Elmore Leonard Acceptance Speech The National Book Foundation 2012 Medal For Distinguished Contribution To American Letters November 14, 2012

Transcription

1 Elmore Leonard Acceptance Speech The National Book Foundation 2012 Medal For Distinguished Contribution To American Letters November 14, 2012 Thanks, Martin. If you're surprised to see Martin Amis introducing me this evening...martin and I have made appearances together here and in Los Angeles. What I do is describe Martin Amis as the complete literary star, at the top of his game, and then I might mention that I've appeared as a category on Jeopardy several times in fact. Earlier this year when I began writing a book I m calling Blue Dreams, I thought it might turn out to be my last novel, number 46, to add to the stack. I was finally getting tired. But then the first chapter of

2 Page 2 the book sold to The Atlantic as a short story, and not long after a letter arrived from the National Book Foundation awarding me this year s medal for my work, all of it, and I thought: With this kind of boost coming out of nowhere, how could I be working on my last book? I've been writing fiction for 60 years but didn't make many bestseller lists until the mid 1980's. I didn't worry about it; my books aren't exactly plot-driven; they're about people with guns in dire situations. Once I became known, I thought reviewers were going a bit overboard saying the subtext of my work was the systematic exposure of artistic pretension. Or that my writing was an indictment of civilization and its byproducts. But the review I think of as the most stimulating, if not a realistic appraisal of my work, comes from New Musical Express in

3 Page 3 London who called me "the poet laureate of wild assholes with revolvers." You hope in vain to see a quote like that on the back cover of your next book. Once I began selling my work, the first one to Argosy in 1951, it took ten years to come up with a natural style that I liked. I'd get out of bed at five a.m. and write until seven five days a week - before getting ready for my job at an ad agency. My only rule at five in the morning, I had to start writing, get into the story before I put the coffee on. Most of the fiction I wrote at daybreak sold to pulp magazines, Dime Western or Zane Grey Western, for two cents a word. Three- Ten to Yuma in 1953, a 4500 word Western, sold for 90 dollars. Two years later a studio paid four thousand to make a movie starring Glenn Ford and Van Heflin. I liked it a lot but Walter Winchell called the picture "Three

4 Page 4 hours and ten minutes past High Noon. In '69 I wrote my first book that wasn't a Western called The Big Bounce. My agent in Hollywood at the time, H.N. Swanson, read it, called and said, "Kiddo, I'm gonna to make you rich. Swanie saw The Big Bounce as a quick movie sale, sent it out to producers over the next few months and got 84 rejections. But the book did sell and twice was adapted for the screen. I can't believe anyone in this room saw either version of the picture, or remembers it, if you did. I wrote screenplays in the '70s thinking I'd be good at it, but wore myself out rewriting scripts for producers who nearly always believed the plot needed more backstory. In the winter of '72 Swanie called to ask if I'd read The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins. I told him I hadn't heard of it and Swanie said, "This is your kind of

5 Page 5 stuff, kiddo, run out and get it before you write another word." I got the book and read the opening sentence in the store. "Jackie Brown at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns." I finished the book at home in one sitting and felt like I d been set free. Higgins moved his story almost entirely with dialogue: the conversations of cops and criminals, their voices establishing the style of his writing. I stopped trying to tell what was going on in my books and began to show it from the points of view and voices of the characters--bad guys and good ones, the way George Higgins used his ear to tell what his people were up to. Five years after Eddie Coyle came out, a New York Times review of one of my books said that I often cannot resist a set piece--a lowbrow aria with a crazy kind of

6 Page 6 scatalogical poetry--in the manner of George Higgins." And that's pretty much how I learned to write in a style I lifted from Higgins but changed enough until it became my own sound. I want to thank the National Book Foundation for my award and recognize executive director, Harold Augenbraum and his people for keeping this event on track despite Sandy trying to stop us. They deserve our thanks and praise. I have to tell you I m energized by this honor. The only thing I ve ever wanted to do in my life is have a good time writing stories. This award tells me I m still at it. Thank you.