Writers, Abandon Literary Prizes

14 hours ago 1

When I worked in documentaries, what my job seemed to be, as much as anything else, was listening to war stories from cameramen.

The most gung-ho of those cameramen was, at the same time I was working with him, working on a film about the U.S. military in Afghanistan. The film was made by a hotshot director and it was like “filming with a Kalashnikov,” my cameraman said. He was doing really crazy things. He had ranged all over Afghanistan, filming with U.S. and Afghan forces, trying always to get as close to the fighting as he could. He had been in gunfire and, when everybody else fled, he went for closeups. The film had taken a real personal toll—the cameraman had picked up Covid during his travels and given it to his family. But then the film wasn’t nominated for an Oscar, and the hotshot director didn’t even really bother with the rest of its publicity tour. He had moved on to something else.

My cameraman was a pro and he told me this without any recrimination. That was just the way it was. A high-end documentary film could only make its own back if it landed an Oscar nomination—and picked up that attendant publicity and sales. Otherwise, it was just a write-off for everyone who had invested money in it.

But I wasn’t as much of a pro as the cameraman and that sentiment rankled—and, even more so when I started to learn more about the publishing industry and realized that the same dynamics are in play. When it comes to literary fiction, the calendar works backwards. What matters are the end-of-year lists and the prizes. If a book happens to deliver there, then it could pick up enough sales on the back of the prizes to be a worthwhile investment. If not, not.

This logic struck me as barely palatable in the case of documentary films where there is, after all, a huge sunk cost (flights to Afghanistan aren’t cheap and neither is combat insurance) but completely indefensible when it comes to literary fiction (which is supposed to be a very pure form, fairly free of market considerations), and also, at core, much of the explanation for what’s gone wrong with literary fiction in our era.

Now, look, I like a prize and a list as much as anyone. I remember trying to memorize the Almanac’s list of Nobel Prize winners—and thinking that that really meant something. But I was about 10 years old, and it seemed like a natural drift-over from baseball statistics.

As I got older and developed a more mature understanding of what literature is, the prizes started to seem increasingly bizarre and then sort of embarrassing. Literature isn’t really like sports. It comes out of people’s souls and speaks to people’s highest truths. Giving out a prize for novels is a bit like a priest taking Sunday confession from the whole congregation and then giving out awards to the best ones. That seems self-evident and one would expect everybody else who becomes a professional in any kind of literary discipline to go through the same psychological journey. But the more I understood how the industry works, the more I realized that just the opposite is taking place—and it is the tail wagging the dog, the prizes and the literary heraldry are determining what gets published and promoted and then, even further upstream than that, affecting how writers think about their germinating work and what they choose to put their energy into.

Prizes are a very 20th century phenomenon. People wrote, and made things, for a long time without much need for prizes. In their modern form, prizes were almost entirely a concoction of Alfred Nobel, the dynamite king, who in his will—much to the amazement of everybody who read it—left a bequest for a series of lifetime achievement awards, including a cryptic note that seemed to turn authority over the assessment of literature to the King of Sweden and his Academy. What the King of Sweden has to do with great literature is beyond me, but everybody seemed to like the new system—even if it became something of a sport for literary types to point out how egregiously bad a high percentage of the Nobel picks are.

In the first year, faced with all the riches of the 19th century—Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Henry James, Mark Twain—the Committee, in its infinite wisdom, selected Sully Prudhomme, who is best remembered for a sentimental poem called “The Broken Vase,” which discusses how a lady’s fan knocked a vase off a table and concludes with the practical (if not exactly super-literary) admonition, “Do not touch the broken vase.” That was the starting gun for a very erratic footrace. The 20th century would see omissions of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, and Vladimir Nabokov to the benefit of Bjornstjerne Bjornson, José Echegaray, Giosuè Carducci, Rudolf Eucken, Paul von Heyse. The politics and favoritism of the Committee has largely been condoned by the literary community with only one real mutiny—when in 1974, the Committee, faced with the vexing choice of Graham Greene, Jorge Luis Borges, Saul Bellow, and Vladimir Nabokov instead went with the little-known writers Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson, who also happened to be members of the Swedish Academy. At that point the wool seemed to be removed from much of the literary community’s eyes, with one Swedish journalist writing that the decision would “wipe out [the Nobel’s credibility] with mockery.”

The Nobel’s failings are well known, but they really only scratch the surface of how hopelessly corrupt and inept prizes are. If we play a little game where we think of the best American novels of the 20th century, we might come up with The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, The Sound and the Fury, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom The Bell Tolls, Catch-22, The Invisible Man, Lolita, On The Road, The Bell Jar—a dizzying array of great literature, all of which have, as maybe their sole point in common, that none of them won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. (Although some of these authors, like Faulkner and Hemingway, did win Nobel Prizes).

These kinds of errors aren’t some kink in the system. They are the system. Great literature, by definition, pushes form and taste, does the unexpected. The cozy group of industry insiders who sit in judgment over the prizes have no incentive whatsoever to reward what’s genuinely different or interesting. They have their politics to play, their friends who feel overdue for recognition, the major publishers who are eager to increase the sales for their work. “The dirty secret of book prizes is the vendettas, paybacks, and payoffs that often go with them,” Richard Flanagan wrote shortly before winning the Booker. More than anything, the prizes tend to be about remembering which members of their club might feel left out.

The real argument for prizes isn’t about their merit—everybody does know at some level that they’re kind of silly—it’s that the industry needs them, that sales of high-end fiction would plummet without them. But that strikes me as a very food-scarce way of thinking.

The basic dynamic here is that there used to be this wild animal, fiction. People wrote it from battlefields and sailing ships, hid their manuscripts under their needlework and published under pseudonyms, sometimes wrote as they starved to death. Then it got domesticated. The houses turned it into an “industry.” The newspapers wrote polite reviews of it, omitting no part of the plot in their summaries. The prizes bestowed an imprimatur of authority. Eventually, the universities got in on the action, and high-end fiction became something like a branch of academia. If writers disliked all the polite stuffing of this, the argument was that, well, they would never survive in the wild and even if the prizes were deeply silly and anti-artistic it just wasn’t the done thing for the animals to bite their zookeeper.

And on we bounce along with our tame, domestic fiction. People look at tepid mediocrities like Jason Torres’ Blackouts, Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book, Jayne Anne Phillips’ Night Watch that have picked up recent prizes and sensibly conclude that if this is the best that literary fiction has to offer then it can’t be worth reading much more of it. Or they read Marie Howe’s New and Selected Poems, the most recent winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and come across the following lines, “I say bone — it’s what the pet store calls / a bully stick, which is in fact a bull’s penis / dried out and hard. / That a small dog should chew on a bull’s penis! / Well, we eat swordfish don’t we?” And, after looking around to see if the Candid Camera is anywhere in the vicinity, they close the book and stare at the Pulitzer sticker on the cover, and decide that the age-old relationship between human beings and poetry has now finally expired, in the indelible image of a small dog chewing on a penis that is, via a metaphorical flight, comparable to eating swordfish. And, as Alexander Pope wrote, “Dullness … lets the curtain fall and universal darkness covers all.”

To get anything like its pride back, the literary community is going to have to bite the hand off the zookeeper, start to recognize that the publishing industry is not its friend, that the prizes are a very weird way of creating an economics of artificial scarcity that makes the reading public less interested in checking out anything that’s not a prize-winner, and that this kind of tinpot “authority” has nothing whatsoever to do with the wilds of artistic expression.

Something like that isn’t going to come from one person or several. It’s not a matter of one prominent author or another rejecting their prizes—although that would help. It’s a matter of a change in mindset of the literary community as a whole. It doesn’t serve an industry and shouldn’t wait with hands clasped for the industry to bestow its marks of favor. The industry serves writers, not the other way around. Abandoning prizes—and getting out of the deferential mindset that goes into them—is the first step for writers to regain their self-respect.

Sam Kahn is associate editor at Persuasion and writes the Substack Castalia.

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