Cash and Culture

At the National Book Awards ceremony last year, after a young man had streaked naked in front of the stage, the imperturbable master of ceremonies remarked, "That's funny. I talked to Alfred Knopf just a few days ago, and he said then that he couldn't make it tonight." For this year's ceremonies the famous publisher, now 82, turned up onstage at New York's Avery Fisher Hall, suitably clad in a pink shirt. Knopf was being given a special citation for more than half a century of distinguished publishing, and his brief remarks recalled a happier time when deluxe editions of books could be bought for $1.50 apiece.

The sense of cost and continuity was a somber reminder to the audience that after 26 years, this might be the last N.B.A. ceremony. Plagued by rising costs and dwindling support, derived mainly from the Association of American Publishers, the National Book Committee, which long sponsored the awards, last year went out of business. The 1975 N.B.A. ceremonies, in fact, took place only because Roger Stevens, chairman of the committee on awards policy, personally guaranteed expenses. Whether or not he can save the awards is still very much in doubt.

Persistent complaints and suggestions about the N.B.A. range from the publishers' charge that the awards do not sell books to the preposterous notion that the official ceremonies should resemble the Academy Awards, with the myrmidons of show biz whooping things up on network TV. But the N.B.A. lists of nominees and winners over the past 26 years could serve as a remarkably concise index to the quality of postwar American literature and the broad concerns of American life.

This year's winners were typical of that diversity. In fiction, the split award went to a traditional academic novel, Thomas Williams' The Hair of Harold Roux, and Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers, a savage morality tale that moves as fast as a whodunit and finds a nihilistic link between the Viet Nam War and the drug culture. The arts and letters award was shared by Lewis Thomas' The Lives of a Cell, a meditation on the structure of all living matter, and Roger Shattuck's life of Marcel Proust. For the recently created category, contemporary affairs, the judges put together a list of nominees that included Bernstein and Woodward's All the President's Men and Robert Caro's The Power Broker. They finally chose Theodore Rosengarten's All God's Dangers, the unforgettable memoir of an Alabama sharecropper.

Soul and Psyche. Other winners: in history, Bernard Bailyn's The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson, a study of the Royal Governor of Massachusetts on the eve of the American Revolution; in philosophy, Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia, a disquisition upon just how and why that government is best which governs least. In poetry, Marilyn Hacker's Presentation Piece; in biography, Richard B. Sewall's The Life of Emily Dickinson; in children's books, Virginia Hamilton's M.C. Higgins, the Great, a story about growing up black in the Cumberland Mountains. Science and translation offered a contrast between trouble of the psyche and of the soul: Silvano Arieti's Interpretations of Schizophrenia and the Anthony Kerrigan translation of Spanish Philosopher Miguel de Unamuno's The Agony of Christianity and Essays on Faith.

In an acceptance speech, Dr. Arieti admitted that his book represented some 34 years effort. That news is not likely to encourage commercial publishers. But if the awards do not sell many books in the short run, they are a powerful institutional advertisement for reading and the importance of ideas. It is useful to be reminded, too, that books that matter still tend to be created by individuals working over long periods of time--mostly alone and not mainly for money. The awards' present fiscal plight offers any potential backer a great cultural bargain. One minute of advertising on the Cher TV show costs around $75,000. A guarantee of just about that much would keep the N.B.A. afloat for a full year.

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