NEXT MONTH WILL see the annual jamboree when this year's Nobel laureates get their medals and fat cheques. In all the pomp and publicity, questions about the validity of such awards will be forgotten and few who watch the ceremony on television will remember much about the man who started it all, except that he invented dynamite.
If Alfred Nobel felt guilty about being an armaments manufacturer, he never showed it. He saw it as strictly business. But he was not your typical arms dealer. A cultured man, Nobel was fluent in several languages and a writer of poetry and plays. Although he made his fortune from war, he hoped that mankind would finally find a way to live without wars. In his will he explained that he wanted a peace prize to encourage 'fraternity among nations . . . abolition or reduction of standing armies, or promotion of peace congresses'.
He died in 1896 and it took five years of bickering within the Nobel Foundation and its nominating committees before the first prizes were awarded. The in-fighting continues to this day.
The Nobel committee of the Swedish Academy, which chooses the literature laureate, was, in 1901, full of old men with Victorian attitudes. The committee rejected Leo Tolstoy's nomination, because it thought his work contained 'ghastly naturalistic descriptions'.
Throughout its chequered history, the literature prize has left several other geniuses out in the cold and often honoured mediocre authors.
Writers who have the best chance are those who have lived to a ripe old age and whose material is uplifting. As the critic Herbert Howarth put it, the prize is like 'a death mask on fulfilled grandeur'.
Novelists like Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov who tell it as they see it never had a chance.
