The Man Who Didn’t Win the Nobel Prize

    Jorge Luis Borges, the blind poet of the Argentine and the greatest writer of the 20th Century, was often considered for, but never awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Borges himself, in a famous quip, referred to the Nobel Committee’s annual ritual of denying him the prize as "a minor Swedish industry." The chief villain in this travesty was the late Swedish Communist writer Arthur Lundquist, one of a committee of six that presents candidates to the Swedish Academy.
    

               
        Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo,born 1899 in Buenos Aires, died 1986 in Geneva

     Among Herr Lundquist’s outstanding achievements during his long service with the Academy (in addition to blackballing Borges) was scuttling British novelist Graham Greene’s nomination for the award. To get an idea of the measure of the man’s pettiness and venom, Lundquist is quoted as saying, "Graham Greene will receive the prize over my dead body." The occasion for Lundquist’s wrath, apparently, was a lengthy affair Greene had with a Swedish actress.
    Here are some additional highlights of Lundquist’s career:

1958: Recipient of the USSR’s Lenin Prize.
1965: Championship of his buddy Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov resulting in Sholokhov gaining the Nobel Prize in Literature. Sholokhov, in addition to authoring one notable book, "And Quiet Flows the Don" was a life-long Communist, a member of the Supreme Soviet, a favorite of Soviet mass-murderer Joseph Stalin, a member of the USSR’s Central Committee, a "Hero of Socialist Labor," and vice president of the Association of Soviet Writers in which office he took pains to attack Alexander Solzhenitsyn in a speech to Soviet farmers: "...you farmers have done away with pests, while we, unfortunately, still have Colorado beetles [i.e., Solzhenitsyn] — those who eat Soviet bread but who want to serve Western bourgeois masters and send their works there through secret channels."
1967: Championship of fellow Communist and fellow Lenin Prize winner Miguel Angel Asturias culminating in Asturias being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Señor Asturias was succinctly described by a New York Times literary critic as that "Guatemalan windbag."
1971: After 20 years of proselytizing on behalf of Chilean Communist poet Pablo Neruda Lundquist’s efforts paid off as he managed to ramrod Neruda down the presumably deep throats of the 18-member Swedish Academy.

    One might think that with these credentials, Herr Lundquist would not hold political opinions and friendships with dictators against candidates when it came to handing out Nobel Prizes.
    Sure. Right. Except, of course, for Jorge Luis Borges who committed the Nobel Committee’s ultimate sin for a Spanish writer: Failure to be a Communist. Worse yet, after years of persecution by the Peronist regime, Borges had the effrontery to say things that all good leftists (Those Choice and Master Spirits of This Age) condemn to that special hell reserved for those who dare oppose the Church of Liberalism. Among Borges’ dastardly acts:

● Stating (in Spain of all places) that Federico Garcia Lorca was a second-rate poet whose fame stemmed from his fortuitous murder by Fascists. (True on both counts.)
● Announcing that the military junta that ousted Juan Peron had saved Argentina "from chaos, from the abject state we were in, and, above all, from idiocy." (It should be mentioned that he later protested on behalf of the desaparecidos — those who had vanished under the junta’s dictatorship — and also lampooned the generals’ Falklands fiasco.)
● Accepting an award from General Augusto Pinochet who led a coup d’etat that overthrew Salvator Allende’s Marxist regime in Chile.

Just what, if anything, Borges’ Quixotic political opinions had to do with his literary excellence (he was fond of taking unpopular stances against just about everything) is unclear to most normal human beings, i.e., those who are not members of the Swedish intelligentsia — the very same intelligentsia, by the way, that rationalized the nation’s cozy relationship with Hitler during World War II while Germany’s armies were busy enslaving Europe and slaughtering millions of innocents on behalf of their necrophilial Fuhrer.
    Graham Greene once remarked, "I'm not upset at not winning the Nobel prize. It's a lottery, not an accolade." I’m sure Borges would have echoed the sentiment.
    At the end of one of his most famous and most haunting stories, "The Babylon Lottery," Borges writes of a mysterious, omniscient quasi-religious syndicate (indistinguishable from God) that runs the lottery and intrudes on every aspect of life in Babylon::

"There is a conjecture, spoken from the mouths of masked heresiarchs, to the effect that the Company has never existed and never will. A conjecture no less vile argues that it is indifferently inconsequential to affirm or deny the reality of the shadowy corporation, because Babylon itself is nothing but an infinite game of chance."

    I’ve taken the liberty of changing a few words to express what I fancy would have been Borges’ opinion of the whole sordid Nobel Prize affair:

"There is a conjecture, spoken from the mouths of low-brow reactionaries, to the effect that the Nobel Committee has never existed and never will. A conjecture no less vile argues that it is indifferently inconsequential to affirm or deny the reality of the shadowy committee, because the Nobel Prize itself is nothing but a meaningless crap shoot."

Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net
Posted by dome of glass at 5/8/2010 1:37 PM
Categories: Literature, Communism, Criticism
Tags: Arthur Lundquist Nobel Prizes Sweden Jorge Borges
 

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