The Nobel Prize Process: An Appendix to The Grants-Fix

A person living on the border of a province is better able to decide which peaks inside it are the highest than an observer standing amidst the mountains themselves.

—Esaias Tegner, director of the Swedish Academy in 1980


Of all the world's literary prizes (whose numbers seem to increase each year), none is quite so famous or so remunerative or so incomparably prestigious as the Nobel Prize. Awarded annually since 1901, it is the granddaddy of such prizes and perhaps the model as well. Recent winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature, as it is officially called, have included Czeslaw Milosz, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Patrick White, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, and Samuel Beckett. As of 1981, the proceeds of the prize were one million Swedish crowns, which roughly translates into 200,000 dollars—a sum grand enough to purchase a castle or, better yet, to support a writer free of financial distractions for several productive years.

The Nobel Prizes were initially funded by the estate of Alfred Nobel, a Swede born in 1833 who died in 1896. Most of his fortune came from the profits he received from the invention and manufacture of dynamite—of all things, dynamite! In his one-page will of 1895, Nobel stipulated that his estate be invested "in safe securities" that shall generate "a fund the interest on which shall be annually distributed in the form of prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind." These funds were in turn to be divided into five parts and thus distributed among five prizes—one for physics, a second for chemistry, a third for physiology or medicine, a fourth for "champions of peace," and a fifth to "the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work of an ideal tendency." (The Nobel Prize in Economics is a recent invention sponsored not by the Nobel Foundation but by the Bank of Sweden.) A cultivated, chronic traveler who spoke several languages and even wrote poetry in English, Nobel also stipulated that "in awarding the prize no consideration whatever shall be given to the nationality of the candidates, but that the most worthy shall receive the prize, whether he be a Scandinavian or not."

In the short will, Nobel had the further ingenuity to assign responsibility for selecting each of the prize winners to a particular Scandinavian institution: that for physiology/medicine to Stockholm's medical university, those for physics and chemistry to the Swedish Academy of Science, that for Peace by "a committee of five persons to be elected by the Norwegian Storting [Parliament]" and "that for Literature by the Academy in Stockholm." Founded in 1786 as the Scandinavian equivalent of the Academie Franaise, the Swedish Academy consists of eighteen people, which is perhaps large for a country its size. The Academie Franaise has forty members, or slightly more than twice as many, representing roughly twelve times the population. According to a booklet published by itself, the Swedish Academy's traditional business has been "certain undertakings in philology and in preserving the purity of the language, personal and other history, the science of literature and literary criticism and above all support to Swedish belles-lettres and modern Swedish poetry." To this last end, the Academy awards grants and scholarships to individuals, magazines and "other publications," which is to say that it functions roughly like our own National Endowment for the Arts. The sum of its beneficence in these areas "corresponds roughly to three Nobel prizes," or one-half million dollars, which is roughly 6 cents apiece for 9 million Swedes. Our own Literature Program at the NEA had six million dollars at its peak (or three cents apiece for over 200 million Americans).

The eighteen Swedish Academicians are selected through a self-perpetuating procedure. Whenever one dies, the remaining members elect his or her successor to the vacant chair. According to the booklet quoted before, "About half the members are themselves writers of polite literature," which appears to be a translator's euphemism for the "belles-lettres" mentioned before. "The others are persons from Swedish cultural life and the humanities, with literary leanings and expert knowledge of the Academy's various spheres for responsibility." To Ulf Linde, an art critic and museum curator who is also one of the newest Academicians, "Eighteen is a well-chosen number. It is small enough that we get to know each other and yet big enough to have a diversity of opinion. I'm also a member of the Academy of Art, which has seventy people but doesn't function at all. It is entirely different in spirit."

Each of the institutions responsible for a Prize chooses from its membership a Nobel committee to do the preliminary work in selecting the candidates. For the literature prize, there were six in 1981: Johannes Edfelt, Karl Ragnar Gierow, and Artur Lundkvist, all of whom were men of letters then in their late seventies; Lars Gyllensten, in his early sixties, a sometime medical professor who had written several books mostly of prose and then served as the Academy's permanent secretary; Osten Sjostrand, a poet and critic then in his fifties; and Anders Osterling, a poet and reviewer who had belonged to the Academy since 1919 and to its Nobel committee since 1921. He was then 97 years old and, as Ulf Linde put it, "scarcely the oldest at heart."

One theme acknowledged by everyone is the utter independence of all Nobel decision-making committees. To quote the booklet again:

It can be particularly emphasized that the government or other representatives of the state authorities cannot interfere in the prize decisions. Now and then attempts are made in various quarters to bring pressure to bear, such as diplomatic requests, propaganda and expressions of opinion in the press. Actions of this kind tend to inspire skepticism regarding the actual merits of those under discussion, rather than to further the aim in question.

Were that not sufficient to discourage even the chronically meddlesome, let me report that everyone involved in the Nobel processes relates at least one amusing story about outsiders attempting to bring excessive pressure on them.

As the prize is awarded in December and the name of the winner is customarily announced in mid-fall, the work of the committee begins early in the calendar year. The first step is soliciting nominations from several sources: members of the Swedish Academy, previous winners of the Literature prize, members of "other academies, institutions and societies similar to it in membership and aims," "professors of languages or in the history of literature at universities and university colleges," and "presidents of authors' organizations which are representative of the literary activities of their respective countries." The ground rules are that these nominations must be submitted in writing before "the end of January of the year in which the award is made." (The booklet curtly adds, "Applications to receive a prize are disregarded.")

Between three hundred and four hundred nominations arrive each year. As many writers are proposed by more than one source, the sum of nominees is customarily between 100 and 150. Anders Ryberg, secretary of the committee, compiles a definitive list that is formally presented to the Academy as a whole in February. Gyllensten insists that, "All who are on the nomination list shall be appraised. For one reason or another, many are unthinkable as Nobel laureates—perhaps because their production must be regarded as scholarship without the stipulated literary qualities, perhaps because their work, even if it does belong to literature, is far from having the necessary weight on grounds other than factual or literary ones." At the beginning, the competition is populous.

At that point the six-man committee's real work begins. Books by those nominated are taken out of the Nobel Library, which already has over 175,000 volumes of modern literature and adds between 1,500 and 2,000 more each year. If a nominee's books are not yet available in Sweden, Ryberg orders them. (He is also the chief librarian.) If promising candidates write in a language unfamiliar to Academy members, translations are commissioned, usually from people already residing in Sweden. Experts both within and outside the Academy are commissioned to submit reports on individual writers, or literatures in esoteric languages, national literatures and even certain literary schools or genres. By March or so, the committee has met a few times and reduced the original list to between fifteen and twenty names; these are the secret semi-finalists. Artur Lundkvist told me, "Most names on this reduced list have been there before, sometimes for as long as forty years." Then the tough haggling begins, for the rule is that only five names can be presented to the Academy as finalists. (Sometimes a sixth or even a seventh name is added, usually paired with another.) As Lundkvist describes it, "One after another the candidates disappear. The process is argument." If one member advocates a particular writer, he must get support from others on the committee, which is to say that no one gets to second base without a considered, concerted effort being made on his behalf.

The finalists' names, along with examples of their work and other published evidence, are then presented to all eighteen Academicians in April; and in May the Academy recesses for the summer, in part to consider the finalists at leisure. Late in September, they resume meeting as they usually do—every Thursday at 5:00 p.m., beginning with an examination of new additions to the Nobel Library. These books are set upon a large table in the library's main room. After drinks in the Academicians adjourn to dinner at a nearby restaurant that was donated to the Academy many years ago. "The atmosphere during these discussions is brilliant; it is not at all dull," Ulf Linde told me. "The dinner is free; the liquor is free."

The Academy ordinarily makes the final selection within a month. A quorum of at least twelve decides by majority rule, with secret ballots in writing. According to Gyllensten, "Usually the result is apparent after lengthy discussion and scrutiny, so that a large majority, or all, can agree on the prize winners. No reservations concerning the majority's decision may be expressed, still less made public." Always, always, the details of their deliberations remain secret for at least fifty years. Once the selection is made, the prizewinner is informed, customarily by telegram, and his or her name is announced to the press. The Academy then issues a brief citation explaining why the winner is important. These words are later inscribed on the Nobel diploma that the laureate receives from the King of Sweden at a presentation ceremony on December 10th. The prizewinner's speech, known as the Nobel Lecture, is frequently reprinted in the literary press around the world.

And then the process begins anew.
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All this rigmarole is just rigmarole unless it is informed by literary moxie, and to get a sense of the literary intelligence behind the prize I went in 1981 to visit three Academicians: two of them members of the inner circle and the other not. Artur Lundkvist and his wife the poet Maria Wine live in a modest apartment of a few small rooms in one of the "near suburbs" north of Stockholm. A tall handsome man with gray hair, he escorted me into a small living room graced with a few literary mementos and a single shelf of books. Then in his mid-seventies, Lundkvist had worked in literature all his life, initially writing articles and then poems and travelogues and critical books—over sixty volumes in all, only one of which, a long poem Agadar (1961, 1979), had been translated into English. The reason why books are so scarce in his home is that most of those he receives—even those personally inscribed to him—are donated to the Nobel Library, which is incidentally the same library that he used all his years as a literary freelance. He speaks of that Library as "my instrument," which is to say an extension of his house. Elected to the Academy in 1968, Lundkvist immediately joined the Nobel literary committee and has reportedly functioned as one of its most efficient members, if not the most influential—a first among equals.

The root of his strength is a knowledge of contemporary literature that is not only awesomely universal but awesomely detailed. Mention an important writer over forty-five in America, anyone who has been writing prominently for over fifteen years—mention John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Allen Ginsberg, Joyce Carol Oates, Bernard Malamud, among others—and Lundkvist will give not only his general estimate of each author's work but his sense of the virtues and defects of individual books. He does it without note cards and without pause; the books are all alive in his head. And he has the same encyclopedic sense of current literature in all the languages he can read—not only English and the Scandinavian languages but Spanish and French. (German and Italian are his principal omissions. Other Academicians, he assured me, are proficient in those.) Beside him were books in several languages that he had recently been reading, perhaps in sequence, perhaps at once; for Lundkvist creates the impression that he must spread several books out on his desk and then read them simultaneously. Once or twice a month he contributes articles on his recent reading to Swedish newspapers.

He is also a prodigious traveler who has met (and remembered) many laureates (and candidates): Pablo Neruda whom he had known since an extended trip to South America in 1949; Patrick White, whom he went to meet in his Australian home. Lundkvist once wrote a book on the filmmaker Luis Bunuel during a boat trip to Hong King, and many of his other prose books deal with his travels to esoteric places: Africa, India, China, Tashkent, Israel, Cuba and Australia. (The poem Agadar deals with his experience, by chance, of a devastating earthquake in Morocco.) The reason why Lundkvist visited Patrick White, a few years before White received the Nobel Prize, is that Lundkvist had been reviewing White's fiction since the late 1930s. Lundkvist told me that he had been reading Milosz since the early fifties, first with The Captive Mind, and Neruda since the late 1940s, "when I first began to read Spanish." He discovered Odysseus Elytis, the 1979 winner, about the same time in the literary magazines of France and the United States.

To get a sense of his literary taste, but also remembering his pledge of secrecy about current Nobel activities, I asked him which past writers in his opinion should have gotten the Nobel Prize but didn't. He replied, with scarce pause: Joseph Conrad, Maxim Gorky, Rainer Maria Rilke, Theodore Dreiser, Andre Breton. "D.H. Lawrence died too early. I would have voted for James Joyce." When I asked why outsiders might regard him as the most influential of the six committeemen, he replied, "I have strong opinions, with some willpower. I know personally many of the writers who have been candidates or will be candidates because I have traveled so much." My impression was that he dominated the committee through his literacy, which included a capacity to find fault with others' recommendations. At one point he told me that he usually finds all five finalists sympathetic, which indicated, to my mind, that while he might not dominate the whole Academy in making the final selection, he could fairly completely determine the pool of finalists from which his seventeen colleagues could choose.

Osten Sjostrand is a younger man who joined the Academy in 1975 and immediately went onto the Nobel Committee (and also became the editor of Artes, a bi-monthly magazine published by the three Swedish arts academies). A tall, large man he lives with his wife Eva in a duplex row house overlooking the bay in one of Stockholm's "south suburbs." Primarily a poet, he has published several volumes of his own work and written several opera librettos, in addition to publishing translations from the French, English, American, German, Italian, Danish and Norwegian and collaborative translations of Greek, Polish, Czech and Russian poetry. Like Lundkvist, Sjostrand speaks fluent, if imperfect, English. As we drank orange juice in his living room, he emphasized the sheer amount of work behind the prize—work not only for the committee but for its outside experts. "This is a position you grow into. You must be accustomed to a life of reading as something as natural as eating. You must have an inner kick."

Sjostrand told me that he first met Milosz in 1952, at a literary-political conference in Paris, "right after his rupture with Poland," and that the work of Odysseus Elytis had likewise been familiar to him for over twenty years. Since Sjostrand had collaborated in translating into Swedish a book of poems by Yannis Ritsos, another contemporary Greek poet customarily regarded as superior to Elytis, I asked him for the reasons behind the 1979 selection. As Sjostrand explained in vivid, elaborate detail how Elytis had regenerated Classic Greek myth in a rich way, I sensed that he was probably repeating a case that he had made, then in Swedish no doubt, two years before to his colleagues. Whereas Lundkvist impressed me with his encyclopedic knowledge, Sjostrand struck me as an earnest man with a taste for fine critical distinctions.

"We try to pay attention to minority cultures—ethnic groups and minor languages," Sjostrand added. "This grows out of an awareness that we don't want to get involved in the great machinery of the superpowers. It is not a process of selecting the world's best writers. We choose writers whom we feel are important to literature in languages other than their own. That is the most profound editorial politics of the Nobel committee." This bias may also explain why many recent choices seem esoteric by international standards—a Greek, a Lithuanian who writes mostly in Polish and has long taught in America, a Yiddish-American, a Latin American. More reserved than Lundkvist, Sjostrand was at first reluctant to name omissions from the Nobel record; but when I told him whom the other Academicians had mentioned, he volunteered: Valery, Rilke, Joyce, Breton. "Remember," he added as I was leaving, "we don't give the Nobel Peace Prize—other people do that—and that we are completely independent of the state, unlike academies in the Eastern [Communist] countries."

"I can assure you that I do not know why they chose me," Ulf Linda told me, speaking English haltingly in his office in the Thielska Gallery. "I've written very little. I don't feel assured with what is happening in world literature; my field is visual art. I was very surprised when I was selected." A bulky man with an impish manner, a genuine modesty and decisive tastes, Linde continued, "I read more now than I've done before, so that I can take part in the discussion. My contribution is to criticize the judgment of the others. I understand literature as I understand art. What I like in Matisse I like in Dostoevsky. It's an intensity and authenticity and originality of vision. I can assure you that I'm not silent at the meetings." Then and later, Linde struck me as generally smart about Art.

Since Linde is known to be a great admirer of Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, both of whom write with distinctive originality in addition to practicing other arts, I asked whether he would have proposed either of them for the Nobel Prize in Literature?  He replied, while doodling on his blotter, that while he regarded each of them as being "on the level of most of the Nobel winners, the literary output of each is insufficient. Remember that the whole Academy decides. If you can see it is not realistic, there is no point in suggesting it." Well, then, should there be a Nobel Prize for Art? "Yes, but it should be given every fourth years. Otherwise, it would not have the prestige of the literary prize. There are not so many good artists as there are good writers." Omissions? Valery, Ezra Pound, Breton. "By the time Kafka would have gotten it, he was already dead. He is not an omission that was technically possible. Joyce and Proust did not live long enough." As I prepared to leave, Linde moved to a steel vibraphone behind his desk, took up four sticks and improvised a stunning solo, reminding me (and I guess himself) that he was once a jazz vibraphonist whom some regarded as Sweden's best. "That's to show you that the Swedish Academy hasn't the solemnity of a clerisy."

Close observers of the Swedish Academy mention from time to time the possible influence of the Nobel staff—the people who process the information to the Academy: among them, Ryberg, the librarian; Knute Ahnlund, a sometime literature professor who writes many critical reports (that likewise go into the secret archive); Katarina Gruber, a parttime assistant to Ryberg who, among other things, prepared the Swedish translations of Czeslaw Milosz's poetry. However, all speculations about their influence remain speculations. As of August, 1981, when I did this research, the rumored finalists included Nadine Gordimer, Claude Simon, and either Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Maria Vargas Llosa (but not both). A further, more credible speculation was that all four of those authors would eventually get the prize, one at a time; and by five years later, half of them had.

The most serious criticism of the Nobel Prize for Literature is that it does nothing consequential—it has no real effect upon the course of modern writing. True, it rewards a few writers with a goodly sum, as well as sufficient publicity to inspire subsidiary benefits of translations in languages other than his own. However, more winners than not have failed to do major work after receiving the prize, because it comes not when it would be most useful—at the beginning or at the apex of a writing career—but at its end, generally benefiting not the writer but his heirs.  Indeed, the award is in practice often redundant. As Wallace Brockway wrote in 1958 of the awards to T.S. Eliot (1948) and Ernest Hemingway (1954), "In both cases their genius had shown itself a quarter of a century before; now they little need the honor and probably as little need the money." In the development of literature, the Prize is thus a distraction, albeit a classy one.

On the other hand, there will always been prizes in profession that depends so heavily upon qualitative judgments; and the best that can be said about the Nobel is that it is a good prize, if not the best there is, for a variety of laudable reasons: From the beginning it has been a universal prize, rather than a purely regional or national prize. A second reason is the elaborateness of the annual selection process. This is not a committee that like NEA panels meets once or a few times to make its choice(s); it meets every Thursday for most of the year. A third reason is the continuity of a selection committee that remembers previous discussions and then develops a sense of distribution and timing. As Sjostrand put it, "Everyone who wins we have discussed for so many years, being such a coherent institution." To these factors must be added the undoubted independence and integrity of the procedure, along with the rigor of the commitment to secrecy. That in turn relates to Sweden's high-minded distance from the Frankfurt Book Fair and the promotions of multinational publishing. The literature prize gains as well from being awarded along with other Nobel Prizes that, while mostly not as well-known as the literary award, nonetheless add weight to it. As Linde put it, "If it were only a purely literary prize, the prestige would have been less." A final factor is the spectacular amount of money, which would, of course, be money, only money, without the other reasons.