I am sorry not to be able to accept in person the National Book Award but I could not find a suitable boat to take me across the ocean and flying is for the birds.
To illustrate, through an amiable representative, my appreciation of this splendid prize allows me to dwell briefly on the bright side of a writer’s life by listing the delights of the greatest of arts, the art of fiction. I enjoy, I have always enjoyed stressing the word “art.” An unpopular intonation nowadays: art not as a profession, not as a summer commune of kindred minds, and not as a demonstration of topical ideas in a drizzle of politics, but Art with a capital A as big as the biggest Arch of Triumph, art careful and carefree, selfless and self-centered, art burning the brow and cooling the brain.
I have in view, naturally, my dedication to it not my achievement, which today is given a rich tangible prize and tomorrow may have to be content with a footnote in a survey of extinct authors—one of those suppositions that are permissible then only when one does not really believe them.
My sense of utter surrender to art started sixty years ago when my father’s private librarian typed out for me and posted to the best literary review my first poem which, though as banal as a blue puddle in March, was immediately accepted. Its printed image caused me much less of a thrill than the preliminary process, the sight of my live lines being sown by the typist in regular rows on the sheets, with a purple duplicate that I kept for years as one does a lock of hair or the bell tail of a rattler.
I must skip the later delight of writing a novel over which I took such fond trouble that I can still regurgitate it in my mind; and one always remembers the arrival of one’s published book, the precious, the pure volume which one tenderly opens—to find a fatal misprint of the plausible kind that will keep up with the book’s destiny through hard and soft, from one edition to another, like a tenacious ancestral wart. A much later bedazzlement was the Boxed Book, with its Order of the Ribbon affixed to the headband—and this touch of luxury leads me back to the thrill of a Literary Award.
And even if, at this eloquent point, to the stupefaction of the audience, a wild-eyed messenger on a real horse gallops onto the stage crying that it all had been a hideous mistake I would be delightfully recompensed by the embarrassed smile of the real winner waiting in the wings with his little speech.
* “Mr. Nabokov’s Acceptance Speech,” in case he won when the American National Book Awards, for which his Look at the Harlequins! was short-listed, were announced. Typescript, VNA Montreux. To his editor at McGraw-Hill, Fred Hills, he wrote on April 8, 1975, “I shall airmail express to you tomorrow the phantasm of an acceptance speech….Dan Lacy or you would be kind to substitute for me if fancy becomes fact” (Selected Letters, 1940–1977, ed. DN and Matthew J. Bruccoli [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich / Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1989], 545). His novel did not win.