The Stockholm Syndrome: Is the Nobel a Curse?

By Walter Kirn

After years of enduring tantalizing rumors that she would win the Nobel Prize for Literature, South African novelist Nadine Gordimer developed a pat response for nosy journalists: "I would say, 'If I ever win it, I'll let you know,' and I'd put the phone down." Then one day in 1991, while standing in the kitchen, Gordimer--whose piercingly authoritative phone manner reflects the high moral seriousness of such books as Burger's Daughter and July's People--received the call that ended the speculation. "I was, of course, delighted," she says. "Everybody must be when they get the Nobel Prize."

Delighted at first, that is. Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, who won the prize in 1992, recalls a similar burst of joy followed by a prolonged state of siege. "The phone rang endlessly, and a lot of invitations came. It was a really terrible time, not terrible in a bad sense but terrible in how exacting it is. For a while you can't work, because it's so demanding." What Walcott characterizes as the Nobel's less than phenomenal influence on his book sales didn't make up for the chaotic fuss. What did soothe him, however, was the prize money, as he frankly and cheerfully admits. "It was almost a million dollars," he recalls. "What I'm really grateful for is the fact that I could build a very nice house in a very nice little bay in St. Lucia with a studio."

Once labeled a potential "kiss of death" by novelist Saul Bellow, after he won the prize in 1976, the Nobel can be a bittersweet distinction. For William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, the prize was a swan song, a tribute to past masterpieces whose greatness their subsequent work did not approach. For others, it's just a very prestigious distraction. Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, the 1996 laureate, complained that the prize destroyed her cherished privacy by turning her into an "official person." According to Jonathan Galassi, editor in chief of Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Gordimer's and Walcott's publisher), the prize can "inundate" a writer. "People," he says, "want a piece of your ass even more than they did before."

Judging by the pace at which they're working, both Gordimer and Walcott appear to be surviving the Nobel. Gordimer's new novel, The House Gun, which comes out this month, is a tense postapartheid family drama as vital as anything she has ever written. The protagonists are a white upper-middle-class couple who've managed to glide through their country's revolution without so much as a hair out of place. Then their adult son confesses to murder, and the stalled karmic wheels begin to turn. The story deftly brings home a tricky truth: peace can be as perilous as war, and even more confusing to negotiate.

As a member of the African National Congress, Gordimer has always been a deeply political creature, both in her public life and in her writing, but the resolution of her nation's great issue hasn't cooled her intellectual fires. With her son, documentary filmmaker Hugo Cassirer, she's currently working on a film that will contrast the recent histories of two long-divided but now reunified cities, Berlin and Johannesburg. Referring to the project, Gordimer may as well be speaking of her own experience with the Nobel: "We've become fascinated by what happens after the initial euphoria, and how you deal with daily life."

Walcott's daily life is hectic. As the co-writer of the book and lyrics for Paul Simon's long-awaited musical The Capeman, he has a Broadway opening this month--an unusually suspenseful opening. The Capeman, which tells the story of Salvador Agron, a Puerto Rican teen who killed two white youths in a Manhattan playground in 1959, has been plagued by a drumbeat of doomsaying in the New York media, last-minute changes and a postponed opening date. The Nobel curse may be chasing Walcott, but his productivity seems unaffected. His most recent book of poetry, The Bounty, was published last summer to good reviews, and his next book--a collection of his paintings accompanied by a long poem--is due to appear later this year.

The Nobel Prize isn't perfect. Not every great writer wins, and not every winner is a great writer. Still, the Nobel does bring the one thing every writer can always use, besides a nice house on a bay: self-confidence. "You could say, 'Oh, yes, it was time the prize was given to a black woman or to a Caribbean writer,'" says Walcott. "But one likes to believe that it is based on merit, even if it sounds flattering to say that." Sometimes literature's kiss of death, it seems, can be the breath of life. --By Walter Kirn. With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York

With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York