The ignoble prize

Then there's guilt by association. Playwright Luigi Pirandello (Italy 1929) joined the Fascist Party in 1923 and tried to ingratiate himself with Mussolini, envisioning for himself the role of national bard, Virgil to his Augustus. Later, after he came to realize that Il Duce was no Augustus, and tired of the party's heavy-handed interference in his theater company, he referred to the jut-jawed one as "an empty top hat that by itself cannot stand upright." His unfinished last play, "The Mountain Giants," is in part an allegory on the illusion of artistic autonomy.

With poet Jacinto Benevente (Spain 1922) and novelist Camilo José Cela (Spain 1988), the charge of guilt by association is more ambiguous. Both were on the "wrong" side of the Spanish Civil War (Cela actually took up arms), but Cela's case is tempered by the fact that his novels were frequently censored and banned under Franco. He also founded and edited Spain's leading literary magazine, which not only took a strong line against the regime but also published many writers who'd fled into exile. By contrast Benevente, a coddled señorito, was afraid that he'd lose his privileges in a representative democracy.

Knut Hamsun, Mikhail Sholokhov and Pablo Neruda scraped the lowest depths. A lifelong Germanophile whose pathological antipathy to modern life and much of Western civilization informed his oeuvre, Hamsun (Norway 1920) became a collaborator during the Nazi occupation of Norway. His enthusiasm was such that he gave his Nobel Prize medal to that prime specimen of the master race (and failed novelist), Joseph Goebbels; he also met Hitler. Unlike his infamous friend, Nazi politician Vidkun Quisling, Hamsun escaped the firing squad after the Second World War; he was judged insane.

According to scholars, notably Roy Medvedev, huge chunks of Sholokhov's prize-winning "And Quiet Flows the Don" (USSR 1965) were lifted from the works of Fyodor Kryukov, a Cossack and anti-Bolshevik writer who died of typhus in 1920. His victory was the crowning glory of a Communist Party toady whose rise in Soviet literary officialdom, as witnessed by dissident writer Vassily Aksyonov, was nothing "other than a supreme farce. Decade after decade his pen failed to create anything worth reading. Meanwhile, his mouth created nothing but propagandistic banalities."

The most shameful (and least known) episode, however, concerns Neruda, a lifelong, unrepentant Stalinist. During his stint at the Chilean Embassy in Paris dealing with asylum applications from Spanish Civil War refugees, Neruda is said to have heavily favored those who shared his hard-line beliefs when it came to issuing visas. One wonders how many of the rejected perished in concentration camps or wound up as slave laborers under Nazi and Vichy rule. There's also the little matter of Neruda's aiding and abetting under diplomatic cover an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Trotsky in Mexico in 1940, an action he defended his entire life.

So Grass is in good company then. Since Hamsun and Neruda are still read and well thought of, it's a good bet that in the long run his cultivated self-image will survive largely intact -- his conscience is another matter.

None of this, however, is to dispute Grass' qualities as a writer, or anyone else's; I happen to like Neruda's (non-Stalinist) poems and greatly admire Pirandello, whose works I studied at university. This is only to say that perhaps we shouldn't be so surprised when the prize blows up in our faces. (Among other things, Alfred Nobel invented dynamite.) We seem to think that the Nobel should be bestowed on those of seemingly unblemished virtue -- which is why such reviled figures as Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Ezra Pound never got the gong. (Bertolt Brecht might have won it but for his philandering, which was rumored to have irked a cuckold who sat on the committee.) No question that there's an aura about the Nobel that seems to transform dwarfs into giants, mice into men, and disarms skeptics in the process.

Then I think, wait a moment, there is a writer who embodies all the ideals the Nobel stands for: Samuel Beckett (Ireland 1969), whose centenary year this is. Unbeknown even to many of his closest friends until after his death, Beckett had been a member of the French resistance during the war and received the Croix de Guerre. This is all the more admirable in that Beckett was from a neutral, if not impartial, country. (Sinn Fein was not entirely unsympathetic to the Axis powers on the dubious principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.) Beckett was deeply committed to human rights; he firmly and totally opposed apartheid, and from a very early age was hostile to all forms of racism and anti-Semitism; he supported human rights movements throughout the world, including Amnesty International and Oxfam. He lent his prestige to freedom movements behind the iron curtain, worked on behalf of the campaign to free Vaclav Havel and was a vigorous opponent of censorship. Though hardly a saint, he also apparently gave away most of his Nobel Prize money to those who needed it. True to character, Beckett did all of this out of the public eye, with no finger wagging, no pious speeches; for he exemplified, to his roots, in his writing, in his life, the adage "Suaviter in modo, fortiter in re" -- discreet in form, strong in content. A noble laureate indeed.

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