I was quite bowled over when John Updike telephoned last spring to tell me that he and the distinguished members of the committee had chosen me for the medal. I had of course heard of it and knew of its very special quality. But, in all honesty, I never thought it would come my way. I was very surprised, but gradually I cooled off and began to wonder at the reason for my intense mixed reaction. I began to feel a little troubled. I asked myself why news of such an honor—even one of the greatest prestige like the MacDowell Medal—should leave me with this sense of uneasiness. Was it because some inner voice told me that I might not really deserve it—that there were at least three or four writers whom I greatly admired whose work should have gained the accolade instead of mine? Or was it because the whole issue of medals and prizes had once more surfaced, this time beneath my nose, making me ask the question again: “Are prizes necessary, or even desirable?” Isn't satisfaction in one's work sufficient reward, and so forth? These are, of course, tiresome worries. I am a Gemini with a bifurcated ego, one branch of which delights in being stroked, while the other emits howls of dismay. I was at that moment rereading the stories of my fellow Virginian (although born in Boston), Edgar Allan Poe, and it suddenly occurred to me that some of the distress I felt may have come from the question I abruptly asked myself: “Had Edgar Allan Poe ever won a medal?” I went to the source book (an old and rather ponderous biography by one Edmund Clarence Stedman), in which I was puzzled to discover, among other things, that Poe suffered from, and may have even died in part from, a malady described as “platonic erotomania,” which baffled me for a long time because Stedman offered no explanation. I put aside, however, the search for this riddle, and was able to ascertain after diligent checking that, no, Poe had never won a medal. This fact so piqued my interest that I was led to further research on medals, especially of the nineteenth century and more particularly as they affected the culture of the United States and of Europe, and I came up with some provocative data that I want to share with you very briefly. I'm concentrating on literary artists, though I'm sure similar cases could be made in music and the visual arts.
In the 1800s, Europe rewarded its writers handsomely with medals and trophies. Victor Hugo was a major collector of laurels; he had a whole room filled with bronzes and statuettes that fed a self-esteem already swollen by public idolatry scarcely equalled in the history of literature. At the same time, the behavior of Gustave Flaubert is an example of the extreme ambivalence toward medals which artists have often displayed. There is no more crushingly contemptuous line in all of world fiction than the final sentence of Madame Bovary, where the narrator, simultaneously summing up his feelings for his least favorite character, the odious Monsieur Homais, and expressing his hatred of such bourgeois claptrap as the Legion of Honor, writes: “He has just been awarded the Legion of Honor.” It is the put-down par excellence. Yet, a few years after Madame Bovary appeared, the recently reviled but now redeemed Flaubert was himself offered the Legion of Honor, a medal which one biographer described the great man as accepting with “gleeful alacrity.” So much for the famous cold Flaubertian detachment. But the champion acquirer of medals has to be Henrik Ibsen. So great was the demand for Ibsen's presence at medal-giving ceremonies all over Europe that the dramatist wrote his plays for half the year and went collecting medals the other half. Departing Oslo, then known as Christiania, in the spring, he would head southward to Bonn and Leipzig, pause, then mosey on to Vienna and Budapest—at all of which places there were kings and princes to hang medallion-bedecked ribbons around his neck—and then, as summer grew ripe, he would pass on down to Torino, Milano, Rome, back up to Paris and Brussels, thence to London for a whole clutch of medals and on to Amsterdam, Dublin, and Edinburgh, returning at last, when the first chill breeze of autumn roiled the North Sea, to Norway, clanking with bronze and gold, so weighted down with the ornaments that overlaid his chest that he was actually seen to list slightly to port as he trudged down the gangplank into the arms of his cheering admirers.
Contrast, if you will, this European cornucopia of honors with the situation as it existed at the same time in our country. No one cared a fig for literature. No medals for Edgar Allan Poe, no medals for Fenimore Cooper or Hawthorne, no medals for Whitman. No medals, no prizes, no annual publishers’ awards, no seals of approval from a book critics circle, no fellowships, no grants, no MacDowell Colony, nothing. It may have seemed a bleak and ungenerous society when compared with Europe, if anyone bothered to make the comparison, and certainly nineteenth-century American writers were unrewarded when likened to their present-day counterparts, yet it is hard to believe that the existence of awards and honors might have improved the quality of the work of our literary ancestors. There is something about the immense and tormented loneliness of the writers at that time—an alienation far more intense, really, than the one rather facilely attributed to our own period—that makes it plausible to think that their work might have been violated, perhaps even irreparably damaged, had that loneliness been intruded upon by anxieties over winning a prize. Like all artists, they were hungry for recognition, and this a few of them got, though most failed to receive anything like renown commensurate with their genius; it may be that at least part of the splendor of their achievement derives from the very loneliness and obscurity out of which it flowered. One thinks with relief of Emily Dickinson never having had to compound her existential dread by missing out, once again, on the Bollingen, and only horror could attend contemplation of what twentieth-century book chat might have achieved back in those days, the gossip churning about Melville's stupendous, perennially doomed quest for the Pulitzer, or a MacArthur grant going to Mark Twain, who didn't need it.
The twentieth century, however, has offered no dearth of awards in America. Only France exceeds us in the bestowal of public bouquets to flatter the artistic self (in France it is often literally nothing but a bouquet). But the trouble is that the proliferation of awards has frequently debased the very concept of honor, and laurel branches descend indiscriminately upon the brows of the journeyman and the hack. If, as in my Presbyterian childhood, every boy and girl wins a Bible, there is not much feeling of distinction. More seriously, the reputedly prestigious prizes become tainted, like virtually everything else in the nation, by commercialism or, worse, by political infighting which results in cowardly compromises and the award going to individuals of stunning mediocrity. But perhaps one should not complain too strenuously about this situation and rejoice rather in the knowledge that a nation which has had so little use for aesthetic endeavor has developed sufficient maturity to honor genuine artists, no matter how imperfect their achievement. Who knows, maybe artists in America will someday gain the repute now enjoyed by health food advisors and anchorpersons.
In an election year, I do not think it vainglorious to proclaim or echo, once again, that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. The recent conventions in Atlanta and New Orleans, with their bloated self-love and obscene jingoism, would convey to a man from Mars, or even from Italy, the impression that American politicians and their camp followers are drunk with power and totally insane. And the impression would be largely correct. With important and revered exceptions—and one wonders how Jefferson and Franklin D. Roosevelt ever managed to survive, much less triumph—politicians have ill-served their fellow man in our Darwinian struggle toward the light. The departed writer of whose gifts, in many ways, we most stand in need—I am thinking of H. L. Mencken—once contemplated the long list of American presidents, rolling off their names with heady delight: Harding, Fillmore, Taft, Hayes, not one but two defunct Harrisons, Taylor, Tyler, Pierce, Polk, Buchanan, Garfield, McKinley, on and on. Mencken wrote that their names had all the incantatory magic of a “roll call of mummified Sumerian kings.” I have not meant to be frivolous in conjuring Mencken's list but to juxtapose it against another list, which strikes me as being its antipodean opposite, and constitutes the reason why I am standing here today. I am speaking, of course, of the roster of distinguished artists who have received the Edward MacDowell Medal before now. The name of any one of these dedicated and greatly gifted men and women could not fail to inspire admiration; taken in aggregate, the group—all twenty-eight of them—represents the brightest constellation of American talent that could be assembled in the latter half of this century. The combined power of their creation has provided, I suspect, the invisible counterforce, the equilibrium, which has helped keep our bedeviled nation from the barbarism and darkness—the political vandalism—into which, suicidally, it keeps threatening to plunge. Their work has been of supreme value to the world, and to be asked to join their company flatters me beyond measure.
I would like to close not by asking you to join me in the Pledge of Allegiance but to ask you to listen to a few lines in prose from a poet and translator whose work I greatly admired, and whom I wish I had known better—Robert Fitzgerald, who died in 1985, at the age of 74. “So hard at best is the lot of man,” he wrote not long before his death, “and so great is the beauty he can apprehend, that only a religious conception of things can take in the extremes and meet the case. Our lifetimes have seen the opening of abysses before which the mind quails. But it seems to me there are a few things everyone can humbly try to hold on to: love and mercy (and humor) in everyday living; the quest for exact truth in language and affairs of the intellect; self-recollection or prayer; and the peace, the composed energy of art.”
Such serenity seems appropriate to the ideals of which the Edward MacDowell Medal is an embodiment, and I leave it for your contemplation.
[Speech delivered at the MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire, August 21, 1988.]