That isn’t the only Foreman prize out there. In Britain there was Bafta’s Carl Foreman Award for Most Promising Newcomer in British Film, founded in honor of my father, whose screenplay credits include “High Noon” and “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” I have also won a few prizes in my time, and judged a great many. This puts me in a difficult position when it comes to giving an opinion on them. Be their champion, and I could be accused of having sold out to the corporate-cultural complex. Be dismissive, and I am obviously a typical literary ingrate, biting the hand that feeds.
Goodreads.com lists over 6,000 prizes on its Web site. The oldest, the Nobel Prize in Literature, was founded in 1901; the youngest was established yesterday. Ten more will certainly be announced tomorrow. Literary prizes have become so numerous and pervasive that just like the invention of the computer, it makes you wonder how writers ever survived without them. The fact they got along just fine throws a spotlight on the timing of the first prizes. The inception of the Nobel, the Prix Goncourt, the Pulitzer and the James Tait Black all coincided with the advent of modern advertising, the rise of the newspaper conglomerate — and their mutual willingness to use the arts to boost sales. Nothing was deemed off limits once Thomas J. Barratt, chairman of A.&F. Pears, turned the work of the Pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais into posters to advertise soap.
The Académie Française was in the habit of giving out literary prizes long before Alfred Nobel decided to bequeath his taste in literature as well as his fortune to the world. Nobel’s great innovation was adding cash to the honor of critical recognition. Since Nobel had an explicit idea of the kind of writing he wished to promote (morally uplifting and idealistic), the very notion of a financial award was contentious from the outset.
Tolstoy thought monetary prizes were a threat to an artist’s integrity, and would have refused the Nobel even if the Swedish Academy had been able to overcome its distaste for his politics. George Bernard Shaw thought it was a waste to award a prize to writers who were commercially successful, and gave his Nobel money away. In between these views lies the question, What is the prize money really for? Is it a sanitized form of charity for deserving artists? Workfare for creatives in the age of mechanization? The Austrian iconoclast Thomas Bern­hard was speaking for many writers when he raged: “It was all offensive, but I found myself the most offensive of all. I hated ceremonies, but I took part in them. I hated the prize-givers, but I took their money.”
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