Our literary scandals are different from those of our neighbour. While we've been worrying about the integrity of a tiny anachronistic publisher and the success of an obscure literary author, the Americans have been arguing over the ethics of mass production of bad book ideas.
The U.S. literary media have recently been aiming more kicks at that most bloated and inviting of targets, James Frey. This time, it's not for anything fictitious or otherwise he may have written, or even for any new amusingly egomaniacal or self-aggrandizing nonsense he may have said. It's for his new capitalist enterprise, a publishing company called Full Fathom Five.
Frey and some associates are trying to build a mass-media idea factory for novels and films. According to a recent article in New York magazine, he is asking creative-writing students from around the United States to submit ideas and texts for young-adult stories, mostly on supernatural themes. His aim appears to be to come up with "high-concept" stories about werewolves or aliens and high-school pregnancy, things that could be pitched in one line to a major studio and will have the international blockbuster appeal of the Twilight or Harry Potter series.
He is not in trouble for the idea (which is, after all, a pretty good idea), but for the extremely harsh contract he is offering his collaborators. According to the creative-writing student who wrote the New York article, he wants ideas and full-length manuscripts, which he will then own, rewrite and market under any pseudonym he likes. The initial payment for the work is $250, and then the writer gets 40 per cent of its profit if it sells.
Lawyers have pointed out all kinds of iniquities and pitfalls in the contract, but, of course, the very same earnest literary students who mock him in their discussions of Faulkner and Franzen are eagerly lining up to become part of his enterprise. One of Frey's collaborative efforts, a book called I Am Number Four, has already sold well around the world and is being made into a major film. Everyone wants in on such potential. The story is illuminating as to the mood of American literary endeavour right now; it's an embodiment of a feeling of desperation.
I have a feeling people are picking on the contract because they can't name their irritation with the sheer gall of this guy, to go around buying ideas rather than coming up with them himself. But such actions are neither new nor outrageous. Many authors use collaborators - most successfully, thriller writer James Patterson, who uses "co-authors" to write a first draft, which he will then "rewrite." In practice, it means that both authors' names appear on the cover; it's Patterson's that sells the book. If you are worried that every word in the book may not have been written by him, or that the original idea wasn't even his, you're reading the wrong genre. It just doesn't bother his fans at all, just as it doesn't bother Madonna's fans that she may have a team of songwriters.
And, of course, since the Renaissance, painting studios have put out thousands of pictures by great masters that were largely the product of assistants. It seems silly to worry about whose hand touched the canvas if you find it beautiful.
The artist who most annoyingly exploited the practice of buying ideas was New York painter Mark Kostabi. He made a big conceptual hit in 1988 by announcing that he was creating a factory, called Kostabi World, to produce his paintings, and this factory would employ not just assistants to paint them but ideas people to conceive them. All Kostabi had to do was sign his name. And pay his employees, of course - word at the time was that they were getting, oh, above minimum wage anyway. The system itself, of paying minions a pittance for themes and taking the credit, was seen at the time as being the art - this very clever anti-commodification concept was what buyers were paying for.
It was a weird time. And Frey is making no such ironic point. But it's worth noting that Kostabi is still highly successful, and his work is in museums and on album covers around the world.