Absorbing the Past and Enriching the Future

THE FIRST LADY OF PEN/FAULKNER Absorbing the Past and Enriching the Future Thomas Caplan Sometime in the very late summer or early autumn of 1980 a small piece in Publishers Weekly caught my eye. Mary Lee Settle, with whose work I was familiar although not then intimate, was endeavoring to catalyze a new, peer-judged award for American Fiction. Contact details were given and, in due course, I rang to offer help. I am not sure to which stimulus I responded. I had greatly admired Blood Tie, for which she had won the 1978 National Book Award (NBA). As much, I had been moved by Going after Cacciato, Tim O'Brien's Vietnam novel, which had garnered the same award the following year. And the new award was expressly meant to carry on the then temporarily cast-off tradition of the NBA: not only writers judging writers, but a panel of judges drawing upon different sorts of writers, in Mary Lee's phrase: "one classical, one avant garde and one young Turk - everyone in, no one out." For a brief period in those days, the NBA had been morphed by its sponsors into something called the American Book Awards (not to be confused with the contemporary American Book Awards), which were far greater in number and for which the judges were not exclusively writers. I had attended, as the guest of a friend, the memorable ceremony at which Tim O'Brien had accepted his fiction prize, and it had seemed to me exactly the kind of thing that ought to be supported and perpetuated, a nimble mechanism for bringing deserving excellence (albeit not all deserving excellence) to light and to a larger public. Having published my own first novel the year before and feeling a bit starved for the company of those following similar paths, I must also have imagined what became PEN/Faulkner not merely as a prize, but a community. The first time Mary Lee called me, we talked for half-an-hour. The envisioned prize, she explained, was to be provisionally under the sponsorship of PEN/South (which, at that time, largely meant Mary Lee) and the University of Virginia (under whose auspices we could raise money). Through the gracious widow of William Faulkner's friend Linton Massey, the Faulkner Foundation was also involved, making an initial contribution and lending its name and one or two 55 board members. Mary Lee suggested that we meet in Charlottesville, where both she and her husband, Widdy Tazewell, were then teaching, commuting weekly from their home in Norfolk. Well, the first thing to be said is that Mary Lee possessed all the style off the page her words did on it. Like many fiction writers, perhaps especially of her generation (the generation of glamorous movie stars), she had an instinctive sense of how things ought to be done, even when she lacked the necessary resources to do them in quite that spectacular way. We would meet to plan things in midOctober and present the award, beneath Mr. Jefferson's rotunda, in mid-April. The autumn foliage would be at its peak as we made our plans; the dogwoods in full bloom as we celebrated. The finest houses, including that of the University's president, would be thrown open to the visiting literati; there would be good wine, the best spirits. At the first gathering, which lasted two nights and three days (here I deliberately employ holiday jargon, as a holiday was how it seemed) we got to know each other. On successive nights in the rotunda Anne Beattie and Steve Goodwin, then Tim O'Brien and Don Barthelme read from recent work. We dined at an Italian restaurant, from which we were the last to leave. We talked and drank, in daylight, dusk and darkness, on the porch of the Colonnade Club, in sight of students on the Lawn, feeling young ourselves. Kirk and Faith Sale were there from New York; Doris Grumbach, from Washington. For two years, this semi-annual party reconvened, enlarging itself with new winners and nominees, with spouses and lovers and friends and supporters of various kinds. By the time it adjourned to Washington and...