Nobel Prize
Again the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded by the Swedish Academy. Again no American had arisen to such distinction. The recipient was Ladislas St. Reymont, Pole, aged 56, author of 23 volumes of short stories and novels, in particular author of The Peasants (4 vols., 1902-06), for which the prize this year was given. In form a novel, the work actually constitutes a review of Poland's history since her partition at the close of the 18th Century.
Author Reymont, one of the dozen children of poor parents, grew up under the hardships to which so many Slavic writers have been heirs. Early expelled from school for refusing to abandon his native language for the Russian, he tried variously to make a livelihood--as store clerk, telegraph operator, actor, rail employe, farm hand, Paulist novice. He wrote his first short story, The Death, in 1894. He is now working on a cycle of six novels, of which one will have its setting in the U. S., whither he came in 1919 to study the life of Polish peasants who had emigrated.
The Nobel Prize brought Author Reymont about $40,000.
Winners of Nobel Prizes in Literature:
YEAR NAME NATIONALITY
1923. . . .William B. Yeats Irish
1922. . . Jacinte Benavente. . . . Spanish
1921 . . . . Anatole France French
1920....Knut Hamsun Norwegian
1919 Carl Spitteler Swiss
1918 H. Pontoppidan Danish
1917.... K. Gjellerup Danish
1916. . . . Verner Heidenstam ....Swedish
1915. . . .Romain Holland French
1914.... Not awarded
1913. . . . Rabindranath Tagore. .Bengalese
1912 Gerhart Hauptmann . . . .German
1911 Maurice Maeterlinck . . . Belgian
1910 Paul Heyse German
1909 Selma Lagerloef Swedish
1908. .. .Rudolf C. Eucken German
1907. .. .Rudy ard Kipling English
1906 .... Giosue Carducci Italian
1905 Henryk Sienkiewicz Polish
1904. .. .Frederic Mistral French Jose Echegaray Spanish
1903 B. B jornson Norwegian
1902 .... Theodor Mommsen .... German
1901.... R. F. A. Sully-Prudhomme. . Fr.
The New York Times pointed out that the Nobel Prize committee, "on the whole, frowns upon rebels and pessimists"; that Tolstoy lived nine years and Chekhov four years after the prize was established (1901); that Gorky and Andreiev, each with a wide reputation, have never been honored; that the donor's prime purpose was to establish a forum for the genius of small and "backward" nations.
James Branch Cabell
Fine Words Concerning His Charm
James Branch Cabell is one of the many young gentlemen who have chosen to write an early autobiography-- perhaps autobiographically inclined narrative were a better expression. Mr. Cabell's Straws and Prayerbooks* is a book which admirers of Mr. Cabell will find admirable and most of the others will find dull. The author of Jurgen I have never met, although I have several times met his delightful wife. In Richmond, one hears much of this local hero, who is from a long line of Virginians. His loyal friends attest his charm. He is visited by such literary figures as Hergesheimer, Van Vechten, Elinor Wylie. They return with fine words concerning his charm. As a writer, I find him positively the hero of the U. S. undergraduate of the intellectual type. His books I admire for their grace and elaborate technique; but all this is a prelude to the statement that, for the most part, I find his writings dull, and I seem to be fairly alone in this opinion.
From The Literary Spotlight I quote a description:
"Cabell is a man of medium height, and of a somewhat stocky figure. His head is finely molded with the broad forehead of the esthete and the thinker, not unlike that of the young Augustus; his eyes are heavy-lidded and sleepy, such eyes as one often sees in old portraits of the cavaliers and courtiers of the time of the Stuarts, rather insolent and a little bored; his mouth is delicately cut and sensitive, generous yet not too full, the mouth of a poet but not of a philosopher; and between those eyes and this mouth he has a quizzical little snout."
Cabell was born at Richmond in 1879 and has lived there most of his life. He was graduated from William and Mary College in 1898, has taught French and Greek and has a hobby for studying and writing about genealogical subjects. This is shown forth in the publication of such efforts as Branchiana, Branch of Abingdon, The Majors and Their Marriages, etc., etc.
Whatever else he may be, he occupies a lonely and a wistful place in American letters. The age of chivalry is not with us; and he writes beautifully and grotesquely of some chivalric code manufactured by himself in his mystical land of Poictesme. As he himself is withdrawn from people, so his books are withdrawn from life, and yet all the time his pretty visions are punctuated by shafts of irony.
J.F.
*STRAWS AND PRAYERBOOKS--James Branch Cabell-- McBride ($2.50).