The Whitbread Prize, 1999

The Internet Review of Books report

Hover over Prizewinners window to pause scroll. Click on links to order any title.

Frieda Hughes' moving acceptance of the £21,000 Whitbread "Book of the Year" prize for her late father was just about the only thing that lent any dignity to what was otherwise a tawdry and irrelevant affair.

Excusing herself in advance for fear she might not be able to go through with it, she read a letter from the poet to a friend about his book of memoirs of life and death with Sylvia Plath: "I had always thought them unpublishably raw, and unguarded, simply too vulnerable. But then I just could not endure being blocked any longer. How strange that we have to make these public declarations of our secrets, but we do.

"If only I had done the equivalent thirty years ago, I might have had a more fruitful career, certainly a freer psychological life.

"Even now, the sensation of inner liberation, a huge, sudden possibility, of new inner experience. Quite strange."

Click here to hear the audio.

It was a moving moment.

But that apart, as broadcast on BBC TV, from what looked like a stretched circus bigtop tent, with thumping Muzak between the awards, as if in a vain attempt to lend the event the significance of the Hollywood Oscars, it was difficult to understand the purpose of such awards.

Presumably, the brewers have lent their name in some sort of vain hope that readers might be tempted thereby to try their dreadful beers. (Surely they can't imagine the sight of the likes of Alan Baddiel and Fay Weldon pontificating on who might or might not win would turn beer drinkers on to literature?)

Is it corporate guilt?

Is it corporate guilt, such as that which motivated Alfred Nobel to end a life of arms-dealing with an award for peace (plus chemistry, medicine, physics, and of course literature)?

But in the case of the Nobel Prize for Literature, it offers recognition, often in cases where it has not hitherto been recognised in the WASP US-European literary establishment, to literary achievement on a timescale wider than that accorded to the year's sales returns.

At the other end of the scale, there are the best-seller lists, which merely (purport to) report what's happening, so The Little Book of Calm or something else equally meritricious comes out top, with no one making any assumptions about its quality, save that bad money continues to drive out good.

The success in the Whitbreads of Ted Hughes' last and least testimony to the collapse of the talent that once belonged to possibly the greatest poet writing in the English-language today, was so predictable that the bookies might as well have given up and gone home.

The rehabilitation after his death of the so-recent feminist demon to a status akin to that accorded to Lady Di absolutely required that he win this prize, and it would have been a brave judge who strove to swim upstream against the wave of sentimentality that has accrued to him in the past few months.

Forgotten is the execrable doggerel . . .

Forgotten is the execrable doggerel he teased out in his time as Poet Laureate, like his verses on the Queen Mum. But forgotten, too, is the hard core of his genius, the mythic horror of Crow, with all it said about the animalism of the human condition. Misanthropic, yes, but brilliantly hard-edged and concrete.

In its stead we get memoirs of events like the time he and Sylvia missed each other on a trip to London, how he was happily resting on a train while she was going frantic with worry looking for him. Great poetry has been made of such trivia, but this is not it. Indeed, it is arguable that this is not poetry at all, but another of those purgings of the spirit that have become so popular of late, with cancer patients recording the progress of their disease.

As he himself said, we repeat, the experience gave him "the sensation of inner liberation, a huge, sudden possibility, of new inner experience".

Is this what literature is supposed to be about: a hardcopy version of a psychiatrist's chair? Surely not.

But even if we assume it to be poetry, and the great work of literature that comedian David Baddiel reckons it to be, how may it be measured against its fellow shortlisteds, like Philip Gross's The Wasting Game (another purging, this time of the experience of a loved one's anorexia, with its terrible conclusion, "all paths converge on nothing / but a ten-foot concrete square"), or The Boy from the Chemist is Here to See You with its stark imagery taken from a modern industrial wasteland: "sole freeholder of every empty office space in town, and from the quayside I can count the cost each low tide brings - the skeletons and rust of boats, cars, hats, boots, iron, a terrier"?

How may these apples be compared with that lemon?

How may these apples be compared with that lemon, not to mention the books that for some reason were not short-listed?

In a year that saw new collections from Heaney and Abse, it cannot be said that there was no competition. Anyway, why are the judges limited solely to the English-speaking world?

In a year when we have seen new poetry from black women like Maya Angelou, Lemn Sissay, Grace Nichols, and Karen McCarthy, the white male orientation of the shortlists is only too predictable.

The insularity and ethnocentricity of most such awards is remarkable. We are asked to believe that Justin Cartwright's amusing but lightweight record of his return to a US university looms larger than, say, Tom Wolfe's superior successor to Bonfire of the Vanities or even Don DeLillo's over-praised and over-long (but also richly languaged) Underworld.

And why, broadening the canvas slightly, does Whitbread single out biography from all other non-fiction as especially worthy of attention? Why no science?

But in the end the realisation cannot be escaped: that great writing may not be ranked in league tables, that while awards like these may play a part in the marketing of books or beer, they have little resonance outside the ringing of cashtills.