BOOKS Prizes and the midcult
MARTIN SEYMOUR-SMITH
It was announced this week that the second winner of the Booker Prize for fiction, which is worth £5,000 and a trophy, is Bernice Rubens for The Elected Member. This is bound to come as a shock to any serious reader, especially in the light of the chairman of the judges' statement that: `It was not the reputation of the writer, but the quality of the book that mattered.' Here is the expected apology, no doubt, for not awarding the prize to an established coffee table writer. But what is surprising is the chairman's assertion of critical values. It suggests that this novel has some special distinction. This is not so. More to the point, perhaps, is that its chief protagonist is a drug addict, though not as ordinary a one as David Holloway would have us believe when he says, `the problem that [the novel] is discussing so brilliantly is universal.' In fact, The Elected Member most clearly demonstrates the superficiality of Miss Rubens's understanding of her own thesis, which is derived from the theories of R. D. Laing and—indirectly—Gregory Bateson. 1969 was, admittedly, a mediocre year for English fiction, but let us say so, instead of resorting to cliché and an appeal to fashion in an attempt to elevate the mediocre to the status of the distinguished.
The judges for the 1969 Booker Prize were, besides Mr Holloway as chairman, Dame Rebecca West, Ross Higgins (a bookseller), Lady Antonia Fraser and Pro- fessor Richard Hoggart. The books shortlisted, besides the winner, were: A. L. Barker's John Brown's Body, Eva Trout by Elizabeth Bowen, Bruno's Dream by Iris Murdoch, Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel by William Trevor and Terence Wheeler's The Conjunction. Of course, a largf number of other novels might easily have been substituted for these, in the sense that (ex- cept perhaps for Mrs Eckdorff in O'Neill's Hotel, which is both a clever and a funny book) this particular half-dozen are neither more nor less remarkable than countless others published last year. Few better straightforwardly realistic novels appeared in 1969 than Cliff Ashby's The Old Old Story (Hodder and Stoughton); is The Conjunction better than Graham Greene's Travels with my Aunt? And so on. The problems are insoluble.
Last year's Booker Prize was won by P. H. Newby; novels by Anthony Powell and by Michael Frayn—an extremely interesting and accomplished book, this—that were eligible were not even considered on the short list. This is a more serious lapse, and is absurd by any standards. But is the business of literary prizes and patronage really worth taking seriously?
The whole question is a delicate one. One would not wish to stop it—it is not, in itself, a bad thing. And from time to time someone gets some money; occasionally he is a good writer. Often—and this applies° particularly to recipients of grants of public money—he is a mediocre writer, a charlatan, a psychotic or `in a bad way': the Arts Council has cer- tainly supported its own favourite indigents, as well as plenty of bad writers, although it has been known to deny, officially, that it supports the needy simply because they are needy.
Given the nature of existence, I can't see that it is a bad business if at any given time a large proportion of the recipients of state cash are friends of so-and-so: there will be another so-and-so in his position (whatever it may be) in a little while. This is on the whole as good a way of getting rid of money and causing a little happiness as any other. But it has absolutely nothing whatever to do with literature; I do not believe that anyone who knows anything about literature will disagree with me.
Hardy, who did not have a rebellious temperament and would have treated Arts Council officials with courtesy, considering their fine intentions, pointed out that all literature is essentially subversive: it can always be traced back to a protest, if only to a protest by implication. The values of a writer can never really be those of his society; examples of 'writers' whose values are those of their society may be found in Soviet Russia. And the reasons why not one German writer consistently supported Nazism is simply that not one writer of value could or did. True, Gottfried Benn took pleasure in the Nazis at first, for private and misanthropic reasons; but he soon became an `inner emigrant', and from 1938 was not even able to submit manuscripts on pain of the concentration camp. His work was ban- ned, and may even have been lucky to survive.
It is of course very different in our own quite remarkably free bourgeois democracy. Our politicians are by no means gangsters or criminals—as, quite simply, the Nazis were, and the leaders of Russia are—and they do not often obtain the opportunity to behave, internally, in a gangster-like manner. There is a good deal of genuine, if private, fraternity between the establishment and the writer. But this does not alter the, fact that the soul of the writer cannot fraternise with the soul of the culture-clerk—of the pom- pous or of the cynical culture-clerk. That is why fiction that is innovatory, in the sense that Ulysses was, never obtains prizes. Such is the comic force of that book, of course, that it has become necessary for society to neutralise it by 'accepting' it and adorning coffee-tables with it.
It should be noted that it did not em- barrass itself by offering to support Joyce in his lifetime. The official policy is to support the pseudo-avantgarde; it is not possible consistently to support serious writers (although sometimes they get something by accident) because serious writers are by their nature critics of the handers-out . . . But some quite notorious upholders of the status quo have been known to make private and therefore meaningful donations to writers. The public gesture, however, is always in the direction of what Dwight Macdonald has well called `midcult': the 'deep' world of Charles Morgan, James Gould Cozzens- and, let's face it, Iris Murdoch.
A sour person might legitimately wonder what, for example, Lady Antonia Fraser was doing on the board of judges for this year's Booker Prize. She is a respected person, and I am sure rightly so; but she would be, I sup- pose, the last person to claim for herself pro- fessional standards of literary criticism. However, the presence of a representative member of the reading public can guarantee a `good read'; something `deep' or `deliciously funny' but not too incomprehensible or dis- comforting or rude. This is excellent. But we should not confuse any of it with literary achievement or literary criticism.
If our society really cared about its writers—but how could it?—it would see to it that every one of them (and not merely their own trained pseudo-satirists or tamed performers) would benefit from a public len- ding right. But as Mr Alan Wykes pointed out in an excellent letter to the Times Literary Supplement some time ago, things are not like that. Society ignores its writers; and its writers criticise it (and themselves inasmuch as they are a part of it). Prizes and public patronage have no possible relevance to the eventually private responses that must , characterise a genuine literary audience.
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