COMMENT
HIMSELF the winner, one had almost said victim, of one prize and judge in another, M Paul Morand refers with mocking tenderness in his first Paris Letter to the vogue of prize-giving and prize-winning which has come over France. At the same time, as M Morand mentions, the question of wholesale marketing of works of literature is being carefully scrutinized there. The two things are close; and they are both based on a misconception which we, in connexion with The Dial's award, have been compelled often to meet. It is, simply, a misconception of the relation between money and any work of art.
Our insistence that The Dial's award is not a prize is frequently taken to be a characteristic pedantry on our part, almost as reprehensible as the use of the preferred spelling in our pages. We can only reply that the dictionary and good usage are the pedants, not ourselves; we are using words in their accurate and accepted sense when we say that a prize is something contested for and that an award is something given. In France books and manuscripts of books are specifically entered for prizes; in America, as in the case of the Pulitzer prize, publications of various sorts come automatically within the scope of the prize and are considered by the judges. But nothing, of any nature, is ever, in any circumstance, submitted to The Dial for its award. The Dial's award "crowns" no book, nor does it imply any moral or even aesthetic judgement of superiority. It indicates only that the recipient has done a service to letters and that, since money is required even by those who serve letters, since the payment in money is generally so inadequate when good work is concerned, The Dial is in a way adding to the earnings of a writer, diminishing, by a little, the discrepancy between his minimum requirements as a citizen in a commercial society and his earnings as an artist. We have never believed that the recipient has, or will have, done exactly two thousand dollars' worth of service to letters. We haven't the standard of measurement for such delicacy of judgement.
We dissociate ourselves utterly from the business of giving prizes, and at the same time we call the attention of our publishers
