Sharp verbal swords and glittering literary prizes
Last week I attended the award of the Catherine Pakenham Memorial Prize for young women journalists under the age of 25. It took place in the garden — formal, angular, fashionably flowerless — of a Bayswater hotel so smart and secretive as to be known only by the letter H. That is by the way. Catherine was the youngest of the famous Pakenham daughters and a little waiflike. I was very fond of her. In a highly competitive family which set great store by academic honours, she was the only one who did not get herself to university or land a glamorous job. She reminded me a little of Claire Claremont who remarked of her background among the brilliant Godwins, 'Oh, in our family, if you have not published a book by the time you are 15, you are nobody at all.' However, Catherine suddenly got a job on the Daily Telegraph Magazine, her spirits rose and all was glitter and dash. She came to see me in my office (I was then an editor) and told me of her good fortune. I took the opportunity to be avuncular. 'By the way. Catherine, let me give you a piece of advice. I saw you walking down Fleet Street the other day with a most notorious coureur des dames. You know who I mean? Allow me to tell you he has had an affair with at least two of your elder sisters.' 'Oh, I know all that,' she said triumphantly. 'But I've got him now!' This as though the man in question was a moth-eaten old teddy bear handed down through the gradations of the family. (Not all that moth-eaten either, since he is still, albeit well over 80, chasing young women.)
So she departed, eyes alight with happiness and success. A week later she was dead, killed in a car crash while on a story. Her grief-stricken parents, to keep alive her memory, created a prize in her name for young women trying to make their way in this dangerous field — dangerous, I mean, to honour and virtue. It has certainly succeeded, for during the 30-odd years of its existence it has produced many winners. I was one of the original judges and we gave the award to such fragrant young things as Tina Brown and Polly Toynbee, now leathery old battleaxes of the trade. (Prodnose: 'How can a battleaxe be leathery? Is this not an outrageous mixed metaphor? No, in the Museum of Norse Art in Oslo I distinctly remember an axe with a hand-grip covered in reindeer hide.) Though long since retired as a judge, I attend the awards every year to see the blushing young ingénues accept their trophies with a delightful modesty they will soon lose. Not always, of course. I recall one brazen winner who announced, 'Thanks ever so. And now let me take this opportunity to denounce some of the evils of the capitalist press. First. . . ' Nervous editors used to station themselves near the doorway to make a quick exit if such ingratitude recurred. Hard-boiled ones stayed on, to laugh and dig each other in the ribs.
I am sorry there are not more prizes for young people. It is, to my mind, the only justification of the prize system. The great majority of literary prizes go to well-known writers who do not need either the recognition or the money. The system goes back to the Goncourt Prize, awarded annually to the most imaginative French work in prose, preferably fiction, published in the previous year. It began in 1903. (The Pulitzer prizes go back only to 1918.) 1 remember a time when publishers used to sit by their telephones the night the Goncourt was announced so that as soon as they knew who had won they could put in a bid for the English rights. Now nobody takes any interest in who wins. The prize system is discredited. For one thing, there are too many of them, and as their numbers have increased so, it seems, the quality of writing has fallen. France now has more than 3,000 literary prizes, and no literature. And this is a country where. since 1958, the state has provided more money per capita for the arts than has any other country in the world. For a lament on France's gruesome situation see Marc Fumaroli's pointed book L'Etat Culturel. In Britain there has been a counterproductive inflation of the prize money. The Goncourt was at its most influential when the award was tiny but the prestige high, and it was left to the public to buy the winning book, as the Goncourt brothers intended.
The best British prizes, like the James Tait Black or the Hawthornden or the Duff Cooper, carry quite modest honorariums. But, beginning with the dreadful Booker, the prize system has fallen into the hands of the moneybags, the publicity hounds, the vulgarians and the unspeakable philistines of TV, with deliberately publicised and even stage-managed rows and stomach-turning displays of tantrums. The prize system, with big money at stake, has joined the Cult of Celebs, one of the salient moral evils of our time. Worse still, far from enhancing literature, it has corrupted it. We now have professional prizewinners and professional judges, the two roles often interchangeable, with all the consequent opportunities for unspoken deals. I once put it to the chairman of Booker McConnell, which founded the prize, that the judges should not be literary celebs but much closer to the reading public — booksellers, English teachers, librarians and so forth: people interested in literature and widely read but completely outside the cosy incestuous booksy world of cronies, vendettas, fears and loathings. He was, however, horrified by the suggestion, I think because his board members and their wives liked to mix with the literary celebs and had little interest in such humdrum toilers as librarians. I suspect that this preference is common among the business circles which donate their shareholders' cash to the promotion of literature and the arts.
So the tainted circus goes on and I now hear of publishers suggesting to writers how a particular book-project can be crafted to appeal to a particular prize jury or a certain category of award. Certainly entrepreneurs in this fashion art trade (as opposed to the professors of fine art) engage in trendy witch-doctoring to win that badge of shame, the Turner Prize, which has now become a joke even at village level. I recently had to judge the Turnip Prize, set up in derisive imitation in our part of west Somerset. Some of the 50 entries were a good deal better, in ingenuity and wit, than the sinister rubbish we are accustomed to see adorning the Tate.
I wonder what Dr Johnson would have thought of literary prizes, one of which now bears his name. Very little, I suspect. He would not have disapproved of the large sums now dispersed as prizes, holding as he did that `No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.' But he would have had the system run by the public, the only sure arbiter of literary merit; I agree. Having said which, I must admit that I am shortly to travel to America to receive a literary prize, and to act as judge of another, which dispenses no fewer than four sums of a quarter of a million each.
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