"Yikes."
That was reportedly Anne Carson's response to winning the Nobel Prize in literature. It might also serve as a response to Princeton's public congratulations to her. Carson taught classics there in the 1980s and was denied tenure. Now the university is celebrating its association with a writer it once decided it could do without.
Institutions have a gift for recognizing excellence once it belongs to someone else.
McGill is celebrating, too. It closed its classics department in 1997, though Carson stayed on and received a named professorship in 2000. Its congratulations are less embarrassing than Princeton's, but closing a department suggests a judgment about the value of its work. Another Canadian writer of some renown put it succinctly: "You don't know what you've got till it's gone." Universities might post that outside the provost's office.
As a scholar of ancient Greek, Carson will know the old couplet about seven cities claiming the dead Homer--the same cities that allowed him to beg for bread in their streets. Whatever the literal truth, the sentiment survives because we recognize the behavior. Carson need not beg for bread, and had substantial honors long before Stockholm called. The pleasure here is in recalling what bureaucracies tend to reward: showing up, keeping quiet, and giving nobody a reason to reconsider how things are done. Originality often looks like a personnel problem until it wins a prize.
Prizes are hardly reliable measures of quality. Committees make decisions, and those decisions tell us something about committees. But occasionally an award directs attention toward someone whose existence is reassuring. Carson is 76, a Canadian poet, essayist and translator who has spent decades on works that do not fit comfortably into the compartments provided for them. An essay may behave like a poem. A poem may betray deep scholarship. An ancient monster may turn up as a troubled teen. The reader has to make some adjustments.
That is a useful demand in a world increasingly organized around giving us more of what we already know we like. Carson's work can be difficult, the consequence of discovering that the usual language is insufficient. We accept this in other pursuits. Nobody expects a gifted musician to limit herself to the chords we happen to know.
Besides, Carson is funny. Elisa Gabbert emphasizes that quality in her appreciation of the new laureate, describing writing in which immense learning accommodates squirrels, heartbreak and jokes. Gabbert is The New York Times Book Review's poetry columnist, a job title I am pleased exists. A newspaper makes judgments about what deserves attention every time it assigns a story or fills a position. There are ways to recognize value before Stockholm calls.
In "Autobiography of Red," Carson takes Geryon, a monster from Greek mythology, and imagines him as a gay teenager. His mother knocks cigarette ash into the kitchen sink; he sits adjusting the focus of his camera, having withdrawn from speech. Antiquity comes close enough to touch without ceasing to be strange. The domestic details do not explain the myth. They give us another way into the loneliness of a creature whose difference precedes anything he might choose to do about it.
Her translation of Sappho, "If Not, Winter," leaves brackets and blank spaces where words have been lost, allowing us to read what survives with some awareness of what is no longer recoverable. In "Nox," she approaches her brother's death through the elegy Catullus wrote for his own brother some 2,000 years earlier. An old poem becomes company in a grief that is her own. There is something consoling in the possibility that words written for someone long dead may still reach a person who needs them.
In the same week Carson's Nobel was announced, the Pentagon announced plans to livestream the firing-squad execution of Nidal Hasan, convicted of the Fort Hood murders. Some people are pleased by the prospect. Why not pay-per-view? The suggestion scarcely feels like satire anymore. The crimes were horrific, but making another person's death available as a spectacle is in no way restorative.
It is something of a wonder that a creature like Anne Carson can exist in such a world, though cruelty and the appetite for it are hardly recent inventions. Neither is the impulse to attend closely to another life. Reading poetry guarantees no one's decency, but Carson's work asks something of our attention for which we should be grateful. We become accustomed to what we see; it is good to remain capable of being surprised by intelligence, tenderness and care.
That wish follows me into the newsroom. You can believe in journalism and still dread another meeting about its survival. Encouragement can sound like a request to ignore what you know. I have worked in newspapers through successive existential crises. Some things have grown worse, and excellent work is not guaranteed to protect jobs in a bottom-line culture. Quality has never been an insurance policy, as Princeton's judgment of Carson reminds us.
Good work remains the only defense I know against encroaching mediocrity. A reporter asks the additional question; an editor notices that a polished sentence conceals an unanswered one. A writer gives up a convenient phrase because it nearly describes what happened, and nearly is insufficient. Readers may never know these choices were made, but over time they come to know a newspaper by the care it takes. They also come to know when that care is gone.
I would like my colleagues to feel that their care still has somewhere to go. I cannot promise them that it will be rewarded, or even recognized. Carson's books were worth reading before the Nobel committee called, and would have remained so had it never called. The prize changes her circumstances; the work was already there.
Tomorrow there will be another page to fill. I would like us to give readers a reason to be glad they opened it, though I understand the weariness, and share it. Doing good work offers no exemption from disappointment; you can spend a lifetime at it and still be astonished by what the world rewards, what it discards, and what it asks of you next. Carson's response seems about right: "Yikes."