The Heywood Hill literary prize

Philip Glazebrook

Idaresay most writers remember very clearly what applause greeted the publica- tion of their books — the acclaim, the appreciative reviews in major journals when everyone else seems to have forgot- ten it. Prizes can put this injury right. A prize reminds us of the winner's abilities and of our own enjoyment of them: it sends us back to the texts. When I heard that Richard 011ard and Norman Lewis were to share the Heywood Hill literary prize this year, I went about the house to gather together from the hiding places to which unwatched books resort the various vol- umes of 011ard and Lewis which we possess: seven Lewises (out of a possible 18 or more) and five 011ards (out of about nine). I thought I'd just glance through them all, picked up Lewis's study of the Sicilian mafia, The Honoured Society, and was still reading it about an hour later. I could have sat down happily with any of those books in either authors' pile, and read for an hour or two with that positive sense of enjoyment which absorbs and elates the reader's mind. Like most people, so much that I read is what I must read: pleasure, as an essential element in read- ing, is not destroyed by the researcher's necessary consultation of many dull books in order to acquire information from them, but it is bypassed, it can even be forgotten as you chase names through bibliographies and consult indices and turn to page 1001 in yet another two-volume work on the siege of Herat held together by gummed paper in the London Library.

Pleasure in reading, the gift of pleasure presented by writers to their readers, is at the heart of the Heywood Hill award. As far as I know there is no short list, no runner-up, none of the usual ballyhoo of prize-giving by which a panel of experts draws attention to itself; with the HH prize it's just whack, and the arrow smites home. Patrick O'Brien has won it, so has Pene- lope Fitzgerald, and . last year a publisher, John Nicoll, was chosen. No specified book, but a sturdy contribution to the enjoyment of literature, was what was celebrated by the presentation of a £7,500 prize to each winner over luncheon at Chatsworth on 19 June.

We don't know quite how the choice is made, or who else was in contention. But people we can trust have done the deciding for us: if an enjoyable book could choose to live where it was appreciated surely it would have Chatsworth for its country seat and 10 Curzon Street for its town house. The shop and its staff are in a strong posi- tion to judge whether a book is enjoyed or not by the person who bought it, because their customers, instead of disappearing

forever with their purchase, tend if dis- pleased to rematerialise in the shop door, scarlet with anger, claiming that the Hey- wood Hill bespoke service has let them down, sold them a book which doesn't fit, `so I've brought the damn thing back'. Indeed it was their customers' reaction to the Booker prize winner in 1994, How Late It Was, How Late by James Kelman— not a single copy was sold in Curzon Street that first suggested to the shop's directors the idea of a prize for another kind of writ- er, the sort that sells well in Curzon Street, one who all his life has set store by present- ing his matter in a form which leaves the reader feeling enlightened and sweetened by the book.

It is rarely a book's subject which con- tributes most to its readers' enjoyment. The author's attitude, the personality he sug- gests for himself, above all the relationship he establishes with the reader — these all count for much, as does a choice vocabu- lary and piquant asides muttered in the reader's ear. It is not a question of the scholar dumbing down to make himself popular. Rather the opposite: the writer (following Isaiah Berlin's example) must contrive to make the reader feel himself lifted to a shared cloud on which there is not lecturing but discussion. No compro- mised standards: the critical glitter in 011ard's eye remains as sharp whether it is bent upon the evidence of a 17th-century witness in his Cromwell's. Earl, or upon the architecture of Maiden Newton in his Dorset Guide; his work, be it on Eton or Pepys, Clarendon or Dorset, is all cut from the same broadcloth. If, of the 011ard opus, only his Dorset guidebook were to survive destruction, men of letters in the future would be able to extrapolate from it (as they postulate a classical author's lost texts) the probable subjects of his other writings, as well as their manner and style. This per- sonal and pleasurable little guide, they would say, is the work of a scholar versed in 17th-century history, but a fox-hunting scholar (probably an old Etonian) with the wide general knowledge and elegant pen of a man of taste. Ex pede Herculem; they 'So we have your whole original manuscript edited down onto this . . . drat, where did that little brute go?' would have reconstructed the man accu- rately. The same experiment might be made with Lewis. His work is consistent, his moral position constant. Again there is no compromise. Whatever the subject under examination, whatever the locality, from Indochina to Brazil he carries with him on his journeys (travels which he calls 'the indispensable stimulant') the passion which unifies his work, always turning his rage against those present-day meddlers with the ways of societies so far unaltered by contact with the civilisations and religions and 'progress' of the West. Vehement and fiery against such interference, it is another characteristic of his writing that he is non- judgmental of the habits, however nasty residual amongst these undisturbed peopl.e.

even the old rural mafia of Sicily, with its cruel grip perpetuating a feudal society' even the criminals of Sardinia (his tone seems to suggest) must be seen in a context which defends their behaviour by exploring its history and its circumstances. To this

end he has a marvellous novelist's eye for the circumstances of an event, the extenua-

tion by which he makes the event itself acceptable; and it is most often those cir- cumstances — the lives lived of necessity by

Sardinian bandits — not the bare happen-

ing — their murder of two English tourists — which make his writings enjoyable as

well as instructive. I have a picturesque image in my mind of Lewis seated beside a king's throne, somewhere in South-east Asia, the pair of them deploring the inroads made upon the king's subjects

innocence by the arrival of the cinema in his realm. From that heroic fragment in inY

possession I could reconstruct the heroic,

the Homeric, the enjoyable Norman Lewis. Enjoyment, the elusive factor. Must it be present in all great books? I remember the elation I felt when I realised 1 was enjoying

Cellini's Memoirs — elation which followed many disappointments in seeking such

unfeigned delight amongst the classics.

About once a year in those days I used to try to enjoy myself whilst reading Tristram Shandy, but I never succeeded. You can fake or doctor many of your own reactions to a famous book, but enjoyment is unfak-

able. Can a book be a masterpiece without, being enjoyable? Which 'great writers' would have failed to win the Heywood Hill prize? A snap poll at the family lunch table produced blackballs for Byron and Scott, and (from an A-level student) another for the Shakespeare of the comedies, before quarrelling obscured reason.

I'm sure there was no such quarrelling in Curzon Street over 011ard and Lewis, but it is one of the many estimable things about the Heywood Hill prize that, because enjoyment is a matter of taste, in the end the choice of winner must be arbitrary, a matter of forceful assertion, which is in tune both with what we know of the style of the shop and with what we surmise of the habits of dukes.