ENDPAPERS : Who Chooses the Winners of the Times Book Prizes?

Secrecy is a hard habit to shake. For the first 11 years of the now 14-year-old Los Angeles Times Book Prize program, The Times withheld the identity of the judges who chose the winners. Judges were instructed not to identify themselves to the public and were almost never invited to write for the Book Review about the writers they had chosen. Then, in 1991, midway in the 12th year, the secrecy officially ended; judges, with the exception of the one judge selected each year to choose the winner of the Robert Kirsch Award, were no longer anonymous.

That should have made an immediate and noticeable difference in the amount of publicity given the judges, but in fact it did not. The unofficial habits born of official secrecy lingered. Judges were still not invited to write about the Book Prize winners they chose. And like the spook I had learned to become as director of the program, I still volunteered no information about the judges. Belatedly, those inertial habits are now changing. A number of the judges for the 1992-1993 eligibility year have contributed essays to this issue of the Book Review.

And by talking about this year’s judges in just one category, I should like this year, for the first time, to indicate some of the criteria that have governed the selection of Times Book Prize judges from the start.

There is, to begin with, a negative criterion: No judge may be an employee of the Los Angeles Times or of any Times Mirror company. The late Art Seidenbaum, founder of The Times Book Prize program, was never wiser than when he made that rule in late 1979 and joined to it a second rule that the decisions of the non-Times judges would be final. In other words, the judges would not be second-guessed by himself as director of the program or by anyone else at the newspaper, including then-Editor Bill Thomas and then-Associate Editor Jean Sharley Taylor, who approved the rules for the program they were launching. The temptation is strong, and I speak from repeated personal experience, to intervene; but down to the present the only role anyone at The Times has ever had in selecting the Book Prize winners has been the role the director of the program plays in choosing the judges.

What makes for an effective judge? The first question to ask about any candidate is, “Is he interested in too many things for his own good?” If the answer is “yes,” then he (or she) may be considered promising. A reader who is too tightly organized, too inner-directed and instrumental about his reading, too “defended,” as the psychologists say, won’t be happy or effective in a task that is, by definition, a long and unpredictable series of distractions.

Grant Barnes, chair of this year’s biography judges and director emeritus of Stanford University Press, is an intellectual omnivore whom I met 15 years ago when I was his junior colleague at the University of California Press. Barnes’ associates stood in awe at the number of manuscripts he managed to sponsor simultaneously and enthusiastically for publication. Once, visiting him at his home in Berkeley to discuss a work on my own, much skimpier, list, I was startled to see a neighbor boy enter the Barnes house through the back door carrying a bicycle. The bicycle was broken, and the boy had come to have Barnes fix it. We moved to the kitchen, where Barnes sat down on the floor and repaired the bicycle without missing a beat in his discussion with me. Some such mix of generosity and polymathic/polytechnic virtuosity, joined to a willingness to be endlessly interrupted, bodes well for a judge’s performance.

The Times prizes are literature prizes, however, so I always hope to have at least one judge on every committee whose persistent question about a book will be, “How well is it written?” On the biography committee this year, if anyone was cast in that role, it was Tom Clark. A prolific poet and poetry editor of the Paris Review for 10 years, Clark is also the author of biographies of Ted Berrigan, Jack Kerouac, Damon Runyan and Charles Olson and of the haunting biographical novel, “The Exile of Celine.” A poet among biographers and a biographer among poets, Clark is, and I use the adjective with maximal intent, a beautiful writer. What is the place of beauty in a biography? Or (the prior question) what is the place of beauty in a life? Clark’s work shows that he has thought about these questions, particularly as they regard the special shape of a writer’s life.

All The Times prizes go to books aimed at the general reader, but sometimes a biography so aimed turns out to be docu-fakery, its factual mood masking sheer sloppiness if not also an ugly agenda of some sort. At such a moment the trained academic reader can function like a prosecuting attorney methodically exposing a fraud. George Simson, the prodigiously well-read director of the Center for Biographical Research at the University of Hawaii and the editor of its impressive scholarly journal, Biography, is as able a prosecutor as a literary court could hope for when faced with some forbiddingly documented, last-word, “definitive” biography.

If I were to assign to each of these judges a single question, I would assign Simson to ask, “Is it true?”; Clark to ask, “Is it beautiful?”; and Barnes to ask, “Have we considered the competition?” Broadly, my hope is that one way or another every one of the three-person committees will ask all three of these questions along with whatever other questions may be special to a given category.

I can’t pretend that any scientific method governs the selection of The Times Book Prize judges. Intrinsic qualifications aside, the several kinds of extrinsic balance to be maintained--liberal vs. conservative, male vs. female, majority vs. minorities, professional vs. amateur, gay vs. straight, local vs. national--defy simultaneous accomplishment.

I console myself, not too effectively, with the thought that A. E. Housman, a great poet, compared himself in his critical mode to a dog scratching for a flea. I know that this is not the image that actually underlies the expression starting from scratch, but (with abject apologies to this year’s superb team of judges), it is the image that comes to mind as I confront my own deplorable lack of method at the start of each cycle. Housman wanted to suggest that the dog somehow gets the job done without at all understanding what the job requires. A merciful notion, but instinct does have its limitations.

For years, until I could bear her gaze no longer, I kept a snapshot of Flannery O’Connor on my bulletin board--the hard-gleaming eye, the one, jutting, fang-like incisor, and below, my own caption, “You expect me to believe that ?” Masochistically, I had appointed this uncongratulatory, unforgiving, wickedly funny woman to be my literary superego, and I cringe, even now, at the thought of what she might do, in a story, with the Los Angeles Times Book Prize program in one of its weaker moments, or with its director, in one of his. We do our best, Miss O’Connor, and oh, by the way, would you be interested in serving as a fiction judge next year? We could use someone from the South, especially a lady like you.

1993 Judges Times Book Prizes

Fiction, Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction: Merrill Joan Gerber (chair), Brian Stonehill, Digby Diehl

Poetry: Killarney Clary (chair), Ray Gonzalez, Jim McMichael

History: Larry Ceplair (chair), Roberta P. Seid, John H. Boyle

Biography: Grant Barnes (chair), George Simson, Tom Clark

Current Interest: Larry Arnn (chair), Daniel Callahan, Jack Burby

Science and Technology: Catherine Caufield (chair), Mark Dowie, Lucy Eisenberg

Robert Kirsch Award: Anonymous