CAAF: From the Dept. of It’s Easier to View Art as a Gift When You Don’t Have Bills to Pay

The drama surrounding the Willesden Herald Short Story Prize continues. A few days after the contest’s judge, Zadie Smith, announced that no prize would be given, one of the contest’s panel of short-listing judges has stepped forward to explain what happened behind the scenes with the judging process leading up to the decision. (Via Ed.)
A friend of mine was fatigued at “hello” by all this, saying, “I can already imagine the newspaper articles mocking Smith, Smith’s injured reaction, the debates on the blogs…” but I remain riveted. In her decision to abstain from awarding the prize, Smith has elected to act as the voice of conscience; these aren’t her words, but her position seems to be, in essence, “None of these stories are good enough, and I won’t assign my name to anything second-rate. And I think we should all try harder to write and read well.” Which is admirable, but then she is also — as a tremendously successful, feted author — able to exercise conscience in a way most others are not. Most of us live in a world of accommodation and make-do, but Smith doesn’t have to; her talent and success have earned her a rank above that kind of shifting. She can make a stand for truth & beauty, and it won’t hurt her book sales, or her ability to be considered for major prizes, or get reviewing gigs — or any of the other considerations that a more mid-list author might have to make, and which would most likely end with him or her going with the flow and awarding the prize to whatever entry they deemed best.
And then here’s poor Bilal Ghafoor, who is not at the top of the food chain, and so must write a beleaguered editorial explaining all the accommodations he and his fellow selection panelists have been forced to make. Read his note and there’s some talk of truth and beauty in there, but mixed in with it are sad tales of data entry, crowded dining room tables, neglected families, logistics juggling, and cups of tea drunk: “We stayed up all night! We spent hours, hours!”
My interest in this is probably all out of proportion, but the entire situation seems to encapsulate some larger struggle about idealism versus accommodation in art. I keep thinking of Thoreau and Shelley, both agitators for purity and of throwing off the yoke of the status quo, and how they were both sons of gentlemen, and so, by inheritance, free from the everyday concerns that make compromisers of the rest of us. (Shelley especially was a great spinner of utopias on other people’s dollars, with no provision for who — once utopia was achieved — would clean up there. You get the sense that Thoreau at least would do his own dishes.) Similarly, part of my long interest in Louisa May Alcott has to do with how she seems an embodiment of this struggle between exaltation and the quotidian: The daughter of a respected philosopher holed away in her room writing Gothic potboilers to support her family, because her father’s high-flown, wildly impractical thought experiments had bankrupted them.
Which isn’t to say I think Smith was wrong to act on principle (especially not having read the shortlisted stories myself, which, for all I know, were real dogs). Only that I find myself feeling for both ends of the equation: On the one side you have a great artist sounding the call for us all to pursue loftier goals, and on the other you have the quite natural irritation of people who, hearing such a call from on high, just want to say “Piss off.”