John le Carré's Olof Palme Prize speech

John le Carré doesn't do awards. Some years ago, he asked to be removed from the shortlist of the Man Booker International Prize saying he 'doesn't compete for literary awards. 

That may have something to do with the literary establishment not commonly considering spy thrillers as having "literary" merit, with le Carré being allowed to be the exception. Not unnaturally, le Carré took, ahem, exception to that unspoken judgement, and it took - it takes - courage to refuse any kind of prize, no matter how much confidence you have in your own writing, and how many books you've written.

Late last year, though, it was announced that John le Carré had been awarded the Olof Palme Prize, which is not a literary prize. It's sometimes awarded to writers, sure - Vaclav Havel won it soon after it was instituted; it's often won by UN folks, a lot by people working in the field of human rights; once, it has made an error of judgement by giving the award to Aung San Suu Kyi, but then lots of people made that same mistake. 

Olof Palme, whom I knew had been assassinated, but in that vague way that one knew of contemporary events while at school, was a name I mostly knew as a road in Delhi and what's more, not one that I ever had reason to be on often. I have visited his grave at Highgate, but the details of his life as social democrat and all-round leftie continue to elude me.

Prizes require the awardee to give speeches. It was a long moment of suspense in the year Dylan won his unlikely Nobel, whether he would actually deliver an address and collect his award, which is contingent upon the winner actually making a speech. No quick "When I was young, my father said, [silence] Actually, he said a lot of things. Thanks for this!" and a wave of a statuette is acceptable. Some measure of gravitas is expected and I don't know if any awardee has ever failed to live up to those expectations, though Dylan came close.

So le Carré had to give a speech at the end of January. I don't think I've ever heard his speak, much less deliver a speech. I don't know if the Olof Palme Prize speech is recorded; I must look for it.

But here's a transcript of John le Carré's speech. It's a moving one, thinking about Palme's life in parallel with his life as a minor spy and a major writer of spy stories.

Reading and thinking about Palme makes you wonder who you are. And who you might have been, but weren’t. And where your moral courage went when it was needed. You ask yourself what power drove him – golden boy, aristocratic family, brilliant scion of the best schools and the best cavalry regiment – to embrace from the outset of his career the cause of the exploited, the deprived, the undervalued and the unheard?

Was there, somewhere in his early life, as there is in the lives of other men and women of his calibre, some defining moment of inner anger and silent purpose? As a child he was sickly, and partly educated at home. He has the feel of a loner. Did his school peers get under his skin: their sense of entitlement, their contempt for the lower orders, their noise, their vulgarity and artlessness? Mine did. And no one is easier to hate than a contemptible version of oneself.

Graham Greene remarked that a novelist needed a chip of ice in his heart. Was there a chip of ice in Palme’s heart? He may not have been a novelist, but there was art in him, and a bit of the actor. He knew that you can’t make great causes stick without political power. And for political power, you definitely need a chip or two of ice.

The United States did not take lightly in those days, any more than it does now, being held to account by a nation it dismisses as tin-pot. And Sweden was a particularly irritating tin-pot nation, because it was European, articulate, cultured, rich, and white. But Palme loved being the irritant. Relished it. Relished being the outsider voice, the one that refuses to be categorised, the one that shouldn’t be in the room at all. It brought out the best in him.

And now and then, I have to say, it does the same for me.

There's a lot of good stuff in the speech, but as with everything else I read these days, I wonder how it speaks to the world we live in right now. 

This lit season in India, the Jaipu Literature Festival, as usual, draws the crowds and the talk. For several years, it's title sponsor has been Zee, which has always been dodgy, but since Modi came to power, has been complicit in spreading hatred and false news. Until nearly the start of the festival, the organisers failed to divulge that Zee was indeed their title sponsor. I wonder if the writers they'd invited knew. 

As far as I can tell, nobody who was invited and accepted, withdrew once they knew Zee was still the title sponsor. If they did, they haven't made their withdrawal public and said why. 

Who, in this country, at this time, is willing to be the irritant in the room? I'm not sure there is one (though Parvati Sharma wrote an honest piece about it recently). I know writers who have declined an invitation when it was made, but nobody has thought to ask them about it, and what views they have are aired on twitter (where they're worth reading. See: an exchange between Priyamvada Gopal and Sharanya Manivannan).

Back to le Carré. He's been producing, along with his sons, a lot of TV adaptations of his work and most of those are fantastic (barring only The Little Drummer Girl, which is a book I just cannot read, mostly for it's politics re Palestine). But something about this speech, so angry about the UK leaving the EU, saving the harshest words for Corbyn's Labour, seems also so final.

I hope I'm wrong, of course. He said, after Agent Running in the Field, that it was probably his last. If le Carré is not writing and being interviewed in advance of a new book being released, it seems unlikely that we'll hear from him again. That kind of final.

But if it is the last thing we hear from him, it's a good speech to end on. 

A letter to end the year

Not mine. Not even from someone I know.

Wait.

You know how there are books of famous speeches that kids used to be encouraged to mug up, for elocution competitions and such? I once thought (and said in some blogpost I can't find) that it would be a great idea to have an anthology of fictional speeches; that is, speeches characters make in books, but which are fantastic and stirring and all that. I was thinking, mainly, of Andre-Louis Moreau from Scaramouche, but that's just me. Cat said, with perfect truth, that any anthology of fictional speeches that left out Gussy Fink-Nottle's prize-giving speech at Market Snodsbury, did not deserve to exist. How can anyone disagree with that?

Speeches are all very well. Anthologies even more well. (Weller. Something.)

I want to now propose, in the last few hours of this old year, that someone do an anthology of fictional letters. Letters written by characters that, if taken out of their context and placed in the world, would deserve to be in Volume 2 of Letters of Note.

This, naturally, disqualifies epistolary novels, because they're all letters and we're not doing volume two of My Dear Bapu.

But I want to nominate this letter below for that imaginary anthology: it's between Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, in Gaudy Night. Now Dorothy Sayers, like a couple of other writers, is on an emergency shelf of books that are comfort reading. I have recently re-read Have His Carcase, but the big gun, the cannon, is Gaudy Night and it's usually saved for emergencies.

But I found this letter here and as love letters go, it is delicate and gorgeous; as a way to end the year, it is perfect. Here it is in full:

Dear Harriet,

I send in my demand notes with the brutal regularity of the income-tax commissioners; and probably you say when you see the envelopes, ‘Oh, God! I know what this is.’ The only difference is that, some time or other, one has to take notice of the income tax.

Will you marry me?—It’s beginning to look like one of those lines in a farce—merely boring till it’s said often enough; and after that, you get a bigger laugh every time it comes.

I should like to write you the kind of words that burn the paper they are written on—but words like that have a way of being not only unforgettable but unforgivable. You will burn the paper in any case; and I would rather there should be nothing in it that you cannot forget if you want to.
Well, that’s over. Don’t worry about it.

My nephew (whom you seem, by the way, to have stimulated to the most extraordinary diligence) is cheering my exile by dark hints that you are involved in some disagreeable and dangerous job of work at Oxford about which he is in honour-bound to say nothing. I hope he is mistaken. But I know that, if you have put anything in hand, disagreeableness and danger will not turn you back, and God forbid they should. Whatever it is, you have my best wishes for it.

I am not my own master at the moment, and do not know where I shall be sent next or when I shall be back—soon, I trust. In the meantime may I hope to hear from time to time that all is well with you?

Yours, more than my own,

Peter Wimsey

*Siiiiigh*

On that letter of note, dear ones, here's wishing you a very happy year ahead.

Utpal Dutt's 'Ray, Renaissance Man?'

Over at The Big Indian Picture (which is, by the way, a must-read) is a magnificent rant by the actor Utpal Dutt, on many things Ray & GoI related. It is even more extraordinary when one realises that this speech was delivered at a Sahitya Akademi/Lalit Kala Akademi/Sangeet Natak Akademi seminar on Ray, shortly after Ray's death.

In contrast, I am thinking of the recent SA Young Writers' Festival, where the general tone was self-congratulatory and unjustifably optimistic.

Utpal Dutt, in his own words:

Already in Pather Panchali, Ray’s protagonists suffer not because gods have willed it so but because of poverty created by men. They are evicted from their home by a power that is stronger than gods— a social system that condones exploitation. And this revolt against a concept of gods who crush human beings reaches fruition in Devi, where a girl, a common housewife, is declared a goddess incarnate and is expected to heal and cure every sick villager, until the boy she loves more than her life is dying and is placed before her so that she can touch and heal him. She dare not play with this boy’s life and tries to flee, her sari torn and her mascara running all over her face. One has merely to compare this film with dozens churned out from the cinema-machine of this country, where a dying child, given up for dead by medical science, is placed before the image of a goddess—and, of course, there is a lengthy song glorifying the goddess—be it Santoshi Ma or some such forgotten local deity. Then the stone image is seen to smile, or to drop a flower on the boy’s corpse, and lo and behold, what the best doctors could not do, the piece of stone achieves in a second! The corpse opens its eyes, even sits up. This is followed either by another unending song of thanksgiving, or the boy’s parents weeping and rolling on the ground to show their gratitude. This kind of brazen, shameless superstition is peddled by film after film in this country every year. Are they any less dangerous than drugs? If drugs destroy the bodies of our young men, these films destroy their minds. A proper tribute to Ray would have been to make it impossible to make such filth and, instead, to make arrangements for Devi to be shown all over the country at cheaper rates. Devi is a revolutionary film in the Indian context. It challenges religion as it has been understood in the depths of the Indian countryside for hundreds of years. It is a direct attack on the black magic that is passed off as divinity in this country. Instead of the vulgarized Ramayana and Mahabharata, the Indian TV could have telecast Devi again and again; then perhaps today we would not have to discuss the outrages of the monkey brigade in Ayodhya.

August Kleinzahler on his ideal reader

From August Kleinzahler's 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize Speech:

I have a very personal, very particular notion of the ideal reader of poetry, my ideal reader. It is, in fact, a composite of readers I know or have known. It is not another poet, probably not another writer, though it could very well be a painter or musician or photographer. It is not a teacher of literature, though it might be a teacher of medicine or economics, say. It is someone of catholic reading tastes and broad knowledge: a serious reader, serious about the pleasure of reading.

The nature of this pleasure involves a degree of difficulty and resistance. This pleasure is not to be confused with diversion, even the cultivated diversion provided by authors like Elmore Leonard. My ideal reader has read widely enough, actively read, and with a certain degree of attention, that upon encountering a patch of dead syntax, tortured diction, bluff gesture, rote strategy, the ingratiating stylistic doffing of the hat or mechanical development and resolution the lights come on and the show is over. After all, it is 2005 and my reader doesn’t have a great deal of time – for time has vanished with inflated rents and the blitzkrieg of what’s cheerfully called information, information to be attended to, and I’m talking right now. The oriental notion of idleness as a civilized activity, or period of time without focused activity, that arena of floating consciousness in which poems are usually conceived or poems are picked up at random and read with unexpected pleasure – these sorts of sessions of empty or unplanned time are regarded as undesirable, perhaps worrisome, even dangerous, in so far that they may be the precursor of a pathological condition. So my reader demands action, complexity and intensity from reading, be it history, fiction, journalism or sci-fi. And the ideal reader of whom I speak demands the most and gets the most from poetry because poetry is the most distilled, complex and satisfying among all forms of writing, at least for the serious, cultivated reader, my ideal reader.

It gets a bit mixed-up once he names his ideal reader Khalid (a taxi driver from Karachi, no less) but until then...

This has nothing to do with this speech, but whenever I think of Kleinzahler, I think of Anthony Bourdain having a drink with him in some ancient episode of No Reservations.

Just, like a nugget of information thrown out there. No poetry can come of this detail.

from 'Meridian'

From Paul Celan's 1960 Büchner Prize speech, more famously known as 'Meridian':

 And from Jacket 40, excerpts from the recent book The Meridian: Final version - Drafts - Materials. [pdf].

The first extract shows portions of the bit I've reproduced here, in the process of being shaped; and fascinating it is too, to see the final form - the language becoming shape - emerge.

There was a whole post I had in my head about this but with blogger down, and being unable to post for the last several hours, it's gone. Yes, I should have written it out anyway but I didn't.

I think it began with marvelling at how little I've moved away from initial positions in essentials. Or perhaps it had to do with recognition, or finding truth in that which only confirms (rather than challenges) one's own views.

I hope it wasn't the last though I suspect there may be an element of that.