PRIZE Awards have been subjected to more than a little sniping this winter. Spectators have inclined to be skeptical, and the critics overly severe. It is, I think, the nature of prize books to arouse a feeling of professional dissent: the reviewer instinctively matches his judgment against the editor or committee that has made the award, and so may be impelled to work harder for his personal victory than for a calm interpretation. Eugene O’Neill is by common consent our foremost American dramatist. But let him receive the Nobel Prize and critics are in haste to heap up his disabilities. The attitude seems to me slightly perverse and very human.
I, of course, am prejudiced in favor of literary prizes. I think they are the most serviceable form of patronage in a democracy — the best means of championing new talent, of calling attention to merit which might otherwise be neglected. American readers are not explorers: they love to follow the crowd. Their interest in a few popular titles would be still more concentrated were it not for the literary awards and for such excellent detective work as is performed by the Book-of-the-Month Club. Some months ago this organization set aside $10,000 to be divided among American authors whose books, published between May 1, 1935, and September 1, 1930, had sold less than 5000 copies — authors who were, in short, ‘insufficiently recognized.’ A coast-to-coast. jury of thirty critics voted (with remarkable unanimity) to divide the sum into four fellowships of $2500 each, and these were awarded partly in respect for a certain book and partly in the expectation of the author’s work to come.
The first fellowship went to the California poet, Robinson Jeffers, whom one of the judges. Miss Millay, described as‘a poet’s poet.’ In this case the award was not only a salute to his recent volume, Solstice and Other Poems (Random House, $2.50); it was clearly a tribute to the intensity and power of 1 iis poetry made manifest in his eleven books, no one of which has been as widely read as it deserved. Mr. Jeffers’s poetry is not easy to read, which is to say that he will he avoided by the lazy-minded. But I should like to think that hereafter there will be at least two thousand Americans each year with enough imagination and attention to give him a hearing.
The award to Katherine Anne Porter was in recognition of her volume of short stories, Flowering Judas (Harcourt, Brace, $2.50) — or, to put it more formally, ’in recognition of the precise and delicate art of her short stories of American and Mexican life.’
James T. Farrell, a young novelist from Chicago. received the third fellowship, the jury having in mind his husky, virulent novel. Studs Lonigan (Vanguard Press, $3.00). The older generation and the hypersensitive reader, I suspect, will shrink from Mr. Farrell’s prose, which comes to grips with dirt, poverty, and brutality. But there will certainly he those with an open mind who agree with the critics in recognizing ‘the strong and vigorous sincerity with which he represents an underprivileged section of American life.’
The winner of the fourth award, Paul Sears, is head of the Botany Department at the University ol Oklahoma. His book. Deserts on the March (University of Oklahoma Press, $2.50), should be required reading for any man or woman having the faintest sympathy for or curiosity about the floods and droughts which are paralyzing such huge sections of American life.
