Perhaps this mixed metaphor — international trade balances, celestial navigation, and DNA analysis — is itself a metaphor for my point: I have steered my own writerly course by the various lights of Faulkner, Joyce, Machado, and Borges, not to mention Cervantes, Boccaccio, Rabelais, and Scheherazade; my muse’s DNA, like that of most writers, is a mestizo smorgasbord of these and many other literary-ethnic inputs, and while I freely acknowledge my debt to them and to the assorted literary traditions that produced them, it is not the sort of debit that requires repayment. My books, whatever their worth, are my only intercultural bookkeeping. If, on some literary-critical balance sheet, those books show a net cultural deficit to Ireland, Brazil, Argentina, Spain, Italy, France, and medieval Araby, that debit is a debt merely of gratitude. And of gratitude I have a plenitude: if not yet quite cien años de, at least cinquenta años de gratitud.
Thank you; muchas gracias; et cetera.
A Window at the Pratt
Winners of the Enoch Pratt Society’s Lifetime Achievement in Letters Award, established in 1997, are expected to say a few words upon their accepting that distinction at Baltimore’s fine old Enoch Pratt Free Library and then, the following evening, to say a few more before giving a reading from their work. My receipt of that honor in 1999 prompted the following remarks on literary awards and then, the next day, the mini-essay after this one, on public readings — both published here for the first time.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON Goethe once remarked to the Duke of Weimar — no doubt on the occasion of accepting some ducal honor — that refusing a distinction (as Boris Pasternak and Jean-Paul Sartre, for different reasons, declined their Nobel prizes in 1958 and 1964) can be as immodest as chasing after it. Philip Roth, upon accepting a New York Book Critics Circle Award, observed that since he, like many another writer, often feels that such prizes go to the wrong guy, this must be his night to be the wrong guy. John Updike’s character Henry Bech, upon accepting the Nobel Prize that his author surely deserves but has yet to be graced with,1 declares that that prize “has become so big, such a celebrity among prizes, that no one is worthy to win it, and the embarrassed winner can shelter his unworthiness behind the unworthiness of everyone else.” That reminds me of how the undergraduates at Washington College over in Chestertown, where my wife and I live, feel about the college’s prestigious Sophie Kerr Lit Prize, a $35,000 plum awarded annually for quite a few years now to one of their number, none of whom thus far (so they tell me) has subsequently evolved into a professionally publishing writer: So convinced are the student competitors that the Kerr Prize is cursed (“Sophie’s Curse,” they call it) that upon my being appointed a Senior Fellow of the college a few years back, I made it my first official act to pronounce that curse lifted. We’ll see what happens.2 And a writer friend of mine — as we were either applauding Gabriel García Márquez’s receipt of the Nobel in 1982 or else shaking our writerly heads at someone else’s receipt of it in some other year, I forget which — observed sagely that there are on the one hand those who do honor to the prize, and on the other hand those to whom the prize does honor.
Welclass="underline" In the short history of the Pratt Society’s Lifetime Achievement award, my two forewinners (Saul Bellow and Joyce Carol Oates) have done enough honor to the prize to permit me simply to be honored by it — as I hope you’ll disagree. In any case, my thanks to the adjudicating committee, whoever you are, the difficulties of whose task I can appreciate, having paid my dues on a similar committee of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Indeed, after doing three years’ hard time on that awards committee, while at the same time tisking at the Swedish Academy for passing over such contemporary giants as Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, and Italo Calvino in favor of one or another lesser entity, I was led to what I think of as the Tragic View of Recognition: namely, that a worthwhile literary prize is one that will at least occasionally be bestowed upon an author despite the fact that she or he happens to deserve it. By that stringent definition, the Pratt Prize has a high credit rating indeed, to which I hope tonight’s occasion will not do lasting damage.
That said, I must confess to feeling a slight chill in the presence of any “Lifetime Achievement” award. Since I persist in still going to my writing-table every weekday morning to see what my muse has on her mind, I can’t help wishing that the thing would say “Lifetime Achievement Thus Far.” In any case, as I used to tell my apprentice fiction-writers up at Johns Hopkins, lit prizes are a bit like PhDs: They don’t invariably equate with excellence (in some cases they may barely equate with proficiency), and some of the very best practitioners don’t have them. But if you’re going to be shrug-shouldered about either literary prizes or doctoral degrees, it’s better to be so after winning them, so that your shrug-shoulderedness can’t be mistaken for sour-grapes envy.
ALLOW ME NOW a very brief reminiscence, and then we’re done. As an undergraduate apprentice myself at Johns Hopkins in the late 1940s, my comrades and I would often take the bus downtown from the university’s Homewood campus to the Pratt, where in addition to using this library’s splendid resources we would admire and envy the authors whose works were honored back then with displays in the building’s street-side windows. Libraries, after all, as William H. Gass somewhere remarks, “acquire what we cannot afford, retain what we prize and would adore, restore the worn, ignore fashion, and repulse prejudice.” Your typical would-be writer, says W. H. Auden, “serves his apprenticeship in a library [I certainly did — but that’s another story].” “Though the Master is deaf and dumb,” Auden continues, “and gives neither instruction nor criticism, the apprentice can choose any Master he likes, living or dead; the Master is available at any hour of the day or night; lessons are all for free; and his passionate admiration of his Master will ensure that he work hard to please him.” Especially to those of my fellow apprentices who (unlike me) had grown up in Baltimore and had made excursions to the Pratt all through their childhood, there seemed to be no more incontrovertible affirmation and validation of one’s writerly calling than to earn, one day, “a window at the Pratt.” I’m honored to regard tonight’s award as my Pratt-window; although I hope that I may have a few stories left to tell, I accept with pleasure this recognition of The Stories Thus Far.