PRIZE NITWITS

Ian McEwan duly accepted his Jerusalem Prize on Sunday. He had been widely criticised for electing to travel to Israel for the ceremony, but his decision to do so was also widely supported. As he said somewhat ruefully in his address, the argument was presented to him that “whatever I believed about literature, its nobility and reach, I couldn’t escape the politics of my decision [as to whether to accept the prize]. Reluctantly, sadly, I must concede that this is the case”.

The cleft stick within which he found himself, in accepting the award, was not one that he articulated but it amounts to this: that to disregard Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians would be implicitly to condone it; to excoriate his hosts for that treatment would be disobliging – that McEwan was mindful of the proprieties cannot be doubted when he noted that the arguments against his acceptance were made “with varying degrees of civility”.

McEwan in mid-address

At any rate, McEwan elected to run with the risk that he would affront his hosts. Before the ceremony, he accompanied the Israeli writer David Grossman in the latter’s regular attendance at the Friday march against the Sheikh Jarrah settlements in east Jerusalem. McEwan had also said that he wanted to meet Palestinian writers during his visit but, reportedly, these writers refused to countenance such a meeting.

McEwan accepted his prize from President Shimon Peres and then, in a most elegant, judicious and deftly uncompromising address, laid out his position, after making a swift but masterly tour d’horizon of Eng Lit and his presumed place in it. Referring to the matsav – the “situation” in Israel/Palestine – he described the “creative struggle to address it and … not to address it”. He is clearly not unaware of his privilege as a citizen of a peaceable country – “we may have our homeless, but we have a homeland” – nor of the danger that an Englishman abroad may blunder innocently into matters far more complex than he can know. It was perhaps unavoidable, whatever he should say, that McEwan would look desperately like the two protagonists, separated by sixty years of history, of Peter Kosminsky’s finely-crafted serial currently running on Channel 4, The Promise, the one a soldier in the dying days of the British mandate, the other his granddaughter perplexed by the holy land’s failure to obey the same natural laws as those of her easy life back home. The newspaper Haaretz reported that McEwan was attended to in “polite, but tense, silence”.

McEwan meets Peres

To accept the award, to go and collect it and to make a speech broadly against the policy of the nation hosting the honour is a species of gesture politics merely. So of course is the bestowing of the award. The Mayor of Jerusalem, under whose purview the biennial Jerusalem Bookfair is held, himself makes a calculated gesture in welcoming a critic and pretending that his city welcomes discussion and dissent. The citation of the Jerusalem Prize specifies that its recipients will be writers “whose work deals with themes of individual freedom in society” and, while those who determined that McEwan should be the 25th recipient will point to that perceived theme in his work, everyone knows that for a foreigner to come to Jerusalem and allow himself to be embraced by Israel’s establishment is to acknowledge that such an event cannot pass without resonance.

The only previous British recipients have been Bertrand Russell (the first ever in 1963) and Graham Greene; two further Britain-domiciled writers to be honoured were émigrés – Isaiah Berlin and VS Naipaul. Other Jerusalem laureates include Frisch, Borges, Ionesco, de Beauvoir, Coetzee, Vargas Llosa, Susan Sontag and Arthur Miller.

This is all very glamorous, very high-flown, very self-important. My own objection to McEwan accepting the prize is entirely different from those overtly political objections so far expressed. I believe that awards and honours are what the Irish call bollix. They should be refused out of hand. McEwan declared, calculatedly flattering his Jerusalem hosts, that “ultimately, the quality of any prize can only be judged by the totality of its recipients”. That consigns to the garbage can next Sunday’s glitzfest in Los Angeles, the Academy Awards, and we must assume that, should McEwan ever win a screenplay Oscar, he will turn it down on grounds of fastidious discrimination about the company he keeps.

Grossman and McEwan at Sheikh Jarrah

AMPAS, the American Academy, has an atrocious record of honouring the wrong movie or the wrong performance – often because it is done belatedly to atone for a manifest injustice committed at an earlier ceremony – and of ignoring the entire careers of many of its finest. Among the directors who never received an Oscar are Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, DW Griffith, Howard Hawks, Ernst Lubitsch, King Vidor, Blake Edwards, Alexander Mackendrick, Cecil B De Mille, Preston Sturges, Sidney Lumet, Arthur Penn, Fritz Lang, Nicholas Ray, Anthony Mann, Stanley Donen, Josef von Sternberg, Douglas Sirk, Rouben Mamoulian, Jean Renoir, Robert Altman, Sir Charles Chaplin and Sir Alfred Hitchcock. Some were given honorary awards, a spurious consolation. But many an Oscar-winning director is not fit to be spoken of in this company.

The list of overlooked actors is too long to contemplate but if I just mention Thelma Ritter, Marlene Dietrich, James Mason, Denholm Elliott and Cary Grant, you will have a sense of the depth of Hollywood’s disgrace. Yet Oscar Night goes on being the ultimate awards event, eclipsed by the Nobel Prize only in prestige and exclusivity, certainly not in razzamatazz and self-importance.

The Oscars carry a particular cachet, partly because a degree of habit and hoopla has grown up around them, partly because they are voted on by the membership of AMPAS. This recognition by one’s peers is thought to be the most desirable because most informed. In practice, endless finagling takes place behind the scenes, millions are spent on self-promotion and many voters simply support the ticket so that technicians are nominated not by particular prowess but because they worked on this year’s favoured movies. Black propaganda has been aimed at Sunday’s prospects for The King’s Speech on the grounds that its subject, George VI, was said to be a Nazi sympathiser. Even if that is true – and it is only irrefutably true of his elder brother Edward VIII – that has nothing whatever to do with the merits or otherwise of the movie.

The sprawling development of east Jerusalem

For the longest time, my personal intention was to accept nothing short of a Nobel Prize, Oscar or Order of Merit from the Queen (the way you do), but more recently it has seemed to me that the only decent and grown-up thing to do is to spurn all such baubles, right up to (and perhaps especially, though of course it would be hard to refuse from the grave) sanctification (not that I entertain lively expectation of being a candidate).

The charade of awards and honours is as deeply suspect as it is deeply flawed. The obsession with tokens of achievement angles the whole culture towards a form of spurious competition. Those set against each other for prizes are rarely even broadly comparable. The novels yanked together in dispute over the Booker Prize each year are plainly trying to achieve different kinds of aesthetic synthesis. Does elevating one of them have any meaning? Doubtless the publisher is thrilled at a sure hike in turnover. Indeed, the paperback editions of all the nominees will shout their nominee status for the rest of their in-print lives, even these days the ludicrous notion that they were "long-listed" for the Booker.

But their lives as works of literature have been subtly (and not so subtly) changed by this imposition of a legend on the cover. Now, the nominated or awarded piece of work will always be the artist’s marquee piece, even though other unheralded work might be considered superior by those who have actually considered the whole œuvre. The headline-writer reaches for the garlanded part of the life and pigeonholes the artist with it. And this year we have the grotesque farce of "the Beryl Booker", a posthumous competition, determined by public vote, among the novels of Dame Beryl Bainbridge to select that of her novels most deserving of the prize that none of them ever won. What insulting piffle.

Berger's way of seeing prizes

For ever after, the actor, director or writer is tagged “Oscar-winner”, even “Oscar-nominated” and this is supposed to bestow some spurious prestige. And that of course is the key to the whole melancholy business. The awards do not truly honour the recipient. They are designed to aggrandize the giver. That is why the BAFTA Awards have been known for some years as the Orange BAFTA Awards or, to state it plainly, the Marketing Opportunity Awards.

Forty years ago next year, John Berger was awarded the Booker Prize for his novel G. Unexpectedly – and thrillingly for those of us watching the live telecast – Berger turned his acceptance speech into a withering attack on the Booker Company’s exploitation of its workers in what were then called third world countries, using half of his cash prize to develop the arguments on behalf of migrant workers and the other half as a direct donation to the Black Panther movement. McEwan has said that he will donate his Jerusalem Prize money to Combatants for Peace, a bilateral union of Palestinian and Israeli soldiers who have laid down their arms to unite in promoting peaceful coexistence.

Given that awards and honours are never given without implicit strings of endorsement – promotional or political – attached, the only honourable spirit in which to accept them is that of dissent and disruption. Give the money to the nearest bunch of revolutionaries and dissenters.