Finding a Form (2 page)

This is an apparently reasonable request. Certainly the sincerity and conscious goodwill of most judges, whether for the Pulitzer or for something else, is not in doubt, nor are the difficulties unreal or easy to surmount. Furthermore, not every outcome is a cropper. Deserved reputations have been made by some awards, and fine writers rescued from obscurity. There have been courageous choices, deeply discerning ones, and quite a few that are at least okay. Of course, you might achieve these results as well by rolling dice. Yes, even pigeon poop is hit or miss—the chances of the skies. 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, unless Toni Morrison’s
Beloved
proves to have the qualities of its title. When missing exceeds chance, as in this case; when a record of failure approaches perfection; then we can begin to wonder whether it is really missing the mark at all; whether the Pulitzer, not by design but through its inherent nature, is being given to those it wishes, quite precisely, to award, and is nourishing, if not the multitude, at least those numbers among the cultivated whose shallow roots need just this sort of gentle drizzle.

By the time Joseph Pulitzer’s charge to the fiction jury reached it, Nicholas Murray Butler had inserted the word “some” in a discreet though critical spot (he called the addition “insubstantial”), so that the jury’s charge read, “novel … which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life …” instead of “whole atmosphere,” the words that were there originally. The jury could not find a winner the first year, wholesomeness being in short supply even among the mediocre, and they would fail again two years later. Butler also fussed about the word “manhood” because he wanted it clearly understood that women writers would be eligible for the prize, so long, of course, as their work presented “the highest standard of American manners and manhood.” “Wholesome” was dropped in 1929 (a poor year for it anyway) and “whole” restored,
but “wholesome” answered the bell again the next round, only to be knocked out for good in 1931. Meanwhile, “manhood” and “manners” were also eliminated. In 1936, “best,” which had been allowed to wander back in front of “American novel,” was softened to “distinguished.” Throughout all this, and from the beginning, the short story was given … well … short shrift. There can be no question that part of the problem with the Pulitzer was the early wording of the award’s conditions.

In 1947 the terms were changed once more, “distinguished novel” becoming “distinguished fiction in book form,” in order that the coming year’s prize could be given to James A. Michener’s
Tales of the South Pacific
. If the Advisory Board had really wished to present the Pulitzer to a fine book of short fiction (as W. J. Stuckey notes in his excellent and judicious retrospective study,
The Pulitzer Prize Novels
), J. F. Powers’s beautiful collection,
The Prince of Darkness
, was available; but at least a good deed was done—broadening the scope of the prize—even if it was for an insipid reason.

The prize regularly stopped at the wrong station. Having passed all of Faulkner’s great novels by with scarcely a hoot of recognition, and Hemingway’s as well, and the best efforts of Lewis and Porter and Bellow and Welty too, it would halt and release its steam for lesser works when their writers were safely of world renown. Yet had it not done so, scarcely a novelist of any note would have made the list, for writers like Dreiser, Fitzgerald, Anderson, Wolfe, West, and Flannery O’Connor were ignored altogether in the old days, while Stanley Elkin, John Barth, John Hawkes, William Gaddis, and Donald Barthelme are not honored in ours.

The single outstanding choice of the Pulitzer Prize Committee during its tenure remains
The Age of Innocence
, which gained the palm in 1921 (this is also Mr. Stuckey’s opinion). But it restores one’s confidence in the otherwise unblemished record of the prize to learn that the majority of the jurors favored
Main Street
(rather astonishing in itself). However, that award was blocked by Hamlin Garland (or possibly by old Nick, the Butler, again), so that it
bounced into Edith Wharton’s arms instead. Her joy deflated by an account of how she had received it, Wharton referred to the award as “the Pulsifer Prize” in one of her later novels, a name eminently worth retaining for the fiction prize so that it would no longer be identified with the awards in other areas whose records, though spotty, are more nearly awful in quite a normal way, and which continue to bestow on the fiction prize a dignity it has not earned for itself and does not deserve.

Although prize juries are sworn to secrecy concerning their proceedings, leaks are more common than quiet containment. The public loves to read about the wrangling more than it cares about the books or the ceremonial bestowal of the awards; however, winners are frequently denied their pleasure in the prize when judges speak too freely or when the panel’s acrimonious and noisy proceedings are overheard, as was the case the first time I was a judge for the NBA. Of course, if you hold your meetings in the public rooms of the Algonquin, you must want to be written up. To find yourself associated with an award given to mediocrity on the basis of sex or race or subject, instead of to literary excellence on the basis of that quality, is, of course, intolerable, and the injustice of having to keep your fist in your mouth when it ought to be in someone else’s is understandably galling; yet when you agree to serve, you are risking your pride and the likely defeat of your intentions. Instead of commingling with like-minded goodhearts in a noble exercise (a condition sometimes met), you may find yourself at the same table with incompetence, imbecility, bad faith, and cowardice. You can bet your chair will wear a nasty label, too.

If, on the other hand, panelists hope too strongly for harmony, they may make their decision on the worst possible grounds, choosing the book that offends none but the honor of the prize, and propose that sign of dismal failure, the compromise candidate.

The point of prizes, presumably, is to establish literary standards, honor worthy work and the writers of it, and enlarge the audience for fine fiction by bringing it to wider public notice than its publishers can bear to. The monies involved are now enough to pay for
an air conditioner and a case of scotch—a windfall not to be scorned, yet still not the muse’s airlift either. Recently, although award amounts have risen, there has been an unfortunate tendency to give prizes to place and show (as if second weren’t last), flattening an already skinny purse, but also to succumb to a publicist’s desire to keep candidates in suspense, corralling them on award night as if they had written a movie, so that an audience can enjoy the discomfiture of four losers as well as the elation of the lucky duck.

The Pulitzer has perceived an important truth about our complex culture: Serious literature is not important to it; however, the myth that it matters must be maintained. Ceremony is essential, although Mammon is the god that’s served. The PEN/Faulkner may toot, but few will hear. Its winners, until recently, could not be made into mass-market movies. Literature, which is written in isolation and read in silence, receives as its share less than 3 percent of the funds available to the National Endowment for the Arts. In my own state of Missouri, by no means the meanest, less than a penny a person is spent per year on arty words. And if you point to the discrepancy between the acknowledged importance of our literature to our culture and the pitiful public support it gets, and decry the injustice of it, you will receive the same response I always have: Those addressed, like a cat, will not follow the direction of your gesture, but will be just curious enough to sniff nervously for a moment the end of your admonitory finger.

So it is silly to give a prize to
Absalom, Absalom!
when you can give it to
Gone with the Wind
, as happened in 1937. It is useless to single out unpleasant books that no one will read or enjoy, like
The Day of the Locust
or
Miss Lonelyhearts
, when so many will love the 1934 winner,
Lamb in His Bosom
, by Caroline Miller. The Pulitzer does not give glory to its choices; its choices give celebrity to it; and that is precisely why it is the best-known and, to the public, the most prestigious prize: It picks best-sellers, books already in the public eye, and if its judges insist on oddities like
Gravity’s Rainbow
, the Advisory Board will overrule them, as it did
in 1974; and if the judges vote for some dim unknown like Norman Maclean, the board will simply leave the year blank again, as it did in 1977. It is difficult to see why anyone of distinction would want to be like an abused wife and serve on a Pulitzer jury.

It’s been clear from the first year that it has never been the judges who needed their consciousness raised, or their moral point of view improved, or their allegiance to American values strengthened, but the Many “out there” who could use such elevation, so it was more than all right if an “all right” book was popular, it was positively a good thing. Indeed, a novel’s simplifications could be defended if its message was thereby better understood and more easily lodged in the reader’s mind. Hence an award-winning book did not necessarily have to represent the private tastes of the judges or the board; it represented, rather, their judgment that it would be edifying for those who read it.
Strive and Succeed
might have been the appropriate name for most of the winners, since that is what they preached.

These winners have a fruit fly’s life span, and oblivion serves their names, but it is beside the point to protest them on this basis, as, indeed, critics have regularly done, sometimes quite scornfully, with no effect whatever. In the last decade the prize has continued its belated ways, finally getting around to John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Cheever. But the prize understands the public’s desires. The public longs to move on.

Suppose the award had really been given to the best work of fiction published each year. Then Faulkner would have won it with
The Sound and the Fury
in 1930, beating out Hemingway and Wolfe (all of whom, in fact, lost to
Laughing Boy
, by Oliver La Farge); he would have won again in 1931 with As
I Lay Dying
, once more in 1933 with
Light in August
, certainly in 1937 with
Absalom, Absalom!
; and he’d have had a good shot at several others. Saul Bellow would have grabbed off at least two, perhaps more, and so on. Well, ho hum, what a bore. It is true that the best tennis players collect cup after cup and carry home baskets of money, but in their case the fix isn’t in. In the history of the Pulitzer Prize
(leaving out Faulkner, who won twice, though for two less-than-worthy works,
A Fable
and
The Reivers
), Booth Tarkington has been the only double winner. Putting a ceiling on winning was wise, because the literary public will chew its fiction only while the immediate flavor lasts and, when that’s gone, spit the book back into its jacket.

But if the award had really been given yearly to the best work, worse than repetition would have occurred.
The Sot-Weed Factor
would have acquired a crown in 1961, and
JR
would have won in ’76, and other horrors too dreadful to describe would have happened. The 1974 jury’s recommendation of
Gravity’s Rainbow
would not have been overruled, for one thing, and Thomas Pynchon would have had the opportunity to turn down a Pulitzer.

While the Pulitzer Prize for poetry has none of the esteem that the Bollingen conveys, it has been spared fiction’s shame, partly, I think, because there is no appreciable audience at all for poetry, consequently no reader whose moral and mental welfare the judges must consider their prizewinning poems to improve.

Nothing essential ever disappears. Schlock certainly seems essential. Hence the public and their fiction prize move on, but safely from same to same. For even if the titles change, or the subjects shift slightly as the fads run by, or the authors lean a little this way rather than that, the result is the fading sweet taste of an imagined past. What the public wants, as the Pulitzer sees it (and as Mr. Stuckey correctly concludes, I think), is an exciting story with a timely theme, although it may have a historical setting. The material should be handled simply and delivered in terms of sharp contrasts in order that the problems the novel raises can be decisively resolved. Ideally, it should be written in a style that is as invisible as Ralph Ellison’s invisible man, so that the reader can let go of the words and grasp the situation the way one might the wheel of the family car. And since most of the consumers of fiction are women (or they were until women went in for professions and other public works and now return home as tired and weary and in need of the screen’s passive amusement as men), it won’t hurt to fulfill a few of
their longings, to grant, now and then, unconsciously an unconscious wish. Because we have a large, affluent, mildly educated middle class that has fundamentally the same tastes as the popular culture it grew up with, yet with pretensions to something more, something higher, something better suited to its half-opened eyes and spongy mind, there is a large industry of artists, academics, critics, and publicists eager to serve it—lean cuisine, if that’s the thing—and the Pulitzer is ready with its rewards.

No, this prize for fiction is not disgraced by its banal and hokey choices. It is the critics and customers who have chosen and acclaimed them, who have bought the books and thought about them and called them literature and tried to stick them like gum on the pillars of our culture. It is they who have earned the opprobrium of this honor.

P
auline experienced many perils, but none to compare with the perils of the present tense, She was tied to tracks, left to teeter on window ledges, allowed to hang from cliffs by the lace in her pantaloons. Yet in the week while we waited for her bloomers to rip or the train to come, time held its breath as we held ours—in serial suspension; that is, we calmly ignored the pause in her plight as we went about our business, placing our modest cares in a parenthetical phrase; because, when the lace on her undies relaxed at last, when the train’s hoot grew cruelly closer, or when Pauline’s delicate balance seemed to have slipped beyond refooting; then her peril continued as if there had never been an interruption, not a shiver was missing, or a screech from a scream, and, in order to reassure us of this, the second episode would reprise the conclusion of the first, and so on, right through fifteen plight-packed Saturday matinees.