Vultures: a footnote to my last post
Someone in Germany has apparently demanded, after Guenther Grass' revelation of his wartime SS membership, that he should return the Nobel Prize. A contemptible demand. First: the prize was bestowed for literature, not for political engagement, and I do not think anyone at present is seriously willing to challenge the rank of Guenther Grass as one of the greatest German writers alive. Second and worse: it is true that there is rumoured to be an informal political test in the Nobel Prize giving committee, which is why, for instance, Jorge Luis Borges and Mario Vargas Llosa never won it in spite of universal esteem - and, conversely, a couple of obviously over-awarded ones (Toni Morrison, Harold Pinter) and a pretty strange one (Dario Fo - a theatrical giant, the funniest man since Charlie Chaplin, but not, in my view, a man of letters) have been given for clearly political reason. In so far as this is true, it ought not to be, and never in a million years ought to be publicly mentioned as a criterion. What I find incredible is that the person who made the demand just assumed, without even arguing it, that such a test existed, and, what is more, that it was right to have it.