Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett’s Guardian piece is one of those news stories that leave me filled with rage and wanting to smash things:
“All you need is a five-minute spot on a morning TV show,” a colleague told me recently. “Then everyone will buy your novel.” I tried to picture myself, with my horror of being filmed, in thick orange makeup, perched on a sofa in a brightly lit studio while trying to talk about how the French critic Hélène Cixous inspired me to want to write the first great ovulation novel. It sounded ridiculous for all involved.
Yet when you’re a writer, you are supposed to take every opportunity you can get. That was the attitude to news that Helen DeWitt had turned down the $175,000 (£129,000) Windham-Campbell prize on the basis of being unable to fulfil its promotional obligations, which included six to eight hours of filming. The prize, which this year was given to eight writers in recognition of their life’s work, is intended to give recipients time and space to work independently of financial concerns.
DeWitt is a critically acclaimed author, and her debut novel, The Last Samurai – published 26 years ago – is widely regarded as a work of innovative genius. Opinions on her recent stance are strongly divided: some have praised her principled refusal to play the self-promotion game that takes so much out of writers, while others have called her a spoilt, entitled nightmare. […]
Reading through DeWitt’s posts, a picture of a supremely talented writer emerges, one who has faced long periods of living hand to mouth, being out of print, tricky paths to publication causing untold stress, struggles with depression and executive dysfunction, and caring responsibilities. Many authors can empathise.
Unable to commit to the promotional work required, DeWitt says she asked the prize organisers for adjustments that they ultimately refused. According to the novelist Daisy Lafarge, this revealed an attitude to disability and chronic illness that is “impoverished and embarrassingly outdated”. “The prize’s refusal to meet her halfway exposes something I’ve found to be endemic in the book world,” says Lafarge, who adds that the art world is way ahead on facilitating the access and assistance needs of artists. In publishing “if you’re not able-bodied, your choices are to drop out or just grit your teeth”. Both are costly. […]
Yet this controversy doesn’t only highlight inclusivity issues in publishing. It’s also that writing no longer feels like the main job. Many writers are oddballs, and some are geniuses whose giftedness is arguably a form of neurodivergence. Artists such as that can be sensitive and difficult. They need uninterrupted time to create. They do not fit easily into the world of professionalised self-promotion that constitutes modern publishing. As DeWitt wrote in a blog post: “We can think of so many writers we admire for whom the whole thing would be unthinkable – off the top of my head, Dickinson, Proust, Kafka, Beckett, Pessoa, Salinger, Harper Lee, Pynchon, DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Ferrante.”
Why on earth would you dangle a large wad of money in front of someone you claim to believe is an important writer but make it contingent on their doing things no writer should be asked to do (though some, of course, are willing to)? Publicity is the business of publishers and salespeople; a writer’s job is to write. I’ve been a DeWitt fan since 2003 and have long been furious that she hasn’t gotten the support that should go along with the universal respect she commands; happily, as the end of the linked piece reveals, a “conservative university thinktank” has offered her a grant of $175,000 with no strings attached, and good for them, I say, even if they’re just trying to score points off the libs. (You can read DeWitt’s own detailed account at her blog.) Thanks, Eric!
Skimming the official blurbs describing the literary merits of prior recipients of this bounty, they sound mostly dreary and banal. I’m not in a position to say whether that means the actual literary production of the winners tends to the dreary and banal or that’s just the blurb-writer’s style.
A half-century ago Pynchon declined the allegedly prestigious William Dean Howells Medal, but I don’t know if that’s because it came with strings he found unacceptable or for some other reason. He did get the National Book Award, which is currently worth $10,000 but quite probably less back then. He would have at the then-going rate gotten an even $1,000 for the Pulitzer if the board hadn’t overruled the committee’s recommendation to give it to him.
The combined estates of Messrs. Windham and Campbell did manage to endow these prizes quite lavishly considering the bohemian creative fellows wikipedia makes them out to be, although perhaps the brief note that Campbell was “the son of the owner of a chemical manufacturing company” is relevant.
It may have come up before here, but Andy Warhol once(?) hired a professional actor to impersonate him for a public appearance. When it came out, the event organiser sued Warhol, but Warhol argued in court that this was a performance artwork, and that the organiser owed Warhol money instead.
Tyler Cowan just gave DeWitt a no-strings $175,000 grant. https://www.reddit.com/r/RSbookclub/comments/1skge6p/a_happy_ending_to_the_helen_dewitt_saga_tyler/