Canadian author Alice Munro will be unable to travel to Stockholm to collect her Nobel Prize for Literature because of poor health. Columnist Joe Fiorito is hoping she'll still be able to prepare a speech.
Out of the bounds of the city and into the realm of literature: were I a member of the Swedish Academy, I’d have endorsed Mavis Gallant or Alistair MacLeod.
In truth, the Nobel for Alice Munro forced me to consider my reaction: how might I have felt if the prize had gone to a woman from a small town in, say, Romania, one who had spent a lifetime chronicling the affairs of the ordinary people around her.
I’d have leapt for joy.
So I leap for Alice.
There were early newscasts in which she was described as the first Canadian woman to win the prize. That’s what happens when children write the news. She is, correctly, the first Canadian.
Saul Bellow was merely born in Montreal. My neighbour is from Chicago and was surprised to learn that Bellow was not born in the city of the big shoulders, but he was clear about one thing.
Bellow is an American.
So, Alice the first.
And now we have something more to look forward to. The laureate is expected to give a banquet speech.
Alice, too ill to attend?
So was Hemingway, who wrote this: “No writer who knows the great writers who did not receive the prize can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list according to his knowledge and his conscience.”
In other words?
For every Alice, an Alistair.
Faulkner was awarded the prize in the uneasy days after the end of the Second World War, around the time of the start of the Cold War.
From his speech: “Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which along can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and worth the sweat.”
The question of the moment is not whether we will be blown up; the question is whether we have poisoned our planet, and ourselves.
Now here is Yasunari Kawabata, one of the supreme novelists of Japan: “I do not look upon my happiness and good fortune in having received the award as mine alone. My emotions are yet deeper at the thought that it perhaps has a new and broad significance for the literature of the world.”
A foreshadowing of Alice.
By the way, if you haven’t read Kawabata, I suggest you start with The Master of Go.
And finally, Albert Camus — and this may be the first time in the history of any kind of writing where the Belle of Wingham and Existential Al have been mentioned in the same breath:
“For myself, I cannot live without my art. But I have never placed it above everything. If, on the other hand, I need it, it is because it cannot be separated from my fellow men, and it allows me to live, such as I am, on one level with them. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of people by offering them a privileged picture of common joys and sufferings. It obliges the artist not to keep himself apart; it subjects him to the most humble and universal truth.”
Okay, so why is a guy who is hired to write about life in the city writing about the Nobel Prize? I do not need an excuse other than this:
Literature is the stuff of life.
Alice may have stopped writing, but I hope she is well enough to prepare a speech.
