Writing And Winning

Illustration by Tom Bachtell

Ngugi wa Thiong’o? Juan Goytisolo? Adonis? Over the past several weeks, some version of this list was muttered, usually to a silent spouse in the middle of the night, by insomniac writers contemplating another Nobel Prize about to go where it shouldn’t; i.e., to someone other than themselves. (Not that winning puts out the competitive fires. Saul Bellow, who won the Nobel for literature in 1976, was said to have grown wistful every October after that, because you can win it only once.) Nor is the muttering restricted to the papabili who make the short list; pretty much every living writer with a word processor thinks that he or she has a shot at winning. (Edmund Wilson reports that our own James Thurber longed for it to go, just once, to a humorist; predictably, he never got anywhere near the podium.)

When this year’s prize was announced, last Thursday, it went to a writer who, if not a North American (again), is at least familiar to North Americans: the Peruvian novelist and man of letters Mario Vargas Llosa. So all hail Vargas Llosa, whom even his noisier left-wing critics have to regard as exactly the kind of writer the prize ought to go to: one with a host of well-regarded novels (“The Time of the Hero,” “Conversation in the Cathedral,” the screen-adapted “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter,” “The Feast of the Goat”) and a sense of social responsibility (he ran seriously for, and lost badly, the Presidency of Peru), not to mention a lively personal life that includes once punching out another future laureate with an equally impressive triple-barrelled moniker, Gabriel García Márquez, reportedly over something to do with Mrs. Vargas Llosa. The Nobel thus not only crowns a career but provides the basis for a fine future Javier Bardem/Antonio Banderas movie. (“The only thing they cared for more than Latin American epic fiction was . . . the honor of a woman.”)

“We’d now like to open the floor to shorter speeches disguised as questions.”

What this year’s prize really shows is that prizes, like people, have a DNA of their own. The Nobel Prize in Literature would have been more illuminatingly named not after Dynamite Alfred but after his close friend, greatest hero, and ideal writer, Victor Hugo, with whom he shared time in Paris and the friendship of the great salon-keeper Juliette Adam-Lamber. (Hugo once called Nobel the “richest vagabond in Europe,” with an eye to his wanderings.) Hugo was not quite a writer-artist in the manner that we associate with Flaubert and James, but he was the big moral writer of his time—a writer who intervened in the world, rowing in and riding the tides of reform. Seen as winners of the Victor Hugo prize, all the Nobel choices make some sense. Even a reticent lyricist like Szymborska or a dyspeptic traveller like Naipaul or writers too readily elbowed aside, like Pearl Buck and Sinclair Lewis, have a neatly delineated social view and a will to engage in the world’s work, an urge to report as much as to invent, whereas the unlaurelled, on the whole, tend to be more writers of the sentence-and-its-structure than of the world-and-its-woes. Perhaps not coincidentally, one of Vargas Llosa’s most recent books, “The Temptation of the Impossible,” is a study of Hugo’s “Les Misérables.”

Last week also revealed that, however much we may discount the Nobel Prize, we still prize it. No matter how many times the worthy losers console themselves with their fellows—who wouldn’t rather be in the company of Proust, Auden, and Nabokov than of Erik Axel Karlfeldt and Henrik Pontoppidan?—we’d all still take the meatball if the Swedes would only offer it. You would have thought that the second-rate nature of some prize-winners would have produced a general degradation of the prize. If you give the Oscar to the likes of “Ordinary People” and “Chariots of Fire” often enough, won’t your prize be worth a bit less? Just the opposite: the more often an established prize goes to a dubious candidate the more valued it becomes.

A kind of Devil’s Theory of Value seems to rule: A prize is always assumed to be shining, intact; it is those wrong prize-winners who are discredited by it. When we win it, the world will be restored to its proper balance. We blame the winners, not the prize, for the errors. Why should this be so? The bleakest theory is that the purpose of a literary prize is not to reward the deserving but to provoke conversation and controversy within a community. When a prize goes to a Brodsky or a Milosz or a Walcott, the way that once in a blue moon a decent apartment goes to a newcomer in Manhattan, it keeps the game alive.

The real reason that literary prizes are so prized, however, is that prize-giving is intrinsic to the purposes of poetry. From birds to bards, the urge to outdo the other singer is what makes us sing. Since the first strum on the oldest lyre, literature has been about competition and the possibility of recognition. Pindar, the father of lyric poetry, took as his chief subject the winning of games, and the spirit of the end-zone dance has been with us ever since. Horace satirized everything except his own appetite for fame. Milton mourned Lycidas not because he stood beyond all prizes but because he died before the prizes could be won. The subtlest souls still show up in Stockholm to make the speech. Fame, honor, the laurel, and the bays, this more even than getting back at the girls, or the boys, who left you for another—the writer’s other great motivation—is the poetic passion. (Even the idea of posthumous fame is merely the thought of a prize given while we are sleeping, and have left our muttering to others.)

In the past decade, one of the enduring axioms of literature has been finally, jarringly broken, and that is Dr. Johnson’s “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” Now the Internet overflows with those who write for glory and a name alone—and not all of them are blockheads. But the opposing axiom, that people write for prizes, survives. Why write? Because you may someday win a prize given by Scandinavians of unknown names and demonstrably uncertain taste? Apparently so. At least, so the writers’ spouses think, and, sleepless in September, they should know. ♦