Critics’ Awards: Nuts and Bolts, and Hold the Glitz

At least the scroll now comes in a frame.

For the first five years of the National Book Critics’ Circle’s existence, that is to say, winners of the group’s annual awards took home not a chunky check or a sculpture by a renowned artist, but a rolled-up scroll lauding the author’s contribution to the field of American letters.

It was not that the NBCC had some lofty purpose in mind, said one of the organization’s founders, free-lance critic Eliot Fremont-Smith; simply that “we didn’t have any money.”

As it happened, added Fremont-Smith, now the NBCC’s treasurer, “the fact that there is no money involved seems to have enhanced the awards. Maybe you could call it reverse snobbism.”

But NBCC president and chairman Nina King, Book World editor of the Washington Post, said, “I don’t think there’s anything impure about giving money. I think the reason we have not given money is that traditionally we have not wanted to accept money from outside sources,” such as publishing houses.

The National Book Awards, for example, takes in substantial revenue from its glitzy, $400-per-person annual awards dinner, an event that is heavily supported by the publishing industry. By contrast, the board of the NBCC, with its dues of $30 per year, once came close to taking up a collection among members to pay for its decidedly unglitzy annual cocktail party.

Meeting, in the manner of literati of generations past, at the staid old Algonquin Hotel, the NBCC was conceived in the spring of 1974 during one of the periodic identity crises of the National Book Awards (which later became the American Book Awards, and still later became once again the National Book Awards).

Although the group intended to pay recognition to the writers of America, the NBCC also grew up in what Nona Balakian, an editor on the New York Times Book Review who was the NBCC’s first secretary-treasurer, called “the high hope and expectation of lifting from growing obscurity and neglect the hard-working book critics of this nation.”

To that end, said King, the NBCC has been successful. Recognizing the contribution of the sometimes lowly literary critic was “the whole point,” she said.

“I think the basic clue to the National Book Critics’ Circle is that it is a very ad hoc organization,” said Brigitte Weeks, the editor-in-chief of the Book-of-the-Month Club, Inc., who served as president of the NBCC when she was editor of the Washington Post’s Book World.

“In the best sense,” Fremont-Smith agreed, “it is still an amateur organization.”

“It’s a sort of tangled gathering of a bunch of people who write about books,” Weeks said. “Some of them have lots of clout and lots of power, and some of them are free-lancers, people who are not well-known at all. And they’re all meeting together, literally in a smoke-filled room.”

That room is no longer in the Algonquin, because when the hotel was sold to a Japanese concern, the NBCC lost its freebie quarters. But the rabble-rousing quality of a 24-person board has persisted--as has the decidedly nonregional character of the NBCC as a whole. Debates over award selections or over issues of ethics are likely to be heated and passionate, board members said. These fierce but friendly arguments and discussions are equally apt to represent voices from far beyond the traditional publishing purview of Gotham.

“There used to be a lot of paranoia about the regional issue; do we have enough people from outside New York,” Fremont-Smith said. But now, former president Weeks said, the NBCC is “not at all Manhattan-dominated. If anything, it’s almost the other way.”

“There is a certain provincialism in the East,” Fremont-Smith said. But, he added, “at least up until now the fact is that the center of publishing has been New York City, period. So the pining and the whining about regionalism has a lot to do with that fact.”

NBCC awards are selected according to what is known as a “two-tier” basis where the general membership is involved in voting on a limited number of nominees. If, in a mail ballot, 20% of those voting choose a particular title, it is automatically nominated.

With as many as three of the five nominations in each category done by the membership, board members then discuss the remaining selections and engage in straw votes. “But nothing is decided until the very end, which is a ratification vote to show that everyone has done his or her best,” Fremont-Smith said. In that phase of the selection process, there is no time limit to discussion, and decisions must be unanimous.

Often, of course, the titles chosen by the NBCC are the same as those selected by the Pulitzer Prize Committee or by the National Book Awards. In part, Nina King said, this is because “the books that do get nominated tend to be the big, noticeable, recognizable books”--and they may also be the country’s best books for that year and that category. “It’s my gut feeling that there are not that many unrecognized gems,” she said.

In some ways, this very harmony that emerges from the voting and selection process almost seems to be in contradiction with an organization made up of people who make their livings by expressing divergent opinions. Critics are by nature an independent, sometimes cantankerous lot. Putting them in a room, or on a single ballot, together and asking them to reach a consensus almost seems to argue with the very notion of autonomy that critics hold so dear.

On the other hand, the continued survival of the NBCC does seem to indicate that there is room for both individual opinions and a collective view. And critics who may feel compromised by a mass statement are not, after all, required to join or to participate.

Weeks, for one, says she misses her involvement in the organization she was forced to quit when she stepped from journalism into the business side of publishing. After all, it was she who sat up late one night, slipping those scrolls into clip-in frames.

The NBCC, she said, “is very nuts and bolts.”

ALSO: A study from the U.S. Department of Commerce ranks the New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago and Washington, D.C., metropolitan areas as the country’s top book markets. But the same report showed that the communities with the highest bookstore sales per household were Austin, Tex.; Madison, Wis.; San Jose, Calif.; Boston, and San Francisco.

In other statistical developments, a survey released by the American Booksellers Assn. showed that 72 million Americans, or 39% of the adult population, gave and/or received a book during the 1989 holiday season. Baby boomers showed a definite preference for books, with 48% of adults ages 35 to 44 reporting that they gave or received a book. Forty-six percent of Republicans and 43% of Independents exchanged books, while only 33% of Democrats did so.

. . . In West Germany, one of the popular ways to buy books is through the 280 book-club centers that serve as supplemental distribution channels for books from all publishers. In East Germany, barely had the Wall come down but Bertelsmann had opened its first book-club center. As in the west, customers wishing to buy books there must first become members. Calling the new facility a test of the East German market, Bertelsmann said the Dresden location would sell only books.

Also on the international front, Aryeh Neier, executive director of Human Rights Watch, and John G. Ryden, director of Yale University Press, have announced a joint publishing program designed to promote worldwide dissemination of Human Rights Watch reports.

“Reliable, documented reports on human-rights abuses have become the most important means of reducing those abuses,” Neier Said, “because in today’s world, almost every government cares about its international reputation and is aware that responsible publications of its abuses damage that reputation.”

The new venture will include publication of select Human Rights Watch reports; publication of an annual “state of the world” volume; publication under a joint imprint of original books on human rights topics, and transfer of the entire Human Rights Watch backlist to a data base to make them more readily accessible.

This year’s National Book Critics’ Circle Awards will be presented Thursday in New York City. The winners are:

For fiction, “Billy Bathgate” by E. L. Doctorow (Random House).

For nonfiction, “The Broken Cord” by Michael Dorris (Harper & Row).

For biography/autobiography: “A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt” by Geoffrey C. Ward (Harper & Row).

For poetry: “Transparent Gestures” by Rodney Jones (Houghton Mifflin).

For criticism: “Not by Fact Alone: Essays on the Writing and Reading of History” by James Clive (Alfred A. Knopf).