The writing of one novel, p.18
The Writing of One Novel, page 18
Almost every year since the publication of my novel, I learn of some Nobel Prize laureate who is reading The Prize. In 1964, the Negro periodical Jet wrote, “The two books gracing the hospital bedside table of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Atlanta, the day he received official notice that he was the 1964 winner of the coveted Nobel Peace Prize: Irving Wallace’s The Prize, a novel about the behind-the-scenes politicking for the Nobel Prize, and Roger Schutz’s This Day Belongs to God.” A photograph of Dr. King reading The Prize in his hospital bed decorates one wall of my study.
In November of 1965, I was invited to a dinner party given by some friends to celebrate the winning of a Nobel Prize by a friend of theirs. The guest of honor was Dr. Richard P. Feynman, of the California Institute of Technology, who had just been notified that he was one of the winners of the 1965 Nobel Prize in physics. At the dinner party I was seated across from Dr. Feynman, a colorful and arresting conversationalist. Dr. Feynman told me that in the week since he’d won the prize, three different people had given him my book as a gift. He suspected that in this way each of them hoped to prepare him for his trip to Sweden. According to my journal:
“Dr. Feynman said that he has read The Prize, and ever since—all of this spoken with mock seriousness—he had been wondering whether he would undergo adventures similar to those that befell Andrew Craig in Stockholm. In any case, he said, he rather hoped that the Swedish government would assign Count Jacobsson to look after him.
“Since finishing the book, Dr. Feynman went on, he had been wondering about one passage. Did the Nobel committees really investigate the personal lives of winners before giving the award, as I had written in my novel? I said, Yes, they certainly did. Dr. Feynman shook his head, pretending to be grave and troubled, and then he said, Well, that finally explained something that had been puzzling him. He had made his prize-winning discovery in 1949, but he had not been honored for it until 1965. And then he added jocularly, Now he could see it was his personal life that had probably kept him from getting the award those many years—until the Nobel people finally saw that he had settled down with his third wife and that now they’d had a child, and that he, himself, was the model of a family man.”
Parenthetically, I might add that in 1965 I also had an encounter with Dr. Edward Teller, the renowned nuclear physicist and so-called ‘Father of the H-Bomb’, who was often spoken of as being a contender for a Nobel Prize. I had received a wire from Dr. Teller, whom I’d never met, stating he was in the city and asking me to call him. I telephoned, and Dr. Teller, speaking with a heavy Hungarian accent, answered. He said that he admired my work, and invited me to a cocktail party being given for him by a UCLA professor. At the party, I found Dr. Teller overconfident of his own opinion, contentious in all matters, and interesting. According to my journal: “Dr. Teller said that he had read The Prize, which he considered ‘too fanciful to constructively criticize,’ and later he had read The Man and of this he said, ‘I have less criticism because you deal with an area I know less about.’“ In my journal I added one final rueful note anent Dr. Teller: “I imagine that he can be a stimulating but not an easy friend.”
Meanwhile, through the remaining months of 1962, The Prize continued to receive what was for a book an almost unprecedented amount of attention from newspapers, magazines, radio, television.
Newspaper and magazine gossip columns carried hundreds and hundreds of items about The Prize. Some of these items were true, the great majority were exaggerations of fact, and a few were out-and-out falsehoods. While these one-line items or short paragraphs did nothing to enhance my literary stature, there is little doubt in my mind that they helped increase the public’s interest in my book. Here is a random sampling of the type of items that were appearing nationwide:
Sheilah Graham, NANA Syndicate: “I wonder who will play the nasty newshen in the movie version of Irving Wallace’s book, The Prize. This female of the fourth estate debunks Mother’s Day, the Red Cross, the Boy Scouts and refers to the great Dr. Albert Schweitzer as ‘an egotistical Teutonic tyrant.’ Is there such a real-life counterpart?”
Hedda Hopper, Chicago Tribune-New York News Syndicate: “I heard The Prize is worse than Chapman Report and by the same guy who made so much money from Chapman he bought a villa in Europe. Hope he stays there. Prize smears American winners of Nobel Prize; it’s unbelievable.”
Leonard Lyons, New York Post: “All foreign-language rights to Irving Wallace’s The Prize have been sold, except in Scandinavia, where the novel is set.”
Robert Sylvester, New York Daily News: “How to write a best seller: Irving Wallace lived in a nudist camp for several weeks to get authentic background for sequences in The Prize.“
Dorothy Manners, INS Syndicate: “It isn’t set—but Ingrid Bergman will get the first chance at the role of the Swedish movie actress in Irving Wallace’s The Prize, all about the Nobel Prize awards. I’m half-way through reading the book, and it’s a spellbinder.”
Louis Sobol, INS Syndicate: “During his research for his new novel, The Prize, Irving Wallace discovered that back in 1921 the Swedish Academy voted the prize in literature to its secretary, Erik Axel Karlfeldt. Karlfeldt spurned the award, insisting, ‘Gentlemen, I must categorically refuse. This vote must be buried with us in this room. The newspapers must never know.’ So the judges voted again—the first and last time any such incident occurred. The prize went to Anatole France.”
References to The Prize took many different forms. The Reporter devoted its weekly full-page puzzle, The Acrostickler, to my book. Jerome Beatty, Jr., in the Saturday Review, used the success of The Prize to reveal that “in the trunk” I had five full manuscripts “that never saw the light of day,” among them a true adventure story of an expedition I had accompanied into the Honduran jungles and a biography of Daniel Defoe that I had written in my adolescence. Walter Winchell gave over his entire nationally syndicated column to telling “things I never knew” about the Nobel Prize, which he had taken from my novel or from additional information obtained from me. “The major fiasco in Nobel history, as Irving Wallace has a character point out in The Prize, “ wrote Winchell, “was the 1905 Nobel award to Dr. Robert Koch of Berlin for discovering a serum to cure tuberculosis—tuberculin. Six months after he became a winner, Koch’s miracle serum began to kill instead of save people!”
In the November 1962 issue of Holiday, Clifton Fadiman published a long article entitled ‘Awarding the Nobel Prize: A Do-lt-Yourself Kit’. Here he nominated ten writers: Robert Frost, Will Durant, Thornton Wilder, Aldous Huxley, E. M. Forster, Arnold Toynbee, Robert Graves. André Malraux, Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Buber. These men, he personally felt, should receive a Nobel Prize in literature but up to that time they had been overlooked. Fadiman added:
“At the moment there is among us perhaps a livelier interest in the Nobel Prizes than at any time in the past … American interest has also been stimulated by Irving Wallace’s best-selling The Prize. This highly readable novel is filled with fascinating Nobel Prize gossip, local color and inside dope. Many of the questions commonly asked about the awards are answered in the course of Mr. Wallace’s narrative.”
Clifton Fadiman made other references to my book. Among them, the following:
“Do geographical considerations influence choice? We-e-ll … Alfred Nobel’s will is explicit on the point of excluding nationality. However, read Mr. Wallace’s book, particularly the volcanic remarks uttered by his character Gunnar Gottling, and decide for yourself.”
Then, when the dates approached for Stockholm and Oslo to make their annual announcements of the new Nobel Prize winners, members of the press began calling upon me for statements relating to the forthcoming awards. In the eyes of the press, I had recently been elevated to the status of ‘expert’ on this subject. I was, of course, anything but an expert. I was simply a writer who had done a vast amount of background research for a novel that was in the public eye. But because I enjoyed discussing the Nobel Prizes, whose history was still fresh in my mind, and because I was eager to have my book read as widely as possible, I cooperated with the press and performed as an amateur expert.
A number of periodicals and newspapers were eager for me to predict the winners of the 1962 Nobel Prizes. Since I could not handle these requests on an individual basis, I prepared a detailed statement for Dan Green, head of publicity at Simon and Schuster. He released this to the national press, and it was widely reprinted. Here are two examples of how my statement was used:
Publishers’ Weekly, October 15, 1962: “Irving Wallace, author of the best-selling novel The Prize, has given high places to Robert Frost, Sir Charles P. Snow, André Malraux and Leopold Sedar Senghor of Senegal, in his recent predictions for the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature. He adds: ‘Had the literary prize been given two months ago, it could have been predicted with considerable certainty that it would have gone to 77-year-old Isak Dinesen of Denmark … Unfortunately her death may deprive her of the 1962 honor.’“
And the Los Angeles Times, October 21, 1962: “Novelist Irving Wallace, whose works include a current best-seller about the Nobel Prize, has ventured to draw on his knowledge of the Nobel selection process to predict the top contenders for this year’s awards. The author of The Prize conceded that ‘the business of prophecy is hazardous’ and then listed some of his favorites in the five categories to be announced within a few weeks …Peace—If awarded to an organization, the Cooperative for American Remittances to Everywhere (CARE) … Physics—Prof. Charles H. Townes of Columbia University for his discovery of the maser and Sir H. S. W. Massey of Great Britain for his work in upper atmosphere physics … Chemistry—Prof. Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat of the University of California at Berkeley for his work in protein synthesis … Medicine—Jointly, Dr. Hans Ussing, professor of biochemistry at the University of Copenhagen, and Dr. Arthur K. Solomon, head of biophysics at Harvard, for their independent discoveries involving the transport mechanism across biological membranes.
“Wallace maintains the judges’ selections are ‘the result of a complex process in which prejudices and outside pressures play a major role.’“
I was awakened one morning five days later by a telephone call from a student-reporter on the California Sun, the UCLA graduate students’ newspaper, and he told me that John Steinbeck, rather than one of my predicted candidates, had just won the Nobel Prize in literature. I confessed that I was surprised that neither Robert Frost, who had the sponsorship of President Kennedy, nor Jean-Paul Sartre, whom I had mentioned in several personal interviews because his gloomy outlook had such appeal to Swedes, had been the winner. I gave the reporter an interview about Steinbeck, which concluded on the following note:
“When asked if he considered Steinbeck the type of author he described in The Prize, Wallace said that the two men were entirely different.
“ ‘Andrew Craig, hero of The Prize, ‘ he said, ‘was not as prolific or as stable as Steinbeck. However, the procedures I described are probably the same as those that gave the prize to Steinbeck.’“
Nor did any of my other predictions for 1962 come to pass that year. However, if I deserved no ‘A’ in Prophecy, I deserved at least a passing grade, because two of the persons I considered likely winners in 1962—Townes in physics and Sartre in literature—were both named Nobel Prize winners in 1964, even though Sartre declined the honor.
The most widely published of the interviews I gave on the Nobel Prizes was one written by Howard C. Heyn of the Associated Press. It appeared coast to coast, bearing such headlines as the one in Florida, ARE THE NOBEL PRIZES BIASED? and the one in Pennsylvania, IS NOBEL PRIZE OUTDATED HONOR? The Associated Press interview read in part:
“Wallace says Alfred Nobel, who was the inventor of dynamite, originally planned only three awards—in medicine, physics and chemistry—but later Baroness Bertha Kinsky von Suttner, a confirmed pacifist, persuaded him to include a peace prize. She got it herself, in 1905.
“The literature prize was added last in the course of the planning, Wallace said, after Nobel himself wrote a horror play, Nemesis. It was so bad that his relatives burned every copy they could find after his death in 1896, according to Wallace.
“‘I suggest the peace prize be eliminated,’ said Wallace. ‘We live in a world of non-war, not peace. Furthermore, if the Nobel judges give a peace prize to an American, the Russians are irritated, and if they give one to a German, the French are annoyed. It has become too ridiculous. There was no peace prize this year and, in fact, it has been skipped 14 times.’
“Wallace proposes as substitutes: A prize honoring the social sciences, to a sociologist or anthropologist; one encompassing advances in botany and biology; one for the arts outside literature …
“Plenty of money is available for new awards, at the going rate of about $48,000 each, said Wallace.
“‘Nobel left the fund $9 million. This has now grown to $12 million through investments in Swedish real estate and $250,000 in Wall Street. If Nobel were alive today I think he would have been interested in some of the new fields I suggest.
“‘I believe he also would recognize—as his heirs and judges do not—that the medical award should be revised to recognize mental therapy and psychoanalysis. Imagine those judges voting down Sigmund Freud every time he was nominated! But they did.’
“He also feels a spot should be reserved for inventors, especially since Nobel made his money through his patents.
“‘It is incredible that Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers were never honored, although they were alive during the early awards.’“
There were almost weekly requests, during this period, for me to appear on national as well as local television shows, and on radio programs, to discuss the forthcoming Nobel Prize awards or my novel or my life as a writer. While I had been cooperating with newspaper and magazine interviewers, I found myself refusing television and radio interviews. These were difficult for me to decline, because I was told that this vast exposure to the viewing and listening public had a great practical value. It had been proved, according to several publishing sources, that such public appearances by an author, promoting a title just beginning to be known, could stimulate the further sales of a book by thousands and thousands of copies. My basic insecurity was constantly increased by these offers to parade myself on the nation’s screens and speak on the country’s radio stations. Briefly, once or twice, I wavered, said that I would reconsider, but in the end I held firm to my resolve.
Several reporters, hearing of my decision and remembering that I had once been ranked by the National Forensic League (the nationwide high school public speaking organization) as one of the ten leading debaters in the United States, wondered why I would not go on television or radio, and I was forced to discover the reason for myself and for them. Finally I was able to explain my decision. In its essence, it is as follows: While the writing of a novel is one of the last absolutely independent careers that exist in this world, it is also a lonely, arduous, and nerve-racking profession. Always, after having completed a novel, I feel that I have earned an added reward—release and relaxation from inner tension and self-generated pressures. To go then before large audiences as a performer, which I believe to be demanding on the nervous system, would be an abdication of one of the many rewards of novel-writing. And so, despite the gains I might sacrifice, I had decided to forgo public appearances to avoid one more pressure in my life. For me, if I may repeat it, one of the wonders of being a novelist is the complete independence that goes with such a career. The novelist is beholden to no one. He has no debt or responsibility to anyone, except to himself and to his art. This freedom to write as I please, think as I please, live as I please (within the boundaries of my society’s structure) is a way of life too precious to compromise. I feel that doing something that I do not wish to do, an activity that my entire nervous system rebels against, would destroy much of the pleasure that my chosen career gives me.
This was a highly personal decision. Many well-known novelists of my acquaintance would disagree with it. They believe that public appearances are important. They feel that, in an extremely competitive field, where almost thirty thousand new books are published every year, they owe it to themselves and their work to do what they can to bring their books before the public. And they may be right. But I suspect that many of the authors who appear on television and radio do so not only to help their books achieve greater sales, but, perhaps more importantly, because they derive considerable ego satisfaction from such appearances.
I felt that such group therapy was excellent for those writers who needed it. Certainly, it makes the writers happy, and it makes their readers or potential readers happy. I simply have found that, for myself, I do not require this, nor had I required it when I wrote books that were anything but bestsellers. Instead, I have preferred to confine my public activities to discussions with newspaper and magazine writers who wish to interview me. I find that these face-to-face, yet relatively private, confrontations are good fun and stimulating, and sufficiently useful to me and to my books. But I would not (and will not) join the electronic circus. That, for me, would not be fun. My book had been written. It was out to be read. In it, any curious reader might learn a good deal about me. If he sought to know more by looking at my corporeal being, I feared he would only be disenchanted.
And so I refused to pontificate about The Prize before television cameras or radio microphones. But I did continue the face-to-face meetings with the press in hotel suites and cocktail bars and small restaurants.
