“One of the signs of Napoleon’s greatness is that he once had a publisher put to death.”
—Siegfried Unseld
For those who are too impatient or fainthearted to weather multiple submissions, one historic way of avoiding dues to the muse remains: In short, avoiding rejection entirely.
Play the Luck, Suck, & Pluck Trifecta: Conquer your own country, kill all competitors and critics, and make your work mandatory national reading.
Jack London, H.G. Wells, Upton Sinclair, James Michener, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, and Hunter Thompson, among others, all ran for office. Fortunately, all lost and returned to the private sector without resorting to arms (except for Mailer and Thompson).
Only three part-time writers have made the LSP Trifecta a reality in modern times: Mao, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Gadhafi. The trio was indebted to a certain rejected German art student for laying the strategic groundwork for such a literary coup—part of his “grandiose” scheme, according to necrographer Mark Seinfelt, to “conquer all the arts.”1
Hitler didn’t pen his autobiographical title from one of his later fuehrer “wolf lairs” but from his suite at Landsberg Prison. Here the once homeless painter served eight months of a five-year stretch for treason. In this time he managed to finish Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice. He had no problem finding a publisher, Max Amann, who inveigled him to change the title to the punchier Mein Kampf (My Struggle) and to cut nearly five hundred pages from the original manuscript.
Hitler’s commanding officer in World War I, Amann, had had his arm blown off and later became the publisher of the SS Monthly. Kampf became an instant hit, allowing its author—whose motto was “Words build bridges into unexplored regions”—to buy a Mercedes even before being paroled. His tax tab on the bestseller topped 405,000 Reichsmarks ($8 million in today’s U.S. currency). When the ex-con became chancellor in 1933 he waived the tax, thus avoiding paying dues to the muse or to the state. But later the patriot compensated Germans by donating a copy of his title to every soldier and newlywed couple.
By 1945, Hitler had distributed 10 million copies of the three official editions: the People’s Edition, the Wedding Edition, and the Portable Edition. Not long after its original publication, he dashed out Zweites Buch (Second Book). But Amann persuaded him to shelve the sequel for fear that it would diminish the feeding frenzy on Kampf. Also, Zweites laid out his plan to overrun the world by 1980, and Amann decided it would be premature to let that cat out of the bag.
Assisting Amann was Hitler’s lit agent, Joseph Goebbels. After completing his doctorate on romance writer Wilhelm von Schutz, he wrote an autobiographical novel, Michael, which he couldn’t get published until he became the Minister of Propaganda in 1929. Then he started burning most everybody else’s books except his and his boss’s.
While Germans who valued their lives were universal in their praise for Hitler’s title, an Italian romance novelist took exception, as Italians will. Mien Kampf, he charged, was filled with “little more than commonplace clichés,” rendering it unreadable. The Fuhrer might have had the critic gassed had he not been his ally, Benito Mussolini.
Mussolini, a former newspaperman, had himself burst onto the literary scene fifteen years before Hitler with his serialized romance, The Cardinal’s Mistress. Although a fascist, Mussolini never made his potboiler required state reading, nor did he release a Wedding Edition. In fact, he later removed the anticlerical screed from circulation in order to gain the Vatican’s favor during the War. But privately, like most heretics, he remained unrepentant. “The history of saints is mainly the history of insane people,” he wrote.
After Adolf swallowed cyanide and Benito was hung from a gas station roof by a meat hook, Mao pinched a chapter from their playbook, but with a wise alteration: He didn’t try to publish too early. The former librarian waited until he finished executing all the Chinese critics during his Cultural Revolution before releasing his poems and aphorisms. In thinning out the intellectuals and Fahrenheit 451-ing their books, he was flattered to be compared to Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor, who did the same in 210 B.C. but on a more modest scale. “He buried 460 scholars alive; we have buried forty-six thousand scholars alive,” the Blessed Leader boasted to the readers who were left. “We have surpassed Qin Shi Huang a hundredfold!”2
The Chairman’s titles outsold Rowling’s Potter series. Even without Oprah or a Barnes & Noble signing tour he became the best-selling author of all time, moving six billion units in forty years (second only to the Bible at 6.5 billion in 2,500 years). The author expected each citizen not only to buy his masterpiece but to carry it at all times lest his literary agents, The Red Guard, more efficient than even CAA or William Morris, recycle them with the 46,000 critics and the three million other armchair quibblers.
To the regret of Harlequin fans, however, Mao never tried his hand at romance, though he’d had four wives, three thousand concubines, and—thanks to powdered deer antlers— never needed Viagra to keep them satisfied. Nor did he need to bathe, brush his teeth, or floss.
Mao’s literary successor, Saddam Hussein, picked up the slack in the genre. While the CIA thought the Middle Eastern Saladin was stockpiling WMD’s, the dictator was actually penning romances, leaving Muammar Qaddafi’s story collection, Escape to Hell, in the Libyan dust, though the colonel had, like Mao, made his work required reading.
Saddam’s debut, Zabibah and the King (2000), was about a beautiful but abused Tikrit town girl.3 The second, The Fortified Castle, was a Romeo and Juliet vehicle involving an Iraqi GI and a Kurdish virgin. Following Joe Klein’s lead in Primary Colors, Saddam published both anonymously as “THE Author.” Seeming to suspect who this might be,4 Iraqis flocked to the bookstores in bulletproof vests.
The Iraqi strongman’s last title, Demons Be Gone, would surely have topped the Baghdad bestseller list, too, had Bush and the infidels not invaded the very day after the ms. was finished in 2003.
Three years later, Saddam’s dutiful daughter, Raghad, in gratitude to him for executing her husband, secured a contract for his swan song. After the Butcher of Baghdad was hung, the Jordanian publisher, who had promised a first run of 100,000, backed out of the deal. Undiscouraged, Raghad went viral with queries and SASEs. But not even Judith Regan would touch Demons. At the time, Murdoch’s maverick editor was rounding out her list of Private Parts, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, and O.J.’s If I Did It.
So, in the end, only Mao Tse-tung won the Luck, Suck, & Pluck Trifecta, paying no dues to the muse but still winning an adoring communist audience.
Critics agree that Mao’s LSP feat may never again be achieved in the truth-stranger-than-fiction annals of publishing.
1 Mark Seinfelt, Final Drafts: Suicides of World-Famous Authors (Prometheus Books, 1999).
2 Kenneth Lieberthal, Governing China: From Revolution to Reform (Second Edition) (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003).
3 The novel was the basis for Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2012 movie The Dictator.
4 According to a New York Times article—“C.I.A. Sleuths Study a Novel for the Thinking of Saddam Hussein” (May 25, 2001)—U.S. intelligence agents concluded that the dictator likely used ghostwriters. The Zabibah introduction revealed that the author declined to identify himself “out of humility.”