1964 A hundred or so writers have won the Nobel Prize for Literature; thousands plausibly think themselves robbed for not having won it. Only one writer, however, can be said to have won it, rejected it, then, some years later, decided he would, after all, accept.
On this day in 1964 the Nobel committee resolved to give the prize to Jean Paul Sartre. He was not principally known as a novelist or playwright – although his works in that field are distinguished. It was more his record of wartime resistance and his current vanguard position in the radical movements of the 1960s that predisposed the Stockholm Academicians: that, and Sartre’s proclaimed anti-Americanism.
His rejecting the prize was not seen as any kind of humiliation by the Nobel committee, but rather a validation of the rightness of their choice. Sartre had forewarned them, on 14 October, that he would not accept the award; nevertheless, academy members felt that ‘he was the only possible recipient this year’. They went ahead and gave it to him, knowing it would be turned down. The chairman of the eighteen-strong panel, Anders Oesterling, saluted Sartre as the ‘father of the existentialist doctrine, which became this generation’s intellectual self-defence’. Defence against what? (Something draped in stars and stripes, one deduced.) In the same year, Martin Luther King won the Peace Prize. He accepted.
Sartre’s published explanation was expressed as a defence of inviolable individual freedom:
It is not the same thing if I sign ‘Jean Paul Sartre’ or if I sign ‘Jean Paul Sartre, Nobel Prize Winner’. A writer must refuse to allow himself to be transformed into an institution, even if it takes place in the most honourable form.
In his autobiography, the distinguished Swedish novelist Lars Gyllensten (who was elected to the Academy in 1966) claimed that Sartre, in 1975, indicated privately that he would now accept the money for the prize that he had briefly, but legitimately, held (the 1964 prize money had been returned to the Foundation and reinvested). The application was, according to Gyllensten, turned down. The story has never been confirmed – although there must, if it is true, be correspondence in the Nobel archive.
Gyllensten resigned from the committee in the late 1980s for what he saw as its weakness in not awarding the Prize to Salman Rushdie, after the fatwa brought down on him for The Satanic Verses. Gyllensten died in 2006.