When publishing toffs and literary celebrities opened their invitations to
the 48th National Book Awards ceremony this fall and saw the words
"Marriott Marquis," an audible sniff was heard. But they got over
themselves, and on the evening of Nov. 18, they gamely made their way to
Times Square to mark a year of bombs and best sellers, literature and pulp.
They had to admit it wasn't all that bad. The lamb course was excellent,
the coat check ample, Wendy Wasserstein made a funny master of ceremonies,
and, in the considered opinion of one New York Times Book Review editor,
"the babe quotient" was "unusually high."
For a few brief hours, they could pretend the occasional clutch of
bewildered tourists wandering into the middle of their cocktail hour had
come to gawk at them. Kurt Vonnegut mingled with Sally Quinn while New
Yorker literary editor Bill Buford showed off a subtly checked tuxedo to
Book Review editor Chip McGrath; Murdoch publishing chief Anthea Disney
paraded around Jane Friedman, her new hire from Random House Inc.;
Grove-Atlantic Inc.'s glamour puss Morgan Entrekin didn't make a move
without a small army; and Harry Evans stood by the dining hall door like an
official greeter. The crowd even laughed good-humoredly when the nonfiction
winner, American Sphinx author and Mount Holyoke historian professor
Joseph J. Ellis, joked that when he had heard that the "N.B.A." had called,
he had misty-eyed visions of athletic stardom.
The event brought out more than 750 guests and raised a record $425,000 for
the National Book Foundation and its programs promoting literacy,
inner-city poetry workshops and a summer writing camp, with Studs Terkel
receiving the 1997 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American
Letters. Indeed, the perennial soul-searching about the purpose and point
of literary beauty pageants and publishing awards was held to a minimum.
Perhaps that was why almost nobody noticed one glaring absence. Henry Holt
& Company was missing. Michael Naumann, the publishing house's president
and chief executive officer, boycotted the awards to protest the exclusion
of Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon from the nominations.
The Holt hole struck an especially odd note given the house's active
participation in the past, particularly while Mr. Naumann's predecessor,
Bruno Quinson, served as a member and then chairman of the book foundation
board. It cast an even harsher light, in retrospect, over the media's
feverish pitting of genial newcomer Charles Frazier and his lush Civil War
novel Cold Mountain against the creative ambitions of literary idol Don
DeLillo in Underworld, both of whom not only rode the best seller list
together for several weeks but also spent much of the time before the
nominees reading the preceding night engaged in intense conversation.
Neil Baldwin, executive director of the National Book Foundation, first got
an inkling of Holt's stance when he called Mr. Naumann because he hadn't
heard from the publisher by the R.S.V.P deadline. Mr. Baldwin was referred
instead to a publicist who told him Holt would not attend. In disbelief, he
called Mr. Naumann a second time. "Michael told me he was very, very upset
and hurt that the Pynchon book wasn't on the list of nominations," Mr.
Baldwin said, "and that it would be an insult to his friend--not that I
know that they are friends--for him to come."
In vain, Mr. Baldwin tried to explain that Holt's spending $7,200 for a
table would help support the book foundation. Mr. Baldwin recounted that he
gave Mr. Naumann his "usual spiel." "I tried to make the point that, even
though this is a very competitive industry and the ferocity of it is great,
especially now, we're a community," he said. "But he was very angry. He
said it was a slap in the face. It's a matter of principle for him."
Mr. Baldwin got angry as well: "I said that if everybody subscribed to the
idea that if they weren't nominated they wouldn't come, there wouldn't be
any more National Book Awards! But Michael just said, 'Neil, I have no
obligation to be anywhere I don't want to be.' It's very frustrating; we're
trying to create a philanthropic mission out of a commercial nexus, and
maybe it's the nature of the culture that we end up in situations where the
very people we're trying to promote don't get it."
Mr. Naumann, however, remains focused on the single evening. "I wasn't
there because the jury chose not to put Thomas Pynchon into the list of
finalists," he said. "I felt it was so awkward, not to say nuts. How
could they say, To hell with one of the greatest writers produced in this
century? And that's not just my opinion, but of reviewers across the
country...I'm not only Tom's friend but also his publisher, and I couldn't
be part of that. So I'm a sore loser--and proud of it!"
Mr. Naumann has followed up with a letter to Mr. Baldwin making another
point, one that was a subject of much debate both during and after the
awards. "I wrote that I just couldn't have watched the spectacle of the
prize not even going to Don DeLillo who, of the nominees, wrote the most
important piece of fiction this year," Mr. Naumann said. "I'm very happy
for Morgan, but there's only so much a publisher can take."
Yet spectacle is at the heart of the matter. Commercially minded publishers
and their audiences want some bang for their buck, and, as Mr. Naumann
recalled of his favorite recluse, "When Tom got the National Book Award for
Gravity's Rainbow, he sent in some professor who made a funny speech, and people got very angry. The institutional memory is very long." Of course,
there is still for Mr. DeLillo--or for Mr. Pynchon--the prospect of the
Pulitzer Prize. "Wouldn't that be embarrassing for the National Book Award
judges," Mr. Naumann laughed.
The DeLillo loss continues to rankle many in literary circles, not the
least because they feel the award's outcome is the result, as an editor in
the DeLillo camp said, "of soft committees who all have friends or enemies
among the nominees. It's payback time. You wonder what they bring to bear
besides grudges.... This year's vote was really a knock against the
postmodernist novel and what DeLillo was trying to do with it."
It is a criticism that Mr. Baldwin takes to heart. "How can you feel badly
about the choice of Cold Mountain?" he said. "On the other hand, when I
read Underworld, I thought there wasn't even an analogy for it--not even
'the Moby-Dick of the 90's.' It's truly unique, regardless of whether you like it or think it's good." To his relief, the DeLillo-versus-Frazier
issue so consumed the other diners at the ceremony that he thought no one
picked up on Holt's disappearing act. "Bruno Quinson was at my table," Mr.
Baldwin said, "and I didn't even tell him."
Mr. DeLillo took a rather different approach to the evening. He arrived
equipped with printed cards, which he gave to fellow finalists, bearing his
name in the upper right-hand corner and the message "I Don't Want to Talk
About It" centered in large letters below. "He said he planned to hand them
out whether he won or lost," one recipient said. And, silently, he did.
