[In the following essay, Pratt speculates on the reasons why some of the most famous writers in British and American literature have not been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.]

What do Mark Twain, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Robert Frost, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, Robert Penn Warren, Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf, Marianne Moore, Katherine Anne Porter, William Carlos Williams, and Robert Lowell all have in common? They happen to be British and American writers of this century who have not won the Nobel Prize in Literature. And what do Rudyard Kipling, John Galsworthy, Sinclair Lewis, Pearl Buck, and William Golding all have in common? They are British and American writers who have received the Nobel Prize. Comparing the unlaureled with the laureled, one might reasonably conclude—as Robert Spiller did in his 1967 Books Abroad survey of the Nobel literary prizes in English—that “the Nobel Prize in Literature is not really a literary award in the modern sense and was never intended to be.”

There have always been critics ready to dismiss the Nobel Prize as either inconsequential or merely political, but to do so is to ignore the names left out of the list above; for whatever sins of omission and commission may be charged to the Swedish Academy, it has chosen enough distinguished Nobel laureates in English alone to crown anyone's canon of major twentieth-century writers: William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Eugene O'Neill, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway. If anyone needs proof that the Nobel Prizes are truly literary, there it is, and if we note that two of these six writers are poets, two are dramatists, and two are novelists, we find a pair of major artists at the top of each of the twentieth century's three major literary genres. Some may object that the merit is not equally distributed among genres, and that between Yeats and Shaw, for instance, or O'Neill and Faulkner, distinctions could be made on purely literary grounds—modern drama, in short, does not measure up to modern poetry or modern fiction in artistic excellence. Still, the balance is certainly there, and so is the evidence that the Swedish Academy has done its job well. It has recognized at least a half-dozen writers in English in this century, in the major literary categories of poetry, drama, and fiction, writers who, according to the terms of Alfred Nobel's will, “shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work of an ideal tendency.” To these six acknowledged masters, some might want to add more recent prizewinners such as John Steinbeck, Samuel Beckett, or Saul Bellow, but these are more open to question than the first six; the same is true of the remaining two Nobel laureates in English, Bertrand Russell and Winston Churchill, who are certainly esteemed in their respective roles of thinker and leader but are not in the strict sense literary artists. All in all, taking in the complete list of seventeen writers of English who have won Nobel Prizes during the nine decades the awards have been offered, and conceding that fame and popularity are likely to weigh more heavily than true literary excellence in any contest—still, without claiming that Nobel Prizes are divided evenly between writers of genius and popular favorites, a record of six out of seventeen is not bad. One bull's-eye for every three tries is not quite the 50-percent success with which Spiller was willing to credit the Academy, but it is a record honorable enough to argue against his conclusion that Nobel Prizes are not “really literary.”

In fact, T. S. Eliot came much nearer the mark when, accepting his Nobel Prize in 1948, he said that to speak of it as “the highest international honor that can be bestowed upon a man of letters, would be only to say what everyone knows already.”¹ No Nobel laureate has ever been in a better position than Eliot to appreciate the work of the Swedish Academy, since he was not only a poet of the first rank in both Britain and America, but a critic who was a principal shaper of the literary taste of his age. He made his acceptance speech an occasion for giving “my own interpretation of the significance of the Nobel Prize in Literature,” which was that it represents “the election of an individual, chosen from time to time from one nation or another, and selected by something like an act of grace, to fill a peculiar role and become a peculiar symbol”—a symbol, quite simply, of the value of literature to the human race. No higher significance need be sought: if the prize honors some writers more than they deserve, whereas others bring honor to the prize, the net result is that literature, being by its nature “of an ideal tendency,” just as Alfred Nobel stated in his will, has been annually held up before the world as a benefit to mankind, comparable to the benefits of medicine, physics, chemistry, and peace (economics is a latecomer not included in Nobel's original bequest). Since literature is the only art so honored, it enjoys a unique status among the Nobel Prizes and draws more than its share of skepticism and controversy. If Nobel Prizes were given in architecture, painting, sculpture, music, or dance—who knows?—they might be equally controversial, but the debate about the literary prizes might be a little less intense.

In any case, it is to the credit of those entrusted with choosing the winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature that it has such high standing with writers as well as readers the world over; for the prize must be awarded to someone every year, and the good writers in any age will always outnumber the great. A few great writers are enough to establish the standard, and clearly, some of the greatest in our century have been Nobel Prize winners. I suppose it could be argued that until 1923, when Yeats won the laurels, the Nobel had not reached its highest level of excellence, at least in the English-speaking world, but since then, no serious writer of English could doubt that the standard is potentially of the very first class. Moreover, the importance of the Nobel Prize to a writer's career is fully illustrated by the case of Faulkner, whose international fame largely dates from the time when he received his Nobel in 1950, proving that the Academy may occasionally be inspired to honor a great writer as yet unappreciated in his own language and justifying William Riggan's conclusion in “The Swedish Academy and the Nobel Prize in Literature: History and Procedure” [World Literature Today, hereafter WLT] (WLT, Summer 1981): “The Nobel Prize in Literature is not intended merely to echo and confirm popularity. It may also attempt to point out talent not yet recognized by most of the world's readers and critics. It may educate the many as it celebrates the one.”²

In the twentieth century it might even be said that being summoned to Stockholm is the equivalent of being invited to Florence in the time of the Medici or to London in the time of Elizabeth I: almost every talented and ambitious writer dreams of being recognized by the Nobel Committee, which has become the royal patron of a democratic age. That the Academy has sometimes withheld its patronage until a writer's career was virtually over, that it has overlooked many deserving authors, and that it has honored many less-deserving ones all seem to me inevitable in any competition which must confer a yearly award; and if I find, when I turn to the Nobel Prizes in English for the past twenty years, that none reaches the very highest standard, I am inclined to think the cause is less a lowering of the standard than a broadening of the range of national and ethnic identities which, for a world-embracing language like English, naturally enter into consideration for an award with the international prestige of the Nobel.

I say this, knowing that the four English-language writers who have won Nobel Prizes in Literature since 1967 would not have been my choices. No, if I had been a member of the Swedish Academy in these last two decades, instead of giving prizes to Samuel Beckett, Patrick White, Saul Bellow, and William Golding, I would have voted to confer the prize on Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, Robert Penn Warren, and Robert Lowell. If I had met fierce opposition from my fellow Academicians to these undisputed masters, I would have been ready to propose four acceptable alternates: Katherine Anne Porter, John Crowe Ransom, Marianne Moore, and Allen Tate. These choices are not mere fantasy, because all the writers were alive two decades ago (and one, Warren, still is); and if I had occupied a seat on the Nobel Committee of the Swedish Academy (more to be desired by any true lover of literature than a seat on the New York Stock Exchange), I would have argued that any of these eight writers deserved the prize more than any of the four who actually received it. I would have based my advocacy on literary merit alone, of course, but then I would have had to contend with my fellow Academicians' notions of what constitutes literary merit and with other considerations as well, which undoubtedly influenced their choices: for instance, that Beckett, whose Nobel citation hailed him for “introducing new forms to the novel and drama,” was born in Ireland but has lived in Paris and written in French as well as English; that White “for the first time has given the continent of Australia an authentic voice”; that Bellow, credited with the “subtle analysis of contemporary culture,” was born in Canada of Jewish parents and has lived and written in the United States; and that Golding, who “illustrates the human condition in the world today,” was born in London. The geographic and ethnic scope of the Nobel Committee's choices is, I admit, wider than mine would have been; and they had, besides the privilege of choosing the winners, the responsibility of justifying their choices, first to their fellow Academicians and then to a world audience, whereas I can confer my awards freely, without dispensing huge sums of money or facing the risk of having them seriously challenged. Still, my point of view is simply that the Nobel laureates of the last twenty years in English have added no special luster to the prize, despite the fact that in this same period there were living masters who might well have done so, had they been chosen instead.

.....

Reflecting on the actual choices rather than on my own wishes, I see that they do bear out Herbert Howarth's observation in the 1967 Books Abroad symposium that prose has prevailed over poetry in the Nobel Prizes, “as if the judges have either thought prose more beneficial to the world than poetry, or have found it easier to reach conclusions about prose and particularly about the novel.” All four of the laureates in English in the last two decades are indeed novelists—though Beckett is better known as a dramatist and is therefore the most original choice among them. Beckett is an original choice in another respect too. It has been contended by some critics that Alfred Nobel's will, with its “idealist” emphasis, has prevented some worthy writers in the past from being nominated: Theodore Dreiser, say, or Robinson Jeffers; and it is at least on record that Ezra Pound, a writer high on the list of nonwinners, when asked jokingly in the twenties by another nonwinner, Wyndham Lewis, whether Pound might not secure a Nobel for him, replied sarcastically, “NO, the Nobel Prize is for idealists.”³ Still, if the suspicion of some kind of liberal humanitarian bias in the literary awards were ever justified, it has been permanently laid to rest by the award to Beckett, since no more nihilistic writer is ever likely to gain a world audience than he. Golding too, at least in his best-known novel, The Lord of the Flies, has written comparably pessimistic—it might even be termed atavistic—fiction, demonstrating, according to his Nobel citation in 1983, that “evil springs from the depth of man himself.” So perhaps one conclusion that can reasonably be drawn from the winners of the last twenty years is that idealism, at any rate of the patently uplifting variety (Pearl Buck may be the example most critics would cite, since she is otherwise hard to account for), is no longer a requirement for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Another discernible trend of the last twenty years has an indirect bearing on my topic of English-language authors and the Nobel: four of the laureates since 1967 have been writers in exile, two Polish and two Russian, all of them now living in the United States and either writing in English or being translated immediately for English-speaking audiences. I refer to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1970), Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978), Czesław Miłosz (1980), and most recent of all, Joseph Brodsky in 1987.⁴ These writers may well be claimed as half-American—thus doubling the list of Nobel laureates in English—and since two of them, Miłosz and Brodsky, are poets, they help enrich the literary variety of the list as a whole. Miłosz's prose, especially his Visions from San Francisco Bay, and Brodsky's prose, especially the essays in his recent collection Less Than One, are written from the point of view of their adopted land as much as of their native countries, and they are eagerly read, as are Solzhenitsyn's accounts of the Soviet gulag and Singer's stories of the Warsaw ghetto, as contributions to American literature as much as to Polish or Russian literature. Brodsky was quoted as saying, in response to the news of his Nobel Prize: “I'm the happiest combination you can think of. I'm a Russian poet, an English essayist, and a citizen of the United States.”⁵ The Irish poet Seamus Heaney (who is also American half the year when he teaches at Harvard) congratulated Brodsky on his bilingualism, remarking wryly of the Russian poet that “in order further to impose upon English the strangeness and density of his imagining, he is now the official translator of his own lines.”⁶ Certainly the presence of so many foreign Nobel laureates in an English-speaking country is bound to enrich the native literary tradition, probably in unpredictable ways—as Beckett in Paris has given the French drama of the absurd an Irish flavor. Already, Solzhenitsyn, Singer, Miłosz, and Brodsky are as familiar to educated readers in America as any contemporary American writer would be—more familiar, probably than they can be to audiences in their native Poland and Russia, where the official disapproval of writers in exile, even if they are Nobel Prize winners, is bound to limit their outreach.

Part of the distinction of English-language literature's Nobel Prizes in the last two decades, I am thus convinced, comes from writers who enjoy bilingual audiences, not simply from writers whose native language is English. It may be they are harbingers of a more international tradition in literature generally, which the Nobel is uniquely situated to honor. If cosmopolitanism seems the order of the future, however, there is much nationalism and regionalism inherent in literary expression that will probably never die out. Indeed, if someone should ask me (happy chance!) to choose where the next Nobel Prizes might come from in the English-speaking world, I would think first of two fairly small regions which have produced some of the finest literature in this century: Ireland and the American South. True, Yeats and Shaw and Beckett are Irish writers who have already won Nobels, but there are at least two more Irish writers today whose work has a growing international reputation: Seamus Heaney in poetry⁷ and Brian Friel in drama. True too, Faulkner was a Southern writer and a Nobel laureate, but of living writers in English, surely none is more deserving of the honor at present than Robert Penn Warren, who has received every other conceivable prize for his poetry, his novels, and his essays and who in his eighties is as prolific as ever, a man of letters in the grand style.⁸ I would also suggest that, with his new novel A Summons to Memphis, Peter Taylor has crowned a career in fiction that arguably deserves something higher than the Pulitzer and Hemingway prizes he has won, leaving only one possibility, the Nobel. As Eliot put it in 1948, Nobel Prizes are a recognition that “an author's reputation has passed the boundaries of his own country and his own language” and is worthy of a world audience; and though there are never many such authors to choose from, there have been a surprisingly large number of them in the twentieth century—most of whom, unfortunately, have not received the Nobel Prize. As Hemingway, one of the lucky ones, acknowledged in his Nobel acceptance speech in 1954, “No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the prize can accept it other than with humility.”⁹

Though it is certainly presumptuous to say what writer in English most deserves future recognition by the Swedish Academy, I would count it a guarantee of literary quality if the next Nobel Prize went to Heaney or Friel, Warren or Taylor. If I were asked, however, not to choose but to bet on the next Nobel Prize recipient in English, I would not put my money on either an Irishman or a male Southerner, but on a woman—say, Margaret Atwood in Canada or Nadine Gordimer in South Africa, or a black writer such as Toni Morrison in the United States, or even, with a little bit of luck, on that thoroughbred of living women writers, Eudora Welty.¹⁰ To predict that a woman will win the next prize is to admit that the Nobel is often political and social as well as literary, and any honest survey would have to concede that fact; still, I would maintain that its emphasis has often been on the literary rather than the political or social side, and I would at least hold out the hope that, when the next Nobel Prize in Literature is announced for an English-speaking writer, he or she will be the kind of literary artist who, like some of the writers of the past, is not only honored by but brings honor to the prize.

Notes

1. Nobel Lectures: Literature, 1901-1967, Horst Frenz, ed., London, Elsevier, 1969, p. 435.

2. Riggan's article is in WLT 55:3 (Summer 1981), pp. 399-405; the quoted passage is from p. 405.

3. Pound/Lewis: The Correspondence of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, Timothy Materer, ed., New York, New Directions, 1985, p. 161.

4. On these four authors, see the following: on Solzhenitsyn, BA 45:1 (Winter 1971), pp. 7-18, and WLT 53:4 (Autumn 1979), pp. 573-84; on Singer, WLT 53:2 (Spring 1979), pp. 197-201; on Miłosz, WLT 51:4 (Autumn 1977), pp. 570-71, and 52:3 (Summer 1978), pp. 357-425; on Brodsky, WLT 57:2 (Spring 1983), pp. 214-18.

5. Quoted by Francis X. Clines in “A Writer Reflects on the Fortunes of Literature and the Russian Language,” New York Times, 23 October 1987, p. 8.

6. Seamus Heaney, “Brodsky's Nobel: What the Applause Was About,” New York Times Book Review, 8 November 1987, p. 63.

7. On Heaney, see WLT 57:3 (Summer 1983), pp. 365-69.

8. On Warren, see WLT 55:4 (Autumn 1981), pp. 626-27.

9. Nobel Lectures, p. 501.

10. On Atwood, see WLT 60:1 (Winter 1986), pp. 47-49; on Gordimer, WLT 52:4 (Autumn 1978), pp. 533-38, 59:3 (Summer 1985), pp. 343-46, and 62:1 (Winter 1988), pp. 76-77; on Welty, WLT 51:4 (Autumn 1977), pp. 579-80.