THE INDUCTION
1983
SOME OF THE FACES could be recognized from their likeness on the dust jackets or reviews of their books, or, in some cases, on the cover of Time. There was Erskine Caldwell, who many thought was dead; there were the elongated granitic features of John Kenneth Galbraith; there was Malcolm Cowley, his face crumpled by age, who had known Hart Crane; there were the husband-and-wife teams, seated apart, as at a dinner party: Eleanor Clark and Robert Penn Warren, Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller. Some notable faces were missing, either because they lived too far away, or were ailing, or were busy elsewhere, or couldn’t be bothered: Mary McCarthy, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Arthur Miller, James Baldwin, James Dickey, Paul Bowles, Kurt Vonnegut, William Styron, Allen Ginsberg.
The occasion was the annual Ceremonial of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, which was being held this Wednesday afternoon, May 18, 1983, in the auditorium at 632 West 156th Street, in New York City. Seated on the stage in six rising tiers divided by an aisle were 128 of the 250 members, in the three disciplines of art, literature, and music.
The members gathered at noon for cocktails, and as they basked in the warm glow of springtime and inclusion, a few of them made the first mistake of the day by overimbibing, perhaps from conviviality or anxiety (if they were scheduled to speak), or a mixture of both. Drinks were downed as waiters passed trays of smoked salmon canapés and escargots en croûte. At one, the refreshed members repaired to the Great Terrace for lunch at round tables under a vast yellow-and-white-striped tent, the lunch being complemented by a Meursault and a Beaujolais picked by the eminent composer and Francophile Virgil Thomson. What an august assembly, to have Virgil Thomson as its sommelier! At three, the Ceremonial proper would begin, to induct new members and hand out cash prizes. The afternoon’s highlight would be the awarding of the Gold Medal for fiction to Bernard Malamud, by Ralph Ellison.
Malcolm Cowley could remember when William Faulkner had given the Gold Medal to John Dos Passos. Faulkner got more and more restless as the afternoon and the speeches wore on, and started crossing out lines from his talk, until, when his turn came, he got up and said, “Here it is, Dos, take it,” handing him the medal. Faulkner would be hard to beat for the shortest speech on record.
Cowley had been a member for thirty-five years, nearly half the life of the Institute, which went back to 1898. It was followed six years later by the Academy, an inner sanctum of fifty, so that even when a writer or painter or composer thought he had arrived by being elected to the Institute, there was still a pecking order.
What Cowley had not seen firsthand in those thirty-five years he had found out for himself. How Robert Underwood Johnson, a magazine editor and third-rate rhetorical poet, who was secretary of the Institute, was so protocol-conscious that when he was named permanent secretary of the Academy, he wrote himself an “I-have-the-honor-to-inform-you” letter, which he answered with an “I-am-happy-to-accept” letter. Johnson found a benefactor for the Academy in the person of Archer M. Huntington, who combined great wealth inherited from his railroad-magnate stepfather with an interest in Spanish literature. Huntington gave the Academy a plot of land between Upper Broadway and the Hudson River, a stately Venetian Renaissance building, and an endowment.
From the start, there were quarrels between ancients (known as stalwarts) and moderns (known as “locofocos”). Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were the stalwarts’ idea of acceptable members, as Presidents who also wrote books, while avant-garde poets like Stephen Vincent Benet and Carl Sandburg were not. As leader of the stalwarts, Robert Underwood Johnson lobbied hard to keep “eccentrics” out. He thought John Brown’s Body was crude, and at an institute dinner in 1933, he read aloud a poem by Sandburg (whom he called Sandbag), on shaving in a Pullman car, as a shocking example of his vulgarity. When H. L. Mencken was proposed, Johnson wrote forty letters to keep him out, which he was unable to do, any more than he could keep out Benet and Sandburg. The level of his indignation may have affected his health, and he died in 1933, at the age of eighty-three.
Cowley remembered most of the little tempests that had shaken the Academy. He remembered John O’Hara, who felt that many lesser writers had been admitted ahead of him, breaking down and weeping on the stage when he was awarded the Gold Medal; and the fracas when Lewis Mumford, who had lost a son in World War II, resigned from the Academy when the Gold Medal was awarded to the isolationist historian Charles Beard. He remembered the only member ever to have been expelled, the painter of German descent Hunt Diedrich, who had mailed his antiwar appeals on Academy letterheads. Ezra Pound, although charged with treason, was not expelled.
More recently, Graham Greene had resigned as an honorary member because the Institute would not speak up against the Vietnam War, and Mumford, who had been readmitted, had again walked out in 1966 over Vietnam. There was quite a lot of dissension in the ranks over that one, but Cowley did not think the Institute should take a stand—it was not, after all, a political club, and taking a stand would only stir up trouble and lead to the loss of valuable members.
With the passage of the years, he had seen former “locofocos” turn stalwart, and campaign against Abstract Expressionists and free-verse poets. He had seen major writers wait fifteen years before being elevated from the Institute to the Academy. Ralph Ellison’s election had been held up because he had published only one novel, Invisible Man. Cowley had once asked him, “Ralph, when are you going to finish your next book?” Another strange case was that of Glenway Wescott, who had not brought out a book in nearly forty years but was working on his memoirs. He did not want them published in his lifetime because they included a frank account of his homosexuality, a subject on which he had old-fashioned qualms, but he did read an excerpt at an Institute dinner.
Then there was the question of women, for in the old days of stalwart supremacy, there had been long years with not a single woman member, but those days were over, and now there were women of every description, from outstanding fiction writers like Eudora Welty and Shirley Hazzard to Susan Sontag, the well-known panelist. Cowley remembered Caroline Gordon blaming her ex-husband Allen Tate for keeping her out, while in fact he was working hard to get her in, but she simply wasn’t known enough as a writer. As far as Cowley was concerned, the decisive question of literary merit was not “Does it menstruate?” Once Arthur Miller had brought his wife Marilyn Monroe to the Ceremonial, and Cowley, watching her in the audience from his chair on the stage, found himself absorbed by the depth of her décolleté, which seemed to descend from her neck right into the orchestra pit. After the Ceremonial, the poet Phyllis McGinley said, “No one noticed my new hat.”
The Institute cast a pretty fine net, but some of the biggest fish got away. Sinclair Lewis had refused membership in 1925, not wanting to “become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile,” and attacked the Institute in his Nobel Prize speech in Stockholm, but in 1935 he had second thoughts and joined. Hemingway turned it down, not wanting to be just another fish in the aquarium. Edmund Wilson and James Thurber did not think it was a writer’s business to join the establishment. Cowley felt that refusing to join was a mistake. The Academy could do some good—there was an Artists and Writers Revolving Fund, which gave cash to down-and-out practitioners of the arts—and if you were a member you could help direct the flow. The dinners were companionable, some of your colleagues became your friends, and once you were in the Academy, your hotel bills were paid if you were in town on Academy business.
In recent years there had been three other famous Refuseniks—J. D. Salinger, who had sent a wire saying I DO NOT FEEL FREE; Gore Vidal, who had said something snippy to the effect that he was not quite ready for the geriatric ward; and Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote, in his persona of permanent exile: “Socially, I am a cripple. Therefore all my thinking life I have decided not to ‘belong.’”
But over the years, Cowley thought, the Institute had done a pretty good job of collecting the best talent from the different schools of American writing. They had kept up with the avant-garde, bringing in banned writers like Henry Miller, “difficult” writers like John Barth, William Gass, and John Hawkes, relatively young poets like John Ashbery and Galway Kinnell, and counterculture figures like Allen Ginsberg, who had spent his entire adult life railing at the Establishment. Cowley liked Ginsberg, whom he had first met in San Francisco in the fifties, when he and his friends wore jeans and drank beer out of cans. Perhaps the Institute had a civilizing influence, for now he was drinking tea out of bone china and wearing vested suits. The trouble with Ginsberg was that he was always pushing to get his friends in—at one point he had tried to get his boyfriend Peter Orlovsky in, which Cowley found appalling.
Cowley usually supported the election of controversial figures—he was after all an Old Bohemian who had championed new writers from Hart Crane to Jack Kerouac. But among the five writers being inducted into the Institute that afternoon, there was one whom he had opposed, and that was William S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch and many other works of an “advanced” or experimental nature. Cowley did not often feel that someone ought to be kept out, but he was lukewarm or even cool to the merit of Burroughs’ work. Replete with homosexual sex scenes, hanging-ejaculation scenes, and scatology, much of it was frankly disgusting. At the November meeting, when new members were discussed, the Burroughs case had been pretty stormy, with some members speaking out quite violently against him. The members had a very high boiling point—oddly enough, there had not been much trouble over Henry Miller—but with Burroughs it was reached. Cowley was reminded of the storm over the composer John Cage in earlier years.
There were allusions to Burroughs’ personal life. He came from a Socially Registered St. Louis family, and his grandfather had invented a model of adding machine widely adopted by American business. But after graduating from Harvard he had rebelled against the values of his family and class, and had professed and written about his homosexuality and addiction to heroin and other drugs. He had engaged in various criminal activities, being arrested on several occasions. Despite his homosexuality, he had married and had a son, but in Mexico City he had (in what was supposedly an accident) shot and killed his wife. His work had been declared obscene and had been banned by U.S. Customs. Was this the sort of person one wanted in the Institute? Cowley did not think that a man’s personal life should be a determining factor in membership, but in Burroughs’ case, he could not see any literary value to the work.
The election of Burroughs once again drew the line between the stalwarts and the “locofocos,” and took six years: he was first nominated in 1977, and did not get in until 1983. The chief “locofoco” this time was Allen Ginsberg, who lobbied for Burroughs as tirelessly as Robert Underwood Johnson had lobbied against Mencken, writing letters, buttonholing sympathetic members, finding seconders, drafting citations, and going through the paperwork year after year.
Ginsberg had been elected in 1974, in belated acknowledgment of the changes of the sixties, so that there might be some kind of balance in the Institute between the combed poets and the shaggy poets. But aside from himself, there was still a Harvard East Coast axis heavily weighted toward the conservatives. Among the poets there was Howard Nemerov, an Establishment type, and Howard Moss, who as poetry editor of The New Yorker passed on his own work, which he published with predictable regularity, and William Jay Smith, who was basically a government type, thought Ginsberg, sent abroad by the U.S.I.A. They had their little network and got their friends in.
Well, Ginsberg would push to get his friends in, too. He would promote the kind of writer who wasn’t normally asked into the Academy. What was the point of joining unless he could shake things up? His first success came in 1975, when he managed to obtain for Burroughs a $3,000 award in recognition of his creative work. The citation, written by Ginsberg, read: “To William Burroughs, invisible man, explorer of souls and cities, whose literary exploration of dense worlds of international consciousness, amounts to homemade, individualistic, self-invented Yankee Tantra.”
But when it came to getting Burroughs elected, there seemed to be nothing but hurdles. One hurdle was the method of election. The number of vacancies depended on the number of deaths that year in the literature department. Then Ginsberg had to find a nominator and at least two seconders. Then there was a departmental ballot that weeded out the nominees from twenty-five or so to a few more than the number of vacancies. Then there was a ballot for all three branches, who voted for as many candidates as there were vacancies. One problem was that the people in the other branches often didn’t know who the writers were—they only knew the people in their own fields, so they had to trust the nominator and see the name reappear a few times until they became familiar with it.
Now Burroughs had a number of admirers in the Institute, among them Mary McCarthy and Christopher Isherwood, whom Ginsberg recruited as seconders in 1977, the year of his first attempt. He was so discouraged when Burroughs was turned down that he sent the Institute an angry letter: “By some mischance the bulk of poets and prose writers nominated for election this year are men of talent but not men of genius . . . something has gone completely wrong with the Academy and Institute by my lights, and I want that opinion registered forthrightly—we have a mediocrity scandal.” The writers elected that year were Hortense Calisher, Elizabeth Hardwick, Joseph Heller, and Ada Louise Huxtable.
“What am I doing here?” the disappointed Ginsberg asked himself. “Why should I lend my name to this club of fakes?” The only advantage he could see was that from time to time he pried some money loose from the fund for his needy friends. Other than that, he wouldn’t even have stayed in. When the poet Gregory Corso was so severely beaten in January 1983 by the San Francisco police that he had to be hospitalized, the fund sent him $1,500 to pay his hospital bill.
But the Burroughs election seemed stalled, and one day in a meeting Ginsberg lost his temper and said, “There’s nothing but a bunch of New Yorker writers here.” Howard Moss got up and said he objected to that, and Ginsberg mumbled a sort of apology: “No, it’s not just that, it’s true, but on the other hand . . .” Then it got to the point where they were nominating John Hollander and Richard Howard, who to Ginsberg were just kids who had never contributed anything real to the advancement of poetry, so at another meeting, speaking out of long frustration, Ginsberg said, “I’m not sure I belong here.” And the venerable Glenway Wescott, who had been there forever and was the chairman of a major committee, said, “Perhaps you don’t.” Ginsberg shuddered when he heard those words, because Wescott had spent years in Paris and known Gertrude Stein, and you would think he would have a soft spot for modernism, but in his dotage he seemed possessed by the stalwart spirit of Robert Underwood Johnson. Ginsberg had been saying that the Academy should bring in what was alive and valuable rather than collect fossils, and Wescott had countered that an Academy was an Academy and not a school for creative writers, which Ginsberg thought was bullshit.
Wescott’s attitude was part of another snag in the Burroughs election, which Ginsberg called the “snooty gays” versus the “scruffy gays.” He had hoped to count on the gay vote, but even here there were divisions, for the “snooty gays” detested Burroughs. It was as though they felt he had given homosexuality a bad name. Glenway Wescott referred to him as “that awful man,” Ned Rorem as “that dreadful fellow,” and Virgil Thomson said his work was “pornography for queers.” Ginsberg felt very much alone. In 1981, however, an unexpected ally joined the Burroughs camp. This was Leon Edel, known among some of his colleagues as “Leon Idol” for his worshipful and overprotective biography of Henry James. Ginsberg had sat next to him at meetings and found him congenial, and on August 24, 1981, Edel wrote Ginsberg from his home in Honolulu, agreeing to second Burroughs: “I am not sufficiently familiar with the writings of Burroughs to write a new citation, but have made a few suggestions on yours. . . . One doesn’t need to push too hard. I doubt whether Burroughs has been passed over for any other reason than that there are few vacancies at any time and it is always a slow process. I am willing to second him—I don’t think I should be the nominator when I simply have not read him except in small bits and pieces. One just has to persist.”
Ginsberg was beginning to understand the log-rolling that went on in the Institute. Edel was willing to second a writer whose work he knew only “in small bits and pieces” as a favor to Ginsberg, which would presumably be returned when Edel nominated someone. At last Ginsberg was making headway. He enlisted fresh supporters, among them Norman Mailer, Peter Matthiessen (with whom he had a connection through their both being Buddhists), John Ashbery, Galway Kinnell, and the novelist Hortense Calisher, who overlooked Burroughs’ reputation as a woman-hater, seeing herself as an ally of offbeat people. As for John Ashbery, he thought Naked Lunch was an important work and wanted to help out in a difficult election, while Galway Kinnell, another admirer of Naked Lunch, agreed with Ginsberg that Burroughs was the kind of writer who should be a member.
Ginsberg also saw the importance of making deals with members in other branches. He traded off with the sculptor Marisol—she would vote for his nomination in literature and he would vote for hers in art. He realized that he had to tone down the wording of his citation. He had been writing extravagant paragraphs—“Mr. Burroughs has influenced the world from Buenos Aires to Helsinki”—but that didn’t work. You had to be laconic and write, “It is time the Academy recognized Mr. Burroughs’ merit,” or, “It would be to the Academy’s advantage to have Mr. Burroughs as a member.”
So Ginsberg wrote a citation which was, by his standards, laconic: “Burroughs is original genius, prose-poet with extraordinary ear for assonance and speech styles; naked eye for hypnotic detail; penetrating mind, innovator of forms, ideas, moods, and cultural symbols; master-influence on several generations of poets and theater-music performers. He improves with age, as do his books. . . .” Nominated by Ginsberg in 1982, and seconded by Hortense Calisher, Leon Edel, Christopher Isherwood, Galway Kinnell, and Peter Matthiessen, Burroughs was at last elected in 1983. Ginsberg, a believer in the old Jewish message, “Today the world is created in you,” had done it. The renegade, the pariah, the outsider, the literary outlaw was brought into the fold of his more conventional peers.
The first inkling the Institute had that Burroughs was “different” was when he was asked to send some material for an exhibit of manuscripts by new members. Rather than a manuscript, he offered to send a work of art entitled Gun Door. Burroughs is a gun nut and there is nothing he likes better than to go out into a field and fire away at targets. At that time he was experimenting with bags of paint attached to plywood panels. He would fire a shotgun blast at this assemblage, which would pockmark the plywood and splatter paint all over it, creating a unique artistic effect. The startled librarian, Casindania P. Eaton, replied that although Gun Door sounded like “a most interesting object,” Burroughs had been elected to the Department of Literature, not to the Department of Art, so that “we shall not be able to use it at this time.” Burroughs sent a few manuscript pages instead.
Burroughs was pleased to accept membership in the Institute. He did not at all feel that, having drawn a bead on the Establishment in his writing, a major theme of which was the denunciation of all control systems, he was now, at the age of sixty-nine, being co-opted by that very Establishment. After all, Henry Miller had been a member, and Norman Mailer, who was a member, had once knifed his wife and been placed under psychiatric observation. Had they been co-opted? Had Ginsberg? As a known drug user who had sometimes been held up by interminable searches at borders, his attitude was “Listen, I want all the medals on my chest I can get . . . gets you respect from customs agents.” There was in fact a purple-and-gold Institute rosette worn on the suit lapel, but no one knew what it was, and people jocularly inquired of Burroughs when he wore it, “Does that thing mean your forefathers came over on the Mayflower?”
So, as the members took their seats on the afternoon of May 18, 1983, there was Burroughs on the same stage as such eminent figures of the literary-academic-political complex as John Hersey, George Kennan, John Kenneth Galbraith, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who, as president of the Academy and Institute, opened the Ceremonial with brief remarks about the future of art in the nuclear age. The distinguished historian of the ages of Jackson and the second Roosevelt had not voted for Burroughs (who had been two years ahead of him at Harvard), not because of his lifestyle but because he felt the work was too disconnected and random and self-promoting and lacking literary merit. But the Burroughs thing was good for the Institute, Schlesinger thought, in the sense that no one could say it was a citadel of reaction.
And then came the induction of new members, and Hortense Calisher read the brief citation for Burroughs: “William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch marked him as an innovator in the form and content of the novel, and as a cultural symbol. He is a prose-poet with an ear for assonance and speech style and an eye for hypnotic detail. . . .” Burroughs stood up and took a little bow . . . thank God he didn’t have to give a speech, he thought . . . it was all quite painless. He was sorry Allen Ginsberg couldn’t be there, because of a poetry reading commitment. He didn’t see it as a consecration of his work but just as something that happens if you live long enough.
The applause was scattered. Some of the stalwarts, including Schlesinger and Barbara Tuchman, who were seated side by side, front row center, quite obviously sat on their hands. Although, thought Hortense Calisher, you couldn’t read too much into the lack of applause. Some of the members were old and deaf, the acoustics were bad, and it was an exhausting day, with drinks and lunch and the race to the toilet, and all the speeches—you had to gear yourself just to get through it.
In the audience, James Grauerholz, who had been Burroughs’ secretary for ten years, was overjoyed to see him on stage, because in terms of his critical standing it was a tremendous boost. It was something the critics couldn’t argue with. It wasn’t just that Burroughs was an outcast in the sociological sense, as an addict and a homosexual; it was that he stood for a whole counterculture movement that the critics hated with vehemence. It reminded Grauerholz of the line in the movie Terms of Endearment, where Jack Nicholson offers Shirley MacLaine a drink, and she asks why she should accept, and he says, “To kill the bug that is up your ass.”
And then, after the awards had been handed out, came the high point of the day, the Gold Medal for fiction to Bernard Malamud, which was to provide yet another small tempest in the history of the Institute, a tempest that was quite illuminating in terms of Burroughs’ induction. For in the Institute were many writers who had known each other for years, who had taught at the same universities, shared houses and meals, gone to the same parties, and dedicated books to one another. Hemingway had once described this hothouse phenomenon as “angleworms in a jar.” It was a literary cronyism from which Burroughs was excluded. His only close friend in the Institute was Allen Ginsberg. So that in what was about to happen Burroughs was like an observer of some curious tribal rite to which he was totally foreign, and only half-comprehending, underlining once again that even though he was now a member of the Institute, he was still, and always would be, an outsider.
Ralph Ellison, who was presenting the Gold Medal, had made his reputation as an outsider, but had long been part of the inside coterie. He came from Oklahoma City, where as a boy he shined shoes and picked cotton. Oklahoma, the forty-sixth state, had no tradition of slavery. Ellison grew up in a white neighborhood, where his mother was the custodian for some apartments. He felt the stigma of race somewhat differently from a young black growing up in the twenties in the South, but perhaps for that reason he felt it all the more deeply, and with all the more clarity, for being less oppressed.
In 1945 he began writing Invisible Man, published in 1952 and immediately recognized as one of the important American novels of the twentieth century. A word often used to describe it was “seminal.” It was in any case a hard act to follow. For the next thirty years, Ellison taught and lectured and received honors and gave readings on his work-in-progress. But the long-promised novel, And Hickman Comes, was still unfinished.
Along the way, Ellison had made friends with Malamud, who taught at Bennington, where Ellison sometimes came to read or visit. But in 1971, there was a crack in the friendship when Malamud published his novel The Tenant, the story of a Jewish novelist named Harry Lesser, who refuses to leave a building that is due for demolition. A black squatter, Willie Spearmint, also a writer, moves into an abandoned apartment and starts showing his work to Lesser. Willie says things like “I’m gon win the fuckn Noble Prize. They gon gimme a million bucks of cash.” Willie has a white girlfriend whom Harry takes away from him. In revenge, Willie steals the manuscript Harry has been working on for years and destroys it.
When the book came out, friends of Ellison’s told him that the jive-talking, paranoid, violence-prone Willie Spearmint was based on him. His friend Bern had exploited him, as Jews were forever exploiting blacks, by modeling this despicable character on him. For years, although he said nothing to Malamud, he had chafed under the suspicion that Willie Spearmint was an injurious caricature of Ralph Ellison.
In spite of all this, they had remained friends. A few days before the Ceremonial, they had seen each other, and Malamud, alluding to the Gold Medal, had said, “Ralph, you’ll be getting one, too—you’re next.” And Ellison, who had for decades been struggling with a second novel that he could not part with, had replied, “No, Bern, I’m finished.”
And now, in front of 127 of his peers onstage and 700 guests in the audience, Ellison was about to make public his rancor over The Tenant, even as he awarded his old friend one of the highest honors in American literature.
In an evident state of animation after the cocktails and the wine at lunch, Ellison said, reading from a typed text, that the presentation was “in a certain way my pleasure, although an agony.” He then went on at some length about Malamud’s emergence from anonymity and his Jewish tradition, and the shared experience of novelists of minority background. It was clear that he was wound up, and that it would take some time for him to unwind, and as he rambled on, the audience, weary from hours of speeches, became restive.
Sitting next to Grauerholz was Terry Southern, the irreverent author of Candy, who scribbled coarsely humorous notes as Ellison resolutely swam against the tide: “He certainly isn’t invisible now . . .” And ten minutes later: “A mind destroyed by syph . . .” And later yet: “Give them an inch . . .”
Onstage, Barbara Tuchman turned to Arthur Schlesinger and whispered, “You’ve got to stop this.” Schlesinger knew that Ellison’s talk was going on too long, but did not feel that he could do him (and his wife, Fanny, who was in the audience) the discourtesy of cutting him short. So Mrs. Tuchman took matters into her own hands and began to applaud, and the audience picked it up and applauded, too, which prompted another Terry Southern comment: “This really is the March to Folly.”
“I hope you’re not telling me to shut up,” Ellison said. “Come on, come on, the best is yet to come.” A few minutes later, there was more applause, and again Ellison said, “I told you, the best is yet to come.” “And now,” he announced, “the biographical aspect. Twelve years ago, when The Tenant, Malamud’s sixth novel, was published, I felt trapped. People insisted that I was the model for the Negro writer who appeared in that work under the name of Willie Spearmint.” Ellison said he had a conversation with a friend who was sure he was Willie. “Do you think,” Ellison replied, “that I once lived in a tenement and became so vicious that I destroyed one of Malamud’s manuscripts?” “Why are you being so literal?” the friend asked. “I wouldn’t want you to think I was capable of destroying another writer’s work,” Ellison said.
As Malamud in astonishment listened to Ellison pour out his long-buried resentment, he grimaced inwardly and reflected on the dilemma between life and art. He thought of himself as an inventive novelist, able to give form to a character through the power of imagination. And now he was being accused of having simply copied from life. It was something he talked to his students about—which was more real, what was true or what was imagined? The imaginative novelist could outguess you; he was one step ahead of you, having made up what you might mistake as real.
Impatient for the proceedings to be over, since he had foregone cocktails and wine at lunch and wanted his late-afternoon drink, Burroughs was bored to death by Ellison’s speech. Ellison seemed quite deliberately determined to be annoying. It was remarkable how someone could talk for half an hour and say absolutely nothing.
Like Burroughs, most of the audience was unaware of the psychodrama taking place onstage. There was ever louder applause, to which Ellison responded defiantly with “You just won the right to listen to the rest of it.” Finally, however, he came to the task at hand: “Contrasting my lingering annoyance at being elected the model for Willie Spearmint with my pleasure at this moment,” he said, “I will get on with my assignment [ear-splitting applause]—Bern, will you approach me?”
Everyone was grateful for the brevity of Malamud’s acceptance speech, and soon members and their guests were threading their way through congested exits from the auditorium to the reception on the terrace. There was considerable head-shaking and tongue-wagging over Ellison’s remarks, which some saw as washing dirty laundry in public, while others said that such incidents were bound to take place in the climate of cronyism that so many Institute writers shared. In twenty years of attending Ceremonials, Richard Hayes, an editor and collaborator of Jerzy Kosinski, had never seen anything like it. Rolling his eyes heavenward, he intoned, “I have heard the chimes at midnight.”
After a festive dinner with friends, Burroughs got back to the apartment on the Bowery he stays in when he is in New York, which, being windowless, is known as the Bunker. Stewart Meyer, an old friend, was waiting up for him. “William, did you make a speech?” Meyer asked. “Yes,” said Burroughs, “I said thank you for your paltry ribbons.” “You didn’t really say that, did you?” Meyer asked. “No, Stew,” Burroughs said, “I just said thanks. These people, twenty years ago, they were saying I belonged in jail. Now they’re saying I belong in their club. I didn’t listen to them then, and I don’t listen to them now.”