The year the Palanca Literary Awards was born was presaged by violence - four men dying from an excess of New Year joy, and scores wounded in scattered incidents of savagery. A fire swept Manila on the first day of January 1950, followed by a strong earthquake the very next, which "jarred nightclub patrons and stopped pendulum clocks."

The center of the temblor was in Isabela where two men were reported speechless by the shock. Rebellion escalated that year, the road to Baguio would be guarded in May against impending threats from the Huks to disrupt the Southeast Asian Union conference.

Fire and mayhem engulfed the countryside. Civilian guards, avenging a comrade's death, razed to the ground, a heretofore little known barrio, Maliwalu, in Bacolor, Pampanga, herding its men to the chapel and there mowing them down. Much later in the year, August to be exact, the Huks sacked eight towns in six provinces in Luzon, but dealt with particular severity with Tarlac, where they burned an army camp, Makabulos, killing 31, including some sick and wounded in the camp hospital, and several nurses two of whom they first raped before shooting.

Many times the dissidents announced an imminent takeover of Manila, in fact came as near as Bulacan, Laguna, and Rizal. Panic running through the city, its mayor, Manuel de la Fuente, and its police chief, Eduardo Quintos, would be prompted to issue statements of reassurance of defensive measures they had taken - more checkpoints, 24-hour police alert, intelligent surveillance - but the enemy was a superior inside as well out: one patrolman, falling in for routine inspection was scolded by a superior for failing to bring his regulation raincoat, whereupon he picked up a carbine, followed the officer to his room, and pumped seven bullets into the hapless man.

There had been a mini-rebellion in Batangas earlier, an upshot of the contested '49 elections, but now in the euphoria of New Year, a Congress shacking off its hangover quickly approved a grant of amnesty to the leader, "General" Francisco Medrano.

Politics and the pursuit of pleasure occupied the people.

Though a controversial presidential election had just been won, and Elpidio Quirino installed as president of the Republic at Luneta ceremonies that seemed immediately portentous ( a canopy collapsed and was blamed on the contractor), the sniping from both Senate and the House began almost at once.

His vice-president, Fernando Lopez, ranged himself beside Quirino's enemies, which included Jose Laurel and Lorenzo Tanada, and at every opportunity public and private, denounced the "graft and corruption" in the administration also variously described as beset by dissidence, with disintegration of public service and bankruptcy in the government. At a rowdy Lion's dinner at the Manila Hotel, Quirino manfully endured the personal insults of Lorenzo Tanada.

Yet, it was not all gloom. Tyrone Power and his wife Linda Christian planed in for the movie, An American Guerilla in the Philippines. Tyrone Power, riveting those irresistible eyes on the women, quickly enraptured the ranks of the matrons and the debutantes, and Vicky Quirino herself allowed herself the exclamation: "Que fatale!"

The gay and vivacious doings of the young lady of the house, Victoria (Vicky), filled the Palace and the society pages. Piquant, frequently impulsive, she had lost her mother and a sister in the last war. In July that year, she would be given away in marriage against a backdrop of satin curtains to a young man from Pangasinan, Luis Gonzalez, who would later become his county's ambassador to Spain. The President, mustering all the grandeur his position could offer, walked his youngest and last child down the aisle of the Ceremonial Hall, then capped the day by writing her a touching farewell.

Scandals and rumors and crime occupied the headlines.

Vicente Araneta was kidnapped in Cavite and released after a harrowing few days for a ransom of P100 thousand. Another rich man's son, a Yupangco heir, lured by his girlfriend's voice, was hogtied and blindfolded, beaten up and then kept prisoner for several days in a small bathroom from where he was rescued by the police.

Despite a war that loomed and then finally burst that June in Korea, it was a gentle time for most, or seemed a gentle time, with writers meeting in convivial groups in one another's house, talking of the latest fiction trends abroad. Several magazines published and paid for fiction - the Evening News Magazine, the Sunday Times and the Chronicle's This Week, the Philippine Free Press. The old writers were still writing, but new names cropped up which could not be ignored. Mostly, they were university students, or young magazine apprentices, who belabored the traditional subjects of love and frustration, but there were also those who, having tasted tragedy in the holocaust just ended, and sensitive to changes of the season, attempted the more difficult subjects of war and death and social struggle.

To them all, the writing of fiction was a solitary effort, lonely and thankless. It had been years since the last Commonwealth Literary Awards, which had been won by writers who seemed, by reputation and intent, to belong to another world. It was nine years before the Republic Cultural Heritage Awards would begin.

The magazines did not pay much. Most writers held down penurious jobs teaching school or in advertising but more than money, recognition was the perennial thirst. No one yet has really explained why writers write, whether from a compulsion of ego or a suicidal bent, but whatever the wellspring, affectation or anguish, every single one is gratified by a measure of recognition.

Against this background, the Carlos Palanca Memorial Award was announced August 1951. On September 2, 1950, or nearly a year before, the man it was commemorating had died, ending a life that lasted for 81 years. He had come to this country in 1884 from Amoy, China, a small place called Wily Village, where he had been born in 1869. Fifteen when he arrived, he carried the Chinese name Tan Guin Lay; was the youngest of six boys, had been orphaned at three, and was so poor he hardly had an education.

But in the Philippines he prospered, starting with his first job at a textile store, moving from there to a small distillery that was later to be the basis of the family fortune. He would branch out eventually into multifarious businesses including banking, fishponds, paper, rice, financing - but he had, to start with, true grit, a knack for learning languages ( Spanish and the dialects ), "and a thorough knowledge of local laws and legal procedures." Adopted by a rich Chinese, he followed the old custom of using his grandfather's name, Carlos Palanca, and in time married and raised his own family, several sons, and a daughter whom he would govern with a combination of love and discipline.

All his life, he was keenly interested in what he had missed as a child; education - he supported the Anglo-Chinese School and countless other similar institutions, - single-handed, urging his children to do their best in school. When he died, his heirs thought it only fitting that their father's name would live on in an endeavor that would enrich the country's heritage.

The contest was announced in August 1951 and included only the short story, in English an Filipino, with the following prizes: P1,000 for first; P500 for second; P250 for third. For the first two years, 1950-51 and 1951-52, the prizes were awarded on the second Saturday of December. The first year's contest covered July 1^st 1950 to June 30,1951; the second covered October 1^st to September 30,1952. All stories in the two languages published anywhere in the Philippines were eligible, provided these were submitted to the sponsor by the editor of the publication. National, provincial and even school publications were welcome.

In the early years, the ceremonies were held at the Champagne Room of the Manila Hotel; with Delfin Ferrer Gamboa and Nenita Bustamante taking care of the details. Gamboa would later move to the Department of Foreign Affairs where he rose to Consul, but Nenita Arce Bustamante has stayed with the contest, almost as durable an institution as the awards.

In 1953, there were two new developments. An additional category, the one-act play, mostly on the urging of the late Teodoro Evangelista, then Far Eastern University presiden, and prime mover behind the Civic Theater, was added, with the following prizes: P500 for first, P300 for second, and P250 for third. That same year, the awards ceremony was moved from December to September 1, the late Carlos Palanca Sr's birth anniversary. By then the interest in the contest had depended and would grow even keener.

In 1955-56, the first winning plays were presented at the FEU auditorium by the Civic Theater. Two years later, in 1958, the Palanca's upped the play's prizes to the same level as fiction. In 1963, the contest was opened to poetry, English and Filipino, with the same prizes as fiction. The response to the ever enlarging scope of the Palanca contest by now overwhelming, with new writers being encouraged, and old ones constantly resuscitated. Also established by this time was the incalculable prestige of being a Palanca awardee.

To make the prizes more realistic, in 1969 they were increased in all categories thus: P2,000 for first; P1,000 for second; and P500 for third. Another increase followed in 1971 with P3,000 for first; P2,000 for second; and P1,000 for third. A final and happy increase was effected in 1973, the same year another contest, the Focus Philippines Literary Contest, was launched (fiction and essay, in English), with sponsors raising the prizes to P5,000 for first, P3,000 for second, and P1,000 for third, thereby matching the prizes of Focus Philippines.

In October 1975, Carlos Palanca, Jr., president of the sponsoring firm, La Tondena, Inc., announced a special category, the three-act play, in both English an Filipino for which only one generous prize was offered, P10,000. "With the addition of this special category," he said, "(it is our hope that) Filipino writers will be further encouraged to develop Philippine playwriting…"

All these moves to broaden the awards and to increase the prizes testified to the seriousness with which the sponsors took the contest. There was some initial suspicion that their motive had been publicity, the "corporate image," but this was dispelled by the care with which they handled the proceedings, starting from the judges whose identities they kept quiet as much as possible, and chose thoughtfully, to the judicious atmosphere of awards night itself.

Usually, the judges, who received no emoluments, only token gifts, were invited to a first dinner at which they met the sponsors and were introduced to their fellow judges. Later, they split into groups, and met in a series of quiet lunches to arrive at their decisions.

If there is anything, however, from which the entire contest might have suffered, it is in that it is forced, again and again, to tap practically the same names for the chore of judging. This is not to be blamed on the sponsors, criticism not being a highly developed genre in this country, but perhaps some measures might now be taken either by the sponsors, the schools, or other related entities, or even by the government itself, to ensure a steady supply of competent judges. This can be done by encouraging the study and pursuit of criticism or, for the Palancas, opening yet another category for their contest, that of literary criticism.

The awards night, always on September 1, the birthday of the old man Carlos Palanca Sr., was in the early days fraught with formality, complete with speeches and the like, but eventually settled for an atmosphere of relaxed conviviality, with perhaps a brief musical program or a dramatic reading. After the first years, the dinner moved from Manila Hotel to the Philippine Columbian Clubhouse, then to the New Selecta on Roxas Boulevard. When it was held at Hilton in 1968, a group of pickets representing disgruntled losers, added to the evening's excitement. Once, in 1971, the ceremony was at Hyatt Regency, but since 1972 prizewinners have converged at the L Tondena Building on Echague in Quiapo where it has more or less settled.

The Palanca clan would be at the ceremony, in full force, even including the dowager, Carlos Palanca's Sr.'s wife, Dona Rosa herself. Once or twice, someone truly exceptional might grace it, like Mrs. Imelda Romualdez Marcos at Hilton and she would brighten the affair with an extra glow. Through it all, though now and then there would be some disagreements engendered by decisions that sat ill with a few losers, there ran like an unmistakable thread the respect with which the writers were treated.

In no other literary contest, with the exeption of the ceremonies crowning the National Artists (begun in 1975), was there a similar grace and warmth. Other contest sponsors, particularly the magazines, kept prizewinners cooling their heels in some anteroom, waiting like job applicants for their money. The more callous ones made the writers come back several times for their checks, or mailed them, demeaning the experience of a literary victory.

But the Palanca contests were something else again, and for this, much credit must go to Nenita Arce Bustamante, who has spent 25 years of her life tying up the loose threads of the contest. Acting as a buffer between the sponsors and the temperamental writers, she has succeeded in minimizing ruffled feelings, and so well does she do this that none of its evident on awards night, except once, in 1968 when activism did not spare this undertaking.

The harvest is extremely rich, with the "award winning works (in fiction, poetry, and drama) making up a substantial body of the best representative writing in both English and (Filipino)." In 20 years, there have been 120 short stories, 33 poets singled out for honors, and 98 plays awarded.

There is no doubt that the awards have stimulated creativity. Chronicling what Rosalinda L. Orosa describes as " the life and times, the soul and sentiment, the mores, culture and traditions of the mid-twentieth century Filipino" the contest has provided invaluable impetus by recognizing the serious talents of many Filipino writers, and the list of prizewinners is a virtual directory of Philippine literati. A good number of them may have moved on to other fields like business and the government, but all have carried with them the added prestige of being Palanca prizewinners.

Going further than they had originally intended, the Palancas in 1957 financed the publication of the first five-year anthology in fiction. Twice, they have staged prizewinning plays, in 1955, at FEU by the Civic Theater, and then more ambitiously in 1975, at the Cultural Center. The 1975 presentations ran for weeks and included several plays: Turn Red the Sea, and The Sign of the Sea Gulls. Although casts and directors were paid, the plays were offered free for the public, and for a finale, were presented at the Luneta on December 26-27, 1975.

The eight-volume edition, therefore, encompassing the contest results of 20 years (1950-1970), puts into permanent form a considerable body of the country's meaningful literature, makes it available to all lovers of good writing, including the man - had he lived longer - -whose memory has made it all possible. - K.P.

Next