Once Again, a Nobelist Speaks for His Time

When the Swedish Academy awarded Hungarian writer Imre Kertesz the 2002 Nobel Prize for Literature on Thursday, it once again recognized not only aesthetic excellence but also an author’s particular relevance to the moral moment in which the world finds itself.

Last year, when the prize went to V.S. Naipaul, the ruins of the World Trade Center still were smoking and thousands of the dead remained unaccounted for. A British subject, born in Trinidad of East Indian parents, Naipaul’s entire life and work represent a majestic condemnation of the vile sectarianism and intolerance that produced Sept. 11’s terrorist attacks.

In the months since, one of the most alarming international trends has been the rise of anti-Semitism, some of it fueled by the very groups that attacked New York and the Pentagon, some of it promoted by Arab governments, some it the work of Islamic emigres and right-wing political thugs who have set upon Jewish institutions across Europe. Recently, some British and American scholars have gone so far as to attempt organized boycotts of their Israeli colleagues out of purported sympathy for the Palestinian cause.

By selecting Kertesz, the Swedish Academy has powerfully summoned the world of literature and--through it--the community of ideas to weigh carefully where the slander and hatred of Jews may lead.

The 72-year-old Kertesz, a Budapest-born Jew and the first Hungarian to win the prize, was arrested by the Nazis in 1944 and deported, first to Auschwitz and then to Buchenwald, from which he was liberated in 1945. On his return to Hungary, he worked briefly as a journalist, then turned to fiction and essays, as well as to translating philosophical and psychoanalytic texts, including those of Nietzsche and Freud.

The heart of his work, which the academy singled out for special recognition, is a trio of novels, which appear to be semiautobiographical reflections on the Holocaust. The first, “Fateless,” recounts the story of a young man who survives a concentration camp through utter conformity, physical and psychological. “The shocking credibility of the description derives perhaps from this very absence of any element of the moral indignation and metaphysical protest that the subject cries out for,” the academy wrote. “For him, Auschwitz is not an exceptional occurrence. It is the ultimate truth about human degradation in modern experience.”

The trilogy’s second volume is “Fiasco,” whose protagonist writes a novel concerning Auschwitz, which he expects will be rejected. When--to his astonishment--it is published, he feels only deep emptiness and experiences acclaim as a loss of privacy.

“If I think of a new book,” Kertesz once said, “I think of Auschwitz.”

The final novel in the sequence is “Kaddish for a Child Not Born,” whose narrator is a middle-aged Holocaust survivor working as a writer and translator. Looking back over a failed marriage and a disappointing career, he agonizes most deeply over his unwillingness to bring a child into an irredeemably cruel world.

Only the trilogy’s first and second volumes are available in English. None of his collections of shorter work, including “The Holocaust as Culture” and “Moments of Silence While the Execution Squad Reloads,” has yet found an English-language publisher. Taken as a whole, Kertesz’s work “upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history,” the Swedish Academy wrote.

“He is a great writer,” Nobel Peace Laureate Elie Wiesel said Thursday. “His style and his approach are of such high quality that he deserved to be given this highest prize in literature.”

Kertesz, who is currently teaching in Berlin, said he hopes the award will awaken his countrymen to their own history. “There is no awareness of the Holocaust in Hungary,” he said. “People have not faced up to the Holocaust. I hope that in the light of this recognition, they will face up to it.”

Wednesday night, the author received another honor, Germany’s Hans-Sahl Prize for Literature. In his acceptance remarks, he said that those willing to ponder the continuing significance of the death camps should look first to the writer-witnesses of his generation.

“We are the last,” he said. “Ask us.”

Dryden Project Complete

A monument of supreme importance to everyone who reads or writes the English language was completed this week at UCLA. No ceremony will mark the occasion, however, for this memorial--53 years in the making--is constructed not of bricks, but of books: 20 volumes of 12,217 pages, published by the University of California Press, representing the complete works of John Dryden, the 17th century poet, playwright, critic and translator.

It is to Dryden, the Restoration’s towering literary figure, that contemporary readers and writers of English owe the structure of the sentences they now take for granted, their admiration of the rhymed couplet as a satiric vehicle, heroic tragedy as a dramatic form and dramatic criticism as a distinct genre.

The last complete collection of his protean output was assembled in 18 volumes in 1808 by Sir Walter Scott and revised later that century by the English scholar George Saintsbury. In the late 1940s, scholars in UCLA’s English department realized that the rare book collection in their Williams Andres Clark Memorial Library housed the finest Dryden collection outside the British Library. They began to assemble a team to publish a definite Dryden collection with all the benefits of modern commentary.

One of those drawn to the project was a 28-year-old Harvard graduate student named Vinton Dearing, who had helped one of his professors compile a collection of Alexander Pope’s correspondence. In 1948, he joined the UCLA faculty and its Dryden project. This week, as emeritus professor of English, he oversaw publication of the collection’s final volume as the series’ editor in chief.

What have 53 years of familiarity with subject taught him?

“There are a couple of things that often are overlooked about Dryden,” said Dearing, who retired from teaching in 1991. “One of them is how well he could write prose. The other has to do with his impact on the English language. You know, he walked in Oliver Cromwell’s funeral procession with John Milton, and I think that was a fateful conjunction. Milton, of course, believed that English prose should resemble Latin as closely as possible with the verbs at the end of clauses and sentences. Dryden was a master of the easier vernacular style. He thought that written English ought to do what spoken English did--begin a sentence with its subject followed by the verb and the object. As far as I’m concerned, he was the source of how we write prose today.”

As an example of the author’s spiritual authenticity, Dearing quotes a bit of verse the poet composed at the dinner table of Elizabeth Creed, a relative he admired:

So much religion in your name doth dwell

Your soul must needs in piety excel.

For in you, belief and practice do together go

My prayers shall be while this short life endures

These may go hand in hand in you and yours.

As Dearing points out, the sentiments were reciprocated in a memorial plaque Creed erected in her village church after Dryden’s death:

“We boasted he was bred and had his first learning here, where he has often made us happy by his kind visits and most delightful conversation. Afer 70 odd years, when nature could be no longer supported he received the notice of his approaching dissolution with sweet submission and entire resignation to the Divine will and he took so tender and obliging a farewell of his friends as none but he himself could have expressed (of which sorrowful number I was one).”