Archives for November 2003

I don’t know how much ink the National Book Awards would have gotten under normal circumstances, but given the events with which today’s papers (on and off line) are understandably crowded, it’s a wonder they got covered at all. Given the brevity of the various news stories about this year’s awards, though, I thought I ought to supply a few more details.

The ceremony was held at the Marriott Marquis, one of the super-monster hotels in the theater district of Manhattan, and a good thing, too–some 900 people showed up. The crowd at the reception was so thick that you could barely get a drink, and it was for all intents and purposes impossible to find anyone you knew (I ran into one of my fellow judges, but only by accident). Inside the ballroom, the tables stretched on and on and on, thus making informed table-hopping similarly impossible. Hence the dinner wasn’t nearly as social an occasion as I’d expected.

The ballroom was full of security–tough guys in tuxes, wearing Secret Service-style earpieces and talking into their hands. I don’t know whether this was standard operating procedure or arose from the fact that Stephen King is in the middle of a much-publicized bout with a stalker, but it seemed clear to me that his presence was part of the reason for their presence. I tried to say hello to him, and a big bruiser shoved himself in front of me and said, “Hey, Mac, you can’t talk ta Mr. King.” On the other hand, he backed down immediately when I told him I was a judge, and I was permitted to pay my respects to the guest of honor.

Of the 900 other guests, only about 120 were authors. I was the lone writer at my table–everybody else was from the business side of publishing. This, too, was a little disorienting, as I’d expected the mealtime chat to be rather more literary in tone, though I did get into a worthwhile conversation with a fellow from RR Donnelly Publishing (they’re the ones who actually manufacture books) about the prospects for e-books (he was skeptical). The food, incidentally, was quite good for a gathering of this sort–I wasn’t counting on rack of lamb.

The fiscal orientation of the audience may help to explain why Stephen King received two standing ovations as he was presented with the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. As one of the Donnelly execs said to me during Standing Ovation No. 1, “That man has made a lot of money for a lot of people in this room.”

King’s speech was interesting. He was clearly moved by the honor–he choked up. He was funny and unpretentious when paying tribute to his wife and talking about the “vulnerability” to self-doubt of poor, struggling authors (such as himself when young). I suspect he was the first National Book Award laureate ever to say “Oh, shit!” in his acceptance speech (he was describing the way an honest author might portray a terrified character in extreme circumstances). And he was simultaneously a bit defensive and more than a little bit aggressive when he informed the crowd that they’d be making a mistake if they treated their decision to give him the prize as an act of “tokenism.” He said (repeatedly) that he didn’t write for money, that genre fiction deserved to be taken seriously, and that the judges of the National Book Awards had an obligation to read the best-selling books that are shaping American popular culture (I’m paraphrasing from memory, but that was the gist of his complaint). “Bridges can be built between the so-called popular fiction and literary fiction,” he declared, and to that end he supplied us with a long reading list of popular novelists whom he commended to our attention, among them Elmore Leonard and John Grisham. (He also mentioned Patrick O’Brian.)

The confrontational tone of King’s speech startled me–I’d never heard him talk before. Had it been adequately reported this morning, I think it would already be stirring up no small amount of controversy in the literary sector of the blogosphere. The reason why I approached him, by the way, was to ask if he’d made arrangements to publish it. He was polite (just) but brisk when he said that he thought somebody “already had dibs” on it. I hope it gets into print in some form or other, because it deserves to be talked about extensively.

King didn’t give the only attention-getting speech of the night. Carlos Eire spoke at unexpected length–eloquently and effectively–upon being given the nonfiction award for Waiting for Snow in Havana. He, too, was moved to the point of tears, but he wasn’t so disconcerted as to forget to point out to us that had he published Waiting for Snow in Havana in Cuba rather than America, he wouldn’t have been receiving an award in New York–he’d be locked up in one of Fidel Castro’s prisons. It was a surprising speech to hear at a gathering of New York literary types, who aren’t accustomed to being reminded that to be an honest writer in Cuba is to run the constant risk of being thrown into a jail not fit for animals (Eire’s words).

Polly Horvath, who received the prize for Young People’s Literature, gave a speech that lasted for about 15 seconds, and her brevity amazed and delighted everyone at my table. C.K. Williams, the poetry winner, read one of his poems in lieu of giving a speech, and it, too, was short. (I very much admired his nerve.)

Then Shirley Hazzard stole the show. Here’s how the New York Times described her acceptance speech:

She accepted the award before a crowd of 900 writers, editors and publishers, and urged American writers to remain aware of their immense power in the world and their consequent responsibility not to degrade the language they had been given.

“We’re drowning in explanations,” she said. “What we need is more questions.”

What the story didn’t say is that Hazzard was chiding Stephen King–politely, but by name, and she made no bones about it–for telling the NBA judges what they ought to be reading. My guess is that she is more accustomed to weighing her words than speaking off the top of her head, for her remarks, though brief, weren’t nearly as pointed as they seemed, and you could tell she was torn between her obligation to be tactful and her desire to tear a piece off King. Nevertheless, it was an unambiguously confrontational moment, and an electric one.

That’s about the size of it, though I do want to add a few last words about the experience of being an NBA judge. We considered 436 books (some of them very, very briefly, but they all got talked about at some point in the past few months). We never raised our voices, never argued with one another, never got angry. Our deliberations were civilized, collegial, and great fun. When we met yesterday afternoon to make our final selection, it was the first time all five of us had been in the same room at once–we mostly deliberated via e-mail and in conference calls–and the atmosphere, far from being tense, was positively festive.

Yes, it was hard work, and I really wish the NBA would break up the nonfiction award into at least two parts: it isn’t easy or fair to directly compare histories, biographies, and memoirs, as we had to do. But we did it, and though I’m sworn to secrecy as to the particulars of our discussions, I think I can speak for the whole panel when I say that we were collectively pleased and proud to give the prize to Waiting for Snow in Havana. I gather that not all literary prizes are awarded in so companionable an atmosphere, so I hate to disappoint you by not reporting any fist fights, but the sad truth is that I had a wonderful time being a judge for the National Book Awards.

UPDATE: More details of the ceremony are getting into print. For a reliable wire-service account (by way of Maud) with good quotes from the King and Hazzard speeches, go here. Looks like the Times punted on this one….

From 2 Blowhards:

1) You don’t have to love everything you’re told is great, 2) You don’t have to claim greatness for everything you love, and 3) You don’t have to dispute the greatness of the works and artists you dislike.

This is part of a posting in which Michael Blowhard offers a list of “great art he doesn’t get,” and invites his co-blogger Friedrich to do the same. (Read the whole thing here.)

Care to play, OGIC? My allergy to Wagner is no secret, to put it mildly, and I’ve confessed to not getting Dickens in this very space. I’m prepared to make further admissions, but only if you ante up.

Dear OGIC:

I tore myself away from the iBook this afternoon and went to see Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. I’m going to be writing about it next week, so I don’t want to give the game completely away, but here’s what I thought in a nutshell: it’s all wrong…and all right.

No, Master and Commander doesn’t reproduce the essence of Patrick O’Brian’s books, which is the inner life of Stephen Maturin. (See this recent post for more details.) It’s a completely exteriorized view of the Aubrey-Maturin novels. But what a view! I know the novels intimately, and I’m stunned by the evocative precision with which Peter Weir has made them manifest on screen. Sure, he’s turned a Trollopian roman fleuve into an action movie, but the action is completely consistent with the tone (and values) of the books. What’s more, Russell Crowe is as good an Aubrey as could possibly be imagined. He looks right, sounds right, acts right. From now on, I’ll see him in my head when I read the books.

Much more later, but for now I’ll add just one thing, which is that I saw Master and Commander in the company of a woman friend whom I thought might not like it, not least because it gets quite bloody from time to time. She was completely enthralled. Me, too. I want to see it again, soon.

So, while Mr. Teachout was keeping score at the National Book Awards dinner last night–and I’ll be damned if I don’t pry a lot more scuttlebutt out of him–I was getting my first taste of Patrick O’Brian, albeit by way of Peter Weir. I felt really grandly entertained at Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, though it seemed clear that the famous Aubrey-Maturin friendship was not captured in anything like all of its nuance and complexity in the books. Make no mistake, this is an adventure movie, and it’s more about the general experiences of being English, at war, and at sea than about specific characters or relationships.

This isn’t to say that the characters aren’t nicely individuated and very believably human. Weir does sketch out the emotional contours of a couple of the shipboard relationships in very broad but deft strokes, and this seems just enough specificity to animate what is essentially a more general evocation of a time and place–and, of course, a great yarn.

The storytelling is terrific, offering up plenty of the sort of well-chosen, toothsome details that make a narrative memorable. There’s a model ship that is a small wonder, both as a material object and as a plot pivot. Later in the movie you get a (literally) breathtaking glimpse of a real ship from far enough away that it, too, looks like a toy–and the plot again turns decisively. I loved the benign, wise-looking beasts of the Gal

A reader writes, apropos of the National Book Awards, but before my first-person account (see immediately below) was posted:

Do you think that personal memoir and narrative nonfiction based on journalistic reconstruction should be in the same category? I suppose that might be like asking whether historical fiction and contempory fiction should be in the same category, yet I can’t help but feel that these forms are very different from one another. I guess this begs the question of what, exactly, is it that you judge when viewing art? Is it the impact upon the viewer/listener/reader? And if the content is inherently more emotional in one work than another, does that skew the comparison? I think, too, of actors. The embodiment of a highly charged character seems to have an edge over a masterful embodiment of a more subtle character, even when I suspect the latter requires much more skill.

Right on all counts, say I. All five of the NBA nonfiction judges were troubled by the fact that we had to render a single judgment on so disparate a group of books, and we have made our feelings known to the powers-that-be at the National Book Foundation. On the other hand, I don’t think there should be a dozen National Book Awards: if there were, nobody would pay attention to them. (It’s hard enough to get the mass media to pay any attention to a literary prize.) Still, disaggregating history from biography, as do the Pulitzer Prizes, seems to me an important step.

On the other hand, to do that would bring us right back to another horn of the dilemma posed by my correspondent. Can you really compare a scholarly biography to a personal memoir? I mean, of course you can, you can compare anything to anything else, but ought they to be considered part of the same category for purposes of prizegiving?

Without telling tales out of school, I can say that my fellow judges and I spent a lot of time talking about precisely these issues. We took them with the highest possible seriousness. But at the end of the day (as they like to say in Washington), we had to perform our assigned task, which wasn’t made any easier by the fact that the National Book Foundation instructed us not to split the first prize between two books. We had to pick one, and we chose Waiting for Snow in Havana. As John Wayne is supposed to have said (though I think the quote is as spurious as “Play it again, Sam”), a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. Better one prize than none.

Today, the National Endowment for the Arts announces the recipients of its Jazz Masters awards for 2004. One of them is Jim Hall, my favorite living jazz musician, whom I interviewed last week for a piece published in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s the lead:

In jazz, all fame is strictly relative. Jim Hall, the greatest living jazz guitarist, has been making records for close to a half-century. He’s worked with everybody from Sonny Rollins to Pat Metheny and played everywhere from the Village Vanguard to the White House. His colleagues view him with something approaching outright awe. But Mr. Hall, like most jazz musicians, is unknown to the public at large–a fact that doesn’t seem to bother him in the least. “It’s a privilege to be able to make a living playing jazz,” he says firmly. “Not too many people listen to me, but maybe I’d be nervous if I were a million-seller. I’d say, uh-oh, I did something wrong.”

Read the whole thing here.

If you’ve never heard Hall play, click here to purchase Jim Hall Live, the CD mentioned in the piece. Recently reissued by Verve, it’s one of his own favorites–and the first Jim Hall album I ever bought, a quarter-century ago. I still love it.

Here are the winners of the 2003 National Book Awards, as announced earlier this evening:

NONFICTION: Carlos Eire, Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy

YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE: Polly Horvath, The Canning Season

POETRY: C.K. Williams, The Singing

FICTION: Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire

I have stories to tell about the ceremony, especially about Stephen King’s speech in acceptance of the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, which was, to put it mildly, an unapologetic defense of popular genre fiction–and which inspired Shirley Hazzard to reply, quietly but firmly, at evening’s end. But…it’s raining in Manhattan, there aren’t any cabs, the subway took forever, I’m soaked to the skin, and it’s time to get out of this wet tuxedo and under a warm comforter. So I’m going to bed. Come back tomorrow and I’ll tell you everything.

I’m off to the top-secret conclave at which I and my four fellow judges will choose the winner of the National Book Award for nonfiction. The five finalists, in case you’ve forgotten or didn’t know, are Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History, George Howe Colt’s The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home, John D’Emilio’s Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin, Carlos Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy, and Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America.

Then, after a change of costume (off with the false mustache, on with the black tie), I’ll be heading for tonight’s NBA dinner, where all the winners will be announced.

More later, probably tomorrow.