Doris Lessing complained to the BBC this week that winning the Nobel Prize for Literature has been “a bloody disaster” to her career as a writer. She told Radio 4’s Front Row program that she has effectively stopped writing under the pressure of media attention: “All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed.” This isn’t a new story: Saul Bellow once described the prize as “a kiss of death,” and several other writers have complained that the prize effectively ended their writing careers.
For many writers, who labor in obscurity and can only dream of the recognition that the Nobel Prize brings, this kind of complaint sounds perverse, even ungracious. From the cheap seats, it looks like the Nobel isn’t a curse, but an act of cultural canonization by which writers who have already enjoyed critical success are given the popular attention they deserve. Some become best-sellers for the first time in their careers, although this effect apparently doesn’t extend to poets or novelists with unpronounceable foreign names: the novels of 2002 winner Imre Kert??sz remain largely untranslated into English, and Derek Walcott has complained that the increase in his book sales didn’t come close to making up for the disruption to his writing. (Still, the prize money ??? which amounted to almost $1 million ??? allowed Walcott to build “a very nice house in a very nice little bay in St. Lucia with a studio,” so we shouldn’t feel too badly for him.) The prize may make it hard to write, but that’s partly because it often comes late in a writer’s career, when his or her creative energy may already be diminishing. Lessing acknowledged as much in her BBC interview, saying that she doesn’t have the energy to write novels anymore: “This is why I keep telling anyone younger than me, don’t imagine you’ll have it forever. Use it while you’ve got it because it’ll go; it’s sliding away like water down a plughole.”
But then, this conflict between writing and literary success goes deeper than the flood of media attention that comes with the Nobel. Writing is a solitary occupation, but publishing is a business based on celebrity. Writers work alone, and need that solitude to allow their imaginations to work, but we long for public acclaim and need readers to validate our work with their attention. Without readers, we’re like prophets hallucinating in the desert with no congregation to terrify with our visions. Writing is private, but literature is an act of communion. It’s the congregation that makes the prophet: without them, he’s just another madman howling in a cave.
Most writers find that by choosing literature, they’ve chosen exile in the desert. In our culture, to write is to cast seeds onto dry, stony land. Winning the Nobel, in these terms, is like getting caught up in a flash flood roaring down through a rocky arroyo: the sudden inundation is even more devastating because it takes place in such a parched landscape. That may partly explain why Lessing’s complaint about the draining away of her creative juices has spared a novelist like Philip Roth, despite his advancing years. In a sense Roth is lucky that he’s never won the Nobel, so he’s never suffered its other ??? psychological ??? effect, in which winners seem to feel that their best writing is now behind them and become stilted and self-considering in their last work. But then Roth has already gone through his own version of the flash-flood of media attention early in his career. One might say that the desert in which he wandered for many years was one of his own making ??? a desert of the ego. Yet he seems miraculously to have emerged from it a better writer as old age has brought its humiliations. (Either that, or he had an agent sharp enough to specify a minimum number of literary triumphs on his contract with the devil, so that now he has a whole workshop full of scribbling demons at his service, churning out one great book after another to fulfill the fine print.)
And that reflects a sad truth we have to acknowledge: humiliation is better for a writer than winning the laurel. Writers are god-like in their imaginations but pathetic in the world. We may try to cultivate humility, but the truth is that it’s simply an attempt to claim a virtue out of necessity: writers have no choice but to be humble, since the world offers us so many humility lessons. But in the strange wasteland of the human psyche, that’s exactly what tempts so many writers to cast this cloak of humility aside and reveal their raging egos. Most writers want more attention than the world concedes to them, so we drink, or teach, or seduce the young to get our fix. Some edit. Some even blog.
But I have to ask: why did we come to this desert, anyway? Did we expect the sky to rain down honey on us? (Try advertising.) Or did we come because we’re caught up in a prophetic fever, and the harshness of this life inspires visions? The truth is that most of the writers I know aren’t egotists, or at least not most of the time. We might wish for success, but most of us accept that writing is as much a spiritual discipline as a career. Given our choice, we embrace our solitary lives and wish for attention not so much for ourselves as for our work. If we dream of literary success, it’s not for the wealth or the fame. (Let’s face it, the rewards of even the greatest literary success, J.K. Rowling excluded, are sadly modest by contemporary standards of wealth and fame.) Every writer begins as a reader, and so we know the power literature has to shape our lives. We want to work that miracle ourselves, so we crouch in our desert caves, longing for rain, but ready to embrace the wind if the visions will come.