A TALE OF THE THREE NORMAN SPINRADS

                             A TALE OF THE THREE NORMAN SPINRADS
           
               “Now is the time for a futile gesture” --attributed to the IRA
             
          “Believe the foma that make you strong and brave and happy”--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
       
   
   One of us is in  Paris France after four days at the Quais Du Polar festival in Lyon and surfing buoyantly at the crest of the wave. Another one of  us is shortly to return to New York City and dreading the inevitable letdown.  The third Norman Spinrad is writing this and attempting to cool his ire enough to try to make analytic sense of our maddeningly disjunctive existential situation.
 
  The Norman Spinrad who lived in Paris for over a decade, who has written  something over 20 novels, more of which than not are currently in print in French, who was handed a lifetime achievement award by the current French prime minister when he was mayor of Nantes, who was tracked down to appear on the major talk show the night of the death of Osama bin Laden, and again the night of the last American Presidential election, is a cultural icon in France, credited by French writers as an inspiration, even asked to be photographed in restaurants.

   Three of his last four novels, IL EST PARMI NOUS, OUSSAMA, LE TEMPS DU REVE, have been published by a major French literary publisher, and the fourth is forthcoming.

   And so on and so forth.  And more.  Difficult as it is for the New York Norman Spinrad to parse, or even fully believe, the Paris Norman Spinrad is affectionately respected, admired, and even loved by France, or at least that is how it seems, and how it creates the desire to reciprocate in whatever way possible, however asked, when presented with the opportunity, which is not that rarely.

  But despite the evidence, the Norman Spinrad in New York finds all this somehow difficult to fully credit.  Difficult to believe that it is truly and fairly earned.  Somehow feels that it  is a will o’the wisp, an ego-tripping dream, the wish-fulfillment fantasy of a writer who, though the author of over 20 published novels in the United States too, has spent a decade with his voice largely silenced, with only the first of the aforementioned novels--HE WALKED AMONG US (IL EST PARMI NOUS)--yet published in the language in which it was written, and the other three yet to find an English language publisher.

  That Norman Spinrad was told by one person who did not wish him well that his literary career would never recover from the hatchet job done to it by Sonny Mehta at Knopf, was told by a foaming at the mouth rejection letter for OSAMA THE GUN that “no American publisher would touch this novel with a fork,” and who, a friend said, whose life story was a tragedy.

  Que Pasa?

  Well,  the New York Norman Spinrad and the French Norman Spinrad have together been a literary and film critic, a political columnist, a literary agent, President of a couple of writers’ organizations, and an analyst of the relationships among literature, writers, and the publishing industry, who even published a book or two about it, so the Norman Spinrad writing this in France might be able analyze this paradoxical situation with a minimum of hubris, paranoia, or false modesty, whereas in New York, it might be paralyzingly difficult not to believe he was guilty of all three.

    And after all, I’m the one who wrote (in SCIENCE FICTION IN THE REAL WORLD) that “even if you live in an ivory tower, you’ve gotta pay the rent.”  Whether economically or karmically.

         From the French perspective, I would not generally be considered guilty of ego-tripping hubris for declaring that while I myself  consider regarding literary production as a competitive sport a ridiculous zero-sum game and other writers colleagues not competitors, I do believe that overall what I have written over half a century is, in literary and cultural terms, not inferior to the oeuvre of any other writer of fiction during the same period.  I can say this now without blushing because I’m saying it in France, where I’ve finally been convinced that what I keep getting told here will stand up to a reading of my novels and stories themselves, which, after all, is what really counts.

   If you can get them to read, that is.  In New York, which is to say in the United States, you pretty well can’t, except for admittedly amateurish self-published ebooks, BUG JACK BARRON, which is barely in print, likewise HE WALKED AMONG US, and professionally published ebooks by Orion and Reanimus.

  It’s not as if I haven’t had a loyal readership in the US for decades too, it’s not as if it hasn’t mutated and grown generationally through the decades, it’s not that many of my less recent novels were given favorable-to-rave reviews in places like the New York Times Book Review, it’s not as if I’m not going to be honored as Guest of Honor at the 2013 World Science Fiction  Convention.

   It’s not as if I’m an unknown or entirely ignored writer in America, and indeed I read about how I’m a heroic literary legend, often in a manner that seems to suppose that the reason I haven’t published anything new in a decade is that I’m dead.

   Well, I’m not dead, at least not corporally, at least not outside the United States.  During my “lost decade” in the US since my last English language  novel publication, I’ve thus far written three novels--OSAMA THE GUN, WELCOME TO YOUR DREAMTIME, and POLICE STATE--all of which have been or will be published in France but have thus far been  rejected for major publication in America.

   Now what some people who know my work in English tell me would suffice to make the New York Norman Spinrad succumb to political paranoia because their explanation massages his ego.

   OSAMA THE GUN, is, after all, told sympathetically through the first person voice of a naive young Muslim terrorist-despite-himself, WELCOME TO YOUR DREAMTIME has no lead character save the readers and is told in second person singular in the form of dreams, many of which are X-rated not just sexually but politically, and things being what they are, major publication of POLICE STATE might just provoke a revolution.

   And what’s more BUG JACK BARRON in some ways sort of did, THE IRON DREAM was supposedly written by Adolf Hitler, and GREENHOUSE SUMMER predicted the current climate and economic situation with the one-liner “They wrote the biggest rubber check in history and passed it off on themselves.”

   You really have to ask that why under the current political and economic conditions the publishing powers that be consider you radioactive?

    Well sitting here in Paris, I can certainly see truth in all that.  But just because it’s true doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the only, or even the main, reason that I’m sitting on three recent novels looking in vain for mainstream or even mainstream genre science fiction publication.

   But the Norman Spinrad who has written two whole books at least partly about the interface between fiction as literature and fiction as commercial publishing product cannot really entirely discount what the American  publishing industry has been doing to him as described by Don Corleone-- “Nothing personal, just business.”
       
   The full story of how and why Sonny Mehta, erstwhile New Wave fringie in  1960’s London and current quite unsecret master of Knopf and New York (which is to say American)publishing assassinated my Knopf-published novel THE DRUID KING in a hissy-fit (“Don’t let on that you knew me when,” as Bob
Dylan put it) is available in various on-line sources if you wish to google it, so I won’t go into it here.

   Except to say that sympathetic paranoid scuttlebutt has opined that I’ve been deliberately blackballed by the most powerful publishing executive in New York.   I don’t believe it.  I don’t believe it because even if Mehta wanted to do such a thing, first of all someone that powerful also makes pretty powerful enemies who would take pleasure in defying such a writ, and more importantly, even if he wanted to blackball me, he wouldn’t have to.

  All any single publishing executive with the power to assure one novel’s commercial failure can torpedo the author’s on-going career just by doing it.  Because of something called BookScan, a subsidiary, appropriately enough, of Nielsen, the famous deliverer of viewership data to the television industry, which now does exactly the same thing for the publishing industry.

  Because Knopf’s hatchet-job publication of THE DRUID KING resulted in BookScan ratings approximating Conan O’Brian’s floppo ratings on the Tonight Show, it would take an editor, or rather a high publishing executive, as an editor who wanted to publish me actually told me,  with the self-confidence, literary passion, and rare power to unilaterally say yes, to roll the bones with a new Norman Spinrad novel in America without the approval of the publishing committee fearfully and slavishly and understandably following the numbers, what with the publishing industry still contracting and publishing employees of all stripes therefore “being rendered redundant” left and right.

  A patron, as they used to call it way back in the day to rescue New York Norman Spinrad from durance vile.
 
Worse still, lousy BookScan ratings turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy known by writers as the “Death Spiral,” whereby the distribution mavens, mainly Amazon and Barnes and Noble these dim demi-monopolistic days, base their potential orders on them, the publishers know this and can pretty much calculate what they will be, and if they come out red, won’t take a chance on buying the book in the first place.

   So what’s a poor boy to do but sing in a rock and roll band, which is something I have done upon occasion, or write screenplays for films that get fucked up by auteur directors, which I’ve also done, while searching thus far futiley for that heroic and powerful publishing executive with ploys such as this.

  Any takers out there?

  No?

  Well there are many worse things than being a prince of the city in Paris and an adopted literary icon in France.  And at least I’m still in show business and still crazy after all these years. You could look it up.

                  end
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