(1961) The Prize

by Irving Wallace

  Lucius Mack, still in the kitchen entrance, interrupted. ‘I told him it was all right, Leah. It’s what they expect of an author.’

  ‘They expect dignity.’ She turned to Craig and her tone softened. ‘Please, Andrew—’

  ‘Lee, I couldn’t climb those stairs again. And if I could, I’d never come down.’ He dropped the telegram and teletype message on the table. ‘I guess it’s official. But I don’t know about Stockholm.’ He looked up at his sister-in-law pleadingly. ‘Lee, I can’t get through this evening without some kind of pick-me-up. There’s a bottle in the cupboard.’

  Leah refused to move. ‘Black coffee,’ she said.

  ‘Awright, dammit, make it coffee then—anything.’

  As Leah went to the stove, the wall telephone rang. She had the percolator in her hand, and nodded to Jake Binninger, who jumped to answer the telephone.

  It was a long-distance call from Craig’s publisher in New York, and this was their first contact in a year. The publisher’s congratulations were hearty. He had good news for Craig. Tomorrow, work would begin on a de-luxe omnibus containing three of Craig’s four novels—‘we’ll use the old plates, thinner paper, and this time, illustrations’—and it would be called ‘the Nobel edition’ and be expedited to catch the spring list.

  The publisher, who had long before written off Craig, the advance on the next novel, and the next novel itself, was now eager to know if Craig had resumed writing. ‘If you mean, have I stopped drinking, the answer is no,’ Craig said harshly. The publisher treated his reply as a joke. He reiterated his faith in Craig. Tangible proof of this would be a cheque going into the post within a week, an advance against the omnibus and an additional advance on the new novel. He was proud that his house was associated with a Nobel Prize winner. He hoped to see Craig before the Stockholm trip. Craig remained noncommittal and, as soon as possible, hung up. ‘Bastard,’ he muttered. Leah admonished Craig. The publisher had every reason to have behaved as he had, before and now. How would Craig have felt, in the publisher’s shoes, towards a writer who took money and did not write? Craig’s good humour returned briefly. ‘I revise my comment,’ he said. ‘Poor bastard.’

  Before he could leave the telephone, it rang again. This long-distance call was from Connecticut, and it was Craig’s literary agent, with whom he had been out of personal touch for months, but to whom Leah constantly wrote. Morosely, Craig listened to the faraway effusions and good wishes. The agent also had news. There had been three calls from motion picture story departments in New York, tentative feelers on Hollywood jobs after Craig came back from Sweden. Apparently, all of them wanted Craig, but also, they all wanted to know about his health. Craig was more amused than irritated. ‘Tell them,’ he said, ‘I’ll work for them for five thousand dollars and five cases of Ballantine’s a week.’ The laughter in Connecticut was uncertain.

  Ten minutes later, just as Craig had finished his cup of coffee and Leah was pouring him more, there was a third long-distance call, this one from Boston. Craig took the receiver from Jake Binninger, and found himself connected with the most renowned lecture manager in the business. Unlike the others, he was a brusque and forthright man. ‘This Nobel Prize,’ he told Craig, ‘makes you a saleable commodity, now. We can book you for a year solid—women’s clubs—the chicken-à-la-king circuit—at a gross of a hundred thousand dollars. Our commission is half of that. The rest is yours, clear. We pay all expenses, routing you, travel, hotels, food, publicity. It’s yours, if you want it, on one condition.’ Craig’s voice was edgy, as he asked the condition. ‘Women’s clubs are touchy,’ the lecture manager said. ‘Our deal is we deliver our literary people sober. I heard you’re on the booze. Is that true?’ Craig decided that he liked this man. ‘Yes, it’s true,’ he said frankly. The manager was matter-of-fact. ‘Well, if you stop, let me know. Anyway, congratulations. You’re way up there now.’

  Back at the table, Craig felt as if his last energy had been suctioned out of him. He could not assemble his thoughts. He drank the second cup of hot coffee, as the others watched him.

  ‘How do you feel?’ Lucius Mack asked.

  ‘Lousy. Half drunk, half hung over. Do you think this is the way Ulysses S. Grant felt at Appomattox?’

  The doorbell chimes sounded. There was someone outside.

  Leah wrung her hands nervously, and started for the door. Lucius Mack blocked her way. ‘Wait a minute.’ He touched Craig’s shoulder. ‘What do you say, Andrew, if it’s the out-of-town reporters? Can you make it?’

  ‘No,’ said Craig.

  ‘Okay.’ He spoke to Leah. ‘If it’s the press people, stall them. Say he’s got fever, the flu, and maybe they can see him in the morning. Meanwhile, tell them I’ll be glad to take them out and give them a fill-in, colour, background, et cetera. Have you got it straight?’

  ‘If you’ve handled Andrew Craig for three years, you can handle anybody,’ she said briskly, and was gone.

  Mack studied Craig for a moment. The author had one hand over his cup of coffee, and he swayed gently in his chair, eyes closed. Mack beckoned to Jake Binninger.

  ‘Jake,’ he said, ‘this is a big story for us and all the papers we’re stringing for. Now, you get yourself down to the library and dig up all the Nobel data you can find, and take it back to the office and bone up fast. Soon’s Andrew can talk, I’ll get what I need from him. Funny, how long you know a man, and you don’t know his vital statistics. I don’t even know where he was born.’

  ‘Cedar Rapids,’ said Craig from the table.

  ‘Well, see, I didn’t know,’ said Mack. He returned to his reporter. ‘Now, you go out the back there and get on it, and I’ll catch up with you later.’

  As Binninger left by the rear door, Mack strained to hear the voice at the front door. He waited apprehensively, and then he heard the pad of footsteps on the carpet. Leah appeared, and she was followed by Alex Inglis, the Joliet College professor. Inglis, his Anglo-Saxon face ruddy from the cold, and his expression frozen into permanent awe, entered the kitchen as he might have entered Count Leo Tolstoy’s study at Yasnaya Polyana.

  ‘It wasn’t the press at all,’ Leah was saying to Craig. ‘It’s Alex Inglis, from the college—’

  Craig opened his eyes and acknowledged his admirer with a blink. Hastily, awkwardly, in his heavy black overcoat and muffler, Inglis sat in the chair opposite his idol.

  ‘I can’t tell you how thrilled we all are,’ Inglis said with reverence. ‘The entire campus is agog. Imagine, a Nobel laureate under our very noses—’

  ‘Thank you,’ Craig murmured.

  ‘So few American authors have been honoured,’ Inglis continued. ‘Sinclair Lewis, Pearl Buck, Eugene O’Neill, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Stearns Eliot—if you would consider him an American—John Steinbeck, and now, Andrew Craig.’

  Craig, showed no reaction, and Inglis looked up for Leah and Mack to endorse his enthusiasm, and then he continued pedantically, ‘Think of it. Mr. Craig is now in the Nobel company of Kipling, Rolland, Anatole France, Thomas Mann, Galsworthy, Churchill—’

  ‘An’ Gjellerup an’ Pontoppidan,’ muttered Craig. ‘Know that? Those Joes won it in nineteen—uh—seventeen. Call me Gjellerup an’ shake well before pronouncing.’

  ‘Please—’ said Leah.

  Inglis was confused. ‘Mr. Craig, aren’t you well?’

  ‘Professor Inglis, I’m drunk.’

  ‘Well, uh, I can’t blame you—no, indeed not—the award does call for celebration.’ He swallowed hard. ‘I came down here, primarily, to congratulate you—’

  ‘Pardon me,’ said Craig. ‘You’re a good fellow, Inglis.’

  ‘—but also to relay some additional good news. I was with the head of the Board of Regents when all of this happened. I have his permission to tell you this. We have received a sizeable endowment to enlarge—immensely enlarge—the Midwestern Historical Society, and it will operate quite independently of the college. This should be completed by
summer. There will be an opening for a curator—rather like the position Archibald MacLeish filled in the Library of Congress—and it would be ideal for you, Mr. Craig. It would be ideal, because it would actually be an honorary position, one constituted to give the Society prestige and attract gift collections. The actual workaday tasks would be performed by a staff of librarians. Except for attending one meeting a month—oh, and perhaps making an occasional speech somewhere on our behalf—you would be independent and free to work on your own novels at home. The honorarium would be fifteen thousand per annum. Of course, I know with all that Nobel money—’

  ‘Won’t be any Nobel money by the time it’s January,’ said Craig, who had squeezed his eyes to bring Inglis into better focus. ‘That’s a good offer.’

  ‘I’m delighted you think so. The Board of Regents is highly favourable to your appointment. They are most impressed with the Nobel matter. Of course—’ He hesitated, and Craig, sobering for an instant, eyed his visitor keenly.

  ‘Of course—what?’

  ‘The Board is willing to make the appointment formally after the Nobel Ceremony—I mean, after you’ve received the honour and made your address.’

  ‘Why not now, Inglis? Are they afraid I might disgrace them—have another fiasco—like the time I was supposed to lecture up at the college? I bet those greybeards don’t think I’ll make the Nobel Ceremony or get on the Stockholm stage sober. They’re afraid of a scandal, aren’t they?’

  Inglis seemed to retreat into his great overcoat, suffused with embarrassment. ‘It’s not that, Mr. Craig—’

  ‘What else can it be, dammit? I’m on probation. Go to Stockholm, Craig, stand up before the world, display academic dignity, show that you are purged, cleansed, reformed—and come back to us, not only with your laurels, but a new man. I’m on probation. That’s it, isn’t it, Inglis?’

  ‘Stop badgering him, Andrew,’ said Leah. ‘He’s doing his best. He’s on your side, like everyone else. They just expect more of you now, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, I’m me,’ he said belligerently. His eyes found Inglis again, and his mood mercurially changed. ‘It’s a good offer, and thank you, and thank them. Maybe I’ll earn it—but don’t put money on me, don’t do that.’

  ‘Mr. Craig, I know it will work out. You’re a great man. I read The Perfect State eight times. I know you won’t disappoint anyone in Stockholm.’

  Craig had closed his eyes, and was rubbing his forehead. He was not listening.

  Leah signalled Inglis, and he quietly rose and tiptoed out of the kitchen after her. Mack followed them.

  Andrew Craig was alone.

  He felt a thousand years tired, and his head felt stuffed and heavy, and his deadened, sodden nerves begged for unconsciousness. He circled his arms on the table, and laid his head in his arms, and tried not to think of the turn of events. But his fatigued brain did not sleep. He thought: I was only trying to die slowly, peacefully, unobtrusively, like a forgotten old plant in the shade. He thought: Why did those Swedes expose and humiliate me by forcing me to die in public? He thought: I’m an immortal now, in the record books, but I’m as sickeningly mortal as I was when I awakened this morning. He remembered George Bernard Shaw’s sardonic remark, when he received the Nobel Prize at sixty-nine: ‘The money is a life belt thrown to a swimmer who has already reached the shore.’ He thought: Only in my case I’d rewrite it . . . a life belt thrown to a man after he’s drowned. He thought: Nothing.

  Andrew Craig had passed out.

  2

  * * *

  IT was a crisp, sunless, silvery early afternoon in Stockholm, the temperature 15° C., this first day in December, when Count Bertil Jacobsson, formal in his silk hat and overcoat, brown cane tucked under his arm, pearl-grey spats on his shoes, emerged from the Nobel Foundation at Sturegatan 14 and walked to the Cadillac limousine awaiting him at the kerb.

  The Swedish Foreign Office had furnished the limousine for the occasion. Now it stood in splendour, its rear door held open by a blond, liveried chauffeur. As Jacobsson approached, the driver inclined his head respectfully, and saluted. Jacobsson answered with a nod, and entered the car. He settled into the nearest corner of the cushioned rear seat, already amply filled by Ingrid Påhl and Carl Adolf Krantz. On the return trip, he and Krantz would sit on the jump seats and allow their guests to join Ingrid Påhl on the softer rear seat.

  ‘Good afternoon, good afternoon,’ said Count Bertil Jacobsson. ‘A lovely day for our beginning.’

  ‘Hello. Yes, lovely,’ said Ingrid Påhl nervously.

  Krantz, who always appeared preoccupied, muttered, ‘Count,’ in greeting, and no more.

  The chauffeur had slammed the front door and was behind the wheel. Jacobsson leaned forward, slid the glass partition open, and said, ‘Arlanda Airport, please.’ He consulted his watch. ‘We are early. You may make this a leisurely drive.’

  He closed the glass partition, as the car started and moved away from the kerb, eased himself back into his corner, and turned his head to his companions.

  ‘Why so solemn, my friends?’ he asked. ‘I always find these first meetings refreshing.’

  ‘I never know what to say,’ said Ingrid Påhl.

  ‘We are privileged,’ Jacobsson went on. ‘We have the opportunity to receive, and intimately acquaint ourselves with, the geniuses of the world—’

  ‘Whom we have made famous,’ Krantz interrupted acidly.

  ‘Not so, Carl, not at all. They have their fame, all of them, before we recognize and crown it.’ He considered this a moment, objectively, and then revised his judgment. ‘Well, not always, but usually, often enough.’ He regarded his companions for a moment. ‘I hope neither of you regrets participating with me on the reception committee? It was not only my judgment, but the various academies—’

  ‘We are honoured,’ said Krantz curtly. He stared out the window a moment, and then he added, ‘Perhaps I’m still smarting at the vote. Except for Professor Stratman—’

  ‘You’re surely not objecting to Dr. Garrett and Dr. Farelli? Their findings electrified the entire world.’

  ‘The press, the press,’ said Krantz. ‘We were swept away. I think we should be more judicious. Perhaps their heart transplant, limited as it is may be the great medical discovery of our time. On the other hand, it may be a circus stunt. I think the Caroline committee should have waited another year or two, for more experiments, more results. As to the Marceau team, I am still not impressed. Sperms in cold storage. Who cares? There were half a dozen more worthy findings to be honoured. The literary award to the American, I won’t even speak of—’

  Ingrid Påhl’s chins quivered with indignation. ‘Var snäll och—please, Carl, do not mix in again. You are a physicist, not a literary critic. I am sure you have not even read Mr. Craig’s books—’

  ‘I read one. It was enough.’

  ‘Well, you simply have no judgment in such matters. I do not meddle when you make your decisions in chemistry and physics, and I do not think you should interfere with those of us in the Swedish Academy. Every year, the same. You made the same comments when we selected Sinclair Lewis, Pearl Buck, Ernest Hemingway. Why is it always the Americans you object to? Why is it that you were only happy when Eucken and Heyse and Hauptmann, your darling Germans, won?’

  Krantz’s lips were tight. ‘On this level, I will not discuss the matter further with you.’

  Krantz turned back to the window. Ingrid Påhl opened her beaded handbag with irritation and sought cigarette and holder for solace. Jacobsson, who had been listening with concern, determined to remain detached.

  By the time they had reached the suburbs of northern Stockholm, the first portion of their twenty-two-mile drive to Arlanda behind them, Jacobsson realized that he could not remain detached, at least not within himself. It was his task, as senior head of the Nobel reception committee, to see that they presented a united and gracious front. For ten days, from this afternoon until the Ceremony on the afternoon of
December tenth, the three of them would be living together, and living with their distinguished guests who had won the prizes and come long distances to receive them. Any note of discord or dissension among the three of them, before their guests, the press, the public, would be disgraceful. Jacobsson decided that should another such argument occur, he could not remain above it, outside it, but must act to put a stop to it at once.

  He blamed himself for influencing the academies to let Krantz and Ingrid Påhl join him on the reception committee. In his absorption with the preparations that had been in his hands the sixteen days since the telegrams had been sent to France, Italy, and America, he had forgotten their antagonism to each other. As always the preparations had been hectic. There had been the detailed letters sent off to the winners. There had been the schedules and programmes. There had been the reservations for choice suites at the Grand Hotel. And there had been the reporters.

  In the midst of all this activity, it had fallen on Jacobsson to recommend to the academies two of their members to join with him in receiving the winners. Because there had been no time to give it lengthy consideration, Jacobsson had hurriedly suggested the names of Krantz and Ingrid Påhl. His choices had been automatically approved. At the time, several weeks before, he had thought the choices excellent ones, regarding them as separate individuals, and not as collaborators with one another and himself. Both were eminently qualified in their fields, or so it had seemed.

  Now, casting a sidelong glance at his companions, as if to support his earlier judgment, he tried to see them as the foreign guests would see them. Ingrid Påhl, beside him, was puffing away steadily at a cigarette in the ebony holder. A floral hat covered most of her greying hair. Her enormous face, with flat, fat features, was like a pinkish mound of unkneaded dough. Beneath her loose chins hung many strands of necklaces of varied coloured stones. A great pudding of a woman, her shapeless body was encased in a tentlike blue dress. She resembled, Jacobsson often thought, Madame Helena P. Blavatsky, the Russian theosophist with whom his father had been photographed in London near the end of the last century. Although her face was now grim, aggravated still by the disagreement with Krantz, she was ordinarily pleasant, almost bland, exuding naïve Swedish simplicity and sweetness.