1972 For writers other than the austerely Marxist John Berger this would have been an annus mirabilis. His TV series – Ways of Seeing – had revolutionised art history, and how it was taught, doing for the discipline what ‘Theory’ was currently doing for literary criticism (see 21 October). Later in the year, his novel G. won the country’s premier literary prize, the Booker (Booker-McConnell, to give it its full title).
There were three judges for the prize (now in its third year). The most influential was Dr George Steiner, a very advanced thinker and literary critic. The chair was the sadly decrepit lion of London’s (1940s) literary world, Cyril Connolly: no longer an advanced thinker, constitutionally lazy, and chronically ill. It was Steiner’s authority, everyone assumed, that tilted the choice towards Berger’s extravagantly literary work (submitted by his publisher, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, not himself, as it later became clear). The publisher’s blurb played down the elliptical, enigmatic, epistolary nature of the narrative.
‘G.’ is a young man forging an energetic sexual career in Europe during the early years of this century. With profound compassion, Berger explores the hearts and minds of both men and women, and what happens during sex, to reveal the conditions of Don Juan’s success: his essential loneliness, the quiet culmination in each of his sexual experiences of all those that precede it, the tenderness that infuses even the briefest of his encounters, and the way women experience their own extraordinariness through their moments with him. All of this Berger sets against the turbulent backdrop of Garibaldi and the failed revolution of Milanese workers in 1889, the Boer War, and the first flight across the Alps, making G. a brilliant novel about the search for intimacy in history’s private moments.
The award ceremony at the Café Royal (not, as it proved, the ideal location) did not go to anyone’s plan, except Berger’s. His winner’s speech opened with a critique of cash prizes for art and the pernicious (capitalistic) competition they represented:
Since you have awarded me this prize, you may like to know, briefly, what it means to me. The competitiveness of prizes I find distasteful. And in the case of the prize, the publication of the shortlist, the deliberately publicised suspense, the speculation of writers concerned as though they were horses, the whole emphasis on winners and losers is false and out of place in the context of literature.
Nevertheless prizes act as a stimulus – not to writers themselves but to publishers, readers and booksellers. And so the basic cultural value of a prize depends upon what it is a stimulus to. To the conformity of the market and the consensus of the average opinion; or to imaginative independence on the part of both reader and writer.
This was bad, but worse was to come. Berger turned on the sponsors, Booker-McConnell, whose commercial wealth, he contemptuously noted, had largely come from 130 years of cultivating sugar, with indentured black labour, in the West Indies. He would no more accept their laurels than a handout from Simon Legree (the vicious slave-owner in Uncle Tom’s Cabin). Half the £5,000 award he would donate to the Black Panthers (alas, their British chapter no longer existed: but, as they say about gifts, it’s the thought that counts).
The evening was a disaster. Not least because G. went on to be a flop in the bookshops. The reading public did not share Steiner’s enthusiasm for fiction they found baffling. The events of 23 November led to material changes in the way the prize was subsequently run. The panels were expanded to five – with a majority of lay (and, occasionally, ‘celebrity’) judges. The apparatus, paradoxically, increasingly conformed to Berger’s stinging remark about ‘stimuli’ to book sales and the welfare of the British book trade.
Berger himself left Britain for good eighteen months later, to live in a village in the French Alps, and write a novel on the plight of foreign migrant workers.