PEN HEMINGWAY AWARDS CEREMONY
RICHARD RHODES KEYNOTE SPEAKER
03.29.09
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TOM PUTNAM: Good afternoon. I’m Tom Putnam, Director of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. And on behalf of all of the sponsors who are listed in your program, it’s my pleasure to welcome you to the annual PEN Hemingway Awards ceremony. It’s been said that Ernest Hemingway thought it bad luck to talk about writing. But, fortunately, his son Patrick is not nearly so superstitious. So I feel some assurance that the stage won't collapse on us as I open these proceedings.
Today we present the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Awards and the Hemingway Foundation PEN Award, America’s best known prize for a distinguished first book of fiction. There is something romantic about the notion of aspiring writers at work on their craft, each with his or her own influences and unique ways of putting off the writing task. “Sometimes, when I was starting a new story and could not get it going,” Hemingway writes, “I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made.” The influences of Hemingway were many in those early years in Paris as he worked to write one true sentence. But I’m particularly fond of the line in which he describes Ezra Pound as, “The man who taught me to distrust adjectives as I would later learn to distrust certain people.”
John Updike, who we will pay tribute to here later this spring, describes wiling away hours in his one-room rented office in Ipswich, smoking nickel cigarillos, their little boxes littering his desk. “My main debt at the time,” he writes, “was to Hemingway. It was he who showed us all how much tension and complexity unalloyed dialogue can convey, and how much poetry lurks in the simplest nouns and predicates.” Updike concludes an introduction to a volume of his early stories, “I felt that I was packaging something as delicately pervasive as smoke, one box after another in that room, where my only duty was to describe reality as it had come to me, to give the mundane its beautiful due.”
Today we give our due to a number of magnificent writers. But before doing so, I want to acknowledge many people and organizations that are here today. First, let me recognize members of the Hemingway family, including Patrick who’s here with me on stage, his wife Carol, and Ernest Hemmingway’s grandson Sean and his wife Colette, who have both been busy working on Hemingway projects this year. Colette has written a book In His Time about Hemingway’s lifelong interest in art and the paintings he collected, a number of which are displayed in the Hemingway Room upstairs. Sean has edited a restored version of A Moveable Feast, as Hemingway had prepared it, with a new preface by Patrick, which will be published on Bastille Day. And perhaps the most important member of the Hemingway family in the room is the newest member of their family, Sean and Colette’s daughter Anook.
I want to thank the individuals and organizations that make this annual awards ceremony possible, the Hemingway Foundation and Society, which funds the PEN Award, and its president James Meredith, who I ask to stand and be recognized. [APPLAUSE] Leah Bailey and the Boston Globe Foundation, the Ucross Foundation, the University of Idaho, and PEN New England, including Helen Atwan, Richard Hoffman and Karen Wulf, all of whom do so much to coordinate the judging and orchestration of today’s awards.
My colleagues here at the Library, Amy Macdonald, Susan Wrynn, Nancy McCoy, my predecessor as the Library Director, Deborah Leff, who creatively strengthened our Hemingway enterprise in so many ways, and the Friends of the Hemingway Collection, our membership organization dedicated to commemorating the life and work of Ernest Hemingway, which supports the purchase and preservation of materials for our archives. Brochures are available at the registration table, and I encourage all who have not already done so to join.
Before we begin the presentation of the 2009 awards, Patrick will read a passage of his father’s work. He’ll be followed by Richard Russo, one of this year’s judges, who will announce the finalists of the Hemingway Foundation PEN Award. This will be followed by the presentation to and reading by the 2009 winner.
Richard Hoffman and John Crawford, who is here with his mother Joanna Crawford, daughter of Lawrence Winship, to represent the Winship family, will then make the presentation to the three writers of the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Awards. And this year we’ll hear from the Winship winner in fiction. Finally, Rebecca Goldstein, a former MacArthur Grant recipient who served recently as a judge for the National Book Awards, will introduce our keynote speaker, Richard Rhodes.
Patrick Hemingway and his wife, Carol, are truly the guiding force for the Hemingway Collection housed here at the Library. They were here officially to open the Hemingway Room in 1980, to commemorate the Hemingway Centennial in 1999, and we’re deeply indebted to them for their generosity and the care and the direction they continue to offer to support us in our work, preserving and providing access to the letters, manuscripts and ephemera stored here, in Patrick’s words, “To get under the skin of literature.”
We turn to him often. For, as you can imagine, Patrick’s knowledge of Hemingway and his works is simply unsurpassed, though he is the one who often prods us to expand our outlook and to promote literature writ large for literature’s sake. Patrick’s insatiable curiosity, his prolific knowledge, generous spirit and infectious laugh make him a delight to be with.
In the past, I’ve introduced him with lines that his father wrote about a fictionalized character based on Patrick as a young boy. But this afternoon, I thought I would leave you with this one true sentence written by Hemingway, not about Patrick directly, but I think the words apply to the man he has become. “The great thing is to last and get your work done and see and hear and learn and understand.” Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Patrick Hemingway. [APPLAUSE]
PATRICK HEMINGWAY: After that introduction, I’m bound to be a disappointment. [He chuckles.] The passage that I picked today was written at the height of the Great Depression, at a time when people really wanted to laugh. And it’s Hemingway in a much less serious mode than people usually read him. And it’s taken from Byline, his work for journalism, specifically for Esquire Magazine in the period 1933 to 1936.
On the old man’s day off or on national holidays visitors will sometimes get into the house itself. Since his home has been listed as an official attraction your correspondent feels that he owes it to the F.E.R.A. to give such visitors their money’s worth. Such a visitor was Mr. Questioner, a prominent businessman and fellow member of the Players Club, who honored us with his visit lately. Your correspondent had just finished a hard day’s work and was feeling rather fatigued when the door opened and looking up he saw Mr. Questioner.
“Why, hello Questioner, old pal,” you say.
“I just dropped in,” said Questioner.“Saw the door was open and noticed you sitting there reading. Not fishing today?”
“No. Been working.”
“Ha.Call that working? What do they pay you for those things?”
“Oh, it varies. Sometimes a dollar a word. Sometimes 75 cents. Sometimes you bid them up to two dollars when you have something on them. Of course the stuff that kids do is a little cheaper.”
“I didn’t know your children wrote.”
“Well, of course, there’s only one of them really writes. That’s the oldest boy, Bumby. The others just dictate.”
“And you sell their stuff as yours?”
“Every word of it. [laughter] Of course you have to touch up the punctuation a bit.”
“It’s a regular business,’ says Questioner, very interested now. “I had no idea that there was that much money in it. What does the little boys’ stuff bring?”
“We get about three for a quarter for the eldest boy. The others are in proportion.” “Even at that, it’s money.”
“Gad yes,” you say.“If you can keep the little bastards at work.” [laughter]
“Is it hard?”
“It’s not easy. When you over-beat them they write such damned sad stuff there’s no market for it until you get down around a dime a word. And I want to keep their standards up.”
“My word, yes,’ said Questioner. “Tell me more about it. I had no idea this writing business was so interesting. What do you mean when you have something on an editor?”
“It’s rather like the old badger game,” you explain. “Of course we have to give quite a cut to the police though. So there’s not the money in it there used to be. Say an editor comes down, a married editor, and we get off to one of those-- well, you know -- or we just surprise him in his room sometime and then of course the price goes up[laughter]. But there’s really no money in that anymore. The N.R.A. has practically put a stop to it.”
“They’ve tried to stop everything,’ said Questioner.
“Johnson cracked down on us about the kids,” you say.“Tried to call it child labor-- and the oldest boy over ten! I had to get to Washington on it. “Listen, Hugh,” I said to him. “It’s no skin off the ants of conscience in my pants what you do to Richberg. But the little boy works, see?” Then I walked out on him. We got the little fellow up to around 10,000 words a day after that but about half of it was sad and we had to take a loss on that.’ [laughter]
“Even at that,’ said Questioner, ‘it’s money.”
“It’s money, yes. But it isn't real money.”
“I’d like to see them working.”
“We work them nights,” you tell him. “It’s not so good for the eyes but they can concentrate better. Then in the morning I can go over their stuff.”
“You don’t mind putting it all out under your name?”
“Of course not. The name is sort of a trademark. The second rate stuff we sell under other names. You’ve probably seen some of it around. There was quite a lot of it around at one time. Now there’s not so much. We marketed it under too many names and it killed the market.”
“Don’t you write any yourself anymore?”
“Just a little to keep it going. The boys are doing fine and I’m proud of the boys. If they live I’m going to turn the business over to them [laughter]. I’ll never forget how proud I was when young Patrick came in with the finished manuscript of Death in the Afternoon [laughter]. He had done the whole thing from a single inspiration. Damned odd story. He saw a negro funeral going by one of the Sons and Daughters of Rewarded Sorrow, a sort of insurance agency that’s quite popular down here, and as it was the afternoon at the time that gave him his title. The little chap went right ahead and dictated the whole thing straight off to his nurse and in less than a week.”
“Damned amazing,” said Questioner. “I’d like to get in on something like that [laughter].”
Well, those were sad times, and I guess people wanted a laugh. [APPLAUSE]
RICHARD RUSSO: Hello. I’m Richard Russo, glad to be here. And my first duty is to say a word of sincere thanks to my fellow judges. I am one of the judges this year of the PEN Hemingway Award in first fiction. And I want to thank Anita Shreve and Stewart O’Nan, who are over here, [applause] who joined me in this task. We each read, I think, about somewhere of 35 books for this award. And I don’t want to speak for the other judges, but I have to tell you, it was excruciating, but not for the reason you would think. There is just a lot of just truly blinding talent out there. And this was a labor of what came to be a labor of joy, that just it’s a snapshot of an entire generation of young writers coming. Publishing may be on hard times, but there’s no shortage of talent out there as I think you're going to discover today.
Now, however, I need my glasses. The first finalist for this year’s Hemingway Foundation PEN Award in Fiction is Sana Krasikov.One More Yearby Sana Krasikov is a quietly beguiling collection of short stories of immigrants coming to the bittersweet acceptance of their lot in America, primarily in their relationships and career aspirations. Shining a light on a slice of life that we don’t often encounter, Krasikov’s collection is a masterful one. The language is elegant and spare, the guiding intelligence of the author steady and relentless. Most illuminating of all, Krasikov’s writing is that which disappears, a skill usually reserved for seasoned writers, so that the stories can go directly from the page into the hearts and minds of readers. Sana Krasikov. [APPLAUSE]
A second finalist for the PEN Hemingway this year goes to Ed Park. Ed Park’s Personal Daysis a hilarious take on today’s cubicle culture. Its oh- so-savvy narrative gives us sharply delineated characters who are somehow less important than the larger human organism they become part of when they report each day for clueless, paranoid duty, and Park’s seemingly effortless sizzling prose belies the book’s considerable ambitions. Ed Park. [APPLAUSE]
And this year’s winner of the 2009 PEN Hemingway Award is Michael Dahlie for A Gentleman’s Guide to Graceful Living. Arthur Camden has run his family’s venerable import/export business into the ground. Abandoned by his cheating wife, blackballed by the club that he helped to found, Michael Dahlie’s hero is a lost lamb who can’t do anything right. Is it too late for this passive, middle-aged blueblood to find his place in the world? Flawless and dazzling, A Gentleman’s Guide to Graceful Living is a wise and gentle satire that has us rooting for its hero, even as we laugh at him. Michael Dahlie.
[APPLAUSE]
MICHAEL DAHLIE: I just have a few things to say and then a very short reading. So far, I’ve had pretty good luck with publications. But in the early days of a career, as I imagine everyone knows, it’s almost impossible to make a living writing fiction, especially for someone like me, since I squander every penny before the checks have even cleared. And so, for the past decade, I’ve been something of a so-called Grubb Street writer. And I’ve written endless-- and I really mean endless -- amounts of extremely low-grade work for money. [LAUGHTER] It’s basically how I’ve supported myself over the years and how, for the past seven months, I’ve been feeding my infant son.
But one of my intellectual influences is a guy named Robert Darton. He’s a resident of Boston and teaches history at Harvard. He also runs Harvard’s vast library system. And his historical work is all about hired writers, particularly French ones from the 18th century. His work, both the quality of the research and the strange subjects he writes about, has been something of an inspiration for me, in that it’s given me comfort when I’ve felt pretty alone in my embarrassing poverty and my hand-in-mouth employment. And the lot of the writer, I promise you, has not changed in 300 years. But the reason that Darton’s work is inspiring is his ability to tell stories with an enormous amount of humor and compassion, something unusual in scholarly work, I think. And it’s something I appreciate, because his stories of disgrace and humility seem similar, not just in my professional life, but to what I write about, in particular with the protagonist of my novel.
Disgrace and humiliation and shame, particularly of men, in fact, is all I seem to care about these days, in a literary way. And this doesn’t seem like it’s going to change.
But a man who knows about humiliation and shame also knows something about love and gratitude. The protagonist of my novel does, and I think, hopefully, so do I. The reason that I’m a hack writer for 50% of my life is that the time spent in humiliating situations, being lectured by some freelance editor in Oregon about how much he hates my use of parentheses or how he’s not going to pay my invoice because of my shocking misunderstanding of the important events of the lives of Mandy Moore or Shaquille O’Neal, for all that, I get to spend the other half of my life writing things that I love and believe in. And when something you write that you believe in gets published, and then a few people appreciate it, it makes you feel extremely fortunate and extremely lucky.
And I know this kind of occasion calls for me to say something erudite and sophisticated. The feeling of gratitude I have, now, trumps any sort of sophisticated speculations I have about the nature of literature. I feel rather as I did the day that I got a call from W.W. Norton saying that they wanted to publish my book, that is, not as a distinguished man of lettersbut something more like a weeping mother who’s just been handed a child that’s been rescued from a burning building. [LAUGHTER]