Pulitzer Dream Can Turn Into Nightmare Once It Comes True : Authors: Six-figure advances, best-seller lists, Hollywood deals are among trappings. Down side is often more startling and less tangible.

By NANCY SHULINS

July 10, 1994 12 AM PT

ASSOCIATED PRESS

VERSHIRE, Vt. — Two days, six bouquets and an entire roll of fax paper after winning the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for “The Shipping News,” novelist E. Annie Proulx realized something startling.

“I’ve become a thing ,” she said. She sounded both delighted and relieved. Delighted, because the Pulitzer is “a very, very, very major thing, a big heavy-duty.” Relieved, because she was finally beginning to make sense of the bedlam that surrounded her.

Proulx’s Pulitzer capped a year that had already brought her three major prizes: the PEN-Faulkner Award for “Postcards,” her first novel; and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize and the National Book Award for “The Shipping News,” her second.

“I thought I was hardened,” said Proulx, a no-nonsense woman whose manner over the course of an hourlong interview shifted from friendly to flinty and back. “But this is different.”

So it is. Unlike most book awards, the Pulitzer Prize arrives without warning. No short list of finalists is made public in advance by Columbia University in New York, which administers the awards. Winners generally hear the news from the first enterprising reporter able to get them on the phone.

The year’s most publicized literary trophy may also be the most lucrative. Winners of the fiction prize routinely show up on best-seller lists, command six-figure advances and get courted by Hollywood.

They also get horrifying amounts of mail that will never be answered, backbiting reviews by lesser writers in the throes of Pulitzer envy, and endless demands that have little or nothing to do with writing.

It’s a great time to be pregnant, says 1992 winner Jane Smiley, who was, and a terrible time to have call-waiting, says 1993 winner Robert Olen Butler, who did.

“In the eight to 10 days after my winning, the phone only rang eight or 10 times,” he said. “In fact, another 250 to 300 calls daisy-chained their way through my life in that week and a half.”

Not so for Proulx. Her phone rang. And rang. And rang.

The fax machine never stopped faxing.

The flowers kept coming. So did the reporters. Eventually, she said, “I got frightened.” So she picked up the phone and called Butler, last year’s winner for “A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain,” a collection of short stories about the legacy of the Vietnam War.

“How long does it last?” Proulx asked Butler.

“For the rest of your life,” he replied. “The first eight words of your obituary have been written. Pulitzer Prize-winners become icons of literature. You represent something. You can either play with it and have fun or not.”

He then passed along some advice given to him by Pulitzer Prize-winner Oscar Hijuelos, whose novel, “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love,” won the 1990 prize: “Get ready to take a warm bath in your own life.”

For Proulx, who lives in splendid isolation in a tall, weathered house tucked beside an anonymous dirt road in a town of a few hundred people, it felt more like an icy shower. Her calendar was already crammed with literary commitments that would take her away from the things she likes best: fishing, canoeing and partridge hunting. How could she possibly squeeze in more?

There was also the house she’d just bought in Newfoundland, where whales play in the front yard and icebergs float past. When would she ever get time to spend there?

Rugged and wild, Newfoundland is Proulx’s idea of heaven. It’s also the setting for “The Shipping News,” the story of a widowed, third-rate newspaperman who builds a new life for himself and his children in the abandoned home of his ancestors. Like most of Proulx’s stories, its central themes are loss of community and the end of a way of life.

She wrote it during long, leisurely mornings by the wood stove. Now, because of the prize, “I have to learn to write in short spans of attention, to carry my work around on the road.”

That may be easier said than done for Proulx, a tireless researcher whose giant jigsaw puzzle of a novel is pieced together with intricate detail about arcane topics--how to tie ancient sailor’s knots, how to prepare seal flipper pie.

For Butler, who produced his first four published novels on the Long Island Rail Road while commuting to work as a business journalist in New York, writing on the run is old hat. He now does much of his writing on airplane tray tables.

In other ways, though, his leap to Pulitzer status was far more dramatic than Proulx’s. Prior to winning, he had had six novels published during the 1980s “to great but very narrowly pocketed acclaim and absolutely no sales.”

“I always say ‘relative,’ or ‘considerable,’ but in truth, it was absolute obscurity. Mine was the classic overnight reversal,” Butler said.

“Your first impulse is to be a slut, to say yes to everything. It’s hard to say no to opportunities that two weeks before you would have been desperately grateful to have.”

An aspiring actor who majored in theater at Northwestern University in the mid-’60s, Butler seems ideally suited for literary stardom. “The ham has been sizzling hotly this past year,” said the author, who invited a reporter to feel free to call him back anytime, day or night. This, despite having just returned home to Lake Charles, La., from “the mother of all book tours,” 40 cities in three months.

He likens his Year of the Pulitzer to Miss America’s reign, except that the Pulitzer never ends. “You’re no longer Miss America once the age lines start showing around your eyes. But you never stop being the Pulitzer Prize-winner. It affects the pace of your life, the clamor of the quotidian upon you.”

His most memorable moment: being recognized by a woman at passport control in Kuala Lumpur. A counterbalancing moment: a reader calling up his publisher to request a copy of “A Good Scent From a Strange Woman.”

Peter Taylor, who won his Pulitzer in 1987 for “A Summons to Memphis,” still chuckles when he recalls his most humbling moment. Having heard about Taylor’s Pulitzer, a friend asked if he’d be flying to Sweden to get it. When he stopped laughing, Taylor explained that he’d won a Pulitzer, not a Nobel.

“A Summons to Memphis” is the story of a man called home by his sisters to stop their widowed father from remarrying. It was the first novel in nearly 40 years for Taylor, 77, primarily a highly regarded short-story writer whose previous books never sold more than a few thousand copies. He’s since finished two other novels and started a third. “As you get older,” he said, “you get more long-winded.”

His late-in-life Pulitzer “didn’t change things that much. I had my pattern of life all worked out.” He never considered giving up his teaching posts at Harvard University and the University of Virginia, but acknowledges he no longer needed to teach for financial reasons. He has since retired.

Butler says he will continue to teach creative writing at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, even though he, too, could get by without his salary. Paperback rights for “They Whisper,” his first novel post-Pulitzer, recently sold for well into six figures.

Factoring in foreign sales, screen rights and opportunities on the lecture circuit, “all these add up to quite a bit of money,” he said.

But the greatest reward has been far less tangible.

Though reviews of “They Whisper” have been mixed, the Pulitzer has provided “a kind of insulation. I used to be really sensitive to bad reviews. Now they don’t bother me at all.

“It has not or will not change my vision of the world or what I say. But I don’t have to win anything anymore. The monkey is off my back, and it’s wonderfully liberating.”

Not all winners share Butler’s love of the limelight.

Jane Smiley has chosen to keep a low profile, as evidenced by the message on her answering machine at Iowa State University, where she teaches: No books signed, no talks given, no manuscripts read, no assignments accepted. Thank you for calling.

Smiley won for “A Thousand Acres,” a modern-day reworking of Shakespeare’s “King Lear” set on an Iowa farm. Like “A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain,” it appears headed for the big screen.

The baby she was expecting when she toasted her Pulitzer with fruit juice is 18 months old now. She also has two older children, a husband, two dogs, and her teaching job, along with her writing life.

“You can’t get caught up; you have to start resisting right away,” she said of the heightened demands that accompany the Pulitzer. “Maybe there’s a price you pay somewhere down the road, but I’m willing to pay the cost.”

Unlike Butler, Smiley was already fairly well known when she won. “One thing about writing eight books, being around for a long time before getting famous, you have a long time to contemplate the potential effects of fame on you. It doesn’t come as a surprise. I always thought I would just go on being as I was.”

There’s an added bonus to doing so, she said. “Once you’ve won the Pulitzer, if you act like a normal person, everybody thinks how great you are. It gains some sort of weird dimension in other people’s eyes.”