Pablo Neruda may have won the Nobel prize for literature in 1971, but newly opened archives in Stockholm reveal the judging panel’s concerns about the Chilean poet’s “communist tendencies”.
The list of writers in the running for the Nobel prize, and the deliberations of the secretive members of the judging panel at the Swedish Academy, are kept confidential for 50 years. But the newly opened archives show that, although 1971’s winner Neruda was praised by the prize-givers for “a poetry that with the action of an elemental force brings alive a continent’s destiny and dreams”, behind the scenes some members of the Swedish Academy were hesitant.
They questioned how works such as Neruda’s odes to Stalin fitted with Alfred Nobel’s stipulation that the prize go to “the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction” – according to journalist Kaj Schueler, who researched the Swedish Academy’s documents from 1971 for the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet.
While the Nobel committee chair Anders Österling praised Neruda’s “poetic natural power and dynamic vitality”, he questioned whether “the increasingly dominant communist tendency in his poetry is compatible with the purpose of the Nobel prize”. Neruda, known for his passionate, romantic poetry, was also a leftwing politician and diplomat, and close friend of President Salvador Allende. Neruda died days after Augusto Pinochet’s military coup in 1973, under circumstances that have since been investigated.
“A writer’s way of thinking – whether Marxist, syndicalist, anarchist or something else – belongs to his free right. However, Neruda is fully politically involved, including through his hymns to Stalin and other purely propagandistic achievements. On that basis, I have reservations about his candidacy, without, however, wanting to firmly reject it in advance,” wrote Österling in 1963 – an opinion that he continued to hold in 1971, according to Schueler.

The opening of the archives also shows that WH Auden, James Baldwin, Philip Larkin and Jorge Luis Borges were all nominated for the 1971 award.

Neruda got the Nobel Prize in spite of hack poetry that praised Stalin, murderer of millions. Borges wrote no hack poetry in praise of the Junta.

I think your description of Tolkien as a small ‘c’ conservative is quite on the mark.

You must be thinking of a book I just finished reading. Poul Anderson’s “The Boat of a Million Years”.

The immortals in the story (most of them), once realizing their immortality, would become very cautious, preserving their seemingly endless life to no purpose. They were afraid to love because they would eventually lose those they loved.

I’d call Lafferty’s novel Past Master a major example of Catholic science fiction; the protagonist, Thomas More, is a canonized saint of the Catholic Church. Lafferty was a devout Catholic, and his Catholic world-view pervades his writing.

Tolkien’s literary friend, C.S. Lewis, meets that standard as well.
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In “Present Concerns,” Lewis admitted, “I don’t deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation. Nor do most people who believe advertisements, and think in catch-words and spread rumors. The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows.”

https://www.cslewis.com/lewis-and-politics/

they do try for a novel that involves ideas like tom wolves 90s cri de couer, man in full wasn’t very satisfying,

John+F.+MacMichael:

Ralph Ellison (“Invisible Man”) and Harper Lee (“To Kill a Mockingbird”) also suffered terrible writer’s block after masterpiece first novels.

Truman Capote, Harper Lee’s childhood friend BTW, got further down the path with “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “In Cold Blood” but suffered a similar fate. Though I think he made a deal with the devil on the second book. (Not entirely joking.)

And an ever-so-polite goddamn for Hemingway’s heirs for publishing “The Garden of Eden,” which should have been left in a file cabinet.

Now I have a cat walking across my desk (and on my keyboard) to remind me it is time for his mid-afternoon treat so I must attend to that!