A. J. Liebling, Jean Stafford, Walker Percy, and the 1962 National Book Award for The Moviegoer

Jim Santel’s beautiful recent essay in The Millions revisiting how The Moviegoer changed his life “like a slow-release drug” reminds us that Walker Percy’s novel is among several remarkable works of fiction celebrating their fiftieth anniversary this year. The finalists for the 1962 National Book Award for Fiction, all published in 1961, included Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, A New Life by Bernard Malamud, The Château by William Maxwell, Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger, The Spinoza of Market Street and Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Pawnbroker by Edward Lewis Wallant, and Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates.

What may be less well known is that the publisher of the winning book, a first novel, did not submit it for consideration. The Moviegoer had sold less than 5,000 copies and Knopf had placed its bet on The Château. Jay Tolson tells the story in Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy:

Unlikely as it sounds, The Moviegoer won the National Book Award in large part because of writer A. J. Liebling’s interest in Earl Long and Louisiana politics. Having finished a book on the colorful and corrupt governor [The Earl of Louisiana], Liebling happened to read a review of The Moviegoer that mentioned the book’s New Orleans setting. Liebling bought a copy of the novel, read it, and was so impressed that he recommended it to his wife, Jean Stafford, who was then serving on the NBA fiction panel, along with Herbert Gold and Lewis Gannett. Stafford was equally taken with the novel and thought it far better than anything she had so far read. She asked the National Book Foundation to send copies of the books to the other two judges. When the three judges met in early March, they came swiftly and unanimously to the choice: The Moviegoer.

Percy did not learn of how he came to be nominated until Gay Talese published an account in The New York Times two days after the award ceremony, which prompted Percy to write Stafford:

. . . I will ask you to pass on to Mr. Liebling the gratitude which I am only just now making out the dimensions of. (I’ll call him Joe if you all come to Louisiana—right now the habit of literary respect is too great.) If I understand it correctly, had it not been for Mr. Liebling (and his recent interest in Louisiana) The Moviegoer might never, would never have been considered. To think then, that if it hadn’t been for old Earl, etc. For the first time, I feel kindly to the Longs.

Talese reported that “Apparently [Stafford] convinced the other two fiction judges of the merits of the novel,” which incited an editorial in Show magazine denouncing Stafford and Liebling for cheating “Joseph Heller’s brilliant farce-tragedy” out of the award it deserved. Liebling responded by publishing a letter in Show detailing what happened and noting that the two other judges had been out of the country until they met to make their final decision.

As part of his award-winning ordeal, the reticent Percy had to appear on The Today Show the morning after the awards. Asked by host Hugh Downs why the South produced such good literature, Percy famously answered “Because we lost the war.” Shortly after returning home to Covington Percy received a congratulatory note from a fellow Southern writer whose opinion he highly prized:

Dear Mr. Percy,
I’m glad we lost the War and you won the National Book Award. I didn’t think the judges would have that much sense but they surprized [sic] me.
Regards,
Flannery O’Connor

Previous Reader’s Almanac posts of interest:

• W. H. Auden, A. J. Liebling: September 1 writings frame World War II in Europe
• Flannery O'Connor: the writer vs. the believer
• William Maxwell, novelist, editor, born 102 years ago

Related LOA works: A. J. Liebling: The Sweet Science and Other Writings (includes The Earl of Louisiana); William Maxwell: Later Novels and Stories (includes The Château); Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works

Tom Perrotta on superiority and vulnerability in Flannery O’Connor’s satire

In the latest of her continuing series focusing on “a specific piece of writing” that has influenced a writer or critic, Jenny Attiyeh discusses Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” with Tom Perrotta, author of Little Children, Election, and The Abstinence Teacher. Perotta’s relationship with O’Connor, notes Attiyeh, “borders on kinship, and he admires and admonishes her as he would a family member.”

After reading a small excerpt from the story, Perrotta talks about the religious, autobiographical, and satirical elements of the story, and how in O’Connor’s later works she featured characters who were somewhat educated yet trapped at home, often with domineering mothers. “Good Country People” features the thirty-two-year-old Joy, who has lost her leg in a childhood accident and who, to her mother’s chagrin, has a PhD in philosophy. Joy has changed her name to Hulga, and her mother is “certain that she had thought and thought until she had hit upon the ugliest name in any language.” Perrotta, who was introduced to O’Connor as a teenager, describes how his approach to the story has evolved:

For a while, I really resisted the story, which seemed so simple: [Hulga] just gets humiliated. But when I read the biography I thought, oh my god, it’s not so simple as that, because O’Connor is seeing herself as Hulga. She’s the afflicted, college-educated, superior person who still wants love, and she still thinks she’s in control of a relationship that she’s not in control of. . . . It really made me see the story in a very different light, [because of] that doubleness: [O’Connor] is humiliating educated liberals who have gotten away from the truth of God, but she’s also implicating herself. And I think any satire that implicates the writer becomes much more complex and interesting—the position of superiority disappears. And I think that was the place O’Connor was moving towards in her later work: this way to keep her satirical tone but make herself vulnerable.

You can hear the full interview here. Perrotta also discusses his own writing, including his forthcoming novel The Leftovers, which will be published at the end of the summer.

Related LOA volume: Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works

Kenneth Holditch remembers Tennessee Williams for his 100th birthday

Guest blog post by Kenneth Holditch, co-editor of the two-volume Library of America collection, Tennessee Williams: Plays 1937–1980

In January 1978 Tennessee Williams gave his only public reading in New Orleans in honor of his friend Oliver Evans—“the Professor,” as Tennessee called him. I met Tennessee and his assistant, Don Lee Keith, for the first time the day before at Marti’s Restaurant. We walked from there to the Theater for the Performing Arts, where he checked out the lighting and sound. On the way to the theater, Tennessee and I talked briefly, and he asked me about property values in New Orleans. When I told him that prices were rising, he smiled and said, “Good! You know, I’m just like a wise old fox; I’ve bought property everywhere I went.” This was something of an exaggeration, but he did have a house in New Orleans and one in Key West.

That night New Orleans experienced one of those torrential rains that sometimes come unexpectedly and the streets flooded. Undaunted, a large crowd gathered to hear America’s greatest playwright, who considered New Orleans his home. It was my honor and pleasure to introduce Tennessee to the audience that night. He read his story “Man Bring This Up Road” and some poems by Oliver Evans, and was then interviewed on stage by Don Lee Keith.

Following the performance, Tennessee kindly autographed the many books his fans had brought. Afterwards, eight of us crossed the street to Restaurant Jonathan for a dinner hosted by the two owners. We had drinks—Tennessee had a martini, I recall, then wine with dinner—and we proceeded to have one of the fabulous seafood meals for which the place was famed. Fortunately, I sat by Tennessee and we discussed mutual friends in New Orleans, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Then the conversation turned to Southern literature and we both agreed that we very much liked the work of Flannery O’Connor. Looking somewhat conspiratorial, he leaned toward me and inquired, “Do you read any of the northern writers.” Baffled a bit—did he mean Hawthorne and Melville?—I decided that he was referring to contemporary authors and said I very much admired Philip Roth and John Updike. “I like Updike, but I haven't read Roth,” he said, “but cannot read Saul Bellow!” When I said I also had trouble with Bellow, Tennessee “reared back,” as we say in the South,” and announced, “Well, there you have it!” Thus ended our only literary conversation. The two days—meeting, rehearsing, the performance, and the meal—live on as a cherished memory.

Hard as it is to believe, Tennessee would have been one hundred this Saturday, March 26. Those of us who knew him cannot imagine him at that age, but we all share wonderful memories of the man and the writer in his glory days. He lives on in the miracles that are his plays.

Also of interest:

• Kenneth Holditch and two other experts discuss whether Williams is “America’s greatest playwright”
• New Orleans celebrates the 100th birthday of Tennessee Williams March 23 through 27
• Read about some of the sites on the “Tennessee Williams Walking Tour” of New Orleans that Kenneth Holditch leads 
• Read about Elia Kazan’s 1947 stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire in a previous Reader’s Almanac post

Related LOA works: The Collected Plays of Tennessee Williams (boxed set); The American Stage: Writing on Theater from Washington Irving to Tony Kushner (includes Harold Clurman on Tennessee Williams and Williams’s essay “Author and Director: A Delicate Situation”)

Emma Straub on her formative influences: Flannery O’Connor and Raymond Carver

Other People We Married
by Emma Straub
(FiveChapters Books, 2011)

Continuing the series of guest blog posts by writers of fiction, history, essays, and poetry, Emma Straub muses on the two writers who introduced her to the short story.

Though I was always aware of short stories as entities in the universe, I didn’t truly read short stories until I was in college, and didn’t truly absorb them until graduate school. It pains me to admit that I didn’t read Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” until I was in a workshop with Lorrie Moore, another American master of the genre. Since then, I’ve been working overtime to catch up. The entry points, for me, were O’Connor and Raymond Carver, who taught me about epiphanies and quiet transformation, about condensing the action of a story into an emotional shift.

Reading Carver’s story “Cathedral” taught me about slowing down, about lingering in the moment past the point of discomfort. Novels can zip and zoom, but short stories are all about careful observation. Raymond Carver is the writer that I most often think of, in the middle of the day, if some remembered anecdote swims back to me—did that really happen to someone I know, I’ll ask myself, or was it in a Carver story? After I fell in love with Carver, I read everything: all the stories, all the poems. There is something classically American about his work: something laconic and strange, like a John Wayne movie with the sound turned off, playing on a television in the back of a suburban diner. When I write, I aim for that clarity, that assured focus, where you can almost feel the characters shifting their weight from foot to foot, never standing entirely still.

Her teacher Lorrie Moore has called Other People We Married, Straub’s new collection of stories, “a revelation . . . In these stories of grief, love, loss and transplantation, Emma Straub demonstrates her brilliance, her humor, her sharp observational powers, as well as her lyrical gifts and affection for the world.” In the “Approval Matrix” for the week of February 14, New York Magazine placed Straub’s collection in the “Highbrow/Brilliant” quadrant, and just this past week came the news that her forthcoming novel has been signed by Penguin’s Riverhead Books. You can read more about Emma Straub on her blog.

Previous Reader’s Almanac posts of interest:

• Adam Levin on works that influenced The Instructions
• Geoffrey O’Brien on the works behind The Fall of the House of Walworth
• Flannery O’Connor: the writer vs. the believer

Related LOA works: Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works; Raymond Carver: Collected Stories

Looking back: The most popular Story of the Week selections and Reader’s Almanac posts

The beginning of the year prompts moments of reflection. Looking back on 2010 The Library of America has been heartened by the warm reception readers gave to two of the year’s initiatives. In January LOA launched Story of the Week to a base of thirty thousand subscribers. That number is now approaching seventy thousand and increasing every week.

The swelling numbers may account for the most popular stories occurring in the past five months. What else connects them? We’ll leave that to you, although watching thousands of readers vault a lesser-known gem like "The Little Room" to the #2 spot makes us think "a good yarn” is as good a guess as any.

1. “Hunting the Deceitful Turkey,” Mark Twain – week of November 22
2. “The Little Room,” Madeline Yale Wynne – October 18
3. “The Train,” Flannery O’Connor – October 4
4. “I’ll Be Waiting,” Raymond Chandler – December 6
5. “The Nature of Liberty,” H. L. Mencken  – September 6

In July LOA launched the Reader’s Almanac with daily posts seeking the “enduring” in American literature. The most popular posts often surprised us by spiking traffic five to seven times the average volume. Finding a pattern among them is a bit of a puzzle. Who knew so many readers would find sales data so interesting? Or a decades-old video of ethnographic research? Or an anonymous rejection letter?

1. The Best-Selling Titles in The Library of America’s First Three Decades – January 3, 2011
2. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Bob Dylan: Desolation Angels led to “Desolation Row” – October 21, 2010
3. Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita first published in the U.S. 52 years ago – August 18, 2010
4. Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, and How to Sell a Banned Book – September 29, 2010
5. Zora Neale Hurston: Video of her ethnographic work in Florida in 1928 – July 26, 2010

We know that no one would get a greater kick over his appearance on both lists than Mark Twain, this year’s most beguiling best-selling author, but he probably would have expected no less.

Flannery O'Connor: the writer vs. the believer

There’s a lively debate currently energizing the posts at Big Questions Online over whether a letter Flannery O’Connor wrote in 1958 to a friend troubled about his faith—especially the lines “You don’t serve God by saying: the Church is ineffective. . . Your pain over its ineffectiveness is a sign of your nearness to God”—provides a persuasive counter-argument to the reasons Anne Rice gives in her recent public announcement on Facebook that she is “quitting Christianity.”

Many readers find it difficult to reconcile O’Connor’s devout Catholicism with the dark often horrific comedy of her fiction. Brad Gooch, author of Flannery: The Life of Flannery O’Connor, addressed the question in an exclusive 2009 interview with The Library of America:

LOA: Your biography closely chronicles what a devout Catholic O’Connor was: a daily communicant who enjoyed reading and discussing scholarly theological treatises. Yet she didn’t entirely discourage writers who took contrarian readings of her works. For instance, you recount her telling John Hawkes that she “liked very very much” his essay “Flannery O’Connor’s Devil” in which he finds her “authorial attitude in itself in some measure diabolical . . . that is, ‘the disbelief that we breathe in with the air of the times’ emerges fully as two-sided or complex as the ‘attraction for the Holy.’” Was it her aim, do you think, to create works that could be interpreted in antithetical ways?

Gooch: O’Connor forever crossed wires in her life and work. Conan O’Brien wrote his senior thesis at Harvard on O’Connor. One night on The Charlie Rose Show he put the riddle succinctly: “You’d think it was this bitter old alcoholic who’s writing these really funny, dark stories. Then you find out that she’s a woman and that she’s devoutly religious. It’s the opposite of what you would expect.” She definitely designed her stories to be read in a world not as given as she to literal belief in God or the devil. Such a trick was not easy and took a while to develop. While at Iowa, she sought guidance from a local priest: how could a Catholic girl be writing about snarly types like Haze Motes, who calls on a town prostitute. The priest told her she didn’t need to write for 15-year-old girls. She slowly parlayed this advice into a more sophisticated apology, borrowed from Thomas Aquinas by way of Jacques Maritain: art is a habit of the practical rather than the moral intellect. As she put it: “You don’t have to be good to write well. Much to be thankful for.”

But the issue of contrary readings of O’Connor’s fiction is compelling, and has never been raised more provocatively than by her friend John Hawkes during her lifetime. Borrowing a line of reasoning from Dr. Johnson when he claimed that Milton was “of the Devil’s party” because Paradise Lost loses its zing when Satan is offstage, Hawkes finds the “diabolical” to be the guilty pleasure in O’Connor’s work. Privately—not to Hawkes—she judged the theory “off center.” But Hawkes was not alone in the camp that felt O’Connor was not the best reader of her own work, and her theological gloss perhaps spin, whether conscious or not. Firmly planted in this opinion was her progressive friend Maryat Lee, who found dissonance between O’Connor the story writer and O’Connor the theologian. “The writing is one thing and the thinking and speeches are another,” she wrote to a mutual friend. “Jekyll and Hyde if you will. Perhaps.”

Read the entire interview here (PDF).

There are an impressive number of websites dedicated to aggregating online essays and information about Flannery O’Connor. See in particular Comforts of Home, the O’Connor Collection at Georgia College & State University, and the Andalusia Foundation, which keeps her farm open to the public and which you can support with purchases from its gift shop—including the classic “I’d rather be reading Flannery O’Connor” bumper sticker.

Related LOA works: Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works