This happy occasion is brought about by the imaginative and valuable program of the Whiting Foundation in support of writers, and therefore in support of literature. They have undertaken, in my view, a very difficult task, which is of discovering talent and promise in beginning writers. This discovery is much more anxious-making than acknowledging what others have discovered. However, they have acknowledged well, as you can tell tonight. Some of the writers have published a number of books, some have published one, and some have published none, so this shows the wonderful courage of the foundation. Also, I wish to speak of the gallantry of the money, which I suppose won’t change anyone’s life, but it might change the next year or two. As for this program, I can’t think of any other so fraught with bureaucratic pains of process, so rich in rewards.

I thought I would speak briefly about reading and readers. I’m aware that I can take a very out- of-date, provincial point of view because I’m not really up on the contemporary criticism in this field. It’s really a battlefield, filled with academics like Roman legions on the plain, who question the very integrity of a text and also seem to imply that you’re not reading what you think you’re reading. But I will go on as if that weren’t happening.

For those of you who are at the beginning of a writing career, it might be a good idea to put off the reading of Grub Street for a little while. The tortured author in this novel has the paralysis that all writers know—he can’t write at the moment—and one of his problems is the three- volume novel in demand at the time. We’ve gotten over that debilitating infection, but I don’t think there will ever be a cure for the pain expressed in the book by the writer’s wife, who is facing starvation. (That might still happen now.) One of her questions during the day is this, “What is to prevent your writing, dear?” What is to prevent it? Well, that’s a sort of homicidal question, I think, the kind of domestic question that’s most dangerous – when you keep being asked by a friend just the horrible question you’re asking yourself.

It’s a curious thing to get up in the morning and write a little something. It really is a very odd occupation, I think, and the tools of the trade, the pencil, or pen, or typewriter, or word processor, these are instruments that work on behalf of the writer’s imagination. It looks a lot like secretarial work and perhaps some of it is. Someplace years ago, I read that Paul Valéry said that he couldn’t bear to write a novel (though he did write one, a very peculiar one, of course) because he thought it was utterly degrading to sit down and write, “Madam put on her hat and went out the door.”

When the author is composing, the most important reader is himself. This reader, like every other reader, is a critic. Still, there’s an eventual reader, not the writer himself, who comes into this murky process of writing. There is always the question of just to whom a certain piece of writing is addressed. To address someone smarter or even as smart as you are has its dangers, of course—you court rejection. Yet I think it is an honorable act that can incline the writer to do the best work possible. Writing, this loathsome, sedentary work, is, of course, violently active.

Reading is thought to be passive, and by comparison to writing, I guess that’s true enough. On the other hand, to overwhelm a book, to engage it, to throw it to the ground without injuring yourself, you need all the practice and skill, say, of a student of the martial arts.

Perhaps there is some inborn talent involved in appreciating imaginative literature, something called the reader’s imagination. Some critics have maintained that the words on a page in a novel or story are really cutlines, sketches that promote the imagination of the reader to create in his own mind the characters and to participate in this moving pageantry of action, human reality and emotion brought about by a sentence such as, “Mary tossed her head and Henry groaned because he knew what was coming.” That sentence is very different, of course, from another sentence, a very short one, which is, “Call me Ishmael.” (At the time of Melville, of course, the son of Abraham and Hagar had a kind of resonance for the public, and perhaps it doesn’t in our time.)

Anyway, when you think about reading, you begin to think about time, that profound reality and abstraction. Our life shows a determination to provide methods of time-saving: in the kitchen, office, and so on. But this saving does not seem to accumulate. I don’t know where it is, the time that’s been saved! People with time on their hands are an object of pity. Old, retired people are constantly told to keep busy. But you can’t read if you’re always busy! In fact, to read you have to sit around all day doing nothing. During the presidential primaries, the candidates were asked about their reading and I don’t remember the actual books they managed to excavate (that’s what it felt like) from the recesses of their heads. I do remember that the books were either for relaxation, as they rather proudly said, or for quick information. One of the results of genuine power in business, politics, law, medicine, is that there is no time to read imaginative works. For those who actually run the country, summary is a passageway to wisdom about the most complex matters of moral and practical life. In a sense, the contents of the political and corporate mind, I think, would be grossly disturbed by contemplation of the wisdom of the ages, since such wisdom tends to undermine self-importance. By not reading, they’re quite happily cut off from a lot of downright insults.

Tonight we’re here in this beautiful Morgan Library. The aura of a public library has somewhat declined as a live, national institution. For myself I like to remember those reading and studying generations in the New York Public Library, which was filled with scruffy intellectuals— contentious, learned people. Some of these people actually used to say, “My university is the New York Public Library.” This is especially true of immigrants and children of immigrants. Louis MacNeice has a beautiful poem about the reading room of the British Museum and it has these lines in it, “ Beneath enormous fluted Ionic columns/ There seeps from heavily jowled or hawk-like foreign faces/ The guttural sorrow of the refugees.” I was in the elevator of the library one day during World War II, a time when the most malnourished, unhandy, awkward sort of bookish young men were being called into the army, and I heard one girl speaking to another: “How does Jack, or Sam, whoever, like it at Fort Dix or Fort Bragg?” And the answer was: “He hates it: they’re all Neo-Platonists there.” Well, there was the New York Public Library of the old days.

All those who write have to deal with a steady increase of ennui on the part of the reading public. The question so hostile to the arts today is, “So, what’s new?” This boredom would seem to put the reader in ascendency over the writer, and that’s an ascendency the reader has not earned.