Journey to ‘Caribe’ Took Him 40 Years : 1st Novel Combines Adventure, Mysticism

When the spark for his novel first glowed in J. R. Sprechman’s brain, Harry Truman was President, Ronald Reagan was a liberal Democrat, and Ernest Hemingway was still two-fisting his way into literary immortality.

It is now, of course, 1986 and the 66-year-old film accountant’s first novel--”Caribe” (E. P. Dutton: $17.95) has just been published.

By Sprechman’s reckoning, it has been a 40-year odyssey from concept to hardcover.

Pored Over Budgets

In that time he made a career in movie studios, negotiating contracts and poring over budgets to support himself and his family.

But all along, in fits and starts, he was driven by the desire to write and a mystical compulsion to write one particular book.

“I had to finish this one first,” he said the other day in his plainly furnished, clutter-free office in Hollywood where he is chief financial officer of Kaleidoscope Inc., a major producer of movie trailers and commercials. He noted that “Caribe” is the first of a projected trilogy and explained that the book was like a wall that had to be broken through before he could go on to the next novel. “I couldn’t reverse it, don’t ask me why. . . . I asked myself, ‘If this book can’t sell, what the hell can I write that will sell?’ ”

(Forty years, by the way, is not a record for most time spent on one novel, but it comes close. That record probably is held by Helen Hooven Santmyer, whose “ . . . And Ladies of the Club” was composed over 50 years and became a best seller when it was brought out by a New York publisher in 1984.)

Superficially, “Caribe” is a genre work, a thriller full of tough guys with a plot about gunrunning, political corruption, superpower intrigue and general skulduggery in a fictitious Caribbean island-nation. But it doesn’t give away the plot to add that there’s a mystical core to the book, perhaps exemplified best by one character, a dwarf cursed by eternal life.

Whatever element of the book may strike a reader, none is likely to summon up an image of an author like J. R. Sprechman.

A Placid Life

Sprechman is not only mild-mannered, he at first seems self-effacing, exactly the kind of man who would not write a hard-boiled adventure, let alone one with spiritual overtones. He talks about his book and himself with a certain detachment and, by his own account, his life has been placid. Moreover, friends say there apparently have been few outward ripples that somewhere inside Sprechman a novelist was struggling to surface.

For instance, Peter Silbermann, a marketing coordinator at 20th Century Fox, said he has known Sprechman for about 20 years but before reading “Caribe” he “never suspected he (Sprechman) was as complex and spiritual as he is.”

But there is a calculating side to Sprechman, too. As an author he is J. R. Sprechman. As an accountant, he is Julius No Middle Initial Sprechman. The initials, thanks to J. R. Ewing of television’s “Dallas,” make a better name for an author, Sprechman said. Furthermore, he said, he has given the book to people such as Silbermann in hopes that he will eventually sell the movie rights to the novel.

The Insider’s Track

Silbermann--who said he liked the book, thinks it would make a good film and has passed it on to others in the business--said Sprechman’s contacts within the movie industry will give him an insider’s track that could pay off.

“I think it’s helpful in that he’s a man who’s well liked and trusted and respected,” he said. “He has access to people that most writers wouldn’t normally have.”

Sprechman himself said that his years in the movie business with producers such as Joseph E. Levine have taught him not only how to take advantage of his insider status but also how to withstand disappointment.

“I think I understand what you might call the indifference of the other side,” he explained. “There’s a system, there’s nothing personal. A guy tells you he doesn’t like your book or script, he doesn’t care if your name is Julius Sprechman. Once you get out of this feeling that you’re personally involved, although you are, once you understand that, it makes you a little smarter about how to crack the system.”

And Sprechman said he has been haunting bookstores, lobbying managers to give the novel greater display and to find out how it has been selling.

With a first printing of 5,000 copies, Sprechman said he is aware that his book is spread thinly across the country and that his chief hope for greater visibility lies in a second printing. He said he also has hopes for reviews and has strategically placed copies with friends around the country but apparently so far without success.

Where it is available, “Caribe” seems to sell fast. At the Brentano’s bookstore in Beverly Hills, for example, in-store book buyer Anita Nelson estimated that about 60 copies have been sold since the book went on the shelves last month and has been reordered several times. “It’s probably word-of-mouth that’s selling it,” she said.

But there is more to Sprechman than that of a plodding first-time novelist now playing the angles to get himself noticed. There is, in fact, a decades-long story of false starts, disappointments and deadends that somehow evolved into a novel that satisfied the author’s taste for the metaphysical and the publishing industry’s taste for the commercial.

When he first decided to write a book, Sprechman said, he was at a period in his life when philosophical concerns were paramount. He became a follower of spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti.

Strong Influence

Krishnamurti, Sprechman said, is “the only man who has ever influenced my thinking deeply. . . . I’ve heard him speak maybe four times in 40 years. . . . I never shook his hand. I’m not the sort of guy who would do that. It would sort of demean the situation, you know.”

Looking back, Sprechman seems surprised by this interlude in a life characterized by balance sheets.

“I was in a philosophical mood in those days,” he recalled. “I don’t know why, I’m really a pragmatic person. I think the title of the book then was to be ‘The Death of a God.’ I mean it was pretty heavy stuff. The gist of the book was, and I wrote it by the way, was the difference between a personal and an impersonal God. I don’t know how many years it took, a lot of years. I’m busy making a living doing what I do here at a desk and I write when I write, when I have the impetus, when I have the energy, mostly on weekends and an hour or so at night.

“And I finally put together a book after many years. Now, you’ve got to understand that when I say many years, for another writer that would probably be a half year’s work. For me, it’s two, three, four years. I finally got it out to an agent in New York. . . . He was very encouraging--I see now that he was probably trying to go easy on me. He said the book was very well-written but the book was not publishable and he suggested that I start all over again.”

Which he did. Eventually. But the sidetracks included an aborted picaresque novel set in the days of the French Revolution and Napoleon.

Holding thumb and forefinger a couple of inches apart, Sprechman explained, “I wrote about this much manuscript and it was not doing as well as I wanted it to do, for one reason. No matter how much research I did, I couldn’t get the feeling of the times. For me, it wasn’t authentic.”

But despite the frustrations, Sprechman said he retained the urge to write and noted that he has taken risks that would give him the experience to write more meaningfully.

In World War II, for example, he said he volunteered for the Battle of the Bulge, the fight against the last big Nazi offensive of the war.

“I was in the Medical Corps working in a hospital in England,” Sprechman recalled. “I was working in the orthopedic ward, that was the ward where they brought the guys with the broken bones, the seriously broken bones. They used to have hospital trains coming in at night and I’d be there and you’d see the worst that you can see. One day they were calling for volunteers for the Ardennes, you know, the winter offensive, and I decided to volunteer.

“I had to be crazy. I had a cushy job, it wasn’t a pleasant job, but it was a good, safe job and I saw what happened when these guys came back. I decided to volunteer because I wanted to have the experience to be able to write about it. . . . In 24 hours I was over there, that’s pretty good for the Army. So if you ask how much I want to write, that’s about as good an example as I can give you.”

In his next try at the novel, “Caribe” began to take on its final tone, acquiring the detective, “a Clint Eastwood type,” who is the hero, and the immortal dwarf. When he had finished that draft, Sprechman said he felt as if he had something publishable, although in its latest incarnation the novel hardly resembled his original effort. But the dozen or so publishers who saw the book didn’t agree and the book went into limbo again.

Spurred by the Inquiries

Sprechman revived the novel a little over a year ago after several people, including his daughter, Lise, asked him what had happened to his book. Spurred by the inquiries, Sprechman, who was recovering from quintuple heart bypass surgery, dusted off his manuscript, reworked it a bit, got an agent and hoped for the best. In its final incarnation, Sprechman estimated, he wrote 100 words for every word that was finally published.

“I decided to take one more shot,” he said. “If this hadn’t worked out, I don’t know if I would have had the inner resources to try another.”

Dissatisfied with the agent’s apparent lack of activity and believing his book was going nowhere, luck began to smile on Sprechman. A friend in New York offered to submit the book to Dutton. Within four days, the manuscript was accepted.

When the call came from Joe Kanon, Dutton’s head, Sprechman, laughing at the memory, recalled that his first words were, “Who are you?”

And that’s the story of how Joe Sprechman became a published novelist.

Now he’s waiting to see what happens next. Publicity, he realizes, may center on the length of his effort, not the quality of his work.

“There’ll be flack, people will say, ‘Why were you writing so long?’ But I wasn’t writing every night, maybe a decade went by sometimes.”

A little later, he added, “I’m not a particularly slow writer, but I want what I want and if I can’t get it, I’ll wait another half year. I’ve got plenty of time. I don’t depend on writing for my living. If I had to depend on writing, I’d be dead--I mean dead.”