Anatomy of a National Book Award

Could we have a quick update on the National Book Awards, please? A bit of background?

With pleasure. The NBA is a twenty-five-year-old program of literary prizes administered by the National Book Committee, Roger Stevens, chairman. Annually the Committee awards ten one-thousand-dollar prizes to the authors of the year’s best books in Arts and Letters, Biography, Contemporary Affairs, Fiction, History, Juveniles, Philosophy and Religion, Poetry, the Sciences, and Translation. The Committee also sponsors a threeday culture festival in Manhattan honoring the prizewinners, book reviewers, editors, salesmen, P.R. folk, miscellaneous authors of best sellers, and, in general, the idea of reading a book. The tab for all this is picked up by four book industry groups.

You’re one of the judges—how are they picked?

it’s pretty clear that the pickers aim for a mix—a few stars (Clifton Fadiman, Studs Terkel, Donald Barthelme, Truman Capote in 1974), but mainly “specialists in the fields,” reviewers, and common readers. In 1964 and 1974 1 was a common reader for the NBA, this time in Philosophy and Religion.

Are the judges—forgive me—paid?

$250 plus travel expenses for two trips to New York for group consultation. In addition the judges receive the franchise.

Sorry?

NBA judges choose the recipient of each year’s National Medal for Literature. (A Baskin medallion and $10,000; winner this year: Vladimir Nabokov.) A committee of stars chooses four or five candidates, prints a ballot, and sends it to all present and former NBA judges. You vote your hero, sign your name, and mail it back. Egowise, it’s elevating. Weighing your betters . . .

What exactly do you do as a judge to earn your fee?

First you choose the “contenders.” In March the Book Committee buys space in various magazines to advertise ten or so leading contenders for each of its prizes. The judges make up these lists. It’s a matter of selecting ten or twelve books from among a hundred, say, or a hundred and fifty. After that’s done you have a month to brood and talk to each other—the two other judges— on the phone or in person about which book ought to win. Then there’s a citation to write, and you’re obliged to show up at the Awards ceremony in case anybody wants to savage the judges.

I understand that happens, NBA UNDER FIRE? Scandals, controversy?

It happens. Some years back there were only three awards—fiction, nonfiction, poetry—and people complained that lumping everything nonfictional together was unfair. So they divvied n.f. into categories, added translation and the contenders business, whereupon people complained that now there were too many titles—confusing to the public. (This spring 111 books made the contenders’ list—the print in the NBA ads is hard to read.)

You believe in the contenders idea?

It’s good for the judges. You don’t start out dismissing books. You’re simply sorting out entries, assigning weights, looking for quality. It’s also true, I think, that a phrase like “author of Highwaycar Up, NBA contender 1974” can catch a reviewer’s or editor’s eye.

What about other complaints?

Too commercial, some say. The Book Committee is trying to hold together a cultural world that doesn’t make a whole. Up on the summit there’s the grand invitational dinner for the National Medalist, black tie at the New York Public Library. Down in the lowlands there are mass ballroom booze-ups and panels of celebrity authors of non books for whom it’s presumed “out-of-town reviewers” have the hots. The prizewinners have an instant of solemn joy ahead of them—solid recognition by a few of their peers—but to get there they have to cross a minefield (the Festivities). On the other hand, a culture is what it is and no book committee can be asked to transform it on its own.

What about cliques?

(Wincing) You hear this a lot—too much New York in the equation, too many in-groups. When a gifted far-Westerner or other foreigner doesn’t make the contenders’ list, somebody usually speaks up in print about the omission, if Mr. Hinterland has an established reputation. There were public complaints when the 1972 fiction jury left out Wallace Stegner. But in 1973 the fiction jury ignored Jack Matthews’ Charisma Campaigns—a sixth book by an undervalued Kansan, marvelous short novel, better (I thought) than many items on the list—and no one so much as coughed. But this is another hard subject. I’m a hinterland person and I’ve been a judge twice. As a matter of fact I could tell you a story—

You sound co-opted. But tell your story.

First ask me how it works—the judging, I mean.

How does the judging work?

In the middle of last year the New York offices of the Book Committee sent the P & R judges a list of titles already suggested by their publishers. We checked the items we wanted; the committee alerted the publishers and they sent us the books. Four more lists came from New York before mid-February— about 120 titles.

How did you decide what to ask for?

Partly by following my own (amateur) interests—Kierkegaard and phenomenology, for instance. Partly by paying attention to reputations: some famous people had new books in “our” category. The most important help came from the other judges.

What kind of help?

One judge on our panel was literary editor of a religious journal—the job requires him to look over every new title published in the field. He jotted down a descriptive-evaluative phrase about each nominee on the lists and circulated them. I checked him a few times at random—his notes were never tendentious and always well informed. The other judge was a semi-specialist herself. She tracked down obscure items that even the editor had missed. Both these people were haunted by the fear of neglecting something first-rate. They went far beyond publishers’ nominations and the Book Committee lists, scoured the weekly 1973 listings in Publishers Weekly, talked with specialists among faculty colleagues, studied catalogues with their booksellers. . . . Two of our top contenders were books not even proposed by the people who published them. One of the two won the prize.

Who are these paragon judges?

Francine du Plessix Gray, writer for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, and Martin Marty, associate dean of the divinity school of Chicago University, literary editor of the Christian Century and an NBA winner himself.

Should all judges be specialists?

I didn’t say that. Once or twice I, as the common reader, dared to propose a title to Marty or Francine. I also won hearings for some titles they’d marked for dismissal. My job was to say whether a person without professional commitments in these fields could or couldn’t read title X or Y or whatever with profit and interest. I also noticed that when the common reader flips about a book the authorities know is first-rate as scholarship, that has considerable effect. About the really bad books, incidentally, we three were invariably in agreement.

You say you met together once? What happened there?

Sober occasion. We sat in a corner office in a Broadway theater building (the Stevens influence). A Book Committee representative introduced us to each other and stayed on—not one unsolicited word, critical or otherwise—while we worked. We’d settled on six or seven top books by phone and mail. The dozen strongest candidates for the last few places were piled up on a desk in front of us, together with our first choices. We knew we weren’t talking now about possible winners. We compared notions about whether we should allow consideration of earlier achievements to figure in our judgment of an author’s most recent work. How “available” to a general audience should a “contender” be? This book in a field that none of us is expert in: shouldn’t one of us check out reviewers’ opinions in the specialized journals? That devastating critique of Author A in the Times Literary Supplement correspondence columns: was the letter writer’s scholarship impeccable? Shouldn’t Author J have made fuller acknowledgment to the predecessor in his field on whom his book so evidently leans? . . .

On toward lunchtime, sandwiches coming in, decisions fairly firm, Martin Marty rose and went to the table on which all the rejected texts were laid out in even, separate rows. He pulled a dozen books carefully out of line, remarking: “These are the ones I’ll keep for my library.” I had a frisson at that moment. Had I done justice to any of them? What could I remember about them? If I’d read this one here a little harder, mightn’t I have put the case for it in such a way that, with Marty so well disposed, it would have made its way into contention?

Our list fixed, qualms calmed, we acknowledged to each other that one of the ten contenders was running well ahead of the others in our joint estimate: best, however, to wait a week before settling, whether in New York again or during a conference call. (In the end, unanimity held; we voted the candidate up, three to zero, on the phone, finding nothing else in its league.) Over a drink we praised ourselves for harmony and civility and exchanged rumors and gossip about the furies of fiction juries of yesteryear. Then we finished our sandwiches and went our ways.

Should we hear about the chosen titles?

Absolutely. I’ve boiled down my notes as follows:

Don S. Browning, On Generative Man: Psychoanalytic Perspectives (Westminster Press, $10.95). Theme is “society and the good man in the writings of Philip Rieff, Norman Brown, Erich Fromm and Erik Erikson”; the question is, which if any of these successors of Freud has produced a model of moral man that’s useful now? Prose is a bit dumpy but there’s an excellent critique of Brown and a shrewd appreciation of Erikson. A solid work of critical synthesis.

Harvey Cox, The Seduction of the Spirit (Simon & Schuster, $8.00). A “spiritual autobiography”; portraying the best-selling Harvard theologian as a small-town Baptist youngster and as a grown-up visitor to a mariachi Mass, an Essalen weekend, and other big-time scenes. The writing is disheveled and the organization invisible. But the thesis— Cox sees mod pop religion as an assertion of personal innerness, a mode of struggle against the obliterations of the objectivizing media world—has intermittent force and interest.

Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, $10.95). A seminal mind begins a summa. Fromm’s earlier books compose a complex psychology of social character; Browning (see above) shows forth their interrelationships and fundamental coherence. But a significant mind has its own way of putting itself together, and there are several surprises in this first volume of an intellectual retrospective. Difficult, but important.

Marjorie Grene, Sartre (Watts, $8.95). Scrupulous, clearheaded analysis of Sartre’s sources and development. Then at the end a patch of glory. Concentrating on Sartre’s in-progress study of Flaubert, Professor Grene elucidates a new strain in Sartre’s conception of human mutuality and love, pulling out marvelous bits of observation (“the immoderate vanity of the wanted child”), and revealing the fine range of her own as well as of her subject’s sensibility.

Maurice Natanson, Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks (Northwestern University Press, $10.00). Phenomenology “explained” . . . Gorgeous original examples of minds laboring to uncreate the everyday world, to dismantle dailiness, to scrape themselves and the familiar down to the wood in pursuit of structure. If it’s not for the man in the street, as Marty noted, it nevertheless concerns him—indeed, is all about him, hence all about us. [Natanson was “my” candidate and he won. The citation reads; “‘For Husserl,’ Maurice Natanson writes, ‘the philosopher is humanity’s representative, its delegate of reason, and its advocate of Spirit.’ Professor Natanson himself incarnates these roles in a work of intellectual boldness and lyric intensity that opens a new path to the center of a major modern mind.” That language is stiff; the book is a superlative imaginative performance.]

Trent Schroyer, The Critique of Domination (Braziller, $8.95). The System and the Systems Analysts are killing us, and this young man’s jargon at moments is part of the problem, not of the solution. (“Norm-guided,” “dialogics,” “selfreflexivity,” “monadically-constituted,” “ transindividua11y,” “monologic,” and a dozen similar bummers on one dinky page—in a book against abstraction!) But Schroyer’s hunt for intellectual resources by means of which we can contend against technological domination is, finally, both stimulating and valuable. His main man is Jürgen Habermas.

Laurence Veysey, The Communal Experience (Harper & Row, $15.00). A Santa Cruz history prof tracks out the American countercultural tradition—first through straight historical research (the Ferrer Colony, 1915, New Brunswick, N.J.), then through field experience (living in New Mexico communes in the 1970s). Veysey is a together academic historian with an extremely downright, yet never unsubtle literary manner. Nobody I’ve read can match him for penetration of “characteristic” counterculturalist states of feeling at nonleadership levels. A work of sympathy and understanding, and a remarkably gripping read.

Frederic Wakeman, Jr., History and Will: Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-tung’s Thought (University of California Press, $12.75). The author is a history professor at Berkeley, the book is a study in intellectual backgrounds, the materials summarized range from Confucian classics to Chinese general magazines, to Mill, Darwin, Marx, you name it. In my opinion this is a wretchedly organized book in search of an editor. The author runs on for chapters at a time detailing familiar episodes in the history of Western philosophy as though the story had never been told before. But the question returns: where but in this book can you find a guide to the incredible variety of materials that shaped Mao’s thought? A valuable omnium gatherum.

Harry Austryn Wolfson, Studies in the History of Philosophy and Religion (Harvard University Press, $15.00). Collected papers of a great philosophical and literary scholar. Most are highly specialized (“The Amphibolous Terms in Aristotle, Arabic Philosophy and Maimonides”) but the huge learning is lightly worn. The quality of the writing sent me back to an earlier and more available book by Wolfson (Religious Philosophy, 1961); I found a beautifully composed essay about immortality that must surely be among the wittiest, most learned, and most humane talks ever delivered to the student body of a Harvard graduate school. [Wolfson at eighty-six remained a top contender to the final round.]

Larzer Ziff, Puritanism in America (Viking, $10.00). A survey of Puritanism “as a culture” from the Reformation to the final “major colonial manifestation in the Great Awakening.” Ziffs purpose is to connect ideas with their environments; he’s impatient with the metaphysical and ideological preoccupation of the Perry Miller School. [A fellow judge remarked that this is a less striking work than Ziff’s earlier study of John Cotton. Ignorant of Cotton, I was available for instruction and learned much from the book.]

What about that “story” you mentioned?

I nearly forgot. It has to do with Natanson, but let me reset the scene. I’m out of my field, remember, traveling in the dark, don’t know the “surround” of half the books I’m reading, haven’t (in the other half) been around these areas for years. Furthermore I’m having trouble separating one treatise on the Jesus movement from another, distinguishing between “process Christology” and “body theology.”

. . . Can it be that every one of these books begins by asserting; “There are new stirrings in Christianity today. Something is going on.” Midway through the reading, thirty-odd books “finished,” I open a package from a university press and find an item not on any list I’ve yet checked off. Sent by accident? Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks by Maurice Natanson.

I read Husserl as an undergraduate, remember something interesting about him. . . . I begin the book and am seized—Jesu, a Discovery! At last I can do what my colleagues have been doing for weeks—whip off a bulletin announcing news of a hitherto unheard-of contender. I do this and my letter brings a gratifying response. “A wonderful book,” says one judge, and I swell a little, pleased that I, the outsider, the nonprofessional, the hinterland man, have done my job. Santa Cruz to Evanston to Amherst, with no lit’ry mafia pulling strings. Up the common reader!

At the judges’ first meeting I refer once or twice, lightly yet not unfatuously, to my “discovery,” and catch an odd expression on Francine Gray’s face. I ask a question and am quickly put in the picture. Francine was having lunch, it seems, with Thomas Hess, the critic and editor; she was being invited to do a particular piece for New York magazine and she was begging offall this reading she had to do, judging philosophy books. Oh, says Hess, a friend of mine’s been trying to get me to read a new philosophy book, Don Barthelme. What book? says Francine eagerly. She presses, Hess isn’t quite sure, promises to have Barthelme call her. Barthelme calls, he and Francine lunch, and the reference is provided: Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks. The author, Natanson, is Barthelme’s friend and classmate, fine fellow. . . . Francine later learns to her amazement that the publisher hasn’t even recommended the book. She immediately orders copies for us. Her narrative is, for me, a downer. “My” discovery isn’t mine.

Is it not silly to worry about the process by which good work comes to notice? Who cares how as long as it does?

Of course, of course. Still, it would have been lovely (for me) if my Openness and Diligence had made the difference! For the record I should add that the other top contender not brought to notice by its publisher also was brought to notice by “New York.” Barthelme “found” Natanson, R. B. Silvers of The New York Review of Books put our jury on to Wolfson.

Now that you’re an expert in philosophy and religion, do you have generalizations to share?

Dozens. (1) First-rate minds have not yet begun to return in droves to discourse about faith. (2) Countercultural mysticism and moral-political utopianism continue to be key influences on current authorial choices of “religious subjects.” (3) Some newly energized fields of intellectual inquiry are; phenomenology and ethology. (4) The most dismal trend is: death-mongering. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying was an exceptional work but bad apples are strewn among its offspring. Writers who use—quite seriously—phrases like “low level grief” . . . books that nag the reader ceaselessly with the question, “Have you done your death work?” . . . chapters transcribing hospital conversations between dying men and a base form of life called the “death researcher.” Friend, the “death researcher” seems ever on the point of saying, friend, are you aware you’re dying? Lady, don’t you see you’re through? (—Dear family: Please, when My Hour comes, remember that most profoundly I believed that a poor scared son of a bitch in a hospital bed ought not to have to cope with sociological creeps squatting at his ear, attempting to put him out of his evasiveness with a multi-choice questionnaire about how it feels to shuffle off.)

Bitter, bitter. This isn’t, however, where you come out, is it? You enjoyed the work, you believe in the NBA ?

I do rather trust these prizes. Logrolling occurs in fiction and poetry, I’m sure, and publishers doze sometimes as they forget to speak up for their own best books, and there’s fierce frustration for judges who aren”t experts, can’t read everything, can’t properly challenge “expert opinion.” But on the whole the Awards are an honorable show. Find twenty Martys and Francines a year—impossible but still the right goal—and the glow may never leave this thing.

You’d do it again, in sum?

Actually I can see a slot for me up the line ten years. I didn’t have much history, I had less religion, but when it comes to real nakedness, science is my—

The Sciences! You?

(Coloring) Just, you understand, as your friendly common reader. Over there, I’m told, Discovery really is the name of the game.