I AM going through a phase of being awarded prizes. The other week I received, from the hands of the Prime Minister herself, one of the British Press Awards. As the occasion was the big Fleet Street event of the year, and marked by an eloquent and lengthy philosophical statement from Mrs Thatcher, I innocently assumed that the daily press would devote retrospective space to it. But only those newspapers which had prizemen on their own staff reported it, and they referred exclusively to those prizemen.
So much for the great myths of journalistic impartiality. The Daily Mail report gave the impression that Mrs Thatcher had a tête-à-tête luncheon at the Savoy with a Daily Mail photographer and a Daily Mail specialist writer. I came back to Monaco to find that I had been awarded the International Prize by the Press Association of Rome on the strength of an article written some months ago for the Guardian. Last year I was given a little golden man or uomo d’oro as a selection for the Premio Bancarella. Some years back I was told that if I turned up at a particular time in a particular Italian town I would receive a prize as the Film Scenarist of the Year. I was not able to turn up and so did not get it. The Italians, a festive people despite heavy inflation, rampant terrorism and an inability to be governed, love giving prizes.
I love being given prizes, like everyone else, but, like another writer with a far better claim to the homage of Fleet Street, I have long been resigned to ‘pushing on my work through difficulties, of which it is useless to complain… without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour.’ This is the writer’s usual situation, and to be given a prize is like having strobe lights switched on in a place of habitual, though comfortable, darkness.
It seemed to me quite in order that I should receive at Sardi’s a couple of awards from the New York critics on behalf of the director Stanley Kubrick, who had made a film out of one of my books. The role of vicarious recipient has been congenial; now it seems to be changing.
I would never be so presumptuous as to imagine that the bigger awards are now being eased into propulsion towards this increasingly fatigable hack. Though I have so far here begun nearly every paragraph with ‘I,’ I have always maintained a kind of humility. Anyone who has contrived to make a living out of writing for the past quarter-century would be wise to consider that he has already been rewarded enough.
But there are British novelists like myself (I had better remind the prize-muses of my primary vocation) who dream of winning the Booker Prize and, to that end, compose novels about living on a Thames houseboat or about Primrose Hill lasagne and fornication. There are even British novelists who have covertly learnt by heart a speech in Swedish. This is easiest for writers from the Northern Provinces, where bairns have the belly wartch.
I (there I go again) had a drink the other day with a man very influential with the Nobel committee: he told me that the prize for literature had become too political and would probably soon be abandoned. This ought to be good news for British writers, who have to be reminded annually that the nation which produced Shakespeare now stands no chance in comparison with its upstart daughters or the small oppressed enclaves. The Nobel may be for Chicago or Lower Slobbovia, but it is no longer for the sons of Bingley or Berkhamsted.
There remain for us the small prizes – the handsome paperweight and the modest cheque. (Not always so modest in Italy: this afternoon my representative receives on my behalf from the President himself a cheque for two million lire.) This is as it ought to be – enough to pay an outstanding gas bill and get moderately drunk, a reminder on the tortured desk that somebody has liked our work.
Writers need these reminders far more than plumbers and musicians. Musicians are publicly applauded and plumbers are fawned at. Every writer, especially in Britain, seems to throw his work into a terrible silence. He has, now and again, to know that somebody reads him.
I did not have a chance to whisper to the Prime Minister that writers are not averse to accepting state honours, despite the example of J.B. Priestley and a few others to whom literature and money are their own reward. Evelyn Waugh wanted a knighthood: it was not much to ask for, and it would have cost the state nothing. The stage and the concert hall are over-rewarded; publishers have been ennobled; soon there will be literary agents with the DBE. What writers want, to be truthful, is contingent honour for their wives. Mrs Waugh deserved to be Lady Waugh, all authors’ wives deserve something for their suffering. Ask Lady Burgess.
Observer, 25 May 1980