THE FRITTERING PRIZES

The prizes writers feel they deserve is a whole comedy unto itself. How great a comedy I first began to realize when some years ago I read, in Burton Bernstein’s biography of James Thurber, that Thurber, this most minor of writers, late in his career, was disappointed afresh each year upon discovering that he had not won the Nobel Prize.

But even winning it probably isn’t good enough. “Don’t call X this morning,” my friend Edward Shils once remarked to me over the phone apropos of another friend who actually had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. “They announced the Nobel Prize for Literature this morning and he didn’t win it again this year. He’s likely to be touchy.”

The number of prizes given for writing is plentiful, even extravagant. The standard prizes — the Nobel, the Pulitzer, the Bollingen, the Lilly, the Lannan, the Tanning and the International, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle, the National Medal of Arts, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Awards, the PEN prizes, the Booker and Whitbread in England, the Prix Goncourt in France — are only, as in the old joke about the anti-Semite, the tip of the greenberg.

I often read the “News Notes” at the back of Poetry magazine to” discover prizes given to poets, and it turns out there are scores of them, some bringing fairly heavy bread, such as the $ 50,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Many prizes are impressively specialized. Only a few weeks ago I discovered the Fortabat Foundation Prize for the best first novel by an Argentine. In Publishers Weekly, I learned about the Rea Award for the short story: $ 30,000. The New York Times recently carried small ads from publishers congratulating three different authors for winning the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Non- fiction, and something called the Robert E Kennedy Book Award, now in its seventeenth year, given, I take it, for nonfiction. So many are the prizes floating around that contemporary literature sometimes begins to seem like one of those progressive schools in which everyone gets a prize, even the child who fouls himself in the most pleasing pattern.

Prizes of course catch writers in that ample soft place between their greed and their vanity. As a sad case in point, I offer Exhibit A: myself.

I returned home late one afternoon to find a woman’s voice on my answering machine, conveying the following sweet message: “Mr. Epstein, I am calling to inform you that your book of stories, The Goldin Boys, has won the Edward Lewis Wallant Prize. Congratulations. We are all delighted and hope you will be, too. I shall call back tomorrow with details. Thank you.”

Well, thought I, here is a dandy way to end a day. I knew of Edward Lewis Wallant as the author of The Pawnbroker, a powerful Holocaust novel made into a dark and painful movie starring Rod Steiger. That Hollywood was connected to Wallant’s name set fire to my own rather easily inflamed financial imagination. Wondering how much the Edward Lewis Wallant Prize was worth, I began estimating it at $ 5,000, and by bedtime, gathering the covers around me, I had it up to a pleasantly warming $ 25,000. Twentyfive grand would be a help, yes, no doubt about it.

The next morning when I spoke to the woman who had called, I learned that the jury who awarded my book the prize had two members of whom I had never heard and one whom I heartily disliked. I also learned that the prize itself was to be given at a luncheon in Hartford, Connecticut. The woman said that they were “very excited” about my excellent book having won the Wallant Prize. “I am, too,” I said, adding, in what I hoped was a sufficiently casual tone of voice, “Oh, by the way, what is the amount of the prize?” A slight clearing of my respondent’s throat prefaced her announcing, “$ 250.” Shit, I thought, blithely.

To make a short story mildly excruciating, I later learned that, in connection with receiving the Edward Lewis Wallant Prize, a speech was expected of me; that I could not get a plane in and out of Hartford in the same day, and so would have to stay the weekend; and that my host and hostess, who gave the luncheon in connection with the prize, expected me to be at their call in a way that made me feel rather less a distinguished prize- winner thanhired help.

In the end, I chose to forgo the Edward Lewis Wallant Prize. I said I couldn’t give up the weekend, not to mention the time it would take for me to compose an intelligible acceptance speech. So instead of winning the Edward Lewis Wallant Prize, I won the lifelong enmity of the donors of the prize, who soon thereafter wrote in to cancel their subscription to the American Scholar, the magazine I edit, saying that they had rarely met a more miserable human being than yours truly. Another day, I always say, another dolor.

I managed to keep my only other literary prize. In 1989, I won something called the Heartland Prize, for non-fiction, for a book of my literary essays, given by the Chicago Tribune, which brought with it a small glass statue of a book and $ 5,000. As it happened, my mother, then still alive, called just after I learned about it, and so I told her that I had just won $ 5,000 from the Trib. “Oh,” she said, “we get that stuff in the mail all the time. I just throw it out.”

Some wise person once said that, if someone tells you that you are the best at what you do, ask him who he thinks is second best, which is guaranteed to restore your humility straightaway. Something similar goes for literary prizes. The questions to ask here are: Who was on the jury, and, Who has won the prize before? The answers will generally return you to normal hat size instanter. Far too many hacks serve on prize juries and no American literary prize now exists that hasn’t been sullied by having been given to a mediocrity, out of either a lapse in taste or a desire to seem politically correct.

I have served on a few literary juries. The one that pleased me most was that for the Joseph Bennett Award, given by the Hudson Review in the name of one of its former editors. The year I was on the jury the prize went to Andrei Sinyavsky, who wrote under the name Abram Tertz and who had survived the hardest of hard time in the Soviet Gulag. I have been a member of the jury for the Ingersoll Prizes, given by the Rockford Institute, which I was able to win for Jacques Barzun, who, for his own reasons, decided to turn it and its $ 15,000 check down. One year, too, I was appointed, at a fee of $ I, 000, a nominator for the MacArthur Fellows — the Big Macs, or so-called genius grants. I don’t recall how many people I nominated, but none won.

Please note that none of the above juries involved any real work. Real work here means lots of reading. Being on a literary jury often entails giving up one’s regular reading life in order to read the work of the writers up for prizes. I was once asked to be a member of a Pulitzer Prize jury for fiction. I said no without hesitation, for three reasons: because the Pulitzer Prizes in fiction have been very ragged, not to say wretched; because of the amount of reading involved; and because Pulitzer juries can be vetoed by the Pulitzer Prize Advisory Board, which has frequently done just that, vetoing prizes for, among others, Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street in 1921, Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow in 1974, and Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It in 1977.

Perhaps the best thing a Pulitzer juryman can do is keep one of the usual suspects from getting the prize. A friend of mine, who was on the Pulitzer jury for biography, some years ago recounted to me walking into the jury’s first meeting and announcing, “Look here, boys, we aren’t going to do the obvious thing and give this prize to Ronald Steel, are we?” Steel had written a much-fawned-over biography of Walter Lippmann that was the obvious favorite for that year, but with my friend’s remark, Steel’s boat was immediately dead in the water. The Pulitzer for biography that year went elsewhere.

More recently, I was asked to be on the jury for the National Book Awards. A small fee was offered — the exact sum, I believe, of the Edward Lewis Wallant Prize — for which one was expected to read, or at least intelligently skim, more than 200 novels and short-story collections. The prospect of all those jiffy bags coming into my apartment seemed depressing in the extreme. Thank you, I said, but no thank you.

I wonder, though, if I have not been too selfish in declining such jobs. Good work can be done in serving on such juries. In 1967, Hilton Kramer served on a National Book Awards jury and was able to win the prize for criticism for William Troy, a critic of the highest seriousness who had died long before and whose book was published by the rather obscure Rutgers University Press.

Learning that the prize was to go to William Troy, one of the officials for the National Book Awards came in to inform the jury that the prize could not be given posthumously and asked that they provide another book and (living) author. The Kramer jury refused, saying that if the winner weren’t William Troy then there would be no winner that year in their category. The official backed down, and the prize went to the late (though still splendid) Troy. I remember thinking at the time that this was a victory for high culture, for the good guys, for artistic integrity generally.

The reason I thought this is that, at the time, who won the National Book Awards seemed very important. By 1967, the prize had gone only to good writers; no mediocre or fake books had yet won it. It was a record worth preserving. If a book, especially a novel, won the National Book Award, it meant it was a work of substance. Winning it could make a writer’s reputation. The Moviegoer, Walker Percy’s first and best novel, had been a commercial and even a critical flop, but it redeemed itself and its author by winning the National Book Award for 1962. National Book Awards were worth having because they were given with real care. It all mattered, greatly.

Now take out a sheet of paper. Quick quiz. What book won the National Book Award last year? Who won the Pulitzer for fiction? Name the last three winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature? Go to your room, you idiot. I’ll join you there in a moment, for I don’t have the complete answers to these questions either. Cultivated chaps and chapesses though we are, why are we all so ignorant about this?

The reason is that none of these prizes, as the Victorians used to say, signify. Somehow there is a feeling that the giving of prizes in literature is, if not quite rigged, something damn close to it. It all seems a bit irrelevant, pointless, peripheral, the intellectual equivalent of the Special Olympics. The handing out of literary prizes seems, as F. R. Leavis once said of the Sitwells, to have more to do with the history of publicity than with the history of literature.

Some of these prizes have been vastly overrated to begin with. The novelist and critic William Gass gets nicely worked up at the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, arguing that it “takes dead aim at mediocrity and almost never misses.” There is an element of hit and miss in many awards in the arts, Gass claims, “yet the Pulitzer Prize in fiction is almost pure miss. The award is not batting a fine .300 or an acceptable .250. It is nearly zero for the season.” Only rarely is it given when it might do a writer some good; it usually passes by any original work, and when it is given to important artists, it is usually for their weaker books and long after it might be of any use to them. During their lifetimes, the Pulitzer bypassed Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Thomas Wolfe, Nathaniel West, and Flannery O’Connor.

When a literary prize bungles things so often, it loses its cachet, as the Pulitzer for fiction long ago did. The one exception here may be the Nobel for Literature. This prize itself began on a great bungle by not going, in 1901, its first year, to Leo Tolstoy. Tolstoy was beyond any question the world’s greatest living writer and the perfect candidate, especially given the phrase in Alfred Nobel’s will about the prize going to writers of ” idealistic tendency.” Apparently everyone on the committee that year assumed that everyone else would vote for Tolstoy, and so they decided not to waste their votes on the obvious. As a result the winner was the redoubtable Sully Prudhomme, the French poet best known today as the man who won the Nobel Prize meant for Leo Tolstoy.

The Nobel was also not given to Henry James, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Ezra Pound, and Virginia Woolf. Closer to our own day, the Nobel Prize committee passed up Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Graham a Greene, and (thus far) V. S. Naipaul. Only one writer, Jean-Paul Sartre, ever turned the Nobel down. W. H. Auden is thought knowingly to have blown it by making some objectionable remarks about Dag Hammarskjold in an introduction to the latter’s book, Markings. Auden’s biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, recounts that not winning the Nobel Prize later became an obsession with Auden. ” Toward the end of his life, Auden began to be preoccupied with not having won it, declaring that he would have liked it not for the honor but for the money — he said he would have used it to buy a new organ for the Kirchstetten church” near his final home in Austria.

The Nobel Prize must be the world’s most remunerative prize — it is now worth well over a million dollars — but it also has the odd effect of making its recipients a little posthumous. Having won it, they find all other prizes come by way of an anticlimax. With the exception of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, very few of its recipients have produced better work after receiving it.

Other prizes also seem to have had the effect of freezing writers. Consider the MacArthur Fellowships, which in recent years seem to have gone less and less to conventional writers and more and more to multicultural exotics: a Thai chef who juggles flaming garlic on Native American reservations, that sort of thing. But earlier, when the fellowships did go to more writers than they do today, it seemed to cause its winners to write less, if not to cease writing altogether. Not a bad thing, really, especially since most MacArthur fellows weren’t quite first-class, and most were too prolific to begin with.

Still, the only serious question about the MacArthur Fellowships, which can pay a recipient more than $ 400,000 over five years, is, Where’s mine? A friend once told me that,in his role as a nominator, he had put me up for a Big Mac; and another friend sent me a copy of his four-page recommendation of me, in which he portrayed me as the natural successor to H. L. Mencken and Edmund Wilson but more wide-ranging and deeper than either. It was heavy- handed puffery, but — who knew — maybe the MacArthur Foundation might believe it.

In those days, the head of the Fellowship Program was a nice man well-named Kenneth Hope. I received several messages from him that year; you cannot know what it is like to return home and discover a message on your answering machine from Ken Hope of the MacArthur Foundation. “Ah, Hope,” I would say to myself. “This is it. My fellowship is ready, my ship has come in, I can at long last get rid of this cardboard belt.” But it never happened.

By now there are a number of people who make more than a nice living out of the literary-prize racket and its attendant scares. The mind is a great wanderer, and in weak moments my own often imagines the mail of Toni Morrison, filled with requests for $ 25,000 talks, still more prizes (to go with her Pulitzer, Nobel, and the rest), honorary degrees, and God knows what other little bijoux. The poet Rita Dove is another harvester of prizes. “Rita Dove, the former poet laureate of the United States,” a recent New York Times story began, “thought there could be no surprises left for her after her appointment to that august post in 1993.” Well, you will I know be shocked to learn, she was wrong, for in 1996 she won something called a Heinz Award for $ 250,000, given to “people who make a difference in their chosen fields.” What this difference was went unmentioned in the Times story.

Part of all this is, of course, affirmative action. Prize-giving was complicated enough before politics obtruded into it so heavily as it now has. The Nobel has often been awarded geopolitically, or multiculturally on the global level; it goes to a Third World writer one year, to an Eastern European writer the next, and only then to some usually predictable Western writer the year after.

Panels and juries for most literary prizes currently have to be made up of sufficient percentages of minorities, as they are called, and prizes, too, it is understood, must be parceled out the same way. “The only qualification a judge ought to have had is unimpeachable good taste,” writes William Gass, ” which immediately renders irrelevant such puerile concerns as skin color, sex, and origin.” Alas, if Gass thinks this is any longer a serious possibility, I’d like to show him some real estate, perhaps something deep in the Everglades.

Gass says that some writers have been penalized by the Pulitzers for being ” known to have the wrong politics.” I don’t think there can be any doubt about this. Conservatives, with a few notable exceptions, really need not apply for prizes given by PEN, or the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and many others besides. Today, a well-regarded novelist such as Mark Helprin has probably ended his own chances for any literary prizes by having written a few speeches for Bob Dole.

Gass writes, “I like to believe I could have voted a poetry prize to Marianne Moore even though I know she once wore a Nixon button.” This has not always been the way things worked. Fifty years ago a mainly leftliberal group of poets approved the Bollingen Poetry Prize for Ezra Pound, after his having given clearly anti-Semitic radio broadcasts for Mussolini during World War Two that left him susceptible to charges of treason, which he was able to elude only through, in effect, a plea of insanity.

At the time of the Bollingen award to Pound, there was still a small body of men and women who constituted what was somewhat pretentiously known as the Republic of Letters. Its members were those who were genuinely devoted to literature, who recognized the real thing when they saw it, lived for it, and could themselves produce it. Their connection to literature was the main thing about them, surmounting their social class, race, sex, and certainly their politics. How else explain that the reactionary politics of so many of the chief figures of literary modernism did not deprive them of immense admiration!

No special pleading made membership in this Republic of Letters possible. One was either a true writer, major or minor, or one wasn’t. Prizes were awarded, not so lavishly as now, but they were never the mark of a writer’s true stature. What gave a writer his stature was the opinion of his contemporaries — that small number of men and women who also knew the real thing when they saw it.

Today, no matter how wretched a writer, he can usually point to his having won a prize or fellowship or award of some sort. The breakdown in standards across the board in intellectual life is represented in good part by the vast number of available prizes that don’t really find worthy recipients and yet — what the hell — are given out anyhow.

Too many prizes are given in the United States generally, of course. We have Emmy Awards for best soapopera acting. There are Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Awards for younger writers, Cable Ace Awards for the best programs on cable television, Grammys and scores of other prizes for music. We live in a country, let it not be forgotten, with a Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame.

In the best of all worlds, literary prizes would help set standards for excellent work, reward genuine achievement, and publicize originality. As now constituted, literary prizes seem to do none of these things. Their real point is commerce, the stroking of writers, and the boosting of morale within the publishing business.

As for the stroking of writers, the need for this is endless, and how better than through prizes? Writing to Gore Vidal in 1965, the novelist Louis Auchincloss mentioned the chances of winning the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Rector of Justin: “Do I care? Of course, I care. I have reached the age when I want prizes, any prizes. I want silver cups with gold lining such as I never won at potato races in children’s parties; I want gold stars; I want ribbons.” The Pulitzer that year went to Shirley Ann Grau.

For writers, prizes represent official praise. But for good writers, even the greatest prizes can’t finally do the job. Thomas Mann, a Nobel laureate, used to refer to praise as “Vitamin P,” which, as his diaries make plain, he preferred to take in large quantities. Mann knew a thing or two about praise, but the most important thing he knew is that, for the good writer, “praise will never subdue scepticism.” Take it from an almost Edward Lewis Wallant Prize winner: all too sadly true.

Contributing editor Joseph Epstein writes regularly for THE WEEKLY STANDARD about the literary life.