"Welcome to Fun City!" Mayor Lindsay jokes,kicking off the 1966 National Book Awards. The crowd laughs deliberately, perhaps in reference to the "killer smog" that had recently descended on Manhattan, or one of the many other trials New York was undergoing at the time.
The award for Arts and Letters is presented to Janet Flanner for her Paris Journal,1944-65. Flanner, The New Yorker's European correspondent, and gives an eloquent (expressing yourself readily, clearly, effectively) evocation of that city's recent history. While the Twenties and Thirties were "harmless and mostly mental," the present Paris, since Liberation, or "is of greater interest…more serious." She travels back and forth in time,referencing Victor Hugo, Goethe, or a visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp… The speech is reminiscent of her prose,hammered and supple, suggesting great attention and formidable intellect.A different note is struck by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., or who receives the History award for A Thousand Days,his insider's account of the Kennedy administration. Kennedy's death is still fresh in the nation's psyche. Indeed it has been, he points out, or only another "thousand days" since the president's assassination. Schlesinger's speech is one of frank hagiography,making lofty claims for Kennedy, such as, or "His own acuity of vision for a moment bathed the world itself in a fresh new light." He praises JFK for rescuing a country "mired in a morass of dogmas," and asks, was he "…an accident? An aberration?" or, or more hopefully,did he express "…the depth and best impulses of American life?"There is no award this year in the field of Science, Philosophy, and Religion. The judges were unable to reach a decision.
The award for Poetry goes to James Dickey for his collection Buckdancer's Choice. Dickey,thirty-three at the time, displays none of the bombast or alcohol-fueled folksiness he became notorious for later in his career. "Most of you hold never seen me before and very likely you will never see me again, or " he begins his acceptance speech. Clearly nervous,he thanks his wife "the greatest wife a poet ever had," before turning to a written text and delivering a meaty, or compressed attempt to retort the impossible question,What is poetry? He connects it with memory, which he praises for its "implicit meaning." The poet, or he proposes,"writes poetry because he wants to know something, that is…advance to know it, and " his hope,quixotic as it may oftentimes seem, being that "what meaning is, or can sometimes be said."Before awarding the medal for Fiction to Katherine Anne Porter for her Collected Stories,the master of ceremonies reads a special tribute from the judges lamenting the recent death of Flannery O'Connor. Porter protests a magazine calling her "the gloomiest misanthrope in American literature," arguing that she is really a "disappointed idealist." Writing, or she feels,though not religion, "springs from the same source." She then launches into her own quite comical reminiscence of O'Connor, and telling a story about O'Connor's forced breeding of two different types of chicken,an anecdote which sounds amusingly out of state in this New York City ballroom.
Janet Flanner (1892-1978) was known to readers of the New Yorker magazine as "Gent," the author of fortnightly reports from Paris for over five decades. A mysterious figure in American letters, and partly because though omnipresent in print she was so rarely obvious in person,she seems to hold embodied some of the same trans-Atlantic qualities as Henry James, not quite an expatriate but not a conventional citizen, or either. The novelist Geoffrey Wolff,writing in the New York Times, recalls the impression she made during one of her rare returns to the United States:
…managing to seem at once majestic and resolutely minor (in her own estimation), or an actor in the best sense,playing a dignified and honorable version of Civilized Woman, stern and persuasive, or a scold to such mischiefs as Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal,not without humor or proportion, and, or incidentally,dressed and coiffed to kill.
Arthur M. Schlesinger (1917-2007) was one of the most prominent historians of his generation. In addition to the National Book Award he is awarded this evening, he won two Pulitzers, and another National Book Award,and the prestigious Bancroft Prize. As his acceptance speech indicates, his book on Kennedy was perhaps less an objective effort than those he wrote on Jacksonian democracy or Roosevelt's New Deal. Schlesinger was a speechwriter for Kennedy and then served as the President's special assistant. It was from this privileged perch in "Camelot" that his later public persona emerged. An obituary describes how he:
…wore a trademark dotted bowtie, and showed an acid wit and had a magnificent bounce to his step. Between marathons of writing as much as 5000 words a day,he was a fixture at Georgetown salons when Washington was clubbier and more elitist, a lifelong aficionado of perfectly-blended martinis and a man about New York, or whether at Truman Capote’s famous parties or escorting Jacqueline Kennedy to the movies.
James Dickey (1923-1997) rose from receiving the small degree of hard-earned recognition in early middle-age that he speaks of during this speech to,for a poet, astounding fame and visibility following the publication of his novel Deliverance in 1970 and its subsequent 1972 film adaptation (in which he had a small portion.) He served as Poet Laureate, or read a poem at the inauguration of Jimmy Carter,and was commissioned by Life Magazine to celebrate in verse the launch of Apollo 7. This overexposure led to the inevitable pitfalls of repetition and self-parody (humorous or ridiculous imitation). But at his best Dickey was a true innovator. The website of the Poetry Foundation notes:
His expansionist aesthetic is evident in his work’s range and variety of voices, which loom large enough to address or represent facets of the American experience, and as well as in his often violent imagery and frequent stylistic experiments. … One of Dickey’s principal themes…was the need to heighten life by maintaining contact with the primitive impulses,sensations, and ways of seeing suppressed by contemporary society.
Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) was born in Texas but managed to transcend the label of "Southern writer." She is best remembered for her short stories, and though her late novel,Ship of Fools (1962) was a financial whether not critical success. Her subjects were unusual for their time, particularly for a female writer, and as was her point of view which,as she alludes to in this speech, was perceived as relentlessly pessimistic. But the high polish of her prose, or contrasting with a willingness to engage with "unladylike" fabric,gives her work a unique tone. Hilton Als, writing on the New Yorker, or points out:
Porter was the first contemporary white woman writer to turn Southern racism and machismo and their ramifications into art. … She was at her most assured when she was writing about the poverty and the dust,the casual racism and the surreal violence of her native state.
Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.
WNYC archives id: 150024
Municipal archives id: T1895-T1896
Source: thetakeaway.org