WHEN YOU ASKED me to speak today, you may have thought you were issuing an invitation; but you issued a challenge. This is the most difficult public statement I have had to make in my life.1
To think of “Awards and Award Winners” filled me with such conflict that my first reaction was to refuse, and it was only the vehemence of the reaction that made me have second, and subsequent, thoughts.
The first thing I noticed was that the vehemence was in conflict with itself. The argument was active on both sides of an opinion I had never consciously held. Until you asked, I had nothing to say; but, when you asked, the words came howling out. The emotional and non-rational response to the subject of today’s seminar is: “Awards are an irrelevant impertinence, a distorting imposition on a book, and I want every one I can get.”
I could see that this was not the most educated of responses, so I decided that I may best serve your time and patience today by dealing with the implications of my stupidity. Let me clear away the trivial and the uncouth first, so that there is no ill-feeling.
A writer has to live an insoluble paradox. He requires a public, and can achieve it only by becoming most private. I have been doing nothing else but write for twenty-three years, and have been published for almost nineteen. For four years no one knew that I was writing, and I had no evidence that I could learn to write. Now, if I were still unpublished, should I still be writing? Yes, I should. A more telling question is whether I should have written the books I have written, in the order I wrote them, and whether they would in all respects be the same books. That is: has recognition, of whatever kind, influenced the development of the work?
I feel that the books would have emerged as they are, but even more slowly. That is what I feel: and I know that I am wrong. The delusion of self-sufficiency is brought about by my concentration on the text at the time of writing it. Nothing and nobody can penetrate where this activity is generating its force. It is unstoppable, and knows only its own terms of reference.
Therefore, in the essential privacy, publication itself, never mind literary awards, is irrelevant. The only concern is to get to the end. Yet a book responds to one of the basic laws of physics: that every action has its equal and opposite reaction.
For myself, once a book is finished; that is, when I have discharged my responsibilities to the final proofs, I have no further interest in it. I do not read it. The printed object goes onto the shelf unopened. The total concern is answered by a total forgetting. I am not interested in what has been written, and find it hard to discuss my own work or to remember it. I do not disparage the work, but, by the time the book is launched and a response can be felt, that experience has gone from me and all my concentration is needed for the next. There is one egocentric divergence from this apparent disdain, and one fear. The fear, which keeps me from opening the book, is that I shall see either a compositor’s error, or a gaucherie I ought to have caught at an earlier stage: or both. The egocentric moment is that I do open the book, but only far enough to see the international copyright symbol. Then, at last, I know that the book has been written, and I rejoice and emotionally collapse at the same time.
Such attitudes may be idiosyncratic, but they are proper. They are the effect of the demands of a privacy that is needed for any birth. An attempt to distract by dragging up the past obsession to the detriment of the present will elicit a snarl: “What book? What award? Who? Go away, you Porlock Person!”
At this level, which carries great emotional weight, a published book is a sloughed skin, inert and non-vital, the physical residue of an inner process that can never be shared. The book is a by-product, not an end in itself.
That is the triviality that makes me incline towards the uncouth. I forget that the sloughed skin may have a virtue that can come truly into being only once I have shed it.
The tendency to be affronted by literary awards relates to an inner stress, which is over by the time the book is published, and has been replaced by fresh crises. Praise or abuse cannot intrude. They have no bearing on the activity. But although this aspect is foremost in my experience of a book the book is, or should be, more than the symptom of a neurosis.
The book has its own life, is made by many people, and it is the life and the making that are helped by the award. Just as privacy is proper to the isolation of the writing, so formal recognition is proper to the achievement. My failure to differentiate between these two aspects caused the conflict that welled up when you invited me to speak. I had let the strands cross, and I was wrong. However, once the main issue is settled, a third and hybrid matter can be seen. It is true that I should still be writing if I had never been published, but I should be writing less well. I have no conscious wish to influence anybody through my work, but the environment created by a caring, critical readership is healthier than unheard self-indulgence would have been. Privacy needs to be inviolable, but the result of that privacy needs a response from outside, my objections notwithstanding.
The enduring creative act is between the work and the perceiver, and each re-creation says more about the work, and from each re-creation there builds a momentum, which grows to a collaborative response, which I become aware of and am helped by. The help is not so much a deed at a given time but an atmosphere. It is more subtle than applause. Applause tempts the performer to show off, to please, to repeat. All that is damaging. The help I mean is simple. It is the quiet nod, the unostentatious sign that what one does is worthwhile. This leads to an interesting concept. Literary awards, which are very public, are based on many private readings, each unique. The solitary reader, who may never speak about the experience, by the act of reading adds somehow to the communal response and brings about the environment in which the writer may flourish. Then the privacy of the writer and the isolation of the reader are transcended and become a reciprocal dialogue.
It is a long way from my petulant flurry that “awards are an irrelevant impertinence, a distorting imposition on a book, and I want every one I can get”. I hope that I have disposed of “impertinence” and “imposition”. But I can hardly escape the question of whether my ambition, too, is not here a little gaudy.
The subject of ambition is difficult for me, since the whole of my training and thought is against it, and my nature is to be aggressively competitive. One of the conscious factors in my becoming a writer was that I had been an athlete; and I had had enough of feeding on the failure of others. In a race, the runners had been there to form a pattern in my wake, and, although they did not appear to mind, I, eventually, did. I began to look for a way of living where the drive could be made positive, where the competitor to beat would be myself. Writing offered the challenge, and there is no doubt that it soaks up the adrenaline. I have found the race that cannot be won, and it needs no stimulus from outside.
My one irreconcilable worry about literary awards is that they may introduce a sense of competition into writing. If that should happen, then creativity is undermined. Literature would not be served by an award that claimed to apportion the absolute qualitative “best” to what should be an art. It would be a frame of reference turned towards conformity and against experiment: more aptly applied to the growing of giant leeks than to the writing of books.
I would argue the point strongly, outside my particular sensitivity in this area. It may not be possible to write a book so that every word is penned towards winning a prize, but it would be a disaster if such a book did win.
For myself, although I hope there has been some improvement over the last quarter of a century, I fear that my concentration would be divided if I were aware of a scale of measurement outside myself I am still close to Charlie Brown in the belief that “winning isn’t everything, but losing’s nothing”. That apart, a literary award can do great good. It may be only a token, in itself, but it is the visible recognition of that sense of service I was educated to respect. It is the antithesis of vainglory. It celebrates the work, and all who have made the work. It is not restricted to the holder of the pen. It is here, in the common endeavour, that my ambition lies.
I have dealt with the importance of a public recognition. Far more gratifying is the private. Unpublished, the books would be less than they are because they would not have been edited, and, for me, the relationship with an editor is the most rewarding part of my job.
The physical writing of a manuscript is so panic-ridden and relentless that it can be compared only to itself There is no choice but to let it come. But the written manuscript does not live until it is read. The reading is the first evidence that the marks on the paper make any sense, because I have lost my objectivity, suspended judgment, in order to let the book come, and now I need help. It is the editor who rescues me. She (and I think it is significant that all the editors I have worked with, so far, are women) has to be simultaneously objective, ruthless, open, supportive and quick. No critic could be as savage as an editorial discussion, and few are ever as constructive. Without being partisan, the editor challenges me either to argue or to retract, but there is no acrimony. We are both at the service of the text, and we treat it as though we were discovering it together, which we are.
Then through the months leading up to publication, other people become engaged with us, and I see enthusiasm, an excitement that something new and significant is happening, and we are all equal sharers in the venture. It is a venture that, emotionally, never fails. The reason why it never fails is that I can rely on my editor to justify my faith in her. I trust her, and, as I have become more established, the trust becomes more and not less important to my self-confidence. And I trust her to reject my manuscript if it should ever be a poor one. With that assurance, I am able to let the story be what it is, not what I would restrict it to being; and this freedom makes for innovation and vitality.
I can never thank the professionals who back me up. They find the books to be their own reward. But, when “reward” becomes “award”, then it is deserved recognition for skill and caring, and the contradictions of my initial vehemence at being asked to speak today are resolved and make sense. A literary award is the way a writer can celebrate the publisher, and I, for one, have much to celebrate.
Finally, I was asked to say what winning various awards has meant to me.
What I have said here has taken shape because you, by your invitation, forced the issue, and I have surprised myself by what I found I have to say. When I first received a literary award, although I had never discussed the possibility, my editor (as an editor should) knew my drift, and, at the end of her letter, in which she had told me the news, she added a handwritten line to the typed words of delight: “Don’t you dare refuse it.”
Well, I did not refuse. To have done so would have been to trample on finer sensibilities than mine in order to make my own wrong point wrongly. I value the concern shown for what I do, and I thank you for obliging me to reappraise those values today.
I am left with one thought unspoken.
Excellence is always scarce, and, as the awards increase in number, I fear for the effects of diminishing returns. To those of you who are jurors, I would make a writer’s plea. Never let standards slip.
The work must merit the award, if the award is to merit the work.
1 This lecture was delivered to a meeting of the International Board on Books for Young People, on the theme of “Children’s Book Awards and Award Winners”, held in Birmingham on 29 March 1979.