An Ignoble Literary Struggle

Autumn is Nobel season here in the Swedish capital, and every Thursday afternoon since the beginning of September a small group of men and women has been meeting in secret in an ornate 18th century hall to discuss who will receive the world’s top honor for literature.

No one records the deliberations over the prize, this year valued at about $1.1 million. The names of the four runners-up--there are normally five finalists--are to remain sealed for 50 years. As for the discussions--the horse trading, the strong language exchanged in the heat of the final debate--participants are sworn to take these particulars to their graves.

Only the winner’s name is to be read out, in a brief news conference today after the panelists have ritually cast their ballots in an antique silver tankard.

Let the profit-driven publishing barons of London and Manhattan determine which writers will become bestsellers; leave it to Hollywood to decide what books will be transformed into box-office hits. The members of the Swedish Academy of Letters have it as their life’s work to decide what is the world’s greatest literature.

But now, suddenly, comes a noted Swedish man of letters lobbing a bombshell into this bastion of tradition and taste.

Swedish Academy member Knut Ahnlund has announced that he has stopped taking part in the Thursday sessions, to protest what he called the academy’s “Freemason tendencies.”

He cites several grievances and points an accusing finger at the academy’s leader, Permanent Secretary Sture Allen, whom he calls an “autocrat.”

Ahnlund says he would return to the conference table only if Allen were to depart.

These signs of a power struggle among the world’s foremost arbiters of literary taste have shocked Sweden, where Ahnlund has long been seen as one of the academy’s most knowledgeable literary critics. Specializing in literature from French-, Spanish- and English-speaking countries, he also reads Polish and Russian and has served the academy for 26 years.

His departure is especially remarkable because it follows, by just a few years, the withdrawals of three other respected members from the 18-seat academy.

Lars Gyllensten, a much-admired Swedish novelist, critic and professor of microscopic anatomy, along with the crime novelist Kerstin Ekman, dropped out in 1989 to protest the academy’s refusal to lend its support to British writer Salman Rushdie, in hiding since then because of a death sentence issued by the Iranian clergy.

The writer Werner Aspenstroem took advantage of this gesture to say he wanted to leave too, not over Rushdie but because he disliked working on committees.

The four resignation announcements have thrown new light onto a quirk of Swedish Academy life: Like the priesthood, technically it cannot be abandoned. Because of a strict interpretation of its organizational statutes, the Swedish Academy has refused to recognize the defections.

With the resignations deemed invalid, none of the absent scholars can be replaced. That means just 14 of the 18 numbered seats at the academy’s conference table are filled. The academy bylaws call for a quorum of 12.

The average age of those remaining is 70, and one 91-year-old academician says he is tired and has little left to contribute.

“The Nobel Prize is under threat,” warned the Stockholm newspaper Expressen.

In a recent editorial, it called for an urgent, independent review of the academy’s bylaws to see what can be done to fill those empty chairs and to resolve the behind-the-scenes power struggle they imply.

Unresolved Rift

People familiar with the Swedish Academy say the real problem is not Rushdie or the other annoyances on Ahnlund’s mind.

The sad reality, they say, is an unresolved rift between some literary critics in the academy and some of its other professionals--historians, a lawyer, linguists and others who help award the prize.

Each has been selected, upon the death of an academician, by surviving members, who “take a look and see whether there is a gap to be filled, whether we need an author or a linguist, an art theoretician or a historian,” Allen explains.

He says the new member is then confirmed by the king of Sweden, “our lord protector, as it were.”

Allen, the man at the center of the current storm, is a linguist. He is known in Sweden not for his literary criticism, but for the pioneering work he has done bringing computer science to the study of language.

His elegant office, just off the academy’s official meeting room, is a noble sanctum of marble busts, royal portraits, Persian rugs, crystal chandeliers, quill pens in sterling inkwells and scholarly books on the meaning of the inscriptions on Sweden’s ancient runic stones.

Allen, seated at a desk in the center of this room, stiffens visibly when asked about the Ahnlund affair--as if someone had taken advantage of a papal audience to lobby for married priests.

Allen takes a piece of paper and writes his response: “The Nobel Prize for Literature is in no way in danger. The rumor emanates from groundless speculations in the media. The work of the Swedish Academy is carried on in democratic order, as usual.”

He slides the paper across his desktop with an air of finality. This is all he wishes to say on the subject.

“There is a concept called dignity,” he says. “And sometimes, there is a limit that is reached.”

Allen is not the first guardian of the Nobel Prize for Literature to come under attack.

Cater-corner from his desk, on a marble pillar, there stands a bust of Carl David Wirsen, who was permanent secretary in 1896, the year Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel died and bequeathed most of his estate to the establishment of the Nobel prizes.

Nobel, a sometime poet and the inventor of dynamite, wanted to honor, each year, “the person who shall have produced, in the field of literature, the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency.”

He stipulated that this prize for literature should be decided by the Swedish Academy, at the time a rather sleepy, 115-year-old body created by Sweden’s King Gustav III--an irrepressible Francophile--to nurture and promote the Swedish language much the way the Academie Francaise guards the purity of French.

Trouble was, some Swedish Academy members did not want this new responsibility, the criticism it was sure to bring or the inevitable battles with Nobel’s nieces and nephews, who were contesting their rich uncle’s will.

Wirsen had to twist his colleagues’ arms to secure their cooperation. And on the night of the first Nobel Prize ceremony, in 1901, he gave a speech that tried to capture in poetry the reluctance Sweden felt about its new role:

Unwished the task, unsought for, bearing now

so weightily on Swedish backs; it seems

we tremble taking obligation’s vow:

Henceforth a world will deem how Sweden deems.

And Wirsen was right. The Nobel Prize for Literature has become almost as much a lightning rod as the Nobel Prize for Peace, which is decided by a Norwegian panel and awarded each winter in Oslo.

Blasting the Swedish Academy’s selections became an international sport, starting in that first year, when the academy snubbed Leo Tolstoy and gave the prize to the Frenchman Rene Sully-Prudhomme. Forty-two Swedish writers responded by firing off an open letter disassociating themselves from the prize and paying tribute to the Russian novelist.

Subsequent choices have set off similar hullabaloos. Why did a little-known Finnish writer, Frans Eemil Sillanpaa, pop onto the world stage to win a Nobel in 1939? Could it have been because Finland was, that fall, bravely resisting Soviet demands for a redrawing of borders?

Did Irish poet William Butler Yeats win in 1923 as a reward for Ireland’s acceptance of a boundary agreement with London? Why did Winston Churchill win a Nobel for literature in 1953 anyway? And did his success--and the resulting criticism--ruin the chances of another writer-cum-politician, the French novelist and Culture Minister Andre Malraux?

What about Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz’s selection in 1980, the year of the Gdansk shipyard uprising? And is it true that Argentine Jorge Luis Borges was blackballed because he was too soft on Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet?

Some members of the Swedish Academy have tried to throw cold water on these fires, writing learned essays presenting evidence that shows, say, that Churchill really won for the eloquence of his speeches and that Sillanpaa had been short-listed long before the Soviet Union began to pressure Finland.

Secrecy and Silence

But the academy’s official secrecy hampers its ability to silence critics. The cloak may be necessary to preserve the Nobel Prize from unseemly second-guessing and appeal attempts--but still, it is the closed-off and implied undemocratic process that is nagging today at open, egalitarian Sweden.

“I’m not anxious that it should [look as if] I am out to slaughter the Swedish Academy,” Ahnlund says. “But the secretary has said some things that make me think he had grown very authoritarian.”

Ahnlund says he was troubled in 1989 by Allen’s decision to maintain silence on Rushdie. He was bothered again in 1994, when the academy declined to lend its institutional support to the exiled Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin, who had been persecuted at home.

Most recently, Ahnlund completed a book on the Swedish preacher-poet Sven Lidman, and he says he got into another dispute with Allen because he wanted to publish the biography at his favorite Stockholm firm, not the official academy publishing house.

“But this was not the reason I left,” he adds, returning to what he sees as the underlying issues of power and democracy.

Allen, Ahnlund alleges, wants to control all facets of academy life, and in doing so he is overstepping the boundaries of his academic expertise.

“Allen is a linguist,” Ahnlund says. “He is not a literary specialist. This makes a difference.”

Gyllensten--one of the two who resigned over Rushdie and a former permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy--says that difference first became apparent in 1986, when the Nobel Prize went to Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka.

Some of the literary types in the academy, himself included, did not like the speech Allen had written for the occasion, Gyllensten says, explaining that he found the wording and ideas too “abstract.”

But Allen went ahead with it.

The next year, fearing a repeat, several academy members proposed letting someone else give the speech naming Russian-born poet Joseph Brodsky.

“Allen responded as if a mutiny were in the making,” Gyllensten says.

Allen ended up as the speaker again, “despite the fact that he . . . lacks the competence to uphold the literary standard of the academy,” Gyllensten adds.

Though he does not want to honor such charges by answering them, Allen does hint that defector Ahnlund may not be motivated by the purest of literary concerns.

Ahnlund began his academy boycott in January but waited to announce it to coincide with the publication of his new book this fall.

Might Ahnlund’s j’accuse be nothing more than a clever marketing gimmick? His biography is getting rave reviews in the Swedish press, and the Nobel controversy has landed him on talk shows just when he can make profitable use of the free air time.

But if the Ahnlund affair did begin as a book-launching exercise, it has now rallied other academy critics to battle stations. Even as the Nobel Prize is announced, many in Sweden are asking whether the academy should be “modernized”--at least to give members the right to resign.

Otherwise, suggests Bo Stroemstedt, a former editor of Expressen, when there is a death and a recognized vacancy to fill, some of the nation’s brightest literary lights might decline invitations to join. And that would limit the pool of Nobel-selecting talent.

“The thought that one would swear lifetime loyalty to a collective, without knowing what the future will be, is an affront to the 20th century citizen,” Stroemstedt says. “The constitution says one has the right to belong to any organization of one’s preference, but there is no corresponding law of having the freedom not to belong.”