SOURCE: Feldman, Burton. “The Nobel Prize in Literature.” In The Nobel Prize: A History of Genius, Controversy, and Prestige, pp. 55-113. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2000.

[In the following excerpt, Feldman presents a detailed overview of the winners, criteria, and limitations of the Nobel Prize in Literature.]

For a portrait of what the Nobel Prize in Literature is not, one can't do better than Irving Wallace's novel The Prize. Published in 1962, it quickly became a best-seller and a hit movie, and no wonder, considering its sensational plot. The young, “lanky” author is dead drunk when he learns he has won the Nobel Prize. Embittered since his wife died, and a romantic rebel against social convention, he very reluctantly agrees to accept the award: he can use the money. But winning the Nobel Prize is the least of his triumphs in the book. In Stockholm he falls in love, plunges into a wildly complicated spy chase in which he single-handedly unravels a plot to abduct a science laureate to the Soviet Union, and solves everything just as the stately Nobel ceremony itself gets under way. Even aside from such a farrago, the writer-hero is much too young to have won a literature Nobel—by the time they are chosen, most literary laureates are too old to chase anyone. But then, The Prize paints the Nobel ceremony and literature laureates as the exciting things that thrillers and Hollywood wish they were.

Some offended mutterings arose about Wallace's preposterous sensationalizing of the exalted Nobel ceremony. Certainly, no very wild things seem to happen there. The acme of exciting behavior was probably reached by the Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, who won the 1920 prize. Hamsun started drinking riotously the night of the ceremony, pulled the whiskers of an “elderly Nobel committee man,” and then snapped his finger against the corset of his fellow Norwegian laureate Sigrid Undset (literature, 1928) and cried, “It sounds like a bell buoy!”¹

If the Nobel in literature is not exactly a thriller like Wallace's novel, it might however be compared to a ghost story. At least, as the king bestows the medals, a great ghost compounded of all the great writers ignored by the Nobel haunts the festivities. No prizes went to Tolstoy or Ibsen or Joyce or Virginia Woolf or Rilke, to Wallace Stevens or Vladimir Nabokov or Paul Celan. To exclude such figures is like a Nobel Prize in Physics that passed over Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and Feynman, just to start.

Indeed, the world's most prestigious literary award has become widely seen as a political one—a peace prize in literary disguise. For the Nobel judges, it is charged, art and social reform are inseparable. Writers indifferent to moral uplift like Nabokov imperil their chances. An exception or two, such as Samuel Beckett in 1969, proves the rule. Writers of political taste disapproved by Nobel judges certainly risk being blackballed, as seems to have happened to Bertolt Brecht, André Malraux, Ezra Pound, and Jorge Luis Borges.

THE NOBEL LITERARY MUSEUM

Reading through the Nobel list across the century is a curious experience: one is apt to think more about those absent than present. From 1901 to 1945, the list is depressing. Of the forty laureates in that period (awards were omitted in some years), only Kipling, Hamsun, Yeats, Shaw, Mann, and Pirandello have held stature. Hauptmann and Maeterlinck were once esteemed. The others are largely unread or unreadable, such as Sully Prudhomme, José Echegaray and Frédéric Mistral, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Selma Lagerlöf, Paul Heyse, Romain Rolland, Verner von Heidenstam, Gjellerup and Pontoppidan, Carl Spitteler, the philosopher Rudolf Eucken (so forgotten that even philosophers are usually surprised he was a philosopher), Anatole France, Jacinto Benavente, Władyslaw Reymont, Grazia Deledda, Erik Karlfeldt, John Galsworthy, Ivan Bunin, Pearl Buck, Frans Sillanpää, J. V. Jensen.

In that same period, the Nobel judges ignored or rejected all of the following (a deep breath is advised before reading): Leo Tolstoy, Emile Zola, Mark Twain, Henry James, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Henry Adams, Thomas Hardy, Machado de Assis, Pérez Galdós, Joseph Conrad—and this is only the generation bridging 1900.

It takes a heroic blindness to miss everyone in so illustrious a list. But the Nobel committee managed to do as poorly in the next generation as well, missing or rejecting writers as towering as the century provides: Marcel Proust, Rilke, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Theodore Dreiser, D. H. Lawrence, Karel Čapek, Jaroslav Hašek, Willa Cather, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Chaim Bialik, Miguel de Unamuno, George Santayana, José Ortega y Gasset, Alfred Döblin, Stefan George, Robert Musil, Karl Kraus, Arno Schmidt, H. G. Wells, Andrei Bely, Aleksandr Blok, Georges Bernanos, Fernando Pessoa, César Vallejo.²

After 1945 the Nobel committee began a sort of reparations campaign to honor neglected modernist pioneers. At long last, T. S. Eliot, Hemingway, François Mauriac, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Boris Pasternak became laureates. Since about 1970 the prizes began to catch up with writers whose careers were still flourishing: Samuel Beckett, Pablo Neruda, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, Naguib Mahfouz, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney.

But again, great ghosts haunt the list. Since 1945 the Nobel Prize has denied (to list only the departed) Colette, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, W. H. Auden, William Carlos Williams, Anna Akhmatova, Hermann Broch, Bertolt Brecht, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Evelyn Waugh, Gunnar Ekelöf, Luis Cernuda, Hugh MacDiarmid, Ignazio Silone, Marguerite Yourcenar, Raymond Queneau, André Malraux, René Char, Yannis Ritsos, Jorge Luis Borges, Paul Celan, Witold Gombrowicz, Philip Larkin, Jean Genet, Italo Calvino, Alberto Moravia, Thomas Bernhard, Eugène Ionesco, Primo Levi, Danilo Kiš.

“OLD AGE PENSION PRIZES”

When pioneers like T. S. Eliot or André Gide or Hemingway began to receive prizes, most were so famous that their prize seemed only an anticlimax. These and others were usually long past their productive years. Eliot wryly described the prize as a nail in an author's coffin. The critic Herbert Howarth put it as gravely: the Nobel prize is like “a deathmask on fulfilled grandeur.”

But long-delayed prizes continue: the Spanish novelist Camilo José Cela was at last honored in 1989 at age 73, almost fifty years after the innovative work that won him the prize. Of laureates since 1984, the Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert was 83 years old when honored, the French writer Claude Simon 72, the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz 77, the Mexican poet Octavio Paz 76, the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska 73, the Portuguese novelist José Saramago 75. When the Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney was honored at 56, he could seem positively boyish by comparison. The youngest laureate ever was Kipling back in 1907—at age forty-two.

Such long delays allow the Nobel judges to have their cake and eat it too, avoiding controversy yet claiming to honor boldness. Eliot in the 1920s and 1930s was a rebellious sort the Nobel then spurned. But by 1948 he had become venerable and mainstream, and his prize could seem an appeal to tradition against some of the new rebels—say, the French dramatist Jean Genet, whose plays mockingly pulled down all respectable social and sexual values, and who was never Nobelized.

Long delays have made laureates of some who happened to outlive their unhonored contemporaries, and thereby became stand-ins for them. Anders Österling, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy from 1941 to 1970, is supposed to have admitted that the Nobel Prize given to the Russian novelist Bunin in 1933 was “to pay off our consciences on Chekhov and Tolstoy.”³ The Nobel citation for Juan Ramón Jiménez (1956) says:

This year's laureate is the last survivor of the famous Generation of 1898. … When the Swedish Academy renders homage to Juan Ramón Jiménez, it renders homage to an entire epoch in the glorious Spanish literature.

This generous homage to a past generation was in fact caused by earlier Nobel neglect of a group of writers who in 1898 set out to revive Spanish writing, Antonio and Manuel Machado, Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Miguel de Unamuno, the Nicaraguan Rubén Darío (then living in Spain), and Jiménez among them. Jiménez is an excellent poet. But making him a stand-in for a neglected generation renders his own honor ambiguous. Did he deserve the honor on his own, or because the others died ignored and he happened to live so long? He was seventy-five when honored.

The citation for the Greek George Seferis (Nobel 1963) says: “Now that Palamas and Sikelianos are dead, Seferis is today the representative Hellenic poet.” Palamas lived until 1943, Sikelianos to 1951, and Kazantzakis to 1957, yet none was honored. To the living belong the spoils, when the Nobel feels it is time to reward a Greek poet?

Paul Valéry's Nobel Prize was delayed so often that his death “regretfully” intervened in 1945. The next French poet honored was Saint-John Perse (1960). But would Perse have won if Valéry hadn't died “too soon”? The citation to Perse tactfully did not mention Valéry explicitly but surely invoked that poet by its praise of Perse's “rhetorical tradition inherited from the classics.” And here is the German-Swiss novelist-poet Hermann Hesse (1946), another stand-in. The citation: “Since the death of Rilke and [Stefan] George, he has been the foremost German poet of our time.” In short, if either Rilke or George were then alive, Hesse would not have become the laureate. The Spanish poet Vicente Aleixandre (Nobel 1977) was similarly the proxy for the dead Lorca, Jorge Guillén, Rafael Alberti, and Luis Cernuda.

Faulkner's citation suggests that his prize was partly meant to ease the Nobel conscience for neglecting Joyce. “Side by side with Joyce—and perhaps even more so—Faulkner is the great experimentalist among twentieth-century novelists.” (The great experimentalist? One wonders if the Nobel judges had taken a look at Finnegans Wake.) Beckett's prize in 1969 may also have been a gesture toward Joyce, who was Beckett's mentor.

Part of the reason for honoring Joseph Brodsky, the Russian émigré to the U.S., was as a stand-in for an entire generation ignored by Nobel judges—the great line of Russian poets from Aleksandr Blok to Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva, and especially Anna Akhmatova. Brodsky was Akhmatova's favorite young poet. Else why a prize so young, at age forty-seven, and soon?

As the list of laureates makes clear, the Nobel Prize in Literature is still far from being the global award it claims to be. Its prizes have repeatedly gone to writing in a few major European languages, primarily English, French, German, Spanish—not to mention fourteen prizes in the Scandinavian languages, one-seventh of all awarded. Literature in India has been honored only once—Tagore in 1913, which was really another prize in English, since it was awarded on the basis of a translation. No Chinese writer has ever won the prize, though two Japanese writers have become laureates, by the luck of superb translations. Arabic, which spans the world and has a rich literary tradition, won its first and only prize in 1988 (the Egyptian novelist Mahfouz). Nothing in the Bantu languages, or Turkish, or the Malayan group.

Is it possible that no Chinese writer has ever measured up to Nobel standards? And none in India since 1911? That only one writer in Arabic can be found? One can easily imagine that so great a Hebrew poet as Chaim Bialik (died 1934) was invisible to Stockholm. The fact is that the Swedish Academy lacks the linguistic competence needed for a truly international jury, which is not surprising. Perhaps only three or four of the greatest universities in the world have such resources. Unprepared to read fluently and directly in major and populous languages such as Chinese, Arabic, or Hindi, not to mention minor ones, the Nobel committee is overly dependent on translations, whose occurrence and quality are notoriously capricious. One would assume that Nobel judges would all be fluent readers of French. But it has been claimed that the French novelist Claude Simon's Nobel award (1985) gained immeasurably from a Swedish translation of all his work just before his prize.⁴ And that the French poet Saint-John Perse won his prize only because of the Swedish diplomat Dag Hammarskjöld's enormous influence and tireless promoting.

The Nobel Prizes in science and peace are true international awards; the literature prize is not. Unless it soon moves beyond its familiar linguistic horizons, it may end up a glorified Pulitzer Prize. It treads a fine line here. If it dutifully starts distributing the prize around the globe, it can become less a literary than an international goodwill prize.

The Nobel seems at least to be trying to close the gender gap. In almost a century, only nine women have been literary laureates: six in the first ninety years, but three since 1991 (Gordimer, Morrison, Szymborska).

THE NOBEL REPLIES TO ITS CRITICS

The Nobel literary jury has ringed itself with four main lines of defense.⁵ A favorite official plea is that if Conrad and Joyce were bypassed, this was unfortunately because they were “never nominated.” The official history of the Nobel literary awards trots out this bureaucratic disclaimer quite often, as if the rules regrettably tied their hands. But of course the Nobel committee itself selected those very nominators who, while ignoring a Joseph Conrad, did nominate Pierre Loti, Emile Faguet, Paul Bourget, Gaspar Núñez de Arce, Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Upton Sinclair, or Margaret Mitchell. Even if its nominators were so undiscerning, members of the Swedish Academy and its committee can enter nominations. If they chose not to do that, the fault is their own.⁶

Another favored argument, also wearisomely bureaucratic, takes the form “died too soon before could be properly evaluated.” Frequently cited instances are C. P. Cavafy, Rainer Maria Rilke, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Franz Kafka. Certainly, discovering the Alexandrian poet Cavafy (d. 1933) or Kafka or Anton Chekhov would have been a miraculous long shot: Cavafy and Kafka published very little before their early deaths; Chekhov died in 1904.

Neglect of others is not so easily explained away. True, Rilke died in 1926, only three years after writing his masterpieces, the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus. But those poems, great as they were, were only the capstone of a brilliant career. Since 1899 his published work had given him outstanding claim as one of the greatest poets in the German language. Yeats, who came to greatness around 1910, won in 1923—why not Rilke about the same time? Many critics have suggested that Yeats's award was politically motivated: Ireland had just become independent. But Rilke, born in Prague, wandered restlessly and had no nation, thus no Nobel “identity” or support from a national academy or critics.

D. H. Lawrence died in 1930, but had an international reputation by the mid-1920s. Joyce and Woolf died in 1941, both recognized as masters.⁷ Proust is more problematic. He published the first volume of his great work, À la recherche du temps perdu, in 1913, and the second and third parts in 1919 and 1921. In 1920 he won the prestigious Prix Goncourt. Why was the Nobel committee in doubt that Proust was a deserving choice, when many international observers very early on thought him the greatest living novelist? True, he died only three years after finishing his great cycle. But this masterpiece had been available for nine years before he died, and the Nobel judges needed only nine years to honor Sienkiewicz for his Quo Vadis—“displacing Tolstoy,” claimed a Nobel evaluator—and only three to make Pearl Buck a laureate.

An unspoken implication here is that the Nobel Prize in Literature cannot rush into things like lesser prizes, as the Prix Goncourt did in crowning Proust. The supreme international dignity and status of the Nobel, its great renown and prestige, require doing nothing precipitate. Alas, this lofty principle, useful against a Woolf or Joyce, has also been passed over at will, as with Buck, Sinclair Lewis, Joseph Brodsky, or Gabriel García Márquez.

A third defense often raised is related to the limitations of committees. Nobel defenders, with suitable murmurings of regret after the fact, acknowledge that certain kinds of writers (Tolstoy, Ibsen) were simply not acceptable to certain committees, especially during the first half of the century. This bias went under the rubric of “idealism”; we shall return to it shortly because it remains a major factor.

The final line of defense is to admit that mistakes have been made, but insist that the record on the whole is quite good. Thus, in the official history of the prizes, Anders Österling of the Swedish Academy begins roundly conceding the mistakes: “It is not to be denied that the history of the Nobel Prizes in Literature is also a history of inexpiable sins of omission.” This is strong language. Yet loyal committeeman Österling immediately paints the brighter side:

But even so, it may perhaps be said that the mistakes have been comparatively few, that no truly unworthy candidate has been crowned, and that if allowances are made for legitimate criticism, the results have reasonably matched the requirements and difficulties of an almost paradoxical assignment.⁸

This last statement of course expiates the “inexpiable” omission of Tolstoy, Rilke, and all the rest. After all, if the mistakes have been few, if no truly unworthy candidate has been crowned, and “if allowances are made for legitimate criticism” (whatever that may mean), who has any reason to complain?

For the moment, let us consider the optimistic side. Surely, if Czesław Miłosz, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, and Günter Grass have become laureates, the Nobel must be making progress. Better late than never. However hesitantly, the award has also begun to move beyond Europe with an occasional award to the Mideast, Japan, Africa. This sort of piecemeal improvement encourages some to believe that one or another remedy will cure the Nobel of its lapses. Let the judges embrace new stirrings. Let them become fluent in Chinese or Estonian. Let them not play so many safe bets among the unobjectionably good but do as the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld was said to urge, when protesting awards to the superfamous such as Hemingway or Churchill: “Oh—if once we could show a touch of daring!”⁹

Yet this sort of progress is at best only patchwork. Two main obstacles are the heavy moralistic-political emphasis and the committee system.

THE NOBEL COMMITTEE AS BOYG

In Ibsen's Peer Gynt there is an all-devouring, formless monster called the Boyg. The Danish critic Georg Brandes (1842-1927) interpreted this as “the Spirit of Compromise.”¹⁰ The world of course leans on committees to arrive at a working consensus—which means being willing to cooperate and compromise. Safe choices are apt to be preferred to the trouble-making sort. The Nobel Prize is the work of committees. But a committee is a poor way to evaluate literature.

Nobel's will did not set up a committee to sift and nominate laureates. That was done by the Nobel Statutes of 1900. Practicality was and remains the reason. World literature—and the Nobel claims to deal with nothing less—is fragmented into hundreds of languages and diverse nations. There is so much of it, and so indigenous, that only a committee with a huge network of specialists can possibly cope with it, even in the most limited way. Literary “experts”—scholars, linguists, critics, historians, librarians—are required. As noted, luckily for the new Nobel literary committee of 1901, literature was then becoming institutionalized and professionalized as never before in history. This is why professors dominate the Nobel's nominators and judges; they already know how to work inside a bureaucracy.

Practicality is also the answer when the Nobel jury is reproached—continually—for having ignored this or that eminent writer. It responds, fairly, that there are too many worthy writers for any annual prize to honor. The official solution to this dilemma has been set forth recently by the chair of the literature committee, Kjell Espmark: What the Swedish Academy “cannot afford is giving [the] Nobel's laurels to a minor talent.” One might counter that what the Nobel really cannot afford is giving its laurels to any but writers of the caliber of Tolstoy, Joyce, or Woolf. This is said not to be feasible. The Nobel jury receives two hundred nominations a year from respected nominators; these must be closely evaluated by committee members and their far-flung network of advisers; thick reports must be assembled to guide the academy's decisions. Doubtless some writers are “great” and some only “good.” But any committee or academy member who claims to know who the geniuses are will only set off a long wrangle. Better to wait twenty or thirty years to learn who is worthy. As for “greatness,” leave that to posterity.

The difficulty of getting agreement about how to rank contemporary writing is at least one reason why every account of the Nobel jury reports their often bitter electioneering. Some writers—the great poet Pablo Neruda, for example—openly campaign for a prize, thus creating factions on the jury. Even without this, the Swedish Academy and its committee seem to indulge in constant infighting. Some publish public denunciations of fellow members.¹¹ Others confide to journalists their contempt for their colleagues: one described the present permanent secretary, Sture Allen, as “an intellectual accountant” and as someone “who doesn't even read.”¹² But of course the committee system itself, with its outlying bureaucracy of academic consultants and nominators long experienced in partisan maneuvers, is apt for intrigue.

Meanwhile, everyone realizes that a compromise must somehow be cobbled together in a few months so that the next prize can be announced by October. The committee and academy count up individual preferences and prejudices, and the majority wins. The decision is always presented to the public as a unanimous choice.

Using such a commmittee process is outlandish only for the literature award. Committees work quite well for the sciences. Robert Oppenheimer once wrote that “there is something inherently comforting about a panel of experts” because slanted and merely personal ideas can be corrected.¹³ For science, yes: the best experts there must approve the work or else it is stillborn. But superior literary prizes are harder to choose than science prizes. Science speaks a common language around the globe, and is a cumulative, collective enterprise; theories can often be tested quickly by rigorous experiments. Literary works stand on their own. Comparisons are anyone's right and gamble.

The Swedish Academy is a self-perpetuating enclave: it elects its own successors and, like other bureaucracies, tends to preserve its character, including its fractious nature. Discussions and negotiations are secret and sealed, to ensure freedom of decision, but of course such secrecy also insulates it from outside criticism. As noted, a member cannot resign but can stop attending meetings and can refuse to vote. In 1989 two of the academy's members withdrew, protesting the body's refusal to denounce Iran's death sentence on Salman Rushdie. At present, three or perhaps four members of the academy are boycotting votes. This can produce very narrow margins, since twelve votes of the eighteen-member academy are needed to award a prize.

Certainly, the Nobel committees have changed character over the years. Espmark, who has documented this in detail, is sharp with critics of the Nobel system who make sweeping charges about the defects of the awards while not being “historical” about how each particular committee “had its special character and its own criteria.”¹⁴ The German naturalistic playwright Gerhart Hauptmann was thus anathema to the first committee but acceptable to the new one in 1912. That new committee sought the “great style,” with Goethe's example of high classicism and universal appeal in mind. After 1945 there came another shift, honoring neglected modernist “pioneers.” From about the 1970s a “pragmatic” attitude has prevailed.

Espmark's behind-the-scenes explanation is, however, beside the point. As the American critic Herbert Howarth has put it,

As soon as one asks about a prize-man not “Was he the best man?” but “Why did the judges select him?” one is likely to perceive he was chosen for reasonable reasons; and one reports these; and in so doing willy-nilly defends the good instead of demanding the best.¹⁵

That is a succinct indictment of the committee system. Why certain judges did not choose Rilke or Joyce has the same sort of interest, finally, as an insider's details on how a political campaign was run. It can be absorbing, but what really matters is only that, for example, a Lincoln was elected or not. The rest is details for the archivist to pick over.

Yet the literature committee has undoubtedly improved, and the literature prize has become much more consistently a “literary” prize. The old bogey of “idealism” has been tamed if not altogether exorcized. But this change happened also because recent committees are in a luckier historical position than earlier ones. The recent sustained improvement of the prizes begins just after the once baffling “experimentalism” of early modernism—Ulysses, The Waves, The Castle, Duino Elegies—finally filtered into broad literary usage and also became familiar to a wide readership. The early moderns—“difficult” or “immoral” or “inaccessible”—were the ones who frightened the literary judges for more than half of the twentieth century. Nobel laureates in the last three decades obviously owe a diffuse and incalculable artistic debt to those forerunners—and also the Nobel's new welcome mat. The Nobel judges have become more open; so has everyone else. Late-twentieth-century writing does not bristle with the old shock and strangeness because it does not need to. That necessary battle was fought and won earlier. The Nobel committee presents its 1969 award to Samuel Beckett as a breakthrough. But the breakthrough for Beckett's own innovations was prepared decades before. Thus his Waiting for Godot and other plays, and even his novels, have enjoyed popular success as no early avant-gardist's did.

Are there any alternatives to the present committee system? Espmark complains that the nomination of Gone with the Wind showed up “a weak aspect of whole selection system,” by which he means “the significant degree of incompetence” among nominators.¹⁶ It is misleading to narrow that problem to Gone with the Wind. Nominators are usually as incompetent when it comes to Mrs. Dalloway or Mother Courage. Faced with the strangeness and newness that great writing often involves, the Nobel's eminent professors and critics are quite as fallible as the rest of us. Each year the Nobel jury faces a challenge that very few minds in history have been able to solve, and then only erratically: to know which literary works truly surpass others now, and will continue to stay alive for generations to come. In short, to predict how posterity will think, fifty or a hundred years from now. Each year's Nobel literary award is just such a gamble on the future. The Nobel's task is not to decide that the old Eliot was a great poet—everyone knew he was—but to have decided the younger Eliot was. Otherwise the Nobels degenerate into “old age pensions” or honorary degrees.

But literary reputations are among the riskiest businesses known. Kipling's stature sank for years, but now keeps rising fitfully. Sinclair Lewis—peculiarly hailed by the Nobel citation as an American “humorist”—and his once-shocking Babbitt and other novels have largely vanished from the minds even of Americans. Eliot and Hemingway do not rate as the colossi they once seemed; the stock has already fallen on Solzhenitsyn, even as he continues to publish.

The predictive gift is the rarest sort of critical intelligence. It has little to do with being a great scholar or critic or writer. Extraordinarily few have shown genius in the stock market of fame. In the English-speaking world, Ezra Pound is perhaps the best known. He had an uncanny eye for what was new, superb, and lasting. He proved it with his prescient judgments on the as yet unknown Robert Frost and James Joyce, the still obscure T. S. Eliot, the not yet famous Ernest Hemingway, and with his quick appreciation of Yeats's new style of poetry from 1910. No matter that Pound was wildly unbalanced about fascism and uneven in his own poetry. He would have made the perfect scout for the Nobel literary committee. Eliot and Hemingway could have been honored in midcareer, and Joyce, Frost, and Gertrude Stein made laureates as they deserved, to the future glory of the Nobel Prizes. Prophetic readers like Pound can recognize genius when they see it, light-years ahead of the rest.

Except that no Nobel committee could tolerate any such arch-spirit of the anti-Boyg.¹⁷

THE IRON CORSET OF IDEALISM

Here is the other main stumbling block. Alfred Nobel's will contained only the following terse criterion for the literary award: it “should go to the person who shall have produced in the field of Literature the most distinguished work of an idealistic tendency.” This sentence has bedeviled the prize. Should the award go to a specific work, or to an author's lifetime achievement? Honoring only works done “in the preceding year,” as the will earlier and broadly stated, would have hamstrung the literary awards intolerably. The Nobel jury has mainly honored a writer's lifetime work, but occasionally a specific work has been singled out for the award (Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, John Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga).

The prickliest part was the phrase “of an idealistic tendency.” Surely Nobel meant high-minded moral goodness? A minority view, however, startlingly maintained the opposite. The prominent Swedish mathematician Mittag-Leffler, who had known Alfred Nobel, claimed that the inventor intended “idealism” to mean a sceptical, even satirical attitude to religion, royalty, marriage, and the social order in general. Or so he was reported as saying by the aforementioned Danish critic Georg Brandes, one of the great early champions of Nietzsche, and himself a nominee for a Nobel.¹⁸

Many of Nobel's own writings are indeed sceptical and caustic—his play Nemesis, written only a year before he died, or the satirical In Lightest Africa and The Bacillus Patent. And he could be strangely ironic, as in his plan to set up that lavish mansion where prospective suicides could die amid luxury, rather than drown in the cold, filthy Seine. To Österling, Nobel's literary tone recalled Strindberg's mordant attacks.¹⁹ That was strong backing for “idealism” as an ironically subversive force.

But can a grand international prize be devoted to subversive irony of this sort? And backed, no less, by a solemn academic institution and the Swedish government itself? It is unthinkable. The opposite and respectable view prevailed. Österling inadvertently describes how this was managed. While conceding that Nobel himself frequently spoke as if “an enemy of all religious faith, [even] an out-and-out atheist,” Österling nonetheless pronounces this “so-called atheism … in reality … very close to Platonism and Christianity.”²⁰ As shall be seen, this conversion of nay-saying into an optimistic and reassuring “idealism” threads decisively through all Nobel literature prizes to the present.

The first champion of such a view, the iron force in the first Nobel jury from 1901 to 1912, was Carl afWirsen (the prefix af denotes nobility in Sweden). Born in 1842, he was permanent secretary, or director, of the Swedish Academy from 1901 until his death in 1912. This moribund academy included no critic of real power and one minor poet, Carl Snoilsky (1841-1903), who wrote in the Swedish neoromantic manner of the 1860s. Ibsen and Strindberg, who could have revitalized things, had long before been blackballed. The rest of the first Nobel committee chosen by the academy in 1901 included Elias Tegner, orientalist (1841-1903); Carl Nyblom, Uppsala literature professor (1832-1907); and Carl Odhner, historian (1836-1904).

As their birth dates suggest, these judges were elderly Victorians who showed it. So were the rest of the eighteen members of the Swedish Academy. Assigning them the Nobel Prize in Literature was quixotic. As twentieth-century literature entered its first great period of innovative achievement, it was disinherited by the Nobel jury set up to honor it. As one late-nineteenth-century observer put it, the guardians of Swedish culture were like “elderly men … who after a particularly refined dinner with a plenitude of wines, are discussing religion and the affairs of state over their glasses of arrak punch.”²¹ Strindberg, in his New Realm of 1884, pilloried the hypocrisies and pettinesses of Swedish culture that Wirsen embodied. Nor did Strindberg spare the Swedish Academy's eighteen “immortals” who thought of themselves as carrying on the traditions of the Académie Française, their “foster-parent” institution. Strindberg lived to 1912 but of course never won the Nobel Prize.

Wirsen was wonderfully unequipped to lead the Nobel assignment. Even back in 1889, he despised what he saw as a perverse new literature flooding the world. As chair of the Nobel jury, Wirsen used “idealism”—reactionary, respectful of State and Church and Society—as a stick to beat off Emile Zola as “lurid” and “spiritless and often grossly cynical.” Ibsen, the greatest dramatist of the nineteenth century, was evaluated as “totally atheistic and, in ethical-sexual questions, highly adventurous in outlook.” Hardy was unacceptable because his God “lacks any sense of justice or mercy.”²²

It was especially Tolstoy, widely and rightly admired as the greatest living writer, who put the committee in a terrible fix. Blessedly for the committee, a technicality saved them in 1901. Tolstoy had not been “duly nominated” that year. The very first Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1901, went to Sully Prudhomme, suggesting that he was the world's foremost living poet. He was in fact as forgettable a poet as can be found in the Nobel's long list of mediocrities. His poetry was of the mid-nineteenth-century French Parnassian sort, sculpted in line, refined in taste, quite vacant—or, as the Nobel citation chose to put it, “noble, melancholy, and thoughtful.” When he became the laureate at age sixty-two, his productive years were long past. He was, however, a member of the Académie Française, strongly supported by that parent organization of the Swedish Academy, and thus a reassuringly respectable choice: no wild writers need apply.

Tolstoy's exclusion caused forty-two Swedish writers, artists, and critics to protest. The Nobel committee evaluated Tolstoy's work as containing “ghastly naturalistic descriptions” and “negative asceticism” and abhorrent religious, fatalist, and anarchist sympathies. But in 1902, again blessedly for the Nobel committee, Tolstoy declared himself happy not to receive such a valuable prize, since “money brings nothing but evil.”²³ Saved from the terrible fate of honoring Tolstoy, the Nobel committee instead made a laureate of the German Theodor Mommsen, whose monumental history of ancient Rome dated all the way back to 1845-56, with a last volume in 1885. Mommsen was then eighty-five years old, and his work was hardly “recent” or of surpassing literary merit.²⁴ No matter: however aged and dormant, Mommsen rescued the Nobel committee from having to honor the “morbid” Emile Zola or his ilk.

In 1903 another crisis arose. The Norwegian Ibsen, greatest dramatist of the past century, was now a candidate. But, subverter of authority and champion of individual freedom, he was all too unacceptable to the Nobel jury. They found a proxy in another Norwegian dramatist, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson.

In recent years Nobel officials have impatiently insisted that “idealism” is a dead and discarded issue. Now only the “best” writing is what matters.²⁵ Espmark declares that idealism of the “patently uplifting variety” is no longer a Nobel requirement, that only literary “integrity” matters, whether corrosive or uplifting. He cites prizes to Samuel Beckett and Camilo José Cela as honoring those who “uncompromisingly” depict the “human predicament.” The American critic Alexander Coleman once wrote that “it would be easy to say that that Academy does anything it wishes, wrapping itself in the flag of idealism only at the hour of the ceremony.” But, he went on, it has in fact always endorsed such idealism. (He also suggested that, as there used to be Kremlinologists, so there should be Nobelogists, who could divine the hidden tendencies of this secretive organization.)²⁶

Certainly, the issue is not dead. When the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska won in 1996, the TLS reviewer still felt obliged to insist she had won for merit, not “for being a moral comforter to humanity, nor for being a literary activist indicating what the correct lines or parties are.”²⁷

The Nobel literary judges are doubtless sick of the issue. In 1997, indeed, it seems that their collective gorge rose and they provocatively chose Dario Fo, who is an actor, stand-up comedian, performance artist—almost anything but a writer in the sense of Yeats or Mann. After that, who could dare call the Swedish Academy old-fashioned?

But not much has really changed. In 1901 the Nobel citation lauded its very first laureate, the French poet Sully Prudhomme, for tirelessly seeking

evidence of man's supernatural destiny in the moral realm, in the voice of conscience, and in the lofty and undeniable prescriptions of duty. From this point of view, Sully Prudhomme represents better than most writers what the testator called an “idealistic” spirit in literature.

Ninety years after Sully Prudhomme, the 1991 Nobel award went to the South African novelist Nadine Gordimer, praised in the Nobel citation for “her involvement on behalf of literature and free speech in a police state where censorship and persecution of books and people exist.” This is still the Nobel idealism of 1901, only now politicized and liberal rather than spiritualized and conservative. In 1986 Wole Soyinka of Nigeria ended his Nobel lecture with these words: “The prize is the consequent enthronement of its complement: universal suffrage—and peace.”

But as in Sully Prudhomme's case, high ethics or worthy politics do not make anyone's writing better or worse. Gordimer is a good novelist, yet one cannot forget—nor does the Nobel citation let us—that she was also a leading white South African activist against apartheid. While any comparison here will seem invidious, unavoidably, it may be said that Doris Lessing, also a white African but long removed to Europe and not such an activist, has thus far been passed over for a prize—although Gordimer has arguably never written a novel to match Lessing's brilliant, disturbing The Golden Notebook.

Kjell Espmark complains that such remarks are typical of the “armchair politicizing” surrounding Nobel literature prizes. But the cause lies not in the armchair critic but in the Nobel citations themselves. A sceptical reader is urged to read through the last century's citations for proof. In 1967, for example, the Guatemalan novelist Miguel Angel Asturias was praised for protesting against imperialism, tyranny, slavery, and injustice, and his citation concluded: “This was indeed what Alfred Nobel hoped to promote by his Prizes.” His fellow Caribbean, V. S. Naipaul, though a more powerful writer, continues to be ignored, likely because of his scathing portraits of the Third World.

Now as then, too, the Nobel citations tend to nudge writers into an “affirming” mode. One recalls how Nobel's own “out-and-out atheism” somehow emerged “Christian.” Did T. S. Eliot wince when his citation rephrased his idea of tradition to harmonize with Nobel sentiments? “The existing monuments of literature form an idealistic order …” was not quite what Eliot meant.

Some laureates have resisted Nobel uplift. The fastidious French poet-diplomat Saint-John Perse (Nobel 1960), after being lauded for exalting “man's creative powers,” uncompromisingly concluded his acceptance speech by saying, “It is enough for the poet to be the bad conscience of his age.” The most eloquent rejection of the Nobel's hectoring came from the Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney. In 1995 he was honored for his remarkable poetry but also and inevitably “for concerning himself with analysis of the violence in Northern Ireland.” Heaney's own views, however, indicted the Nobel's motives here. Poetry, he wrote, offers an alternative to reality

which has a liberating and verifying effect upon the individual spirit, and yet I can see how such a function would be deemed insufficient by a political activist. … Engaged parties are not going to be grateful for a mere image—no matter how inventive or original—of the field of force of which they are a part. They will always want the redress of poetry to be an exercise of leverage on behalf of their own point of view; they will require the entire weight of the thing to come down on their side of the scales.²⁸

Reading through the citations, indeed, one sometimes wonders if the Nobel judges recognized who or what they were honoring. In 1923 an earlier Irish poet, William Butler Yeats, became the laureate. Only two years before, he had published “The Second Coming,” with its unforgettable vision of the nightmare settling on modern civilization. This apocalyptic vision is the voice of the devil's advocate condemning the Nobel's usual optimistic and middle-of-the-road view. Was the Nobel committee listening? One doubts it, since their citation for Yeats praised him as if he were still the dreamy Celtic Twilight poet of 1900. The citation incredibly described Yeats's 1910 volume The Green Helmet—where he began his “passionate syntax” to handle prosaic themes and responsibilities—as “a merrily heroic myth of a peculiarly primitive wildness.”²⁹

Such idealistic uplift and call for social betterment explain much about the Nobel choices that is otherwise mystifying. The prize to Pearl Buck in 1938 suggests she swept the Nobel judges off their feet.³⁰ Her famous trilogy on China, including The Good Earth, came out between 1931 and 1935. Three short years later, she was a Nobel Prize winner. The Nobel literary judges have rarely moved so fast. To honor her, the Nobel committee had to ignore Dreiser (whose An American Tragedy came out in 1925), Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby, 1926, and Tender Is the Night, 1934), Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises, 1926, and A Farewell to Arms, 1929), and John Dos Passos, whose great trilogy U.S.A. (completed 1936) made the young Jean-Paul Sartre call him the greatest writer in the world. However exaggerated that was, Dos Passos deserved a Nobel Prize for his work through the 1920s and 1930s. On literary merit, the choice of Buck was dubious. But her Nobel citation sings a paean to her sympathy with the plight and dignity of Chinese peasants. Buck built “idealistic” international bridges between East and West in The Good Earth and sequels which became famed best-sellers through the world. Buck's heart was in the right place, though her prose remained as flat as ever, with the moral complexities flattened as well. Still, worrying about her literary merit may be irrelevant. In the official Nobel history, Österling astonishingly says that the “decisive factor in the Academy's judgment” was her “incomparable” biographies of her parents, both missionaries in China.³¹

Is it only coincidence that the last two prizes to Americans writing in English have gone to Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison? Bellow is “Jewish-American,” and Morrison “African-American,” and both can therefore stand as “minority” writers. One can scarcely believe that the Nobel judges chose such extraordinary writers even partly on so narrow a basis. And yet, the American laureate preceding them was John Steinbeck (1962), famous for his Grapes of Wrath set in the 1930s Depression. His selection as a Nobelist puzzled many American readers, since he was preferred over Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, John Dos Passos, and others. It puzzled Steinbeck as well. The suspicion that this was yet another politicized prize gained credence with a report from a Swedish source that the Nobel judges saw Steinbeck's award in 1962 “at least in part, as a social gesture in support of the tormented South. As if Americans would easily make the connection between the ‘okie’ of the Thirties and the Negro of the Sixties!”³²

MODERNISM AT ARM'S LENǵTH

Herbert Howarth has astutely summed up the situation of the Nobel Prize in Literature:

The Nobel's penitent longing for a better world will be answered whenever the Academy gives the Prize not to the best-wishing maker but to the best maker—even if the best maker appears to wish ill.³³

But the Nobel has tended to shun writing of a modernist sort as too “difficult” or “morbid” or “inaccessible,” or simply ignore it. The first Nobel Prize in 1901 came as the Dreyfus Affair split France for decades to come. That was a tiny but apt prelude to twentieth-century world wars, totalitarianism, and other nightmares. To many, human history has sometimes seemed to be radically disconnecting from its past and anchor. “Man is falling toward an X,” Nietzsche said.

The Nobel's shying from literature too intimate with the dangers and extremism of our age shows in the number of awards to less disturbing writers. Up to 1945, the Nobel judges awarded nineteen prizes to fiction writers. Eleven of those went to the “saga” genre, mostly many-volume renderings of rural or folk and traditional ways of life, vanishing or vanished—which spoke not only of an earlier era, but like one. Of course, some saga laureates far transcend this genre, such as Halldór Laxness of Iceland (1955). Still, the Nobel committees favored the way the saga practitioners usually held at a safe distance the anarchic modern world so intimately linked to the city, the new unrooted intelligentsia, the energies of revolution and change. They were also accessible to a popular audience. There has always been a populist streak in the Nobel literary jury.³⁴

Saga prizes began as early as 1905 with the prize to Sienkiewicz, author of Quo Vadis. In 1908 Lagerlöf became a laureate for her Gösta Berling's Saga. In 1915 the indefatigable Romain Rolland won the Nobel for his Jean-Christophe (1903-12), which runs to ten volumes. Modernist literature was already on the scene in force—Pound and Wyndham Lewis's Blast of 1914, or the Italian Futurists of 1909 who sang of “glorifying war … the only hygiene of the world.” Rolland instead preached being a “good European” via art—his French hero Jean-Christophe was captivated by German music. In 1917 two Danish novelists shared the prize: Henrik Pontoppidan and Karl Gjellerup. The Nobel's wish to award “neutral” prizes during the war made this possible. Any other reason for choosing Gjellerup remains a mystery. Pontoppidan however was in the saga line, with his eight-volume Lykke-Per (Lucky Peter, 1898-1904) and his five-volume De Dödes Rige (The Realm of the Dead, 1912-16).

The only other novelists honored up to this point had been Kipling (1907), Hamsun (1920), and Anatole France (1921). In 1924, however, the prizes reverted to saga writers with the Polish Reymont (Conrad, unhonored, died that year), and the 1928 winner was the Norwegian Sigrid Undset, whose Kristin Lavransdattar is set in fourteenth-century Norway. One may add the Italian Grazia Deledda (1926), who explored the life of Sardinian peasants. Perhaps also Thomas Mann in 1929. His 1900 novel Buddenbrooks, his closest approach to the saga genre up to the time of his award, was singled out in the Nobel citation, which passed over his 1926 masterpiece The Magic Mountain, a portrayal of modern diseased civilization, in a single phrase. In the 1930s three of the four fiction prizes again went to saga writers. John Galsworthy won in 1932 for his Forsyte Saga. If his subject was the gentry rather than the folk, the results could be as deadening. Someone has noted that Galsworthy's popularity abroad came from his portraying the English precisely as foreigners liked to imagine them. In 1937 the prizewinner was the Frenchman Roger Martin du Gard, whose best-known novel, still worth reading if one can persevere, is Les Thibault (1922-40), another many-volume, closely realistic chronicle, this time about the tensions and crises of a pre-1914 bourgeois family. He is an impressive writer, perhaps lacking only that final carrying surge of poetic verve or imaginative daring that lifts such writing above its steady level. In 1938 came Pearl Buck with her trilogy saga about China. In 1944 the prize went to J. V. Jensen of Denmark, whose six-volume saga moves with evolution from the great apes to early human history. After John Steinbeck came the Australian Patrick White (1973) for his masterpieces The Tree of Man and Voss, though White surmounts any genre, as does Faulkner—who indeed did write a full-fledged saga, which perhaps influenced the Nobel judges to honor him in 1949.

Other laureate practitioners of the saga genre are Ivo Andrič (1961) and Mikhail Sholokhov (1965). Their work falls in the period when the Nobel Prizes collided with the Cold War, and needs looking at now.

POLITICAL PRESSURES FROM WITHIN AND WITHOUT

The Swedish Academy bristles at any suggestion that its awards have been influenced by politics. But as Henry Thoreau (pre-Nobel) once wrote: “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong—as when you find a trout in the milk.” And some large trout swim in the milky Nobel record. In 1912 the Catalan writer Angel Guimera was denied a prize lest honoring him offend the Spanish government. Spain had conquered Catalonia centuries before, but memories are long there. The Nobel committee justified this rejection as “promoting peace.”³⁵

From the 1920s, some writers went right (D. H. Lawrence, Yeats, Pound, Hamsun), some left (Brecht, Aragon, Sartre, Auden). Some were card-carrying members for longer or shorter periods (Neruda in the Communist Party, Pirandello in the Fascist); some became totalitarian propagandists (Pound, or the Soviet poet Mayakovsky). T. S. Eliot was on the right, Hemingway on the left.

Intentionally or not, the Nobel by long delays diluted such contentious disputes into its own softer idealism. By honoring Eliot and Hemingway only after 1948—after the Spanish Civil War and the defeat of fascism—the Nobel could present them as elder statesmen in a “republic of letters,” with their earlier energizing differences covered over by ceremonial plaudits.

At the height of the Cold War, from about 1950 to 1970, the Nobel jury found itself dogged by politics as never before. The media, East and West, were eager to turn Nobel awards into simulacra of Big Power hostility or detente. The Swedish Academy could have tried to finesse this by choosing laureates as far as possible from Cold War partisanship. Instead they bravely plunged in, and did well in resisting outside censorship. But they indulged in some political censoring of their own.

First, the outside pressures. The most sensational disputes about Nobel neutrality involved the Soviet Union. Take the following chronology of prizes during the Cold War:

1955 Halldór Laxness

1956 Bertolt Brecht dies (never a laureate)

1957 Camus

1958 Pasternak

1961 Andrič

1964 Sartre

1965 Sholokhov

1967 Anna Akhmatova dies (never a laureate)

1970 Solzhenitsyn

1971 Neruda

1972 Böll

Laxness, the Icelandic novelist, won the first Nobel involving the Cold War. He had long championed the Stalinist regime; the Soviets were gratified. Almost immediately after, however, came three prizes in a row applauded by the anti-Soviet bloc. Camus eloquently opposed Soviet repressive policies and totalitarian premises, and was accused by Communists of winning the prize because he was a lackey of capitalism. Pasternak won the first literature prize ever awarded to a Soviet citizen, mainly for his novel Doctor Zhivago, but he had published this novel in the West without permission, and the regime denounced its new laureate as a Judas, “a foreign stain on our socialist country,” and a traitor. The Soviet authorities refused to let Pasternak go to Stockholm to receive his prize. Nor did the 1961 award to the Yugoslavian novelist Ivo Andrič please Moscow: Yugoslavia was then led by Marshal Tito, who had broken free of the Soviet empire and remained defiant of the Kremlin.

Only a few years later, as if in reverse, three Nobel Prizes in four years went to Soviets or their apologists. This about-face suggested to many that the Nobel committee was making amends to Moscow, especially for the Pasternak offense. When Sartre was awarded the prize in 1964 he was the most powerful intellectual in France—probably in the world—defending Soviet policies or the allegedly higher virtues of totalitarianism. Sartre however declined the prize, the first to do so voluntarily since Tolstoy in 1902. The Swedish Academy, grown wiser since the Tolstoy fiasco, refused to withdraw his award. Some suggested that Sartre was in a pique because his rival Camus had won first. Sartre's own explanation was that he never accepted public honors; only an unaffiliated writer could speak freely about politics. Accepting the Nobel Prize, he claimed, turned one into a spokesman for that institution. Speaking of himself in the third person, he said that “Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize winner” would thenceforth be appended to every statement he made; “he is in a way inevitably coopted by simply being crowned. It's a way of saying, Finally he's on our side.”³⁶ For the same reason, Sartre claimed he would never accept a Lenin Prize, although he declared his sympathies lay entirely with the Soviet Union versus the West, and the Nobel Prize, “objectively speaking,” lined up against the Soviet Union. It was after all “an honor restricted to Western writers and Eastern rebels.”³⁷ By such a rebel he meant Pasternak, and regretted that Sholokhov was not honored before Pasternak.

Indeed, right after Sartre, Sholokhov became the laureate. His famous The Quiet Don (1927-32) is a saga of the sort long beloved by Nobel committees. Sholokhov was also the “good” Soviet writer.³⁸ He had denounced the award to Pasternak (in later years he recanted this), and the Soviet leaders permitted him to accept his Nobel in person. Then in 1967 the Guatemalan Asturias won; highly sympathetic to the Soviet Union, he had spent much of his life fighting Latin-American dictators and U.S. greed: his “banana trilogy” attacks the rapacity of the United Fruit Company, at its peak in the 1920s.

In 1970, however, the Nobel made a laureate of Solzhenitsyn, the great scourge of the Soviet regime. He had been imprisoned in labor camps and “internal exile” from 1945 to 1956 on trumped-up charges; these experiences launched his epochal history of the Gulag, the huge invisible Soviet prison system. During the “thaw” initiated by Khrushchev in 1965, Solzhenitsyn published The First Circle (1968) and The Cancer Ward (1968-69), both cited by the Nobel judges. He had also become a leader of public protest against the regime. The Soviet authorities derided his prize as “political enmity” or worse. Espmark reports that the Nobel jury refused a request by the Swedish Foreign Office to drop the prize to Solzhenitsyn.³⁹ Solzhenitsyn declined to leave the USSR to accept his prize, lest the Soviet leaders refuse to let him return.

Then, one year after Solzhenitsyn, another possible flip-flop: the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda took the prize. He had served long years as a loyal Stalinist, in and out of Russia. Was this prize an effort to soothe Soviet resentment about Solzhenitsyn?

The Cold War staggered on, but from 1971 the prizes no longer ricocheted back and forth. After Solzhenitsyn it was seventeen years before another Russian writer won the prize—and he was then living in exile: Joseph Brodsky (1987). Later prizes went to several who had lived under Soviet oppression: Miłosz of Poland (1980), Jaroslav Seifert of Czechoslovakia (1984), and the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska (1996). The poet and critic Octavio Paz and the novelist Carlos Fuentes had long been the leading Mexican candidates for the Nobel award. For years, they had also been political opponents—Fuentes on the Marxist side, Paz against. Paz won the 1995 Nobel Prize. In 1989 the Soviet Union itself collapsed, and Cold War prizes with it.

THE NOBEL, THE STALIN, AND THE “HITLER” PRIZE

Among the laureates just named, several of the Stalinist defenders had accepted Stalin Prizes. Why was a Stalin Prize acceptable to Nobel judges when a “Hitler Prize” would not be? (No Hitler Prize actually existed; it is meant to indicate those who might have accepted such an honor had it been available.)

That question cannot be lightly dismissed. The Stalin and Lenin Prizes, after all, honored a tyranny which lasted much longer than Hitler's and outmatched him in numbers of innocent victims. The Nobel committee's response to this was peculiar, to say the least. When Laxness was honored in 1955, he had accepted the Stalin Prize only two years before, although much was known by then about Stalinist terror and murder. Yet to go by his Nobel citation, the jury's main concern was only whether Communism had diminished his art. In his 1963 autobiography, Skalditimi, Laxness caused an uproar among his former ideological allies by denouncing Soviet Communism.

Neruda received a Lenin Peace Prize in 1950, and a Stalin Peace Prize in 1953. In 1954 this very great poet actually fawned on Stalin as “the high noon, the fulfillment of men and peoples.”⁴⁰ Neruda hungrily sought the Nobel Prize, but was balked by the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf, a member of the Nobel committee. Ekelöf suspected that Neruda had been involved in Trotsky's murder in Mexico in 1940; Neruda had been a Chilean diplomat in Mexico at the time.⁴¹ Ekelöf died in 1968, and three years later Neruda was the laureate. In his Memoirs of 1963, Neruda recanted his Stalinism, though not his Communism. But the poems honored by the Nobel Prize had been written in his Stalinist years. Once more, the Nobel judges worried only whether Neruda's art had been compromised. So too with Asturias, who had accepted a Lenin Peace Prize in 1966, the year before he won the Nobel award.

The Nobel committee was not so lenient to writers on the right. As Dag Hammarskjöld in 1959 explained to Pär Lagerkvist (the 1951 Nobelist) about his objections to a prize for Ezra Pound:

I have no objection to a Nobel Prize being given to an author who is mentally unbalanced. … But Pound [fell] victim to anti-Semitism. … such a “subhuman” reaction ought to exclude the possibility of a prize intended to lay weight on the “idealistic tendency.” … I do not know exactly what the words “idealistic tendency” mean, but at least I do know what is diametrically opposed to what they can reasonably be assumed to signify.⁴²

Racism is a horror. But if, as Hammarskjöld says, some acts are so foul that they should preclude any Nobel award at all, one can only ask again: why is killing people for belonging to the “wrong” race worse than killing them in gulags for belonging to the “wrong” class? The victims are both as dead, the motives are both as subhuman.

In 1979 Karl Vennberg, a Swedish critic, challenged the Nobel's claim that it judged literature apart from politics. If so, he asked, why didn't the academy award Ezra Pound a prize? “The private politics of an author amount after all to an aberration that dies with his historical epoch.”⁴³ Even vehement Marxists no longer condemn the “reactionary” Balzac. A member of the Swedish Academy, Artur Lundkvist, disagreed with Vennberg: “the limited merits” of Pound's work could not make up for his “shameful outpourings of psychopathic hatred and evil.”⁴⁴ Did Lundkvist mean that a less limited writer than Pound, but also a fascist, could be awarded the prize? He did not clarify this delicate point.

But there was such a writer. Lundkvist lumped the French novelist Céline with Pound as too limited in achievement, and too shamefully full of hatred, to be prizeworthy. Céline was the pen name of Louis-Ferdinand Destouches (1894-1961), a physician who worked selflessly for the desperately poor. From 1938 he also published tracts filled with ravening hatred of Jews—Pound's is feeble by comparison. But Céline was a writer whose “aberrations” did not diminish his work any more than Stalinism did Neruda's. One of the powerfully disturbing writers of our age, he deserved the Nobel Prize for his Journey to the End of the Night (1932) and Death on the Installment Plan (1936). Reading those novels, even now, one can feel the world's pious verities trembling beneath one's feet, and see how a rising hatred might well bring down the temples—as almost happened. In the fateful 1930s, the decade of Céline's horrific visions, the Nobel laureates included the tepid Galsworthy, Bunin, Pearl Buck, Frans Sillanpää, and J. V. Jensen.⁴⁵

The Nobel judges have waged a Cold War of their own against other writers whose politics displeased them. Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine poet, fictionist, and essayist, utterly deserved a prize but never won. A Nobel judge, Artur Lundkvist again, said he would blackball Borges because he accepted an honor from the dictator Pinochet. Lundkvist said he much admired and even had translated Borges, but “his political blunders, this time in a fascist direction … make him in my opinion unsuitable on ethical and human grounds for a Nobel Prize.”⁴⁶ Borges was as far from being fascist as was Churchill. But neither the greatness nor the uniqueness of Borges's art could override this political veto. André Malraux felt he was also vetoed as too conservative (a Gaullist!) by the Stockholm judges.

The most telling case is not of a conservative but of a Communist: Bertolt Brecht, the famed author of Mother Courage, The Threepenny Opera, Galileo, and many other great plays from 1922 to his death in 1956. Brecht was clearly blackballed for political reasons. There was no other possible reason to delay or reject him. From the 1930s, Brecht was as great a dramatist as Europe produced, and one of Germany's best poets as well. Few writers deserved the prize more than he did. But he died unhonored—first nominated only in the year of his death, according to Espmark. Why nominated so very late? In his case, the judges did not “need more time for evaluation,” as they often say. Espmark merely notes that Brecht's “tendentious” Communism kept him from being honored earlier. As an ideologue, he was of course tendentious: so are all ideologues. But that cannot be said about his dramas, which generously enlarge the meaning and mystery of life.

As for “benefit to mankind,” as Nobel set forth in his will, why wasn't Arthur Koestler made a laureate, at least for Darkness at Noon (1940)? That novel helped shift European history from darkness at a crucial moment, circa 1948. Of how many poems or novels in any century can that be said? And the Nobel Prize, as seen, has singled out certain works as deserving the prize.

Sadly, one cannot say that the Nobel committee or the Swedish Academy has always been willing to fight very hard to back up its liberal or idealistic aims. In 1989 two members of the academy—Kerstin Ekman and Lars Gyllensten, publicly resigned, charging that the academy would not openly support the Anglo-Indian Salman Rushdie against the Iranian call for his assassination. Rushdie is not a laureate; if he were, that title might help protect him. But not necessarily. The Nigerian dramatist Wole Soyinka (Nobel 1986) was imprisoned in his homeland by the military junta from 1967 to 1969 and forcibly exiled in 1983. Despite his prize—or, more likely, because of the international attention it attracts—he has again been in exile since 1994; in early 1997 the regime charged him with treason, which carried the death penalty.

Soyinka's award points up how reluctantly the Nobel Prize guardians have moved outside the orbit of Europe and European languages. This is true not only of Asian nations and languages but of those on the margin of Europe itself, such as Greece, which won its first prize only in 1963, to the poet George Seferis. Israel and Egypt are Mediterranean countries, only a skip away from Greece—but the Hebrew and Arabic languages can seem light-years away. Still, Israeli literature won its first award as early as 1966, to the novelist Shmuel Y. Agnon, who wrote in Hebrew. Part of the reason was that he shared the prize with the Jewish poet Nelly Sachs, who wrote in German. Sachs, born and raised in Germany, fled to Sweden in 1940. After the Holocaust was revealed, her poems caught fire for a memorable decade or so. She can be haunting to the bone but also repetitive; Stephen Spender said that all her poems seem the same poem. Agnon is the greater writer. Why did they share the prize? According to the Nobel citation, because they shared a “kinship”:

to honor two writers who, although they write in different languages, are united in a spiritual kinship and complement each other in a superb effort to present the cultural heritage of the Jewish people through the written word.

By having them share a prize, the American critic Theodore Ziolkowski commented,

the Swedish Academy has succeeded in making itself ridiculous and in reducing the Nobel Prize to a farce, so blatantly tactical, so palpably non-literary are the reasons for its choice.⁴⁷

“It would have been more honest,” he concludes, if Sachs had been given the 1966 peace prize, and Agnon the literary award alone. He adds that though Sachs wrote in German, her award was as much another prize for Swedish literature, since she had had no connection with Germany or its writing for thirty years. But others have claimed that, far from having no connection with Germany, her poems had a too intimate connection which the Germans sought to evade: the death camps. Her major book of poems is titled The Chimneys. It has been plausibly argued that Sachs's prize was prompted by West Germany's wish in the 1960s for reconciliation with the Jews. Several high German prizes went to her just before the Nobel. But the distinguished German-Jewish poet Hilde Domin claimed that by thus locking Sachs into being “a poet of the Holocaust,” the Germans could ignore her role in German writing and the German past. This freed the Germans “from the obligation to live with such poems.” Certainly the strain wracked Nelly Sachs. She spent three years in a mental asylum, suffering from persecution mania. Her Nobel Prize came in the middle of this siege. She died in 1970.⁴⁸

If non-European languages like Hebrew or Arabic can handicap a writer, being without a nation has excluded some from any consideration. Exile is not the issue here, but that small nations can be swallowed up by their neighbors and disappear. Up to the collapse of the Soviet empire, for example, no Latvian or Lithuanian as such could ever win an award; they did not even exist: they were all “Soviet” writers.

The far-ranging effects of a Nobel award in this context have been sharply noted by Czesław Miłosz, the Polish poet and 1980 Nobelist. Until recently, he said in 1983, the literary map of Europe had several blank spots. England, France, Germany, and Italy were distinct. So too Spain, Portugal, Holland, Belgium, and Scandinavia. Moscow and Russia bulked large to the east. But for Eastern Europeans like Ukrainians and others, the “white spaces” could easily have borne the old inscription found on medieval maps: Ubi leones (Here be lions). That blank space included cities like Prague (“mentioned sometimes because of Kafka”), Warsaw, Budapest, and Belgrade. The effect of this kind of literary map is by no means negligible, said Miłosz:

The images preserved by a cultural elite undoubtedly also have political significance as they influence the decisions of the groups that govern, and it is no wonder that the statesmen who signed the Yalta agreement so easily wrote off a hundred million Europeans from those blank areas.⁴⁹

Miłosz refers, of course, to how Churchill and Roosevelt ceded Eastern Europe to Stalin in 1945. Would a less provincial and parochial Nobel attitude to Eastern European writing have made a difference at the time of Yalta? Miłosz suggests yes, and his point cannot easily be set aside. Because of prizes to writers like García Márquez, Octavio Paz, Miguel Angel Asturias, and Pablo Neruda, Latin America is no longer one of the blank places in world consciousness. The effect of a Nobel award can be incalculably important.

A HANDFUL OF POETS, AND FEWER PLAYWRIGHTS

Since 1901 the Nobel literary awards display a curious statistic. Although laureates have often crossed genres, generally fiction writers have won almost three times as often as poets, and eight times more often than dramatists. Up to 1999, of ninety-six laureates—there were no awards in some years—poets have won twenty-six whole prizes and shared six more times. Dramatists have won seven whole and three or four shared prizes; the rest are almost all fiction writers. The above number does not include writers who also wrote poems but were more famous in other genres, such as Kipling or Beckett. Why this disbalance? One can hardly conclude that our century has been so lacking in worthy poets and dramatists.

Poetry competes with fiction under two obvious handicaps. Great modern poetry often has seemed “obscure” to general readers and the Nobel committee alike. As late as 1960, the citation for the French symbolist poet Saint-John Perse apologized for his “difficulty,” by which time such modernism was an undergraduate school subject. And of course, fiction “travels” much better in translation than poetry. It would be interesting to know what languages the Nobel committee of 2000 read fluently in the original.

Since the Nobel judges depend so heavily on translations of verse, poets from minor European languages are at a disadvantage—if the Polish Szymborska had not been available in German and Swedish translations, would she ever have won?—and those from non-European languages all the more so. Nobel officials often point to the Indian laureate Tagore (1913) as an example of an early non-Western poet on their list. Unfortunately, although Tagore did write originally in Bengali, he won the Nobel Prize because of his English translation of the collection Gitanjali (Song Offerings). This once roused great enthusiasm in the West as an expression of Indian wisdom, and still has many admirers. It reads like a late-Victorian effusion edged with vague melancholy: “This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life.” A Nobel committee member, Verner von Heidenstam, a later laureate, claimed that just as knowing only a selection of Goethe's poems would convince us of his greatness, so too with Tagore. Reading some of Goethe in the original German, if you know German, and deciding he is a great poet is one thing. To read Tagore only in an English translation and conclude he must be a great Bengali poet is fatuous. And of course the Nobel judges could not read Bengali.⁵⁰

If the Nobel has heavily favored fiction over poetry, it has almost disinherited drama. Its eight awards (shared or whole) are: Bjørnson (1903), Maeterlinck (1911), Hauptmann (1912), Shaw (1925), Pirandello (1934), O'Neill (1936), then a fifty-year wait until Wole Soyinka (1983) and, after another decade, Dario Fo (1997).

But one can argue that the twentieth century was a great age of drama: Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Claudel, John Millington Synge, Sean O'Casey, Brecht, Brian Friel, John Osborne, Harold Pinter, Athol Fugard, Ugo Betti, Giraudoux, Jean Anouilh, Fernando Arrabal, Eugène Ionesco, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Max Frisch, Peter Weiss, Vaclav Havel, Michel de Ghelderode, Peter Barnes, Tom Stoppard.

Some reasons for ignoring Chekhov, Strindberg, and Brecht have been mentioned. As for the mighty Ibsen, the Nobel committee derailed his nomination in 1903 by selecting Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, inferior but more gratifyingly “idealistic.” The committee resorted to some astonishing arguments to justify barring Ibsen. One was that “the genius of Ibsen had unquestionably burnt out.”⁵¹ Between 1892 and 1899, Ibsen had merely written The Master Builder, John Gabriel Borkman, and When We Dead Awaken! A historian of Swedish literature has remarked that Bjørnson would still be one of Norway's national heroes if he had never published a line—as a supreme orator, political influence, and publicist. Wirsen's citation did not fail to mention that Bjørnson had written the Norwegian national anthem. Ibsen himself said that Bjørnson's life was his best work. Of course, Bjørnson's choice effectively put Ibsen out of the running, since Scandinavians could not be honored too frequently. Ibsen died in 1906. Once that happened, however, the worry about too quickly honoring another Scandinavian quickly faded. Only three years later, in 1909, the Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlöf was made a laureate.

Paul Claudel, perhaps the greatest French dramatist of this century, did his major work before 1920. The Nobel committee thus had ample time to come to know his work before he died in 1955. In 1926 he was a candidate for the prize. The evaluation praised the richness of his work and style but, with the usual Nobel nervousness about any “difficult” writing, worried about joining “this strangely esoteric poetry with the publicity of the Nobel Prize.” Espmark sums up the objections: “unnaturalness” and “unreality” versus “immediate” accessibility. Claudel was passed over. In 1937 Claudel was again rejected as too “difficult.” Österling, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy in the year before Claudel's death, called him “France's leading poet”⁵² but complained that, in the dramas, the religious symbolism stifled the aesthetic side. W. H. Auden wrote that Time worships language and

          Will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

The Nobel jury apparently could not accept posterity's strange excuse, Claudel was vetoed.

In 1997 the prize went to the Italian Dario Fo, whom many consider not a dramatist but a writer of scripts for his own performances. He is a vivid and popular actor of farce and satire, aimed mostly at political but also at other targets—the Vatican, anti-abortion, graft, genetic engineering. In each performance he improvises at will, so that his scripts are never quite available in permanent form, but remain prompt-books. He is the first postmodern “playwright”—or performance artist—in the Nobel list. One remembers that Charlie Chaplin was once nominated for the literature prize, since he too wrote his own scripts, but was rejected as not truly a dramatist. Yet Chaplin's films now exist in more permanent form than Fo's scripts.⁵³

PHILOSOPHY AND HISTORY

History entered the Nobel literary canon with the 1902 award to the German historian Mommsen. Only one other award to a historian—Churchill in 1953—has ever been given. Philosophy arrived when Eucken of Germany won the 1908 prize. After a two-decade pause, the French philosopher Henri Bergson was honored in 1927. A quarter century later, in 1950, came the British philosopher Bertrand Russell. Jean-Paul Sartre was honored both as writer and philosopher in 1964.

Trying to discover a pattern or principle in these prizes is hopeless. Committee quirks seem the only explanation. Eucken was a last-ditch compromise candidate when the judges deadlocked over Swinburne and Lagerlöf.⁵⁴ Bergson was a candidate from 1915, but his militant French patriotism kept him from being honored during the war. A magnificent stylist, he was the most popular philosopher in France; savants and society hostesses and Proust attended his lectures. Whatever else, the Nobel conservatives saw him as a staunch opponent of the materialists. Not least, Bergson brought to Stockholm the prestige of the French intellectual world and the Académie Française.

But the American philosophers William James (d. 1910) and George Santayana (d. 1952) were as fine stylists as Bergson, and his intellectual peers. Santayana should have been a candidate from 1920 on, but there is no sign he was ever nominated. The American Henry Adams (d. 1918), who wrote Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres as well as The Education of Henry Adams, and some first-rate American history, was ignored. The Spanish philosopher and cultural critic José Ortega y Gasset (d. 1955) deserved a prize, but he too may never have been nominated. Though Benedetto Croce was a candidate and strongly recommended, the Italian was rejected in 1933 perhaps because the judges were then disinclined to move away from strictly literary fields. The Spaniard Unamuno was rejected in 1935 as too “abstract,” which may surprise anyone who has read his Tragic View of Life (1913) or his Meditations on Don Quixote (1914). J. G. Frazer, author of The Golden Bough in 1915, was rejected because his work was “too old.” Freud, a master of German style, was set aside as having “a sick and distorted imagination”⁵⁵ and as really belonging in the field of medicine, where he was also denied a prize.

Bertrand Russell began as a philosopher of mathematical logic as forbiddingly technical as possible. But he then shifted to intellectual popularizations of any subject under the sun—science, history, psychology, pedagogy, political thought. Like George Bernard Shaw, Russell turned into a long-lived and revered perpetual enfant terrible; his Nobel chances were certainly helped by his receiving the prestigious British Order of Merit the year before. He was surely a lucid philosophic expositor, but even the Nobel judges could hardly believe that amounted to great literature.

Mommsen was eighty-five when named a laureate, a living monument of historical scholarship. Churchill himself was a living monument of history. His six-volume The Second World War, published from 1948 to 1954, provided a “literary” reason for making him a laureate, but the Nobel jury suggests it was thinking as much or more of his oratory during World War II.⁵⁶

NOBEL IDENTITIES: LANGUAGE AND NATION

Nobel laureates have always been identified by nation. But with the literary prizes, language provides a more accurate reckoning. Nations divide, redivide, and sometimes vanish. A laureate's nation is not always easy to determine. Languages are stabler. Czesław Miłosz, the poet and Nobel laureate who writes in Polish, was born and raised in Lithuania, which together with part of Poland was then under Russian rule. Miłosz has lived many decades in America, but the Poles rightly count him as one of their own, as Russians do the émigré poet Joseph Brodsky, an American resident to his death. Languages ignore all such political happenstance. Isaac Bashevis Singer is part of Yiddish writing, for which there has never been, and now will never be, a nation.

The Nobel Prize in Literature has of course mostly honored the major European nations. But being a Great Power does not guarantee success. Germany did moderately well until 1929, when Thomas Mann took the prize, but has had only two prizes since then, spaced almost thirty years apart: to Heinrich Böll in 1972, and to Günter Grass in 1999. But though a nation may not do well, its language can. Although Germany has earned only seven prizes, the German language also lives in Austria, Switzerland, and here and there in Central Europe; Kafka and Rilke, both from Prague, wrote in German. The German language has a total of eleven laureates, including two from Switzerland plus the German-writing Canetti and also counting Nelly Sachs. Spain has won only five awards, but Spanish-language Nobels have mounted up impressively: Spain after all colonized a continent. Of the thirteen nations in South America, nine speak Spanish, as do all countries in Central America; Brazil, with no winners, uses Portuguese. There are now five Latin-American laureates, all but one in the last third of the century.

English has spread even further. Prizes here now dominate the Nobel list—twenty-one awards, including writers from Great Britain, the U.S., Ireland, Australia, South Africa, Nigeria, and the West Indies.

France, with a very high total of eleven up to 1965, has had only one prize in the last thirty years. Italy has won six, Poland four, and a handful of others one or two.

Scandinavian nations have had the extraordinarily high total of fourteen laureates. But the Swedish Academy's generosity to its own and neighboring writers has ceased, at least for the moment: the last Scandinavian laureates were in 1974. One of the Scandinavian prizes was to the Finnish novelist Sillanpää; Finland is a Scandinavian nation but Finnish isn't a kindred language, which shows how complicated counting Nobels by nations can get.

NOBELS IN ENGLISH

LAUREATES FROM GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND

1907 Rudyard Kipling, fiction

1923 William Butler Yeats, poetry (Irish Free State)

1925 George Bernard Shaw, drama

1932 John Galsworthy, fiction

1948 T. S. Eliot, poetry

1950 Bertrand Russell, philosophy

1953 Winston Churchill, history

1969 Samuel Beckett, fiction and drama (Irish-French)

1983 William Golding, fiction

1995 Seamus Heaney, poetry

As a representation of Great Britain's best writing in the twentieth century, this list is of course absurd, and the Nobel judges realize it.⁵⁷ Without the Irish component of Yeats, Shaw, Heaney, and Beckett and the Anglo-American Eliot, the English fiction list shrinks to Kipling, Galsworthy, and Golding: not brilliant. The Nobel jury, at least, has not been able to find any native English, or Scottish or Welsh, writers of true distinction.

Instead of the undistinguished Galsworthy, a more competent Nobel jury would have chosen Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Sean O'Casey, or E. M. Forster. As noted, Golding's merits were so disputable that a Swedish Academy member, in a rare breach of Nobel secrecy, publicly dismissed him as a nonentity. Among his contemporaries, the Nobel jury could have honored Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Philip Larkin, Graham Greene, Anthony Burgess, Hugh MacDiarmid, or Doris Lessing.

Early unsuccessful British candidates included the philosopher Herbert Spencer, too “agnostic”; George Meredith, too “often artificial and febrile”; and Thomas Hardy, vetoed for his unGodly novels—his present high status as a poet came after his death in 1928. There was also the Victorian poet Algernon Swinburne, whose best work by 1901 lay more than thirty years back. He lost out in an inimitable Nobel comedy. Swinburne's perverse, sometimes sadistic touches (“O lips full of lust and laughter, / Curled snakes that are fed from my breast, / Bite hard …”) and his pagan anti-Christianity had often shocked his Victorian readers, and he also once sang songs of revolution. The reactionary Wirsen nonetheless enthusiastically backed him for an award. He blamed Swinburne's excesses on the wicked Baudelaire's influence; he was also pleased that the old Swinburne, come to his senses, now censured libidinous poets like Whitman and stoutly championed monarchy. But Swinburne lost out in 1908 and died soon after.

Some of those passed over by the Nobel judges could comprise a Great Books collection:

Joseph Conrad: Conrad desperately hoped to win the award, always anxious about his reputation and always in financial straits until the last few years of his life. He had high claims as the world's finest sea writer, but also for such novels as Lord Jim (1900), Heart of Darkness (1902), and the extraordinary sequence of political novels Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911). Conrad, never very practical, pinned his hopes for a Nobel Prize on his novel The Rescue (1919-20), not one of his best. But the 1919 prize went to the Swiss poet Carl Spitteler. Conrad hoped that after the 1923 prize to Yeats, a novelist would be chosen next—perhaps Conrad himself. In 1924 it was indeed a novelist, and a Polish one—Władysław Reymont. Conrad died that same year. Espmark claims that Conrad had never been nominated for the Nobel award from Britain or the U.S.,⁵⁸ though he later adds that “not a single legitimate proposal” was made. This is cryptic: had Conrad been nominated or not? Conrad's reputation was high not only in Britain and the U.S. but in France. A simpler reason doubtless kept Conrad from a prize. If the Nobel jury could not see the Yeats of 1923 except in terms of his Celtic Twilight self of 1900, what could they make of a Pole writing exotic English about terrorists and nihilists, as in Under Western Eyes and The Secret Agent, or strange and sinister colonialists as in Heart of Darkness? T. S. Eliot quoted from Conrad, unidentified as from a classic, in his The Waste Land and “The Hollow Men” of the early 1920s; but the Nobel judges at that time also found Eliot indigestible.

D. H. Lawrence: Lawrence's “international breakthrough” occurred in the 1920s, Espmark concedes, but Lawrence died in 1930, “too soon to be evaluated.” Lawrence had by then written Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1921), The Plumed Serpent (1926), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), as well as much powerful short fiction. But it is useless to repeat that the Nobel jury needed only three years to honor Pearl Buck, less than ten for others like Sinclair Lewis or Sienkiewicz. Espmark broaches the real reason Lawrence was never honored: it was unlikely that the Swedish Academy of those days “would have been capable of realizing the importance of this controversial figure.” In short, Lawrence would never have won a prize no matter how long that hostile jury “evaluated” his works.

Virginia Woolf: If they ever read her, the Nobel judges might have wondered if Woolf's lyrically allusive Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), not to mention the dazzling poetic formalisms of The Waves (1931) and The Years (1937), were in fact novels at all. In Nobel view, she was all those things they disliked and feared—“difficult,” “eccentric,” “exclusive,” their code words for a writer without popular appeal.

James Joyce: As usual, we are told that Joyce was never nominated. In 1923 Desmond Fitzgerald, a minister of the new Irish Free State, wrote Joyce that Ireland should propose him for a Nobel prize. Joyce commented that such a move not only would not get him the prize but would probably get Fitzgerald sacked.⁵⁹

Defending the Nobel jury, Espmark claims that Joyce's “stature was not properly recognized even in the English-speaking world.” This is limp. Ulysses was published in 1922, and within ten years, discerning and influential critics—T. S. Eliot, Pound, Edmund Wilson, Ernst Robert Curtius, and others of that rank—“properly” recognized him as one of the world's greatest living novelists. Espmark concedes this by saying that Joyce would doubtless have been honored as a “pioneer” like Eliot in 1948 if he had only lived until the post-war years. But Joyce died in 1941. In 1947 or so, he would have been worthy of a prize, but not six years before? The Nobel litany of “died too soon” thus really seems to mean “didn't live long enough for us.”

LAUREATES FROM THE UNITED STATES

1930 Sinclair Lewis, fiction

1936 Eugene O'Neill, drama

1938 Pearl Buck, fiction

1949 William Faulkner, fiction

1954 Ernest Hemingway, fiction

1962 John Steinbeck, fiction

1976 Saul Bellow, fiction

1978 Isaac Bashevis Singer, fiction in Yiddish (resident in the U.S. when awarded prize)

1980 Czesław Miłosz, poetry in Polish (resident in the U.S. when awarded prize)

1987 Joseph Brodsky, poetry in Russian (resident in the U.S. when awarded prize)

1993 Toni Morrison, fiction

As a record of great American writing, this is as peculiar as that of Britain. First, the Nobel Prize ignored giants such as Twain (d. 1910, apparently never considered) and Henry James. In 1911 Edith Wharton, Edmund Gosse, and William Dean Howells began a campaign to get James the Nobel award. He deserved it, was ill, and badly needed the money. They did all the right things: they gathered eminent supporters; they had impressive letters sent to the Nobel committees spelling out James's towering position as an Anglo-American novelist. It had no effect. The Nobel jury read the letters but, as James's biographer Leon Edel puts it,

the Northern judges of the world's literature had not read James. They had not read about him in the newspapers; he was intensely private. Moreover, they tended to be influenced by the degree to which foreign writers were popular in other countries than their own and the extent to which they were translated. James had been very little translated. He considered himself—and most translators agree—untranslatable.⁶⁰

The evaluators of James, as Espmark reports them, admit he had fine style, but with wondrous blindness claimed his novels were too often only “conversation and situation novels,” and he “lacks concentration.” The Wings of the Dove had “an improbable and odious subject.”⁶¹

After no prizes at all to Americans until 1930, three came in quick succession to Lewis, O'Neill, and Buck. Was the Nobel committee trying to make up for past neglect? Perhaps they were truly smitten by what seemed fresh new voices. But Sinclair Lewis has faded dramatically. It is difficult now to recapture the excitement of Lewis's early novels, each a devastating satirical blow at American complacency: Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Arrowsmith (1925), Elmer Gantry (1927). He was the deadly deflater of twenties boosterism and American brashness. His satire had a photographic perfection in which every fatuous flaw in the target loomed up at one. But when the provincialism and hectic phoniness of the 1920s gave way to the deeper problems of the Depression, he seemed at sea. He lived to 1951 and turned out novels regularly, often best-sellers, too often bloated and formulaic.

Why was Lewis chosen as the first American Nobelist? The Nobel committee claimed he was beginning a new national literature. Having earlier passed over Twain and James, they now managed to ignore other new makers of American writing far more important than Lewis. In fiction alone, there was F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, and Theodore Dreiser. In his Nobel acceptance speech, Lewis honorably and generously suggested that Dreiser was more deserving of the Nobel award: “more than any other man” he was the real pioneer, “marching alone, usually unappreciated, often hated,” but “he cleared the trail from Victorian … timidity and gentility.” A better description of exactly the sort of writer the Nobel juries of that time would never honor could hardly be given.

Faulkner's award was one of the Nobel's finest moments: they actually picked a writer who had been dismissed in the United States and Britain as perverse, grotesque, impenetrable, or a mere regionalist, and most of his books were out of print. The New York Times derided his prize: “Incest and rape may be common in Faulkner's Jefferson, Mississippi, but they are not elsewhere in the United States.” As for Hemingway, he was one of the world's supercelebrities when he won the prize, but though he was only fifty-five, his career was essentially over. The Swedish Academy praised The Old Man and the Sea (1952) as a masterpiece and a sign of Hemingway's regenerated powers; it was neither. Then came John Steinbeck, described by the Nobel citation as embracing all America in his sympathy for its mountains and coasts, its oppressed and misfits and ordinary folk—the citation in its turn embracing all of Steinbeck by devoting a paragraph of praise even to Travels with Charley (1962), Steinbeck's book about touring the country with his dog in a truck named Rosinante. Far more gifted than Pearl Buck, Steinbeck is however also her closest relative on the Nobel's American list.

The prizes to Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison have rightly received wide approval. Bellow, with Beckett, is the greatest comic novelist on the Nobel list; Faulkner is a contender. Another supreme comic master unjustly denied a Nobel Prize was Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977). Perhaps the Nobel committee, blinking like a mole at too much sunlight, judged Lolita (1955) obscene, Pale Fire (1962) too eccentric, and the enchanting Pnin (1957) too slight.

A real test of the Nobel's maturity, openness, literary wisdom, and determination to honor genius would have been a prize to Gertrude Stein. Her novel Three Lives (1903) has lost none of its audacity and freshness (in both senses); nor has Tender Buttons (1915) or The Making of Americans (1925) or Operas and Plays (1937). But for such a “difficult” and “eccentric” writer, her chances were zero. She died in 1946.

To date, American laureates have all been fiction writers, with O'Neill the only dramatist. No American poet has ever been honored. Worthy candidates have hardly been lacking. By the 1920s, an American renaissance in poetry was spilling over: Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, to name only the most prominent. If a Nobel Prize is ever given to an American poet, the future poet-Nobelist is going to have to contend with these potent ghosts, and the comparisons will likely not be polite.

Why no American poets? The Swedish judges patently lacked a sense of what was new and good in American poetry. And the Nobel's disdain for “difficult” writing put most of the above poets out of court automatically—except Robert Frost. Up to the late 1950s, Frost was still widely seen in the United States as the homespun philosopher of rural New England folkways; the sense of his darkly ironic, even nihilistic side spread slowly. He was America's most popular poet of the time. He wrote always in disciplined meter and style, and could never be accused of formal eccentricity. Indeed, if any poet seemed ideal for the Nobel Prize in the Swedish Academy's own terms, it was Frost. Why then did he never win? Our cicerone to the Nobel committee, Espmark, notes without further explanation that the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld thought Frost lost out to Hemingway for “political” reasons.⁶²

Frost lived until 1963, Stevens to 1955, Williams to 1963, Moore to 1972.

The one “American” poet who came close was W. H. Auden, who died in 1973. Here arises another nationality tangle: Auden had lived in the United States for thirty years, and became a citizen; if Eliot was counted English, didn't Auden count as American? In 1965 the two leading candidates apparently were Auden and Sartre. Sartre was deemed the philosophy pioneer, Auden the literary innovator. Sartre won; Auden's best work was thought “too far back in time.” In 1967 Auden came up again with Miguel Angel Asturias of Guatemala and Graham Greene as his rivals. But now Auden was set aside by a Nobel swing of mood against honoring too well-known writers: why bother to celebrate the celebrated? The same argument obviously worked against Greene; Asturias won.

ENGLISH-LANGUAGE LAUREATES FROM ELSEWHERE

1973 Patrick White, fiction (Australia)

1986 Wole Soyinka, drama (Nigeria)

1991 Nadine Gordimer, fiction (South Africa)

1992 Derek Walcott, poetry (West Indies)

Patrick White (1912-1990) dominated Australian writing in his lifetime and still does. His is no provincial reputation; White is properly seen as one of the great writers of the twentieth century in any language. Soyinka and Gordimer are two from a vast continent of important writers, as yet scarcely noticed by the Nobel committee. Soyinka is a major dramatist, Gordimer a distinguished novelist. But prizes to African writing in English could as rightly have gone to the Nigerian novelists Chinua Achebe (b. 1930) and Amos Tutuola (b. 1922), the Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor (b. 1935), the Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o (b. 1938), J. M. Coetzee (b. 1940) of South Africa. Or the major poets Léopold Sédar Senghor or Aimé Césaire, who wrote in French. There may also be worthy prize candidates who write in native African languages or in Portuguese. Walcott's poetry focuses on his West Indian roots, but he draws eclectically from European and American modernism, Greek myth, and much else. V. S. Naipaul is from Trinidad but, as earlier noted, has been passed over by Stockholm.

NOBELS IN FRENCH

LAUREATES FROM FRANCE

1901 Sully Prudhomme, poetry

1904 Frédéric Mistral, poetry (shared with Echegaray of Spain)

1915 Romain Rolland, fiction

1921 Anatole France, fiction

1927 Henri Bergson, philosophy

1937 Roger Martin du Gard, fiction

1947 André Gide, fiction

1952 François Mauriac, fiction

1957 Albert Camus, fiction

1960 Saint-John Perse, poetry

1964 Jean-Paul Sartre, philosophy and fiction

1985 Claude Simon, fiction

Anatole France used to be thought a sceptical Epicurean, Martin du Gard an epic novelist of the bourgeois, Gide an intellectual in the guise of novelist, Mauriac a novelist of Catholic guilt on the rack. Their reputations have faded, Mauriac's perhaps the least.

Albert Camus was the first laureate (1957) from the World War II generation. He wrote existential philosophy in The Rebel (1951), and novels of the “absurd” with classic control: The Stranger (1942), The Plague (1947), The Fall (1956). Camus agonized over his award. He thought André Malraux more deserving; and he worried that all his writing from then on—he was only forty-four when he became a laureate—would have to live up to his Nobel reputation. His prestige as a Nobelist and his Algerian birth made him a large political target during the Algerian crisis exploding at that time. But three years later, in 1960, Camus was dead in a car accident.

His onetime existentialist ally and then political opponent was Jean-Paul Sartre, the combative lion of that generation of French intellectuals. But after Sartre's refusal of the 1964 prize, no French writer won for twenty years. Many French saw this as the Swedes' revenge. Others pointed out that Beckett's prize in 1969 was half for writing in French. In 1985 the novelist Claude Simon finally brought France a “full” laureate. A candidate since the 1960s, heavily influenced by Faulkner, Simon's stylistic explorations or obsessions make him one of the few strenuously avant-garde prose writers on the Nobel list.

Among the excluded:

André Malraux: The omission of Malraux (1901-1976) is one of the Nobel's great lapses. He began as a novelist and in midcareer moved into art history, with his famous Voices of Silence (1951) and The Imaginary Museum (1953), and other works including innovative biography and autobiography. In 1969, after Camus and Sartre had become laureates, many expected Malraux finally to win. He had long been a prominent candidate. But Beckett was chosen instead as the French representative. Malraux believed that the Swedish Academy refused to honor him because they considered Gaullism to be semifascist; Malraux served as a minister under de Gaulle. The Nobel's explanation, according to Espmark, was that Churchill's Nobel Prize, given when he was prime minister, raised charges of political favoritism. Since then, the Swedish Academy chose to honor no writer holding political office. This is supposedly why Léopold Sédar Senghor, president of the Republic of Senegal from 1960, was not honored. But Senghor stepped down in 1980. And why, when de Gaulle was out of office and Malraux not a minister, wasn't he honored then? One is forced to conclude Malraux was right: the Nobel jury's politics vetoed not his work but his Gaullism.

Colette: Sidonie Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954) was so brilliantly the writer of sensuous life, landscape, longing and love, that she was also often confined to a narrow and quintessentially feminine carnality. For the same reason, she has been charged with being trapped in the fin-de-siècle, in the demimonde, in childhood memory and adolescence wakening to sexuality and life. Yet she was a writer of overwhelming natural power, perfect instinct, and inexhaustible vitality. Colette still seems to await adequate appreciation. But after novels like Chéri (1920) and memoirs like Sido (1929), and her prolific output before and after, she should have been honored in the later 1930s, when she easily outclassed the Italian Grazia Deledda or the Danish J. V. Jensen, to mention no others.

Paul Valéry: Scheduled to be the laureate for 1945, Valéry died in July of that year. The Nobel jury had awarded a posthumous prize in 1931 to the Swedish poet and member of the Swedish Academy Erik Karlfeldt, but decided against this with Valéry, probably since there were many protests that Valéry should have been honored a decade or so before. Valéry's selection was meant as a sign that the Nobel had somewhat abandoned its resistance to “difficult” modernist poetry. A new committee had been appointed, the same that soon honored Faulkner; the next poet selected, Eliot in 1948, was in Valéry's symbolist tradition, as was Perse in 1960, and both were also used to pay homage to Valéry.⁶³

Of the three poets among French laureates, only Perse has great distinction, the two others being Sully Prudhomme and Frédéric Mistral. But there has been a crowd of superb poets in French: Louis Aragon, Blaise Cendrars, René Char, Henri Michaux, Pierre Reverdy, Francis Ponge, Yves Bonnefoy, Mohammed Dib, Aimé Césaire.

And why did Marguerite Yourcenar never receive a Nobel?

NOBELS IN GERMAN

Though the few Nobel awards here suggest otherwise, twentieth-century writing in German has been one of modern literature's richest areas, as well as one of the richest mixes of participating nationalities. Poets included Rilke from Prague, Hofmannsthal from Vienna, Paul Celan from Romania, Stefan George and Arno Holz and Peter Huchel from Germany, Carl Spitteler from Switzerland. In fiction and drama, Thomas Mann, Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll, and Bertolt Brecht from Germany; Kafka from Prague; Hermann Broch, Robert Musil, Thomas Bernhard, and the satirist Karl Kraus from Austria; Hermann Hesse and the dramatists Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt from Switzerland. With all this talent, the Nobel has netted seven Germans, two Swiss, and two émigré writers. Of these probably only Thomas Mann is of undoubted first rank. How, even in the erratic history of Nobel committees, could so many have been missed by so few?

LAUREATES FROM GERMANY

1902 Theodor Mommsen, history

1908 Rudolf Eucken, philosophy

1910 Paul Heyse, poetry

1912 Gerhart Hauptmann, drama

1929 Thomas Mann, fiction

1972 Heinrich Böll, fiction

1999 Günter Grass, fiction

LAUREATES FROM SWITZERLAND

1919 Carl Spitteler, poetry

1946 Hermann Hesse, fiction

OTHER GERMAN-LANGUAGE LAUREATES

1966 Nelly Sachs, poetry (Sweden)

1981 Elias Canetti, fiction (Bulgaria-Austria-Britain)

Germany's Nobel list is perhaps the strangest of any major European country: four to 1912, then only three in almost ninety years following. Hauptmann, Spitteler, and Heyse were a generation older than Thomas Mann. But Mann's generation is the one strikingly missing from the Nobel awards. Mann (born 1875) was almost an exact contemporary of Rilke (b. 1875), Kafka (b. 1883), Hofmannsthal (b. 1874), Musil (b. 1880), Karl Kraus (b. 1874), Broch (b. 1886), Alfred Döblin (b. 1878). The Nobel judges missed them all. Kafka published too little. The others had the bad luck, with the Nobel in mind, to come to maturity from around 1900 to about 1940—true even of Brecht, born 1898, because of his precocity—when the Nobel strongly disdained modernism.

They also came from unlucky lands: Germany and Austria with their wars and Nazi interregnum, or Central Europe with its contentious small nations and minorities—Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Bosnians, Croatians, Poles, Romanians, Bulgarians, Hungarians—often swallowed up by powerful neighbors or thrust into precarious, short-lived independence. Small, fractured, inwardly clashing nations scarcely provide the sort of prestigious nominations and organizational support possible in France or the U.S. In this Mitteleuropa, even becoming visible through translation was difficult, since it was often a point of honor not to know a major language like German or Russian.

Remarkably, there is as yet no Austrian laureate, unless one counts the émigré Canetti.⁶⁴ Yet Vienna, in concentration of genius, easily rivaled Paris before Hitler arrived in 1938. Perhaps these Central Europeans were too precocious about the tremors and disorientations of modernity—the Central Europeans knew disorder and fragmentation, as it were, in their bones and history, “along the blood,” in a way not available to the French or British, or Swedes. The Nobel committee took fifty years or more to begin to catch up with them. And by then, the 1870s generation were dead or “too old” or still undiscovered. Robert Musil's great novel The Man without Qualities (written 1930-43), like those of the Austrian Joseph Roth (1894-1939), is only now coming into its own.

Of this lost generation, special mention must be made of Hermann Broch and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Broch's epical, many-layered, prose-poetical The Death of Virgil (1945) puts him on the level of Proust, Mann, and Joyce. Thomas Mann and Einstein were among those nominating him for a Nobel Prize. The Nobel evaluator felt that The Death of Virgil lacked a wide following (true, but irrelevant) and that it mixed narrative, poetry, philosophy, and history to excess (how define “excess”?). Broch died in 1951. By the 1980s the Nobel jury was finally ready to cope with such writing and they chose the lesser Canetti. Hofmannsthal is best known as the librettist for Richard Strauss's operas, but as a poet and dramatist, and analyst of the disintegration of language, he has few superiors.

The novelist Günter Grass, Rabelaisian in energy and enormities, is also outspoken and truculent politically. In 1972, when the Nobel judges finally selected their first postwar German laureate, they passed over Grass—who by then had published The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, and Dog Years—and instead chose the excellent but also more respectable Heinrich Böll, who spoke for decent, middle-of-the-road Germans. Grass finally won in 1999, aged seventy-three.

Of recent writers, the poet Paul Celan is among the Nobel's most serious lapses. Celan was a Romanian Jew born in 1920, who survived the Holocaust, worked in Paris, and wrote poetry in German. Any discussion of modern writing must soon move him into the forefront. His subject was the Holocaust and in his style—the chopped syntax, the words burdened with silences and derailments—that horrifying experience leaks through like blood at every point. But he committed suicide in 1970, aged fifty, while the Nobel evaluators were still cautiously deciding if he measured up to Nobel standards. Was he perhaps not old enough for a prize? One wonders if the Russian poet Brodsky, honored so young and quickly, was another of the Nobel's stand-ins here.

NOBELS IN SCANDINAVIA

SCANDINAVIAN LAUREATES

1903 Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (Norway)

1909 Selma Lagerlöf (Sweden)

1916 Carl Verner von Heidenstam (Sweden)

1917 Karl Gjellerup (Denmark); Henrik Pontoppidan (Denmark)

1920 Knut Hamsun (Norway)

1928 Sigrid Undset (Norway)

1931 Erik Karlfeldt (Sweden)

1939 Frans Sillanpää (Finland)

1944 Johannes V. Jensen (Denmark)

1951 Pär Lagerkvist (Sweden)

1955 Halldór Laxness (Iceland)

1974 Eyvind Johnson (Sweden); Harry Martinson (Sweden)

One may perhaps add Nelly Sachs, though she wrote in German and is considered above.

This is fourteen or perhaps fifteen Nobel Prizes to Scandinavian writers—against twelve for France and seven for Germany. One might thus assume we are dealing with a very major body of world writing. But only Hamsun's reputation, and recently Martinson's, has grown. Sillanpää is often said to have won because the Nobel wanted to reward Finland for its brave resistance to the Soviet Union in the 1939 war; Espmark refutes that, pointing out that the USSR attacked Finland on 14 December 1939, months after Sillanpää had been named. But wasn't the Soviet threat discernible months before? Harry Martinson's epic poem Aniara is a haunting masterpiece of humans leaving the earth as the space age begins; perhaps Martinson lacks the international fame he deserves because the list's general Scandinavian mediocrity makes him suspect.

It could have been a much more impressive list. To start, there were Ibsen, Strindberg, Georg Brandes, and Isak Dinesen. Was the superb Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf (1907-1968) omitted only because by then the list was already swollen with not-so-great Northern writers? And has the arresting Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer been denied because adding another Swede might be too embarrassing now?

NOBELS IN ITALY

ITALIAN LAUREATES

1906 Giosuè Carducci, poetry

1926 Grazia Deledda, fiction

1934 Luigi Pirandello, drama

1959 Salvatore Quasimodo, poetry

1975 Eugenio Montale, poetry

1997 Dario Fo

As poet and critic, Carducci was a dominating figure in Italian literature in the last third of the nineteenth century. His is the aura of an emancipator. From midcentury, he challenged a decayed romanticism with an invigorating classicism, and at a time when Italy preferred even poor translations of mediocre French poetry or fiction to its own living best, he helped restore Italian writing to dignity in its homeland. This was the period of his great Odi barbare (1877-89), of many sonnets, and of poems celebrating Shelley, Rome, and Dante's church.

Grazia Deledda was self-educated and wrote against all the odds for a woman at that time in that place. Her Sardinian landscapes and peasants, the social world that seemed as fixed and archaic as the earth, are real yet not compelling. The Nobel committee of the 1920s, Espmark notes, considered her an example of the Goethean “great and noble simplicity” they had chosen as their model. One suspects this was another way for the Nobel to finesse the challenge of modern writing, the greatest of which did not meet, nor wish to, Goethean neoclassical standards.

Pirandello is still perhaps the most famous Italian writer of this century. He anticipated the modernist theater, experimental, existential, and absurd. Unfortunately, “Pirandello” too often narrows down to one or two of his plays, Six Characters in Search of an Author and Right You Are, If You Think You Are. He wrote more than forty plays, seven novels, a hundred-odd short stories, and a great weight of criticism and essays.

Salvatore Quasimodo's Nobel Prize before Montale's seems to have depended crucially on a brilliant English translation by the American poet and translator Allen Mandelbaum, which came out at the opportune moment. That Quasimodo wrote some lovely verses, says Ragusa,

and that at a certain point he rejected the poetics of Hermeticism to turn to a more readily graspable diction seem insufficient reasons for the decision of the Nobel committee at the expense of alternate possibilities.⁶⁵

Montale has great humanity. But the unanointed Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970) was a greater poet, of such compact power that he can make all other poets garrulous.

NOBELS IN RUSSIA/USSR

RUSSIAN LAUREATES

1933 Ivan Bunin, fiction

1958 Boris Pasternak, poetry and fiction

1965 Mikhail Sholokhov, fiction

1970 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, fiction

1987 Joseph Brodsky, poetry

Twentieth-century Russian literature has been extraordinarily rich, but almost three entire generations were murdered or had their careers chopped short by the Soviet regime, or emigrated—the young Nabokov, for example. In 1925 the Communist Party declared total censorship privilege over all art. In 1932 the Soviet Writers Union took over direct control of publishing and support. A short list with dates suggests how some of the greatest writers had no chance at a Nobel award:

Andrei Bely, fiction, 1880-1934 (remained in USSR; no important work after 1920s)

Aleksandr Blok, fiction, 1880-1921 (died from overwork)

Vladimir Mayakovsky, poetry, 1893-1930 (suicide)

Osip Mandelstam, poetry, 1891-1938 (died in prison camp)

Eugene Zamyatin, fiction, 1884-1937 (exiled in early 1930s)

Marina Tsvetaeva, poetry, 1892-1941 (suicide)

Isaac Babel, fiction, 1894-1941? (murdered in purges)

Mikhail Bulgakov, fiction, 1891-1940 (major work banned during lifetime)

Anna Akhmatova, poetry, 1889-1966 (mostly unpublished from 1920s; publicly denounced 1946)

Of those who matured during and after the revolution, Boris Pasternak was the first of a meager handful to become a laureate. Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago is, however, often said to be rivaled or surpassed by Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita, allowed into print only sixteen years after the author died. Anna Akhmatova survived by the skin of her teeth, and from the 1950s gained international notice, but the Nobel jury let her die unhonored. It is one of the Stockholm mysteries. Isaiah Berlin, the famous Oxford don and Russia expert, visited her during the war and shortly after, and knew her great worth. Was he ever a Nobel nominator, and if not, why on earth not? There appears only one reason he might not have nominated her—that she might thereby suffer more official harassment. But if the Nobel jury were concerned about that, why then did they expose Pasternak to even worse possible harassment, since his “crime” of publishing a historical novel in the West about the Soviet world was more flagrant? Akhmatova is as great a loss to the list as anyone namable.

Ivan Bunin (Nobel 1933) survived by leaving the Soviet Union in 1920 and never returning. He kept writing in Russian, and happily was widely translated, by D. H. Lawrence among others. It is difficult to see Bunin as anything but a minor writer, but the Nobel citation, laying stress on his link with Russia before the Communists, and even bringing in Tolstoy, suggested Bunin was preserving the great pre-Bolshevik tradition. Even by the time of Bunin's award, however, Nabokov was often considered the best Russian émigré writer. It is known that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, for all his apparent distance from Nabokovian playfulness and dandyism, nominated him for the Nobel Prize. Nabokov never won—he seems to hold the record as the writer who should have won a Nobel in either or both of two different languages.

NOBELS IN POLAND

POLISH LAUREATES

1905 Henryk Sienkiewicz, fiction

1924 Władyslaw Reymont, fiction

1980 Czesław Miłosz, poetry

1996 Wisława Szymborska, poetry

Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis appeared in 1896 and over the next few decades sold millions of copies. The Nobel judges have often been greatly impressed by the international popularity of a writer—it can seem a testimony of worth—and here was one indeed.

By the time Reymont's historical novels were honored, Polish writing was starting to remake itself into writing as vital as any in the world. In the 1920s new movements sprang up. Before and after the Second War there were such fiction writers, to mention only those best known in the West, as Tadeus Borowski, Witold Gombrowicz, Bruno Schulz, Jerzy Peterkiewicz, the science-fantasist Stanisław Lem—and such Yiddish writers as I. J. Singer, brother of the Nobelist I. B. Singer. Poets included Miłosz, Alexander Wat, and the slightly younger Zbigniew Herbert, Tadeus Resewicz, and Adam Mickiewicz. In the 1980s, the later Russian Nobelist Joseph Brodsky was not alone in saying that everyone should learn Polish because the century's most interesting poetry was being written in that language.

Miłosz came to maturity in the 1930s, in a Poland wracked between the Soviets and Nazis, and inwardly by its own many tensions; he witnessed firsthand the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto; in 1951, he went into exile. His poetry brims with extraordinary richness, an unsettling blend of generosity and bitterness, open to all experience. The next Polish laureate, in 1996, was another poet, Wisława Szymborska (b. 1923). Younger than Miłosz, she is little known in the West. She has been called one of the least prolific major poets of our time. No one else quite so casual and commanding comes to mind.

And should Isaac Bashevis Singer be added to the Polish list? The puzzling notion of nationality arises again. He lived in Poland, mainly Warsaw, until he was thirty-one, writing in Yiddish, publishing there his famous story “Satan in Goray.” In 1935 he emigrated to the U.S., but he kept writing in Yiddish and setting his fiction most often in Poland. After James Joyce left Ireland, he kept writing about Dublin, and remained an Irish writer. So should Singer be listed among “Polish” writers?

NOBELS IN SPANISH

SPANISH-LANGUAGE LAUREATES

1904 José Echegaray, drama, Spain

1922 Jacinto Benavente, drama, Spain

1945 Gabriela Mistral, poetry, Chile

1956 Juan Ramón Jiménez, poetry, Spain

1967 Miguel Angel Asturias, fiction, Guatemala

1971 Pablo Neruda, poetry, Chile

1977 Vicente Aleixandre, poetry, Spain

1982 Gabriel García Márquez, fiction, Colombia

1989 Camilo José Cela, fiction, Spain

1990 Octavio Paz, poetry, Mexico

The awards to Echegaray and Benavente, both deemed lightweight writers, roused scepticism and protests in Spain. No prizes thereafter for Spain for thirty years, until the award to Jiménez. He was famous in Spain for his Platero y yo (1917) and later symbolist poetry, but, as noted, his prize was partly to honor a generation passed over by the Nobel jury. So too with Aleixandre.

The opening of Latin America to the Nobel Prize was bound to cause disputes about awards. The continent seemed overflowing with talent. Was Gabriela Mistral really a more deserving poet than César Vallejo of Peru, or did she simply outlive him—he died in 1938, aged forty-six—and so be there when the Nobel jury decided it was time to honor the first South American?⁶⁶ Mistral's award also blocked one to the eminent Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro, whom many believe superior to Mistral. The prizes to Neruda, García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude), and Octavio Paz seem universally approved.

Against Latin America's two fiction laureates, Spain has one: Camilo José Cela, who reinvigorated Spanish fiction after the Civil War, especially by his The Hive (1951), whose hero is Madrid itself, traversed by 116 characters. It remains a puzzle why the Nobel judges delayed Cela for more than forty years, or after such a delay, honored him.

Two Argentines were never honored, to the Nobel's impoverishment: Julio Cortázar (died 1984) and the incomparable Jorge Luis Borges (died 1986).

And not until 1998 was the first Portuguese laureate named: the novelist José Saramago, at age seventy-five.

JAPANESE NOBELS

LAUREATES FROM JAPAN

1968 Yasunari Kawabata, fiction

1994 Kenzaburo Oe, fiction

Of all Asian nations, Japan alone has won two Nobels. The remarkable interest from the 1950s of English and French translators in Japanese literature helps account for this, as well as Japan's own determined effort to westernize itself. Its first great modern novelist, Natsume Soseki (1867-1916), studied in England from 1900 to 1902, and the influence of European writing showed in his work only a few years later. A great and subtle novelist, of undoubted Nobel caliber, he remained untranslated before his death.

In the decades after the Second World War, when enough translations were at hand, two writers attracting world attention were Jun'ichiro Tanizaki (1886-1965) and Yukio Mishima (1925-1970). Tanizaki's subjects were unpredictable and startling: The Makioka Sisters (1948) seemed to some Western readers as clinically obsessed with disease as Mann's The Magic Mountain. His novel of a man masochistically submitting to lovely women for a glimpse of higher beauty (Diary of an Old Mad Man) is at once bizarre and brilliantly perceptive. But he won no Nobel. Perhaps, as a critic of Japanese literature pointedly noted, “his resolutely aesthetic focus, meager in what might be called redeeming social values,” greatly reduced his Nobel chances.⁶⁷ The flamboyant Mishima committed ritual suicide in 1970 when he was forty-five.

The first laureate was Kawabata. His prize raised two questions that emerge about every non-Western Nobel Prize. Are the Nobel jury drawn to works showing Western influence, since these can be compared more readily to what they know? Or the opposite: do they seek what seems to them unwesternized, exotic, “other,” redolent of strangeness? Many Japanese deemed Kawabata's novels quite inwardly Japanese. To go by their citation, the Nobel judges must have thought so too. He was lauded “for his narrative mastery which with great sensibility expresses the essence of the Japanese mind,” and he thus contributes to “spiritual bridge-building between East and West.” Kawabata is assuredly a great writer, so far as one can tell from an English translation that must render experiences of a fragmented modern kind narrated in prose that often seems like haiku.

The second award went—almost thirty full years after Kawabata's—to Kenzaburo Oe. His story is unusual and moving. He began writing fiction after a son was born brain-damaged. The experiences of Hiroshima survivors affected Oe's decision here as well: writing was “a way of exorcism.” The son, though remaining mentally handicapped, emerged as a remarkable composer; the father won the Nobel Prize. Oe says he was greatly influenced by fellow members of a writers' group he belonged to, including Kobo Abe, best known for The Woman in the Dune, and Masuji Ibuse, who wrote Black Rain. Both died before Oe became a laureate; in a sense, he is another stand-in. Since winning the prize—and with his son's success as a composer—Oe has decided to stop writing novels, and perhaps try a different literary form.

THE NOBEL “OUT THERE”

Artur Lundkvist, a member of the Nobel jury, once bluntly commented that while the Swedish Academy is reproached for neglecting writing in Asian, African, and other regions,

I doubt if there is very much to find there. It is a question of literatures that [he cites Japan as an exception], as far as can be judged, have not achieved the level of development (artistic, psychological, linguistic) that can make them truly significant outside their given context.

This was taken by many as arrogantly Eurocentric. But Lundkvist was raising a real if politically unpalatable possibility: “The Nobel Prize is after all a Western institution and cannot reasonably be distributed on the basis of other than Western evaluations.”⁶⁸

The literature Nobel is rooted in the centrality of the book and writing. What happens when such a self-contained artifact doesn't matter? Or when literature exists in ritual or political contexts that baffle analysis in Western terms? Or if, even among people of the Book, taking up Western literary forms is to be resisted, as among Islamic fundamentalists, in the name of national or religious integrity? The conviction can arise, as Lundkvist attests, that there is little of worth to find “out there”—at least for the Nobel Prize as now known.

There are other mountainous problems. In countries as vast as China and India, the number of writers about whom even the best-informed Western expert knows essentially nothing is staggering. It would take a generation of monumental labor and endless computerizing simply to read, tabulate, and sort them out, to get the lay of the literary landscape and the start of a feel for its special topography—and we are not yet speaking of translating or critical evaluation with sufficient cultural and linguistic intimacy and sympathy. The languages of Indian literature include Hindi, Kashmiri, Punjabi, Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, Maithili, Tamil, Assamese, among others; prosodies can vary dizzyingly, as do the assumptions underlying imagery and themes, variously springing from Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic roots. The important African novelist Ngugi wa Thiong'o, after establishing a reputation with novels in English, began writing in Kikuyu, his native tongue.⁶⁹

What to do? The Novel committee, as befits a committee, has sought the help of other committees and organizations such as PEN groups, and meanwhile beefed up its own resources—in earlier times with an Arabic scholar and someone who could read Tagore in Bengali (but chose not to!) and more recently with an expert on modern Chinese literature along with a member who can read Russian. Other specialists have been consulted.⁷⁰

But this is like pitting a few sandbags against a flooding Mississippi. The sheer diversity of languages in the world is overwhelming. One needs a small army of linguists just for India, another for Africa. And linguists are beside the point here anyway, since one needs literary critics gifted enough to spot the very best, and there have never been enough of those anywhere.

There is also the Nobel's constant fear of being labeled politically biased. Should the committee select some neglected language area and then systematically search for the “best” writer? No: “Doing so would amount to a politicization of the prize.”⁷¹ But the alternative is to wait until, somehow, a writer from a “remote” area becomes prominent enough to be nominated as a candidate.

Yet it needs no emphasizing that writers' contemporary reputations often owe as much to chance and manipulation as to merit. In the West, with its free competitive cultural and economic markets, much depends on skill at promotion and self-advertisement. Advertising money spent by publishers can grease the slide. But how does it work in Somalia, or Sri Lanka, or Syria, or Surinam? The media and universities there are often government-controlled; scholars and critics usually command little international clout; professional literary societies may not exist and individual scholars may be poorly informed; translations, if any, may be rare or amateurish.

It cannot be doubted that the Swedish Academy acutely understands the difficulties involved in all this as well as anyone. But to have a resident specialist in Chinese and the like will not help much. Even in France or the U.S., where the scrutiny and assessment of contemporary writing is incessantly done by hundreds of experts, there is not the slightest guarantee that such effort locates the best writers. What then are the chances in an India with its multitudinous languages and subcultures? Or in a small African nation?

Can anything help? At the end of almost a century of awarding prizes, the Nobel is still quite unadventurous in its move out into global literature. But perhaps it is not unadventurousness, after all. Perhaps a certain realism is setting in, now that the easier awards (i.e., major Western) have been made. Perhaps the committee will reorganize itself radically to cope with the strange swarming mass of literary and linguistic usages “out there.” Perhaps it will redefine what it means by “literature.” Or perhaps it will stand pat, and wait for arbitrary market and other chance forces to flush up an author from a distant land who then, willy-nilly, becomes a “major candidate.” This hardly seems satisfactory, but radical surgery on the Nobel doesn't seem likely either. Perhaps its slogan should be the very last remark of Beckett's narrator in The Unnamable: “You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.”

FINALE

The Nobel Prize in Literature is bedeviled by its history. A physicist who nominated Einstein added the warning: imagine how the Nobel scientific list will look fifty years from now with Einstein missing. The Nobel Literature Prize demonstrates the truth of that remark. But the prize has indeed changed greatly and for the better. At least in the last three decades, the awards have kept a high level. If this can only continue for another thirty years or so, the weak laureates of the first half century will gradually be forgotten. It is a high-risk task, given the uncertain nature of literary reputations, to say nothing of the uncertain future of literature itself.

Long before the Nobel existed, Herman Melville worried this same problem. Melville of course lost his own readership with Moby Dick, and in our century would never have won a Nobel Prize (too obscure, misanthropic). Here he is prophetically taking up our concern. He is thinking not of glorified prizes but of the literary establishment that sets the taste for the public and the age. He is writing about Hawthorne, trying to persuade the reader to see how great Hawthorne is right now, and not to leave him hanging until “posterity” (or any Nobel authority) hands down a verdict:

Give not over to future generations the glad duty of acknowledging him for what he is. Take that joy to yourself, in your own generation; and so shall he feel those grateful impulses on him, that may possibly prompt him to the full flower of some still greater achievement in your eyes. And by confessing him, you thereby confess others; you brace the whole brotherhood. For genius, all over the world, stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.

Notes

1. Wallace, Writing of a Novel, 161. The novel referred to in the title is The Prize.

2. In these same decades (1910-40) the Pulitzer Prizes in the U.S. chose the same sort of middlebrow writers: Booth Tarkington, Edna Ferber, Louis Bromfield, Julia Peterkin, Oliver LaFarge, Pearl Buck, Margaret Mitchell, J. P. Marquand, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (of The Yearling fame). Like the Nobels, the Pulitzers occasionally landed a good one: Cather, Sinclair Lewis (who refused the prize), Thornton Wilder. But in this same period they blackballed Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dos Passos, and Faulkner.

3. Frenz, “What Prize Glory?” 44.

4. Brown, “Twenty Years and Two Laureates,” 208.

5. Kjell Espmark, The Nobel Prize in Literature (1986) is the indispensable study of the voting and nominating records of the Nobel literary committees from 1901 to 1986. This chapter is crucially indebted to his work. His book resulted from unrestricted access to the otherwise sealed Nobel archives. He has been chair of the Nobel literary committee since 1988. In every sense an insider, he views the Nobel awards in terms of the various committees' historical biases, needs, and constraints. He writes neither to defend nor to attack the Nobel choices and fairly gives evidence on both sides, but places them in the historical context of the Nobel committees. This is a healthy corrective to any naive notion of how the prize originates. But besides seeing how the prizes reflect the personalities of the committees, they must finally be judged on their own terms, and that is a different story. On that side, the Nobel Prizes do present themselves to the public in terms of “timeless” excellence. The history of the American presidency cannot be understood in terms of election campaigns. See Herbert Howarth's trenchant comment in the text for the limitations of an approach like Espmark's, and also the Finale section.

6. Ödelberg, Nobel, 91.

7. Espmark, Nobel Prize in Literature, 153.

8. Ödelberg, Nobel, 136.

9. Espmark, Nobel Prize in Literature, 79.

10. For “the Boyg,” see Levin, Memories of the Moderns, 115-16.

11. Specter, “The Nobel Syndrome,” 48. The next quote in the text about Sture Allen is also from Specter, 48.

12. Perhaps this animosity is why Sture Allen remains permanent secretary, while Kjell Espmark has chaired the committee since 1988. Up to 1986, the permanent secretary also chaired the committee.

13. Oppenheimer, The Open Mind, 119.

14. Espmark, Nobel Prize in Literature, 146.

15. Howarth, “Petition to the Swedish Academy,” 6.

16. Espmark, Nobel Prize in Literature, 64.

17. One of the most successful awards of prizes without a committee occurred in 1914, when the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose family was wealthy, decided to give 100,000 Austrian crowns (then worth about approximately £4,000 or $20,000, almost the size of a Nobel Prize) to needy Austrian artists. Wittgenstein asked an Austrian editor, Ludwig von Ficker, to decide. Ficker split the money among three artists: Rilke, Georg Trakl, and Carl Dallago.

18. Espmark, Nobel Prize in Literature, 4-5.

19. Ödelberg, Nobel, 77.

20. Ibid., 9.

21. Ruth, “Second New Nation,” 53.

22. These quotes, respectively, are from Espmark, Nobel Prize in Literature, 10-11, 17, 18, 25.

23. Ibid., 16-17.

24. The classical scholar G. W. Bowersock, in a review of a translation of Mommsen's History of Rome, claims the work still had relevance when honored in 1902, and that perhaps the Nobel jury believed it could push the eighty-five-year-old author into finishing his missing volume 4. They were wrong. See Bowersock, “Rendering unto Caesar.”

25. See Espmark, Nobel Prize in Literature, 164-65.

26. Coleman, “Why Asturias?” 1-3.

27. Sommer, “The Air You Breathe.”

28. Heaney, Redress of Poetry, 2.

29. Nobel Lectures in Literature 1901-67, 196.

30. Wallace, Writing of a Novel, 17. Wallace claims he was told that Buck scarcely bowled over the academy. Ten of the eighteen members voted against her, but Sven Hedin and Selma Lagerlöf changed their minds. Hedin was Wallace's informant.

31. Ödelberg, Nobel, 115.

32. Vowles, “Twelve Northern Authors.”

33. Howarth, “Petition to the Swedish Academy,” 5.

34. The influential Swedish critic Sven Delblanc, writing in 1982, claimed that saga fiction appealed so much to the Nobel judges and Swedish readers because Swedish writers were more comfortable dealing with their country's past than its present. But this past is painted darkly, so that readers—while escaping the present—can also say that things aren't so bad now. Quoted in Gustafsson, “Silences of the North,” 97.

35. Espmark, Nobel Prize in Literature, 38.

36. Contat and Rybalka, Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, 455. For Sartre's pro-Communism and Nobel “objectivity,” see Espmark, Nobel Prize in Literature, 109-12.

37. Contat and Rybalka, Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, 453.

38. Sholokhov wrote The Quiet Don (more than a thousand pages) between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-five. The first volume appeared in 1928, and there were immediate charges that Sholokhov had plagiarized a Cossack writer; evidence for and against has been advanced, but the case remains unsettled. His writing during the rest of his life never came near matching the Don work. See Scammell, “The Don Flows Again.”

39. Espmark, “Nobel Prize in Literature” on Nobel website, 8.

40. Bizzarro, Pablo Neruda, 135

41. Specter, “The Nobel Syndrome,” 52.

42. Espmark, Nobel Prize in Literature, 108. Also Espmark, “Nobel Prize in Literature,” Nobel website, 4, states that Hammarskjöld negotiated “on the Academy's commission” for Pound's release from St. Elizabeth's Hospital, where he was confined after World War II. Espmark cites this as an instance of the academy's “generosity.” But if the Swedish Academy thought Pound not mentally ill—and thus fit to be released from the mental asylum—shouldn't they have concluded he had committed treason against his country and belonged in jail?

43. Espmark, Nobel Prize in Literature, 109.

44. Ibid.

45. On Céline, see Steiner, “Cry Havoc,” 35-46.

46. Espmark, Nobel Prize in Literature, 115.

47. Ziolkowski, “German Literature and the Prize,” 1.

48. See Bahti and Fries, Jewish Writers, for a general discussion; for Sachs's mental suffering, 35; for Domin, 3 and 49 (Sachs's “poetry belongs to the best produced in the German language during this century”); for the German isolation of Sachs as a Holocaust poet, 8, 49-50, and passim.

49. Miłosz, Witness of Poetry, 7. For a survey of the nations and writers involved, see Czerwinski, “For Whom the Nobel Tolls.”

50. Dutta and Robinson, Tagore, report that in the 1920s and 1930s he was one of the most popular lecturers in the world.

51. Ödelberg, Nobel, 94.

52. Dates and comments on Claudel are given in Espmark, Nobel Prize in Literature, 54, 59, and 161.

53. The film critic Stanley Kauffmann suggested Nobel awards for screenplays, with Ingmar Bergman or Akira Kurosawa as eligibles.

54. Ödelberg, Nobel, 97.

55. Espmark, Nobel Prize in Literature, 67.

56. Ödelberg, Nobel, 123.

57. Österling in Ödelberg, Nobel, 1st ed., 132: the prizes “obviously cannot serve as a representative picture of the literary standards in each country.”

58. Espmark, Nobel Prize in Literature, 42, 152; for “not a single legitimate proposal,” 190.

59. Ellmann, James Joyce, 546. For Joyce's non-nominations, see Espmark, Nobel Prize in Literature, 152.

60. Edel, Henry James: The Master; 476.

61. Espmark, Nobel Prize in Literature, 26.

62. Ibid., 106.

63. Ibid., 74, on Valéry as “difficult”; 59 and 80 on earlier Nobel evaluations of Valéry.

64. In a letter to the New York Times (18 October 1981), the German literature scholar Roman Karst protested that the Times had described Canetti as “the first Bulgarian” to win the Nobel in Literature. Karst pointed out that Canetti left Bulgaria at age six, lived in Austria from 1921 to 1938 and wrote his major works there, and, alluding to his debt to that city's writers Nestroy and Karl Kraus, said, “I am a Viennese writer.”

65. Ragusa, “Carducci, Deledda, Pirandello, Quasimodo.”

66. More intriguing gossip from Irving Wallace: a Nobel committee member told him that Mistral was chosen over Croce, Hesse, Sandburg, Jules Romains, and others because a Nobel judge and poet, Hjalmar Gullberg, fell in love with her verse and translated it all into Swedish—and single-handedly swayed the entire vote. See Writing of a Novel, 19.

67. Yoshio Iwamoto, “The Nobel Prize in Literature, 1967-87: A Japanese View,” 218.

68. Espmark, Nobel Prize in Literature, 141.

69. Preminger, Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry, 389-90. For Ngugi, see Sturrock, Oxford Guide to Contemporary Writing, 13.

70. See Espmark for the Bengali scholar. Espmark thus claims that the academy's “linguistic competence has, as a rule, been high,” in “Nobel Prize in Literature,” Nobel website, 7.

71. Espmark, Nobel Prize in Literature, 142.