The Nobel Prize for Literature
Lyle Larsen
Alfred Nobel , a Swedish chemist and engineer, invented dynamite. It brought him great wealth, but it also brought him feelings of guilt for having created such a deadly material. To help ease his conscience, he arranged, two weeks before his death in 1896, to leave his fortune to "those persons who shall have contributed most materially to the benefit of mankind during the year immediately preceding."
The Nobel Foundation was thus established. Since 1901, various committees have awarded monetary prizes annually on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death, to those who have most benefited humanity in the areas of literature, physics, chemistry, world peace, and medicine or physiology. In 1968 an additional award was established for economics.
Alfred Nobel stipulated that candidates should be chosen regardless of nationality. But as with many human endeavors, politics, prejudice, and simple stupidity have entered in. The general feeling is that the Swedish Nobel Prize Academy has, over the years, been generally anti-American in literature, anti-Russian in science and literature, pro-German in science (until World War II), and pro-Scandinavian in every category.
One fascinating aspect of the Nobel Prize for Literature has to do with the people who didn't win it. Leo Tolstoy never did. He was considered for the initial prize in 1901, but the judges determined that for his anarchism and his eccentric religious views, he should be passed over. The award went instead to the French poet René F. A. Sully-Prudhomme, surely a name familiar to all.
Tolstoy was again nominated in 1902, but was again rejected. Tolstoy said that he didn't mind "because it saved me from the painful necessity of dealing in some way with money--generally regarded as very necessary and useful, but which I regard as the source of every kind of evil."
Mark Twain never got the prize though he would seem to have been an obvious choice. Henrik Ibsen was constantly rejected because his writings were too realistic and did not contain any idealism. Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and Theodore Dreiser likewise never received the award.
In 1906 the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to the Italian Giosuč Carducci, another household name, the judges electing him unanimously over the other nominees for that year--Mark Twain, Rainer Maria Rilke, George Meredith, and Henry James.
Rudyard Kipling is the youngest writer to ever receive the prize, elected in 1907 at the age of 42.
Sinclair Lewis won the prize in 1930 for Main Street, Babbitt, and Arrowsmith. In his acceptance speech he attacked American literary pundits, saying, "American professors like their literature clear, cold, pure, and very dead."
After William Faulkner won the prize in 1949 for The Sound and the Fury and Sanctuary, he went with friends on his annual hunting trip. He started drinking and continued in a drunken stupor until shortly before leaving for the award ceremony in Stockholm. His friends were worried, but Faulkner straightened up and remained sober long enough to give what is thought to be one of the finest Nobel Prize acceptance speeches ever delivered.
Ernest Hemingway called the award the IGnobel Prize. Although generally recognized at the time as one of the world's great authors, he had been repeatedly passed over. One of the judges later said, "He had been put to a vote several times before, and once he was very, very close to winning. Our conservatism had kept the award from him."
But Hemingway finally won in 1954. Yet he would not have won then but for the retirement of the senior judge, Per Hallstrom, who loved Hemingway's work, especially The Old Man and the Sea. The committee voted for Hemingway, said one of the members privately, as "a gesture of courtesy toward the dean of the Academy, who at that time was nearly 90 years old."
Hemingway graciously accepted the award but later claimed that he got no pleasure or fun out of it. "It is nice money to pay taxes with," he wrote in a letter, "but otherwise it only furnishes people with some sort of a license to intrude on your privacy." One afternoon at his home outside Havana, Cuba, while Hemingway was cutting up fish and green turtles taken from the Gulf Stream that morning, the consuls general of Portugal and China, and an official from Spain, called on him. "I took what pleasure there was," he said, "in shaking them by the hand with a turtle smeared hand and wishing them God Speed."
Boris Pasternak, an anti-communist Russian, won the prize in 1958 for his novel Dr. Zhivago. After Pasternak said he would "joyfully" accept the prize, Pravda mounted a campaign claiming that this "reactionary bourgeois award" had been given, not to a novelist, but to a "lampooner who had blackened the socialist revolution." The Soviet government did not allow Pasternak to leave Russia to accept the award.
Jean-Paul Sartre, elected in 1964, is the only Nobel laureate to voluntarily decline the Nobel Prize for Literature. In turning down the $53,000 award, he said, "It is not the same thing if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre or if I sign Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize winner. A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if it takes place in the most honorable form."
In 1974 Graham Greene, Vladimir Nabokov, and Saul Bellow were passed over for a joint award to Eyvind Johnson and Harry E. Martinson, both from Sweden and both Nobel judges themselves. "The choice reflects a lack of judgment by the Academy," wrote a professor at Uppsala University in the Stockholm Expressen. The thing, he said, looked too much like corruption. "Mutual admiration is one thing, but this smells almost like embezzlement."
Wanting to appear fair in its distribution of the prize, the Academy decided secretly that the award for 1968 should go to a Japanese. The committee actually sent scouts to Japan to ferret out a worthy recipient. That year Gunter Grass, Robert Graves, and Lawrence Durrell were passed over in favor of Yasunari Kawabata for his Snow Country and Thousand Cranes.
In a further effort to keep up the appearance of non-partisanship, the Academy awarded the 1973 prize of $121,000 to the Australian Patrick White for The Tree of Man and Voss, passing over Graham Greene, André Malraux, and Vladimir Nabokov.
Recent recipients of the Nobel Prize for Literature have been Gao Xingjian (China) 2000, V. S. Naipaul (Trinidad) 2001, and Imre Kertesz (Hungary) 2002.
To reach the Nobel Prizes web site, click here: http://almaz.com/nobel/literature.html .