Black Prizes, Black Prospects

When the 1987 National Book Award, one of our major literary prizes, went to Larry Heinemann’s “Paco’s Story” instead of, as widely predicted, to Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” it caused a fair stir among those people in New York who publish books or write about them.

No real damage seemed to have been done, except to feelings. If you are a teacup, tempests are what you do for excitement. The New York world of letters does resemble teacups in a few particulars: circularity, coziness, brittleness and as an occasion for gossip.

Three weeks ago, however, things turned harder. The New York Times printed a statement by 48 black writers, along with a letter from two of its signatories, June Jordan and Houston A. Baker Jr. Both the statement and the letter were fervent tributes to Tony Morrison. In addition, the letter noted that James Baldwin had recently died without ever winning either the National Book Award or the Pulitzer Prize. And the statement notched the comparison tight. It deplored the “oversight and harmful whimsy” that has so far denied the same prizes to Morrison.

Subsequently, the authors have said that the statement and the letter were simply their own prize to Morrison. Despite their implication of unfair treatment of black writers, they were not meant to be an attack on the Pulitzer and Book Award juries, let alone an accusation of discrimination. And they were not intended to influence the 1988 Pulitzer, which will be awarded this spring.

Whether you believe all of this or not, there is nothing wrong with lambasting judges. All literary prizes are necessarily a mixture of oversight and whimsy, in the sense that there is usually more than one candidate who should win, and the choice, at best, is personal taste. (At worst, and not infrequently, it is politics.) In the case of the Pulitzers, for example, this was as true when the winners were Alice Walker and Rita Dove as when they were Peter Taylor and John Updike. The literary heights are round, not pointed.

Here, since I was one of the three NBA judges--the others were the black novelist Gloria Naylor and the white novelist Hilma Wolitzer--I should state the following: No oversight was involved when we chose five finalists, including Heinemann and Morrison, and none of us felt whimsical when two of us then chose Heinemann and one of us chose another of the five as the winner. The final vote involved neither compromise nor lobbying. Whatever uncertainties any of us had about who should be No. 1--there were some--these were resolved by each of us alone, and on the night shift.

I regret the air of mystery that hangs over the preceding paragraph. But the three of us agreed from the start that, in the event of a 2-1 vote, we would not disclose the identity of the runner-up or who voted for whom. As to race considerations, I can only say that none of us bent either backwards or forwards.

Sometimes, of course, not bending means you get clipped on the head. In this case, the target was Gloria Naylor. There was a rumor around New York that she had not voted for “Beloved,” a rumor that John Leonard saw fit to spread when he wrote in Newsday: “. . . Most of the protesters also know who voted how on the NBA judges’ panel, which means they know that beautiful black sisterhood is not invariably abiding.” June Jordan, who teaches at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, wrote Naylor that it would be “embarrassing and morally elliptical” for her to take up the month’s residency in creative writing at Stony Brook that had been arranged. Naylor replied, in effect, that she would not go where she was not welcome. For the reason already stated, I may not say whether the report of Naylor’s vote was true or not, but it hardly matters. Intellectual intolerance has an obstinate resemblance to itself.

The broader question raised by the letter and statement, and by the debate that followed, is more interesting than these particulars. To suggest that writers should be recognized as speaking for a race or a community so that if Morrison fails to win a prize, all blacks fail with her--to suggest this is to raise a deeper question. Do writers write, or should they write, as the voice of a particular community or of a particular communal experience? To the first formulation, we may tend quickly to say no; or rather, to say that such writing, however forceful, is genre writing and is limited by definition.

But put it the second way. How else does anyone write? There was a bit of Western culture that Shakespeare stood upon when he composed his plays. Matthew Arnold’s humane and troubled sensibility may seem to us today, even while affecting us, the voice of a remote tribe on--Hugh Kenner’s term--a sinking island.

Surely the sensibilities of Updike’s suburbanites are the sensibilities of a band of Goths passing into sunset. Surely Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth’s characters are as stamped with ethnic and communal particularity as those of John Cheever. Roth even uses the clamorous, commanding voice that some black critics find a limitation among many black writers--Charles Johnson finds it so with Toni Morrison--a voice that “tells” rather than “shows.”

If black writing has, for so long, been genre writing in a relatively narrow sense of the word, this narrowness is changing. The strict communal theme broadens. The poetic language and mythic sense of Morrison, the unforgettable feminist images of Ntozake Shange and Gloria Naylor, and John Edgar Wideman’s ability to create an aged seer, in “Reuben,” who surveys a ghetto that becomes a haunting image of our wider fading--these feel like the beginnings of not a cultural facsimilation but a kind of synthesis. Only the beginnings, though; there is a hard way to go.

John Leonard has written that black writers feel themselves to be emigres still in our society. In truth, it is harder than that. Jewish-American, Irish-American, Italian-American writers could wrestle with the question of joining the mainstream.

Their forebears had come voluntarily, after all. It was in the first instance a fulfillment not a denial of their heritage to try to assimilate. And, by one of the wonderful paradoxes that bless literature, it was by assimilating that the original identity emerged in universal form. Zuckerman doesn’t become us; we become Zuckerman.

But if your ancestors have been brought here as slaves, that first impulse of assimilation, even when allowed, cannot help but seem a betrayal. Wideman and others have written of the dilemma: loyalty and authenticity at the cost of separateness, or losing yourself in order to toy with universality. The day may come when black writers will write about whites from the inside, and on that day, the white literary sensibility will become partly black.

It is a remote prospect still, yet already Morrison’s language, Naylor’s exuberant women, and Wideman’s stoic and fading world challenge us to look, not outside but inside ourselves.