A Salute to the Transcendent Power of Books

Brenda Maddox, winner of the biography prize for “Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom,” thanked “all the biographers who ignored Nora and left her for me.”

William Greider, winner in the current interest category for “Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country,” thanked Simon & Schuster for figuring out how to market “an 800-page book about monetary policy.”

And British-born poet Thom Gunn, a San Franciscan for 30 years, told an interviewer after being announced as winner of the Robert Kirsch Award--presented each year to a writer whose body of work has focused on the American West--that most American writers are “too modest” about the West Coast, that it seduced him immediately because, unlike the East Coast, “it’s so un-European.”

The occasion was presentation of the 1988 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes at a ceremony Friday evening at Times-Mirror Square. In his opening remarks to an appreciative audience of about 400, Times Book Editor Jack Miles, invoking Voltaire, noted that “the best is the enemy of the good,” that while only six writers could be chosen, hundreds of others were deserving nominees.

The fiction prize went to Colombia-born Gabriel Garcia Marquez for “Love in the Time of Cholera,” and Eric Foner won the history prize for “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877.” The winner for poetry was Richard Wilbur for “New and Collected Poems,” a 40-year sampler of the work of the man invested in 1987 as poet laureate of the United States.

Counterculture Poet

Times Arts Editor Charles Champlin, introducing Kirsch winner Gunn as a player in an ongoing “literary lend-lease” between England and the United States (Gunn came to Stanford University on a fellowship in 1954 and stayed), observed that the poet has written of beaches, motorcyclists, tattoo parlors, street people, the ‘60s counterculture and “the confident shoddiness of Hollywood Boulevard.”

To Californians, all of this is a familiar world, Champlin said, “but (Gunn) discovers in it links with yesterday and tomorrow.” Accepting the prize, Gunn, whose most recent work is “The Passages of Joy” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), described himself as an “Anglo-American poet.” (A graduate of Trinity College at Cambridge University, he now teaches at UC Berkeley but remains a resident alien.)

Winners of the prizes (each of whom received a $1,000 cash award and a leather-bound copy of the winning book; in the case of the Kirsch Award, a representative book) had all, with the exception of Gunn, been named Sept. 22 in New York at a Los Angeles Times reception for the publishers of all the nominated books. The Kirsch Award winner was announced at the presentation.

Publishers of the prize-winning books are Alfred A. Knopf, “Love in the Time of Cholera”; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, “New and Collected Poems”; Harper and Row, “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877”; Houghton Mifflin, “Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom,” and Simon & Schuster, “Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country.”

Foner’s widely praised history of the American post-Civil War years reveals blacks as activists who helped set the agenda that a century later became the civil rights movement.

Accepting his award, Foner, a professor of American history at Columbia, thanked his father, Jack, also a historian--”one of those academics blacklisted during the McCarthy period”--for his “integrity,” as well as for baby-sitting his infant daughter in New York so Foner and his wife could come to Los Angeles.

Reflective Style

Wilbur, known for his playful, reflective style and distinctive way with rhyme and meter, won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award in 1957, the year after publication of his “Things of This World.” The poet, who lives in Massachusetts, had a longstanding commitment to address benefactors of Smith College, where he is professor emeritus, so his prize was accepted by Rubin Pfeffer of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

William Greider, a columnist for Rolling Stone magazine, was honored for breathing life into a monumental subject: the inner workings of the Federal Reserve Board from 1979 to 1987 under the leadership of its powerful chairman, Paul Volcker. Accepting, Greider reminded the audience of the need to examine and challenge the “crumbling” orthodoxies that have been in place in America since the end of World War II before these collapse into “some kind of calamity.” And he spoke of the West, with its openness, as the place where this re-examination is beginning.

Many readers of Maddox’s portrait of Nora Barnacle, James Joyce’s wife, have concluded that she was a woman every bit as fascinating as any fictional woman about whom Joyce wrote.

Accepting the prize, Maddox described her subject, a middle-class Irish woman who struggled to hold her family together as she stood by her hard-drinking husband, as “an ordinary woman” who, dealt “an extraordinary deck,” played it with consummate skill. She quipped that Nora was “a prototype for all of us wives who don’t take our husbands’ work seriously enough.” (Joyce’s family lived in poverty while he worked, slowly, on “Ulysses” and other masterpieces.)

Edith Grossman, who translated Garcia Marquez’s novel from the Spanish, accepted for the author, who is one of the pre-eminent writers in the current flowering of literature in Latin America. Garcia Marquez, who also wrote “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” lives in Mexico City but was in Europe.

His latest novel is a touching, often comical, story of a man’s attempt to win the love of a beautiful widow he had wooed, and lost, 50 years earlier. It also addresses the prejudice that nations direct toward their immigrants, in this instance a Chinese poet snubbed by residents of a country on the Caribbean coast of South America.

Polyglot Los Angeles

Miles observed that, in a polyglot city such as Los Angeles, literature has the potential to “make friends of strangers.”

Winners of the ninth annual Los Angeles Times Book Prizes in the five categories were chosen by five committees of three judges each, all anonymous, most of them widely published writers, from nominations by 100 past outside contributors to the Book Review. The Kirsch Award winner was chosen by a single anonymous judge from among 100 nominees submitted by free-lance contributors to the Book Review during this and previous years.