The Prize Obsession

I can recall reading somewhere that there are so many literary prizes it is difficult to avoid winning one.  Let me reassure you, it is perfectly easy.  Having published fifteen books I have yet to win a prize – though I was on a shortlist of six for the 2003 Marsh Biography Prize and took my charity shop tuxedo out of mothballs for the dinner where Brenda Maddox deservedly pipped us all to the post.  Naturally everyone would like to win because there is usually some cash, sometimes a lot of it, and it does wonders for sales but one doesn't have to be a conspiracy theorist to see how, as with most other aspects of the English literary world, the usual rules of engagement apply. These can be summed up briefly: make sure you know the right people. In the case of major poetry prizes: really make sure you know the right people.

In a literary culture where reviewing is becoming ever more inadequate prizes start to become significant as a device for ranking books so it's no surprise that publishers get so excited about them.  Independent-minded readers don't need them because they award their own prizes in their head.

Which brings me to the Man Booker which never quite seems to get it right in contrast to the much more reliable (in my view) Goncourt in France which has (a) no musical chair-changing celebrity judges (b) a cash award of 10 euros and (b) a very good track record.  I was interested to see Boyd Tonkin in The Independent on Friday proposing something which sounded rather like the Goncourt.  Over to you Boyd:


Not the Man Booker Prize?

I refuse to criticise the Man Booker long-list. I've done that job; it's tough. You can't begin to satisfy the clamour of competing voices in your head, let alone in the world outside (established stars vs newcomers; large vs small firms; British novelists vs the rest, and so on). Yet as I began to tally my cherished casualties this year (Michael Ondaatje, Graham Swift, Ali Smith, Justin Cartwright, Andrew Miller, Francesca Kay... ), as well as other critics', a subversive idea took shape. Perhaps we need a new prize. As well as, not instead of. Only for UK authors or else permanent British residents. The same jury of genuine authorities (writers, teachers, critics) every year. No submissions from publishers; just selections by the judges. No thought of striking a balance between ages, genders, genres, publishers. Above all, an uncompromising, single-minded commitment to excellence in the art of fiction. Howls of complaint against "elitism" would pierce the air. Publishers would hate it. And novelists would kill to win.

[The Independent, 5 August 2011 by Boyd Tonkin]

A Postcript


It has been pointed out to me that the Goncourt is not necessarily such a good model and that is had its fair share of weird choices and has attracted accusations of being controlled by a cabal of publishers etc etc.  All I can say is that its last three choices which I have read have been more satisfying to me than the Booker choices.

Tony Judt and the Alternative Conversation

The historian and critic Tony Judt – who died almost a year ago of a variant of motor neurone disease known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis – managed to complete a book Ill Fares the Land which I have just finished and which makes me think of Stéphane Hessel's Indignez Vous! (see older post in this blog) in its determination not to be cowed by the current intellectual climate of supine acceptance of the nostrums of privatisation and the worship of markets as a substitute for creative public policy.  Too sharply intelligent and knowledgeable to fall back on nostalgia, romanticising past struggles, or self-indulgent political fantasy, Judt simply asks for what he calls "a new moral narrative", a way of thinking and talking about contemporary politics that returns to ethical principles instead of parroting the post-Thatcher free market slogans.  It is a thoughtful, crisply written book that, like Hessel, offers no single Great Idea to solve all our problems but rather calls for a willingness to challenge, to dissent, as a preparation for a better way.  And its opening sentence makes a declaration that no one in the Labour Party, for example, would ever make: "Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today."  It is a book to read and ponder rather than a source book of slogans or policies and none the worse for that.  One can imagine the policy wonks in all the parties, trapped in their bubble of self-referring and self-reflecting cant, dismissing it with a smug wave of the hand but those of us who long ago ceased to expect anything from that quarter at least have something to energise our thinking about alternatives.

Where Do Fictional Characters Come From?

I have enjoyed reading Alan Hollinghurst's new novel The Stranger's Child, which centres around a First World War poet called Cecil Valance and I notice that some people have been having fun trying to identify "the original of" Cecil, arguing, for example that he is "based on" Rupert Brooke.   This in spite of the fact that Brooke is mentioned in the novel alongside Cecil Valance.  I found myself playing the game too, seeing Julian Grenfell and maybe a bit of Charles Hamilton Sorley in this character. And then I reminded myself that this is fiction.   That's right: invention, imagination, creation.   Novelists, even conventionally realistic ones, are not newspaper reporters (perhaps a bad analogy just now but you know what I mean) but they may well build their characters out of the raw material of people they have known and experienced.  In an autobiographical novel the relationship one supposes is clear enough but mostly characters are amalgams of perhaps three or four people or they are pure invention.  In so far as we observe the mantra of the creative writing classes – Write About What You Know – then we will draw on actual experience, but surely what matters is the significance and meaning of the character in the novel's overall aesthetic structure.  "The only sure truth about characters in prose fiction," wrote Susan Sontag, "is that they are, in Henry James' phrase, 'a compositional resource'."  The more we emphasise the realism of the novel over its other elements, the more we will think these detective games matter.

A Twitter Poem (+140)

Trending 

Tied it seems in perpetuity

to the ceaseless fatuity

of Twittering

I go on littering

the lawn of my mind with stuff

when I should cry: Enough!

Shakespeare and the Chavs

A play opening on Saturday in London about the current crisis in Greece?  It is an odd experience re-reading Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream against a background of news reports of the 'austerity measures' being inflicted on the Greeks that will, as ever, have the worst impact on the poorest.  For at the heart of the play is of course The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe performed by a cast of 'rude mechanicals' aka the Athens working class (carpenters, joiners, weavers, repair-men tailors, etc).  In Athinas Street in Athens, just off Omonia Square, each morning Shakespeare's "hard-handed" workers gather with the tools of their particular trade in front of them on the pavement as a sort of advertisement  – or they did last time I was there but today they are probably queueing in one of the soup-kitchens shown this week on the news bulletins.  This connects also to a debate about Owen Jones recent book (which I haven't yet read) Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class which I gather deals with the way we represent and talk about the working class in a context of the daft belief in the media that we now live in a classless society.

Shakespeare presents his working men with humour rather than the kind of aggressive prejudice towards "chavs" that I presume Owen Jones is taking issue with.  He pokes fun at their uneducated speech, their malapropisms, their comic bombast and exaggerations, but it feels affectionate, and their play embodies the "serious" themes of the main play in a valuable way.  Apologising for the fact that a stage lion might frighten the middle class women in the audience "whose gentle hearts do fear/The smallest monstrous mouse that creeps on floor" Snug the joiner explains that he is not a real lion, just an ordinary trades unionist moonlighting as an actor for the evening.  So these are not terrifying hoodies with knives and guns on their person but mild mechanicals on a summer's evening in Athens.  They are the old-fashioned decent working class that we all love and sentimentalise but don't want to be because we want to pursue our upward mobility and dine in fancy restaurants and write literary blogs.

When the play is put on it is the aristocracy who seem to have a problem.  Hippolyta, about to be married to Theseus, Duke of Athens, is clearly a Daily Mail reader and resents having to watch these proles perform but the Duke exudes liberal tolerance from his throne and chooses the play of the "hard-handed men that work in Athens here" in preference to some other worthy options including a piece of cultural lament about dumbing-down which he decides sounds too heavy and serious for a wedding bash.  He argues that the naive art of the working men is worthy of respect: "For never anything can be amiss/When simpleness and duty tender it."  Surrounded by terrified sycophants who can hardly get their words out he appreciates the "tongue-tied simplicity" of the workers turned actors for the night.  Hippolyta doesn't share this view and continues to mutter about the quality of the performance ("This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard.") but Theseus is prepared to look for the glint in the rough diamond and to exercise a little sympathetic imagination towards their "palpable-gross play": "If we imagine no worse of them than they of themselves, they may pass for excellent men."

Granted, this is all feudal stuff, power patronising the workers, but it's at least an attempt at fairness of representation, of respect, and a lot better than middle-class fear of the "feral" working class of the inner city estates.  I just hope those painters in Athinas Street, with their white-spattered boots, have got some work this morning.

Tahar Ben Jelloun: Writing on Fire

The leading French-Moroccan novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun has always been unafraid of tackling contemporary political subjects in a way that British novelists always seem to find so difficult to do, terrified as they are of seeming "strident" or insufficiently circumspect. But his latest book, Par le feu [By Fire], just published, is a remarkably rapid response to the events of the Arab Spring.  It is a short story or récit of a mere 50 pages that tells as fiction the story of Mohamed Bouazizi, the unemployed Tunisian graduate forced to sell fruit from a handcart until beaten up by the police.  Pushed to the limit, he then set fire to himself last December, igniting the Arab revolutions.  The fiction is beautifully and sparely written and it conveys with great economy the brutal daily reality of life under the Tunisian régime, the harassment by corrupt police and officials, the resignation of the majority of the people in spite of their awareness of the injustice that was their daily ration, and the absence of all hope in a culture of grinding poverty where the poor face only humiliation and harassment.  Less than six months after the death of Mohamed the Gallimard presses have rolled (I picked it up on Monday in the Librairie Pages et Images in St Malo) and Ben Jelloun's composed and restrained anger shows no sign of undue haste in the writing.  Let's hope it's quickly translated.

P.S. Ben Jelloun has also written simultaneously, I gather, an essay on the same theme called L'étincelle [The Spark] which I haven't yet seen.

William Empson Remembered

Today in Marchmont Street, Bloomsbury, a plaque was unveiled, by his son, to the poet and critic, Sir William Empson, who lived in this Bloomsbury Street after he was expelled from Cambridge in the late 1920s and who wrote a substantial part of his famous work of literary criticism, Seven Types of Ambiguity, in the flat above what is now a Bangladeshi food store.

Passers-by were intrigued to watch a collection of writers and scholars who had gathered to hear Empson's poem about the British Museum read for the first and perhaps the last time in a Bloomsbury shopping street.  The crowd included a sprinkling of professors, a former poetry editor of Faber and Faber, the diarist of the TLS (the famous "J.C."), the mayor of Camden, and even yours truly who was handed the microphone at one point only to stammer out a plug for his own book, Real Bloomsbury, which contains an account of Empson's residence.  Another of his sons told me that one night Empson and Dylan Thomas returned from a boozy evening in Fitzrovia and were found the next morning each rolled up in the carpet where they had fallen the night before.

I think they may have exceeded their number of units on that occasion.