, but gave the most ravishing reading since blind Homer's day, and how he exited chasing a fat, middle-aged blonde. Occasionally one hears, but does not care to investigate, stories about a Beat poet who does a striptease while howling his strophes to captive audiences in women's colleges, and at one authenticated 'symposium' in New York's Poetry Centre a few years ago Gregory Corso baited a crowd of non-Beat poets who had made the mistake of sharing the plat- form with him into using four-letter words tta show they were just as emancipated as he was. But such things are small potatoes, lacking the grandeur of the Starkie campaign for Blunden or of the afiaire Bollingen. • Nothing on that scale will happen, I am afraid, at the great annual literary to-do about to make its descent upon New York. This is the National Book Awards ceremony, which bestows thousand- dollar prizes upon five American authors judged to have written the best books of the preceding year in their respective categories : poetry, fiction, history or biography, criticism, and science, philosophy or religion. This year, for example, the poetry award went to James Dickey for Buckdancer's Choice; the Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter won the fiction award; Arthur Schlesinger's A Thousand Days : John F. Kennedy in the White House was the history choice, and Janet Flanner's Paris Journal 1944-65 won the criticism award (no award was made for science, philosophy and religion). The money comes from the association of publishers, booksellers and book manufacturers, but is ad- ministered with consummate integrity by the National Book Committee, which appoints the Awards Advisory Committee that selects com- mittees of judges and makes the other necessary arrangements.
The National Book Awards idea is a good one, despite the ponderous public-relations machinery that accompanies it. Reviewers swarm into the city from all over the country, unsus- pected enterprises like the Publishers' Publicity Association and the Publishers' Adclub emerge blinking into the light, pouring cocktails as they come, the press takes an unwonted interest in letters under their stimulus, men with a reputa- tion for brilliance, wit and wisdom are given a chance to be the main speaker at the cere- monies—no one has yet come through this ordeal with reputation quite intact.
Occasionally the authors themselves, in the brief acceptance speeches they are allowed, say memorable things. Robert Lowell, the year his Life Studies won the poetry award, made his famous distinction between 'raw' and 'cooked' poetry. Aileen Ward, accepting the prize for her biography of Keats, observed that readers who wanted a more deeply authoritative study should read Walter Jackson Bate's biography, pub- lished the same year as her own. It is the age of the biographer in American letters anyway, and it was interesting to hear Leon Edel, the James biographer, and Richard Ellman, the Joyce biographer, touching discreetly and elegantly upon one another's methods in the respective years of their triumphs. With so much com- petition in so many categories, few choides are unanimously acclaimed, and sometimes the omissions are more conspicuous than the winners. Hannah Arendt's study of the Eichmann trial, for instance, not only was not a winner, but was not even put on the list of leading candidates compiled fairly early on by the committees. (The aim is not only to choose winners, but to en- courage attention to all the interesting books of the year.) Every committee has its own idiosyncrasies—choosing a new set of three judges for each of the five every year is among the most trying tasks imaginable, and the results are varied. But the names include many that are impressive; among this year's judges are Glen- way Westcott (fiction), Francis Fergusson and Norman Holmes Pearson (arts and letters), Louis Fischer (history and biography) and John K. Galbraith (science, philosophy and religion).
Of course, the mystery about all these affairs is how untouched they can leave the general public that they are wooing. It is like the indifference of the Negro populace to the experimental Negro theatre in Harlem, from which, I understand, government funds have just been withdrawn because of factional reasons not yet come to publishable light. The poet and playwright Leroi Jones, about whom I shall write in my next column, has been work- ing with this group until very recently. There are volcanic dynamics behind the predicaments and public attitudes of writers like Jones that will probably give us the really dramatic out- bursts of American literary life in the near future.
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