DON MURRAY:
Cheap immortality
November 13, 2003 | More from Don Murray
Autumn, and the leaves and literary prizes flutter down.
On November 12 it was the Governor General's awards. A week earlier it was the Giller, complete with glitz, glamorous showbiz people, politicians and, above all, money. The Giller is worth $25,000, the Governor General's award $15,000. In Britain, the Man Booker prize offers upwards of $40,000 to the chosen author. And in Ireland, the Dublin IMPAC literary award dwarfs them all by shovelling more than $200,000 the winner's way. Only the Nobel tops that.
And then there is France's entry – the Goncourt. It offers $10 to the winner. This year it celebrated its 100th anniversary. And for 100 years it has been the gold standard against which all literary prizes in the French-speaking world, and some in the English-speaking world, have been measured.
The story of the Goncourt is one of lunch and a literary legacy. The legacy came first. It was the work of an old, bitter writer by the name of Edmond de Goncourt. He was rich and one half of a well-known literary team. The other half was his brother Jules.
Together, in 1851, they began to write a private literary diary. It was witty, catty and nasty. It became, when published, a vicious roadmap of the French world of letters of the time.
So symbiotic were the brothers that they boasted they wrote with two hands and one voice. In 1870, Jules abandoned the partnership for the grave, a victim of too much sex and tertiary syphilis. (Tertiary syphilis was the disease of choice to end your days in literary Paris in the late 19th century, claiming Guy de Maupassant and Alphonse Daudet as well.)
Edmond, in the arch words of a rival, was left a "widow." The widow mourned for 15 years, clipping his coupons, thanks to the fortune bestowed on the brothers by their father. Then he set about restoring Jules's room so that it would look exactly as it did when he died.
He began inviting friends to the embalmed room for literary chats. No women, though. "Women prevent conversation; they mistake noise for ideas." Thus spoke Edmond de Goncourt, diarist and misogynist.
The literary lions conversed and Edmond meditated on his grand plan: to create an academy to rival the hated academy. This was l'Académie française, defender and protector of the French language and dispenser of the Prix de l'Académie française. This, he believed, stifled and corrupted creativity with its unrelenting string of "safe" choices.
And so, in his will, Edmond, a bachelor without children, directed that his entire fortune be used for the creation and upkeep of l'Académie Goncourt. Its 10 members would be paid 6,000 francs a year for life. This was, at the time, a comfortable salary.
They would award a Goncourt prize once a year. His will spelled out the conditions: the prize would reward "youth, original talent, and new or challenging efforts to extend thought and form" in a novel. The winner would receive a prize of 5,000 francs.
On the 21st of December, 1903, the members of the Goncourt Academy sat down to dinner and, between cheese and dessert, awarded their first prize. As a French literary historian put it: "it went to a complete unknown – and one who remained so."
The academy members were undeterred. They continued to award prizes every year but, as they had jobs for life and weren't young to begin with, the decision was discreetly taken in 1912 to move dinner up to lunch. Easier for the old folks to get home.
The Goncourt has sailed on, indifferent to the vicissitudes of war and fortune. The First World War decimated Edmond's legacy. The prize was slashed from 5,000 francs to 50 – $10. More unknown authors were rewarded, and forgotten.
Then, in 1919, perhaps proving the theory that a large number of monkeys in front of a large number of computers would eventually type out a play by Shakespeare, the Goncourt rewarded a true literary talent. This was Marcel Proust.
Proust was already well-launched on his epic A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. The volume crowned in the eight-volume cycle was neither the first nor the last, but it was enough for the author to set aside his well-known snobbery. "This may lower me in the eyes of some but if it sells books, I'll take it over other honours." Three years later he died, still correcting his opus.
One Proust specialist judges that "Proust's world reputation began with the Goncourt."
But, as the French say, once doesn't make a habit. The aging academy went lunching through the decades, picking safe winners and ignoring a veritable pantheon of French literary greatness – Sartre, Camus, Mauriac, Gide.
Other French prizes were created to correct, their creators proclaimed, the errors of the Goncourt. The real reason, one suspects, is that prizes, especially the Goncourt, sell books. Today its choice can expect to sell 200,000 to 500,000 copies. One of the academy's few other inspired choices – André Malraux's La Condition Humaine – has sold four million.
For the record, only one Canadian entry has ever won. That was Pélagie la Charette by Antonine Maillet.
Today the Goncourt's jurors-for-life are a geriatric lot – five men and women in their 80s, three in their 70s and two a mere 58. Yet they live comfortably. Six of them are employed as editors by the three big French publishing houses – two each.
When the jurors publish books, they get big advances and large print runs. In return, the big three publishing houses have taken all but a handful of Goncourt prizes over the decades. Each year articles are written about loaded dice, uneven playing fields and literary fraud. The Goncourt serenely lunches on.
Old the jurors may be but, on the occasion of the prize's 100th anniversary, they showed themselves to be unexpectedly spry. They gathered to lunch in secret two weeks early and announced their winner in October instead of early November.
Thus the Goncourt was the first literary prize of the French fall season and its winner could not be co-opted by another, lesser academy. Much ink was spilled in the French press about this latest Goncourt coup. Their work done, the jurors went back to rest up for another year.
The winner? La Maitresse de Brecht by Jacques-Pierre Amette. Typical, sniffed the French critics. The book, they said, was worthy but rather ordinary.
But Edmond de Goncourt would be happy. The goal, he once wrote, "is to do everything so that the name of Goncourt is not forgotten." A $10 prize has done the trick.
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