Bob Dylan, as everyone knows, was awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. Everyone, that is, with the possible exception of . . . Bob Dylan. Several days after the award was announced, the committee that makes the decision still had not been able to contact Dylan. So either he didn’t know or didn’t care and, in either case, good for him.
As the New York Post has reported, “After a week of failing to return calls from the Nobel committee [the Dylan web page] promoting a book of his lyrics was suddenly updated with the phrase: ‘Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.’ But by Friday, the words were removed without explanation.”
And then, there is the question of whether Dylan will travel “to accept the award, plus a cash prize of about $740,000, at a ceremony planned for Nov. 10 in Stockholm.”
All this recalls the story of another American who won the prize and created a small scandal by his indifference to the established protocols. This would have been in 1962. John F. Kennedy was in the White House and his wife Jacqueline was trying to introduce a little culture to the primitives. She held a soirée at the White House. Pablo Casals would perform and all the living Nobel Prize winners from the Western hemisphere would be invited. The president himself gave a speech in which he described his guests as “the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”
Not bad. But one of the no-shows at that dinner got off a better line. William Faulkner was, at the time, writer in residence at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, about 100 miles away. Faulkner was, of course, a winner of the same prize that was just bestowed upon Bob Dylan. But Faulkner did not accept his invitation to the White House dinner. And when he was asked, later, why not, he said, “Why, that’s a hundred miles away. That’s a long way to go just to eat.”
