On Declining

[Henry Musikar]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/04/jm-coetzee-eliot-philip-hoare declination 
In declining to collect the Athens prize for literature for The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell joins a long and distinguished list of ceremony no-shows. JM Coetzee has twice missed out on picking up the Booker, although he did feel able to make the trip to Stockholm to receive the $1m-plus Nobel prize for literature from the King of Sweden in 2003. Another celebrated Booker boycotter was Anthony Burgess, who demanded an assurance that he would win, didn't get it, and sulked at the Savoy while William Golding collected the prize. 

Jean-Paul Sartre declined the Nobel ("a writer must refuse to turn himself into an institution"), Samuel Beckett sent the publisher Jerome Lindon to accept it for him, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn only picked up the 1970 award four years later after much toing-and-froing - he refused to risk being refused readmission to the USSR by travelling to Stockholm, and the organisers said no to holding the ceremony at Sweden's Moscow embassy.

In a letter to the jury published online this week, Littell ended with the hope that "my inability to join you today will be taken for what it is, an expression of our common love of literature ... literature is a very private matter now [and] belongs to a sphere utterly different from the interaction of that work with those who read it, comment on it, praise it or damn it". 

Surely preferable to such solemn verbal acrobatics is the parodic approach taken by Thomas Pynchon, a never-show who dispatched the comedian Professor Irwin Corey to pick up his National Book Award in 1974. Corey's speech (transcript at http://thomaspynchon.com/gravitys-rainbow/extra/corey.html ) concluded with mysterious thanks to "Brezhnev, Kissinger - the acting president of the United States - and Truman Capote", named the author as Richard Python, and hailed him as "a recluse who has found that the world in itself which seems to be a time not of the toad".
John Dugdale

Henry Mu
http://astore.amazon.com/tdcoccamsaxe-20/