Forgotten, Famous and Favourite Nobel Literature Prize Winners, 1937-1947

First Latin American. Famous French Immoralist. Best Forgotten Novelist.

The Second World War stalked the winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature between 1937 and 1947. But this decade included:

• the forgotten author of the best 20th century novel that you have never heard of

• the favourite woman writer of Latin America in the 1930s, and

• the most famous immoral French writer of the mid-twentieth century.

Since 1901, 120 writers have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Some are forgotten. Many remain famous. A few became notorious for reasons that might surprise you and change your understanding of modern history. Discover them all in the 120 Nobels Challenge and let me know your favourites.

This week, we read the winners from 1937 to 1947.

• 1937 Roger du Gard, France

• 1938 Pearl Buck, USA

• 1939 Frans Sillanpää, Finland

• 1944 Johannes Jensen, Denmark

• 1945 Gabriela Mistral, Chile

• 1946 Herman Hesse, Germany/Switzerland

• 1947 André Gide, France

Voiceover is available if you want to listen on a walk or while doing some chores.

1937 Roger Martin du Gard (1881–1958) France

Roger du Gard may be the best 20th century novelist you have never heard of. I did not know him before this challenge. Yet his story resonates uncannily with our own times. Writers promote international peace. Great powers do not heed their prophecies.

He even has a connection to the Burning Archive. He trained as an archivist. He did not work in the profession for long, but his writing had the habits of a historian. His meticulously planned novels were erected on careful historical research. He did not impose aesthetic patterns. He described the ever-changing river of events and people. He sought a sense of reality, not the rush of symbolic modernism.

He was the son of a stockbroker, and a man shaped by upper bourgeois Catholic France. That gave him a character, will for peace, and moral integrity that was admired by his contemporaries including later Nobel Prize winners Albert Camus and André Gide, of whom Du Gard wrote a memoir.

His social background gave du Gard uncommon reserve and distaste for the vulgar world of commercial publicity. When his Nobel Prize was announced, du Gard packed his bags and fled to Nice to avoid all contact with journalists. 

His life experience, including engagement in the Dreyfus Affair, gave him a deep commitment to peace. Military service in World War One deepened that commitment. It was from that experience that his Nobel Prize winning literature grew.

Following his demobilisation in 1919, du Gard planned his vast roman fleuve, Les Thibaults. A roman fleuve (literally ‘river novel’) is a long novel that follows a large group of characters across time and explores their minds, ideas, intertwined fates, social manners and historical setting. Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time are examples. Du Gard’s Les Thibaults is less complacent and more incisive than Galsworthy, and less aestheticised and more realistic than Proust. 

Over eight large parts, this panoramic novel traced the story of two brothers, Antoine and Jacques Thibault, from the early twentieth century to the tragedy of World War One.  Jacques is a resolute pacifist who seeks to prevent the war in cooperation with his socialist friends. In one volume, L’Eté 1914 (Summer 1914), Jacques despairs at the incitement of war by some European governments during the events of August, and then the rapid seduction of supposedly peaceful socialists and other intellectuals by the sirens of nationalism and the calls to defend civilisation.

It is a story of how a search for peace was defeated. It is History as tragedy. The idealistic, courageous and ambitious seek to control events. But History is too wild a dragon to be ridden towards good intentions. He remarked that “the real value of life is not its beauty but its tragedy.” 

His style adapted nineteenth century realism, such as Thomas Hardy, to contemporary concerns. At the same time as du Gard pondered the uncertainties of social reality, Heisenberg won the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the uncertainty principle in observing physical reality. The perspective infused Les Thibaults.

“Tant la réalité a d'évidence ... Tant cette évidence s'impose! ... Dès que les choses sont arrivées, nous ne pensons même plus qu'elles auraient pu ne pas être ... Ou qu'elles auraient pu être toutes différentes.”

[So much reality is obvious... So much of this obviousness is imposed!... As soon as things have happened, we no longer even think that they could not have been... Or that they could have been completely different.]

― Roger Martin du Gard, Les Thibault, Tome III

The final volume of Les Thibaults was published in 1937 as the Last Imperial War (1931-1945) accelerated into wars in China, Spain, and Ethiopia. This tragic fictional plea for peace won de Gard the Nobel Prize and the esteem of his contemporaries. But his memory would not last. The Second World War, broken Europe, shattered dreams, and cultural ferment after 1945 threw Du Gard into the oblivion of the Burning Archive.

You can read Summer 1914 here. I plan to read it next year, assuming we do not relive the Guns of August in 2024.

1938 Pearl Buck (1892–1973) U.S.A.

Pearl Buck was a popular American novelist and humanitarian campaigner. Her story exposes the U.S.A.’s complicity in the tragedies of modern Chinese history. 

In 1938 the China-Japan War was raging. The Swedish Academy took a stand for peace, as they had before. But the committee chose not to grant the Prize to a Chinese writer, but to an American Presbyterian missionary. 

Pearl Buck was the adopted name of Comfort Sydenstricker. She was born to German-Dutch Presbyterian missionaries who took her to China as an infant. American missionaries and commercial interests had prowled China since the Opium Wars. They proselytised during the Christian inspired Taiping Rebellion. They sheltered in treaty-ports and privileged quarters while China endured its century of humiliation. 

Buck was brought up in this cloistered world of European-American missionaries and traders who profited from the disintegration of the Qing empire. Her memoir recalled two contrasting worlds: the "small, white, clean Presbyterian world of my parents", and the “big, loving merry not-too-clean Chinese world.” She witnessed the Boxer rebellion, the fall of the Qing, the warlord period and the Nanking Incident of 1927, in which the Chinese lashed out against the foreign imperialists.

Yet Buck’s affection for Chinese culture was warm. She praised its great novels, supported humanitarian efforts, facilitated family exchanges, and wrote about the life of Chinese peasants with heartfelt compassion. The Good Earth, which won both the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes, was honoured "for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China."

But what did China think? In 1938, those Chinese peasants were at war with Japan.  They were being mobilised by the Communist Party of China and Mao Tse-Tung. But America was determined to keep China within its orbit as part of its conflict with Japan for the Western Pacific. This story ended in 1949, when America “lost China”. After 1949, the People’s Republic of China refused Buck re-entry to the country. Its leaders and intellectuals denounced the Nobel’s missionary as an "American cultural imperialist." 

It was not surprising. Buck supported the forces defeated in the Chinese Revolution, just like the USA government. The USA refused to recognise the new, real government of China. It backed the breakaway province of Taiwan. China repeatedly refused Buck’s attempts to return. 

Buck turned from novels to geopolitics. In 1962 she proposed to President Kennedy that the USA accept de facto independence of Taiwan, with a promise of a negotiated settlement on the never-never. She also published Satan Never Sleeps with her views on life in Communist China, which she never visited. When Nixon went to China in 1972, Buck tried one more time. She urged President Nixon to permit her to return to China. But Nixon knew Mao and Zhou Enlai’s view on Taiwan. He refused the novelist’s old China dream.

Pearl Buck was a Nobel Laureate of the populist thirties. Her literary reputation was sustained by her advocacy of humanitarian causes, in the new missionary American Century. Her novels read to me as compassionate yet distorted memories of China through American eyes.

Her books remain widely available, and her popularity makes free online editions scarce. You can read The Mother here. In 2018, The Good Earth was turned into a graphic novel. It was a fitting artefact for Pearl Buck’s legacy.

1939 Frans Eemil Sillanpää (1888–1964) Finland

Frans Sillanpää was the first Finnish winner of the Nobel Prize. The Finnish prize completed a full Scandinavian set, after Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Finland was a complex cultural mix. Many spoke Swedish. Others, Russian. A few spoke Saami languages. But Sillanpää wrote in Finnish.

He was another pacifist Laureate, an admirer of science, and a man of rural Finland. The Nobel Committee honoured him “for his deep understanding of his country's peasantry and the exquisite art with which he has portrayed their way of life and their relationship with Nature.”

He came from a peasant family, and wrote short stories and novels of the Finland he knew. But they were not hazy populist romances, but informed by his studies in natural science. He saw humanity as the human animal, grounded in biology. He believed science could solve all human problems, even war. The twentieth century would prove him wrong.

His novel Meek Heritage [Hurskas Kurjuus] (1919, transl. 1938) portrayed the Finnish civil war of 1918, consequential of the Russian Revolution in part. In 1918 Sillanpää had watched Red Army soldiers enter his local village. Direct experience of war enabled him to portray this ambivalent civil war with great sensitivity. You can read an English translation of Meek Heritage here.

Its prologue reflected on war.

“But war, in an exact sense, is nothing in itself; it is a certain fleeting relationship between individual and collective fates. It passes, but the fates involved are treasures achieved, in which respect they are equal. Very soon after the battles an individual human soul can attain to a moment when the eye no longer, even by an effort of will, halts at the inessential surface, at the physical exertions, the dirt, the hunger and cruelties, but penetrates irresistibly deeper, where all are as though petrified and still in their various attitudes. There no one is nobler or more justified than another, for through the agency of the warring parties circumstances have clashed of which the fighters have no inkling. The dead arise and wonder why they have been buried in this fashion in separate graves; they cannot at all remember what meaning attaches to this discrimination.” p. 3.

He was deeply popular at the time. His novels lasted in the Northern tradition. His hope that science might extinguish war failed.

1944 Johannes Vilhelm Jensen (1873–1950) Denmark

Johannes Jensen was a prolific writer of novels, poetry, essays and journalism. He is remembered for a classic historical novel, but Jensen celebrated the commercial, technological dynamism of the new century. He reoriented Danish literature to the new American Century.

His prize came three years after Henry Luce declared in Life magazine that the century ahead would belong not to the Old World of Europe but the cream of the New World in the USA. It came a few months after the Normandy invasion began the collapse of Nazi control of Western Europe. Denmark was occupied by Germany and Jensen, the aged admirer of America, had stayed in Copenhagen during the war. When the German forces entered Denmark in April 1940, Jensen burned decades of diaries and letters, in case his sympathies risked his life.

Since the 1890s Jensen had celebrated science, technology, the metropolis, pragmatic materialism, and commerce. He was not alone in admiring the transformation of the world and believing its future was America. Kafka wrote a novel of the hope of the New World, Amerika. Tens of thousands of Scandinavians had migrated to the USA, as we saw with the portrait of Selma Lagerlöf. 

But Jensen’s love affair with America was more fertile than many. It appeared in his artistic and journalistic writing. He wrote prose poems modelled on Walt Whitman. He wrote historical fantasies (The Long Journey) that wove together the early Scandinavian expeditions of Leif Erickson to North America with the discoveries of Christopher Columbus, back in the days when Columbus was seen as a hero. He wrote journalism that changed popular perceptions of America in Denmark and raised the social esteem of Denmark in the USA. 

His passion for America and the modern world was also more febrile than most. His celebrations of science and technology were lyrical but dubious. They were laced with pseudo-scientific theories. His love for America was expressed in frequent travels to and from democratic USA. But it was also marked by a similar technological modernism to the Fascist Futurists. This futurism drove expansion of nation-empires and fuelled authoritarian ethics that brought those empires to war. For Jensen, war was the price of progress. He believed cultures and civilizations fought in a Darwinian struggle for existence. He took a bet that America would win.

But his encounters with war and American power chilled Jensen’s passion. During World War One he thought Americans childish and bigoted. He regretted war between the “Gothic” nations of Germany and Britain. In the 1920s and 1930s he stood mute before rising authoritarianism. Late in the day, in 1938, he criticised anti-Semitism. Six months before war broke out in Europe, he travelled to America. He was disappointed with American vulgarity and materialism. They pursued technology as an end in itself, rather than for human inventiveness. He left for home, and the tragedy of German occupation of Denmark.

Unlike his unbalanced hopes for geopolitics, Jensen’s writing has endured. He introduced futuristic modernism and the prose poem to 20th century Danish poetry. His 1906 collection Poems (Digte), is considered his major literary achievement. His historical novel The Fall of the King (1901) was voted the best Danish novel of the 20th century in 1999. 

The novel combines omniscient narration, prose poems, brute realism, and rhapsodic dreams to tell a story of Denmark’s fall to greater powers. Set in the first half of the sixteenth century, in Europe torn apart by Reformation, war and rival powers, the novel tells the story of an unworldly student Mikkel Thøgersen who becomes a mercenary under King Christian II of Denmark. He witnesses the horrors of war. He endures imprisonment together with his king. He symbolises the fall of his country and old Europe.

Its story demands some knowledge of Danish history, but it is not hard to obtain. The Fall of the King opens with Mikkel sitting in a Copenhagen inn in which crude German soldiers are acting like oafs. Any Danish reader of The Fall of the King in 1901 would have read the passage with memories of the 1864 war between Germany and Denmark. Any reader in 1944 would imagine its more recent occupation.

You can read the novel here and a 2013 translation is available in bookstores and libraries.

1945 Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957) Chile

Gabriela Mistral was the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. 

She was idolised by generations of Latin Americans as the national schoolteacher-mother of Chile. Yet Mistral lived against the maternal myth. She never gave birth, and her poetry explored the gender and sexual politics of her time, in the machismo countries of Latin America.

Indeed, in a recent book, Licia Fiol-Matta portrayed Mistral as A Queer Mother for the Nation. It may be a polemical account. Other literary biographies emphasise Mistral’s focus on “the basic passion of love as seen in the various relationships of mother and offspring, man and woman, individual and humankind, soul and God.” Which version of Mistral is true?  

Mistral was a committed intellectual of the mid twentieth century who spoke out for the poor and downtrodden in a way that was both progressive and Franciscan. She became a school principal in 1920s Santiago, while pursuing both a spiritual and writing life.

She wrote under a pseudonym, Gabriela Mistral, to cloak her career in administration. Her birth name was Lucila Alcayaga. Her birthplace was the remote Elqui Valley in the Andes. But her literature was inspired by European heritage. Her pseudonym was borrowed from another Nobel Laureate, Fréderic Mistral (1904), who Gabriela called the “singer of Provence”. But her name was inspired by her love of the wind, which she called “the most spiritual of elements.” Mistral shared his name with the great Mediterranean breeze, mistral, which in his Occitan dialect means “masterly”.

From 1922 she began to publish books, and travel - to Mexico, Cuba, the USA and Europe. Her travels as a well-known poet included a stint as a lesser-known bureaucrat in the flawed League of Nations. She had many encounters with the troubled world of the Last Imperial War.

The Gale Dictionary of Literary Biography says her poetry has endured long after her death unlike many Nobel Laureates. “The strongly spiritual character of her search for a transcendental joy unavailable in the world contrasts with her love for the materiality of everyday existence.” 

I have not explored Mistral’s political and social essays. I doubt they will teach me that much. But I was struck by her poetry and the presence of the figure of the mad woman and prophetess, Cassandra, in her poems.

I am the one who Apollo left,

as a pledge of his love, two lucid eyes.

Without tears I sailed on a sea of tears,

and stepped down without balking

from my captive’s car, understanding and consenting.

This woman envelops me with cinches,

but it’s his blood that girds me

and his coral thread that bears off with him

the one who is both hostage and beloved.

And the doors close behind that woman

who had him twenty years without loving him,

whom I loved and followed over sea and islands,

inhaling essences aboard the ship

to retain the pure aroma of my homeland.

Now the two of us are here at last, rich

in purple and in passion, won and lost,

understanding all and grateful for all

to the Fate that knows, unites and saves.

— Gabriela Mistral “Cassandra”

You can read more translations of her selected poems here. 

1946 Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) Germany and Switzerland (after 1923)

Hesse was a lonely outsider and difficult child. He was prodigiously educated by a polyglot grandfather. He emerged in the tradition of the great German intellectuals of Imperial Germany. But Germany, as we have found in the challenge, was a complex, far-reaching culture between 1900 and 1940. It was not the caricature that decades of Anglo-American history have seeded in popular culture.

Hesse’s family had connections to India. German culture and scholarship were central to maintaining the heritage of Indian civilization in the years of the British Raj. Max Müller, the German philologist based at Oxford University, founded Western academic study of Indian civilization, culture and religion. Hesse adapted the wisdom traditions of that civilization. Without Müller, Hesse’s novels would not be possible.

In 1911, Hesse visited India, and had direct encounters with Indian spiritual traditions. These traditions would later dominate his novels. They secured him iconic status in the hippie revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. He was still a household name in my teen years when this culture soured into post-punk gothic wails.

Like so many Germans, the first world war was catastrophic for Hesse. He volunteered, but the sickly scholar was rejected as unfit. He gave lukewarm support for the nationalist cause. Then he was rebuffed for his prevarication. His wife developed schizophrenia, and Hesse fled the torments of her madness, and abandoned his wife in her years of crisis.

He remade his life in an old Swiss castle, Casa Camuzzi. There he wrote his major works, Steppenwolf, Siddhartha, Narcissus and Goldmund, and The Glass Bead Game. These literary works explored the individual's search for authenticity, self-knowledge, and spirituality. They expressed a philosophy of spiritual wisdom, influenced by non-European traditions.

“Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else ... Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.”

― Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

In Switzerland, Hesse befriended Carl Jung and practised some psychotherapy. His first wife did not benefit. A friend gave me The Glass Bead Game thirty-five years ago. It is a story of the cruel games of intellectuals and monster-artists. I sometimes think I should finally read it. But then I think the failures of Hesse’s real life offer a better lesson than the fictions of his philosophy.

1947 André Gide (1869–1951) France

We have come full circle in these seven prizes over a decade.  Du Gard, the 1937 winner, was the friend and memoirist of the 1947 winner, André Gide.

Gide was arguably the most influential French writer of the early twentieth century. When he died in 1951, the New York Times, eager to assume the role of cultural arbiter in the new American imperium, declared Gide to be “France's greatest contemporary man of letters.” I wonder today, after several waves of French intellectuals since 1945 have washed over the Western cultural shore, if Andre Gide is now forgotten. 

Maybe Gide should be forgotten? He was a self-declared pederast. I find his writing hard to take. I spent three years in vicarious trauma when I worked on the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. I wrote about this experience in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat. Can I bear to read his excuses for his liberty paid for by a child’s pain?

Gide began his literary career as a symbolist, one of the early experimenters that the very first Nobel Prize winner, Sully Prudhomme, had opposed. He befriended Oscar Wilde. He helped to found the Nouvelle Revue Française, and in the 1920s was a key figure in French surrealism. By the early 1930s, he espoused communism as a fellow traveller, although without the aesthetic constraints of socialist realism. After all, Gide was a political flâneur, not a party animal. In 1935 he travelled to the Soviet Union. After returning to Paris, he repudiated the political repression of Stalin’s terror and shifted away from communism. After 1945, when the Cold War closed the Western Mind, Gide embraced Christian traditions like a frail old man approaching death. Protestant asceticism formed Gide’s character and his instinct to rebel. In late life, he revalued the Christian civilization against which he had transgressed, but the Soviets now threatened. This Christian civilization, Gide wrote, could be saved "if we accepted the responsibility of the sacred charge laid on us by our traditions and our past.” His life was a drama of rebellion against convention and embrace of authority.

His writings are too vast to summarise. His genres included novels, drama, translation, literary criticism, letters, essays, and diaries. His style was French classicism: succinct, spare, subtle phrases. He was that quaint old thing, so ill-matched to our world of niches, a “man of letters.” One classic Gidean phrase stood out to me because I know Vaclav Havel reworked it in colloquial Czech.

“Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.”

I have sampled The Immoralist (in French here and in English in Penguin classics). It described Gide’s alter ego in love with a young Arab boy. It was drawn from life and Gide’s many travels to French colonial Africa where he liberated himself on the bodies of a collapsing empire’s subjects. His celebration of transgression and homosexuality led the Catholic Church to place yet another Nobel Laureate, Gide, on the index of banned books. After all, the Church knew it had a secret about sex with young boys.

Gide’s diaries and journals are famous windows onto French intellectual life. You can work your way through his complete works in French. Most good libraries stock his work. But please forgive me. For reasons of vicarious trauma, I pass over Gide from now in silence.