Pulitzer: The People’s Prize

It is not a serious novelist’s nightmare (the possibility is so absurd); nevertheless, suppose you fancied yourself a serious novelist (a writer, as they say, of the first rank), and a wire were delivered in your dream (the telephone rang, there was a sudden knock), and this were followed by the formal announcement that you, Julia Peterkin, or you, Marjorie Rawlings, or you, Allen Drury or Michael Shaara or Alison Lurie, had been awarded the Pultizer Prize in fiction for 1929 or ’39 or ’60 or ’75 or ’85. Well, what a pleasant supposition: to receive a prize, a famous one at that, with considerable prestige and the presumption of increased sales, as well as other benefits. Why should such a compliment to your art be denied; why should the thought be unlikely, the award embarrassing, the fact nightmarish? Because the Pulitzer Prize in fiction takes dead aim at mediocrity and almost never misses; the prize is simply not given to work of the first rank, rarely even to the second; and if you believed yourself to be a writer of that eminence, you are now assured of being over the hill—not a sturdy mountain flower but a little wilted lily of the valley.

The giving of prizes is a notoriously chancy business. Look at the mistakes the Nobel committee has made. Or shall we amuse ourselves by listing the important works the National Book Awards missed, even before it renamed itself the American Book Awards and brought in movie stars to crown pulpy books at its ceremony, or even after it reformed itself and endeavored to return to respectability again by failing to give Toni Morrison its prize in an oversight so flagrantly outrageous the Pultizer was forced for once to do the right thing? Any award-giving outfit, whether it is the National Book Critics Circle or PEN, with its Faulkner Award, is doomed by its cumbersome committee structure to make mistakes, to pass the masters by in silence and applaud the apprentices, the mimics, the hacks, or to honor one of those agile surfers who ride very fresh wave.

We must be realistic. The judges are supposed to be notables, not ninnies; consequently they are busy people, a long time in the rackets, with grudges and buddies and old scores and IOUs and other obligations like everybody else. They will have a hundred novels to peruse, most of them so porous even the dense will feel ventilated. They will have to find time for the customary committee get-togethers, which will mean still more debits against an already overdrawn account. The rules for the award will normally be ridiculous, their wording narrow, ambiguous, vague, and overly hortatory. Joseph Pultizer specified the first fiction prize this way: “Annually, for the American novel published during the year which shall best present the whole atmosphere of American life and the highest standard of American manners and manhood. $1000.”

The panel will be formed with the same unfailing dimsight its members will feel obliged to display, and the three judges or the occasional five (for early National Book Awards, for instance, as well as its rejuvenation) will collide like cars at an intersection. Not only will they be partisans of their own tastes—that’s natural—each will be implicitly asked to represent their region, race, or sex, because one will have to be a woman, another a black or academic or journalist, old hand or upstart. At least one novelist ought to be on the fiction panel, and a place found for a poet on the poets’, as obnoxious as they both often are. The only qualification a judge ought to have is unimpeachable good taste, which immediately renders irrelevant such puerile pluralistic concerns as skin color, sex, and origin. Egalitarians shouldn’t give prizes and be too humble to receive them.

It is also likely that the judges will be as conscious of themselves and their reputations as they will be of the books (it adds tone to one’s vita and authority to the voice). Indeed, power, self-importance, and pomposity will bloom like a garden. The judiciousness of some will extend only to writers who come from the Old South or are politically okay or of a fine family, or who drive with a can of beer between their knees, or who have gold old in the service, have been neglected, are awfully nice, and would simply love the honor.

Then there will be members too lazy to do the work, or too busy, and those who will pretend they’ve read every line of everything when they are ignorant even of the blurbs. There will be quirks and tics and idiosyncrasies brought into play the normal person could not imagine or allow in the bedroom. Some will want to ran their friends and fancies through into the glare of all that glory no matter what (besides, wouldn’t Ann or Phil or Billy do the same for them—when that other jury meets next Tuesday?), while others will be so intent on bending over backward all they’ll see is sky. Some jurors will try to intimidate others or, failing that, will try to gang up, their cliques meshing like a zipper, and sometimes they’ll succeed. A few will be honestly persuasive about weak work, while the most effective will simply be stubborn. Some judges, some juries, abide by their names and treat each work before them as someone accused of a crime.

A lot of writers are disliked and their works slighted because they have been praised by the wrong critics, have sappy photographs on their dust jackets, overly effusive or too bountiful blurbs, made-up, movie-star names. Or are known to have the wrong politics. (I like to believe I could have voted a poetry prize to Marianne Moore even though I know she once wore a Nixon button). If a work has already won a prize, it is very likely going to be found unfit for another. Oh, yes . . . and publishers don’t make the books available to the panel sometimes, even when the prize-givers are willing to pay for them. According to John Hohenberg’s history of the awards, The Pulitzer Prizes, only five books published in 1916 were submitted to the jury for the first year of the award, 1917, and I have served on juries where repeated requests to publishers brought no response. Nowadays, it costs publishers money for each book they submit to the NBA. Recently, one juror, Paul West, had to ask Dalkey Archive Press to put up Felipe Alfau’s Chromos, an extraordinary novel, which ought to have won instead of the third-rate work that did.

To complete our descent into the tacky: in some cases the jurors are expected to give the books back. Moreover, publishers have been known to complain bitterly when one of their authors won a prestigious prize—in the first place, because the news would have to be hailed in The New York Times (in the same costly box that would announce the writer’s demise), and in the second place, because the victory entailed a victory party for which the publishers had no desire to foot the bill, and which, in the third place, they didn’t wish to attend because they had no interest in shaking the hand of an author whose merit was an embarrassment to the house.

Someone always foots the bill, of course, and when the outcome doesn’t smartly show the shoes, the soles are inclined to squeak, as Nicholas Murray Butler did in the old days when, as president of Columbia University, he oversaw the labors of the Pulitzer Advisory Board, to which the jury makes its recommendation for a final decision. Overseers are inclined to meddle, or to withdraw their moral and monetary support (as the publishers did from the National Book Awards when the modest level of excellence it usually approved was still too elevated to be useful to the concerns of the market).

In addition to these hazards, the fact is that good taste and sensible judgment are rare, and excellence itself is threatening, innovation an outrage. On the other hand, one must be most wary of the jurors who boast that only literary quality guides their selections, because the phrase “literary quality” is a conservative code word these days that means “I wouldn’t toss a dime into an ethnic’s hat.” And “experimental” can be more frankly replaced by “self-indulgent and inept” so often as to cause one to despair of the word. In the face of all these frailties, then, is it any wonder that awards go awry? So complain about human nature if you want to, but there’s no need to pull a face about the Pulitzer.

This is an appar, ently 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 years, 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 Barthlme 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 than 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/Faulknew 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 to 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 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 insists on oddities like Gravity’s Rainbow, the Advisory Board will overrule them, as it did in 1947; 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 name, 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 an 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.