After the Reverend Joseph McClatchey of Wheaton Collegenoffered an invocation, John Howard opened thenawards banquet with remarks focusing on the intent of thenlate Leopold Tyrmand and The IngersoU Foundation innestabhshing The IngersoU Prizes. Dr. Howard describednthe prizes as a needed corrective in an age when manynmajor writers have abdicated their moral responsibility andnare now “degrading the very concept of art.” He cited atnlength Saul Bellow’s indictment of most contemporarynwriters:n”We do not, we writers, represent mankind adequately.n. . . We put into our books the consumer, civil servant,nfootball fan, lover, television viewer. And in the contractualndaylight version, their life is a kind of death. There isnanother life, coming from an insistent sense of what we are,nthat denies these daylight formulations and the false lifen—the death in life—they make for us. For it is false and wenknow it. . . . Perhaps humankind cannot bear too muchnreality, but neither can it bear too much unreality, toonmuch abuse of truth. . . .n”Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public isnwonderfully patient with them, continues to read them andnendures disappointment after disappointment, waiting tonhear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy,nsocial theory, and what it cannot hear from purenscience. Out of the struggle has come an immense, painfulnlonging for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent,nmore comprehensive account of what we human beings arenand what this life is for.”nDr. Howard lauded V.S. Naipaul and Andrew Lytic asnexceptional authors who have responded to the “longing”ndescribed by Bellow. He praised both as men “who understandnand articulate the permanent values—truth, faith,nintegrity, reason, conscience, tradition—who provide reasonsnto resist the human inclinations toward cruelty,ndisorder, dissension, and cynicism.”nIn his remarks, Thomas Fleming assessed the ways innwhich the two laureates have resisted the modern assaultnupon Western civilization:nCivilization and Its Discontents was the title of one ofnSigmund Freud’s most provocative essays. Writing in 1930n—less than a decade before the second outbreak of war innEurope—Freud painted a bleak picture of Western mannsuppressing all his most basic instincts in his struggle tonmaintain civilization. Since 1930, Freud’s theme has beenntaken up and expanded by countless critics who seemed tonfind a strange sort of joy in predicting the Decline of thenWest.nWhat is the alternative to this civilization of ours, whosenroots were put down in ancient times by Greeks, Romans,nand Jews? For many years Marxism seemed to hold out thenpromise of a new beginning, a world without strife, withoutninequality, without want. With some sadness, we have tonconfess those dreams have not been realized in the SovietnUnion or in any part of its Eastern European empire. Oncenthe so-called Second World had to be acknowledged as anfailure, the enemies of our civilization began to turn,nincreasingly, to the Third World of ex-colonial nations innAfrica, Asia, and Latin America. Here were people whonJohn Frederick Nims with former colleague AndrewnLytic.nT.S. Eliot award recipient V.S. Naipaul with Eliot’snbiographer Russell Kirk.ncould utilize modern technology without losing their soulsnto Western greed or American individualism.nNo one can wish these new nations anything but fulfillmentnof their dreams. But the terrible lies told in defense ofnthe Third World do no good whatsoever. Poverty, ignorance,nand brutality are no easier to endure for being gildednwith deceitful propaganda. The people of Uganda, thenCentral African empire, and Grenada could take smallncomfort from the press releases issued by Idi Amin, thenEmperor Bokhasa, or Maurice Bishop. Back in our ownnFirst World, the celebration of these Third World Utopiasnhas been equally harmful in giving ammunition to thosenwho would, in the words of Andrew Marvell, “ruin thengreat work of time.”nOur civilization is not without its defenders. Today, wenare here to celebrate two of them: Mr. V.S. Naipaul andnMr. Andrew Nelson Lytic. . . .nnnJANUARY 1987 / 33n