A glimpse behind the scenes: The Booker at 50

Over a few months in 1968 Rebecca West, Stephen Spender, Frank Kermode, David Farrer and W. L. Webb gathered to discuss around sixty books. Sometimes they met at Bertorelli’s restaurant in London. Once they spent a weekend together at Michael Astor’s house in the Cotswolds. In West’s typewritten notes from that inaugural year of the Booker Prize, Michael Frayn was deemed “curiously dull”, Melvyn Bragg “grossly over-written” and Anthony Powell “not earth-shaking, I feel, because there is such a high percentage of twaddling on”. (The assessment of Powell, by the way, was as close as she got to a compliment.)

“Getting through the sixty was made easier by our not daring to take on Dame Rebecca”, Frank Kermode later remembered. The Booker archive at Oxford Brookes University holds many small white postcards from West, full of imperious putdowns in handwriting as tiny as her pronouncements are sweeping. “It is to be noted”, she scrawled, “that all the novels about Ireland yet submitted cause a feeling of regret that people are not killing themselves all over Ireland and not just in Ulster.” And so on.

Once the prize was established, the sponsors were routinely referred to in correspondence as “the sugar daddies”. One of the most infamous stories about the early history of the prize is John Berger’s donation, in 1972, of half of his £5,000 winnings to the British Black Panthers, as if in restitution for the origins of the money. His speech – flamboyant, and somewhat comical in its merely partial gift – was not as antagonistic as its disparaging reception suggested; a nuanced view might see that impulse as already baked into the purpose of the prize itself. Indeed, a sift through the archive reveals Berger’s apparently oppositional gesture to be part of its DNA.

Prizes can be a useful platform for protest: Jean-Paul Sartre declined the Nobel in 1964, setting in motion a tradition so strong that – as J. C. suggested in the pages of the TLS – there might be a Sartre Prize for the refusal of prizes. (“So great is the status of the Jean-Paul Sartre Prize for Prize Refusal that writers all over Europe and America are turning down awards in the hope of being nominated for a Sartre”, wrote J. C. in 2012.) An alternative to declining a prize was to use it to draw attention to something else. In 1973, the year after Berger won the Booker, Marlon Brando boycotted the Academy Awards and sent a Native American woman to turn down his Oscar for Best Actor. In 1968, the year the Booker was built, the American poet Robert Bly gave his National Book Award to the anti-Vietnam effort.

The founders of the Booker Prize knew this sort of gesture could confer distinction – as well as publicity. If you look at the correspondence about its inception, one of the most striking aspects is the Booker Prize’s association with revolution from the start. Jill Mortimer, who was working for the Publishers Association and conducting research in order to set up the prize, remarked that it had been difficult to get much information about the Goncourt prize because, in May 1968, the post from Paris was rather slow. W. L. Webb, Literary Editor of the Guardian and the Booker’s first chair of the judges, wrote to Mortimer from the road, going back and forth between London and Prague, where he was working with Václav Havel, then a dissident playwright, later the President of Czechoslovakia (and then the Czech Republic).

When Berger gave part of his money to the Black Panthers, a rumour circulated that the movement had already petered out. That wasn’t true; they hadn’t disbanded, they were just disorganized. The British Black Panthers were not – and never had been – a political party like the Black Panthers in the United States. They also had quite different goals. These were not African Americans emerging from an era of segregation; they were immigrants from the Commonwealth who had faced discrimination on arrival in the UK. Among other things, they sought to quash a repatriation bill, and succeeded.

All this bears remembering, in the light of recent treatment of the Windrush generation – the concerns to which the Booker drew attention are not antique. And it’s worth recalling, too, what Berger actually said. Because you might argue that when he made his acceptance speech, he didn’t just give the prize the greatest public impact it had hitherto enjoyed. He also drew attention to the possibility of a prize that would shed light on the world and welcome its rebels. As the writer David Storey put it, before winning the Booker in 1976, “Prizes tend to be rewarded to the reliable rather than the liabilities, and the liabilities are the people who matter in the end”.

What do the judges seek, and how do we seek the judges? The former judge Ruth Rendell pointed out (characteristically, given her chosen genre) that it’s not really a “jury”, because jurors have to decide between innocence and guilt; Man Booker judges have to choose the best. But what does that mean? There is no more specific remit – each set of judges has to make up its own model.

One of the risks of the prize’s being so well-established is what the former chair Fay Weldon warned of when (echoing David Storey) she described “the whole institutionalised tendency to play safe and avoid trouble”. Good books may cause no trouble at all, of course, but – judges have to ask themselves – are we open to them if they do? Another issue was illustrated as long ago as 1987, when Julian Barnes wrote about the prize, after he’d been shortlisted but long before he won it. “The Booker, after 19 years”, he wrote, “is beginning to drive people mad. It drives publishers mad with hope, booksellers mad with greed, judges mad with power, winners mad with pride, and losers (the unsuccessful shortlistees plus every other novelist in the country) mad with envy and disappointment.”

When Graham Swift won the prize for Last Orders in 1996, he noted that although its impact on a writer’s fortunes in Britain was well documented, he’d had no idea until then “how extensively it is respected abroad”. That has also been its purpose from the outset. The very first year, hundreds of copies of P. H. Newby’s Something To Answer For were sent to Zambia, as well as to Trinidad and Guyana. And now that the Man Booker International Prize rewards novels translated into English, the effects are being felt by writers even in their own countries. When Han Kang and her translator Deborah Smith won the Man Booker International with The Vegetarian, a book that had been published in Korea a decade earlier and sold 20,000 copies in that period, half a million copies of the Korean edition were ordered within a fortnight.

There is one particular strange effect of the judging process. Just as a wedding is almost diametrically opposed to a marriage (the first being a one-off public event and the second being, with any luck, long and private), the small room in which the winner is chosen doesn’t remotely reflect the colossal impact of the decision made there. Judges spend months talking and whittling things down. Eventually, the pressure is upon them; they must choose the best book. Is it the one that looks best to them now, in close-up, after an unprecedented amount of reading? Or is it the one that, when they look up and out into the world, they would most like to press into the hands of the most people? Ideally, the answer to both questions would be the same. But it’s worth bearing in mind, because that’s what happens when they leave the room. They go to dinner, and the book goes everywhere.

Recently, there have been suggestions that Americans have no place competing in this prize, and – most disconcertingly – that their presence pushes out more marginal voices to which the prize has traditionally drawn attention. These are important considerations, and an ongoing conversation is required in order to be alert to them. As things stand, from the trenches, there are a few things to note. The judges hired since that rule change was made are not remotely biased in favour of Americans, and it’s interesting to see how many famous American writers have been eligible but not longlisted in that time: Donna Tartt, Don DeLillo, Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Safran Foer – none of the Jonathans, in fact, have made the cut. And marginal voices can have American passports too: Paul Beatty was not well known on either side of the Atlantic when his dazzlingly subversive novel The Sellout won in 2016. More importantly, the fundamental position should be one of confidence: British and Irish and Commonwealth writers can of course be the best in the world.

In the closing lines of his Nobel lecture, given last December, Kazuo Ishiguro made an appeal that the Man Booker Prize might usefully adopt as a partial manifesto. “It’s hard to put the whole world to rights”, he said, “but let us at least think about how we can prepare our own small corner of it, this corner of ‘literature’, where we read, write, publish, recommend, denounce and give awards to books. If we are to play an important role in this uncertain future, if we are to get the best from the writers of today and tomorrow, I believe we must become more diverse.”