1957.7普利策奖已被视为美国文学界有价值的奖项

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The Pulitzer Prizes
Over the years, the Pulitzer Prizes have come to be regarded as valued awards in American letters, especially when they signalize new talent. But from time to time there are mutterings; there were mutterings in 1926 when Sinclair Lewis refused to accept the prize for his novel Arrowsmith, and again this year when there was evidently a hung jury in Fiction. Critic and Professor of English at Cornell, ARTHUR MIZENER looks back at the record. Mr. Mizener is the author of The Far Side of Paradise.

By Arthur Mizener
JULY 1957 ISSUE
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by ARTHUR MIZENER

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WHEN Robert Penn Warren received the Pulitzer Prize for All the King’s Men in 1947, he learned about it from an enterprising reporter. “How do you feel, Mr. Warren?" the reporter asked, and Warren said, “I feel guilty about all the writers better than I am who have never received the Pulitzer Prize.”


It is true that many of us are naïve enough to think the Pulitzer Prize is awarded for the best novel by an American during a given year; and even the present terms of the award —“for distinguished fiction” —suggest that judges are concerned solely with literary merit. Quite rightly, therefore, within our limits, we question a good many of the awards. Resides, it is fun to secondguess the judges, especially as it is easy to be wise after enough time has passed to free us from the temporary distortion of values which exists at any given moment of history and is certain to influence powerfully any judgment that has to be made in that moment. Some of us are old enough to remember what things were like in 1921 and thus to understand how the judges came to think not only that The Age of Innocence was a better book than Main Street (which it probably is) but that it was superior in another, nonliterary way—it was a safer book to give the prize to. The buzz of gossip is pretty loud even in the remote fastnesses far above Cayuga’s waters where I live. It must be appalling in New York, where, as I understand it, literary people feel that day has been lost on which they do not attend a couple of literary cocktail parties where they are edified by the latest in-group wisdom. Perhaps, after all, we should admire the Pulitzer judges for having chosen so many good books under these conditions — especially good books of poetry — rather than criticize them for having chosen so many inferior novels.

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There are, nonetheless, some pretty odd choices even among the books of poetry. In 1935, the year of Marianne Moore’s Selected Poems and of Robert Penn Warren’s Thirty-six Poems, the prize went to Robert P. Tristram Coffin’s Strange Holiness; in 1938 our judges preferred Mary a Zaturenska’s Cold Morning Sky to Stevens’ Man with the Blue Guitar and Allen Tate’s Selected Poems. One could easily multiply examples of this kind. But these are perhaps enough to suggest the pattern which seems to run through the poetry awards. In spite of the brilliance of Southern Agrarian poets like Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, John Peale Bishop, and Robert Penn Warren, none of them has ever won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry. This heroic refusal by the judges to recognize persistent merit however great is almost enough to make even a Yankee share the slightly paranoid Southern literary dogma that New York’s control of the business side of literature is used systematically to discriminate against Southern writers.


The judges seem also to have sustained an irrational prejudice against neo-metaphysical poets, especially if they were expatriates, as were the greatest of these poets, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. It is certainly hard today to understand their refusal to honor at least one of the volumes — for instance, The Waste Land — which Mr. Eliot published before he became a British subject in 1927. Perhaps it is too much to expect the judges to show the kind of courage an award to Ezra Pound calls for nowadays, especially after what happened to the Fellows of the Library of Congress for saying what was almost certainly true: that Pound’s Pisan Cantos were the best poems by an American published in 1948. But there were a half-dozen Pound volumes published before the last war which could have been noticed without arousing political passions.

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The truth is that the judges have — with rare exceptions — limited themselves to regional poets who celebrate the area north of Jersey City and east of Albany. This narrow provincialism has forced them into giving the prize to Robert Frost four times and to a handful of other poets two or three times, and into ignoring all the other good poets. Nonetheless, it is true — again, with some exceptions — that the poets the judges have honored have been good poets, so that there is a valid if narrow-minded defense to be made of them.

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BUT there is not, I think, any valid literary defense that can be made for the awards in the novel. If a defense is to be made, it will have to be made on other grounds. A few examples will show why. (These examples are all later than 1931, the year in which the Advisory Board announced that the award would be given “for the best novel published during the year by an American writer.” Pulitzer’s original terms were: “For the original American novel published during the year which shall best present the wholesome atmosphere of American life and the highest standard of American manners and manhood.” Actually, the judges appear to have started ignoring these terms as early as 1929, when the award went to Scarlet Sister Mary, whose seven illegitimate children can hardly have been the kind of thing Pulitzer had in mind when he urged “the highest standard of American . . . manhood” on the judges’ attention.) Of the novels published in 1934, the year in which Scott Fitzgerald and John O’Hara published their finest novels and two brilliant tours do force appeared (Caroline Gordon’s Aleck Maury and Cozzens’ Castaway) — for that annus mirabilis the judges chose Josephine Johnson’s Now in November. For 1936 they succeeded in ignoring Absalom, Absalom!, In Dubious Battle, and The Big Money in order to honor Gone with the Wind. For 1940 they found no novel worthy of the award: that was the year of For Whom the Bell Tolls, You Can’t Go Home Again, The Hamlet, Ask Me Tomorrow, and The Pilgrim Hawk. For 1951 they passed over Requiem for a Nun, Melville Goodwin, USA, and Catcher in the Rye for The Caine Mutiny.


Some obviously extraliterary criteria which are scarcely evident in the judging of poetry appear to be at work here; they show up, I think, because we care about novels in a way we do not, alas, care about poetry. What novels say is, we think, something understandable about the life we are actually living; novels are not muttering incoherently about April’s being the cruelest month, which we can ignore as nonsense, or waving their arms about hysterically over—God help us — usury. What is worse (for no doubt we ourselves are wise enough to resist the bad effect of seductively wicked novels), the other fellow can read them and understand what they are saying, and heaven only knows what damage to the soundness of the country that may do. What I am trying to say is that our moral and political interests are deeply involved in our judgment of novels. Of course they should be involved in all our literary judgments, but because they are not often involved in our judgment of poetry, we find it easier to be fair to the literary merit of poetry. Yeats once remarked bitterly that he could say anything he wanted to about Ireland in his poems because no one in Dublin read them. But if Yeats could scorn Ireland as a country which spent all its time “fumbling in a greasy till” and still become an Irish senator, no novelist — not even so obscure a one as Joyce — could. Even the mild denigration which is an effect of complete objectivity such as you have in Dubliners can lead to the kind of suppression Dubliners suffered.

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Much the same thing is true of literary judgment in America. The Pulitzer Prize judges have honored poets who have said some pretty severe things about our moral and political beliefs; even their favorite, Robert Frost, can be devastating in poems like “Design,” “Provide, Provide,” and “Directive.” This is no man to turn loose among conventional readers if there is any risk of their fully understanding him. The risk is apparently not great; at least no disappointed poet has yet appeared in the Saturday Review to condemn the Pulitzer Prize judges for honoring Robert Frost. But with novelists the judges have to be careful. They know it, because the market tells them so. The novel is a commodity, but the distribution of poetry is a charity practiced by publishers.


At its crudest and most obvious, then, the extraliterary importance of the novel is shown by what I am told economists like to call the market mechanism — a metaphor which any decent poet could tell them they are someday going to regret. Now no self-respecting publisher, even less any selfrespecting writer, takes the judgment of the market mechanism lying down. But I doubt if any publisher would deny, either, that it has a cumulative effect. Moreover, it has an effect on writers themselves: there is an amateur Virginia Kirkus in every writer, and she has a quite astonishing effect on some of them, as Edmund Wilson was noticing with his usual acerbity when he remarked of the Pulitzer Prize winner for 1927: “By unremitting industry and a kind of stubborn integrity that seems to make it impossible for him to turn out his rubbish without thoroughly believing in it, [Louis Bromfield] has gradually made his way into the fourth rank, where his place is now secure.”

Sadly enough, this is the history of many promising writers in America, and of some w ho not only promised to achieve something but did so — for a little while. In nearly every decade you can find a really good American writer who later petered out, as Sinclair Lewis did after the twenties. Why, asked Scott Fitzgerald, are there no second acts in American lives? What discrepancy in values is there in America that makes so many of our writers go to pieces and, to return to the other side of our equation, makes able judges award novel prizes to mediocre books?—for I think there can be no doubt that the committees which award prizes are just as intelligent as anybody else, and just as honest.


Yet what they do can be as astonishing as what happens to gifted writers. Their practice seems to imply certain criteria of judgment which are, at best, only incidentally literary. For one thing, the books they will choose must — without being crude about it — look at experience in a properly American way. This way may occasionally include a criticism of America, but the grounds of such criticism must be American moral or political ideals: naughty fellows like the young Faulkner or socialists, however American, like the young Dos Passos need not apply. In short, to win the Pulitzer Prize a novel must not be, in either form or content, very novel. For another thing, the book must be popular — not just a best seller, but a book that is accepted as serious by a large number of American readers.

This second criterion is most clearly shown by the judges’ consistent refusal to pick an early book by an important writer. If the writer persists stubbornly and becomes popular, there is a possibility that they may recognize his fourth or fifth good book, but the chances are better that, if they recognize him at all, they will wait until very near the end of the first act of his life or even until well into that dismal second act Fitzgerald was asking about. Thus they passed over not only Main Street in 1920 but Babbitt in 1922. But they did choose Arrowsmith in 1926. The previous year The Sun Also Rises did not get chosen for reasons Hemingway foresaw quite clearly in the book itself. When Bill Gorton, fresh over from New York, joins Jake in Europe, he is full of talk about irony and pity, and Jake says to him, “Who did you get this stuff from?” Bill says, “Everybody. Don’t you read? Don’t you ever see anybody? You know what you are? You’re an expatriate. Why don’t you live in New York? Then you’d know these things. What do you want me to do? Come over here and tell you every year? . . . Nobody that ever left their own country ever wrote anything worth printing. . . . You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. . . . You’re an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés.” And Jake says, “It sounds like a swell life. When do I work?” Like Jake, Hemingway did work, and twenty-five years later the Pulitzer judges joined the Luce Enterprises in honoring The Old Man and the Sea. If you measure from Faulkner’s first indubitably great novel, The Sound and the Fury, it was twenty-six years before they discovered him.


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I THINK there is enough evidence here to convince us that the Pulitzer Prize often does not go to one of the very best novels of the year, even when it is pretty clear at the time what the best novels are, because certain extraliterary criteria are at least as important to the judges as are the literary ones. But I hope I have not sounded as if I think these judges are galled by prejudice while our withers are unwrung. Which one of us, when it is a question we really care about, knows how to hold the balance between our sense of literary excellence and our regard for the moral and political conxictions by which we live? Well, there is, perhaps, an answer to that rhetorical question. People who take an all-for-art-or-the-world-welllost attitude do not attempt to hold any balance, but I think they are worse off than our judges. Irresponsibility never solves any problems, especially when it makes as many purely literary misjudgments as responsibility does — at least, I think the race between the little magazines and the best-seller lists to see who can pick the most phony geniuses is a very close thing.

Responsible judges like those for the Pulitzer Prize are in very much the same dilemma as Robert Penn Warren was in: torn between his writer’s conviction that better writers than he had, for non literary reasons, been deprived of the Pulitzer Prize and the fact, perfectly clear to Warren himself, that he shared most of the values which lead judges to ignore good writers. Any intelligent literary man will frequently be shocked by what Pulitzer Prize judges and Hollywood do. But I think it can be said in a completely uncynical way that he will nonetheless probably accept their money and even the kind of work their recognition will bring him. The conflict of values manifest here works very subtly, and it works on the businessmen of literature just as surely as it works on the writers who succeed. Indeed, it works on us all.


When a writer has produced the best book he can, he will tell himself that he need not turn down any money it brings him, for he has not compromised his principles or his taste in writing it. He is likely to feel only innocent delight if his publisher thinks his book may be a best seller, a candidate for the Pulitzer Prize, even a movie buy. It seems to him a trifling, temporary interruption of his work when his publisher suggests a visit to New York to help build up the book. Possibly he is faintly disturbed when he finds himself at literary cocktail parties being almost flattering to influential reviewers he has always — probably with some justice — thought stupid. But the next thing he knows, he is appearing on radio and television shows, where the regal bearing of radio personalities awes him into expressing opinions he neither believes nor respects. (What a man won’t say when Mary Margaret McBride goes to work on him!) If our writer is not lucky enough to fade quickly into obscurity, he will end up writing scripts in Hollywood, where he will probably not even have the consolation of being a success.

You see the obverse of this course among publishers. Publishers arc all more or less bad businessmen because they all care to some extent for good books and are forever trying to publish them. It’s a mug’s game and as businessmen they know it. What would a really hard-boiled businessman think of Alfred Knopf’s attempt, a few years ago, to revive Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End? Parade’s End is a tetralogy, a book of over 800 fairly difficult pages, and the most salable of Ford’s books is, as a commodity, so dead that Ford hasn’t much of a reputation even among the avant-garde. But Alfred Knopf knows that Ford is a fine novelist. The poor fellow therefore not only published Parade’s End; he even spent good money to collect and print the favorable opinions of Ford held by a group of odd characters with no influence whatsoever on the buying public. I know about this because I was one of the odd characters. Well, Parade’s Pnd was published all right; it was remaindered, too, almost before the ink was dry on the paper.


Mary McCarthy once remarked that we Americans are a nation of twenty million bathtubs, with a humanist in every tub. We are also a nation of twenty thousand intellectuals, each of whom has a couple of children he wants to send to Princeton and Vassar and a wife with a well-publicized scheme for doing over every room in the house. The intellectuals need the community of their fellows far too deeply ever to make the radical rejection of the middle-class way of life which their intellectual commitments in strict logic require, just as their fellows need to participate in the life of the mind, even at the expense of their business sense, in order to convince themselves that they are not hucksters. I think it would be hard to say whether the most representative hero of American society is Charlie Anderson, of Dos Passos’ The Big Money, who killed himself trying to recover the pleasures of the mind and spirit he had sacrificed to achieve the Big Money, or whether that hero is Huck Finn, the patron saint of all intellectuals, who ended by having to light out for the terrible loneliness of the territory because he couldn’t stand what he called being sivilized” — that is, conforming to the standards of his fellow Americans in St. Petersburg.

Each of these heroes accepted one of the two nearly exclusive goods we Americans need, and each was destroyed by his inability to find the other. The hero who is caught, as they were, between the need for success and community and the need for integrity and loneliness is omnipresent in American fiction because, in a less heroic form, he is omnipresent in American life. Let me give you an illustration, a story by James Thurber in which Thurber finds himself stuck at a cocktail party with a businessman named Matthews. This Thurber suffers from a rather foolish but understandable desire for a kind of society in which his talent for intellectual wit will be admired. Mr. Matthews is a shrewd and friendly man who tries all through the Story to understand Thurber’s trouble but can’t because he is aware of only the practical values. The two are in difficulties from the start.


“Where now, Matthews,”I demanded, “are Belong draperies, the bright chandeliers, the shining floors, the high ceilings, the snuffboxes, the handkerchief stuck in the sleeve with careless care, the perfect bow from the waist, the formal but agile idiom?”

“Setup is different today,”Matthews said.

After trying to make Matthews see how vulgarized our civilization is by showing him how Thurber witticisms have been cheapened for popular consumption, Thurber finally tries to get through to him by describing how a publisher once asked him to do a new set of illustrations for Alice in Wonderland and Thurber said, “Let’s keep the Tenniel drawings and I’ll rewrite the story.” Trying his damnedest to get the point of this, Matthews succeeds only in displaying his complete ignorance of who James Thurber is. He says, “Fellow thought you were an artist instead of a writer, eh?” The cocktail party ends with Thurber shouting at a woman because she tells him how much she admires him for having refused to rewrite Alice in Wonderland in spite of all the money they offered him.

This seems to me a brilliant exploitation of the dilemma I have been trying to describe. It shows us the innocent egotism of the intellectual who wants to have his talent recognized by his fellows without sacrificing the intellectual subtlety on which he prides himself. It shows us the shrewd ignorance of the businessman who wants to feel he can understand this intellectual but lands hopelessly beside the point every time. Thurber has put a Columbus-Ohio Huck Finn and a CornwallConnecticut Charlie Anderson in the same story.


For all his lightness of tone, Thurber is showing us our nightmare of defeat. Most of the time, in actuality, we do not live in this nightmare, though I suppose we all frequently imagine it. Instead, we achieve some shaky and slightly conscience-stricken balance between the demands of our two sets of values, teetering ludicrously, like the clown in the circus’s balancing act. Clowns are only absurd because they are pathetic. And so are the Pulitzer Prize judges. And so are all of us.





普利策奖
多年来，普利策奖已被视为美国文学界有价值的奖项，特别是当它们标志着新的人才。但是，时常会有嘀咕声；1926年，当辛克莱-刘易斯拒绝接受他的小说《箭士》的奖项时，就有了嘀咕声；今年，当《小说》的陪审团明显悬空时，又有了嘀咕声。评论家、康奈尔大学英语系教授阿瑟-米泽纳回顾了这一记录。米泽纳先生是《天堂的另一面》的作者。

作者：阿瑟-米泽纳
1957年7月号
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作者：阿瑟-米泽纳（ARTHUR MIZENER

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当罗伯特-潘-沃伦在1947年因《国王的男人》获得普利策奖时，他是从一个有魄力的记者那里得知的。"你感觉如何，沃伦先生？"记者问，沃伦说："我对所有比我强的作家都没有获得普利策奖感到内疚。"


诚然，我们中的许多人都天真地认为普利策奖是为美国人在某一年中的最佳小说而颁发的；甚至该奖项的现有条款--"为杰出的小说"--也暗示评委们只关注文学价值。因此，在我们的范围内，我们对许多奖项提出质疑，这是非常正确的。在这里，猜测评委是件有趣的事，尤其是在时间过去后，我们很容易从价值观的暂时扭曲中清醒过来，这种扭曲存在于历史的任何特定时刻，肯定会有力地影响在那个时刻必须作出的任何判断。我们中的一些人已经老得足以记住1921年的情况，从而理解评委们如何认为《纯真年代》不仅是一本比《大街》更好的书（它可能是），而且在另一个非文学方面更胜一筹--把奖给它是一本更安全的书。即使在我居住的远在卡尤加水域之上的偏远山寨，流言蜚语的嗡嗡声也相当响亮。在纽约，这一定是骇人听闻的，据我所知，在那里，文学家们觉得没有参加几个文学鸡尾酒会的日子已经过去了，他们在那里受到最新的群体智慧的熏陶。也许，毕竟我们应该佩服普利策奖评委在这种条件下选择了这么多好书--尤其是好的诗集--而不是批评他们选择了这么多劣质的小说。

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尽管如此，即使在诗集中也有一些相当奇怪的选择。1935年，也就是玛丽安-摩尔的《诗选》和罗伯特-彭-沃伦的《三十六首诗》的那一年，奖项颁给了罗伯特-P-特里斯特伦-科芬的《奇怪的圣洁》；1938年，我们的评委更喜欢玛丽-扎特伦斯卡的《寒冷的早晨的天空》，而不是史蒂文斯的《带着蓝色吉他的人》和艾伦-塔特的《诗选》。这样的例子可以很容易地多起来。但这些也许足以表明似乎贯穿诗歌奖的模式。尽管像艾伦-塔特、约翰-克劳-兰瑟姆、约翰-皮尔-毕晓普和罗伯特-彭-沃伦这样的南方农业诗人才华横溢，但他们中没有一个人获得过普利策诗歌奖。评委们这种英勇地拒绝承认无论多么伟大的持久性功绩，几乎足以让一个美国人分享略带偏执的南方文学教条，即纽约对文学商业方面的控制被系统地用来歧视南方作家。


法官们似乎还对新形而上学诗人保持着非理性的偏见，特别是如果他们是外籍人士，就像这些诗人中最伟大的埃兹拉-庞德和T-S-艾略特那样。今天，我们当然很难理解他们至少拒绝尊重艾略特先生在1927年成为英国公民之前出版的其中一卷--例如《荒原》。也许现在指望评委们表现出授予埃兹拉-庞德的那种勇气是过分的，特别是在美国国会图书馆的研究员们因为说了几乎可以肯定是真的话：庞德的《皮桑大合唱》是美国人在1948年出版的最好的诗作之后。但在上一次战争之前，还有半打庞德的作品出版，这些作品本可以在不引起政治激情的情况下被关注。

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事实是，评委们--除了极少数的例外--把自己局限于赞美泽西市以北和奥尔巴尼以东地区的地区诗人。这种狭隘的省份主义迫使他们把奖项给了罗伯特-弗罗斯特四次，给了其他少数几个诗人两三次，而忽略了其他所有的好诗人。尽管如此，事实是--同样有一些例外--评委们所表彰的诗人都是好诗人，因此，对他们的辩护即使是狭隘的，也是有效的。

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但是，我认为，对于小说中的奖项，没有任何有效的文学辩护。如果要进行辩护，就必须以其他理由进行。几个例子可以说明原因。(这些例子都是在1931年之后，也就是咨询委员会宣布该奖将 "授予美国作家在该年度出版的最佳小说 "的那一年。普利策的最初条款是。"奖励当年出版的美国原创小说，该小说应最能体现美国生活的健康氛围以及美国礼仪和男子汉的最高标准。" 实际上，评委们似乎早在1929年就开始忽视这些条款了，当时获奖的是《红玫瑰》(Scarlet Sister Mary)，当普利策敦促评委们注意 "美国......男子汉的最高标准 "时，她的七个私生子很难成为他心目中的那种东西）。在1934年出版的小说中，斯科特-菲茨杰拉德和约翰-奥哈拉在这一年出版了他们最好的小说，并出现了两部出色的作品（卡罗琳-戈登的《阿莱克-莫里》和科赞斯的《海滨》）--对于这个奇迹年，评委们选择了约瑟芬-约翰逊的《十一月的现在》。1936年，他们成功地忽略了《荒唐，荒唐！》、《可疑的战斗》和《大钱》，以表彰《飘》。1940年，他们没有发现值得获奖的小说：那一年有《丧钟为谁而鸣》、《你不能再回家》、《哈姆雷特》、《明天问我》和《朝圣之鹰》。1951年，他们放弃了《修女的安魂曲》、《美国的梅尔维尔-古德温》和《麦田里的守望者》，而选择了《凯恩叛变》。


在诗歌评比中几乎不明显的一些明显的文学以外的标准似乎在这里起了作用；我想，它们之所以出现，是因为我们以一种我们不关心诗歌的方式关心小说。我们认为，小说所说的是关于我们实际生活的一些可以理解的东西；小说并没有语无伦次地嘀咕四月是最残酷的月份，我们可以把它当作无稽之谈来忽略，也没有歇斯底里地挥舞着手臂谈论上帝帮助我们的高利贷。更糟糕的是（因为毫无疑问，我们自己有足够的智慧来抵制诱人的邪恶小说的坏影响），另一个家伙可以读到它们，并理解它们在说什么，只有天知道这可能对国家的健全造成什么损害。我想说的是，我们的道德和政治利益深深卷入了我们对小说的判断中。当然，它们应该参与我们所有的文学判断，但由于它们并不经常参与我们对诗歌的判断，我们发现对诗歌的文学价值更容易做到公平。叶芝曾经痛苦地说过，他可以在他的诗中对爱尔兰说任何他想说的话，因为在都柏林没有人读这些诗。但是，如果叶芝可以蔑视爱尔兰，认为它是一个整天 "在油锅里摸索 "的国家，还能成为爱尔兰的参议员，那么没有一个小说家--甚至像乔伊斯这样默默无闻的人--可以做到。即使是像你在《都柏林人》中的那种完全客观的温和诋毁，也会导致《都柏林人》所遭受的那种压制。

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在美国，对文学的评判也大致如此。普利策奖评委对那些对我们的道德和政治信仰说过一些相当严厉的话的诗人进行了表彰；即使是他们最喜欢的罗伯特-弗罗斯特，在《设计》、《提供，提供》和《指令》等诗中也会有毁灭性的表现。如果传统的读者有可能完全理解他的话，这个人就不能在传统的读者中放任自流。这种风险显然不大；至少还没有一个失望的诗人出现在《星期六评论》上，谴责普利策奖评委对罗伯特-弗罗斯特的表彰。但对于小说家，评委们就得小心了。他们知道这一点，因为市场告诉他们如此。小说是一种商品，但诗歌的发行是出版商实行的一种慈善。


那么，在其最粗糙和最明显的地方，小说的文学之外的重要性是由我被告知经济学家喜欢称之为市场机制的东西所显示的--任何一个体面的诗人都可以告诉他们，他们有一天会后悔。现在，没有一个有自尊心的出版商，更没有一个有自尊心的作家，会对市场机制的判断置之不理。但我怀疑是否有出版商会否认，它有一种累积效应。此外，它对作家本身也有影响：每个作家都有一个业余的弗吉尼亚-柯库斯，她对其中一些人有相当惊人的影响，正如埃德蒙-威尔逊在谈到1927年的普利策奖得主时，以他一贯的尖刻态度注意到的那样。"通过不懈的努力和一种顽强的正直，似乎使他不可能不彻底相信自己的垃圾，[路易斯-布罗姆菲尔德]已经逐渐进入了第四等级，他的地位现在已经稳固了。"

可悲的是，这就是美国许多有前途的作家的历史，有些人不仅承诺要取得成就，而且还取得了成就--只是一小段时间而已。几乎在每一个十年中，你都可以找到一个真正优秀的美国作家，他后来逐渐消失了，就像辛克莱-刘易斯在20年代后所做的那样。斯科特-菲茨杰拉德问道，为什么美国人的生活中没有第二幕？美国在价值观上存在着什么差异，使我们这么多的作家粉身碎骨，而且，回到我们的等式的另一面，使有能力的评委把小说奖颁给平庸的书。


然而，他们的所作所为和发生在有天赋的作家身上的事情一样令人吃惊。他们的做法似乎暗示了某些判断标准，而这些标准充其量只是附带的文学性。首先，他们将选择的书必须--在不粗暴的情况下--以适当的美国方式看待经验。这种方式可能偶尔包括对美国的批评，但这种批评的理由必须是美国的道德或政治理想：像年轻的福克纳这样的淘气鬼或社会主义者，不管是怎样的美国人，像年轻的多斯帕索斯，都不需要申请。简而言之，要赢得普利策奖，一部小说无论在形式上还是在内容上都不能是非常新颖的。另外，这本书必须是受欢迎的--不仅仅是畅销书，而且是一本被大量美国读者接受为严肃的书。

这第二条标准最清楚地体现在评委们一贯拒绝挑选一位重要作家的早期作品。如果作家顽强地坚持下去并变得很受欢迎，他们就有可能认可他的第四本或第五本好书，但如果他们认可他的话，机会更好，他们会等到他生命中第一幕非常接近尾声的时候，甚至等到菲茨杰拉德所问的那个令人沮丧的第二幕的时候。因此，他们不仅放弃了1920年的《大街》，而且放弃了1922年的《巴比特》。但他们确实在1926年选择了《箭士》。前一年，《太阳照常升起》没有被选中，原因是海明威在书中很清楚地预见到了。当刚从纽约过来的比尔-戈顿在欧洲与杰克会合时，他满嘴都是关于讽刺和怜悯的话题，杰克对他说："你从谁那里得到这些东西？" 比尔说："所有人。你不读书吗？你不曾见过任何人吗？你知道你是什么吗？你是一个外籍人士。你为什么不住在纽约？那你就会知道这些事情。你想让我做什么？每年都来这里告诉你？没有人离开过自己的国家，没有人写过值得印刷的东西。. . . 你把自己喝死了。你变得对性很着迷。. . 你是一个外籍人士，看到了吗？你在咖啡馆里闲逛。" 杰克说，"这听起来是一种很好的生活。我什么时候能工作？" 像杰克一样，海明威确实在工作，25年后，普利策奖评委与卢斯企业一起对《老人与海》进行表彰。如果你从福克纳的第一部无可争议的伟大小说《声音与愤怒》开始计算，那么在他们发现他之前已经过了26年。


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我认为这里有足够的证据让我们相信，普利策奖往往不会颁给当年最好的小说之一，即使当时很清楚什么是最好的小说，因为某些文学以外的标准对评委来说至少与文学标准一样重要。但我希望我没有听起来好像我认为这些评委被偏见吓坏了，而我们却没有受到伤害。当这是一个我们真正关心的问题时，我们中的哪一个知道如何在我们对文学的卓越感和对我们赖以生存的道德和政治信念的重视之间保持平衡？好吧，也许这个反问句有一个答案。那些抱着 "不成功便成仁 "态度的人并没有试图保持任何平衡，但我认为他们比我们的法官更糟。不负责任永远解决不了任何问题，尤其是当它像负责任一样做出许多纯文学的错误判断时--至少，我认为小杂志和畅销书排行榜之间的竞赛，看谁能选出最多虚假的天才，是一件非常接近的事情。

像普利策奖的那些负责任的评委，正处于和罗伯特-潘-沃伦一样的两难境地：在他的作家信念中纠结，比他更好的作家由于非文学原因而被剥夺了普利策奖，而沃伦自己非常清楚，他和大多数导致评委忽视好作家的价值观是一样的。任何聪明的文学家都会经常对普利策奖评委和好莱坞的做法感到震惊。但我认为可以完全不客气地说，他还是可能会接受他们的钱，甚至接受他们的认可会给他带来的那种工作。这里体现出来的价值冲突非常微妙，它对文学商人的作用就像对成功的作家的作用一样肯定。事实上，它对我们所有人都起作用。


当一个作家写出了他能写的最好的书，他会告诉自己，他不需要拒绝任何给他带来的钱，因为他在写这本书时没有损害他的原则或品味。如果出版商认为他的书可能成为畅销书，成为普利策奖的候选人，甚至成为电影的买点，他可能只会感到无辜的喜悦。在他看来，当他的出版商建议他去纽约访问，以帮助建立这本书时，这对他的工作来说是微不足道的、暂时的中断。当他发现自己在文学鸡尾酒会上对有影响力的评论家几乎是阿谀奉承时，他可能会感到微微不安，他一直--可能有一些正义感--认为自己很愚蠢。但接下来他知道的是，他出现在电台和电视节目中，电台主持人的高贵气质让他惊恐地表达了他既不相信也不尊重的意见。(当玛丽-玛格丽特-麦克布赖德对他进行工作时，一个人不会说什么！)如果我们的作家不够幸运，没有迅速淡出人们的视线，他最终会在好莱坞写剧本，在那里他甚至可能得不到成功的安慰。

你在出版商中看到了这一过程的反面。出版商或多或少都是坏商人，因为他们都在某种程度上关心好书，并永远在努力出版它们。这是个杯具的游戏，作为商人他们知道这一点。几年前，阿尔弗雷德-克诺夫试图恢复福特-马多克斯-福特的《游行的尽头》，一个真正的硬汉商人会怎么想？游行的尽头》是一部四部曲，是一本超过800页的相当难懂的书，而福特最畅销的书，作为一种商品，已经死了，甚至在先锋派中福特也没有什么名气。但阿尔弗雷德-克诺夫知道，福特是一位优秀的小说家。因此，这个可怜的家伙不仅出版了《游街示众》，他甚至还花大价钱收集并印刷了一群对购买者没有任何影响的奇特人物对福特的好评。我知道这件事，因为我就是其中的一个怪人。好吧，Parade's Pnd出版得很好；它也被退回了，几乎在纸上的墨水还没干的时候就被退回了。


玛丽-麦卡锡曾经说过，我们美国人是一个有两千万个浴缸的国家，每个浴缸里都有一个人文主义者。我们也是一个由两万名知识分子组成的国家，其中每个人都有几个孩子，他想把他们送到普林斯顿和瓦萨大学，还有一个妻子，她有一个广为人知的计划，要把家里的每个房间都装修一下。知识分子太需要他们的伙伴们的社区了，以至于他们对中产阶级的生活方式进行了彻底的拒绝，而这正是他们的伙伴们需要参与心灵的生活，甚至牺牲他们的商业意识，以说服自己他们不是骗子。我认为很难说美国社会最具代表性的英雄是多斯-帕索斯的《大钱》中的查理-安德森，他为了恢复他为实现大钱而牺牲的思想和精神的乐趣而自杀，或者说这个英雄是哈克-费恩，所有知识分子的守护神，他最后不得不为领土的可怕的孤独而亮出，因为他不能忍受他所谓的被文明化"--即符合他在圣彼得堡的美国同伴的标准。

这些英雄中的每个人都接受了我们美国人所需要的两种几乎独占的商品中的一种，而每个人都被他无法找到另一种商品而摧毁。像他们一样，夹在对成功和社区的需求与对正直和孤独的需求之间的英雄，在美国小说中无处不在，因为，以一种不那么英雄的形式，他在美国生活中无处不在。让我给你举个例子，詹姆斯-瑟伯的一个故事，瑟伯发现自己被困在一个鸡尾酒会上，和一个叫马修斯的商人在一起。这个瑟伯患有一种相当愚蠢但可以理解的愿望，即希望在一种社会中，他的智慧机智的天赋会被钦佩。马修斯先生是一个精明而友好的人，他在《故事》中一直试图理解瑟伯的烦恼，但无法理解，因为他只知道实用价值。这两个人从一开始就陷入了困境。


"马修斯，现在在哪里，"我问道，"贝隆的窗帘、明亮的吊灯、闪亮的地板、高高的天花板、鼻烟壶、不经意间插在袖子里的手帕、腰部的完美鞠躬、正式但敏捷的成语？"

"今天的设置是不同的，"马修斯说。

在试图通过向马修斯展示瑟伯的俏皮话如何被廉价地用于大众消费来让他看到我们的文明是多么的庸俗化之后，瑟伯最后试图通过描述一个出版商曾经要求他为《爱丽丝梦游仙境》做一套新的插图来打动他，瑟伯说："让我们保留滕尼尔的画，我来重写这个故事。" 马修斯竭力想了解这一点，但他只成功地显示了他对詹姆斯-瑟伯是谁的完全无知。他说："研究员认为你是一个艺术家，而不是一个作家，嗯？" 酒会结束时，瑟伯对一个女人大喊大叫，因为她告诉他，尽管他们给了他很多钱，但他拒绝重写《爱丽丝梦游仙境》，她非常钦佩他。

在我看来，这是对我一直试图描述的困境的精彩利用。它向我们展示了知识分子无辜的利己主义，他想让自己的才华得到伙伴们的认可，同时又不牺牲他引以为豪的智慧的精妙。它向我们展示了商人的精明无知，他想觉得自己能理解这个知识分子，但每次都无可奈何地偏离了主题。瑟伯把俄亥俄州哥伦布市的哈克-芬恩和康沃尔州的查理-安德森放在同一个故事里。


尽管瑟伯的语气很轻松，但他向我们展示了我们失败的噩梦。大多数时候，在实际生活中，我们并没有生活在这个噩梦中，尽管我想我们都经常想象它。相反，我们在两套价值观的要求之间取得了某种摇摇欲坠、略带良心不安的平衡，像马戏团里的小丑一样，可笑地摇摆着。小丑之所以荒谬，是因为他们很可悲。普利策奖的评委也是如此。我们所有人都是如此。