Most of us writers who were involved as judges at the birth of an unfortunate literary enterprise called the Turner Tomorrow Award wish we had never heard of it, for the thing was misshapen, ill-conceived in its Atlanta womb, and caused us who presided at its parturition to be cast as the venal midwives. Sponsored by the Turner Publishing Co., offshoot of Ted Turner's communications empire, the award of $500,000 (reputedly the largest of its kind ever given) was to go to a single work of fiction that would produce “creative and positive solutions to global problems.” Four awards of $50,000 each would go to the runners-up.
In a diatribe written by Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post’s in-house Torquemada, the judges—who included Carlos Fuentes, Peter Matthiessen, Wallace Stegner, Nadine Gordimer, and myself—were accused of being whorish sellouts who not only would comprise our literary standards, if we had any, by getting connected with such a venture but “would do just about anything” to obtain the $10,000 fee we were each given for our labors.1 Yardley's piece is filled with silly judgmental bluster, but if, as a responsible journalist, he had bothered to discover some of the facts about our involvement in this venture he could have easily done so.
Most of us had some misgivings when the Turner organization enlisted us through Thomas Guinzburg—a respected New York literary figure who was a friend of all of us—but I think that we each felt it was possible that our participation might at least cause some of this huge amount of money to be distributed to a few writers of promise. But this was before the outlines of the woeful project became clear. Some months later, early this year, when we learned of the extraordinary dreck the first readers were encountering in the winnowing-out process (one manuscript among the 2,500 submitted worldwide contained the word “pray” repeated an estimated 150,000 times) our earlier doubts crystallized into dismay. We sent a letter to Guinzburg stating our misgivings and making it clear that we wished to resign, categorically, so that other judges might be substituted. Interestingly, the letter contains virtually the same indictment of the award that Yardley made (including the impossibility of good fiction being served up on demand) and that he implied we would never dare to express, being “blinded by the bucks.”
If we had insisted on resigning, as we should have, each of us would have had to forfeit the $10,000 fee, a reward which Yardley really believes had held us in greedy expectation for nearly a year. One hates to paw over this matter in public, but it's hard to avoid Yardley's vulgar fixation on money. He is at his most sanctimonious in his insistence that the prospect of this “fortune,” as he puts it, unhinged us with avarice. Few American writers make as much as a second-rate TV anchorperson or a second-rate second baseman, but some of us do quite well. Carlos Fuentes, who lectures widely, receives a minimum of $15,000 an appearance. There is scarcely one of the judges who could not with ease get $10,000 for a lecture or an appearance and spare him or herself the miseries of the Turner Tomorrow Award, which required—in my case—setting aside numerous afternoons better devoted to my work, plowing through twelve hulking manuscripts, taking three thousand words of notes, conferring with fellow judges, and traveling to the final judges’ meeting with its poisonous unpleasantness. (Nadine Gordimer, a woman of stony integrity, told me in distress that she actually lost income during the grind, which included a fourteen-thousand-mile round-trip from South Africa.) On emotional grounds alone, I would not repeat the experience for twice the fee.
But we were persuaded to stay by Guinzburg and in the process were blandly deceived by the Turner organization. One of our inducements was the claim that there were many promising entries from the Third World and Eastern Europe, where money, publication, and media attention would be a significant boon to writers who had worked long in obscurity. (These never materialized.) We were also told that if we stayed we would be free to make any prize-winning decisions we chose to, even if our judgments were negative. Indeed, we could make no awards at all. Given this autonomy, we stayed. Our reading did turn up, surprisingly enough, four novels by writers we felt were deserving of encouragement, though no single one of the books, in the opinion of the majority of the judges, was exciting enough to make us want to anoint it with $500,000—a sum we thought from the beginning (and said in our letter) was cosmically inflated. We therefore decided on the more modest course of awarding each of the four winners the runner-up prize of $50,000, with Ishmael—an intelligent and provocative work by Daniel Quinn—being singled out for special attention.2 This seemed a way of bringing sensible scale, at least, to a project badly afflicted by grandiosity.
At a fairly rancorous judges’ meeting in New York City early in May—also attended by one Michael Reagan, a self-styled “media” person representing the Turner management—our majority decision was accepted as binding. Of the final panel of nine judges only three, including the science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury, favored the bloated half-million-dollar award and took the side of Reagan, who, though a nonvoting onlooker, was plainly seething over our refusal to give the seal of approval to Ted Turner's megalomaniacal shower of gold. (Reagan would later make whiny remarks about the dissenting judges’ failure to hand our fees back, his apparent logic being that only judges favorable to the Cause deserved recompense; he also was plainly determined to overlook our authority to make any decision we pleased.) When we left the meeting it was with the understanding that our decision would be honored.
We were wrong. At the Turner Tomorrow Award ceremony early in June it was announced that Ishmael had received the $500,000 prize. We had been lied to and betrayed. Our public protest over the betrayal comprised a tempest that would fit comfortably into my granddaughter's half-inch-wide china teapot.3 And even she could tell that we were badly taken. But being taken is not the same as being venal—and one trusts this puts the record straight.
[Washington Post, July 16, 1991.]