The Mercantile Library Honors Talese & Purdy
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The Mercantile Library recently honored Doubleday senior vice president Nan Talese with the first annual Maxwell E. Perkins Award, named for the legendary Scribner’s editor who nurtured the writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and Ernest Hemingway, among others. Playwright and fiction writer James Purdy, author of “Eustace Chisholm and the Works” (Carroll and Graf) received the Clifton Fadiman Medal for Excellence in Fiction, named for a former longtime editor at Knopf and Simon & Schuster who edited many literary anthologies.
At the dinner celebrating these awards last week, Mercantile Library executive director Noreen Tomassi quoted Eudora Welty: “Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, indeed, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction.”
Jonathan Franzen selected Mr. Purdy as recipient of the Clifton Fadiman award. Introducing him was author Anne Fadiman. She related her late father’s observation: “You don’t read ‘War and Peace’ to see ‘how it comes out’ any more than you live your life to see how it will end.”
In accepting her award, Ms. Talese said, “The editor’s role is really behind the scenes so I’m really unaccustomed to this.” Gesturing with her hands, she said publishing was an upside-down pyramid, resting on the writer “not the CEO on top.”
In attendance were authors David Halberstam and Pat Conroy, attorney Martin Garbus, and others.
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SZASZ SPEAKS On Saturday night, the Foundation for Economic Education hosted a lecture by Dr. Thomas Szasz, a retired member of the Department of Psychiatry at the SUNY Upstate Medical Center and author of books such as “The Myth of Mental Illness” and “The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement.” He is a columnist for the foundation’s monthly journal, the Freeman. He spoke on “Freedom and the Therapeutic State.”
A libertarian, Dr. Szasz believes the state should not impose psychiatric treatment on anyone. He said a mental hospital is a lot like a communist state: “Everything is done for you in there. The one thing you can’t do is leave.”
He opposes involuntary hospitalization and treatment. He would also abolish the insanity defense. Surgeons cut and pathologists examine tissues, he said. But what do psychiatrists do? “They lock up innocent people and excuse guilty people.”
