BIRTH
The Prize was published on June 11, 1962.
Publication day, in the novelist’s personal world, usually has little meaning. It dawns with much less excitement than does his son’s birthday or his daughter’s Open House. No rockets go off that day, no gifts arrive, no applause is heard, no feast is held. It is not comparable to a playwright’s highly charged opening night or even to a screenwriter’s attendance at a sneak preview or the premiere of his latest film. The author was alone before publication day, and usually he is alone, in a sense, all through this day, too. Sometimes a limping telegram of congratulations and good-luck wishes will come in from his agent or editor or an understanding fellow novelist—sometimes, but rarely. His wife, pitying him. may break open a bottle of domestic champagne.
What publication day really represents is an arbitrary date after which bookstores throughout the nation may display the novel (although most stores have received their shipments and put their books on sale weeks before) and a date after which magazines and newspapers may release their reviews of it. Also, this date sets the time at which ‘advance orders’ are replaced by ‘reorders’. The measurement of a book’s commercial success is determined by the publisher’s weekly count of these reorders. For if a certain bookshop in Cleveland has had ten copies in stock and on display, and then writes or wires in a reorder for ten more, the publisher knows that the store has actually sold its first ten copies.
Publication day for The Prize was somewhat different from what it had been for my earlier books. I had gone to New York six days before the official birth of The Prize to give interviews. My seventh day in New York, and my last one there, was a Monday and the day of publication. I noted the events of this long-awaited day in my journal:
“Pub date. Awakened at 9 in our suite at the Plaza. Down to the Edwardian Room for breakfast. Korda called Sylvia, said next Sunday’s New York Times Book Review carries a big and favorable review. Korda sent a copy over, and I was thrilled. Phoned the publisher. Advance sales till today over 34,000 copies shipped.
“At 12:30, Associated Press Radio’s Kay Lawrence interviewed me in Cafe Louis XIV. Next, long drive downtown to New York World-Telegram where feature writer Robert Saffron interviewed me in the city room. Back to Rockefeller Center and up to Simon and Schuster to be interviewed by Martha MacGregor of the New York Post’s book page.
“Spoke to Korda, Schwed, was shown advance of Time magazine review, which ignored discussing book, simply attacked me. Saw John Barkham’s review in New York World-Telegram, released by Saturday Review Syndicate, and was most pleased.
“Returned to the Plaza. Talked to Amy and David long-distance. Off to have dinner with Peggy and Jerome Weidman at San Marino restaurant. Back to rooms to pack for California tomorrow.”
After that, the book began to receive the maximum exposure possible through the appearance of reviews, advertisements, interviews, feature articles, and column paragraphs about it. Upon this exposure—as well as the support of personnel in the nation’s bookshops and reader interest in the novel’s subject or the author’s name—would depend the initial sales of the book. And after that, it would be entirely the public’s verdict. The public would either ignore the book or proceed to read it. If read, the book would then be either condemned or praised, and if praised, there might be generated that magical word of mouth that excites more and more people to read a book. This verdict would decide the fate of my book, fifteen years after I had conceived it and two years after I had begun to write it. Curiously, some of the comments and events that followed publication helped underline and highlight, or more clearly define, at least for me, what I had been trying to do during my actual creation of the book.
The reviews came in a deluge. And from the first montage of headlines, I could see that a great play was being made on the words ‘Nobel’ and ‘noble’ and on the word ‘prize’. The headlines were dizzying: the Long Island Newsday, NOBLE WORK ON THE NOBEL WORKS; the Oakland Tribune, WALLACE NOVEL WILL WIN NO PRIZE, BUT IT’S DELIGHTFUL; the Washington, D. C. News, THE BOOBY PRIZE; the Houston Press, IG-NOBEL ‘PRIZE’ MAY NOT WIN ONE BUT IT WILL SELL; Charlotte Observer, THE PRIZE OFFERS PRIZE CHARACTERS; the Dayton News, THE PRIZE IS RIGHT.
The reviews were diverse enough to infect any author, if this were possible, with a lifelong case of schizophrenia. The average reader sees only a few reviews. The author himself, if he wishes, can see them all.
Are they instructive? Let us find out.
First, they considered the question: Was the idea of creating a novel around the Nobel Prize awards a sound idea for a book?
According to the Baltimore Morning Sun, the Nobel Prize “seems an unlikely subject around which to weave the threads of a novel.” Yet the Greensboro, North Carolina, News, states that “this is a wonderful ready-made plot.”
Next, What were the author’s feelings while he was writing the novel?
The author learns from The New Yorker: “In a postscript, Mr. Wallace says, ‘The gestation period of this novel was fifteen years.’ He does not add, because he does not need to, the writing of it was sheer drudgery.” But then the author is reassured by the Richmond News Leader: “It is clear that this novel has been a labor of love …”
Did the author succeed in his creation and development of lifelike fictional characters?
According to The National Observer, the people “are wooden … more caricature than character,” and according to the Newark News, they are “bloodless, sleepwalking characters.” On the other hand, the Chicago Sun-Times announces that the author “succeeded in the difficult task of delineating a number of totally different characters with honesty, depth, and feeling,” and the Tampa Tribune agrees that the “winners are masterfully portrayed in depth, height, and width.”
What were the comments on the plot or story line of the novel?
The Charleston, South Carolina, Post states that “the plot contrivance shows through at times when the covering wears thin.” Yet the Salt Lake City Tribune believes that “the unity of the novel is perfect,” and that the author “has the ability, seldom seen nowadays, of tying together plot and subplots without leaving any loose ends.”
What were the reactions to the author’s writing style?
The author is told by the Washington, D. C., Star that the prose is “inelegant and turgid.” But then he is reassured by both the Hartford Courant and the Springfield, Massachusetts, Republican that the book is “well-written.”
What were the reactions to the novel’s storytelling?
Here there were no dissents. The Associated Press promises that “There is never a dull moment. This is storytelling for its own sake … This is popular reading in the good old-fashioned sense. Wallace has rung the bell of sheer narrative excitement.” And this was echoed in all the city reviews, even the most grudging ones.
What was the response to the climactic final chapter that the author had revised so often?
The National Observer believes that “the manufactured happy ending,” and other faults, “make The Prize a simultaneous literary failure and a commercial success.” Opposing this view, the Salt Lake City Tribune is satisfied that “the climax is unexpected and completely logical.”
How did the reviewers react to the handling of love and sex in the novel?
There is a deluge of comment, accompanied by violent disagreement.
According to Time, “Wallace’s intellectual giants have feet of such soft clay that they find it difficult to stay upright for longer than a chapter. They tumble into bed with all the verve of the casual Californians in The Chapman Report.’“ To which the New York World-Telegram added, “What will lift most eyebrows, I imagine, is the emphatically sexual character of the story with which the author fleshes out his facts … What has happened is that some of Mr. Wallace’s preoccupation with the boudoir has spilled from The Chapman Report (where it belongs) to The Prize (where it obtrudes). This is not a matter of prudishness but of proportion.” And the Detroit Free Press announced flatly, “To assure the book’s success, Wallace has indiscriminately scattered sex throughout.” And the Columbus Dispatch lectured, “This author is one who does not need to sensationalize sex to sell books. He has a number of scenes in ‘The Prize all too evidently written for no other purpose but which are unnecessary and serve only to slow down the action. Anyone who writes as well as Wallace does both himself and some of his potential readers a disservice by resorting to a tawdry device that only cheapens and pollutes an otherwise fine novel.”
On the other hand, according to The Book Buyer’s Guide, “ The Prize is a staid and restrained narrative.” To which the Dayton News added, “It makes up in suspense and violence what it lacks in sex.” And from Clifton Fadiman in the Book-of-the-Month Club News the statement, “Particularly interesting is the candid revelation of the relaxed and wholesome sexual morality of Sweden.” And from the Dallas Times Herald, “It’s a relief from the oversexed Chapman Report.“ And from the Springfield, Missouri, News and Leader, “Sometimes it is hilarious, particularly in the bedroom scenes.”
What about the author’s having integrated factual research with fiction in The Prize?
The degree to which this technique had been employed had caused differences between my wife and myself, and again between my publisher and editor. How had the reviewers reacted to the inclusion of such factual documentation in a fictional work?
Newsweek feels that the book possesses “all the local detail of a James A. Fitzpatrick Traveltalk.” The Chicago Tribune decides that, “The fault of the novel is that Wallace has shoved in every last word of research.” Many other reviews concurred. The Richmond, Virginia, News Leader agrees that “the serious defects of the novel stem from the sheer glut of information such documentation creates; it arrests the narrative pace and even worse, destroys the plausibility of characterization too often.”
On the other hand, an equal number of reviewers feel that the documentary technique is commendable. According to Clifton Fadiman in the Book-of-the-Month Club News, “What gives this … narrative its motive power is the extraordinary vividness of the Stockholm scene and the seemingly absolute authority with which Mr. Wallace retails secret after secret involving actual awards of the immediate and distant past.” To this there are many amens. For the Oakland Tribune, “Some of the novel’s most absorbing moments are those having to do with the Nobel Prizes themselves.” For the Newark News this research was the novel’s “sturdiest virtue,” and for the San Francisco News-Call Bulletin the use of factual material helped the book rise “to the heights of noble eloquence.” In fact, to the Spokane Chronicle this “prodigious amount of information” was often “far more interesting than any of the activities of Irving Wallace’s six fictional laureates.”
When taking an overall view of my novel, the critics fell into three distinct categories. A small number hated the book, found no merit in it whatsoever; the greatest number liked the book, but found some imperfections in it; and a fair number loved the book, found it completely wonderful. Here, then, a sampling of the widely varied reactions:
The out-and-out haters: According to Newsweek, “For the connoisseur who deliberately seeks out the worst movie of the year or the most tasteless pop song, this novel is full of rewards.” And the Cleveland Press, “For the most part these people are more interested in sex than in scientific or literary achievement. It’s not in good taste, but the movies have it.” And the Washington News, “ The Prize isn’t as nasty a confection as Mr. Wallace’s The Chapman Report, but it ought to sell better. There’s more of it.”
The qualified but favorable ones: According to The New York Times Book Review, “That The Prize is a continuously readable—and sometimes eloquent—novel there can be no doubt. Mr. Wallace is a cerebral professional with a Balzacian flair, and he is aiming at the widest audience. Whether his novel is equally successful in form and content is another matter. Now and then the basic contrivances of plot and character show through, especially in the closing two hundred pages … For its general information and style, for its topical interest and historical background, an award of merit is herewith voted to The Prize. Flaws and all, it’s a good buy for readers.” And the Saturday Review Syndicate, “The author has coped with his cornucopia of research in a manner that must inspire respect for his agility, if not his selectivity. The Prize is massive, sometimes discursive, but always hypnotically readable.” And the Phoenix Arizona Republic, “In spite of its major faults of plotting and taste, The Prize is nevertheless mesmeric reading. Most readers will become caught up with the characters, never quite believing them but compelled to find out how they extricate themselves from their respective dilemmas.” And the Washington Post, “The story is marred by several outrageously contrived coincidences and an overdose of sensationalism. Yet, despite its melodramatic aspects, The Prize is an engrossing and fascinating novel.” And the San Francisco News-Call Bulletin, “A novel like Irving Wallace’s The Prize embarrasses a book reviewer. He knows it isn’t first-rate, but he had to finish it. He distrusts the excitement it arouses in him as he reads it, but he is sure it will be a bestseller. He feels that much of it is meretricious and shameless exploitation of his emotions, but neither was Charles Dickens above shameless sentimentality.”
The ones who loved it: According to the International News Service, “The word ‘remarkable’ is applicable to Wallace’s opus because it is (a) a literary work of art; (b) it is thoroughly engrossing reading matter that maintains its quality and interest without a letdown through 768 pages.” And the Boston Herald, “The characters are definitely entities in themselves. They have breath and blood and there are no pauses in the swift movement of the story and the interest this panoramic novel engenders. A book which I hope everyone will read not just because it is a fine and honest achievement; unselfconscious, straightforward, perceptive and true but because of the effect it is bound to have on the heart, mind and outlook of the reader.” And the Worcester Telegram, “Felicitous in style and insight, it is a literary gem that shines and sparkles in every polished facet.” And the Hartford Courant, “Most readers will wish the book were twice as long. Well-written, well-plotted, well-researched, this book is certainly one which can be recommended without reservation.” And the Boston Globe, “Told with excitement and drama that stirs both the heart and the imagination. Each character in the huge canvas stands out as clearly as the unforgettable faces in a Brueghel painting.”
Scanning almost two hundred American reviews, I found that while reviewers singled out various scenes in my novel for favorable or unfavorable comment, there was one scene that was quoted, in whole or part, in nine leading reviews. Located on page 25 of the hardcover edition and page 22 of the paperback edition of The Prize, this is the tag end of the scene where Denise Marceau telephones her husband Claude in the Paris apartment of his mistress, Gisèle Jordan. Claude and Gisèle are in bed together when the telephone rings, and Gisèle takes the call and learns that the voice on the other end belongs to her lover’s wife. The scene goes on as follows:
“Gisèle was dumbfounded, helpless. Her poise was gone. She covered the mouthpiece fully, and looked imploringly at Claude. ‘Your wife—she knows—’
“‘No, I cannot. Say anything,’ he begged.
“Gisèle would not return to the telephone. ‘She says it’s important—’
“The length of their exchange had given them away, and Claude knew it. Miserably, he disengaged his body from Gisèle’s, took the prosecuting telephone, and sat up, cross-legged, on the bed.
“ ‘Denise? Listen to me—’
“ ‘You listen, you rotten pig—you pull your pants on and come home. The press is on its way—we’ve just won the Nobel Prize!’“
Thus, the end of the introductory Marceau scene, which was used to lead off the reviews of the Washington News and Pasadena Star-News, and was quoted extensively in publications ranging from the St. Paul Dispatch to Time magazine.
Also, in scanning my reviews, of which perhaps thirty appeared in major newspapers or magazines, I found that fourteen of the reviews devoted much of their allotted space to reporting that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had purchased motion-picture rights to the book, and named the six-figure price paid. Most of these reviews that mentioned the film sale also happened to be—possibly by coincidence—unfavorable reviews, and they included such widely read publications as Time, Newsweek, The National Observer, the Cleveland Press, and the Austin American-Statesman. The lesson, I suppose, is that no novelist should permit premature sale of motion-picture rights to a forthcoming book, or if they are sold, he should not permit the studio or producer to announce the fact until the book itself has been published and the critics have had an unprejudiced look at it.
In the years since, I have frequently found reviewers coupling my books with their motion-picture sales in a way harmful to the novels and detrimental to me as a novelist. Typically, and perhaps more viciously than this sort of thing is usually done, a novelist- lecturer named Herbert Kubly wrote in his article ’The Vanishing Novel’, published in the Saturday Review:
“Ideas are sprung over breakfast Bloody Marys in Hollywood’s Beverly Hills Hotel or over Scotch-on-the-rocks in New York’s Toots Shor’s, or on a long-distance phone between the two. A publisher makes a deal with a film producer who promises an advertising snow job and a seven-star cinematic production. Among such Hollywood-inspired best-sellers are works by … Irving Wallace…. Such trashy books purveyed as literature with a high price can hardly stimulate long-range buying and reading of fiction.”
Literary commentators of this stripe, perhaps because of their own frustrations, are quick to denigrate a novel because it will be adapted into a motion picture. The enormous publicity attending a sale of motion-picture rights inspires countless such falsehoods and calumnies. The Kublys will not bother to investigate in order to find out what is true or what is not true. Nor will the editors of the Saturday Review. As a consequence, reviewers become prejudiced by misinformation, and through them thousands of readers, librarians, literature professors are equally deceived by untrue or dishonest equations of novels with the motion pictures they spawn.
Speaking as a novelist who has had the good fortune to have sold film rights to six of his eleven books, I have every reason to have affection for motion pictures. But, literary commentators and critics notwithstanding, I cannot conceive that any serious novelist would deliberately slant a novel to effect a possible motion-picture sale.
I would suggest that it is next to impossible to prefabricate a novel successfully with a motion-picture sale as the ultimate goal. I would also suggest it ridiculous to consider receiving motion-picture ideas for novels from film producers over “breakfast Bloody Marys” or to attempt to develop “Hollywood-inspired best-sellers” from these ideas. This kind of malicious backbiting is part of the myth perpetrated by literary commentators who have no knowledge of working novelists or motion-picture executives. For the working novelist to produce a book that would be just right for the screen would require the construction of a book that would be all wrong for the reading public. And without that reading public, the novelist could never sell his book to the screen. As for motion-picture executives, they would hold in disdain any brainchild produced by or written for them through artificial insemination, because they would have no faith in its originality or natural public acceptance.
I adhere to the belief that the novelist, except for his role as a spectator, should have no interest in motion pictures. Every novelist, myself included, hopes and prays that Hollywood will purchase film rights to his novels. Such a subsidiary windfall, as I have stated earlier, just like a book-club sale or a foreign-rights sale, must be regarded in the same way that the writer would regard the lucky possession of a winning lottery ticket. The novelist’s only concern must be, as mine has always been, for the book itself, for the novel being written as a book.
Yet it is not always the sale of film rights alone that creates antagonism in the press. There is something else. It is the fact that a motion-picture sale is synonymous with money, just as a bestseller is also synonymous with money. And to link a writer’s name with money is to bring under suspicion his motives and his literary product, as well as to imply a lack of integrity, a selling out, a pandering to the public.
I have never understood this attitude from the literary press. Any other kind of creative artist, on any level, can allow the amount of his earnings to become publicized, be he Picasso, Olivier, Stravinsky, Nureyev, and his integrity is not impugned and reviews of his work are not prejudiced. Money actually serves to prove his value. He remains pure. But in the literary world, money is equated with corruption. A novelist may perform many abnormal, illegal, or antisocial acts. He may admit to homosexuality, alcoholism, addiction to drugs, a penchant for mistresses; he may beat his wife and kick small animals; and somehow this is acceptable, even colorful, and somehow it enhances the literary image. But money, never money, the root of all evil—including evil reviews.
While discussing this subject, I am reminded of a recent episode which reveals reviewer mentality. The book editor of the Santa Ana, California, Register, William Melton, had published a feature story in which authors looked at critics, and in this he had used parallel interviews with Irving Stone and myself. When Melton had asked me what I believed a balanced book review should contain, I had told him what I thought. I had also told him what a balanced review should not contain. “A good book review,” I said, “should not contain anything about the author’s domestic or social behavior, income tax bracket, or supposed motivations for writing his work. These aspects of the author’s life belong to the gossip columnist, the accountant, the psychiatrist. Only the product of the author’s pen should be the concern of a good review.” In this same feature story I had referred to “newsmagazines” as being among the worst offenders when it came to unbalanced and dishonest reviewing. William Melton passed on copies of his feature story to Time, where a lady, authorized to speak ‘For the Editors’, replied, “With all the books that Irvings Stone and Wallace have sold—they should be worrying about what the critics think?”
Yet, despite those who speak ‘For the Editors’, novelists do worry about what the critics think. They fret over bad reviews because they are, by their very nature, unsure, uncertain, sensitive human beings whose stock-in-trade consists of fragile ideas and words. They fret over savage reviews because rejection of their work before the eyes of the world means rejection of themselves and of years of their working lives. They fret over unfair reviews because they fear that such reviews may keep their work from a large segment of the public.
However, it is clear that no review, no matter how bad or how unfair, can seriously injure the sale of a book if the public desires to read it. Most members of the reading public have minds of their own and somehow determine for themselves what will interest them. At the same time, there is concrete evidence that a number of dishonest reviews can turn some segment of the undecided public away from a specific book or author. I can cite as an example an experience I had two years after The Prize, when I published The Man. Although there was a great demand for this book by library users, numerous libraries refused to provide the book for these readers. Not long ago, I was shown a book-review column that had appeared in the Winchester, Massachusetts, Star written by Leila-Jane Roberts of the Winchester Public Library. In reviewing this novel, The Man, she wrote:
“Irving Wallace is looked down on by librarians and others interested in serious writing as one who sells the movie rights before he finishes writing a novel, and who creates expressly for the bestseller market—often building a novel on sensational news headlines rather than on more enduring human values and endeavors. Therefore, when this book came out, it was prejudged perhaps unwisely. Reviews were not encouraging … about the place of this book in a permanent library collection … But alas, reviews are not any more infallible than the individuals who write them. Here is one book which the library decided not to buy and which may well be used in social-studies courses fifty years from now much as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is used today … We erred in not adding this book to the collection … It is now a part of the public library collection and will be in circulation by the time this review is published.”
All the while that I had been receiving clippings of the reviews on The Prize, I was in touch with my publisher or my editor, frequently commenting to them upon these reviews. On June 19, I was writing my editor, “The first reviews are starting to come in … for the most I am extremely well pleased. The majority I see are good, and even the in-betweens and bads are generally selling ones. Of course, I saw New Yorker yesterday. It didn’t even upset me. It was simply too ridiculous: this labor of love a ‘drudgery.’ Of course it was their ass-backward way of making a criticism, but just too silly.”
On June 27, I was writing my publisher, “Did you see the marvelous International News Service syndicated Kinnaird review? It set me up, along with the other stuff, wonderfully. The reviews are streaming in, and all of them are at least interesting.” Then, on July 28, another letter went to my editor, with this added note: “I had a lovely letter from Somerset Maugham today. He just received The Prize, which, for sentimental reasons, I had sent him at his villa on the Riviera—and he is about to leave on a long trip and is taking the novel along for reading en route.”
Shortly after the reviews appeared, there arose two controversies concerning The Prize, both widely aired in the press, and they drew more attention to the book than a novel ordinarily receives.
The first controversy, a lesser and a not-unfamiliar one, grew out of the reviews in which critics had speculated on the real-life prototypes of my fictional characters. As the Coffeyville, Kansas, Journal, put it:
“A new literary guessing-game will probably be in vogue with the publication of the new novel by Irving Wallace, The Prize. … Wallace has chosen as one of his characters a novelist who is a drunkard, which will recall a real novelist who did win The Prize, and who was fond of his cups. He has another in the recipient for the prize for medicine—who shares the prize with another scientist he is convinced stole his own work and glory. This too suggests a real scientist who made just such a charge.”
The ‘guessing-game’ had begun.
Whom did I have in mind when I created the characters of Denise and Claude Marceau?
The Riverside, California, Press Enterprise suggested that I had written about “two Pierre and Marie Curie type French chemists on the verge of divorce.” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch was more certain, although it voted for the Curies’ son-in-law and daughter, and spoke of “The Marceaus—pale imitations of the Joliot-Curies.”
And who was really Märta Norberg, my Swedish actress in the book?
Easy? For The New York Times, yes. She was “the Garbo-like movie star with whom Andrew Craig involves himself.” For the New York Herald-Tribune, also, she was “a Garboesque actress sulking in semiretirement.”
And on whom had I based the characters of my Swedish nudist, Lilly Hedqvist, and my brash American newspaperwoman, Sue Wiley?
The Montgomery, Alabama, Advertiser had the answers. Lilly was the “immoral Swedish girl (shades of Marilyn Monroe),” and Sue was the “nasty newspaperwoman after scandal (shades of Dorothy Kilgallen).”
But most of the speculation revolved around the author-hero of my novel.
Of whom had I been thinking when I invented Andrew Craig?
Clifton Fadiman, in the Book-of-the-Month Club News said, “Andrew Craig is central to the story, and cannot fail to recall the figure of Sinclair Lewis.” The Montgomery Advertiser disagreed, and offered its own candidate, “shades of Faulkner.” The Chicago Tribune voted with Fadiman, stating, “Wallace does brilliantly with Craig, who is reminiscent of Sinclair Lewis.” The Omaha World-Herald also agreed that Craig was “so reminiscent of Sinclair Lewis.” However, the New York Journal-American could find no literary cannibalism, for it reported that, “Aside from his being a periodic drunk, Andrew Craig doesn’t have specific traits of character in common with any actual male U. S. winners of the Nobel laurels.” The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot concurred in part, when it stated, “The novelist is not identifiable with any novelist I know of, but had characteristics of several recognizable American writers.” But then, the Detroit Free Press made it a landslide for Sinclair Lewis, with its unequivocal stand that “There are three scientists, two doctors and an American author (Wallace even lacks the imagination to base this character on anyone but Sinclair Lewis).”
The last barb, I felt, was potentially dangerous because it transcended mere sport. Here was no “reminiscent of” or “shades of” Sinclair Lewis, but Craig-is-Lewis, period. I decided to answer directly, not only this newspaper, but all speculators. On July 12, 1962,1 wrote to the Detroit Free Press as follows:
“In speaking of the hero-author of The Prize, your reviewer states, ‘Wallace even lacks the imagination to base this character on anyone but Sinclair Lewis.’
“If my fictional hero, Andrew Craig, resembles Sinclair Lewis, it would then be proper to conclude that one of my two heroines, Lilly, the young Swedish nudist, is based on Whistler’s Mother.
“It is evident to me that your reviewer has absolutely no real knowledge of Sinclair Lewis or any of the other American writers who have won the Nobel Prize. The only habit shared by my fictional author and the late Mr. Lewis is that both drank heavily. On the other hand, my hero shares this habit with several other American Nobel Prize winners in literature—let us name William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene O’Neill—who have had, it is alleged, intimate acquaintance with hangovers.
“I did not draw the hero of The Prize from the character or life of Mr. Lewis or any other actual laureate. I did not find it necessary. I had my own experience as an author, as an author who will take a drink with a Swedish girl. Moreover, all authors, just like people, have problems, and some even have sex lives.
“I leave your reviewer, and his public, with a tidbit about an author now beyond reproach. One day a reporter asked Gustave Flaubert to identify the real-life Madame Emma Bovary. Flaubert snapped at the reporter, ‘I am Madame Bovary!’“
In my novel I had two fictional doctors, one John Garrett, an American, the other Carlo Farelli, an Italian, jointly winning the Nobel Prize. The American hated the Italian because he felt the Italian did not deserve to share this honor and the prize money. Immediately after reading about these characters, a number of newspapers, as well as some letter-writing physicians, charged me with having drawn these fictional characters, and their situation, straight out of real life.
It appears that some years before, Dr. Frederick Banting and Dr. John Macleod, both Canadians, actually shared the Nobel Prize in medicine for their discovery of insulin. The award brought their feud into the open. Dr. Banting said that Dr. Macleod had not even been in the laboratory when Banting had made the discovery, and therefore Banting gave half of his money to a third colleague who had been present. Dr. Macleod, who had definitely participated in earlier research, responded to the challenge by giving half of his money to someone who had worked with him.
All well and good, I replied in print, but this kind of professional disagreement is hardly uncommon in medical circles. In my researches I had found that on several occasions feuds had broken out between Nobel winners. I was also aware, from my social contacts with physicians and scientists, that many of these men were normally engaged in professional feuds, just as ordinary men fight over lesser matters. There was simply no necessity for me to base my fiction on the Banting-Macleod disagreement. I had created my fictional feud because I knew such problems were not uncommon, and because this antagonism grew naturally out of my imagined character, John Garrett.
However, the controversy did have one interesting aftermath for me, personally. It stimulated me to enter upon an inner exploration—a search that has not ceased to this day—to attempt to discover the sources of various fictional characters I have invented. The search has provided me with no absolute answer. But it has provided me with clear questions. Does a novelist derive his fictional characters from some remembrance of individual people—actual persons known, observed, heard about, read about—or from general types of persons, or perhaps from mere fragments of actual people? Or does a novelist create his fictional characters out of that unknown inner force, unconscious and mystic, which he calls imagination? Or is it the compounding, the merging, of both the real and the unreal, the known and the unknown?
In more cases than not, I would suggest that fictional characters grow out of a merging process: first, a wisp of fact; then, a cloud of fancy. Add conscious memory. Next, a subconscious development. Followed, last, by controlled embellishment.
Example. This extract from Henry James’s notebook:
“Florence, January 12th. 1887. Hamilton (V. L.’s brother) told me a curious thing of Capt. Silsbee—the Boston art-critic and Shelley-worshipper; that is of a curious adventure of his. Miss Claremont, Byron’s çi-devant mistress (the mother of Allegra) was living, until lately, here in Florence, at a great age, 80 or thereabouts, and with her lived her niece, a younger Miss Claremont—of about 50. Silsbee knew they had interesting papers—letters of Shelley’s and Byron’s—he had known it for a long time and cherished the idea of getting hold of them. To this end he laid the plan of going to lodge with the Misses Claremont—hoping that the old lady in view of her great age and failing condition would die while he was there, so that he might put his hands upon the documents, which she hugged close in life. He carried out this scheme—and things se passèrent as he had expected. The old woman did die—and then he approached the younger one—the old maid of 50—on the subject of his desires. Her answer was—’I’ll give you all the letters if you will marry me!’ H. says that Silsbee court encore. Certainly there is a little subject there: the picture of the two faded, queer, poor and discredited old English women—living on into a strange generation, in their musty corner of a foreign town—with these illustrious letters their most precious possession. Then the plot of the Shelley fanatic—his watchings and waitings—the way he covets the treasure. The denouement needn’t be the one related of poor Silsbee; and at any rate the general situation is in itself a subject and a picture. It strikes me much.”
Six months later, Henry James was writing his novel The Aspern Papers—and a wisp of the real Claire Claremont had, through the author’s imagination and art, become uniquely and individually transformed into the fictional Juliana Bordereau.
Recently, going through my notes relating to The Prize, I tried to trace the genesis of several minor characters. One of these was Harriet Decker Craig, the hero’s wife, dead long before my book begins, but alive in the hero’s mind and in the minds of several other characters.
My first description of Harriet Craig, in my published novel, was the following one:
“Lucius Mack had met Harriet Craig one morning in the first month of their residence, when she had visited the newspaper to place a classified advertisement for day help. Memory usually dimmed with the years, but Mack still retained what had impressed him then: a dark blonde, quiet and self-possessed, with a pleasing, almost gay Slavic face, all features broad but regular—he had guessed that her antecedents were Lithuanian.”
Had I dreamed her up? Or was she rooted in reality? If I had forgotten, I would soon be reminded. One morning, from a girl (now a married woman) I had not seen in thirty years, there arrived a letter postmarked with the name of a town in South Dakota, and at the end of it, she signed her name and added, “whose ‘antecedents were Lithuanian.’“
It came back to me at once. I had based my description of the fictional character on an adolescent sweetheart. I promptly wrote her as follows:
“As to Harriet whose ‘antecedents were Lithuanian’—yes, here and there, I suspect, you will find touches of yourself (that I hold in memory) in my writings. One does not easily, if ever, forget a first or early love. As a matter of fact, these last weeks I have been poring over old papers of mine and I came across many mementos of our time in Kenosha. I still have a battered novel, Young Man of Manhattan by Katharine Brush, signed by you—and the silk handkerchief you gave me on my high school graduation—and some photographs. You are forever frozen in my memory as the marvelously attractive blonde of 16 and 17 whom I used to accompany home from school, used to sit with in your parents’ living room, used to date. I simply can’t imagine you in 1966 instead of 1933 and 1934.”
Yet I had remembered her in 1961 when I was writing The Prize. But if I thought that I had discovered the entire genesis of my fictional Harriet Craig, I was soon to be surprised. Reading on in my published book, I came upon the scene where the hero first meets his future wife:
“Fortified by two drinks, he arrived in the plush apartment after ten o’clock. The food was, indeed, good, but what was better was Miss Harriet Decker. When Wilson had introduced him to the nearest drunks at hand, Harriet had been stretched supine on the sofa, in stocking feet, her head in someone’s lap, as was the fashion for that age that year. She was one of many guests horizontal, but the only guest completely sober. She had acknowledged Craig by shading her eyes, passing her gaze up his lank figure, and saying, ‘Hi, up there.’“
Immediately, I realized that this was not my high school sweetheart. This was from another memory. This was my wife Sylvia, stretched out on a sofa, her head in a famous newspaper columnist’s lap, the first time I set eyes on her at a party I had attended in 1940.
Reading further, I came on the following:
“Often, he would return to the house, half drunk, half sober, and trudge up to his room, and sit at his desk and stare at the photograph of her face in its leather frame. He would stare at her face and want to share some minute pleasure of the new day, something seen, heard, read, felt, and in his head he would talk to her, and then he would realize with a clutch of inner pain that she understood nothing, heard nothing, that she was only a flat image in black-and-white on glossy paper size 8 by 10.”
And then I realized that that had not come from either my high school sweetheart or my wife but from a conversation with an English girl I had taken out to dinner in Paris one evening during 1949. This English girl had not long before been widowed, and now drinking with me, she told me of the first months after her husband’s accidental death. “At night I would look at his picture, and want to share with him, as I always had, some of the things that had happened to each of us that day, and I would try, until I realized lie wasn’t there, he wasn’t anywhere, and it was no use. Finally, I buried his picture in a drawer.”
There were more moments of my fictional Harriet Craig in the book, and many of those I could not trace to any living source. These, I am sure, had grown entirely from my imagination.
But one conviction had been reinforced by this inner exploration. Just as I owed Harriet Craig to no single source, so did I not owe Andrew Craig to Sinclair Lewis or to any other Nobel Prize laureate, as the Detroit newspaper and other columnists had fallaciously insisted. The controversy was being stirred up by writers who knew little if anything about the creative process.
The second and greater controversy arising after The Prize was published was an explosive one that became an international press scandal, and it resulted from the reaction of the Swedish newspapers, the Nobel Prize judges, and the Nobel Foundation directors to the factual concept of the book.
At publication time, there had been many reviewers who felt that the Swedes would not be offended by the book. The Savannah News commented, “In the end Wallace manages to … not tarnish the glory of The Prize.” But most reviewers had thought otherwise, and were less optimistic. “I shudder to think what the Swedes will say about it,” said John Barkham in his Saturday Review Syndicate story on the book. “This novel may exasperate a fair number of Swedish citizens,” the Houston Chronicle predicted. “Considering all the wild doings he has scrambled together with the august proceedings of Nobel Prize awards, I would imagine The Prize will not be too affectionately regarded in Sweden,” said the Indianapolis Times. While the New York Post thought that all readers would be fascinated by the book, the newspaper added, “What the Nobel Foundation will think of the book’s melodramatic view of the ceremonies is another matter.” United Press International seemed to know what the Nobel Foundation would think and publicly predicted that my book would “blast normally neutral Sweden into a fit of combative outrage.”
I regarded this as no more than typical press provocation. The Swedes and Norwegians whom I had met abroad had appeared reasonable persons. And my book had not weighted the scales for or against the Nobel Prize personnel, but had tried to present their human virtues as well as their human faults. I had expected nothing to happen when my book came out, no reaction in Scandinavia whatsoever, simply because I had assumed that the Nobel Foundation, and the Scandinavian press and populace that revered it, would feel the institution too lofty, invincible, holy, to be troubled by the publication of a distant American novel.
I was wrong. And the prediction of United Press International was correct. Not only the Swedes but other Scandinavians, too, were thrown into a wild fit of “combative outrage.”
It was the Norwegians, custodians of the Nobel Prize for peace, who reacted with the greatest initial outrage.
On June 19, 1962, the Oslo Aftenposten, Norway’s most widely read newspaper, ran the headline: SCANDAL NOVEL ABOUT THE NOBEL PRIZES. Their story began: “Protests and excitement have followed the literary enterprises of the young American author, Irving Wallace. He knows how to create a storm around his name, and has done it again with his book, The Prize.“
A little more than a week later, the Oslo Dagbladet ran its strongest blast yet. “The attitude of the author is most clearly shown in the story itself. He adds that there is no known proof of blackmail or criminal action or any major scandal in the history of the Nobel Prize. Why does he state this? Because he has provided the Swedish Academy with an atmosphere of hypocrisy, intrigue, cynicism, and blackmail, in other words, criminal activity.
“Wallace has done everything in his power to drag the Prize and the Prize winners down in the mud, that’s what he has done. He knows that he himself will never be able to win the Prize, therefore, he settled for second best, to try to show the world that the highest honor is not worth anything because the members of the Academy are corrupt, and the Prize winners scoundrels or idiots. He is envious.
“Some of the characters in the novel have a certain life to begin with, but everything ends in emptiness … The reporter, Sue Wiley, is the only one with a sustained characterization because Wallace has created her in his own image. Therefore, she is real.”
The most threatening article was one written by Albert Brock-Utne, a Norwegian correspondent assigned to cover the United States, whose story was syndicated throughout Norway. “Irving Wallace’s book about the Nobel Prize, The Prize, has created quite a sensation, and raises the question of possible court actions. The named associates of the Nobel Institute in Stockholm are morally duty-bound to insist that their names be removed as sources. The Nobel Institute in Oslo must organize a joint action by all the named sources and demand that the book be withdrawn.”
I had seen no reason to enter into this battle, or make any defense of my novel, until it came to my attention that the Swedish press was running front-page attacks on my book. This, in itself, would not have impelled me to act, either. What finally made me enter the battle was word I received of a leading story that had appeared in the Stockholm Dagens Nyheter which was headlined: NOBEL PRIZE AND SIN BECOMES BEST SELLER IN USA. In this story, my honesty and integrity were assaulted by the recitation of a series of inaccuracies, and this, I knew, no author could afford to ignore. At once, on July 16, 1962, I wrote a lengthy letter to the managing editor of the Stockholm Dagens Nyheter:
“You have interviewed Professor Erik Rudberg, a member of the Nobel Foundation, and he has told you, ‘The Nobel Foundation has, as far as we know, had no contact whatever with Irving Wallace during his visit to Stockholm or at any other time.’ While I hate to contradict Professor Rudberg, he is uninformed and completely incorrect. I visited the Nobel Foundation in person in 1946. I corresponded with the Nobel Foundation in 1949, 1960, and 1961, and I herewith submit proof. I visited the Nobel Foundation in 1960. I have the following evidence to support this …
“You have also interviewed Uno Willers, Secretary of the Swedish Academy’s Nobel committee, who seems to agree with Professor Rudberg. Uno Willers is also wrong. I visited the Academy in the Old Town in 1946 and 1960, was courteously received, and have original interview notes and photographs to prove it.
“You state that ‘the private discussions that go on [in the voting meetings] are completely secret, and any account of these proceedings which may be found in the book can be traced to the author’s own phantasy.’ This is utter nonsense. The various Nobel academies may intend to keep their discussions private and their exact voting secret, but in fact this is not the case at all. In the official volume, Nobel—The Man and His Prizes, edited by the Nobel Foundation, and published in America by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1951, innumerable of these so-called private discussions or debates and the votings are brought out into the open for everyone to see. To add to that, during two visits to Stockholm I had long interviews with a number of veteran judges on Nobel committees and they were all cooperative in telling me, quite frankly, what went on in their chambers before and during Nobel voting time. I have the original notes of these interviews. Other material came to me in other ways, from Nobel officials who were not judges, from prize laureates who had heard about the voting, from Swedish information officers and newspapermen. If there be phantasy in what I have written of the ‘private discussions’, I assure you that the phantasy is not my own!
“Since I have many friends in Sweden, since I am deeply appreciative of the many Swedish citizens who helped me prepare The Prize—since, above all, I have a genuine love for your nation—I feel it imperative that I make a statement here and now about the true intent of my work of fiction.
“My novel, The Prize, was not written, in any sense, as an exposé or in an effort to create a scandal. I determined to use the Nobel Prize background in fiction because it appealed to me as having the essence of drama. As stated, I researched the factual aspects with care. If certain elements of my fictional story have been made to seem sensational or indeed are sensational, it is because I am primarily a novelist and the heart of any novel is conflict. It seemed to me that a group of foreigners, visiting your land for the highest prize on earth, would be in a situation that invited character conflict and story drama. And perhaps some of my invention is not so far removed from true life, after all.
“I did not set out to defame the Nobel committees. Anyone who has carefully read my book will see that I have treated all the fictional Nobel judges and officials, save one, with honest respect. The character Bertil Jacobsson is the spokesman of Sweden and the Nobel committees in my book, and I love him and believe him to be an admirable character. For the most, I have given the Nobel committees praise and credit, because I felt this was due them. However, that I have also shown their human weaknesses, I will not deny. Surely, the tradition of the Nobel committees is old enough, strong enough, most often right enough, to stand up under outside criticism. Every human face has two profiles. As a novelist, it is my duty to show not one but both.”
While attacks on my ‘scandal book’ continued to appear on front pages throughout Scandinavia, the wide circulation given to my letter had a salutary effect. It forced the Nobel Foundation to confirm that I was right, that some of their people had been wrong, and it left my integrity unimpaired.
It was Nils Ståhle, Executive Director of the Nobel Foundation, who finally came to my defense. He submitted to a telephone interview with the Stockholm Dagens Nyheter, and the newspaper featured the story on July 20, 1962:
“The American author, Irving Wallace, is correct in saying that he visited the Nobel Institute and that he received, both orally and by letter, answers to a number of the questions he had asked … This was confirmed by the Institute’s Executive Director, Envoy Nils K. Ståhle, by telephone from his summer home in Arild, as a commentary on the author’s letter to Dagens Nyheter. Envoy Ståhle also agrees with the author on another important point—he believes that Wallace’s controversial best seller, The Prize, is ‘not written in a tone unfriendly to Sweden and the Nobel Prize.’
“‘The book could have profited from a thorough condensation,’ says Mr. Ståhle. ‘At least for an older reader it is both tiring and unnecessary for the author to have spiced the meal with so many bedroom scenes. Fact and fiction are so interwoven that people not familiar with the milieu could get the most peculiar impression of how things are done in the Nobel circle,’ Ståhle fears. ‘But on the whole the book is skillfully written.’“
Two weeks later, one of the most prominent of the Nobel judges decided to speak out. In 1946, I had interviewed Dr. Anders Österling, Secretary of the Swedish Academy, which votes the annual Nobel Prize in literature. Now, sixteen years later, Dr. Österling, who had been voting on the literary award for thirty-six years, agreed to receive a reporter from the Stockholm Expressen.
What was Dr. Österling’s opinion of The Prize? On August 4, 1962, the newspaper reported Dr. Österling’s comments:
“I have been reading my usual summer literature [works by nominees for the next Nobel Prize], but this novel, The Prize, I thought I’d better throw in as my responsibility to the Swedish Academy.
“As a thriller, the book isn’t bad, but it is almost completely fantasy throughout. Of course, it is in poor taste, but not so vulgar as I expected. Rather amusing, as a matter of fact … Irving Wallace is one of the most successful authors of our time. He has for several years earned millions in Swedish crowns on books about sex, lightly seasoned with scandals. It should be noted that compared to his earlier books, his latest novel, the one about the Nobel Prize winners, is not half as filled with the above ingredients as other best sellers he has written. Lost in all the commotion around Sin with a capital S, Swedish girls and their morals, a little frigidity and alcoholism and extramarital relations, is the serious study of how the Nobel Prize winners are chosen.”
Now the controversy began to intensify in another direction. I had learned that the Scandinavian countries—Sweden, Norway, Denmark, each of whom had successfully published my previous novel—were refusing to translate The Prize. When a reporter from United Press International called upon me, I told him what I thought. I told him there was a ‘sub rosa boycott’ existing in Scandinavia against my novel. According to the wire-service story:
“Book publishers in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and Norway have rejected offers of publishing rights in their countries even though they had an option to buy such rights. They took the options after the success in Scandinavia of an earlier Wallace novel …
“‘The only thing I can think,’ said Wallace, ‘is that the publishers may be under some kind of pressure because The Prize is against what they feel is the national good. A Copenhagen publisher told me the book was “sacrilegious to a highly important institution in Scandinavia” but the others did not even give me a reason.’“
Once again, there were headlines in Sweden. The front page of the Stockholm Aftonblcidet carried the head: AMERICAN BEST SELLING AUTHOR ACCUSES SWEDEN OF BOYCOTT ON BOOK ABOUT THE NOBEL PRIZES. The rest of the press carried similar streamers. One newspaper insisted that I was “dead wrong” to think that Scandinavian publishers would ever boycott a book for any reason.
But I was not dead wrong. I was dead right. The Oslo Aftenposten decided to interview Norwegian publishers and learn the truth. They pursued Gyldendals, my publisher in Norway, and the director of this firm, Harald Grieg, told them, “The reasons we do not want it are many … It gives a false impression of the Nobel committees’ function and depicts the prize winners in a fashion which does not at all correspond with the truth. It would be entirely unnatural for our firm, which has brought out more works by Nobel Prize winners than any other Norwegian firm, to publish it.” The Aftenposten then spoke to Ragnar Wold, head of E. G. Mortensen’s, who had also refused to publish The Prize. “We found it would be altogether too dangerous a project to embark upon, what with all the little details and relationships the author describes which we cannot prove. Also, the book is highly uncomplimentary to the Swedes. This is true not only of the prize givers, but of Swedes in general. But I want it understood there has been no pressure put upon us except in the sense that the Swedish people are sticking together on this.”
To this day, The Prize has not been published in Sweden, Norway, or Denmark, although in the years since, these three countries have brought out editions of either The Man or The Plot, two of my later novels.
Among the actual Nobel Prize winners who had read the book, at least among those I heard from or about, there were reactions as strong as those I had heard from Scandinavia. However, the reactions of the laureates were more evenly divided for and against.
Dr. Ralph Bunche, who had been voted the Nobel Prize for peace in 1950, disapproved. According to Bent Vanberg, writing for the Oslo Dagbladet, “The Undersecretary of the United Nations, Dr. Ralph Bunche, has little good to say about Irving Wallace’s book, The Prize. ‘This is a questionable effort done in bestseller form,’ categorically replies the American Nobel Peace Prize winner as an answer to Dagbladet’s question as to his reaction to the novel. Dr. Bunche is thus the first Nobel Prize winner to publicly comment on the book.”
The next laureate heard from was Dr. Linus Pauling, of the California Institute of Technology, who wrote to my publisher objecting to “some errors of fact in the book.” Dr. Pauling pointed to a passage where I had a character in the novel speak of Mme Irène Joliot-Curie and her husband as members of the French Communist Party. The passage that offended Dr. Pauling appears in the opening scene of Chapter VII, where Count Jacobsson receives Claude and Denise Marceau, the laureates in chemistry, and senses that there exists some personal animosity between them which might develop into trouble before the award ceremonies. The passage in the book reads, in part:
“Instinctively, Jacobsson wanted this couple to be happier, to be drawn closer together. He wanted to inform them of how happy Marie Curie, the first woman to win the prize, had been to share it with her husband … But somehow, Jacobsson felt that this might not be the time for such examples. Yet there was his job and the dignity of the awards, and he must think of something to give the Marceaus subtle warning. Then he thought of Irène and Frederic Joliot-Curie, who had shared the $41,000 prize in 1935, and with them he thought that he might make his point.
“‘Indeed, you are in a select circle,’ Jacobsson told the Marceaus. ‘You are only the fourth husband-and-wife pair in our history to win the prize. We are sentimental about such awards, and the winners, with one exception, have made us proud.’
“‘One exception?’ said Denise carefully.
“‘I am thinking of your countrymen, Irène and Frederic Joliot-Curie, who won the chemistry award for their discoveries in radioactive elements.’
“‘What of them?’ asked Denise.
“‘They earned the award for artificial radium, and they received it here in Stockholm, and we would give it to them again. But their subsequent history, after the prize, was—in some respects—unfortunate.’
“‘They were a devoted couple,’ said Denise sharply, with an eye on her husband.
“‘Oh, yes, yes, nothing like that,’ said Jacobsson hastily. ‘Indeed, they were heroes of the Second World War. Frederic Joliot-Curie stole the world’s greatest supply of heavy water—then important in atomic research—from under the noses of the Nazis in Norway. He got it safely to England. And in France, despite the Gestapo, he organized eighteen underground laboratories to make incendiary bottles for the maquis. I have no doubt you know all of that.’
“‘Yes, we do,’ said Denise.
“‘It was their activity after the war that most Swedes deplored,’ said Jacobsson. ‘They joined the French Communist Party. And Irène Joliot-Curie told an American visitor that the United States was uncivilized, and that the workingmen should overthrow the government. I remember more that she said, for I have recorded all in my Notes. She told the American, “You are deliberately fomenting war. You are imperialists, and you want war. You will attack the U.S.S.R., but it will conquer you through the power of its idea.” I tell you, this caused much headshaking in the Swedish Academy of Science.’
“‘Unfortunate,’ said Claude. ‘However, surely you judge by the scientific achievement of your laureates, not by their personal activities.’
“‘True,’ said Jacobsson. And then, he added slowly, ‘Still, our laureates are so much looked up to, so widely respected, that when they commit scandals we are unhappy—extremely unhappy.’
“The shaft, motivated by instinct and not information, hit its targets, Jacobsson was certain. For Denise regarded her husband coldly, and Claude avoided her gaze and lifted his heavy-set frame from the sofa.”
Dr. Linus Pauling had not liked that passage at all.
In his letter, Dr. Pauling said that he had met Mme Joliot-Curie in her laboratory in 1952, and that she had personally told him that she was not a member of the Communist Party and had never been one. Furthermore, Dr. Pauling doubted the truth of Jacobsson’s statement in the passage that indicated Mme Joliot-Curie had been anti-American. Since the Madame was dead and could not defend herself, said Dr. Pauling, he felt that it was his duty to come to her defense. Also, he felt it his duty to come to the defense of the Nobel Foundation, since I had attributed my quotations to a fictional member of the Foundation. As a whole, the tone of Dr. Pauling’s letter was testy.
My publisher forwarded the protest to me, suggesting that I might want to reply to Dr. Pauling. This I did directly. Here, in part, is my reply to Dr. Pauling:
“Let me say at once that I have always had tremendous respect for Madame Joliot-Curie’s achievements in chemistry. I make factual mention of these achievements in my novel, just as I salute the genius and bravery of her husband. At the same time, I have somewhat less respect for the late Madame’s politics and her public utterances in fields outside of science.
“I am quite aware that the Madame is dead and cannot defend herself. I do not feel this is an issue. If one were barred from writing about the dead, there would be no more history. However, in a manner of speaking, Madame Joliot-Curie is quite alive, for she has left a published record of her beliefs as well as her accomplishments. As a public figure, her surviving record of speeches and interviews in France and America also remains to reflect her life. And, to the end, these speeches and interviews were anti-democracy, anti-Unitcd States, pro-Communist, pro-U.S.S.R …
“Do not misunderstand me, Dr. Pauling. I am not saying that her political judgments were not always justified. I am merely saying that they are what they are, and they exist, and that many liberal democrats in the United States, France, Sweden found them objectionable.
“In my novel, I was writing a work of fiction, shot through with factual conversation, almost all of it substantiated by solid sources. When my fictional character of Count Jacobsson spoke of the Joliot-Curies, he spoke as a character in a story. He was not necessarily wearing my cap or thoughts. He was making a story point for two other fictional characters—and the Joliot-Curies seemed to me an excellent example of the point he was trying to make. By this, I am not disavowing my responsibility for what my invented characters say. I merely remind you of my motivation.
“Now let me take up, specifically, your three objections.
1. You are correct in pointing out that Madame Joliot-Curie was not a Communist in the card-carrying sense. Technically, I am in error on page 371 to have a character remark, ‘They joined the Communist Party.’ The slip is regrettable [I made sure it was corrected in the third edition], and I can find only one way to explain it: even though Madame Joliot-Curie did not join the Communist Party, it always appeared to me, from the evidence on hand, that she was far more fervent a Communist or fellow traveler than her husband who held a card.
2. As to the anti-American statements I attribute to Madame Joliot-Curie, I find no reason to revise them. The Madame’s affection for the U.S.S.R. and its system, and her dislike of ‘Fascist’ United States, are a matter of printed record in a wide variety of publications.
3. There is no necessity for you to defend the Nobel Foundation against anything I have written. The Foundation, through correspondence I have on hand, through admitting me inside its doors, was entirely cooperative during both my visits to Stockholm. In Count Bertil Jacobsson, fictional spokesman of the Foundation, I tried to create one of the most sympathetic and likeable characters in a long book … Since you have forwarded a copy of your original letter to Professor Arne Tiselius, a scientist I have never met but always admired, I hope you will be kind enough to forward to him a copy of this reply to you.”
Dr. Linus Pauling hopped on the last. Two days later he was writing me that he could not resist making a comment on the fact that while I admitted I had never met Professor Tiselius, in my printed acknowledgments I had expressed gratefulness to the professor for research help.
This was nasty, and I was irritated. I replied to Dr. Pauling’s letter with the following: “At this rate, we will become pen pals.” I added: “At the end of a last letter to me, dated March 21, 1961, a member of the Nobel Foundation replied to my questions and reminded me that the new Chairman of the Foundation was Professor Arne Tiselius. In short, I was being told that the cooperation I was receiving was under the guidance of Professor Tiselius … I had never met the professor. On the other hand, I owed thanks to him for permitting members of his staff to answer my inquiries in detail. Therefore, I thanked him in the book …”
A few days later, I was able to write my publisher, Peter Schwed, of a happier reaction from a Nobel laureate. “A psychiatrist friend just telephoned. She was down in La Jolla yesterday and saw Dr. H. C. Urey, winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry (1934), lolling on the beach reading The Prize. She inquired how he liked it. He said he had just begun, loved it, and both he and his wife were wild about Dr. Garrett’s group therapy session and Garrett’s obsession with Farelli.”
One evening in this hectic period, attending a big-name dinner party, I met the wife of a prominent recent Nobel Prize winner. She told me that she had enjoyed most of the book—”all except that absolute nonsense about Dr. Claude Marceau’s having an affair behind his wife’s back—it was unbelievable—you simply don’t know—I’m married to a Nobel Prize winner, and neither he nor his Nobel winner friends behave like that—they’re just not that sort, and they’re far too preoccupied with their work.” Just three years later, at another dinner party, 1 met this same Nobel Prize winner’s wife again, and she was contrite and apologetic. “My God, what a fool I was,” she said. “I was absolutely naive when I told you that what you’d written was improbable. At that very time—but how could I know?—my husband was having an affair with some younger woman, some slut. Winning the prize had gone to his head. He’d become a public figure. And there were available women everywhere, especially this one, and what happened was just like in your novel. The damn fool. Well, we’re getting a divorce….”
Almost every year since the publication of my novel, I learn of some Nobel Prize laureate who is reading The Prize. In 1964, the Negro periodical Jet wrote, “The two books gracing the hospital bedside table of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Atlanta, the day he received official notice that he was the 1964 winner of the coveted Nobel Peace Prize: Irving Wallace’s The Prize, a novel about the behind-the-scenes politicking for the Nobel Prize, and Roger Schutz’s This Day Belongs to God.” A photograph of Dr. King reading The Prize in his hospital bed decorates one wall of my study.
In November of 1965, I was invited to a dinner party given by some friends to celebrate the winning of a Nobel Prize by a friend of theirs. The guest of honor was Dr. Richard P. Feynman, of the California Institute of Technology, who had just been notified that he was one of the winners of the 1965 Nobel Prize in physics. At the dinner party I was seated across from Dr. Feynman, a colorful and arresting conversationalist. Dr. Feynman told me that in the week since he’d won the prize, three different people had given him my book as a gift. He suspected that in this way each of them hoped to prepare him for his trip to Sweden. According to my journal:
“Dr. Feynman said that he has read The Prize, and ever since—all of this spoken with mock seriousness—he had been wondering whether he would undergo adventures similar to those that befell Andrew Craig in Stockholm. In any case, he said, he rather hoped that the Swedish government would assign Count Jacobsson to look after him.
“Since finishing the book, Dr. Feynman went on, he had been wondering about one passage. Did the Nobel committees really investigate the personal lives of winners before giving the award, as I had written in my novel? I said, Yes, they certainly did. Dr. Feynman shook his head, pretending to be grave and troubled, and then he said, Well, that finally explained something that had been puzzling him. He had made his prize-winning discovery in 1949, but he had not been honored for it until 1965. And then he added jocularly, Now he could see it was his personal life that had probably kept him from getting the award those many years—until the Nobel people finally saw that he had settled down with his third wife and that now they’d had a child, and that he, himself, was the model of a family man.”
Parenthetically, I might add that in 1965 I also had an encounter with Dr. Edward Teller, the renowned nuclear physicist and so-called ‘Father of the H-Bomb’, who was often spoken of as being a contender for a Nobel Prize. I had received a wire from Dr. Teller, whom I’d never met, stating he was in the city and asking me to call him. I telephoned, and Dr. Teller, speaking with a heavy Hungarian accent, answered. He said that he admired my work, and invited me to a cocktail party being given for him by a UCLA professor. At the party, I found Dr. Teller overconfident of his own opinion, contentious in all matters, and interesting. According to my journal: “Dr. Teller said that he had read The Prize, which he considered ‘too fanciful to constructively criticize,’ and later he had read The Man and of this he said, ‘I have less criticism because you deal with an area I know less about.’“ In my journal I added one final rueful note anent Dr. Teller: “I imagine that he can be a stimulating but not an easy friend.”
Meanwhile, through the remaining months of 1962, The Prize continued to receive what was for a book an almost unprecedented amount of attention from newspapers, magazines, radio, television.
Newspaper and magazine gossip columns carried hundreds and hundreds of items about The Prize. Some of these items were true, the great majority were exaggerations of fact, and a few were out-and-out falsehoods. While these one-line items or short paragraphs did nothing to enhance my literary stature, there is little doubt in my mind that they helped increase the public’s interest in my book. Here is a random sampling of the type of items that were appearing nationwide:
Sheilah Graham, NANA Syndicate: “I wonder who will play the nasty newshen in the movie version of Irving Wallace’s book, The Prize. This female of the fourth estate debunks Mother’s Day, the Red Cross, the Boy Scouts and refers to the great Dr. Albert Schweitzer as ‘an egotistical Teutonic tyrant.’ Is there such a real-life counterpart?”
Hedda Hopper, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate: “I heard The Prize is worse than Chapman Report and by the same guy who made so much money from Chapman he bought a villa in Europe. Hope he stays there. Prize smears American winners of Nobel Prize; it’s unbelievable.”
Leonard Lyons, New York Post: “All foreign-language rights to Irving Wallace’s The Prize have been sold, except in Scandinavia, where the novel is set.”
Robert Sylvester, New York Daily News: “How to write a best seller: Irving Wallace lived in a nudist camp for several weeks to get authentic background for sequences in The Prize.“
Dorothy Manners, INS Syndicate: “It isn’t set—but Ingrid Bergman will get the first chance at the role of the Swedish movie actress in Irving Wallace’s The Prize, all about the Nobel Prize awards. I’m half-way through reading the book, and it’s a spellbinder.”
Louis Sobol, INS Syndicate: “During his research for his new novel, The Prize, Irving Wallace discovered that back in 1921 the Swedish Academy voted the prize in literature to its secretary, Erik Axel Karlfeldt. Karlfeldt spurned the award, insisting, ‘Gentlemen, I must categorically refuse. This vote must be buried with us in this room. The newspapers must never know.’ So the judges voted again—the first and last time any such incident occurred. The prize went to Anatole France.”
References to The Prize took many different forms. The Reporter devoted its weekly full-page puzzle, The Acrostickler, to my book. Jerome Beatty, Jr., in the Saturday Review, used the success of The Prize to reveal that “in the trunk” I had five full manuscripts “that never saw the light of day,” among them a true adventure story of an expedition I had accompanied into the Honduran jungles and a biography of Daniel Defoe that I had written in my adolescence. Walter Winchell gave over his entire nationally syndicated column to telling “things I never knew” about the Nobel Prize, which he had taken from my novel or from additional information obtained from me. “The major fiasco in Nobel history, as Irving Wallace has a character point out in The Prize, “ wrote Winchell, “was the 1905 Nobel award to Dr. Robert Koch of Berlin for discovering a serum to cure tuberculosis—tuberculin. Six months after he became a winner, Koch’s miracle serum began to kill instead of save people!”
In the November 1962 issue of Holiday, Clifton Fadiman published a long article entitled ‘Awarding the Nobel Prize: A Do-lt-Yourself Kit’. Here he nominated ten writers: Robert Frost, Will Durant, Thornton Wilder, Aldous Huxley, E. M. Forster, Arnold Toynbee, Robert Graves. André Malraux, Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Buber. These men, he personally felt, should receive a Nobel Prize in literature but up to that time they had been overlooked. Fadiman added:
“At the moment there is among us perhaps a livelier interest in the Nobel Prizes than at any time in the past … American interest has also been stimulated by Irving Wallace’s best-selling The Prize. This highly readable novel is filled with fascinating Nobel Prize gossip, local color and inside dope. Many of the questions commonly asked about the awards are answered in the course of Mr. Wallace’s narrative.”
Clifton Fadiman made other references to my book. Among them, the following:
“Do geographical considerations influence choice? We-e-ll … Alfred Nobel’s will is explicit on the point of excluding nationality. However, read Mr. Wallace’s book, particularly the volcanic remarks uttered by his character Gunnar Gottling, and decide for yourself.”
Then, when the dates approached for Stockholm and Oslo to make their annual announcements of the new Nobel Prize winners, members of the press began calling upon me for statements relating to the forthcoming awards. In the eyes of the press, I had recently been elevated to the status of ‘expert’ on this subject. I was, of course, anything but an expert. I was simply a writer who had done a vast amount of background research for a novel that was in the public eye. But because I enjoyed discussing the Nobel Prizes, whose history was still fresh in my mind, and because I was eager to have my book read as widely as possible, I cooperated with the press and performed as an amateur expert.
A number of periodicals and newspapers were eager for me to predict the winners of the 1962 Nobel Prizes. Since I could not handle these requests on an individual basis, I prepared a detailed statement for Dan Green, head of publicity at Simon and Schuster. He released this to the national press, and it was widely reprinted. Here are two examples of how my statement was used:
Publishers’ Weekly, October 15, 1962: “Irving Wallace, author of the best-selling novel The Prize, has given high places to Robert Frost, Sir Charles P. Snow, André Malraux and Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal, in his recent predictions for the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature. He adds: ‘Had the literary prize been given two months ago, it could have been predicted with considerable certainty that it would have gone to 77-year-old Isak Dinesen of Denmark … Unfortunately her death may deprive her of the 1962 honor.’“
And the Los Angeles Times, October 21, 1962: “Novelist Irving Wallace, whose works include a current best-seller about the Nobel Prize, has ventured to draw on his knowledge of the Nobel selection process to predict the top contenders for this year’s awards. The author of The Prize conceded that ‘the business of prophecy is hazardous’ and then listed some of his favorites in the five categories to be announced within a few weeks …Peace—If awarded to an organization, the Cooperative for American Remittances to Everywhere (CARE) … Physics—Prof. Charles H. Townes of Columbia University for his discovery of the maser and Sir H. S. W. Massey of Great Britain for his work in upper atmosphere physics … Chemistry—Prof. Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat of the University of California at Berkeley for his work in protein synthesis … Medicine—Jointly, Dr. Hans Ussing, professor of biochemistry at the University of Copenhagen, and Dr. Arthur K. Solomon, head of biophysics at Harvard, for their independent discoveries involving the transport mechanism across biological membranes.
“Wallace maintains the judges’ selections are ‘the result of a complex process in which prejudices and outside pressures play a major role.’“
I was awakened one morning five days later by a telephone call from a student-reporter on the California Sun, the UCLA graduate students’ newspaper, and he told me that John Steinbeck, rather than one of my predicted candidates, had just won the Nobel Prize in literature. I confessed that I was surprised that neither Robert Frost, who had the sponsorship of President Kennedy, nor Jean-Paul Sartre, whom I had mentioned in several personal interviews because his gloomy outlook had such appeal to Swedes, had been the winner. I gave the reporter an interview about Steinbeck, which concluded on the following note:
“When asked if he considered Steinbeck the type of author he described in The Prize, Wallace said that the two men were entirely different.
“ ‘Andrew Craig, hero of The Prize, ‘ he said, ‘was not as prolific or as stable as Steinbeck. However, the procedures I described are probably the same as those that gave the prize to Steinbeck.’“
Nor did any of my other predictions for 1962 come to pass that year. However, if I deserved no ‘A’ in Prophecy, I deserved at least a passing grade, because two of the persons I considered likely winners in 1962—Townes in physics and Sartre in literature—were both named Nobel Prize winners in 1964, even though Sartre declined the honor.
The most widely published of the interviews I gave on the Nobel Prizes was one written by Howard C. Heyn of the Associated Press. It appeared coast to coast, bearing such headlines as the one in Florida, ARE THE NOBEL PRIZES BIASED? and the one in Pennsylvania, IS NOBEL PRIZE OUTDATED HONOR? The Associated Press interview read in part:
“Wallace says Alfred Nobel, who was the inventor of dynamite, originally planned only three awards—in medicine, physics and chemistry—but later Baroness Bertha Kinsky von Suttner, a confirmed pacifist, persuaded him to include a peace prize. She got it herself, in 1905.
“The literature prize was added last in the course of the planning, Wallace said, after Nobel himself wrote a horror play, Nemesis. It was so bad that his relatives burned every copy they could find after his death in 1896, according to Wallace.
“‘I suggest the peace prize be eliminated,’ said Wallace. ‘We live in a world of non-war, not peace. Furthermore, if the Nobel judges give a peace prize to an American, the Russians are irritated, and if they give one to a German, the French are annoyed. It has become too ridiculous. There was no peace prize this year and, in fact, it has been skipped 14 times.’
“Wallace proposes as substitutes: A prize honoring the social sciences, to a sociologist or anthropologist; one encompassing advances in botany and biology; one for the arts outside literature …
“Plenty of money is available for new awards, at the going rate of about $48,000 each, said Wallace.
“‘Nobel left the fund $9 million. This has now grown to $12 million through investments in Swedish real estate and $250,000 in Wall Street. If Nobel were alive today I think he would have been interested in some of the new fields I suggest.
“‘I believe he also would recognize—as his heirs and judges do not—that the medical award should be revised to recognize mental therapy and psychoanalysis. Imagine those judges voting down Sigmund Freud every time he was nominated! But they did.’
“He also feels a spot should be reserved for inventors, especially since Nobel made his money through his patents.
“‘It is incredible that Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers were never honored, although they were alive during the early awards.’“
There were almost weekly requests, during this period, for me to appear on national as well as local television shows, and on radio programs, to discuss the forthcoming Nobel Prize awards or my novel or my life as a writer. While I had been cooperating with newspaper and magazine interviewers, I found myself refusing television and radio interviews. These were difficult for me to decline, because I was told that this vast exposure to the viewing and listening public had a great practical value. It had been proved, according to several publishing sources, that such public appearances by an author, promoting a title just beginning to be known, could stimulate the further sales of a book by thousands and thousands of copies. My basic insecurity was constantly increased by these offers to parade myself on the nation’s screens and speak on the country’s radio stations. Briefly, once or twice, I wavered, said that I would reconsider, but in the end I held firm to my resolve.
Several reporters, hearing of my decision and remembering that I had once been ranked by the National Forensic League (the nationwide high school public speaking organization) as one of the ten leading debaters in the United States, wondered why I would not go on television or radio, and I was forced to discover the reason for myself and for them. Finally I was able to explain my decision. In its essence, it is as follows: While the writing of a novel is one of the last absolutely independent careers that exist in this world, it is also a lonely, arduous, and nerve-racking profession. Always, after having completed a novel, I feel that I have earned an added reward—release and relaxation from inner tension and self-generated pressures. To go then before large audiences as a performer, which I believe to be demanding on the nervous system, would be an abdication of one of the many rewards of novel-writing. And so, despite the gains I might sacrifice, I had decided to forgo public appearances to avoid one more pressure in my life. For me, if I may repeat it, one of the wonders of being a novelist is the complete independence that goes with such a career. The novelist is beholden to no one. He has no debt or responsibility to anyone, except to himself and to his art. This freedom to write as I please, think as I please, live as I please (within the boundaries of my society’s structure) is a way of life too precious to compromise. I feel that doing something that I do not wish to do, an activity that my entire nervous system rebels against, would destroy much of the pleasure that my chosen career gives me.
This was a highly personal decision. Many well-known novelists of my acquaintance would disagree with it. They believe that public appearances are important. They feel that, in an extremely competitive field, where almost thirty thousand new books are published every year, they owe it to themselves and their work to do what they can to bring their books before the public. And they may be right. But I suspect that many of the authors who appear on television and radio do so not only to help their books achieve greater sales, but, perhaps more importantly, because they derive considerable ego satisfaction from such appearances.
I felt that such group therapy was excellent for those writers who needed it. Certainly, it makes the writers happy, and it makes their readers or potential readers happy. I simply have found that, for myself, I do not require this, nor had I required it when I wrote books that were anything but bestsellers. Instead, I have preferred to confine my public activities to discussions with newspaper and magazine writers who wish to interview me. I find that these face-to-face, yet relatively private, confrontations are good fun and stimulating, and sufficiently useful to me and to my books. But I would not (and will not) join the electronic circus. That, for me, would not be fun. My book had been written. It was out to be read. In it, any curious reader might learn a good deal about me. If he sought to know more by looking at my corporeal being, I feared he would only be disenchanted.
And so I refused to pontificate about The Prize before television cameras or radio microphones. But I did continue the face-to-face meetings with the press in hotel suites and cocktail bars and small restaurants.
Following the series of interviews I had given on the Nobel Prize awards, the preponderance of other press interviews I participated in were concerned largely with my motivations and methods in writing The Prize.
After interviewing me for the New York Herald-Tribune book supplement, Joe Hyains wrote:
“Does Mr. Wallace set out, as it would seem, to create controversy with his books?
“‘Nothing gets me more angry than to read I set out to manufacture controversy or a best seller,’ he said. ‘My interest is in people and the hidden things of their lives. Sometimes I get carried away by this interest when I sit down to write. But if you examine anyone or any institution, there is bound to be a controversy.
“‘My instinct is to take what’s never shown on the surface and bring it to the surface. That’s what makes a novel…’“
Vernon Scott of United Press International interviewed me and then quoted me as saying:
“‘I did not write the book deliberately to attract a lot of attention and money. Naturally, I hope to make a living. My true motive was to write a worthwhile interesting novel. A man doesn’t spend 15 years in research and writing 768 pages just to cause a sensation.’“ In response to questions from Roy Newquist of the Chicago American, I said the following:
“‘You know, W. Somerset Maugham once said that a book is incomplete until it has a reader. I agree. A book that is unreadable, does not hold the reader, should not have been written or published. A book, whether fact or fiction, must be honest above all, and after that it must communicate, grip, entrance someone else. Otherwise it has no reason to exist, beyond feeding the author’s self-indulgence and vanity. It takes not one but two to make a book: the writer and the reader.’“
In reply to an inquiry from Contemporary Authors, I wrote the following:
“After I have an idea, the characters I need usually come to me automatically. I hardly have to search for them. Once I have a firm grip on these characters, I try to seek an unusual, fresh, storytelling way of encouraging them to perform. Developing the fictional characters usually leads me into specifics of plot. When I have the people and the plot, I begin intensive research into the backgrounds of these people, the setting, atmosphere and whatnot, and this delving usually spades up more characters and situations.”
In an interview for The Writer magazine, Martha Manheim asked many penetrating questions and I answered them at length. I will limit myself to two examples of our exchange.
She asked: “In novels such as The Prize, do you work from character to plot, or are you more interested in the power of a situation to move characters?”
I replied: “The wise ones who teach writing insist that to create a worthwhile novel the author must work out of characterization, from character into plot or story. I think literary history proves this to be partially right. While Gustave Flaubert conceived his Madame Bovary from an actual physician’s wife in Ry, France, and while the younger Dumas conceived Camille from a Parisian courtesan he had known, there is impressive evidence that other highly regarded books came about more from plot situations than from their characters. 1 need only cite Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which grew out of a spectacular adventure a real mariner had endured, and Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, which grew out of the Gillette murder case. Despite the instructors, there are actually no rules … Sometimes I create my books out of an idea or situation that leads me straight into character. If the idea or situation is such that it does not naturally lead me into character, I drop the project. Because, in the end, I doubt that any idea or plot alone can sustain a full-length work of fiction.”
Then she asked: “Is there any specific advice you would give the beginning writer?”
And I replied: “Among other things, I would like to say something about research. Many novelists feel that research is an alien word that belongs to writers of fact. These novelists believe that they should confine themselves to what they know, or can imagine, and include little else. I disagree with this notion and I am not alone in doing so. Too many young writers publish an autobiographical first novel about the odyssey of a young writer, and having done that, they write another autobiographical novel about a young writer and his parents or his wife or his friends. Well and good, and in rare instances this cannot be faulted. Thomas Wolfe did very well within the frontiers of himself. And so did James Joyce and Samuel Butler before him. But, to me, the limitations are deadening. The whole let’s-contemplate-our-navels-and-nothing-else school of writing easily becomes tiresome, to the author, his publisher, and the public alike … I have actually heard a young author complain that, while he had a wonderful idea for a novel, he could not write it because it would have to be about an attorney and his wife, and the author had never been an attorney or been married to an attorney’s wife. I wanted to tell this young man to go and act like an attorney for a half-year, seek some out, talk to them, sit in their offices with them, go home with them, live with them and their wives, and then he would know enough to pretend how it would be if he were an attorney himself … Another time, I met a writer who had a good novel he wanted to write that had to be set in Bombay. He had never been to Bombay, and felt that if he had not been there, he could not place his story there. I wanted to tell him, ‘Look, da Vinci didn’t attend the Last Supper, but he produced an authentic masterpiece about it. Novelists have written great death scenes, without having died.’ I remember when, after having read Lost Horizon and its story of Shangri-La, I met James Hilton and asked him if he had spent a long time in Tibet to get background for the novel. He told me that he had been no closer to Tibet than the pages of the National Geographic, where he did his entire research for that wonderful escapist bestseller.”
Research material obtained from other books is often quite sufficient for a project, but whenever possible, as when preparing The Prize, I have tried to visit the locale chosen for a planned novel, just as I try to get beneath the skin of each new type of character I hope to delineate.
When I was preparing The Man, I knew that one of my main characters would be a Negro who accidentally becomes President of the United States. I had read a great number of books about the Presidency, but I had not convinced myself that I knew enough about a President’s feelings and activities while in office. What I wanted was firsthand experience of the Presidency.
From Rome I wrote Pierre Salinger, then President John F. Kennedy’s press secretary, of my need, and he invited me to the White House. At our first meeting, when Salinger asked me what I wanted to see, I told him that I wanted more than what every tourist saw.
Not only did I want to observe President Kennedy close up, in action, but I desired to know how it felt to be the President. “I want to make believe I am the President,” I told Salinger. “I want to be the President.” Salinger laughed, and said he would find out how he could help me. He spoke to President Kennedy on my behalf, and President Kennedy was agreeable. And so, regularly, for ten days—just nine weeks before Dallas—I was given the freedom of the White House, and daily between two-thirty and four-thirty when President Kennedy napped upstairs, I was permitted to sit in the Oval Office or spend time in the rooms surrounding it, seeing what the President saw every day, and trying to feel it as he felt it. And all of this research, later modified and molded to fit my fictional character, went into the making of The Man and into giving my novel an authentic ring.
Other interviews I gave on The Prize brought out other aspects of my approach to writing a book. A particularly illuminating interview for me was one I gave in Paris to Marc Saporta, a novelist and the editor of Informations & Documents, the French cultural magazine. Saporta was discussing certain “conveniences and coincidences” in some of my novels, and as I defended them, I went on to discuss with him another area where The Prize had been criticized. Here is an excerpt of what I said:
“I’ve also been told I have a dangerous tendency toward happy endings, such as in The Prize. But I am at heart an extremely optimistic person. I am not childishly so. For it is also true that I have a balancing tendency to be cynical. I’ve seen so much that goes on behind people, their greed and hypocrisy. I am also dismayed by and curious about man’s condition on earth—why he was put here, so uniquely, to have so much learning and passion poured into him, and then to be snuffed out of existence so quickly. Yet the very miracle of man’s existence at all in the scheme of things excites me, and makes me believe that for every person’s problem there must be a possible solution. I believe man is too complex and gifted a marvel not to be able to resolve his own or another’s difficulties. Perhaps this is over-optimism on my part. Perhaps it is an anti-death wish. Perhaps it is my unconscious desire as a literary creator (playing god) to make over men and their lives in the best way possible. I don’t know. I only know that this is my nature, and that this is the way I was raised.
“My parents came from Russia and I was born and grew up in the midwestern part of the United States, rather than the tense atmosphere of New York. When I wanted to be a writer my parents encouraged me; my friends who had a similar desire were discouraged by their parents. My parents had grown up on Dostoevski and Tolstoi and thought the art of writing to be a noble vocation. I succeeded at it despite being very poor for years. And I think this comes out in my work. This, too, leads me in my books into a certain amount of optimism in the end about the characters. For, from my own life, I see what is possible in the lives of others.
“As for coincidences, I believe life is filled with them. I feel it is nonsense to say ‘we mustn’t contrive a meeting, a situation which produces such-and-such because this is a convenience for the writer to make the story go ahead.’
“A story creates its own truth. A novel does not have to represent real life, but one often has to go way beyond life to make it seem real.”
This, I might add, was not to be the last word on my leanings toward the relatively happy ending in a novel. In July of 1964, after having spent several days with me in California, Richard Schickel wrote an article called ‘The Big Money Writers’, which was published in Life. After a superficial examination of my life and career, he wrote, in part:
“Despite the myth that success corrupts, and absolute success corrupts absolutely, the money-writers form perhaps the most circumspect group of wealthy men in our society. They tend to stay married to the same girls, to keep the same homes and living styles they had before they made it. Wallace continues to live, without swimming pool, in the same pleasant but by no means gaudy home he acquired in his screenwriting days, continues to put in a seven-hour day at the typewriter—but with more hours spent each evening researching and mulling his work …
“‘Irving’s so optimistic about people, about life, that I sometimes think he’s neurotic,’ says his wife, Sylvia. ‘He wakes up every morning simply beaming.’
“Perhaps, in the final analysis, it is this quality that is most important in the creation of bestsellers … that the oldest kind of insurance a novelist can buy—the comfortable ending—is still very much in force …
“So, mothers, if you want to raise your boy to be a wealthy novelist, teach him first the secret of living a happy life. He may never win a Nobel Prize, but he might make a million dollars writing about the gloomy types who do win it.”
Shortly afterwards, in Chicago, Bob Ellison interviewed me for the Sun-Times. He referred to the Life article, especially to the point made in the article that most popular American novels “had several ingredients in common”, and that among these was “the proverbial happy ending.” Then Ellison read me the statement that my wife Sylvia had made to Life, in which she had said that I was so optimistic about people that she sometimes thought I was neurotic and that I woke up every morning beaming.
According to Ellison, I laughed bitterly at this and told him, “My wife and I didn’t speak for two weeks after that appeared. Because I said to her, ‘What kind of an idiotic quote is that? You know that’s not perfectly true. How can anybody get up that way every morning? That’s sickening!’“
In short, l’affaire Life was one experience that had somewhat less than a happy ending.
During this period, when I was continuing to meet with the press on my novel. John Barkham, book critic for the Saturday Review Syndicate, flew out to Los Angeles to give a lecture and to do several interviews. He interviewed me about The Prize, and then he wrote, in part:
“In one fundamental respect Wallace sides with novelists from Fielding to Maugham. ‘Storytelling is vital to the novel,’ he asserts. ‘If you can’t make the reader anxious to know what happens next, all the other things—style, mood, philosophy—are wasted. Storytelling is central to the novel, and I believe in it.’“
Another self-exploration evolved out of the meeting with Barkham. I had long observed that people who do not write books often ask people who do write books, “What is the theme of your novel?” Most authors, I would guess, do not know what the so-called theme of a novel is before or while they are writing it. They usually try to reason out a satisfactory, sometimes fabricated, answer later, when they are asked the question after their book has been published. However, the thought has frequently occurred to me that if people would simply ask an author, “Above and beyond telling a story, what were you trying to say in your novel?” they might receive a more honest and direct answer.
To his credit, when John Barkham had finished his interview with me, and was about to leave, he asked, “I was just wondering—I would very much like to hear in your own words what you hoped to say in The Prize.” I had privately rehearsed answers for questions about the book’s theme, but I was not sure they were true, and I felt that Barkham deserved a more thoughtful reply. I told him to let me think about his question, and I would write down a reply and mail it to him. Some time later, too late for the published interview but worthwhile for its having forced me to think about the question, I sent John Barkham the following:
“The central point of The Prize is that each of us—because of small or large emotional damages, and this made worse by the perilous times in which we live—becomes fatalistic. We become the cripples of ourselves and our time, dying gradually before we are dead—and the greatest prize we can have is the self-knowledge of the worth of living each full day with the use of all our resources.
“The secondary motif of the novel concerns my desire to humanize and make comment on the awesome things in our lives—oh, the Nobel Prizes, for example—to show these things towering above us are mortally made, an extension of us, in our image, for better or for worse. On this secondary point, I let Count Jacobsson speak for me in one scene:
“‘You know, on many days every November and December, people all over the world pick up their newspapers and read of Nobel Prize winners. They come to believe, without thinking, that the laureates are demigods, and that the award is divinely ordained, but I am the first to admit that the winners, often geniuses and saints, are not demigods but human beings. At the same time, I am also the first to admit that the awards are neither divinely ordained nor decided by judges endowed with superior wisdom, but rather they are voted upon by ordinary men, of fine intellect, but of human frailty … they are mortals—they have personal prejudices, likes and dislikes, neuroses, vanities. They can be influenced by others, and influence one another. They can be bold, and they can be frightened. They can be cosmopolitan, and they can be provincial. They can be overspecialized in one area, and completely ignorant in another … You see, they are wise, and they are foolish, but no wiser and no more foolish than other men.’
“When people ask the theme of The Prize—what does the book try to say—I believe the preceding gives the answers—the first, Craig’s lesson about living, and the second, Jacobsson’s evaluation of the greatest award on earth.”
All of the exposure of The Prize in the press, through the reviews, columns, news stories, interview features, helped generate great public interest in the novel. The week before publication date, the bookstores throughout the country had ordered 34,500 copies on consignment. The first indication that readers were purchasing the book, thereby depleting bookstore stocks, was reflected in reorders of the novel from retail stores and wholesalers alike. My publisher’s IBM machines showed the following figures for orders processed (which did not necessarily include all of the orders actually received) during the first ten weeks after the book was on display:
Reorders
June 5 to 12 1,570 copies
June 12 to 19 1,833 copies
June 19 to 26 4,000 copies
June 26 to July 3 2,705 copies
July 3 to 10 1,000 copies
July 10 to 18 1,400 copies
July 18 to 24 1,388 copies
July 24 to 31 1,500 copies
July 31 to August 7 2,200 copies
August 7 to 14 1,390 copies
These reorders continued to come in steadily for fifty-three weeks, although toward the end the weekly totals began to decrease.
Yes, The Prize was being bought and it was being read those early weeks. But whether it would eventually be widely read would depend, for the most part, on how the first wave of readers felt about the book after finishing it. If they did not like it, then its life in hardcover would be a brief one. If they did like it enough to talk about it, then that magical word of mouth would come into being, and the future life of the book might be considerable.
What did the reading public think?
Fortunately, Simon and Schuster happens to be one of the few publishers who make an effort to find out such things. They had a postcard printed with the heading A note to the reader about The Prize. On the card was the following: ‘Did you like this book? Yes. No. Please tell us in a few words why’. The card also requested, ‘Business or Profession’ and ‘Name and Address’. This postcard was inserted into every tenth copy of The Prize shipped to bookstores.
The public response to this postcard questionnaire was immediate and sizable, and it provided an illuminating inside view of the average reader’s reaction to a book he had purchased or received as a gift. When asked, “Did you like this book?” seventy-six percent of the readers marked an unqualified ‘Yes’. Twelve percent marked an unqualified ‘No’. And twelve percent, who had mixed feelings, wrote ‘Yes and No’.
The readers were most articulate in explaining their reasons for liking or not liking the book. Among the minority who had checked ‘No’ or written ‘Yes and No’, I found the following:
A United States Navy officer wrote from Gales Ferry, Connecticut, “The story was too pat and trite. Two faults dominated. Character development was dime thin. Even a good bedroom romp (which The Prize was not) grows tiresome with repetition.”
An electronics technician wrote from Chicago, “A good story buried in erotic pulp.” A housekeeper wrote from Sparrow Bush, New York, “Yes and No. Not nearly so interesting in theme as The Chapman Report, but impressive re the research done by author.”
Among the majority who had checked ‘Yes’, I found the following:
A housewife wrote from Setauket, New York, “Imaginative, well-integrated, interesting, knowledgeable, all told a most readable book about an otherwise stuffy subject. Loved every word and sorry to see it end!”
A librarian wrote from Avon, Connecticut, “It is a well-written novel with a different plot. From the first to last word it held my attention. That’s my criterion for a best seller!” A manufacturer wrote from Springfield, Massachusetts, “Beautifully written. New theme for a novel.”
A lawyer wrote from Miami Beach, “The author did a magnificent job in writing this book—its composition, its flashbacks, its tying-up of the many characters and events into a composite whole are all outstanding reading.” A housewife wrote from Dallas, “A fascinating, unusual and fast moving plot. A little bit of everything—intrigue, etc. Beautifully written. Have recommended it to all my friends.”
Beyond Simon and Schuster’s poll, there were two other tests of the reading public’s feeling about the book. There were the degree to which readers wrote letters to the author, and the tone of these letters, which were being forwarded to me by my publisher. I cannot adequately excerpt from the enormous amount and variety of mail that I received then, and continue to receive to this day. But I would like to give a sampling of extracts from readers’ letters to show their reactions pro and con, to the characters, stories, research, and writing problems that had concerned me and had involved my editors and myself for so long.
For The Prize, just as with my other books, at least ninety percent of the letters were favorable, letters of warm congratulations, thanks, praise. Fewer than ten percent were unfavorable. With no false modesty, I would attribute this percentage’s being lopsided with love-giving to the fact that the most likely letter-writers are those persons who enjoy a novel, are moved by it, and are thus inspired to communicate with its author. Those who do not like the book feel that they have wasted enough on the price paid for it, and see no point in wasting more money on postage.
The dissenters, as I have said, were few, but they were eloquent.
From Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a lady wrote me: “It strikes me as your being a bit contradictory—in one book the woman is an unsatisfied, frustrated, neurotic, sex-seeking beauty. In your new book you state you use a Swedish woman as a nudist to reflect the wholesome attitude they have towards their bodies and sex—your excuse for that is to encourage a similar attitude in this country—evidently intimating the American female is a frigid, overly modest woman with great inhibitions and vulgar attitudes toward the whole sex aspect. Why don’t you make up your mind what we are? Why don’t you confine your literary efforts to the study of the male sex? Why didn’t you make the male nude the symbol of wholesome attitude toward the body in your novel The Prize? Is it because of your own inhibitions—is it because the male body is obscene and vulgar?”
A gentleman in Atlantic City wrote me that he considered The Prize one of “the most valuable books in our time,” but then he added: “One thing only is hampering its value and this is the very often mentioned sexual episodes and their minute description. I hope you will be able to omit such parts in your next books so that teen-agers as such can read and learn from them.”
A married woman in Philadelphia did not mind The Prize’s being, in her words, “iconoclastic” for it was not my “sling shot aimed at the Nobel Institute” that disturbed her. What disturbed her, she said, was this: “My objection, Mr. Wallace, is that by clever use of thoroughly documented material, culled from the Institute’s records, you infused and confused your fictional laureates with the real thing, thus making them and their foibles a part of an institution that every school child is aware represents the highest recognition of human talent and contribution. Thus you defame, by implication, as the clay feet of your fictional characters drop their mud over the real laureates as you have them intermingle. Because the novel form gives you a certain immunity from redress, this is particularly offensive. I cannot let it go without comment, not because I am protesting a shattered illusion, but because I am wondering how you differ from the sensation-seeking sob sister you drew in The Prize.“
From Westminster, Maryland, a lady gave me a lecture: “In my belief sex is a beautiful and holy thing when used as God meant it to be used in the sacredness of marriage. It degrades this holy thing when it is used as a plaything or a joke outside of marriage or is dragged down to the dirt of unlawful lust. Sex should be kept private, as a holy and loving intimate secret between a man and his wife, not paraded obscenely to satisfy illicit passions. So you see because of my belief I could not finish your book The Prize …”
And from The Hague a gentleman wished to congratulate me on “this achievement of real literature,” and also to point out some flaws in the novel. He thought it strange “that a developed scientist like Dr. Denise Marceau seduces a young chemist like Dr. Lindblom to an adultery scene. It is beyond doubt that Mrs. Wallace would strongly oppose to such an action and this is the best proof of the objection I have against this development.” Several more objections, and then one final point. “Now, speaking man to man: I would not be keen on making love to a girl (Emily) just having told me her Ravensbrück story in full detail, with all the sexual intercourse she had to suffer. One can pity such a girl, but, the idea of going to bed with her is too strong for me to swallow. I would experience an anti-climax to love. Now my age is 64 and Craig’s 42, maybe this makes some difference.”
What seemed to permeate the reactions of the ninety percent who enjoyed the book was a feeling of involvement with its fictional characters.
Typically, a lady in Leawood, Kansas, wrote, “I actually believed what Andrew Craig said in his speech. I do believe it. He was and I like to think he is a marvelous character and I only wish I could meet him personally.” A male student at La Grange College in Georgia found himself closely identifying with Craig, and “seeing that someone could overcome the past like he did, gave me a little more hope for my own future.” A gentleman in Foster, Oregon, found the characters so real that he wanted “to wring the necks of some of them,” but by the end “understanding had replaced impatience and irritation” and “insight moved one toward charity” even for Eckart and Walther Stratman and Märta Norberg.
For an author, letters such as these represent the most gratifying public response of all. Most authors are perfectly aware—to cite but one example—that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s mystery stories will continue to be read year after year not because of their enigmatic plots but because the central character in each story, Sherlock Holmes, has become so real to the public that the London Post Office still receives personal letters addressed to 22IB Baker Street.
Many readers who wrote favorable letters gave one or more specific reasons for enjoying the book.
A married woman in Montebello, California, was grateful for a relatively happy ending: “Thanks a lot for having the book end good—I heaved a big sigh of relief!” A lady in Sarasota, Florida, appreciated what she considered patriotism in one of the characters: “I am not a member in any sense of the word of such groups as the John Birch Society, but if possible, a loyal member, slightly on the conservative side, of this great Republic of ours, and as such I thank you for your objective writing in the pages of the book about Professor Max Stratman and his views on our freedoms.” A female author in Riverdale, New York, singled out Emily’s past: “Because I am a Jew, I want to thank you for reminding the world 20 years later not to forget and so easily forgive Nazi concentration camps.” A married lady in Larwill, Indiana, took time out “in the midst of haying, gardening, picking raspberries,” to say that she appreciated a realistic novel: “Do you know, you modern boys have something—I can’t read Dickens anymore. Too divorced from the reality of today.”
And most entertaining of all, from a Constant Reader and self-appointed poet laureate, an elderly gentleman residing in Herkimer, New York, the following paean:
Wallace showed us, how Pegs can be Square
Originals can be Fabulous too, anywhere.
Chapman the Reporter and Barnum Showman wise
Hold no candle to the Nobel Prize.
What fabulous research went to the Marceau pair
Equally to Stratman—he with no hair.
Garrett, ate a carrot, like a lamb
Farelli playing showman like a ham.
Square peg Craig gentle as a dove
With Lilly and Leah tendering him love.
The Prize is replete with characters galore
It’s got everything—ask for no more.
Wallace with his skill, did it again
The Prize belongs in the Top Ten!
While the response of the reading public is often held in disdain by its more learned gurus, the literary critics, the fact remains that the public exists, and reads, and judges. For the novelist, especially the novelist who has not always been well received by the literary establishment, the reaction of the public is of utmost importance. Bloodied by attacks from the critics, the popular novelist can seek refuge and find sanity and reasons for survival only in joining with his readers, and he must echo, however feebly, the words once spoken by Mark Twain: “The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.”
And so the letters continued to arrive, good ones, only one bad one in every ten, and somehow the long years and lonely travail spent in preparing the book began to appear less wasted and more worthwhile.
To be sure, a certain proportion of the weekly mail had little to do with a reader’s liking or disliking The Prize. The simple fact of the book, of the publicity accorded it and its author, attracted a totally different kind of correspondence.
First there were the flattering letters, familiar to all novelists, that began, as did this one from Utica, New York: “I am writing to tell you how much I enjoyed reading your novel, and to request your autograph. I have a collection of autographs of authors which includes Booth Tarkington, Willa Cather, Rachel Field, Robert Nathan, Robert Frost, Kenneth Roberts, James Hilton …”
And then there were, it sometimes seemed, countless readers who wanted to be writers—without writing, or at least without having to write a book by themselves. All of them, it appeared, had lived dramatic lives that deserved to be immortalized in prose. A gentleman in Flint, Michigan, wanted me to ghostwrite his autobiography, and a married woman in Kermit, Texas, wanted me to collaborate in developing her own experiences into a novel.
There were the letters from a few more enterprising readers who, inspired by some historical reference in my book, had decided to write books of their own and sought my advice on procedure. As I wrote to a lady in San Luis Obispo, California: “I am pleased my reference in The Prize to the Emperor Maximinus of Rome sparked your interest in doing a biography of this unusual man. It could be a fascinating book. As a beginning, I suggest you check your subject in the following basic histories …”
There were readers who, having heard that the film rights to my novel had been acquired by a motion-picture studio, wished my assistance in developing a screenplay based on their story outline. There were enthusiastic clubwomen who planned to review my book for one of their organizations and desired added information on how I had written my novel. There were generous invitations to address gatherings in many parts of the country, and these came from such diverse groups as the Detroit Sisterhood of Temple Israel, the Long Beach Writers’ Conference, the University of Rochester, the Pasadena City College Library, the University of Wisconsin, the University of California at Los Angeles, the New Providence High School in New Jersey, the Centenary College in Shreveport, Louisiana. As was the case with television and radio invitations, I found these requests difficult to refuse, yet to one and all I wrote in this vein: “I am deeply honored … I must decline, with considerable regret because I have a personal policy never to make a public appearance on the lecture platform or in a seminar. I am constantly tempted to break this rule of mine, but …”
The greatest number of written requests came from high school and college students who had read my recent book—and perhaps my earlier books as well—and wished to write a term paper or thesis on The Prize or on its author.
A high school senior in Rochester, Minnesota, preparing a term paper and an article for her school newspaper, posed three questions.
The first two questions concerned the value of journalism as a profession. “What literary value do you think journalism possesses? Can it be employed as a learning device for writers?”
I wrote her that I thought journalism (which I had taken with great enjoyment in high school) could be of inestimable help to a future novelist. It would teach her to write with economy, to write on a variety of subjects, and to write under every sort of adverse condition. But I felt that journalism was useful only up to a point. At that point, the writer could find journalism too constricting as to style and form, and then he must break through the limitations of journalism and attempt to write more freely. But many renowned authors have used journalism as a stepping stone. “The other evening, chatting with Dr. Allan Nevins, I was surprised to learn that even he had once been a journalist,” I reported. “He worked on the New York World, and then the Sun. After he left journalism for books, he became America’s most eminent historian and twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize.”
Her third question was more challenging. “Pearl Buck once said, ‘I can only advise anyone not to be a writer of novels if he-she can avoid it. Writing novels absorbs the entire life and being. If the sacrifice of life and being is not joyfully made, then it should not be made at all.’ Would you give the same advice?”
I replied that, for the most, I was in agreement with Pearl Buck. If a beginner wants to undertake a writing career because he thinks it an easy way to make a livelihood, then he or she will have a difficult time of it, will soon be disillusioned, and most likely fail. Too many beginners seem to wish to be writers rather than to write. But there is no such thing as an Instant Author. A successful writing career usually takes years of hard, solitary apprenticeship. Still, I told her, for one with talent and persistence and love of the word and the story, it can be the most satisfying of careers—since success in this field gives one total independence, freedom of movement, and the never-ending pleasure of discovering fascinating new worlds of one’s own creation.
From a Language Arts instructor at New Providence High School in New Jersey came a dozen provocative inquiries. One of the instructor’s questions turned my mind back to my own beginnings. “What effect, if any, did high school English have on your development as a writer?”
I told him that my high school English courses in Kenosha, Wisconsin, had been valuable to me. They had stimulated my interest in reading more widely. They had forced me to write. They had given me some understanding of the English language. But I remembered that as an English student my performance had been erratic, and my grades had varied from a towering A to a tottering C, simply because I had worked diligently only when the teachers and term-paper subjects had interested me. Whenever I had had a teacher who was enthusiastic about encouraging creativity in her charges, and who had not restricted us with too many hard and fast rules, I had then been stimulated and I had learned much. But whenever I had drawn a teacher whose devotion was strictly to grammar and who adhered to the textbook, I had performed poorly and learned little. As a result, to this day, my grammar is subject to lapses, my spelling is mediocre, and I still, to my shame, do not know the alphabet.
“I’m not proud of this,” I wrote my correspondent, “because it causes my publisher considerable anguish. I regret that I was not more attentive to grammar. I should have liked knowing the rules, as long as they did not hamper my creativity. I remember I had one wonderful high school instructor who felt that the most important aspect of English was to teach students to communicate freely, express themselves clearly, appreciate the wonder of words—and I wrote a theme entirely without punctuation, as an experiment, placing all the punctuation in a box at the end of the paper for the reader to use as he wished, and I was crowned with an A grade. I had another instructor who did not appreciate such freewheeling writing, and when I submitted one offbeat paper to her, she gave it a D and said to me that I could write as I pleased only after I had been published. The next day, I brought her a magazine that had in it one of my early published short stories. She fumed, but was decent enough not to flunk me. Looking back, I’m ashamed to have behaved like such a smart aleck. Because she was right, in a way, too. I was in school to learn the rules of composition, the words, the disciplines, and once I had learned, I could then go off and do as I pleased.”
The New Providence instructor’s question that interested me most was put briefly: “How long does it take you to write a novel?”
To this there was no easy answer. When does a book begin? When does it end? How can the time given over to a book be computed? When I am gazing out the window—daydreaming, remembering, imagining—am I writing?
I told my correspondent that The Prize had been fifteen years in the making. Yet those fifteen years had not been devoted exclusively to it. Exactly how many hours of how many months of those years had been occupied thus, before the first-draft writing began, would be difficult to calculate. One of my earlier books, The Fabulous Showman, a biography of Phineas T. Barnum, had been written in six weeks. However, possibly months of time, in the years before that biography was written, had gone into preparing me for those six weeks. Robert Louis Stevenson had written Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in three days. Feodor Dostoevski had needed only twenty-six days to write The Gambler. But Gustave Flaubert had given up seven years of his life to creating Madame Bovary. In recent times, Katherine Anne Porter took thirty years to complete The Ship of Fools. Yet she was actually working on that novel for a relatively short and concentrated period of months. Although Ernest Hemingway poured out The Sun Also Rises in six weeks, and Lawrence Durrell did Balthazar in six weeks and Clea in seven weeks, there is little doubt that Hemingway and Durrell had been creating these novels in their heads for extended periods of time preceding the actual writing.
How long does it take to write a novel? How deep is the ocean? How high is the sky? And what are the answers to Zeno’s nine paradoxes?
From a high school student in Warminister, Pennsylvania, who was preparing a research paper ‘on a twentieth century author’, two questions. “Why do you write in general—for money or do you see a different purpose? Specifically, why did you write The Prize?”
Why do I write?
“I began at 13, had my first story published at 15, and through all kinds of adversity I have never ceased writing. I write—have always written—because I love to tell stories, to create people and worlds half real, half imaginary. I write, as other authors do (and always have), as my means of surviving on earth—but if I could not earn a penny from my writing, I would earn my livelihood at something else and continue to write at night.”
And The Prize?
“I wrote The Prize to show how worldly acclaim can affect mere mortals, for better or worse—and, to be more exact, to show how the world’s foremost prize-givers are as human as the takers or winners.”
From a professor at Columbia College, in South Carolina, a request for “a statement about your personal philosophy of life and of writing, to be used in a course for language teachers.”
I reflected. I replied. I said many things. And then I said what I had meant to say from the start, and it was this—that when I am dead, the world without my being will not cease to be, and so I believe that every man, beyond what he owes himself, owes to mankind whatever he can offer in the eternal search for truth and wisdom. One of my favorite lines in all of literature, which extends and expresses my true feeling about life, came to me. This is the comment that Seneca made after hearing of a company of Romans trapped in an ambush. Seneca wrote:
“The three hundred Fabiae were not defeated, they were only killed.”
And after mailing my letter, I realized that I had quite forgotten to refer my inquiring professor to the last two pages of The Prize, where Andrew Craig accepts his award in Concert Hall, Stockholm, and speaks those words and has those thoughts that represent not only his philosophy toward life and writing, but my very own as well.
The foregoing were some of the typical letters that arrived bearing questions, forcing me to find answers. But there were other letters, easier to answer, which provided me with reassurance about my book, besides offering me amusement or satisfaction or pleasure because of their incredible variety.
There was the man whose father had tried to harness the rays of the sun, and who was delighted to find his father mentioned in The Prize. There was the vice-president of a New York wine and spirit importing firm who wrote that he was sending a case of their leading brand of whiskey, each bottle labeled: ESPECIALLY BOTTLED FOR IRVING WALLACE IN RECOGNITION OF HIS CONTINUING CONTRIBUTION TO AMERICAN LETTERS OCTOBER 1962. He was doing this, he said, because I had had Andrew Craig drink their brand of Scotch in my novel (and I promptly replied, “If a novelist receives a whiskey he has mentioned in his book, it opens up all kinds of possibilities. What about the Swedish girl I mentioned in my book?”).
There was the German refugee who wrote that he appreciated the “memorial you created for Carl von Ossietzky” in the book. He added that von Ossietzky had been “the conscience of democracy in the later days of the Weimar Republic, and so I am really grateful that you so beautifully revived the memory of this now so widely forgotten hero.” (Ossietzky, a German pacifist, had been a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for peace. Despite pressure from Göring and the Gestapo, he had accepted the honor, and I had revived this almost forgotten story to show his courage and the courage of the Norwegian Nobel Prize committee in thus daring to defy the Hitler regime.)
There was my former junior high school teacher in Kenosha, Wisconsin, who received a gift copy of The Prize and was delighted to inform me, “It came while I was teaching transitive and intransitive verbs to my ninth-graders. I showed it to them and told them how you sat right where they were, and now, says I very dramatically, see what he’s done. One boy raised his hand and asked in an awestruck voice, ‘Did they have transitive verbs then?’“
There was the man who enjoyed my novel but reminded me that the Talmud was too large for Dr. Stratman to stuff in his pocket. There was the woman, made distraught by the sex in the book, who promised to save me (to which I replied, “I am grateful that you are praying for me. In Sweden, a highly civilized nation, they would be praying for you”). There was the lady in Batesville, Mississippi, who had been deeply moved by my novel and who told me that she had had “the pleasure of knowing one Nobel Prize winner, the late William Faulkner,” and that “one of my father’s closest friends accompanied Mr. Faulkner to Sweden, and I have heard him tell of the events of Nobel Week.” There was the man who enjoyed my reference to Jules Silber as one of the world’s greatest spies, and who told me Silber was his mother’s cousin.
There were several letters from scientists and physicians telling me how they had been cheated out of the Nobel Prize by colleagues, or passing on some inside information that they possessed about the awards. One highly respected physician, who practices in Washington, D. C., wrote me the following inside story:
“It might be of interest to you to know that I spoke with one of the members of the Nobel Prize committee, who was active at the time the name of Harvey Cushing came up for selection as laureate in the field of medicine that particular year. The Swedish doctor, a medical neurologist, told me with some satisfaction, I thought, that after it became apparent that the Prize was awarded to Doctor Alexis Carrel some time in the ‘20s for a work which was subsequently demonstrated not to be his in origin, the Nobel Prize committee of medicine simply and flatly decided that never again would the Prize be awarded a surgeon. Therefore, my informer told me, to repeat with some envious glee, that the obvious reception of the Prize was denied to Doctor Cushing on this basis alone.”
There were a number of letters that forced me to examine attitudes or feelings I had had while I was creating the book. A gentleman wrote me from Brooklyn, praising the novel, but he worried about “two facets of incredibility.” He insisted a certain scene of lovemaking had not been written with sufficient detail to be believable, and that I had gone too far in writing that Dr. Stratman’s winning of the prize would give him financial security. To this I replied, “As to not describing the use of contraceptives in a scene of love, I simply did not think it was necessary. I suspect that Lilly was experienced enough to have taken care of herself before the scene began. As to the money, Dr. Max Stratman did indeed acquire some degree of security by winning the Nobel Prize. You are concerned that after taxes his Nobel money of $50,300 would have been worth no more than $15,780. It will make you happy to know that all Nobel Prize cash awards are permitted to be accepted absolutely tax free.”
A Midwestern physician found almost everything in The Prize “beautifully described,” but he had “one great question” to pose to me. “Why should one, a most capable writer, in combining the data leading to the winning of a Nobel Prize, have interlarded the material and story with objectionable scenes and language?” The question was an important one, presented with sincerity, and I gave it thought before replying. “This is an age-old question, one posed to authors for centuries,” I wrote the physician. “Let me take my turn, and reply to it as briefly and honestly as I can. You have made a value judgment about certain scenes and language. By your standards they are objectionable and get in the way of what you find interesting. However, in writing these scenes, I did not think them objectionable—obviously—but regarded them as part of the fabric of the entire narrative. These scenes were part of my total concept of how the characters should and would behave and how the story must be told. None of these scenes were, as you suggest, ‘interlarded.’ They seemed as natural and proper to me as the scenes you preferred. I presume you are referring to scenes concerned with sex in France and Sweden, and if you are, I can only remark that this was the way I found sex in France and Sweden (among such people), and my story would not have been imaginatively true or real without them.”
And from Nairobi, Kenya, a lady in charge of safaris wrote a letter of praise that included one interesting criticism. I replied to her, “As to your one small criticism that very few people in real life come to a ‘happily ever after’ conclusion, I can only say this: don’t be too sure that my characters live happily ever after. As a matter of fact, when The Prize concludes, the characters are left receiving their highest honors, but I am sure that Emily and Craig will go on to have the inevitable difficulties common to any marriage; I am sure that Dr. Stratman will have a serious coronary a year or two later; and I am certain that Dr. Garrett will continue to suffer from his persecution mania, if not because of Farelli, then due to some other cause. In short, in my novel, I tried to represent one exciting segment of each person’s life. What happens thereafter might take another book.”
Yes, the novel was obviously being read, and being discussed, and now favorable news of it passed from reader to reader by word of mouth, and its audience grew ever larger. The worst reviews had long since been forgotten by everyone but the reviewers themselves, a handful of pedants, and the author. The book was being bought and read and discussed and then bought by still others.
The publisher had prepared a first printing of 40,000 copies for the scheduled publication in June of 1962. But by mid-May, advance orders from bookstores were so heavy that the publisher ordered a second printing of 15,000 copies. By August, the publisher had gone back to the presses for a third printing of 7,500 copies. By September, a fourth printing of an additional 7,500 copies was made. And by November, a fifth printing of 7,000 copies was produced. In five months, 82,000 hardcover copies had been sold. Meanwhile, the Doubleday Book Club had made The Prize their January 1963 selection, and they were to sell 284,000 copies.
The national best-seller lists, which do not consider book-club distribution, reflected the sales. The Prize was on The New York Times’ best-seller list—the list regarded by the book trade as the most important one of all—for thirty-three consecutive weeks, on Time’s list for twenty-seven weeks, and on Publishers’ Weekly’s list for twenty-six weeks. All of this, of course, served to whet the appetite of an even larger audience, many of whom could not afford the hardcover edition but were waiting for the lower-priced paperback reprint. A year later. The New American Library issued this reprint, and it soared to Number One on the national best-seller list compiled by Bestsellers magazine, the trade journal for the paperback publishing field. The New American Library sold 1,400,000 copies in the first two years, and they have continued to sell the book steadily ever since.
The success of the novel in the United States, as well as its international setting, had attracted the interest of a host of foreign publishers, and during this period foreign editions of The Prize were prepared in ten countries. In Great Britain the novel was called, as it had been in America, The Prize. Elsewhere the title became more colorful: For West Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Kurt Desch edition was Der Preis; for France, the Gallimard edition was L’Envers des Lauriers; for Portugal and Brazil, the Portugalia Editora edition was O Premio; for the Netherlands, the A.J.G. Strengholt edition was De Prijs; for Italy, the Longanesi edition was Il Premio; for Spain and Mexico, the Ediciones Grijalbo edition was El Premio Nobel; and in Japan there was the Kobundo edition; in Israel, the Ayin edition; in Yugoslavia, there appeared the Bratstro-Jedinstvo edition in Serbo-Croatian, and the Zalozba Obzorja edition in Slovenian. These last four editions had titles that were incomprehensible to me. The edition published on the island of Taiwan, by a vagrant pirate publisher, was merely a theft of the American edition, reproduced by means of copying the printed pages photographically.
The first and most gratifying foreign publication occurred in London, where Cassell and Company, Ltd., produced an edition for their outlets established throughout the British Empire. In England, on the whole, the reviews were far better than they had been in the United States. But it was in England that I also received several of my worst reviews, as well as several of the best in the book’s history.
The worst individual English review was in The Times of London:
“The sheer mass, which to a sophisticated taste means overwriting, may be a manifestation of that exuberance and largeness of heart which also marked the English novel in its great days. Let no one complain, therefore, that Mr. Irving Wallace’s The Prize seems better suited for stopping doors than for reading; its subject, the award of one year’s Nobel Prizes, is not unworthy of such bulk. It is Mr. Wallace who is unworthy. His approach is not epic, but vulgar.”
The best individual English review was in the Illustrated London News:
“This week has produced a novel of such outstanding excellence that it deserves high precedence. Irving Wallace, the American author who wrote The Chapman Report, has now produced The Prize, a long, enthralling story … This book is quite the most brilliant example of this genre that I have ever read; indeed, I cannot recall any novel published since the war of which I can speak with such undiluted enthusiasm. In all its 754 pages, I could not detect a phrase or even a word—let alone an incident or a development—wrongly placed or ill contrived.”
Perhaps the British who were encouraged by the Illustrated London News review to read my book far outnumbered those who were turned away from the book by the review in the London Times. Or perhaps neither review had any widespread influence on the British public. I do not know. I only know that in Great Britain the novel ranked among the nation’s three top bestsellers for many weeks, and that Cassell sold 47,000 hardcover copies in eight printings, while in the Union of South Africa this same Cassell edition achieved the Number One best-seller position. Later in London, a major book club, the Reprint Society, sold 60,000 copies to its membership, and The New English Library issued a lower-priced reprint that sold 214,000 copies. Also, a Braille edition of the book was published in England by the National Library of the Blind.
Paralleling sales in Great Britain, many of the other foreign editions also had large sales, including the Japanese edition, which was published in three volumes, each one issued on a different date. The Prize received further exposure abroad when foreign magazines and newspapers either serialized it or ran extracts from it, and the publications using these reprints ranged from London’s Books and Bookmen magazine to Tel Aviv’s Hungarian newspaper U J Kelet to Tokyo’s Sunday Mainichi.
But all of this international acceptance came later.
Now, a little more than four months after the American publication date of The Prize, I was sitting down with my Journal to summarize some of the events of the year. On the early Sunday afternoon of October 14, 1962, 1 noted the following:
“The Prize has been a steady best seller. In many places, Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, it has been rated Number One. Today it is 4th on The New York Times list. The novels by Katherine Anne Porter and Anne Lindbergh have led me, and my book has competed with the books by the late William Faulkner and Robert Ruark and James Baldwin for the next highest position. Among the major reviews, except for three poor ones, the press has been running fairly good to excellent, and the scandal accorded Chapman seems to be put down.
“The majority of literary critics, so called, have not mentioned me and will not. However, my acceptance by the public outweighs this, and I am not too disturbed—but when I see pedestrian, precious, or pretentious novelists praised, people who do not communicate, when I see them spoken of highly, I am annoyed. Also, I am annoyed when my literary motives are considered suspect in articles—few realizing how honestly I try to write good books, how little I am consciously motivated by commercialism. The fact is, I suppose, I have a sensational turn of mind as to ideas and scenes, and while the public likes this, these particular critics feel I manufacture bestsellers. I doubt that I will ever convince any one of them how far, how very, very far this is from the truth of me. Few authors today, I believe, love and appreciate and seek, in writing, the true perception, the finely wrought phrase or vivid scene or character, more conscientiously than I do, and few work as hard to achieve quality, few prepare so hard for their novels (with research, with thought, by planning, by examining inner feelings) as I do, although much of my creative work is immediate and instinctive, as well … In brief summary, I have been extremely happy with the reception of my new novel. It is deeply satisfying to have achieved, before old age, some of what one dreamt in one’s youth. I recommend it to one and all.”
There was also noted in my journal, during this period, the diversion offered by stimulating evening encounters with new personalities as varied as Dr. Willard Libby, Professor A. H. Rowse, Commodore Walter Schirra, Dorothy Dandridge, Eric Ambler, Princess Saroya, Roald Dahl, John Kenneth Galbraith, Vina Delmar, Dr. Ashley Montagu, to drop only a handful of the names. But while such personages met at social gatherings were stimulating, they were less real to me than another set of people who remained uppermost in my mind. During those intense days, the only names important to me were still those of my old friends, Andrew Craig, Claude and Denise Marceau, Professor Max Stratman, Dr. John Garrett and Dr. Carlo Farelli.
For in the United States, throughout the latter half of 1962, The Prize was continuing to be widely read and discussed. As a result, on the second to last day of October of that year, I received a telegram from The New York Times Book Review:
FOR OUR CHRISTMAS ISSUE WE’RE INVITING THIS YEAR’S BEST SELLING AUTHORS TO CONTRIBUTE TO A LITTLE SYMPOSIUM IN WHICH THEY’LL TELL WHAT IT IS ABOUT THEIR BOOK OR THE CLIMATE OF THE TIMES OR BOTH THAT HAS MADE THEIR WORK SO POPULAR WITH AMERICANS WE’D BE DELIGHTED IF YOU’D JOIN IN …
It was a difficult assignment, trying to figure out exactly why one’s work was being read, but at last I joined with James Baldwin, Patrick Dennis, Allen Drury, Herman Wouk and several others in promising to contribute to the symposium. Each contributor was asked to write the equivalent of two pages. I submitted my two pages. Later, along with the other contributors, I was informed that our efforts would have to be cut by half or more, because of space limitations. As a consequence, The New York Times published only forty percent of what I had written. Now, in this biography of one book, I should like to print in its entirety the original and uncut statement that I had prepared for The New York Times. For, I can see, in having tried to explain why I thought my book was being widely read, I may have unconsciously explained something of my writing of The Prize itself. Here, then, is what I had written:
“When I was struck with the fictional concept of The Prize fifteen years ago in Stockholm, I was nearly unhinged by the excitement of having the Idea. Had any novel been available on the subject, I would have rushed out to read it. But there was none, and so I was compelled to create one for myself in my own brain, to enjoy it privately, to learn what would happen, before the inevitable desire to transmit it to others would come: The Idea of the novel was ‘popular’ with me, you see. That was first. I thought then of no public, no best-seller lists, no royalty checks, no acclaim. I thought of nothing except that here was a provocative story, and I wanted to know its outcome. Only afterwards did I put it to paper, black on white, imposing discipline on the dream. I shared it with others out of pride in it, and because I am by profession a writer.
“In the foregoing there may be some explanation of the popular acceptance of The Prize. If I have to write a book because I love it, to satisfy my own curiosity in the characters or its subject, then perhaps thousands of other people, too wise to live by dreams, but with the same interests I have, may want to buy or borrow some of my make-believe.
“Can our common interests be defined? I do not know. I can only offer some guesses based on the reactions to The Prize that I hear, or read in my mail. For one thing, most of us, I suspect, are impatient with how uninformed we are, how helpless to understand our society. We are conscious of life’s sleight-of-hand, and we want to know how things are in truth and not how they seem to be. Perhaps people read novels like The Prize because they are eager to get behind facades, both institutional and human.
“Then there is a second place where my author interest may merge with reader interest. We live in the Age of Anxiety, to coin nothing. Fear and inadequacy, in every area, infect most of us. To follow characters in whom one faintly recognizes facets of oneself—whether they be base, shameful, confused, or complex—or even facets not precisely one’s own, is intriguing and provides a sense of relief. By standing aloof from these paper people, unseen by them, the reader may watch a small part of himself, or of someone close to him, and know how it will come out, as he will seldom know how it will come out in real life.
“Also, the climate of the time is the climate of candor. As H. R. Hays remarked, society learned from Freud ‘that the innocence of childhood and the purity of women, two of its favorite illusions, were pure myth.’ Conditioned by the real world, constantly aware of it, more and more readers refuse to accept a lacquered picture of life. They want the unvarnished truth about life, as they know or suspect it to be, and they prefer responsible, naturalistic narratives. In short, man may have been at one time the only animal that blushed, but man has grown to regard the blush as an infirmity. He now knows the Queen has legs.
“Since you have asked why I believe The Prize is popular, I can only speculate that in some measure I am one of many storytellers who accidentally or instinctively voice the muted feelings of a body of American readers. I will never be sure, although some critics claim to be, of my exact point of contact with the public. For me, the mystery remains, and I can only continue upon my dream journeys with the hope that I will often have numerous good companions to accompany me along the way.”
My brainchild had been born, had grown, had made its mark, and I was ready to let go. For, with the coming of the new year, I realized that all that had happened to it was the least of it, important only at the time, but really the least of it. For what was the most of it was this—that a casual idea, big and exciting but actually merely an idea, so frail, so often nearly snuffed out, had finally developed and become a book, a world that had not existed before, populated and alive for me, its private Jehovah, and alive for all True Believers out there. What had begun on a rainy afternoon in Stockholm, in a conversation with an oppressive old Swedish gentleman, in a time when I was young, had been fulfilled at last … and one part of me was free, forever.