ACCEPTANCE SPEECH FOR AN AWARD I NEVER RECEIVED
Charles Deemer
In March, 2005, Robert K. Charles nominated me for the Charles Erskine Scott Wood Retrospective Award for a distinguished career in Oregon letters. It was a flattering gesture, and his nomination letter was even true (link to it here). However, I will not receive the award, and since nominations are not saved from year to year, and no one had nominated me before now, I assume no one will nominate me again – and so I never will receive the Charles Erskine Scott Wood Retrospective Award for a distinguished career in Oregon letters. But if I had won, this is what I would have had to say about it.
Awards and competitions – and every award implies a competition – define a curious universe. In this universe, some works of art are better than other works of art. Why? Because a committee decides this is so. Anyone who has ever been on such a committee realizes that opinions differ greatly about matters of art, and often considerable heated discussion precedes any decision about which artist should receive which award. Indeed, there can be enough differences of opinion among committee members to reveal an obvious fact: a different committee, composed of different members with different artistic tastes, would have chosen a different artist to honor. I belabor this point to suggest to you an important first principle about awards and competitions – they have more to do with committees than with art or artists.
The institutions that sponsor such awards and competitions have the best intentions – to honor artists – and certainly to a degree they accomplish this. But in so doing they perpetuate a myth that can be destructive to art and artists, the myth that art takes place in a kind of sporting arena in which there are losers and winners, in which one artist is more important or more worthy of notice than another artist. No doubt some of you are questioning my assumption here since surely the paintings of Picasso are more important, more worthy of notice, than the doodles of someone without drawing talent. But if this is true, what makes it true? Why are the plays of Shakespeare more important to us than the plays of Marlowe? Well, they weren’t always, you know. Only recently. And this is my point.
When I was an undergraduate at UCLA, I took a literature course called 19th Century Popular Literature. We read the best selling novels of the 1800s. We read the writers who won the awards and competitions of the 1800s. We students had never heard of any of them. No one read these books today. These authors, so popular in their own time, were neglected in ours. We read other 18th C. authors. Even a relatively popular author in his time like Herman Melville had to face failure with a book that no one liked and few people bought in his own lifetime. This book was the great failure of his life. The book was Moby Dick.
To put it another way, from an historical perspective, we don’t seem to be very good at judging the books that will be read and cherished long after we’re gone. Tastes vary over time. The most popular literature of a given time, in fact, the best sellers, appear to be the most quickly forgotten by later generations, perhaps because they usually are topical, taking advantage of current fads and fashions. In a brilliant book of criticism, Morris Weitz’s Hamlet and the Philosophy of Criticism, Weitz documents how fragile literary opinion is by tracing the spectrum of evaluation about Shakespeare’s play over the centuries, a dramatic work considered great today but not very great at all in the 18th century. Was the 18th century right or are we right?
This is why awards and competitions have so much to do with committees and so little to do with art and artists. We have no idea which art and which artists working in Oregon today, or in the United States, or in the world, will speak to the readers of the 22nd century or, if I may exhibit uncharacteristic optimism, to an even more distant future. We only know what we like today – and here the “we” is not a general concept but a specific one, the we representing the collective members of the committee that decides which artist or art to honor. It is their particular tastes at a particular time that define the meaning of an individual award. This is what the award means, nothing more and nothing less. The award is the emblem of a consensus rooted in time and place – and just as importantly, in personality.
So what does a writer say when he is honored with an award that, in fact, has not as much to do with him as with a group of people who managed to reach a consensus about their literary taste? He says, Wow, cool. He says more or less the same thing he would say upon winning the lottery or the door prize or the gift certificate. He might even say what Yeats is reported to have said upon learning he had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The first two words out of Yeats’ mouth were, “How much?” This is the a proper writerly attitude toward awards and competitions.
It’s always nice to find a dollar in the street. My lucky day! I accept this award in the same spirit – it’s my lucky day. Luck doesn’t have anything to do with me or my work really, it’s just luck. It’s just a consensus made by a particular committee, which is a consensus different from the one another committee would have reached. I was lucky to draw the right committee.
Wow, cool. Thank you very much.