PART I

CONCEPTION

It is not always possible to travel backward through the blur of years and remember the exact moment when a work of fiction was conceived. But in the case of my novel The Prize, I can even now, although nearly twenty-two years have passed, remember vividly the moment, or several separate moments, of the book’s beginning.

It began in 1946.

I had recently been discharged from the United States Army Signal Corps, demoted from sergeant to free-lance writer, and my wife Sylvia had resigned from her editorial job on a national magazine and was reduced once more from editor to helpmate. Together, we had taken a Swedish liner from New York to Goteborg, and then a train to Stockholm, to begin the research for the first of a series of articles I was to do for Reader’s Digest, The Saturday Evening Post, and Collier’s magazine. We had a regal corner suite in the Grand Hotel of Stockholm, utterly beyond our means, but worth it for the view from the sitting room overlooking the Strommen Canal and the Royal Palace.

It was the month of September in 1946, and I was constantly out in the chilly, wet northern city, trying to fulfill speculative magazine assignments and possibly find ideas for further assignments. I went everywhere in Stockholm, doing interviews and gathering information on stories that I had planned, yet always questioning, listening, observing, in quest of subjects for additional stories I might write.

One name kept recurring in my numerous conversations. That was the name of Dr. Sven Hedin, who was listed in a government publication as one of Sweden’s twenty great scientists of the preceding three hundred years. Dr. Sven Hedin had, in fact, explored Inner Mongolia and Tibet, and had gained an international reputation as a hydrographer, cartographer, and author of widely read travel books like A Conquest of Tibet and Across the Gobi Desert. But the reason Dr. Hedin’s name kept coming up was largely a political one. The Second World War had just ended. During that war, Dr. Hedin had been an aggressively unneutral Swede and had given his passionate support to an unpopular cause. Dr. Hedin had backed Nazi Germany and had counted Göring, Himmler, and Hitler among his intimate friends. Dr. Hedin had publicly characterized Hitler as “one of the greatest men in world history.”

Now, in 1946, I learned that while Nazi Germany had surrendered, Dr. Hedin had not. He was still, at the age of eighty-one, openly loyal to Hitler’s memory. At the same time, he was continuing with his work, writing steadily, adding to the thirty-one volumes he had already published on his explorations.

Among the Swedes I encountered, I noted a curious ambivalence of feeling toward Dr. Sven Hedin. In this small nation, with its shortage of world-renowned figures and celebrities, Dr. Hedin was one of the few remaining international Big Names. There were those who took pride in Dr. Hedin’s fame. On the other hand, the fact remained that Dr. Hedin had been the one prominent Swedish citizen to support Nazi Germany—whose atrocities and horrors had recently been revealed—and Germany had lost, and now Dr. Hedin was not only a Swedish hero but a Swedish scandal and embarrassment.

I was fascinated. Here was a possible magazine article. Perhaps I would write about the one notorious unneutral Swede. Or, if he wouldn’t talk about that, perhaps I would write about him as a Swedish scientist who had survived his affiliations and who, despite his advanced years, was going ahead with his work. Or, at least, I might include him as part of a story I had in mind about Swedish scientists in general, and the progress they had made during the years that much of the rest of the world had been at war.

I wrote Dr. Sven Hedin a note. He responded with an invitation to tea. And so one dark afternoon, I found myself in a taxi, riding up the left side of the impressive Norr Mälarstrand through the moody, rain-swept city, to the address that Dr. Hedin had given me. As I noted that night in my journal:

“September 8, 1946. Arrived at number 66, had trouble getting in until I found buzzer. Hedin’s name after apartment 6. Took two-person triangular elevator to sixth floor. Buzzed. Girl in twenties, Hedin’s niece, print dress, British accent, burst out, greeted me. Walked me up inner flight of circular stairs. Opened door. Alma Hedin, sister, tall with gray sensitive face, halting English, blue dress, in late sixties no doubt, welcomed me warmly. Sven Hedin leaped up from massive desk at far end of room, came to me, took my hand in both of his.”

Presently, after a tour of his two joined apartments, we sat in an old-fashioned parlor (lace doilies everywhere) which contrasted with the modern apartment building in which it was located. I was seated next to Dr. Hedin, a gnome of a man with quick eyes behind thick spectacles, a scrub mustache, a starched wing collar securing, I would note, a “cravatish tie”, and a blue pin-striped suit.

From the moment that our conversation began, Dr. Hedin was entirely himself. He spoke with affection of Adolf Hitler, of Goebbels, Himmler, Göring, Doenitz. “Whenever I wanted to see Hitler,” Dr. Hedin explained, “I would call Prince Wissen of the German Embassy here, a fine fellow, on Monday. He would call Berlin the same day, phone me back several hours later, and say Hitler would lunch with me on Friday. I would leave Thursday so as not to be late, and then see Hitler. He was a hypnotic talker, a fascinating man.”

Dr. Hedin spoke of the inhumanity of the conquering Allies toward defeated Germany. He spoke, with hope, of the probability that America would join a resurrected Germany in a third World War against Russia. I listened more with wonder than dismay. And when, eventually, I questioned Dr. Hedin about science, since he was a scientist, and about literature, since he was a writer, he seemed not only ill-informed but uninterested.

As our interview continued through the waning afternoon, my host, I perceived, was becoming more and more eager, eager and anxious, to impress me with his importance. He wanted the publicity of my article, and he wanted it to be favorable. Suddenly, during some reply of his, he halted abruptly, and then he said to me, “You know I am a Nobel Prize judge, do you not?”

I had not known that, and I was quite astonished and, indeed, impressed. I was impressed because, to me, to most persons I am sure, the Nobel Prize is the world’s foremost accolade given by man to man. And here was I, informally chatting with one of the august Nobel judges. And, I repeat, I was also astonished. What astonished me was the fact that this person I was interviewing was a cobweb of prejudices and misinformation and intolerance on many, many subjects, from the sciences to the arts, all of which came within the sphere of Nobel Prize considerations. To picture Dr. Hedin—someone altogether mortal—as a Nobel judge, one who played a decisive role in the annual crowning of gods, was astounding.

I had always believed, without ever having thought about it much, that if there were Nobel judges, they would be the wisest elders of our age. Actually, I suspected, most people did not believe that the Nobel Prizes were decided upon by human judges at all, but rather were selected at a meeting of deities on high Olympus or selected by some massive, invisible computing machine that could X-ray the earth’s talented, its geniuses, and appoint the most deserving as winners.

Intrigued by the contrast between what I had expected and what I unexpectedly found before me, I came to life, and began to pepper Dr. Sven Hedin, Nobel judge, with questions about his functions on his committee, about how winners were nominated, sorted out, narrowed down, secretly discussed and debated over, voted upon, and about his own role. Dr. Hedin, sensing my excitement, was pleased and expansive, and he rattled on for another hour or more.

What I learned was incredible. My mind reeled. Dr. Hedin was not a Nobel judge on just one committee. He was a Nobel judge on three committees, the only Nobel Prize judge who voted annually on three of the four categories that Sweden controlled. He had been a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science since 1905, and every year since that time he had cast a vote for the laureate in physics and a vote for the laureate in chemistry. In 1913, he had been elected to the Swedish Academy, and ever since then he had been one of the eighteen judges to vote on the yearly Nobel Prize for literature.

Dr. Hedin was full of confidences. Did I know that when Pearl Buck’s name had been proposed for the Nobel Prize in literature in 1938, ten of the eighteen Swedish judges present at the secret-vote meeting were against her? Well, continued Dr. Hedin, he and Selma Lagerlof had been the leaders of the minority who wanted the award to go to Pearl Buck. Dr. Hedin had been the most vociferous in favor of Pearl Buck. He admired her work, her knowledge of China (which almost equaled his own), and he and Selma Lagerlof had fought and finally overcome the resistance of the majority of their fellow judges. “Pearl Buck and her husband published my last book, a biography of Chiang Kai-shek. They gave me too little money for it, and to think how I got her the Nobel Prize!”

Once, when I interrupted to ask Dr. Hedin why some prominent authors had never won the Nobel Prize, he asked me what authors I had in mind. Well, I said, Maxim Gorky for one. “Ah, he died too soon. His name came in several times; he would have got the prize eventually.” What about H. G. Wells? “Too minor and journalistic.” What about W. Somerset Maugham? “Too popular and undistinguished.” And James Joyce. What about James Joyce? Dr. Hedin seemed puzzled. “Who is he?”

It was difficult to suspend disbelief, but these were the words, and this was a Nobel Prize judge. I wanted more of his behind-the-scenes anecdotes, but I realized that the afternoon had worn away. Yet I hated to leave. I knew that this was a real story—the truth about the Nobel Prize awards, the truth about those who gave and those who took—but I did not know what kind of story it was or could be, or in what form this story might take final shape. I knew only that I wanted more of it. Immediately, I requested a second appointment, to discuss only the Nobel Prizes, and Dr. Hedin was delighted to grant me another interview.

Two weeks later we met again. By then, I had done my homework, done extensive reading on the Nobel Prizes, and had made notes, got up a list of blunt questions. And this second time we were together, Dr. Hedin’s answers were even more stimulating. For three hours he discussed specific ballotings that had taken place behind closed doors over many years within the three science committees, and the literary and peace committees. Without inhibition he named names, he discussed the human frailty of the judges and the judged, he revealed stupidity and brilliance in the voting, and he exposed politics and prejudices and petty vanities as well as honesty and wisdom and courage.

Some of my penciled jottings of the interview were explosive. The bitter personal prejudices of a single judge, Dr. Carl David af Wirsen, a poet and critic, prevented the Nobel Prize from going to Tolstoi, Ibsen, Strindberg. Wirsen resented Tolstoi for advocating anarchism and for denouncing all money prizes as harmful to artists, and Wirsen’s colleagues resented Tolstoi for being a Russian. Wirsen’s vote was decisive in rejecting Ibsen, who Wirsen argued had not written anything worthwhile in eleven years. And Wirsen led the opposition against Strindberg, insisting that the great playwright’s dramas were ‘old-fashioned’ and reminding his fellow judges that Strindberg had once announced, “The anti-Nobel Prize is the only one I would accept!” … The personal behavior of authors sometimes kept them from receiving deserved awards. Flagrant immorality barred D’Annunzio, and homosexuality delayed Gide’s receipt of the award for many years … The anti-Semitism of one prominent Nobel Prize winner, the German scientist Philipp Lenard, may have been the major factor in keeping the award from Albert Einstein at a time when Einstein was expected to win it. Lenard, who had great influence among the Nobel Prize judges, told the judges that the theory of relativity was not actually a discovery, had never been proved, and was valueless. Accordingly, the Nobel judges refused to honor Einstein for his early theory of relativity, and continued to pass him by for seven years. By then Lenard’s influence had weakened, and the Swedish judges relented and elected Einstein the physics laureate in 1921 for his lesser work on the photoelectric effect … The selection of Gabriela Mistral for the literary award in 1945, over Hesse, Romains, Croce, Sandburg, and others, was made “because one of our judges, Hjalmar Gullberg, a poet, fell in love with her verse, and translated all of it into Swedish to convince us, and single-handed he swayed our entire vote.”

Dazed, I left Dr. Hedin and, so that I could think, I walked the long distance back to the hotel.

I had a treasure, I knew—provided it was not fool’s gold. But perhaps Dr. Hedin had become merely a malicious gossip, was even sliding into senility at his great age, or perhaps he felt embittered toward his fellow judges, and his memory was faulty, colored by paranoia. On the other hand, if his mind was clear, if he had presented me with facts, I was possessed of material that few other writers were lucky enough to own. Everyone knew the bright side of the moon; I alone knew exactly what lay on the dark side. Only one thing remained to be done. Somehow, I must confirm the accuracy of my interviews with Dr. Hedin.

Immediately, with the help of Dr. Hedin, of the Nobel Foundation, of several other organizations, as well as of some friends that I had made in Stockholm, I arranged to interview six more Nobel Prize judges who officiated in four fields. According to my journal entries:

“Mr. Dahlman, spokesman for the Foreign Office, suggested ‘The’ Svedberg, Nobel Prize-winning scientist at Uppsala … Went to see Dr. Nicholas Norlen, assistant to Dr. Herbert Olivecrona. Dr. Olivecrona, at 55, is one of the world’s leading brain specialists and a Nobel judge for the medical awards … Went to Sturegatan 14 to see Sven L. Hammarskjöld, new Secretary of the Nobel Foundation … September 23, at 3, took cab to the Swedish Academy, through narrow streets behind National Palace in Old Town. Met a Dr. Lamm, giant, white-haired professor of literature who refused to talk but who took me through auditorium, past book-lined walls to meet a dignified, graying poet of fair reputation in Sweden named Dr. Anders Österling …”

One of my key interviews proved to be the one with the formidable Dr. Österling, Secretary of the Swedish Academy, who had voted on the literary awards for over two decades. Dr. Österling was as candid as Dr. Hedin had been. At the time of my interview with Dr. Österling, no Russian writer living inside Russia had ever won a Nobel Prize. Because of the historic Swedish fear and hatred of its big neighbor, the Nobel committees had ignored Russian genius, and the Swedish Academy had voted down Chekhov, Tolstoi, Andreyev, Gorky. Only one Russian author had ever been awarded the prize. In 1933, a minor writer, an expatriate who lived in Paris and had translated Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha into Russian, Ivan Bunin by name, had been voted the Nobel Prize in literature. When I asked Dr. Österling why Bunin got the prize, he replied, “To pay off our bad consciences on passing over Chekhov and Tolstoi.”

Dr. Österling told me that he had fought hard against Pearl Buck’s receiving the award. And while Robert Frost, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair had all been up for consideration and had been decisively voted down, neither Thomas Wolfe nor James Joyce had ever been voted upon, because neither had ever been nominated. He said that often authors’ wives tried to nominate their husbands officially. Furthermore, the language in which an author published was sometimes a factor in his winning an award. Anyone writing in Hindi, for instance, would have a difficult time winning the award, since the Nobel committee had no personal knowledge of the language and no experts upon whom they could rely. Dr. Österling frankly admitted that some of the Swedish literary judges, himself included, were prejudiced against certain American novelists. “I am against Americans getting it because they do not need our check and they receive more money from Hollywood than our Nobel Prize is worth.” Unfair or not, such were the facts.

The facts. Dr. Hedin had been a fountain of truth. The moon was bright, but indeed, indeed, a dark side existed, and I had been there. Yes, I had a treasure, a true one, I knew at last. There remained only one problem. I had not the faintest idea what to do with it.

My Nobel judge interviews were behind me. Another day or two passed, and I did other work, but always bothered and nagged by this new material, this revelation, and suddenly it was Sunday.

I have already recorded a part of what happened next in my book The Sunday Gentleman, where I wrote a reminiscence about my meeting with Dr. Sven Hedin.

It was, as I have said, Sunday. My wife and I slept most of the morning, and after we awakened, we had breakfast in our suite. Outside, the sun was shining. It was noon. I moved to the sitting-room window and looked down upon the Strommen Canal and idly watched and listened as the King’s band played before his enormous Royal Palace across the way. The postcard grandeur of the scene, the outer unreality of it, struck me, and then I remembered my interviews and I was again reminded that all that lay before my eyes was a façade, and that plainer, cruder human events happened behind palace walls, behind academy walls, behind institute walls, behind any walls where mere mortals dwelt. And that was the moment of conception. At once, I knew what must be done.

I turned from the window to my wife, who was still having coffee. “Sylvia,” I said, “has anyone ever written a novel about the Nobel Prizes?”

From that moment, I was possessed of a brainchild, faceless, almost shapeless, that I would not be delivered of for a decade and a half.

What followed I shall recount as candidly as possible, for those who are writers and readers like myself. I speak of this creative experience with no pretense that it was unique or in any way different from what has been endured by other authors whose books have been as painfully and joyously conceived, but simply to reveal to those whose interest in books is merely the pleasure of reading a story—as well as to those who are writers or who wish to be writers and who may one day write a similar book—something of the starts and stops, twistings and turnings, delights and tortures that go into the making of one novel. I know that, in the long run, I have learned less about writing and received less encouragement from English instructors than I have from reading or listening to a working artist relate how a single creation—poem, play, short story, novel—was brought to life and to maturity and to its public place.

Following the meetings with the Nobel judges and my realization that this material could be utilized in a novel, I spent my remaining weeks in Stockholm visiting the various voting Academies, the Caroline Hospital, the Nobel Foundation, meeting still other judges and officials in the five award fields, and meeting also the administrators of the awards and veteran Swedish newspapermen who had covered previous ceremonies. My notebooks were soon filled, and the information in them continued to be extraordinary.

Finally I left Stockholm and, after spending nearly a year in France, Spain, and Italy, I returned to California with my voluminous Nobel Prize notes. Once settled at home in Los Angeles, I put the Nobel material in my file cabinet. This was 1947, and in the two years that followed I devoted myself primarily to making a livelihood as a free-lance magazine writer. But I also persisted, in my limited spare time, in doing research on the Nobel Prize, in building up my file, and I spent countless hours trying to find a fictional approach to my material.

At last, in the spring of 1949, I found my first approach through a character I had devised. My earliest notes began: “A young, mature American scientist, who lives in a rut, does research at a Midwest university. His bachelor life is placid and tweedy. He has an elderly housekeeper, a dog, poker companions, and he is absorbed in investigations of the neutron. One day a cable comes … he has just been voted the Nobel Prize in physics … A recluse who has become a nine-day wonder, he learns a physicist can be as popular as a movie star or baseball player. He is happy to escape to Sweden to be free of the turmoil.”

In this development, I had the scientist fall in love with a healthy Swedish girl, who was a Foreign Office attaché. The pair had a disagreement, and my physicist rebounded into the arms of a Swedish actress, who represented an enemy power desiring nuclear secrets. Thereafter, the hero was in constant jeopardy, longing for the hermit life he had once led. In the end, calling upon resources that he did not know he possessed, he saved himself and his nuclear secrets, and was able to appear at the Nobel Ceremony in Concert Hall.

I brooded about this approach for two months, with the dark suspicion that it was dreadful. Finally, I wrote it off as a false start. The hero was empty; his women were unreal. The story line was contrived, lacked depth, said nothing, and, worst of all, was not gripping. The approach was too trivial for the serious subject I had in mind.

Impatient to do something with my Nobel obsession and material, I suggested to my New York literary agent, Paul R. Reynolds, that it might make a good factual article or series of articles. A new managing editor had come to Collier’s magazine, and he was seeking controversial coverline pieces, stories sensational enough to be featured on the magazine’s front cover. Reynolds got in touch with this editor, and he was enthusiastic. I was given the assignment to develop my material into a two-part article, presenting both sides of the Nobel Prize medallion.

With a great spurt of energy, I resumed my research. I hired veteran correspondents in Sweden to send me more behind-the-scenes copy. Personally, I interviewed or corresponded with a host of former Nobel Prize winners, and among the many who graciously cooperated with me were Professor Albert Einstein, Dr. Robert A. Millikan, Dr. Herman J. Muller, Mrs. Pearl Buck, and Miss Sigrid Undset.

I still treasure my reply from Professor Einstein. I had asked him, among other questions, how he had learned that he had won the Nobel Prize, the circumstances surrounding his acceptance of it, and if he had any criticisms of the Nobel Foundation’s procedures and of the judges’ choices. Writing me from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, on April 25, 1949, Professor Einstein replied to my questions, in part, as follows:

“I was informed that I had received the Nobel Prize by a telegram which I got while on board ship on my way back from a visit to Japan … The prize was not personally handed to me. I was invited, instead, to attend a Swedish scientific congress at Goete- borg [sic] where I delivered an address … I find that the procedure of selection of the prize-winners—at least in my field—is fair and conscientious.”

However, it was Mrs. Pearl Buck who provided me with some of the best material on the personal adventures of a Nobel Prize laureate. On April 22, 1949, she wrote me:

“I happened to be in New York on the day when the news of the award was cabled from Stockholm. The Associated Press called my secretary and she called me. Simultaneously my husband got the news and telephoned to say that I must come to the John Day office as soon as possible because reporters and photographers wanted to see me. I really could not believe the news and it is considered rather a joke on me that I would not talk with the reporters until my husband had called my Swedish publisher by trans-Atlantic telephone to get confirmation. It was my feeling then and still is that that award should have gone to Theodore Dreiser. But I was told that it was the intent to give the Nobel Prize whenever possible to writers who had not yet reached their fullest development, so that it would be an encouragement and help to them, as indeed it has been to me.”

Shortly afterwards, Mrs. Buck’s husband, the late Richard Walsh, a prominent publisher, sent me notes describing everything that he and his wife could recall of what had happened to Mrs. Buck from the moment that she arrived in Stockholm until the moment that she left.

As Mrs. Buck revealed it, on the night of the award ceremony she found herself seated next to Dr. Enrico Fermi, winner of the physics prize for his nuclear researches. Presently, as I would soon report in my article—

“She was introduced and asked to rise and go down the steps to the floor of the hall.

“In a moment she was curtsying to King Gustaf. The monarch shook her hand, then gave her a gold medal in a leather box, a portfolio containing the Nobel citation, and an envelope with the document which was to be exchanged for the prize money.

“Then came the ordeal of walking backward. Handicapped both by high-heeled shoes that almost gave way on the deep Oriental rug and by the long train on her gold lamé dress, Mrs. Buck retreated slowly amid almost unendurable suspense. Sensing her difficulty, the audience applauded her every step on the successful journey back up the stairs and into her seat. The next morning a Stockholm paper ran an eight-column banner headline proclaiming PEARL BUCK GOES GRACEFULLY BACKWARDS!

“Later Mrs. Buck confided to a friend, ‘I was so afraid that I would land in Professor Fermi’s lap that, while the speeches were being made, I memorized the pattern of the rug. Then I followed it right straight back into my chair!’“

This was human, and therefore valuable to me for the article. My wife and I conducted a number of additional personal interviews with Nobel laureates in our area. Among the most rewarding was an interview that Sylvia had with Dr. Robert Millikan, the 1923 Nobel laureate in physics. Sylvia met with Dr. Millikan in his large office at Caltech’s Bridge Laboratory, in Pasadena, California. According to her original notes:

“Two sculptured heads on pedestals in office—one Einstein, one Ben Franklin … He said, ‘It is amazing how few mistakes the judges make. In my opinion they have made only one. But what is one mistake in almost fifty years? Besides, that mistake is only in my opinion.’ … A member of the Swedish Academy of Science told Millikan confidentially (and he told me confidentially) that the committee wanted to give the prize to Einstein. The Academy man said he spent all his time studying Einstein’s theory of relativity. He couldn’t understand it. Didn’t dare give the prize and run risk of learning later that the theory of relativity is invalid.”

My wife’s interview also provided me with one more tidbit of new information. Dr. Millikan said that the Swedes had given him two medals. “One was solid gold, to put in the vault for safekeeping. The other was a brass replica, just to keep around the house to show people.”

But the very best material in my 1949 researches came from professional newspapermen in Sweden, who had covered many Nobel Prize seasons, and who were filled with information they had never been able to use in their routine covering of the Nobel ceremonies. One correspondent—who also held a government post, and whom I paid for replies to a series of questions—sent me a marvelous anecdote. I had wanted to know what the prize money had done for each of a number of winners. In response, he told me what the money had done for Knut Hamsun, a recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature, so that I was able to write in my article the following:

“It saved Knut Hamsun from near poverty and afforded him a historic two-week toot which began the very night of the award ceremony.

“Tying one on, Hamsun pulled the whiskers of an elderly Nobel committeeman and then wove his way over to Selma Lagerlöf, who was also on the Nobel jury. Snapping his fingers against her new corset Hamsun cried, ‘Y’know? Sounds like a bell buoy!’“

When I combined this mass of new material with my three-year-old notes from Nobel judge interviews, and with all of the reading I had done since, I was almost overwhelmed by my research riches. But I managed to condense the material for the two-part article, and then I undertook the writing of the story. The writing went smoothly, and on May 25, 1949, I was able to inform my literary agent:

“Well, here it is. The completed job has turned out very much as I planned … I have never, in 20 years, undertaken anything with as much scope. I found myself dealing with big and with unusual names in medicine, chemistry, physics, literature, and pacifism. It was tough, but honestly fun. When I completed my first draft it ran 120 pages—exactly. About ten pages or so proved to be repetitions, and after I got rid of those, I found myself with 110 pages of solid facts, anecdotes, stories …

“I would be most interested in elaborating the Nobel material into a full-length book. Next year will be the 50th anniversary, the golden anniversary, of the Nobel Prizes. There have been a number of books on Nobel, on the Prizes and the winners, but most are either dull or way out of date. I think there is a place for such a book …”

On May 31, 1949, my literary agent replied as follows:

“I read your piece Friday and got it over to Collier’s. You have certainly done a very exhaustive job on the subject. The piece is very well written … Frankly I can’t see a book on the Nobel Prizes. I don’t see who would buy the book. There is awfully little in books unless you can get an idea that will sell to the public and this wouldn’t seem to me one.”

In my eagerness to use all of the Nobel Prize material, and since I had no satisfactory approach for a novel, I had been willing to settle for an informal nonfiction history of the Prizes, but the moment that my agent threw cold water on the idea, I abandoned it, and perhaps for the best. Meanwhile, the editors of Collier’s had accepted the article, had praised it, had agreed to give me four more assignments if I went to Europe, and I was feeling better.

But three months later, as the magazine was preparing the two-part article for the press, and just as I arrived in Paris to undertake the four new Collier’s assignments, there occurred what today seems an amusing—but at the time was a most serious and upsetting—intervention and censorship. A member of the Crowell-Collier board of directors had routinely scanned the pieces—and suddenly he had seen red.

A letter, dated September 2, 1949, written by my literary agent, had been awaiting my arrival in Paris. It informed me that my four new assignments in Europe had been canceled out of hand. “The whole trouble is the Nobel Prize piece,” my agent had written. “The director of the firm thought the Nobel piece was very pro-Russian and I think he got the idea from it that you were a Communist or a fellow-traveler trying to sneak stuff in.”

This explanation seemed insane, and I tried hard to understand what had happened.

Based on factual evidence, I had shown that the Nobel Prize judges were—up to that time—not only anti-American but also anti-Russian. I accused the Nobel committees of having an unfair bias because they had no respect for American achievements and had hatred for their powerful neighbor Russia. The Crowell-Collier director had said that this was dangerous fellow-traveler propaganda, and so I replied that I was referring not only to prejudice against Communist Russia but against Czarist Russia, and I cited the deliberate boycottings of all great Russian authors under Nicholas I—Tolstoi, Chekhov, Andreyev—and all the great Russian scientists save Pavlov (who won the Nobel Prize only because Alfred Nobel, before his death, had admired and aided him). The Crowell-Collier director remained adamant, and I made one last desperate effort to protect the integrity of the article. On September 5, 1949,1 wrote my agent:

“After giving them exactly what they asked for at Collier’s, what is the result? The result is, I arrive in Paris to find four major assignments canceled and myself suspended from the magazine for an utterly mad personal prejudice on the part of one of their directors.

“I resent that pro-Russian crap of his. I don’t care if the man is one of your friends, or whatever he is. He may be brilliant, bright, nice to children and agents. But if, in reading my Nobel pieces, he can conceive that I am ‘very pro-Russian’, then I say flatly that man is an idiot … Why don’t you reread Nobel and tell me how pro-Russian it is. My God, aren’t those people interested in facts? Out of my final draft of 90-odd pages, a half-dozen, less, dealt with a simple true fact—that with one exception, no Russian, under the Czar, or under Stalin, ever got a Nobel Prize, though several probably deserved it. And because I try to write interestingly and tell all the facts, I repeated instances and anecdotes. What in the devil is Communist about that? I despise working in movie studios, and I always think of the magazine field as fresh air and decent—but this is the first time in 20 years of magazine work I am seriously beginning to wonder.”

This outburst availed me nothing. On October 6, 1949, my agent wrote me:

“I lunched yesterday with the managing editor of Collier’s … Practically all of the Russian material is out, which you won’t like. Actually, most of the Russian material should have and certainly could have stayed in except for two or three rather unfortunate sentences. For example, you open a paragraph with the statement that the Swedes showed their anti-Russian prejudice at the time of the Finnish-Russian war by giving a prize to a Finn. Factually this was, of course, true, but to the average American, Russia’s attack on Finland before the Second World War is just indefensible and, while that probably shouldn’t influence the Nobel Prize Committee, I am afraid the average American would feel sympathetic to the fact that it did. This would be just a matter of changing a couple of words in a sentence. However, now Collier’s seems to have decided they have a swell feature …”

Well, there it was. I was left stranded in Paris with all of my assignments canceled, and with a wife and infant son to be supported back home. Eventually, by redoubling my efforts, I was able to get a few other magazine assignments and salvage something from the trip. But financially, it was a trying period, a period of considerable hardship. And what made it worse was that in the battle over censorship I had lost, and I had no power to prevent the periodical from deleting valuable information and distorting history because of executive idiocy.

This kind of restriction made me more determined than ever to work on this subject in a field where I might be free to write as I pleased—the field of the novel. Another incentive was the response to my two-part article, which appeared in the Collier’s magazines of November 5 and 12 of 1949, as ‘Those Explosive Nobel Prizes’. The blurb over Part One read: “The inventor created another form of dynamite when he left his fortune to establish the world’s biggest giveaway for men of real distinction.” The blurb over Part Two read: “The distinguished juries that grant the world’s most important awards are prey to their own foibles and obscure terms in the inventor’s will.” The response to this article, both in the press and in my mail, was so electric that I was encouraged to think further about the subject.

Once more I returned to the idea of a novel. In the next five years I outlined two more versions, and made numerous notes on both. One of these was called Journey to Malmö. While en route to Stockholm, six Nobel Prize winners—a disillusioned American author, a French woman scientist, a Scandinavian, an Indian, and two Russians sharing one science award—were stranded by a snowslide in the Swedish port of Malmö. The plot centered on the two Russians: one did not want to return to Moscow after the awards, for fear that his bacterial discovery would be adapted to warfare; the other, his Russian co-winner, was not a scientist but was posing as one to keep an eye on the real scientist. Apparently I had a novel of regeneration in mind. I had the group of Nobel laureates cooperate to save the Russian who wanted to be free, and my last note on this approach read: “End book with giving of awards in Stockholm, now that winners are genuinely deserving at last.”

Examining this, I felt that for a second time I was wrong. What I had was a confined situation for a melodrama reflecting the formula of The Petrified Forest. It was interesting but too shallow and familiar. Moreover, it merely skirted the Nobel Prize awards, and failed to penetrate the heart of my basic idea.

Doggedly, while making my livelihood writing for magazines and films, I persisted in trying to find a satisfying approach to the novel, and by 1956 I had written my third version, a sketchy outline which, for the first time, I entitled The Prize. I will quote directly from my preliminary notes:

“Open book in plane from Paris to Stockholm. Passengers are three Nobel Prize winners going to get awards. One is German refugee, physicist, who fled Communism, faced with moral dilemma (whether to reveal a destructive discovery to his new homeland, America); another is a Frenchman (like Malraux) who has won literary prize and flirted with Communism; third is youngish English doctor under fire from older colleagues. Hero is American pilot of plane.”

My notes went on to develop the characters, and then worked into the story:

“Plane blown off course, has engine trouble, makes forced landing in wheat field in East Zone of Germany. Passengers and crew taken to hospital, cleared. All released, except German refugee physicist. Others realize Communists know who he is, want to hold him, make use of his mind or keep him from working for America. Others decide to save him. They rescue him and are on the run, through Germany, hunted the entire week before the Nobel ceremony.”

From that point on I developed mounting tensions, growing inner conflicts and outer obstacles, and described the character changes in the Nobel Prize winners who were forced to convert their theoretical knowledge into the practical skills needed for survival and flight. In the end, they survived and reached their objective, the Copenhagen ferry to Malmö, Sweden.

I seriously considered this approach to the novel for many months. Yet the whole time I was troubled by some vague negative feeling—that this was not the book I really wanted to create about a subject so powerful. It was as if I were still circling the main subject, somehow incapable of meeting it head-on. Gradually, any enthusiasm that I had had for this development of the story withered and died, and I put the outline away and went on with the writing of magazine stories that were shorter and easier, work that fed my family if not my soul.

Suddenly, there occurred a series of events that changed my life and directly affected my attitude toward The Prize—this title and a few wisps of characters being almost all that I had salvaged from my last discarded outline. Up to 1958, I had published only two books. These were collective biographies brought out under the Alfred A. Knopf imprint, and both had been affectionately received by critics and reviewers but both had sold only moderately well. Now, while the creation of books was my great love and passion, I found that I could afford to give the writing of books only the smallest portion of my time. For most authors, a career devoted full-time to books can rarely support a family even poorly. As I had more or less given up magazine writing out of weariness with formula and lack of freedom to write as I pleased, I now obtained my main income from writing screenplays in motion-picture studios. But screen-writing proved just as tiresome and restrictive as magazine work. And by 1958 I had become so frustrated by and bored with this communal writing, a form giving me little opportunity for self-expression and no sense of fulfillment, that I determined to break away from it at any cost.

I had an idea for a short novel—I had never yet written a complete novel—and in the summer of 1958, going hard, I wrote that first novel. It was a failure financially and artistically (although, years later, it would have a curious success with the public and critics in Great Britain and Italy), but it proved to me that I could write a publishable novel and write it as I pleased. Meanwhile, that same year, I finished a biography of Phineas T. Barnum, which provided me with a welcome share of Literary Guild book club money. Encouraged, and with rising confidence, I began to write my fifth book and second novel, and this was The Chapman Report.

I had no idea of what I had in this novel, knew only that I was fascinated by it, especially by the women in it, who represented part of my immediate social circle. I wrote my pages, I hoarded them, and when the book was finally done, I showed it to my wife, agents, and publisher for the first time. I was emotionally overwhelmed by the ensuing reception given the book—the high percentage of favorable notices and comments it gained, the vast international readership it achieved, the controversy it brought on—and thereafter I was more often infuriated than amused to read that I had contrived or manufactured a prefabricated best seller. In the years to follow—even with my most recent novels, The Man and The Plot—every novel I would publish was to be greeted by the more naïve members of the press as the product of some secret commercial prescription. Often, I wished to write these literary gentlemen and tell them that if any best-selling author possessed such a mathematical formula to use in the place of the inevitable brain-racking agony and back-breaking effort and lonely, lonely days and nights that go into the creation of any book, he would immediately patent it and lease it out to would-be writers turned critics (who might thus write bestsellers of their own), and he himself would retire to the Riviera or Majorca, permanently free of the hell that all writing writers know.

At any rate, it was the confidence gained from having written The Chapman Report, even though it was not yet published, the joy of at last being independent and a full-time writer in the field of creativity that I loved the most, that inspired me to find the exact Nobel award story that I had so long sought.

I had been thinking about the Nobel novel off and on, as always, and then late in 1959 I saw fully, all at once, what I had refused to see before but what I must finally come to grips with and overcome. I realized that until then I had always been afraid of doing the big central story. While I had promising fictional characters in mind, I had avoided the real challenge of the subject itself. I had walked around and around it, which was safer. For only when you are fully engaged can you fail—in your own eyes or the world’s eyes—as often as succeed. I had not wanted to chance the failure, apparently. Or perhaps I had been fearful of pitting my untried resources against so monstrously frightening a test. In my earlier outlines I had been ready to undertake only small hells, never the big one.

I have since found that this fear is common among writers not only when attacking an overall subject but when facing up to a single scene inside a novel. Too many authors will avoid what threatens to be an impossibly difficult scene, although an obligatory scene, and instead will write around it rather than into it, simply from fear that they do not possess the perception or skill to master it. This detour into exposition or past tense or summary, as a substitute for daring to dramatize or play out a crucial confrontation, may be entirely unconscious. But once the fear is understood, and once the work in progress dominates the writer and drives him into the big Hell, the author has a chance to live up to his potential. He may be bad before he is good, but one day he will be good, or as good as he can ever be.

Thus, ultimately, I understood how I had been keeping my fictional characters out of the natural arena where they belonged, and how I had been avoiding the real story of The Prize. Once I admitted this, supported as I was by my newly won confidence, the real and honest story for the novel, the one that I could live with, came to me all in one piece.

My very first jottings were dated only ‘late 1959’. On a sheet of scratch paper I typed the following notes to myself:

“Entire novel takes place in Stockholm during forty-eight hours or twenty-four preceding Nobel Prize awards … See whole machinery I exposed in Collier’s … politics, shenanigans, prejudices and favoritism, as well as honesty, nobility, in each Prize group—literature, physics, medicine—told through drunken American novelist, who desperately needs money … German professor stolen or saved from Russians by West, getting physics honor … three others getting awards … Rep of royal family … Swedish girl escort in charge … Russians and Germans and Norwegians and Finns … World press corps, publishers, science politicians … Drama of someone trying to get ex-German physicist to Russia or Finland … Maturing and growth of the embittered American novelist … Climax is award, American’s speech, his preventing defection.”

More notes from the next day or two, dated ‘later 1959’, still rough but enlarging upon the first set, and some would be useful and some would not. I jotted the following:

“The hero, old-young novelist who dwells in Wisconsin, became famous young, then married, and wife (fearing to lose him) encouraged his drinking so that he became dependent upon her. She’s a real bitch; he has power in moments of sobriety, but drunk, he is a fool and miserable and craven … Or, better: in first flush of fame was able to propose to girl he truly loved, and she accidentally was killed, and he drank, and her sister encouraged it to bind him close so he would not leave. Wrote little afterwards, but one book remains unfinished for past five or seven years … He is out of touch with real world, a recluse who won’t face life or self, a subject and ward of this woman and the bottle, knowing the true situation and yet not able to overcome it. Too, a person with no real identity except in dreams on paper …

“When the story opens he is almost unknown, and revered only by a loyal cult. Then, by accident, chain of events, he’s translated into Swedish, acclaimed in Europe for what he has had to say that is now suddenly important, wins Nobel Prize. In Sweden this happens—becomes involved with an obscure, unlettered, beautiful Swedish girl who doesn’t even know who he really is—only sees him as a funny, older, helpless American whom she is sorry for and then loves … At first aloof from fellow winners, he is forced into their company—especially the old German—and in the end, when above the battle, he descends into it to save German.

“Also, old Nobel character who knew Alfred Nobel and is writing definitive history of the awards. Perhaps declassé nobleman … The three other winners … Head of literary committee … Swedish hostess … Tass man … German girl … Make secondary stories of other winners almost as important as hero’s. Restrict story to boundaries of week before award.”

But even as I imagined my characters and story in brief notes, my mind teemed with what else I might write about the hero’s background and thoughts and current problems and the places he had lived. I was writing thousands of words, single-spaced on the typewriter, without thought of style, grammar, spelling, or even any certainty that they would fit into the projected book. I had no name for my hero or his wife or any of the other characters, and no placenames for the settings, so I invented proper names as I went along, using any proper names that came to me. In these earliest writings of The Prize, for my eyes only. I called my main character ‘the hero’ or ‘Doak’ or one of a half-dozen other names, and I called his wife ‘Doris’ or ‘Liz’ or ‘Agnes’, and I called their town in Wisconsin by the name of ‘Marvale’. Before long the hero would have his final book identity as Andrew Craig and his wife would become Harriet and their town would become Miller’s Dam.

I began these earliest writings by feeling out a familiar setting, the land and place where I had been raised and had attended school until I was nineteen years old.

“Marvalc was located fifty miles northwest of Kenosha and Racine,” I wrote. “From Lake Michigan the land rose and fell gracefully like long, lazy ocean swells, what they call a full sea, and this was full earth, rural earth, the landscape bright and unvaried except for occasional billboards, road signs pointing to a gasoline station or hamburger joint, windmills, haystacks, great fields of wheat and corn, and cows grazing on slight yellow slopes. And then you were in Marvale, which was bisected by the little-traveled gray cement highway … No one really lived in the town, except salesmen at the hotel and some women and a few who lived behind the stores. Everyone else lived at the edge of town in two-story flats or on pieces of farmland, and Doak and Agnes lived at the edge of the town, too.”

Then there were other patches of writing I was trying, partial probings into my main character, efforts to appraise him, know him, know the very work that had unexpectedly vaulted him to the Nobel Prize heights and Stockholm.

“The genre in which he wrote was also a subtle avoidance of life,” I noted on paper for myself. “As the compromise of a frightened yet vital mind, he hid his concern for pressing problems of today in resurrections of the past. Somewhere he had read that Plato, having advanced his ideas for a utopian state in the suburban grove known as the Academy, became eager to practice what he had preached in his thirty-six Dialogues. It is said that Plato journeyed to Syracuse to teach the new twenty-five-year-old dictator, Dionysius II, his philosophies of government, help him establish a constitutional monarchy, and create a perfect socialist state. But Dionysius, drinker and lecher, ever fearful of Greek ideas, rebelled, and Plato fled back to Athens and his Academy. The perfect state with its etc. and etc. would have to wait.

“Hero seized upon this historical episode as an ideal transmitting agent for his ideas about growing state socialism and communism. Hero’s novel took Plato and fictional character from Academy to Syracuse and showed what happened when their philosophic ideas were put into actual use and the gradual downfall of this utopia through corruption. Though the action was set in 100 B.C., the book’s barbs were aimed at twentieth-century communism … Book made hero great intellectual reputation, but only moderate money. Pressed by wife, hero set to work on modern book for first time. Then she was killed and his disintegration.

“His earlier book picked up in Scandinavia five years later, translated, so apt and timely, discussed in all papers and on all tongues, for in small country like Sweden you can chance only indirection when taunting and hating a neighboring enemy who is a giant. This brought hero’s other books into translation within a year—gained repute he’d never had in America—and because this advocated Nobel’s ideals, hero nominated for the prize.

“Reflecting on it in his euphoric states, hero saw these historical books not as a small triumph but as an act of creative cowardice, another kind of frightened hiding like living in Marvale.”

Countless other notes, one-line, one-paragraph, ten narrative pages, toying with, testing, invented people, their stories, an overall story, and with the coming of a new year the novel began to take form in a way that excited and pleased me. I had found the way I wanted to write The Prize. Please God, it was the right way, the best way. Regardless, for me, it was the only way, and now I was ready to go ahead.

One more act was necessary: to commit myself to the book publicly. Perhaps a childish game, but one necessary to a person with my psychological makeup. When you are a free and independent writer, without employer, without hours or deadlines, you have to play little games to force yourself into the actual writing. For me, one game is to announce to my family, my literary representatives, sometimes my publisher, that I have finally decided on my next book, that I am ready to write it. I won’t tell anyone much—I cannot endure any reaction to or comment on a book still in the formative stage and as yet unwritten, I find any response too unsettling—I prefer to keep the writing in progress a secret, as a youngster may prepare and hide a secret gift for the holiday. Yet, when my final idea has solidified, when I am sure of it, I let it out to a few persons who are close to me—to put my pride on the line, a promissory note that must be paid one future day.

On February 3, 1960, I sent my literary agent in New York, Paul R. Reynolds, a 900-word general outline of what I had in mind.

“I think this will be a very big book about a subject which, to my knowledge, has never before been handled in book-length fiction,” I wrote. “The entire story of The Prize, except for the opening, takes place in Stockholm in the seventy-two hours preceding the awarding of the four Swedish Nobel Prizes.

“The book opens on the sending of five cables—one from Oslo, four from Stockholm—to five men or women in different corners of the world who are being notified that they have won Nobel Prizes in peace, physics, chemistry, medicine, and literature. Each will have $50,000—and immortality. We pick up each of the major characters individually in Michigan, Massachusetts, Paris, London, Rome, at the moment each is notified—we learn their immediate situations, something of their unresolved problems, a good deal of their tensions. Several of the problems are not those of the winners alone—the French doctor has a young daughter, etc.

“In the first chapter, we will meet our hero-author, the man through whom the entire novel will be told. He is dead drunk at his moment of immortality … The second chapter opens with the arrival of the hero, the other winners and those close to them, in Stockholm on December seventh—the Prize is given each December tenth, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.

“The drama that quickly evolves is three-edged. First, we see the development and growth of the hero, as he finds his identity, frees himself of his guilts. It is also the story of his involvement, in Sweden, with two women. One is an obscure, unlettered young Swedish girl—who doesn’t even know who he is—knows him only as a sardonic, too-old and helpless American for whom she is sorry and whom later she will probably love. Next, we have our secondary stories of the other winners, notably an elderly German physicist who had fled the Russians in Berlin to find a haven in America. Of course, East Germany and the Communists want him back. Finally, behind the characters, based entirely on researched facts, we will see for the first time the inner workings of the Nobel machinery—the politics, prejudices, deals, courageous moves—humanized and told from the inside.

“I want to take the reader behind locked doors. I want to show how sudden greatness ennobles and corrupts, both giver and taker alike.”

At last, after so many false starts, I had overcome the two great barriers—I had found both the way I must do the novel, and the people about whom 1 wished to write. My agent and my American publishers were as enthusiastic about the preliminary outline as I was at the time. However, my reprint publisher, Victor Weybright, of The New American Library, wondered about my “hero-author” who would be “dead drunk at his moment of immortality.” Weybright, apparently, had read Robert Coughlan’s The Private World of William Faulkner, wherein it was pointed out that Faulkner imbibed steadily after he was notified that he had won the Nobel Prize. Consequently, friends worried about Faulkner’s being sober for the Nobel festivities. One close companion warned Faulkner, before he took off for Stockholm, “Now, Bill, you do right.” Faulkner snapped back, “I’m so damn sick and tired of hearin’ that. Everybody from the Swedish Ambassador to my damn houseboy has been tellin’ me to do right.” It is a matter of history that William Faulkner did do right. Now my reprint publisher was apprehensive that I might do wrong. I hastened to reassure him in a letter dated February 24, 1960, “Dear Victor, The Prize will not have its hero from below the Mason-Dixon. Nor will the hero reflect Faulkner or O’Neill—except in drinking and winning the big prize. Of course, it’s too early to tell how he’ll really turn out, but I suspect he’ll resemble me more than anyone else.”

Outside reactions to my idea had bolstered my confidence. But then there was something else that troubled me. This was 1960, and I had not seen Stockholm since the postwar period of 1946. Was it all as I remembered it? Was it drastically different? 1 knew that I must have a second look. Accompanied by my wife and two children, I sailed for Europe in June of 1960. From Paris I took a train to Copenhagen, then the ferry to Malmö, and finally the overnight train to Stockholm.

“Trip on Nord Express was great,” I wrote from the Grand Hotel to my editor, Michael V. Korda, of Simon and Schuster. “Stockholm as divine—and dull—as I knew it fourteen years ago. But am highly stimulated by the daily research I’m doing on my next novel. Material and ideas developing wonderfully.”

I found that Stockholm had changed extensively, and for the better. I also realized that the passage of fourteen years had distorted my memory of certain locales in the city, and the plans of certain buildings, and now I was able to straighten this out. At the same time, I was stumbling across new sites, as well as persons and information, that stimulated me with new ideas for the novel. The contrasts between what I had seen in 1946 and what I was seeing in 1960 so intrigued me that I would later give my hero, Andrew Craig, the similar experience of having visited the northern capital twice in a span of fourteen years.

I was full of the novel, and I was on the move. While I was visiting or revisiting sites that I knew I must use in the novel, my Swedish publisher at the time, Sven-Erik Bergh, took me to Riche’s restaurant and the Djurgårdsbrunns Wardshus, two eating places which later became backdrops for major scenes in the novel. And the manager of the Grand Hotel—he had been in its service forty years—escorted me on an exploration of the hotel premises, including the suites occupied by Nobel Prize winners. One day I might be browsing through the Swedish Academy, where the literary laureates were elected, and the next I would be in the Caroline Institute, where the medical laureates were chosen. I was in and out of the Nobel Foundation several times, interviewing, jotting down notes, taking photographs with my miniature Minox camera.

Wherever I went, I scribbled these penciled notes, and nightly, sustained by an excitement that overcame fatigue, I transferred these scrawled notes into a typed record of my research.

On July 20, 1960, I noted:

“Across from a large park, in better section of residential Stockholm, stands a narrow six-story building (six stories by American count, but only five stories by Swedish count, since the European first floor is our second floor). This is the Nobelstiftelsen or the Nobel Foundation … Upstairs, from Executive Director’s office, enter into the main conference room of the Nobel Institute. Physics and chemistry judges meet and vote here. Once voted in private apartment upstairs. Others—Lit vote in the Swedish Academy in the Old City, and medicine in the Caroline Institute or the Karolinska Institutet, as the Swedes call it … If one enters conference room from reception hall, it looks like this—a long, leather-topped (beaten and worn leather) table in center. Ten chairs, one at head and one at foot, and four and four, covered in old oxhide or similar material and much used. To right on wall is lively portrait of Alfred Nobel’s mother by Zorn. At far end are three pictures. Dominating all, in center, an oil portrait of Nobel painted by Österman in 1915. To one side Bertha Suttner. To the other Ragnar Sohlman who died in 1948 …”

On July 20, 1960, I noted:

“Phone call from Miss Margareta Delin of Nobel Foundation. Answers to questions I left … At Concert Hall ceremony the King gives medallion. Following afternoon at Institute, winners get checks … Most winners arrive a day or two before ceremony. Some known to arrive a week before … Nobel Foundation pays for one week at Grand Hotel and breakfasts for winner and family …”

On July 21, 1960, I noted:

“Visited with Miss Delin, took pictures, learned … Minister of Foreign Affairs assigns an attaché full-time to each winner. Attachés are young diplomats.

“… During forty-eight hours before award, winners have a press conference, dinner hosted by Swedish colleagues in same field, go sight-seeing, evening of Dec. 9th attend reception at home of Chairman of Nobel Board so that winners may meet one another and other Nobel people involved …”

On July 22, 1960, I noted:

“Visited the Swedish Academy across bridge in Old City. Two librarians helped me. Eighteen members on Swedish Academy committee voting literary prize. Most know French, English, German. Big problem is Chinese or any exotic language. About fifty nominees proposed annually. Four of eighteen judges sift nominees with help of linguists who are literary specialists. Everyone reads throughout summer. Middle of September they come here, meet, discuss, and most often in last week in October make final vote.”

On July 23, 1960, I noted:

“Nobel winners usually stay in one of six major suites of Grand Hotel overlooking canal and Palace … In winter, canal never frozen. Last winter snow and below zero, but rarely snow in December here ... Visited suite 525 used by Nobel winners. Small entry, then large hall done in blue with chest of drawers built-in. Off hall large bath, two sinks, bidet. Airy sitting room, desk at left, marble table, sofa, maroon chairs, very modern. Through sliding drapes twin beds and tables revealed …”

On July 24, 1960, I noted: “Spent time last night rereading a diary I kept in Stockholm on first visit. Got fascinated with an entry I made on September 16, 1946, as follows: ‘A typist, tall Swedish girl with angular face, came to work for me. Had once wanted to be actress. She told me her two younger sisters each had illegitimate children by long-time boy friends. One sister dated interned American flyer who wanted to marry her, she said ‘No’, is now sorry. This sister became pregnant. My typist took her to State hospital, she was given a guardian to look after her and see she got money from boy involved. She had baby at cost of eight kronor (State paying the rest). Illegitimacy in Sweden created partially by excess of women. One friend told my typist she wanted two children before she was thirty, had them, and now at thirty-five calls self Mrs. and is respected and loves kids but has not yet found man she loves enough for husband.’ … Will look up story Sylvia published on illegitimacy in Sweden. Will check into it further here. Today my driver explained Swedes under eighteen cannot marry without permission of the King in writing. Twenty-one legal age. No pressure to marry young to prevent unwed mothers. Boys and girls encouraged to live together few years first, even to have children before marrying. Have idea I want to give my Swedish girl in book something like this—illegit son, she is matter-of-fact about boy, which may unsettle hero, make him reevaluate some of his own attitudes.”

While I knew that I wanted a young, unmarried Swedish girl in my novel, 1 also knew that I still had much to learn about this character. I had read considerably and heard much about the habits and morals of unmarried Swedish women. I had known some of them personally in Europe and in America. But now I felt that I must be certain that my understanding of their behavior was correct. With the help of Swedish friends—and the tolerance of my wife—I was able to drink and dine with a half-dozen different Swedish girls, and their revelations proved of value to my book. One blond ingenue-type, a white pancake hat tilted on her lovely head, said, “I hate our upper-level cocktail parties. The men talk to the other men about business, and to women only to sleep with them.” A girl who had a job on a newspaper told me over cocktails, “We Swedish women are good women. We’re aggressive, lively, adaptive to travel. It’s our men who are formal, humorless, too demanding of respect, and generally are bores. I’d guess one out of every four Swedish girls marries a foreigner.”

One important bit of research came about unexpectedly. Because The Chapman Report was a best seller in the United States at that time, and was soon to be published in Sweden, I was invited to give a mass press conference in a large room on the first floor of the Swedish Press Club. Later I made notes on what I remembered of the one-and-a-half-hour inquisition:

“I sat behind small corner table on settee. Two dozen reporters and five photographers. Reporters pulled up chairs directly around me. Questioning began gradually. What are you doing in Sweden? Who you with? How long staying? How Swedish women different from American women? What other aspects of Sweden will you include in your novel? What do you think of Henry Miller and Tennessee Williams? … Grueling. Would not reveal why in Sweden, except to use it as background for novel I could not discuss … During interview sherry and Scotch-on-the-rocks served and cigarettes offered around. Everything consumed.”

This experience, I would realize months later, had been invaluable. When I came to write The Prize, my memories of my press conference enabled me to create realistically the four abrasive press conferences that my fictional laureates were to undergo.

I had finished my firsthand fact-hunting in Stockholm, and now I had no patience for anything but the fictional aspects of my novel. My imagination was stimulated by all I had seen and heard and felt. The creative process—first unconscious and leading me with its fancies, then more conscious and led by me into the realm of possibilities and probabilities of make-believe—had begun to engage all of my senses. I was nearly ready to go ahead, give my characters and their stories and the central story more exact form.

But first, after leaving Stockholm, I took a breather in Copenhagen, and from the Hotel Tre Falke, on July 25, 1960, I summed up the Swedish visit for my editor:

“I think I wrote you that Sweden proved more enchanting than I had previously remembered it to be. I did some marvelous research on the new novel. The visit was a complete success. We took the overnight train from Stockholm to Malmö, with the ferry crossing to Copenhagen. I’m a romantic about European trains; I find the passengers intriguing. I remember the one year when my friend Joe Wechsberg and I both undertook to write factual articles on the Orient Express, he for The New Yorker, I for The Saturday Evening Post. He saw it as a fraud; I saw it as pure Hitchcock. And we were both telling the truth. Anyway, today Sylvia and I are in Copenhagen and footsore and agreeing this is the liveliest city up in these northern parts. Tonight—Tivoli. Will be in Paris again Friday.” When I returned to Paris, my mind wasn’t yet entirely on my new project. On August 1, 1960, I was writing my editor:

“One interesting experience the other eve. Ann and Art Buchwald threw an impressive party which we attended—the Josh Logans, Roz Russell, Bill Saroyan, Pat Suzuki, Carmel Snow, Emlyn Williams, Nancy Spain and such—and one part of the fun, from my point of view, was that nearly everyone present either had read, was reading, or at least knew about The Chapman Report, and they discussed it pro and con heatedly. An English actress, Margalo Gilmore, said she had just crossed on the Queen Elizabeth and the book was all over the Prom Deck. If this is a reflection of what may be happening elsewhere, in other communities, and with as much controversial talk, the book may still be just on its way. Who knows? Future reorders, I suppose, spell the future’s verdict.”

But before long, in Paris, my every thought was directed to the work in progress. In my hotel room in the rue de Berri, I wrote about two thousand words of rough character notes for The Prize, attempting to clarify the main players and their lives and their problems, and I developed sketches of promising peripheral characters. These spontaneous notes reflect the early creative process. A few brief excerpts will show the growing development of the novel:

“Paris, August 4, 1960. Hero quit living after life wronged him once. When he wins prize, he considers it a mockery. What he learns is that other men have suffered even more, yet have greater courage, and the point is you do the best you can, always. The real prize is the inner knowledge that life is worth fighting for, for its gift of existence … Suspense is: will he appear in Stockholm and will he find himself? and will he break away from caretaker who encourages him to drink? … He had been there on honeymoon, and this evokes old memories and he drinks again. He antagonizes a press conference and one reporter in particular. He becomes involved with three women …

“Old German physicist has had several heart attacks and knows the next one will end him. Trip strenuous but he needs money and publicity to finish his great work—and provide for daughter or niece, who has become center of his life aside from his work … Russians want to use him or stop him. Seek to reach him first through getting him award, second (after initial failure to persuade him) through his daughter or niece.

“The award in chemistry goes to a French team, man and wife, who worked jointly on project, but once goal achieved they have nothing in common—on verge of split-up—he has broken off with her and gone to his mistress. Now they are thrown together by the award … Story is from Frenchwoman’s point of view, I think. Perhaps there is a truce to get award. She finds self disinterested in award because is discovering she is a woman not just a scientist … In Stockholm, they become absorbed in research done by colleague in related field—he is stuck with an investigation in chemistry—meeting with colleague engineered by Kruger-like character—and the couple sees a new line for collaborative inquiry, what can be done …

“The medical award goes to two rivals from different countries who despise each other, and after each plots to destroy the other, or discredit the other, they come to realize that their work is bigger than their petty differences … Possibly American or Englishman and Italian winners … Dramatized by case where one of them, or rather someone important in Stockholm, becomes ill, and doctor laureates forced to work together.

“Definitely drop peace award. Would make number of leading characters top-heavy. More important, since given out in Oslo, it would harm unity of keeping entire central action in Stockholm. (Besides, never believed in it. Too inexact, erratic, confusing.)

“Two Swedes of major story importance … One a judge who tries to manipulate Nobel Prizes to suit his prejudices. In case of physics award, wants to satisfy East Germans and that way win a coveted university chair, so works with East Germans and Russians. Always bitter that not fully recognized in own country … Other Swedish judge had known Nobel. He tries to carry on in true tradition of Nobel. Is also historian of awards. Becomes mouthpiece for history and machinery of awards … U.S. girl reporter who has no morality, only survival instinct. Arrives to do a series exposing awards. Antagonized by hero, sets out to prove that his was phony award, too … A soldier-of-fortune spy who worked both World Wars, but time has passed him by, now ludicrous figure always writing memoirs. Could read lips from distance in Turkey. Gets job from Russians, then killed … On an isle lives an international businessman like Ivar Kruger or Zaharoff, cold, tough, the opposite of Nobel. Perhaps he is the one who has young chemist work for him, gets him together with French winners … Instead of Italian actress might it not be better to get legendary Swedish actress who collects writers who win literature prize, always looking for perfect man and vehicle for her comeback. Possibly thirty-eight. This is a good character.”

Traveling from Paris to Venice to Rome, I wrote steadily, in great rough bursts, all unpolished but useful. Often, I wrote out of sequence. I wrote a draft of the last major scene in the novel—a confession made by the enigmatic heroine, Emily Stratman, to Craig, the literature laureate—almost a half year before I would come to it in the actual writing of the novel.

In Rome, I thought that I would have a vacation at last. As a lover of Shelley’s work and life—I had been collecting books about him, and owned a holograph check he made out to Leigh Hunt in 1817—I was eager to visit Shelley’s grave, and so my wife and I made the romantic excursion to the poet’s last resting place. But it was no vacation. Nothing, no day, could be anymore. I was enslaved by The Prize. That evening, on the stationery of the Hotel Excelsior in Rome, I typed four pages of narrative about my hero. One paragraph began:

“He remembered that week in Rome with her, just after the war. They had taken a taxi to the Protestant Cemetery, where a little boy had opened the gate, and they went up the gravel walk, climbing, and then to the left, to the highest portion near the old Roman Wall, and there they had found the white slab pressed in the earth—Shelley—or what had been left of Shelley, saved from the pyre on the beach …”

A year or more later, that vacation day, those notes made in my hotel turned up in the published edition of The Prize as follows:

“In Rome, the first afternoon, they had a pilgrimage to make. From the starkly modern Mediterraneo Hotel, they took a battered taxi to the Protestant Cemetery, and then dismissed the driver. At the gate they waited, until a little black-eyed boy opened it, and then they went up the gravel walk, climbing, and then turned to the left and continued to the highest rise near the ancient Roman wall, and there they found the white slab pressed in the earth—Percy Bysshe Shelley—or what had been left of Shelley, saved from the pyre on the beach at Viareggio—and beside him, so eager to be beside him, the one who had buried him here, the old pirate, Edward John Trelawny.

“As Harriet and Andrew Craig stood in mourning, the sun came through the great quiet trees and touched each grave, and the gentle silence that day made death seem lovely and possible, the peaceful resting after the long travail. Later, they had walked hand in hand downward, beyond the Pyramid of Cestius, and arrived below, at the far corner of the cemetery, where stood the majestic shaft without a name—writ on water—and beside it, vigilant, faithful, the resting place of Joseph Severn.

“Shelley and Keats. That day, Craig felt an affinity for them, felt a sense of history as had they, felt that he was not one of the faceless of the world, the non-entities of time who come, stay briefly, and are blown away into nothingness, forgotten and unremembered as the flying sands on a windswept beach. He, too, would leave a shaft on earth that would stand as long as men stood or could incline their heads before it. That day, in Rome, he knew strength and purpose, and he was filled with his uniqueness and his mission.”

That day in Rome. “How is a novel written?” students often write me. “What writing hours do you keep?” interviewers sometimes ask me. “What do you do when you’re not working?” reviewers frequently inquire of me. Trying to answer, I remember that vacation day in Rome, and I know there are no absolute answers.

Then, on to Florence. There were bad moments during the writing, and there was a bad one here.

One night, at the Hotel Excelsior-ltalie in Florence, it suddenly came to me that while I had my fictional Nobel winners, I had absolutely no notion of what concrete individual achievements had won them their Nobel Prizes. For the literature laureate this was not difficult. I had already sketched out a several-thousand-word biography of him for my own private reference. Now, to this, I added a detailed bibliography of the titles and contents of the novels I supposed he had written, as well as a rundown on how they had sold and been reviewed. However, the fictional achievements of my scientists provided a real impediment. This omission meant that I had to undertake a series of new researches in the fields of physics, chemistry, and medicine. I had to learn about scientific experiments and advances occurring throughout the world, the ones that were important, dramatic, uncompleted yet probable, and that might one year in the near future lead to Nobel medallions.

From Italy, I wrote to my research assistant of many years, Elizebethe Kempthorne, in Riverside, California, and I laid out the problem and the kind of material I was looking for and asked her to start searching popular magazines, scientific periodicals and papers, as well as books, for current experiments that might logically succeed in years to come and could honestly be deemed worthy of Nobel Prizes.

From abroad, later from my home, and even after I had begun writing The Prize, I continued to bombard Kempthorne with questions, as I proceeded with research reading on my own. Gradually I began to focus on certain subjects. A typical note from myself to Kempthorne:

“Dear E, I’ve become wildly fascinated by the following—

“Geneticists working at ‘keeping human male sperms alive’—i.e., a great man could deliver sperms to be used for children by artificial insemination decades after his death! Men doing early work on male sperms are on enclosed slip. Look them up for me soonest.

“Thinking of sperm deal for my chemistry team. What think you?”

Weary months later, after studying and finally rejecting several dozen of the more promising experiments in the three scientific fields, I settled upon a chemistry prize for discoveries in sperm structure (leading to a practicable sperm bank), a physics prize for conversion and storage of solar energy, and a medicine prize for introduction of a surgical technique for cardiac transplants.

I might add that such prognostications in fiction can leave an author on thin ice. If they were to be ridiculed by eminent scientists after they appeared in print, they might negate the impact of an otherwise realistic novel. But I was very lucky. After The Prize appeared, not one scientist faulted the achievements I had projected from experiments still in their early stages. In fact, a number of scientists wrote me that my fictional discoveries might one day become real discoveries. Therefore, it was with satisfaction that I read, recently, that two of my three fictional achievements had become very real indeed.

In my novel, I had Drs. Denise and Claude Marceau win the Nobel Prize for freezing male sperms and implanting them by artificial means in women years later. In my book, I had one of my prize winners tell the press: “If our [discovery] had existed in the sixteenth century … today Shakespeare’s actual sperms might be taken out of storage, thawed, and a dozen of your English ladies impregnated with them and in nine months these would bear his children. If our [discovery] had existed in the last five hundred years, we would today have a storage bank containing the living reproductive sperms of Galileo, Pasteur, Newton, Darwin—Voltaire, Milton, Goethe … Casanova, Napoleon Bonaparte, Nietzsche, Benjamin Franklin … Had we made our discovery earlier in our own lifetime, we might have in the storage bank the living sperms of Luther Burbank or Professor Einstein …”That I had written in 1960. Six years later, on April 7, 1966, I read a headline: 29 MADE PREGNANT BY SPERM FROZEN 2 YEARS. According to a wire-service story, Dr. S. J. Behrman, a University of Michigan biologist, had announced that “29 women had been made pregnant by male sperm which had been frozen up to 2 years.” Dr. Behrman went on to speak of a future when “we can freeze the male cell through which life has been passed on over the centuries … we will be able to take the sperm of an Einstein or a Beethoven and preserve it for reproduction centuries later.”

Also, for The Prize, I created two fictional doctors, Dr. John Garrett, of Pasadena, California, and Dr. Carlo Farelli, of Rome, Italy, who were to win the Nobel Prize for “the discovery of antireactive substances to overcome the immunological barrier to cardiac transplantation” and for “introduction of surgical technique to perform successfully a heterograft of the heart organ into the human body.” In other words, Garrett and Farelli found a serum that neutralized “the human body’s rejection or immunity mechanism” after living calves’ hearts had been transplanted into human chest cavities.

That was in 1960. In 1966, I was not surprised to read that Dr. Michael D. DeBakey had implanted “a half heart” in a rheumatic-heart victim, and the so-called artificial heart kept a dying man alive four days. In recent years I learned that surgeons at the University of Indiana “have developed a complete mechanical heart that might work in a human patient for a short period of time,” and that the National Heart Institute is now on a crash program “to develop a substitute for the human heart.” Meanwhile, in Capetown, South Africa, during December of 1967, Dr. Christiaan Barnard dramatized the possibility that the best substitute for a failing human heart might be the transplantation of a healthy human heart. Making medical history, Dr. Barnard succeeded in a human heart transplant when he removed the pulsating heart of a young woman who died after an automobile accident, and grafted it inside the chest of a fifty-five-year-old man who was dying of a heart ailment.

However, when I decided to develop and use these discoveries in 1960, I had no inkling of how soon it would be that science would catch up with achievements that grew largely out of my imagination. I knew only that I was working in a dangerous area, that any discoveries I projected from tentative theories and seminal experiments could as easily damage my book as enhance it. As a consequence, after doing my homework, I proceeded with caution; then trusting instinct, I gambled on what I should use—and hoped for the best.

So that bad night in Florence, in I960, when I realized that I must do more research, proved to be only a temporary setback. For a short time, it hampered my progress. Still, once this research was initiated, I found that the very problem stimulated me in an odd way. Since it promised to give more body to the backgrounds of my characters, I was able to return to my characters and the story. And by then, I knew that the time had come to leave Europe and go back to my desk to begin formally outlining and writing The Prize.

I returned to Los Angeles, and shortly after unpacking I went into my isolated study, eager to resume work on the novel. It wasn’t easy to resume. “I’m wearing three heads and am a little top-heavy,” I wrote my editor on September 29, 1960. “One head watches The Chapman Report and tries to help out. The second is busy bending over revisions on The Twenty-Seventh Wife. The third, usually at night, works slowly away at laying out my next novel, The Prize, which you know a little about and which has me increasingly absorbed.”

A week and a half later I was wearing one head again. I was able to inform my editor, “I’ve been busy with The Twenty-Seventh Wife rewrite. Now that’s done—and I’m several days on The Prize full-time, trying to coordinate my notes and thinking of the entire past summer, trying to lay out the vast, complex novel. I had a wondrous day yesterday: licked two of the characters completely and projected some scenes I can’t wait to write.”

By now I had assembled my research and spread out on my desk the seemingly countless pages and fragments of pages of preliminary notes. Slowly I began to organize the scattered notes that belonged to each character.

There was Max Stratman, who still had no name.

A typical background sketch on him, which I studied, read as follows:

“Make German physicist Russian-born who, like my parents, leaves home in teens and goes to Poland and then Berlin. War comes and he escapes Russians and goes to American Army. Use my parents’ background for his earliest memories … Possibly Russian-born physicist went to Berlin for education, then England where he spent most of his life, and finally USA for sinecure at Advance School.”

A typical dramatic note for a scene, the one introducing the German physicist in the book, seemed worth retaining. It read:

“For Schmidt, at sixty-seven, it was always pleasant to lie on the doctor’s hard table in the examination room while the comely nurse applied electrodes to his chest and legs. It was soothing, quiet, and he could think.

“But today, lying bare-chested, with trousers rolled up, it was less relaxing than ever before because today it was important. Something vital, besides his future life, hung on the cardiograph result, and this had never been quite true before.”

Having absorbed these notes on the German physicist, I set to work expanding his story and the story of his niece. On October 8, 1960, I wrote 1,400 words of rough notes under the heading ‘The German Physicist’s Story’. These notes began:

“Open with German taking cardiogram. This is regular thing, but today more significance. Offered new contract to head crash program in his field or develop new idea that he has. Much more money and now realizes how little he has and wants money for niece.

“(His brother had saved him, got him out of Germany, brother killed by Nazis. Later inherited brother’s little girl. Now she wants to be a painter, go to school, needs money to study—he wants that for her instead of being clerk or secretary.)

“Learns he has not passed cardio and cannot undertake big traveling job for more money … Troubled, wanders over to faculty club as does every day and watches poker game or bridge, and thinks. Has beer. Chats. Goes home. Niece is waiting with news of Nobel Prize.

“Revise above to read: German has been offered big supervisory job on solar power system he invented. Would take his time from theoretical work, but move program ahead. Means more money, much travel. After heart test, learns no added exertion, travel permitted. Returns and learns won Nobel Prize. Despite heart, decides to accept it in person—this will get him money, can refuse traveling job, devote self to basic research. Calculated risk, but solves everything.

“(The niece, a lovely and lush German Jewess, had been fifteen when sent to concentration camp with father. To save father, had been forced to accommodate head of camp and his aides—called upon almost daily to perform intercourse. When camp abandoned, had told U.S. army psychiatrist, who helped but too busy—she sent for by famous uncle. Never gone out socially except with uncle. Froze when man touched her, as many wished to. Uncle realizing after his death no one left to care for her—no husband or man possible—was concerned to provide for her. Now was lovely, withdrawn, shy, rather well-read and thoughtful woman—whose lushness belied what was eroded beneath.)

“On doctor’s advice, German and niece take Swedish boat to Göteborg. The last night on boat, she is misunderstood and has bad experience with steward or passenger or someone. Uncle finds her sobbing, not at man whom she does not blame, but at self. Uncle gets ship’s doctor for sedative, then explains whole thing to him. Doesn’t explain own heart condition now …”

I wondered where, in the United States, the German physicist and his niece should be living. I wanted a city I had visited, and one which provided the right background. I remembered that my last assignment as an enlisted man in the United States Army Signal Corps had been to Lawson General Hospital in Atlanta, where I had stayed at the Briarcliff Hotel for fourteen days late in 1945. Very well. I would have the German and his niece living in Atlanta, and have the niece doing part-time volunteer work at Lawson Hospital. I consulted a journal I had kept in Atlanta, as well as letters written to my wife. From these I compiled a page of factual notes, which went as follows:

“Peachtree Street, main thoroughfare with no peach trees, turned into Decatur Street, Negro quarter … Henry Grady Hotel on Peachtree … At Five Points turned into Decatur … Briarcliff Hotel on Ponce de Leon Avenue … Lawson Hospital fourteen miles out … Lawson Hospital low-slung dull wooden buildings along cement highway …”

To these notes, I added more up-to-date jottings from recently published books about Atlanta:

“Atlanta loves tradition … 302,000 people … 2,500 factories … mercantile center … Coca-Cola millionaires, therefore ‘architecture rococola’ … Druid Hills section, the rich …”

Of course, the German and his niece were traveling to Göteborg on a ship rather than by airplane because my fictional character had a weak heart, and it would definitely be a Swedish ship because my wife and I had taken one, the S.S. Drottningholm, on our first visit to Sweden in 1946. From my journal notes and letters I had written my parents about the sea voyage, I wrote these background travel-notes for the German and his niece:

“Rooms 3 and 4 on B Deck … sail at 12:30 afternoon … Captain’s table seats twelve … waiter carried portable smorgasbord … sat in wicker chair on Upper A deck within glass enclosure … Swedes toast after every drink, everyone but host—schnapps, pure alcohol flavored with caraway, held rigidly before chest, swallowed while looking into another’s eyes, then glass back to chest and set on table … Deck steward blows bugle for lunch and dinner … 8th day see Orkney Islands and Scotland, walked open B Deck … Arrive Göteborg 5 afternoon 9th day …”

With the German and his niece coming under control, I moved on to the pile of notes I had gathered on the chemistry winners, the Frenchman, his wife—and on his mistress. I examined these earlier notes, and then I wrote about 1,200 words for myself on the possible line of their story. I had not settled on names for these characters, so I simply headed my notes ‘The Jacques, Simone and Denise Story’. Then I began as follows:

“Jacques Jordan and Denise finish eating near the Halle aux Vins, walk to river, past Tour d’Argent, watching couples, talking.

… Had been seeing each other like this, but it could not go on. Night is seductive, and this, more than he, seduces her … They go back to her apartment. Never speak a word. He sleeps with her … Later he speaks of how and why he needs her, and she him, and they speak of future … Simone Jordan phones, stunning them. Orders him home—the press is coming—they have won Nobel Prize.

“Second chapter picks Jordans up on plane, hour from Stockholm. Not speaking … She has not spoken to him much since evening of award announcement. Retrace that evening. He had come home, press already there. Questions. All night visited by colleagues. She’d gone to sleep alone. Once he tried to explain, she would not listen … Exposition about their work, and how it is finished, success after so many years; the good times. Then restless, nothing new to do but rehash old. How she learned of mistress, and about her, and how wife had seen her. Hadn’t planned what to do, except Nobel thing opened it up. On impulse had let him know she knew truth … Now speaks. Going to divorce him after. Keep truce because he wants special chair, prestige, or some Academic. But after—no more … Land in Stockholm. Greeted. Reporter asks ironic question: ‘Do you recommend all married couples have a work in common?’ “

My notes went on to show the French wife in Stockholm, how a Nobel judge introduces her to a ‘Kruger-type’ industrialist, who in turn “introduces her to shy young Swede who has wanted to meet her, is doing work in synthetic food that may interest her.” The ‘Kruger type’ needs the French pair to help the young Swede solve a chemistry problem “to keep alive factories that would otherwise collapse.” The Frenchwoman, in turn, sees how she can use the young Swede to revenge herself upon her husband, even make her husband jealous. “Coldly, now, she sets out to seduce timorous Swede … Husband goes to Kruger-type lab to beat up Swede, becomes entranced by work problem.”

I was ready to christen my characters.

Back on August 4, 1960, I had made a list of likely characters, among them the following:

Hero-author

Sister-in-law

Young Swedish girl

American or Italian actress

Old German physicist

Daughter or niece

French chemist

French chemist’s wife

Israeli-Hungarian doctor

German doctor

Ambitious Swedish judge

Swedish prince-historian

U.S. or English girl reporter

Wenner Gren-Kruger-Zaharoff type who is Swiss

Selma Lagerlöf-type ex-winner

Russian auto agent

By October 11, 1960, each of these characters had a name or the last in a series of names. The hero-author had become Andrew Craig. His sister-in-law had become Leah Decker. The young Swedish girl, after I had gone through a Stockholm telephone directory, was Lilly Hedqvist. The American or Italian actress had been transformed into a Swedish actress, Märta Norberg. The Wenner Gren-Kruger-Zaharoff type was Ragnar Hammarlund. All of these names were retained when, a few days later, I typed my final list of characters. But now there were many other changes. The French chemist had evolved from Jacques Jordan through Julian Marceau to his final name, which was Claude Marceau. The ‘Jordan’ I transferred to his mistress, who became Gisèle Jordan. The wife was definitely Denise. The old German physicist had evolved from Schmidt through Schimmer and Dr. Hans Haber to, finally, Dr. Max Stratman. His daughter or niece had a list of ten names, including Arilda and Eva, before I settled upon Emily. The Israeli-Hungarian doctor was now an American doctor who would be Magill or Bassett or Garrett, and at last was Dr. John Garrett. His co-winner of the Nobel Prize was no longer a German doctor but an Italian doctor, Dr. Carlo Bertini, whose name I quickly changed to Farinelli and finally to Dr. Carlo Farelli. The Russian auto agent had been abandoned for an East German scientist, Stratman’s ex-friend, who was first named Mueller and Ernst, and then Dr. Hans Eckart.

I was nearing the end of my preparatory work.

Every author prepares for a book in the way that best suits his psyche. Apparently, something in my writing system requires that I do an enormous amount of foundation-laying on paper before I can undertake the actual writing of a book.

While most novelists do some preparatory work on paper before starting a new novel, and while a few do a great amount of this work, for years I did not know of any writer who had laid the groundwork for a non-historical novel as exhaustively and obsessively as I did. Nor could I say whether such groundwork was a virtue or a fault. It has made me feel easier to discover recently one modern author who approached a novel, in the pre-writing stage, with even more thoroughness than I do. I refer to Sinclair Lewis.

Every novelist, sooner or later, finds himself compared, to his advantage or detriment, to some one or to several of his literary predecessors. I have found myself compared to a vast melange of different writers. One day, Robert Saffron was to write about The Prize in the New York World-Telegram, saying, “It would seem, actually, that Wallace has created … a novel in the tradition of the good, old American muckrakers: a mass of exhaustive details revealing the ‘inside story’ of an important but little-explored milieu, all festooned on a fast-moving plot line and energized by a dose of indignation.” It was, Mr. Saffron would contend, “the technique” of Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and of Upton Sinclair in The Jungle.

Because I write multi-charactered novels of great breadth, I have found myself compared to Honore de Balzac—and Kathleen Winsor. And because I am devoted to storytelling, I have been compared to Charles Dickens, W. Somerset Maugham—and Gene Stratton Porter. But most often, in reviews, my name has been coupled with that of Sinclair Lewis, basically because my novels are frequently concerned with contemporary sociological themes and because my novels are ‘popular’. In an essay in the Los Angeles Times, August 9, 1964, Robert Kirsch generously wrote, “Irving Wallace is, in my opinion, a better writer than, say, Sinclair Lewis, and may in time emerge as a writer of real importance on the American scene … In order to understand why these writers have found and kept a large audience, one has to examine what people want from a novel and what they have always wanted. It is, basically, entertainment.”

While I had read all of Sinclair Lewis, I had never read in depth about him. Now I was provoked to learn more of his methods. To my amazement, I found that the pre-writing preparation I undertake had been an obsession with Sinclair Lewis, also. Mark Schorer, in his definitive biography, Sinclair Lewis, explained the preparations for Arrowsmith:

“Thus the work progressed: maps of towns and cities; floor plans of houses, hospitals, laboratories; time schedules; full biographies of a score of characters; endless notes on yellow sheets—and then all of it systematically fed into the maw of the growing plan.” And again, when Sinclair Lewis was preparing Work of Art:

“… Lewis would dictate notes at a rate of about two hundred words a minute and Florey [his secretary] would take these words down in something resembling outline form. In those notes, characters were born and named and described, cities and towns named, population figures recorded, homes and rooms and furniture described … Once his plan was set down … Lewis himself took over the typewriter and, from the plan, typed out a twenty-or thirty-page summary of the novel, and if it remained too vague to satisfy him, he rewrote it in forty or fifty pages.”

Thus, going from the notes that he called his plan, to the outline that he called his summary, Sinclair Lewis approached the writing of a novel.

It was enlightening, this knowledge, and it made me feel more comfortable, less embarrassed, to admit that I had always struggled and fussed so much with preliminary details.

For `, I had my voluminous notes. But one more crucial task faced me before I could undertake the actual writing of the first draft. I had small paper mountains of research, character progression, possible scenes, bits and pieces of narrative, and written dialogue. Now I must pull these together into a coherent story, progressing from sequence to sequence. One of my sequence outlines read simply: “1. Notification. 2. Arrival. 3. Press reception. 4. Cocktail party. 5. Tour of city. 6. Hammarlund’s banquet. 7. Visit places of prize voting. 8. Private scenes. 9. Kidnaping. 10. Ending. Fifteen to twenty chapters.”

For me, that was not enough. Because of the complexity of my story, 1 needed an outline, still short perhaps but more complete than any preceding one, to use as a sort of word map of where I hoped to go in the writing. With my notes fully absorbed, I quickly settled down to develop the final outline.

I might add that the opinions of writers differ on the subject of outlines. Over many years, I have discussed writing techniques with countless novelists I have known socially or met casually, from the late Raymond Chandler and Horace McCoy to living authors like Robert Nathan, Irving Stone, James Jones, Ray Bradbury, Leon Uris, Jerome Weidman. From conversations with these writers, and with numerous others, it has become clear to me that there are two contrasting approaches to the writing of a novel. One school believes that you start with no more than a general idea of what you want to do, maybe have a few characters and scenes in mind, or a so-called theme or background, and create everything else as you go along. The second school believes that you work out your idea, characters, story as much as possible in advance, so you know fairly well who is in the story, what it is about, where it is going, and only then do you actually begin to write.

There is something to be said for and against each, approach. In favor of the ‘let’s-sit-down-and-see-what-happens’ school is the spontaneity that inevitably results. The writer is not restricted by a plan. He invents as he goes along. He has more scope for invention. He is less apt to become tired of his work while it is in progress, since he does not know what will happen in it from day to day. Everything is a surprise to him. What may be said against this approach is that an unplanned novel, not haying been thought out with care, can go off in the wrong direction, with minor characters and subplots being overemphasized, thereby making the finished book unbalanced and uneven. This approach can, and often does, lead to wasted effort and time, and inevitable discouragement.

The planned or outlined novel has in its favor the virtue of being creatively thought out, worked out, disciplined in the author’s mind and on paper, with the major characters getting their due, with the main stories and subplots being told in proper perspective and balance, and with the novel getting done fairly close to the way it was envisioned. What operates against this method is that the novelist who plans too carefully in advance may cast his book into such a rigid mold that he leaves no room for his imagination to soar freely or for new ideas to take root and grow, which would expand his narrative more widely.

As I have said, I am strictly an outline man, but with certain personal modifications. On each new novel, I have always written many outlines for myself, developing scenes and characters, underlining story problems that need further thought. I work a novel out, in chronological sequence, over many weeks, in my head and then roughly on paper before beginning it. I want to know that it is right for me. I want to know that it will progress. I do not want to take a wrong turning. And this is doubly necessary in my case, because my novels usually contain large casts of characters, and these characters have interwoven problems, and my books have plots and subplots, so that without some kind of literary Baedeker of my own, I would soon be hopelessly lost. But at the same time, I try to leave a broad area for spontaneity in my outlines. I leave so many holes, so many points undeveloped, so many characters or possible scenes touched on in merely a line or two, that there is always room for considerable creative invention as I go along.

This was exactly the way I approached The Prize. I tried to organize my notes, to set them down briefly in some kind of dramatic sequence, and I constantly turned these sequences inside out until I was more or less satisfied with them. The outline was never quite completed. Frequently, a single sentence in the outline became a scene that ran ten to twenty typewritten pages in the first draft. Also, so many new characters or situations came to me as I wrote—people or scenes or conflicts not in my outlines—that I was constantly revising and replotting what lay ahead.

My final outline, the one that would be adequate to start with, was written during two days. On the first day, October 18, 1960, I wrote the terse sequence and content outline for six of the chapters, and the second day, October 19, I wrote the outline for the last ten chapters. This added up to seven pages single-spaced, or about 2,000 words. When I was almost done, I combined the last two chapters, which then gave me an outline for fifteen chapters in all. Later, while writing the book, cutting and switching and changing material, I condensed this outline sequence into only twelve chapters.

Since the final outline is too long to reproduce here in full, I will confine myself to showing the chapters I started and closed with on each of those two difficult days.

On October 18, I began my final outline with the following:

“CHAP. I: Open with Count Bertil Jacobsson in Stockholm sending congratulatory wires late at night from Nobel Foundation.

… In Paris, Claude Marceau is enjoying affair with Gisèle Jordan, until interrupted by wife Denise’s call about cable. In Atlanta, Professor Max Stratman is having a cardiograph test, when learns news from niece Emily. In Los Angeles, Dr. John Garrett is in group-therapy session, learns news through call from wife in Pasadena. In Miller’s Dam, Wisconsin, Andrew Craig is passed out, drunk, when sister-in-law Leah awakens him with news. (Work in Garrett’s co-winner Dr. Farelli of Rome somehow.)”

I closed this first day’s work with the following:

“CHAP. VI: In morning, Craig gets hell from Leah over his behavior at Royal Banquet and his staying out all night. For first time he revolts a little. They have tour coming up … Count and Craig’s publisher take Emily and Max Stratman and Craig and Leah on tour. Churches, Old City, City Hall, Skansen. Visit place of literary awards in Old City. (During tour pass villa, find Hammarlund and Lindblad playing boules. Hammarlund asks about his dinner, and finds out they have already accepted.) … Craig tries to talk to Emily, get her alone so he can apologize, but each time Leah breaks it up. Toward end of tour, Craig conspires with driver to take Max and Leah into a building and then say he and Emily have gone off … Walk on Kungsgatan … Evening eat at Den Gyldene Freden. Mellowed, Craig speaks about Harriet and himself, something he has done with no woman. Tries to explain Leah, also. But can’t really get Emily to talk about herself. Almost, but not quite … Leah not angry but coy and provocative when he returns. Tries to hold him by sleeping with him. He refuses. She rails against bitch Emily. He slams door and does what he had not meant to—drinks alone. For moment escapes recent past with its guilts, but it is ever with him. Drinks and drinks.”

The following day, October 19, I resumed my final outline with the following:

“CHAP. VII: Activities of three Nobel judges … Jacobsson takes Denise and Claude Marceau on tour, then to Institute to show them how and where they won prize. Conflict between Marceaus … Ingrid Påhl replaced Krantz, and takes Garrett to Karolinska, where Dr. Öhman greets him. Garrett learns how won prize, of past medicine prizes, now wants to see transplant patient.

Learns Farelli has already been there with reporter Sue Wiley. Is furious … Krantz is driving from airport where met Berlin plane. Has greeted Dr. Hans Eckart. Tells how he managed to win the prize for Stratman (some judges felt Stratman’s find not proved), although other physicists were favorites … Combine part of Chap. VIII here: from Stratman’s point of view. Craig finds Emily studying Swedish. Scene where they study together. Stratman dressing to leave … Stratman has had wire from Dr. Eckart who has news on Stratman’s brother Walther. Stratman meets Eckart who explains he helped Walther get to Russia, but now dead, gives mementos for Emily, Walther’s daughter. Eckart feels Stratman out so far as working in East Berlin, its potential and future. Eckart offers job, which Stratman refuses … Add most of Chap. IX later.”

I closed the second day’s work, and had a final outline, after I completed the following notes:

“CHAP. XV: Morning of award ceremony. As seen through Sue Wiley’s eyes, press taken on tour of Concert Hall and briefed … At Karolinska, transplant of Ohman’s threatens to fail for first time. Garrett realizes, à la Koch, he can’t take award. Farelli explains his desperate past and clears self of Nazi-collaboration charges. They work together and save transplant case … Craig tells off Leah and moves out, though she threatens him with destruction. He has message from Emily. Tries to call Emily, can’t find her … Phone ringing in Emily’s room, but she doesn’t answer. She has just learned Max Stratman has had heart attack. Rushes to him. At clinic, learns he is not there. She is then abducted … Craig goes to Emily’s room … (New note on opening of this chapter: Open with Jacobsson’s journal on previous ceremonies—Kipling, Buck, Hamsun, nearsighted King. Then Jacobsson goes down, meets press, briefs them.) … Craig finds door to Emily’s room open. Receives tape and message. Finds Max napping. Reads note, plays tape ordering Stratman to defect if he wants Emily back intact. Craig keeps kidnaping from Stratman, acts on his own … Remembers something ex-spy Daranyi said. Runs into Gottling who offers to drive him. Goes to Lilly, reveals his love for Emily. She helps him get to Daranyi …”

And I continued the final outline in this manner to the end of the last chapter.

I was now as ready as I would ever be to undertake the writing of the book. But that night—the night before the beginning—I was afraid. I am always frightened when I am on the verge of starting the writing of a new book. To research, to plan, to plot, to dream, those are as nothing. Actually to write, that is everything. And then comes fear, fear of the overwhelming task ahead, the slavish dedication, the inadequacy.

I was up late that night, alone, drinking, reading.

I wondered—not for the first time, but it always seems the first time—why I was undertaking a novel. Why does anyone ever undertake a novel?

Is the challenge undertaken, as so many critics insisted about my previous novel, purely for money? Is it done, as so many professors have said, to find a means of expressing one’s self? Is it, as someone has written, an effort to find some degree of immortality? Or is it done, as Dr. Edmund Bergler, the eminent psychoanalyst, stated after treating thirty-six author-patients, to satisfy a neurotic need for ‘exhibitionism’ and ‘voyeurism’ and ‘masochism’?

That night, late, I reread sections of W. Somerset Maugham’s Great Novelists and Their Novels:

“Dr. Johnson, who said that: ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money’, wrote one of the minor masterpieces of English literature to get enough money to pay for his mother’s funeral. Balzac and Dickens without shame wrote for money. The critic’s business is to judge the book he is concerned with on its merits. The motives for which the author wrote it have nothing to do with him …

“If one may judge by these examples [Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoevski, etc.], one may safely say that it is not much of a writer who hates writing. That is not to say that they didn’t find it difficult. It is not easy to write well. No one writes as well as he would like to; he only writes as well as he can … Tolstoi and Balzac wrote, rewrote and corrected almost endlessly. But still, to write was their passion. It was not only the business of their lives, but a need as exigent as hunger or thirst.”

A livelihood, yes. A passion, a need, yes.

That same night, late, I also reread sections of another Maugham book, The Summing Up:

“Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul. This is a counsel of perfection and in an imperfect world a certain indulgence should be bestowed on the professional writer; but this surely is the aim he should keep before him. He does well only to write to liberate his spirit of a subject that he has so long meditated that it burdens him and if he is wise he will take care to write only for the sake of his own peace … For the disadvantages and dangers of the author’s calling are offset by an advantage so great as to make all its difficulties, disappointments, and maybe hardships, unimportant. It gives him spiritual freedom. To him life is a tragedy and by his gift of creation he enjoys the catharsis, the purging of pity and terror, which Aristotle tells us is the object of art.”

For the sake of peace, yes. For a purging, a catharsis, yes.

I remembered something that I had read in another book, and in the silence of the night and the large house, I went to find it. I found it in Arrow in the Blue by Arthur Koestler, and now, with the night giving way to the first gray of dawn, I read Koestler:

“I have no idea whether fifty years from now anybody will want to read a book of mine, but I have a fairly precise idea of what makes me, as a writer, tick. It is the wish to trade a hundred contemporary readers against ten readers in ten years’ time and one reader in a hundred years’ time. This has always seemed to me what a writer’s ambition should be.”

That one reader, yes.

I went to bed, at last, and lay awake for a long time wondering if there were more.

There was much that went through my head, and some of it I later recaptured when Roy Newquist interviewed me for his book, Conversations. Thinking back to that night, I was to tell him:

“There exists a stupid literary tradition … that a hungry writer is the best writer—an empty stomach and slum dwelling being considered most conducive to good books, honest books, uncorrupted books. Revolting nonsense, I say. Why can a better novel be produced in a grimy attic than in a Riviera villa? Tolstoi and Flaubert did very well without attics or hunger pangs. The really hungry writer, I truly believe, is the one most susceptible to corruption and dishonesty, for he has a problem that must intrude upon his creativity. The problem is: he must eat. And to eat, he must often put aside writing as he pleases, to write potboilers for the marketplace, to write what he is told to write.

“The writer who has money, enough or a lot, has to compromise with no one, do nothing he does not want to do. He can afford to write as he pleases. There are exceptions, of course. Hungry writers can survive on bread and water, by begging and stealing, and never compromise, and produce fine works. And financially-secure writers can lose touch with life or repeat themselves because of a neurotic need for more and more wealth. But generally, I suggest, better books are written by men who have survived starvation, have bank accounts, and are beholden to no one. And in the end, I suspect, rich or poor has nothing to do with it; for if hunger is the driving force behind literary honesty, then the real writer is always hungry, a hunger in the mind, the heart, the conscience.”

I thought, late in that black-gray night, about something else, which I also told to Newquist later:

“I think there have always been too many young people who look at the Bromfields, Maughams, Fitzgeralds of their time and say, ‘That’s what I want,’ forgetting what comes before … What these aspirants forget is that every creative person who has attained such fame and freedom did so in the historic literary way—by applying the seat of the pants to the chair—by sitting in a little lonely room or a big lonely room for ceaseless lonely hours, and sweating and cursing and writing word after word, sentence after sentence, alone. Nor is there ever an end to it … If there is to be a next book, it has to be written—alone. The most glamorous, brilliant, prestigious authors still sit by themselves with their tortured psyches and numbed fingers and write and labor under conditions resembling solitary confinement. Tell the boys who want to be authors that that’s the name of the game—work.”

Work, yes. But why?

Because I have something to say.

Because I am committed.

Long after that difficult night, another interviewer—a French novelist—would ask me in Paris, “Do you consider yourself to be a committed author? If that is the case, is it not true that you do not feel concerned by the critics who remark upon your style and your technique if, as of the moment, you estimate that you have convinced your readers and rallied them to your ideas?” And I was to think about it, and my mind would again go back to my thoughts on that dark gray night, and I would reply:

“I don’t think that every writer must be committed. Of course, one is always committed—from the social point of view and in one’s current life. But as a writer, it is not absolutely necessary. A writer is what he is; and I think he should write what he feels like writing and do it as best he can. I live in the world of ideas, and I want to propagate my ideas.

“However, experience shows that it is not ideas that permit a work to survive but characters. Ideas change, but man remains. I believe that it is possible that the novel of commitment can be literature, but if it is so, the reason is the depth of its characterizations. But one simply can’t think of that as he writes. You simply don’t think of such things; you simply write.”

I was ready to sleep, and ready to wake.

I was ready to write.