The Sunday Gentleman (65 page)

I opened the door to leave, but Dr. Hedin continued speaking. He had just read that General Eisenhower was returning to Germany. “A good German name, Eisenhower,” said Dr. Hedin. “I think he is going to Germany to make preparations against Russia.” I said nothing. Dr. Hedin looked at me. Then, suddenly, he said, “I have done all the talking and answered all of your questions. Now you must be kind enough to answer one for me.” I said that I would be glad to do so. Dr. Hedin weighed his question for a moment, then he formed it, and asked it. “Tell me, what do you think is the date for the war to start between the United States and Russia?” I stared at him, wordless for an interval of seconds, unable to speak, able only to shake my head. At last, I said good night, thanks again for the tea, and then I walked downstairs and out into the cool, fresh neutral air.

WHAT HAS HAPPENED SINCE…

After three and a half years as an enlisted man in the United States Army Air Force and in the Army Signal Corps, I was honorably discharged from the service on February 3, 1946, at Fort Dix, New Jersey. While I had made writing tours through Mexico, Central and South America, Japan, and China, I had never been to Europe. I was determined to go as soon as possible. I obtained a series of writing assignments from three national magazines, my wife resigned from her editorial position on a motion picture magazine, and six months after my return to civilian life we were aboard the Swedish liner
Drottningholm
, bound for Göteborg, Sweden.

We reached Stockholm on September 3, 1946, and soon found ourselves settled in a regal corner suite of the Grand Hotel, the hotel that annually played host to the Nobel Prize winners. The cost of the suite was $13.44 a day, utterly beyond our means, but worth it for the view from the third-floor living room overlooking the Strömmen canal and the Royal Palace.

From the first day, I was constantly out in the cold, wet northern city, running down clues to possible stories, questioning, listening, observing, taking notes. I wrote a story on the Swedish National Theater, which was published, and several more stories on a variety of subjects, which were not published. Among the latter was the little adventure with Dr. Sven Hedin.

I had always known of Dr. Hedin. His books of travel and exploration,
The Conquest of Tibet, Across the Gobi Desert, The Silk Road
, were as familiar and romantic to me as the lighter works of Richard Halliburton and Carveth Wells. As I moved about Stockholm, I was surprised to hear his name mentioned often, not only at the King’s bookstore, Fritzes, but almost everywhere I went. The reason this surprised me was that Hedin’s conduct during the Second World War had been scandalous, yet his countrymen rarely referred to his specific activities. Germany’s role in the Second World War had ended little more than a year before, and although many so-called neutral Swedes had been sympathetic toward the Third Reich, Dr. Sven Hedin had been almost the only internationally prominent Swede to announce such a sympathy. Indeed, he had called Adolf Hitler “one of the greatest men in world history.” Since Germany had lost the war, and the Nazi concentration camp horrors had been brought into the open, most Swedes, while admiring Dr. Hedin’s international stature, were embarrassed by his continued loyalty to Hitler’s memory.

I decided that I must meet Dr. Hedin. I was curious. I sensed a story. I had no assignment, in fact no specific story angle or publication in mind, but I had to see the Scandinavian villain. I saw him on a sunny Sunday afternoon, September 8, 1946, and what occurred during our meeting I wrote down a week later, entitling it “Dr. Hedin’s Disgrace.”

Beyond the mere experience of meeting Dr. Hedin, there was something else that happened to me during our conversation, or as a result of it, an inspiration, an idea, that would have a lasting effect upon me as a writer—even though it would find no tangible expression until sixteen years later.

When Dr. Hedin had told me that he was a Nobel Prize judge, I had been quite startled and, indeed, impressed. I was impressed because, to me—to most, I am sure—the Nobel Prize in any category is the earth’s foremost accolade given by man to man. And here was I, informally chatting with one of the august judges. And, I repeat, I was also startled. What startled me was the fact that this person I was interviewing was a cobweb of prejudices and misinformation and intolerance on many, many subjects, from the sciences to the arts. To picture him—someone less than mortal—as a Nobel judge, one who played a decisive role in crowning annual gods, was astonishing. I had always believed, without ever having thought of it much, that if there were Nobel Prize judges, they were the wisest elders of our age. Actually, I suspected, most people did not believe the Nobel Prizes were decided upon by judges at all, but rather selected at a meeting of deities on high Olympus or selected by some massive, invisible computing and judgment machine that could X-ray the earth’s talented, its geniuses, and recommend the winners.

Intrigued by the contrast between what I had expected and what I found before me, I began to ask Dr. Hedin all about his functions on his Nobel committees, about how winners were nominated, sorted out, narrowed down, secretly discussed and debated, and about his own role and the roles of his fellow judges. Dr. Hedin sensed my excitement, and was pleased and expansive, and he rattled on at great length.

After I had left Dr. Hedin, I knew that I had stumbled upon something that should be written about—the truth about the Nobel Prize awards—the truth about those who gave and those who took—but I did not know what kind of story it was or could be, or in what form it might take final shape. I knew only that I wanted more of it. Immediately, I sought out several of Dr. Hedin’s Nobel colleagues, scholarly Swedish judges on the Nobel Prize science and literature committees, who also lived in Stockholm. I found them as outspoken as Dr. Hedin. In discussing the Nobel awards, these other judges named names, spoke of the human frailties of the judges and the judged, revealed stupidities and brilliance in the selections, exposed politics and prejudices and petty vanities as well as honesty and wisdom and courage in the Nobel Prize voting.

When my interviews were done, I had a writer’s treasure, I knew. I had no idea what to do with it.

Still in Stockholm, I did other work in the days that followed, but always bothered and nagged by this new material, and suddenly it was a Sunday. My wife and I slept most of the morning, and after we awakened, we had breakfast in our room. Outside, after a week of rain, the sun was shining at last. It was noon. I moved to the living room window and looked down across the Strömmen canal and idly watched and listened as the King’s band played before his enormous Royal Palace across the way. The postcard grandeur of the scene, the outer unreality of it, struck me, and then I remembered my afternoon with Dr. Sven Hedin, my interviews with the other judges, and I understood that all these sights were facades, and that plainer, cruder, human events happened behind palace walls, behind academy walls, behind all walls where earth people dwelt. And that was the moment of conception. At once, I knew what must be done.

I turned from the window to my wife, who was still having coffee. “Sylvia,” I said, “has anyone ever written a novel about the Nobel Prizes?”

From that moment, I was slave to an embryo, a brainchild, faceless, almost shapeless, that I would not be delivered of for a decade and a half. But it was to Dr. Hedin, and to several of his fellow judges, that I owed my inspiration for the idea, and some of the factual material, that I finally developed into a work of fiction,
The Prize
, a novel which was published in 1962.

I did not keep up with Dr. Hedin’s career after I left Stockholm in 1946, but recently I wondered what had happened to him in the years that had followed our meeting. As far as can be learned, Dr. Hedin went on no more expeditions, either to Asia or to any other country. Instead, he remained in his Stockholm apartments, and continued to write and publish the volumes about his earlier expedition to northern China. When I had seen him, thirty-one volumes had been published. In the next eight years, Dr. Hedin produced eight more volumes. Also, in 1950, I am told, he published a memoir entitled
Without Mission in Berlin
. This, I presume, was the book he told me about in 1946, the one which he then intended to call “Germany’s Last Years.” His political views during these years remained unchanged.

In the eight years that he lived after our meeting, he also continued to cast his ballot for the Nobel Prizes in literature, physics, and chemistry. He was in those eight years one of the judges who elected such Nobel laureates as Sir Edward Appleton in physics, Dr. Arne Tiselius in chemistry, and Andre Gide, T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Bertrand Russell in literature.

I have no knowledge about Dr. Hedin’s relationship with his fellow Nobel judges, but I have my suspicions that it was not always the best. When Norway, which chooses the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, gave its 1935 award to Carl von Ossietzky—a German national and early enemy of the Nazis, then in a concentration camp—Hitler was enraged. He announced that thereafter no German would be allowed to accept a Nobel Prize. Discussing that tense incident. Dr. Hedin had told me in 1946, “I went to Hitler to talk the matter over with him. I explained to him that Norway was solely responsible for that award, and that, after all, four out of five categories of the Nobel Prizes were given by Sweden. I pleaded with him to permit Germans to accept the Swedish-voted prizes. He would not relent.” Relative to this, I found interesting a statement in a book written and endorsed by members of the Nobel Foundation of Stockholm, in 1951. Discussing the Ossietzky award, it said:

“In Germany, there was violent resentment, and on January 31, 1937, Hitler issued a decree forbidding German nationals in the future to accept any Nobel Prize. The Swedish explorer Sven Hedin suggested in this connection that Norway should be deprived of the right to award the Peace Prize, and that this function should be entrusted to Sweden.”

In these words written by August Schou, then Director of the Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize, one might detect a certain degree of asperity toward Dr, Hedin.

Almost to the end. Dr. Hedin’s vigor remained, and he was in control of all his faculties. The year after I saw him, he even recovered the sight of one eye which had been blind for a half century.

He fell ill early in 1952 of a virus disease, and suffered from it through most of that year. In December, 1952, he died of a cerebral inflammation. He was eighty-seven years old.

I cannot say how widely or deeply Dr. Hedin was mourned. He had touched greatness once, but had been brought down—an Icarus who had ventured too close to the heat of savage conflict—because he had loved an alien land and its violent leaders too well and too long. The moral is self-evident: To love with abiding loyalty is not a virtue in itself, if one loves without discrimination.

18

The Man Who Hated

Hemingway

When I arrived in Madrid early one sunny morning last spring, the press association man was waiting for me outside the station beside his little German-made Opel. As I squeezed into the car, I made the obligatory joke about a sardine can, and he laughed in the way all newspapermen laugh when they meet a magazine writer and think to themselves, So that’s how smart you have to be to do it.

We went bumping down the Gran Via, past the shining store windows with their endless offerings of women’s furs and men’s leather game sets, and then turning and turning up wide clean streets to the Ritz Hotel. A fat doorman in an impressive blue coat with brass buttons saluted me and took out the luggage.

The press association man, who was from Arizona and not homesick, was telling me that his wife sent him all the Andrews Sisters records by TWA, and they were months in coming. I sat half in the car, half out, listening to his story. When he finished, he asked if I would dine with him the next evening. I accepted his invitation with thanks, and started to go, but he put his hand on my shoulder. “Just one more thing,” he said. “If I were you, I’d go up and see Olascoaga at the Subsecretariat of Education. He clears you for Foreign Office press credentials. Nothing to it. You get a card with your passport photo on it. And it’s damn useful.”

I thanked him again. But after he left, I promptly forgot about his advice.

The following evening, the press association man called for me and said he was going to show me how the better-class working Spaniard eats. I went with foreboding. We drove deep into Madrid, to a dark side-street
tasca
where the fat proprietor sang out his menu. I had a thick vegetable soup, a slice of chicken in oil and a plate of tirón, a beige-colored gummy Spanish candy, for the equivalent of $1.40.

Since dinner in Madrid begins about ten in the evening, we didn’t return to the hotel until one o’clock. Two soldiers, in long coats and short muskets, were walking back and forth. The press association man explained that they had guarded the Ritz ever since Communist underground members had heaved a bomb into the hotel’s garden and disturbed some of the distinguished guests. Later, I realized that this bombing didn’t explain why draftees were also guarding banks, grocery stores and cafeterias about Madrid. I wondered about it until I learned that Franco had almost a million men under arms (“the largest army in Western Europe,” an INS man told me) and he had to keep them busy.

As I left the car, the press association man said, “By the way, did you do what I told you?”

“Do what?”

“Those press credentials, remember? Did you get them from the Subsecretariat of Education? Well, you’d better. Let me tell you something. A state of war was declared in Spain in 1936, and that declaration has never been rescinded. There’s still an official state of war in this country. That can affect you. Soon you’ll be seeing the underground—”

I said I didn’t know if I would.

“Sure you will, they all do, first thing.”

As a matter of fact, he was right. I saw Republican and anarchist underground leaders within a week.