Pangs and Prizes

When the winners of this year's National Book Awards lined up on the rosy stage of Manhattan's Alice Tully Hall last week, the group was somewhat more suggestive of prize day at school--with something for everyone--than an austere few chosen for literary excellence. The awards were originally conceived to promote "the wider and wiser use of books," and no doubt with that laudable, if ambiguous view in mind, the N.B.A. this year increased the number of prize categories from seven to ten--a notable jump from the early days, nearly a generation ago, when the N.B.A. used to pick only the year's best work of fiction, nonfiction and poetry.

The crowd would have been even larger, cynics observed, if three of the 1971 prizewinners were not dead. Flannery O'Connor, who won in the most coveted fiction category for the complete collection of her matchless stories (TIME, Nov. 29), died in 1964. The fiction judges had to bypass an N.B.A. rule that bars books by authors more than two years departed to give her the award. The history award, a separate category for the first time this year, went to Allan Nevins who died in 1971, after finishing the last two volumes in his massively readable eight-volume history of the Civil War, Ordeal of the Union (Scribners). The N.B.A. poetry panel split between the quick and the dead, dividing honors between the late Frank O'Hara's Collected Poems (Knopf) and Howard Moss's Selected Poems, but thoughtfully awarded the customary $1,000 purse to the latter.

The other living winners included: in biography (a category formerly combined with history), Joseph Lash's splendidly affectionate Eleanor and Franklin (Norton); in arts and letters, Pianist Charles Rosen's demanding study of The Classical Style in the music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven (Viking); in science, George L. Small's ecological lament for the disappearance of The Blue Whale (Columbia University); in philosophy and religion, Martin E. Marty's Righteous Empire: The Protestant Experience in America (Dial); and for translation, Austryn Wain-house's heroic failure to quite transform French Nobel Prizewinner Jacques Monod's prolix inquiry into biological evolution Chance and Necessity (Knopf) into readable English.

Nobody who cares about good writing could object to the choice of Flannery O'Connor. But one could--and many did--with justice point out that Walker Percy, John Updike and E.L. Doctorow, to name only the three most notable examples, had each produced a skilled, serious and powerful novel in 1971. This year, though, most of the customary groans and hisses were reserved for the slenderest and the newest categories. One judge, Lore Segal, a writer of juveniles, filed a solid minority objection when the children's book prize went to Fantasist Donald Barthelme for his arch and static The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine or The Hithering, Thithering Djinn.

When fellow judges in the new contemporary-affairs category chose The Last Whole Earth Catalog, the celebrated counterculture collection that includes a short novel as well as lists of tools, materials, lore and advice about how to live on the land, Garry Wills walked out on the proceedings. The winner, he complained, was a nonbook, and the product not of a writer but of a large group of collaborators.

Prize giving is always a dubious business. Yet there were signs that after a generation the National Book Awards have arrived at a respectable and quite useful compromise that tries to encourage both literary commerce and literary excellence. The much older Pulitzer Prize, though it does its work without the furious round of press parties, interviews and parading of spring authors, has been a bad joke, in fiction at least, ever since 1941 when the review committee, headed by Nicholas Murray Butler, refused Hemingway the prize for For Whom the Bell Tolls on grounds that the book was "lascivious." The N.B.A., for all its lapses and lunges and rule changes, has consistently left its judges free to do their best.

There is plenty of room for improvement, perhaps in formalizing the choice of judges, or reducing the number of categories. Most American institutions, though, are by definition continuing experiments, a fact noted by Stewart Brand, the soft-spoken young ecological entrepreneur who created The Last Whole Earth Catalog, after he had accepted his prize. Readily admitting that the Catalog was the work of scores of young people who wrote in commenting on the books and articles eventually recommended in it, Brand pointed out that the nonprofit Portola Institute, which published the book, is now a rich nonprofit foundation. What is he going to do with it all? "Learn how to be a foundation without becoming a foundation," Brand replied. So far the N.B.A. has become an institution without becoming an institution. And probably that's as it should be.

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