What has a writer accepted once a prize has been given, and is there any way left to say no?
In October 1964 Jean-Paul Sartre read that the Swedish Academy was leaning his way and wrote to decline in advance. The Academy replied that its decision had in principle been taken, and voted him the prize anyway. He refused it that afternoon, and he has been the man who refused it ever since.
Early in the afternoon of October 22, 1964, the wire out of Stockholm carried the Swedish Academy’s decision, and a young reporter for Agence France-Presse went looking for the laureate. He found Jean-Paul Sartre at a table in a restaurant in the 14th arrondissement and asked him for a reaction. Sartre gave him one. He would refuse the prize, for personal and objective reasons, and he would explain himself later; then he left. The reporter was François de Closets, and the scoop was his. The explanation was in Le Figaro the next morning. By then the thing had already been done to him.
He had tried to stop it. In mid-October the Figaro littéraire had reported from Stockholm that the Academy was leaning his way, and Sartre wrote to say he could not accept the prize, that year or any other. The letter is in the archive, which was opened at the start of 2015 after the customary fifty years, and so is the reply. The Academy told him its decision had in principle already been taken. Its Nobel committee had settled on him in September, and some of its members had doubts about him; his letter, had it come a month earlier, would have handed them an argument. As it was, the vote went ahead. On October 22 the Academy had his letter in its files and gave him the prize anyway. He was too late to say no.
In 1919, in Kermanshah, in Persia, a bank official’s daughter was born who would twice turn down a British honor on the grounds that the Empire it named no longer existed, and then, at eighty-seven, come home to reporters at her door and be told she had won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Doris Lessing said, “Oh Christ.” Then she took it.
Two weeks ago the Academy’s permanent secretary telephoned Anne Carson in Iceland, minutes before the announcement, and told her she had won. Carson told Iceland’s public broadcaster that the people who had chosen her were crazy, and told the Academy that she and her husband were thinking of ways to give the money away. Sartre’s refusal, Lessing’s two words and Carson’s first thought are three answers to the same question: what a writer has accepted once the institution has written its name beside hers, and whether there is any way left to say no to that. It is a question the prize never has to ask itself. A prize needs names, and names do not always need prizes.
I
The Letter
The record Sartre was writing into was already long. The Nobel nomination archive shows his name put forward sixteen times between 1957 and 1964, and in 1964 the Swedish PEN Club put him forward, one of two nominations that year. On September 17 the committee made him its top candidate. Reports on the archive suggest who might have won instead: Mikhail Sholokhov, a year early, or W. H. Auden, who never won it.
Into that record went a letter saying he would not be able to accept the prize “either in 1964 or in the future.” He had written to the Academy, he explained afterward, because he did not know that the prize is awarded without consulting the person who receives it, and believed there was still time. The letter itself went to the Nobel Foundation, which is why the Foundation’s archive keeps it; the reply came from the Academy.
When he wrote it is less clear than it should be. In his statement to the Swedish press he said he had read the column in the Figaro littéraire of October 15 and sent his letter the following day, which would make it October 16. As AFP relayed Svenska Dagbladet’s reading of the archive, the letter was sent on October 14. If the archive is right, he wrote before the report he said had set him writing. Nothing in the reports on the archive reconciles the dates.
There was a precedent, and it came from inside the room. At the end of the First World War the Academy wanted to give the prize to its own permanent secretary, the poet Erik Axel Karlfeldt. He declined in advance, in part because of that office, and it was not given to him then. It was awarded to him in 1931, months after his death.
In 1951, thirteen years before Sartre wrote, a French novelist had tried to decline in advance, in print. Julien Gracq had published a pamphlet the year before against the Paris literary world and its prizes, and he had reportedly said that if he were given the Goncourt he could only refuse it. On November 28, with the prize in prospect for his novel Le Rivage des Syrtes, he wrote in the Figaro littéraire that he was not a candidate and never had been; he was a “non-candidate.” The paper added beneath his letter that there were no candidacies for the prize, and so no non-candidacies either. On December 3 the Académie Goncourt gave him the prize on the first ballot, and he refused it. The jury said it had taken no account of anything said or written before the vote: it voted for a book, not for a man. By one account, the novel’s first printing of 7,000 copies grew to 127,000 after the prize.
Sartre was writing from outside, to a room that had already chosen, and on October 22 the Academy voted as its committee had advised.
II
The Doorstep
Lessing’s record was long too. The nomination archive shows her name put forward in 1972 and again in 1973 by a member of the Academy, the poet Artur Lundkvist, and in 1975 by a professor at Cambridge.
She had also been told she would never have it. At a banquet in Sweden, she said in 2007, someone close to the committee had told her that she would never win, and had given the reason: “We don’t like you.” She had found the remark graceless, she said, and had never found out why.
The honors Lessing had turned down were an OBE, in 1977, and a damehood, in 1992. In 1999 she accepted the Order of the Companions of Honour, which names no empire. She had not refused honors as such, only what those two said.
On the day it came, nobody could find her. Horace Engdahl, the Academy’s permanent secretary, told the Associated Press that she could not be reached, and her agent, Jonathan Clowes, told Agence France-Presse that she was out shopping and that they were trying to reach her before she heard it on the news. They did not. She came home to north London in a black cab, to a crowd of reporters at her door, and they told her. She was the oldest writer ever to win the prize, and the eleventh woman.
On the doorstep she was dismissive of the Nobel. She had won every prize in Europe, she told the reporters, as Swedish Radio reported that afternoon: “it’s a royal flush.” The Academy’s own list of her prizes runs from the Somerset Maugham Award in 1954, through the Prix Médicis étranger and the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, to the David Cohen Prize and the Prince of Asturias Prize in 2001. The Associated Press reported her saying that the prize meant nothing artistically. The prize is no longer given to the dead, and she said they had better give it to her “before I’ve popped off.” She also said she would be pleased by new readers.
Later that day she spoke to Engdahl, and to the Nobel Foundation’s website in a telephone interview. She had not yet read the citation, she said, and did not know what the Academy meant by it. She thought the committee had been put off by what it called her science fiction, a label she called mistaken, and by books that were hard to classify.
III
The Second Signature
Sartre could decline the prize. He could not decline having been given it, or the Academy’s name set beside his own. What he could do was explain, and he did so the same day, in a statement to the Swedish press that Le Figaro printed the next morning and Le Monde carried in a French text he had approved.
The skeptic’s case is simple. A writer who can refuse the money does not need it, and a refusal makes more noise than an acceptance. His own statement adds the best evidence. It opens by regretting that the affair had become a scandal. It concedes that a writer who turns the money down on principle deprives a cause of support. And in its middle it says that during the war in Algeria, after he had signed the declaration of the 121, he would have accepted the prize gratefully. A skeptic can read that as proof that the principle was a matter of timing.
The statement’s own case comes next. Its personal reason is that Sartre had always declined official honors: he had refused the Legion of Honor in 1945, and he had never sought a chair at the Collège de France. A writer, he argued, should act only by his own means, which are words, and honors press on his readers in a way he thought undesirable. His name alone and his name with the prize after it were not the same signature. His sympathy for the Venezuelan rebels committed only him; the laureate’s would commit the Nobel Prize.
His objective reasons concerned East and West. He would refuse the Lenin Prize just as firmly, he said, if anyone offered it. As matters stood, the Nobel looked like a distinction reserved for the writers of the West and the rebels of the East, and he named two writers it had passed over, Neruda and Aragon. Then he named the danger. The column that alerted him had said that a controversial political past would not be held against him. Certain circles on the right, he wrote, would read his acceptance as a rehabilitation. “It seems to me less dangerous to decline the prize than to accept it.”
That is where Algeria belongs. During the war the prize would have honored the freedom he and the other signers were fighting for, and he would have taken it. In 1964, with the battle over, it could only forgive him. It had come, in effect, too late to accept. That answers the charge of timing. Nothing in the statement answers the other two: he could afford to refuse, and the refusal was heard.
The Academy answered in a short address by Anders Österling. The laureate, he said, had made it known that he did not wish to accept; declining did not affect the validity of the award; the presentation could not take place. The prize was not withdrawn. Sartre is on the list.
IV
The Lecture
The Nobel adds a sentence of its own. Sartre’s citation, for work that ran from Nausea in 1938 to The Words in 1964, praised its wealth of ideas, its spirit of freedom and its quest for truth. Hers, after more than half a century of books, from The Grass Is Singing in 1950 through The Golden Notebook to five volumes of space fiction, called her “that epicist of the female experience.” Neither sentence names a book. He was fifty-nine; she was eighty-seven.
Each writer’s best-known novel is a private record. Nausea is the diary of Antoine Roquentin, alone in a seaport town with the bare fact of his own existence. The Golden Notebook gives its heroine, Anna Wulf, four notebooks, black for Africa, red for her years as a communist, yellow for a novel about her other self and blue for her diary, and then a fifth, golden, in which she draws them together. The Academy’s notes add that the young feminist movement took it as a pioneering work, and place it among the handful of books that shaped the twentieth century’s view of men and women. She said she had never been an active feminist, and insisted that the novel was no manifesto for women’s liberation.
The notes name more of her books. Children of Violence ran to five novels between 1952 and 1969, and the last of them, The Four-Gated City, is the one they call her masterpiece. They name Briefing for a Descent into Hell, from the years whose novels she herself called inner-space fiction, and The Summer Before the Dark; they say that with Canopus in Argos she expanded the genre of science fiction, the label she called mistaken; they name The Fifth Child; and they call her two volumes of memoir, Under My Skin and Walking in the Shade, a new peak. Her latest novel, The Cleft, had come out that year.
Africa came to Sartre as a cause: Algeria, for which he signed the declaration of the 121. It was where she grew up. Her family moved to a farm in Southern Rhodesia in 1925, and her first novel is about a white farmer’s wife and her black servant. She was a member of the British Communist Party from 1952 to 1956, the years in which he stood beside the French one as a fellow traveler; in 1956, the year of Budapest, she left the Party and he ended his years beside it. That year South Africa barred her for her criticism of its regime, and kept her out until 1995; Southern Rhodesia banned her after a visit. Nearly thirty years after she left the Party she published The Good Terrorist, which the Academy’s notes read as a satire on the left’s need for total control.
Sartre had written that a laureate’s sympathies would commit the prize. Lessing could not travel to Stockholm, and her lecture was read for her at the Swedish Academy on December 7 by her publisher, Nicholas Pearson, under the title “On Not Winning the Nobel Prize.” It began at a school in north-west Zimbabwe in the early 1980s that had no textbooks, atlases or pens, where everyone she met asked her for books and a man told her that they had been taught to read and had no books. It closed on a pregnant young woman in a drought, reading a torn page of Anna Karenina. Her sympathies, read out under the Academy’s roof, had committed the prize to a school without books. Her own library would go, after her death, to the city library in Harare.
The prize came to her instead. On January 30, 2008, the Swedish ambassador, Staffan Carlsson, presented her medal and diploma at the Wallace Collection in London, and she said that thanks did not seem enough for the best prize of them all.
V
Voluntary
Sartre’s statement had named one earlier laureate. It was regrettable, he wrote, that the prize had gone to Pasternak rather than to Sholokhov, and that the only Soviet work it had honored was a novel published abroad and banned at home. He was not, in that sentence, judging the book.
Boris Pasternak had learned in a week what the prize could be made to mean. The Academy announced his prize on October 23, 1958. Two days later he telegraphed Stockholm that he was “immensely thankful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed.” The authorities pressed him to give it up. On October 29 he sent a second telegram. Given the meaning the award had been given in the society to which he belonged, he wrote, he must reject a prize he did not deserve, and he asked the Academy not to receive his “voluntary” rejection with displeasure. His son Yevgeny wrote later that he could hardly recognize his father that evening.
The Academy answered through its permanent secretary, Anders Österling. The refusal, he said, did not alter the validity of the award, and the Academy could only announce, with regret, that the presentation could not take place. In 1964 he would give Sartre the same two answers.
In 1959 Pasternak wrote a short poem called “The Nobel Prize,” in which he is a beast caught in a pen, with the noise of the chase behind him. He died in May 1960 without the medal. In December 1989, after Doctor Zhivago had at last been published in the Soviet Union, his son was allowed to travel to Stockholm to collect it, and said that the tragedy had found a fitting end.
One refusal was pressed on a writer by his government; the other was chosen on principle. At the time, both were answered with the same two statements. The record has since drawn the distinction. The official Nobel page for 1958 now says that Pasternak first accepted the award and was later made to decline by his country’s authorities. The page for 1964 says only that Sartre declined.
VI
The Other Name
The Goncourt can be won only once. Romain Gary had won it in 1956, for Les Racines du ciel. On November 17, 1975, it went to La Vie devant soi, by Émile Ajar, a name Gary had invented. A relative, Paul Pavlowitch, played Ajar for the press, and the secret held until after Gary’s death. Three days after the vote, a refusal was announced in Ajar’s name. The Académie’s president, Hervé Bazin, answered that it voted for a book, not a candidate, and that the prize could no more be accepted or refused than birth or death. Monsieur Ajar, he said, remained crowned.
Lessing tried a second name too. She offered a novel called The Diary of a Good Neighbour, as the work of an unknown named Jane Somers, to her own British publishers first. Jonathan Cape turned it down at once, and Granada kept it a while and then said it was too depressing to publish; by one count, ten British houses refused it. Michael Joseph, which had accepted her first novel more than thirty years before, published it in 1983, and a sequel the next year. In New York, Robert Gottlieb of Knopf saw through it at once and kept the secret. Not one reviewer guessed. By her account the first book sold 1,600 copies in Britain and 2,800 in America, about what first novels sell. In 1984 she said the books were hers, and that she had wanted to show how hard it is for a writer without a name to be published and read. Writing in The Spectator that November, Neasa MacErlean wondered whether the first would have been overpraised had it come out under Lessing’s name. The two were reissued together as The Diaries of Jane Somers.
The Goncourt’s own doctrine is the rival to the idea that a prize needs names. The Goncourt, its jury told Gracq and its president told Ajar, crowns a book and not a man; on that view a prize needs neither a writer’s consent nor his name. Ajar is where the doctrine was tested, and the result can be read both ways: the Académie crowned the book whoever had written it, and kept the crown on the only name it had. Jane Somers put the same question to the market instead. When a critic who thought the novel good asked her American publisher why more had not been done to promote it, the answer, as Lessing tells it, was that there was “nothing to promote, no ‘personality,’ no photograph, no story.”
VII
The Money
Near its close Sartre’s statement came to the money. An enormous sum attached to an homage, Sartre wrote, was a heavy burden for the Academy to impose on a laureate, and the problem had tortured him. A writer who accepted could put the money behind organizations he thought important; his own thoughts had gone to the anti-apartheid committee in London, which opposed the regime that had barred Lessing since 1956. A writer who declined on principle deprived such a movement of support. In the end he believed this a false problem. He renounced the 250,000 crowns because he did not want to be made an institution in either East or West, and because a writer could not be asked to give up, for that sum, principles shared by all his comrades.
Eleven years after the statement, if Gyllensten’s memoir is right, the question came back to Stockholm. Lars Gyllensten, a novelist who sat in the Academy for more than twenty years and later on the board of the Nobel Foundation, wrote in a memoir published in 2000 that in 1975 Sartre, or someone acting for him, asked whether the prize money could still be paid. Two secondhand reports of the memoir both say the request was refused. They differ in how definite they are about who asked: the Italian paper Il Post says an intermediary, the other report Sartre or someone close to him. Only Il Post gives a purpose for the request, a humanitarian one, and a reason for the refusal: the money had gone back into the foundation’s funds, which is where the rules send the money of a prize declined, or not accepted by a set date. It adds that Gyllensten had the story from the Academy’s secretariat, and that Sartre’s biographer, Annie Cohen-Solal, does not believe it. The memoir came twenty-five years after the fact, and no document has been produced. A Reuters report of 2016, which gives no source, tells it a third way: Sartre had fallen on hard times a few years after the prize, his lawyer wrote to the Foundation asking for the money, and the Foundation refused.
The skeptic’s reading is short: a man who refused the prize on principle came back for its money. A kinder reading starts from his statement, which had said that a refusal on principle takes support from a cause; if the purpose was humanitarian, the request fits that. The Foundation’s archive also holds a telegram, undated in its published description, in which Sartre denied rumors that, having refused the prize, he still wanted its money. The accounts disagree about who asked, when and why, and nothing in the record settles which reading is right.
VIII
The Medal
Lessing took the money. On her doorstep, the Associated Press reported, she allowed that it was a lot of it, and said she could already see the begging letters lining up.
The strongest case against Sartre’s argument is hers. She accepted the prize, and what the reports quote of her about it runs through three registers. On the doorstep she said she could not care less. At the Wallace Collection she said thanks did not seem enough. In May 2008 she told BBC Radio 4’s Front Row that it had been a “bloody disaster”: all she did now was give interviews and be photographed, and she did not expect to write another full-length novel. The complaint was about hours.
She died in 2013. Four years later, on December 13, 2017, Christie’s in London sold her Nobel medal for £187,500. It was the second Nobel medal for literature known to have sold at public auction.
Karlfeldt’s prize came after he was dead, Pasternak’s medal went to his son, Gary’s second crown stayed on a name that was not his, and Lessing’s medal was sold after her death. In each case the last word on the prize was not the writer’s. The one refusal in this story that the Academy heeded was its own permanent secretary’s, made in part because of his office, and it held only as long as he lived. The prize needed the names; the writers, in most of these cases, did not need the prize. It was waiting for names, not consent, and that is why the no comes late.
The prize keeps the name. It may have no hold on what a writer does next: Sartre’s explanation, in print the next morning; Lessing’s lecture, which committed the prize to a school without books; and, this month, Anne Carson’s first thought, which was to give the money away. Her prize, worth twelve million kronor, will be presented on December 10.
What does a writer sign by accepting a prize, and is there any way left to say no?
⁂
Sartre’s statement is quoted and paraphrased from Richard Howard’s English, “Sartre on the Nobel Prize” (The New York Review of Books, December 17, 1964). The archive’s account of the committee, the letter and the reply is Svenska Dagbladet’s of January 2015, as relayed by Agence France-Presse in the Korea Herald, The Local and other papers. That the letter went to the Nobel Foundation, and Sartre’s telegram about the money, are from the Centre for Business History’s note on the Foundation’s archive (2021), with Agence France-Presse for the address; his statement says he wrote to the Academy. François de Closets’s scoop is from Agence France-Presse’s own telling, as reported by Slate.fr and by Dawn in 2014, and the restaurant table and the hour from Swiss radio’s archive feature. The nominations are from the Nobel Prize’s nomination archive; the likely alternatives from The Rumpus and Slate.fr; Karlfeldt’s earlier refusal from Britannica and his prize from nobelprize.org’s 1931 summary. The printing of Sartre’s statement in Le Figaro of October 23, 1964, Pasternak’s first telegram and Anders Österling’s answers to both men are from nobelprize.org’s pages for 1958 and 1964, and the record’s present wording from its 1958 and 1964 summaries. The second telegram is printed in full by Open Culture; Yevgeny Pasternak’s memory of that evening is quoted there and in Smithsonian, and his words in Stockholm are from the Associated Press, in the Deseret News of December 10, 1989. Lars Gyllensten’s account is in his memoir Minnen, bara minnen (Albert Bonniers förlag, 2000), as reported by Il Post in 2014, which also gives his source and Annie Cohen-Solal’s doubt, and by English Wikipedia; his career is from Britannica, the Swedish talking-book library Legimus and his publisher. The rule that the money of a prize declined, or not accepted by a set date, goes back into the funds is from Britannica’s entry on the prizes, and the later account of Sartre’s lawyer from Reuters, as carried by ABC News on October 25, 2016. Sartre’s dates are from nobelprize.org’s biographical page and facts, and his citation from its 1964 summary. Nausea is described from Novels for Students; Sartre as a fellow traveler, and his break of 1956, from Thomas R. Flynn’s entry in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Pasternak’s poem is described from its Russian text, as printed at Ruverses, with Anna Genova’s account in Russkiy Mir. Julien Gracq’s letter of November 28, 1951, and the Figaro littéraire’s reply are from the Gazette Drouot, and his earlier statement, the vote and the jury’s answer from Unidivers and Actu-Juridique. The Ajar affair is from RTBF, the chronology at Kronobase and Larousse’s Journal de l’année for 1982; Hervé Bazin’s answer is paraphrased from the French as Tribune Juive gives it from Le Monde of 1975.
Lessing’s banquet story is from Sveriges Radio and The Local (October 11, 2007), which quotes it; her agent’s words, and her saying that she had never been an active feminist, from Agence France-Presse, in the Mail & Guardian; the black cab from the Associated Press, in HeraldNet; the Wallace Collection from nobelprize.org’s prize presentation and The Local of January 31, 2008; the four notebooks and the golden one from Britannica; Horace Engdahl’s failure to reach her from the Associated Press, in the Daily Herald; her telephone interview that evening from nobelprize.org. The Jane Somers novels are from Lessing’s preface to The Diaries of Jane Somers (1984), which gives the publishers, the reviewers, the sales and the American publisher’s reply; from Neasa MacErlean’s “Alias Doris” in The Spectator of November 3, 1984, which gives the count of ten; and from the National Library of Scotland’s account, which quotes her in the New York Times of 1984, and the Museum of Hoaxes, which cites that paper and the Washington Post. Doris Lessing’s “Oh Christ” is from NPR’s account of 2013; “it’s a royal flush” from Sveriges Radio’s English service of October 11, 2007; the rest of what she said on her doorstep, and how she heard the news, from the Associated Press the same day and the next, as printed by Fox News and HeraldNet; the rule against posthumous prizes, in force since 1974, from the Nobel Foundation as quoted by NPR in 2011; and “bloody disaster” from BBC Radio 4’s Front Row in May 2008, as reported by The Local and the New York Sun. Her nominations of 1972, 1973 and 1975 are from the Nobel nomination archive; her father’s post, the farm, her years in the Communist Party, the bans of 1956, the Academy’s reading of The Good Terrorist, her literary prizes, the dates of her books, her own term “inner-space fiction,” and the Academy’s notes on The Golden Notebook and Canopus in Argos are from nobelprize.org’s bio-bibliography and its French text; the Academy’s citation is quoted as Publishers Weekly printed it, and her insistence that the novel was no manifesto for women’s liberation is from the Associated Press’s obituary; and her lecture from nobelprize.org’s lecture page. The honors she declined and accepted, and the price of the medal, are from Christie’s notes for the lot; the date of the sale from Paul Fraser Collectibles; the gift of her library to Harare from Fine Books & Collections. Anne Carson’s telephone call is from EFE, in Revista Mercado; her words to RÚV, Iceland’s public broadcaster, and to the Academy about the money from the Associated Press, in The Boston Globe; the sum and the date of the ceremony from nobelprize.org.
Quotations and figures were checked against the sources named; where a primary source could not be reached, the check rests on the reprint or secondary source given. Drafted with Claude Opus 5.5. Literary and copy editing by Claude Sonnet 5.5; outside reading by Claude Fable 5.1. The header and interior images were generated with Gemini Argus from prompts written for this essay; neither shows a likeness of anyone, and the medal’s face is turned away.