The Green Bouquet

One of the enduring literary parlor games is listing the immortal losers of the Nobel Prize: Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce, Kafka and Rilke are but a few. Despite the vagaries of the judging, the award remains by far the most coveted prize for writers, partly because it is a huge windfall ($98,100). There are always famous bridesmaids waiting for the big green bouquet. At present they include Vladimir Nabokov, the finest novelist alive; Norman Mailer, the most protean writer; and poets like W.H. Auden and Robert Lowell.

As has been rumored for weeks, this year's winner is West German Novelist Heinrich Boell, respected man of letters, prominent leftist Roman Catholic intellectual, and among the earliest and most insistent examiners of his country's conscience since World War II. Still, the award did not escape gossip and second-guessing. The judges of Stockholm never publicly argue or explain their choice, but surely something more than art is involved.

This year, the story goes, Germany was ripe for recognition (Thomas Mann, in 1929, was the last German citizen to win). The other colorable candidate was Gunter Grass, author of the savage satire, The Tin Drum. Boell's triumph may well be due to a line in Alfred Nobel's will that recommends that the award go to writers of "idealistic tendency." Deep compassion for the ordinary man abounds in Boell's books.

Son of a Cologne sculptor and cabinetmaker, Boell was 20 when the Munich Pact was signed in 1938. As a Wehrmacht draftee, he fought mostly on the Eastern front and was wounded four times. Later he wrote of "the f rightful fate of being a soldier and having to wish that the war might be lost."

After 1945 Boell worked as an assistant cabinetmaker but quit as soon as his first stories were published. A realist and an ironist, his prose is terse and direct, his manner as reticent and unflamboyant as Grass's is slashing and spectacular. The despair of war and its appalling hardship run through all his early work. For Boell, West Germany's postwar economic boom drowned out the moral voice of his country's guilty conscience. In 1959 he published Billiards at Half-Past Nine, a family chronicle in which the founding father is an architect who builds a famous religious shrine. Near the end of the war, his son, a demolitions expert, blows up the shrine unnecessarily because he is sick of the church's tolerance of the Nazis and disgusted by those who care more about the survival of their landmark than about the victims of the war. The Clown concerns the emotional collapse of a fellow who simply cannot accept the smug new prosperity. A new novel, Group Portrait with Lady, about the effects of the war on a very complex woman, will be published in the spring.

Boell is an industrious writer: at 54, he has turned out 40 books, not counting revisions or new collections. He likes to travel but has no hobbies. Boell was on his way to Israel when he heard of his prize. He expressed the usual joy and surprise, though only a hermit could not have heard the rumors that swirl like falling leaves each autumn. Shortly afterward, his son Vinzent ungraciously announced that, indeed, his father had been expecting the award. What the young man apparently did not realize was how many other writers were also on tiptoe.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.