In one of his great poems, Wallace Stevens speaks of "musing the obscure." That phrase seems to be the unspoken motto of the Swedish Academy. Last week it again passed over such notables as Vladimir Nabokov, Graham Greene and Saul Bellow to award the Nobel Prize in Literature to Eugenic Montale, 79, an Italian poet virtually unknown to the public outside his native land.
This time, at least, the award appears to be less for political balance than for literary merit. Although Montale's output is meager—five volumes in 50 years—he is greatly valued by connoisseurs. Stephen Spender considers him Italy's greatest living poet, and the academy cited Montale's pessimistic but "indelible feeling for the value of life and the dignity of mankind." Part of this admiration undoubtedly stems from Montale's mastery of the doom-filled Eliotic metaphor ("All our life and all its labors spent/ Are like a man upon a journey sent/ Along a wall that's sheer and steep and endless, dressed/ With bits of broken bottles on its crest"). Part is due to the writer's stoic career. Like an earlier Nobel laureate, Albert Camus, Montale was a bitter antiFascist. His quiet refusal to truckle to Mussolini cost him a sinecure as library executive. Throughout World War II he supported himself by translating an astonishing variety of writers, among them Shakespeare, Eugene O'Neill and Dorothy Parker. A childless widower, Montale now lives in Milan, where he contributes literary and music criticism for the daily Corriere della Sera. The prize of $143,000 is unlikely to alter his life or writings. With typical candor, Montale declared last week that the prize has simply made his existence, "which has always been unhappy, a little less unhappy."