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LITERATURE

Two for one: Swedish Academy member sees Nobel crisis silver lining

The head of Swedish Academy's Nobel Committee has found a possible silver lining for the postponement of the prize — the prospect of two literature laureates rather than one taking to the stage.

Published: 4 May 2018 17:22 CEST
Two for one: Swedish Academy member sees Nobel crisis silver lining
The US novelist William Faulkner receives the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature...in 1950. Photo: AP
Per Wästberg, a former editor of the Dagens Nyheter newspaper, said he still looked back fondly to the year the prize was delayed from 1949 to 1950 – bringing the notoriously boozy American novelist William Faulkner to Stockholm together with the cerebral British philosopher Bertrand Russell.  
 
Wästberg told The Local it had been “a most unlikely pair whom I remember clearly from my school days, Russell in splendid witty form, Faulkner basically drunk”.
 
Faulkner was awarded the 1949 prize for “his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel”, while Russell received the 1950 prize “in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought”.
 
You can listen here to Faulkner's speech and judge for yourself: 
 
 
And here's Bertrand Russell's: 
 
 
Wästberg, a poet and novelist, runs the four-person committee that whittles down nominees before the Academy votes on the winner. 
 
He fully supports the decision to postpone the prize to give the Swedish Academy time to regroup after six members left over the institution's response to allegations of sexual assault against Jean-Claude Arnault, the husband of one of its members, including claims of biased payouts and leaks of Nobel winners.
 
“I am myself, as chairman of the Nobel Committee, very much behind it,” Wästberg said.
 
The work of the committee would continue regardless, he added. 
 
“The Committee will be working as usual, we have in early April agreed – in the entire Academy – to a list of 20 names on the observation or expectancy list which I presented. From them we will select five names for the short list, to be approved by the rest of the Academy in late May.” 
 
Wästberg said the members would study the works on the shortlist “intensely” over the summer. 
 
“I am a voracious reader since childhood, I am generally consuming one good book a day,” he said. “So nothing is changed in our work except the announcement of a laureate.” 
 

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HISTORY

‘Lost’ manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

A book by one of France's most celebrated and controversial literary figures arrives in bookstores this week, 78 years after the manuscript disappeared

Published: 4 May 2022 11:42 CEST
'Lost' manuscript of pro-Nazi French author published 78 years later

It is a rare thing when the story of a book’s publication is even more mysterious than the plot of the novel itself.

But that might be said of Guerre (War) by one of France’s most celebrated and controversial literary figures, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, which arrives in bookstores on Thursday, some 78 years after its manuscript disappeared.

Celine’s reputation has somehow survived the fact that he was one of France’s most eager collaborators with the Nazis.

Already a superstar thanks to his debut novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Celine became one of the most ardent anti-Semitic propagandists even before France’s occupation.

In June 1944, with the Allies advancing on Paris, the writer abandoned a pile of his manuscripts in his Montmartre apartment.

Celine feared rough treatment from authorities in liberated France, having spent the war carousing with the Gestapo, and giving up Jews and foreigners to the Nazi regime and publishing racist pamphlets about Jewish world conspiracies.

For decades, no one knew what happened to his papers, and he accused resistance fighters of burning them. But at some point in the 2000s, they ended up with retired journalist Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, who passed them – completely out of the blue – to Celine’s heirs last summer.

‘A miracle’
Despite the author’s history, reviews of the 150-page novel, published by Gallimard, have been unanimous in their praise.

“The end of a mystery, the discovery of a great text,” writes Le Point; a “miracle,” says Le Monde; “breathtaking,” gushes Journal du Dimanche.

Gallimard has yet to say whether the novel will be translated.

Like much of Celine’s work, Guerre is deeply autobiographical, recounting his experiences during World War I.

It opens with 20-year-old Brigadier Ferdinand finding himself miraculously alive after waking up on a Belgian battlefield, follows his treatment and hasty departure for England – all based on Celine’s real experiences.

His time across the Channel is the subject of another newly discovered novel, Londres (London), to be published this autumn.

If French reviewers seem reluctant to focus on Celine’s rampant World War II anti-Semitism, it is partly because his early writings (Guerre is thought to date from 1934) show little sign of it.

Journey to the End of the Night was a hit among progressives for its anti-war message, as well as a raw, slang-filled style that stuck two fingers up at bourgeois sensibilities.

Celine’s attitude to the Jews only revealed itself in 1937 with the publication of a pamphlet, Trifles for a Massacre, which set him on a new path of racial hatred and conspiracy-mongering.

He never back-tracked. After the war, he launched a campaign of Holocaust-denial and sought to muddy the waters around his own war-time exploits – allowing him to worm his way back into France without repercussions.

‘Divine surprise’
Many in the French literary scene seem keen to separate early and late Celine.

“These manuscripts come at the right time – they are a divine surprise – for Celine to become a writer again: the one who matters, from 1932 to 1936,” literary historian Philippe Roussin told AFP.

Other critics say the early Celine was just hiding his true feelings.

They highlight a quote that may explain the gap between his progressive novels and reactionary feelings: “Knowing what the reader wants, following fashions like a shopgirl, is the job of any writer who is very financially constrained,” Celine wrote to a friend.

Despite his descent into Nazism, he was one of the great chroniclers of the trauma of World War I and the malaise of the inter-war years.

An exhibition about the discovery of the manuscripts opens on Thursday at the Gallimard Gallery and includes the original, hand-written sheets of Guerre.

They end with a line that is typical of Celine: “I caught the war in my head. It is locked in my head.”

In the final years before his death in 1961, Celine endlessly bemoaned the loss of his manuscripts.

The exhibition has a quote from him on the wall: “They burned them, almost three manuscripts, the pest-purging vigilantes!”

This was one occasion – not the only one – where he was proved wrong.

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