‘The Swedish Thing’: writers and the Nobel Prize

The winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, which Hemingway called “The Swedish Thing”, is honoured by a formal-dress royal ceremony in Stockholm on December 10, followed by weeklong banquets, speeches, forums, exhibitions, concerts and torchlight processions.  Its award, £815,000 this year, inspires the most publicity and carries the greatest prestige of any literary prize.  

Yet the winner of this secretly judged competition is determined by many non-literary factors—race, sex, nationality, politics, personal suffering (jail time helps), morbidity (preferably a terminal illness), translations into major languages, sponsorship from previous winners and pressure from greedy governments.  The Prize has frequently been awarded to mediocrities and most of the greatest 20th-century writers have not won it. 

The annual Nobel Prize was first awarded in 1901 when many outstanding 19th-century writers were still alive.  But instead of honoring Leo Tolstoy or Anton Chekhov, George Meredith or Algernon Swinburne, Thomas Hardy or Emile Zola, Mark Twain or Henry James, even the Nordics Henrik Ibsen or August Strindberg, the Academy made its first disastrous choice by giving it to the mediocre French poet and playwright Sully Prudhomme.  The subsequent 120 winners—there were four split-decision double-prizes and five World War-years without an award—from 41 countries can be subjectively divided into three general categories: great international reputations;  second-rank and serious; third-rank and now forgotten.  (See tables.)  Only 20 of the 120 winners are still recognized as great authors, 28 considered serious authors and 72 (more than half) are minor writers.  Like any Academy composed of timorous and traditional members, the Swedes—hostile to innovation and insensitive to genius—have tended to select the old and the safe, the bland and boring, the well-established and conservative writers.

Over the years the Academy has consistently chosen the weaker candidates: Jacinto Benavente, not García Lorca; John Galsworthy, not Joseph Conrad; Grazia Deledda, not Gabriele D’Annunzio; Odysseus Elytis, not Constantine Cavafy; William Golding, not Iris Murdoch; Jaroslav Seifert, not Milan Kundera; Wole Soyinka, not Chinua Achebe; Toni Morrison, not Philip Roth; Kenziburo Oe, not Yukio Mishima; Dario Fo, not Arthur Miller; Harold Pinter, not Tom Stoppard; Alice Munro, not Michael Ondaatje.  There hasn’t been a great winner since the Swede Tomas Transtörmer in 2011.  The Belarusian Svetlana Alexievich, for example, merely recorded, typed up and published her journalistic interviews.  The Tanzanian Abdulrazak Gurnah was a desperate attempt to recruit another African.  The most unfortunate choices among the dubious, unreadable and overrated, were the low-brow American Pearl Buck, the Communist Party hack and plagiarist Mikhail Sholokhov, the ludicrous Italian playwright Dario Fo, and the pop singer and songwriter Bob Dylan.  

The national distribution is also strangely unbalanced. France and America lead with 16 and 13 awards, Britain and Germany with 8 each.  Scandinavians (always generous to themselves) with 15 and Poles with 4 are grossly inflated.  Austria (including German-language writers of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire) has the greatest grievance.  None of its major writers—Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Musil, Franz Kafka and Herrmann Broch as well as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Karl Kraus, Stefan Zweig and Georg Trakl—has ever won the award.  It finally and absurdly went to Elfriede Jelinek.  Some countries, despite promising candidates, have never gained the Prize—Romania had Paul Celan, Albania: Ismail Kadare, Argentina: Jorge Luis Borges, Brazil: Jorge Amado, Pakistan: Mohammed Iqbal, Indonesia: Pramoedya Toer;  Syria still has the poet Adonis. The Netherlands (Anne Frank’s memoir was published posthumously), Philippines and South Korea are still empty-handed.  

The criminals and crazies, the scandalous rebels and extremists in ideas and behavior—Ezra Pound, Henry Miller, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Bertolt Brecht, Malcolm Lowry, Jean Genet, Dylan Thomas, John Berryman, Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg—whose very presence might have disrupted the solemn occasion, had absolutely no hope of winning. 

In addition to the 10 nineteenth-century masters, 12 superior candidates, 4 best Austrian writers and 7 writers from countries that were ignored, 15 other immensely distinguished authors did not win the prize: Ford Madox Ford, E.M. Forster, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, George Orwell and W.H. Auden; Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens; Marcel Proust, Paul Valéry and André Malraux; Anna Akhmatova and Vladimir Nabokov were as excellent as the winners with the most secure reputations.  Thirty-one other writers were as good as the secondary winners: H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Robert Graves, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Arthur Koestler, Olivia Manning, Angus Wilson, Anthony Burgess, Philip Larkin, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes and Geoffrey Hill; Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, J.F. Powers, William Styron and James Salter; Giovanni Verga, Italo Svevo, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Giuseppe di Lampedusa and Primo Levi; Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva and Isaak Babel; Antonio Machado; Fernando Pessoa; and Nikos Kazantzakis.  The 75 losers were more impressive than most of the winners.

Several winners have been sponsored by powerful patrons, often from their own country. Thomas Mann helped Hermann Hesse; Martin du Gard: André Gide; Dag Hammarskjöld: Saint-John Perse; Alexander Solzhenitsyn with great moral authority: Heinrich Böll; Saul Bellow had translated Isaac Singer; W.H. Auden and Robert Lowell: Joseph Brodsky; Brodsky: Derek Walcott (who had a play on in Stockholm the year he won); Czeslaw Milosz: Wislawa Szymborska.

Politics always influenced the decisions.  Graham Greene was too friendly with Left-wing dictators: Fidel Castro and Omar Torrijos of Panama.  André Malraux (whom Albert Camus felt should have won the Prize in 1957) was considered too Right-wing.  Jorge Luis Borges praised the Argentine junta and befriended General Augusto Pinochet. W.H. Auden was rejected after criticising Dag Hammarskjöld in his Introduction to Markings .

Though Greene, Malraux and Borges were politically outcast, the Swedes gave the Prize to the fascist Luigi Pirandello; to Knut Hamsun, who later collaborated with the Nazis in World War II; to Günter Grass, who (he later admitted) served in the Waffen SS; and to the slavish defenders of Stalin, Halldór Laxness and Miguel Angel Asturias, as well as the fanatical Communists: Mikhail Sholokhov, Pablo Neruda, and Elfriede Jelinek, who remained a member of the Communist Party until 1992.  These writers ignored Stalin’s monstrous crimes as well as the Russian invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

By contrast, liberal political views, especially outspoken hostility to totalitarian regimes and years spent in prison, have recently become as influential as literary merit.  Joseph Brodsky, an unusual choice in 1987, exemplified the political trend.  The 47-year-old Russian-Jewish poet was arrested in 1964 and exiled from the Soviet Union in 1972.  When I asked Brodsky if he’d met Frost on his visit to Russia, he replied, “At the time of 

his sojourn in my home town I was behind bars.”  But Milan Kundera, a Czech exile in Paris, and the playwright Vaclev Havel, imprisoned for political offenses, did not get the Prize.  Ariel Dorfman, a Chilean exile in America, and Salman Rushdie, sentenced to death by an Iranian ayatollah and stabbed in the eye by a fanatic, are serious but uninspiring contenders.

In November 1980 the influential Academy member Artur Lundkvist—speaking of the literature of Asia, Africa and other “remote” parts of the world—asserted, “I doubt if there is very much to find there.”  His statement was roundly condemned and the Swedes suddenly adopted a policy of Affirmative Action.  During the next 8 years they eagerly handed the Prize to Wole Soyinka, Naguib Mahfouz, Derek Walcott and Toni Morrison.

Controversy erupted again when some winners couldn’t or didn’t show up in person to receive the Prize.  Hemingway was recovering from serious injuries in two African plane crashes; Harold Pinter was seriously ill and confined to a wheelchair; Doris Lessing begged off with back problems; Elfriede Jelinek, anxious and agoraphobic, complained that she was not in mental shape to withstand the official ordeals.  Francis Ford Coppola had boasted that he would win the first Nobel Prize for screenwriting; Bob Dylan (a weird choice, puffed by the influential English critic Christopher Ricks) realised Coppola’s dream for his songs.  Dylan didn’t respond to the Prize for two weeks and, though he had no tour dates in the month preceding the ceremony, cheekily said he couldn’t appear because of unspecified “pre-existing commitments”.  One outraged novelist declared that Dylan’s award was “wrenched from the rancid prostates of senile, gibbering hippies”.

More refusals, controversy and scandals surrounded the awards to Jean-Paul Sartre, Samuel Beckett, Boris Pasternak and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.  Sartre inspired double headlines in 1964 for both winning the Prize and then refusing it.  His biographer Annie Cohen-Solal notes that as a Communist he disliked “the distinction reserved to writers of the Western bloc and rebels of the Eastern bloc.” She adds that after Sartre’s refusal the Academy seemed to retaliate by “awarding no more prizes to French writers until Claude Simon received it in 1985.  Did the Academy interpret Sartre’s gesture, which had not been intended to cause a scandal, as an insult?  Was Malraux, who did not receive the prize in 1969, a victim of Sartre’s refusal?”  Nevertheless, Sartre “had refused to be embalmed alive, to be made into a living statue and prematurely canonized.”  Sartre’s worldwide fame was increased more by the rejection of the Prize than by its acceptance.

The 1969 citation ignored Beckett’s disturbing vision and garbage-canned characters, filled with panic and nullity, disaster and despair.  They were the absolute antithesis of “works of an idealistic tendency” that were supposed to win the Prize.  But the Academy claimed, with typical flatulence, that in his works “the destiny of modern man acquires its elevation.”  Beckett said he “lacked the Nobel fibre”, tried to refuse the prize and went into hiding in Tunisia when it was announced.  He accepted it because Sartre’s refusal had already “queered the pitch” and he did not wish to be publicly discourteous.  His biographer James Knowlson writes that Beckett regarded the award as a catastrophe that would shatter his present peace and interrupt his future work.  He refused to attend the ceremony; and his formal speech, desired but not required, was delivered by his French publisher Jérôme Lindon, who received the diploma and gold medal from the Swedish king.  Beckett said his old mentor James Joyce should have won the prize and “would have known how to spend it”. He gave most of the then £30,000 award to his alma mater, Trinity College, Dublin.

Pasternak was a critic of the Soviet regime, Solzhenitsyn a political prisoner.  Ronald Hingley writes that when Pasternak won the Nobel in 1958, he was officially informed that he would have to repudiate the Prize that had praised him, an enemy of the Soviet regime, as well as his own novel Doctor Zhivago.   Published by Feltrinelli in Milan during the Khrushchev thaw in 1958, his book was condemned in Russia as “an artistically poverty-stricken and malicious work full of hatred of Socialism”. He was immediately expelled from the Writers’ Union, which meant he could no longer publish his work, and was threatened with forced exile.  With the knife at his throat, Pasternak composed an ironic message that was not meant to be taken literally: “In view of the meaning given to your award by the society to which I belong, I must renounce this underserved distinction which has been conferred upon me.  Please do not take my voluntary renunciation amiss.”  His bitter persecution-poem “The Nobel Prize,” began: “I’m caught like a beast in a trap, / Somewhere there’s freedom, people, light, / but the hunt is after me / and there’s no way out.”

Sholokhov had been an unofficial propagandist; Pasternak had criticised the Soviets; Solzhenitsyn had bravely defied them.  He was a prisoner in the Gulag for 8 years, was expelled from the Writers’ Union in 1969 and won the Nobel in 1970.  Michael Scammell states that Solzhenitsyn’s “animated, militant, ideological temperament” was completely different from Pasternak’s “meek acceptance of the abuse hurled at him and his rejection of the prize.  There would be no repetition of the Pasternak fiasco . . . and he would behave differently.  He would go to Stockholm and make a fighting speech, even if it meant never returning to the Soviet Union, for he could then publish everything he wanted.”  But political and private pressures, including his pregnant lover, forced him to change his mind about appearing in person and facing exile.  He accepted the Prize but instead of giving the Nobel lecture, he sent a letter explaining his reasons for staying away.  It would be impossible to obtain a Soviet passport, he disliked the formal ceremonies and the intense publicity, and he would not be allowed to return to his native land.  Unwilling to offend the Soviet Union, Sweden refused to give him the Prize at their embassy in Moscow. But in 1974, after he’d been expelled from Russia, Solzhenitsyn finally received the award in Stockholm.

Tables

1. Kipling, Yeats, Shaw, Mann, O’Neill, Gide, Eliot, Faulkner, Hemingway, Camus, Sartre, Beckett, Solzhenitsyn, Montale, Bellow, Brodsky, Heaney, Grass, Naipaul and Coetzee.
2. F. Mistral, Carducci, Maeterlinck, Hauptmann, Hamsun, Bunin, Pirandello, Hesse, Russell, Lagerkvist, Mauriac, Milosz, Churchill, Pasternak, Quasimodo, Saint-John Perse, Andric, Seferis, Neruda, Singer, Márquez, Golding, Paz, Kertész, Pinter, Pamuk, Lessing, Tranströmer.

Jeffrey Meyers has recently published James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist and Parallel Lives: From Freud and Mann to Arbus and Plath .  His 45 Ways to Look at Hemingway will be out next year, all with LSU Press.

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