French Literary Dispute : Author of Best Sellers Challenged

In the land of Marcel Proust and Albert Camus and Andre Gide, 40-year-old Paul-Loup Sulitzer, a portly, fast-talking, cigar-smoking millionaire, is hardly anyone’s idea of a literary giant. Yet he is probably France’s most widely read contemporary novelist.

Sulitzer produces, at the pace of about one book a year, what he calls “financial westerns,” fast-paced novels in which the good guys make mind-boggling fortunes and whip the bad guys by rendering them bankrupt.

His novels have topped or almost topped the best-seller lists every year since the first, titled “Money,” was published in 1980. In a recent survey, French college students put two of his books on their list of 10 favorite contemporary novels. Sulitzer says he sells 1.25 million copies of his books a year.

Center of Controversy

His success is a remarkable achievement in a society where intellectuals have long disdained anyone who pursues profit.

Sulitzer, his subject matter and his methods are so unorthodox and irritating to some French that he has become the center of a bitter literary controversy. Bernard Pivot, a 52-year-old critic, editor and television host who often sets intellectual fashions in France, has charged that the Sulitzer novels are written by a ghostwriter.

To an outsider, the controversy about a ghostwriter is less significant than the phenomenon of the books themselves. Sulitzer’s novels, no matter who the author, have obviously struck a chord in a changing society that is beginning to admire new kinds of achievement. The novels, in fact, celebrate the American dream of success at a time when many French are admiring American ways.

Employs Staff of 37

Yet the controversy still reveals much about the Sulitzer spirit. Sulitzer, who owns a house in Arizona and spends a good deal of time in the United States, seems to think of himself less as a novelist than as an entrepreneur, or as a movie producer-director like Steven Spielberg, fashioning a large, personal work with the help of others. “Who’s Who in France” identifies Sulitzer as a business executive, not a writer.

Sulitzer acknowledges that a less-popular novelist, Loup Durand, is highly paid to edit, rewrite and rework his outlines and drafts and that, like a movie producer, Sulitzer employs a staff of 37. In this staff, which he calls “the Sulitzer galaxy,” Sulitzer includes editors, researchers, advisers, salespeople, agents, promoters, lawyers and one security guard.

“They want a writer to sit by himself in a lonely room with a candle and a plume,” Sulitzer said of his critics in a recent interview in his offices in the fashionable 16th Arrondissement of Paris.

“I’m a good writer,” he went on, speaking in rapid, fluent, accented English. “I could write a book in three years. But I don’t want to take that long. . . . Alexander Dumas had a team to work with him. Rodin had a team to work with him. Michelangelo could not even in 200 years paint the Sistine Chapel by himself. Leonardo Da Vinci, the big master of the years, is another example. Shakespeare wrote books that were not Shakespeare.”

Despite his insistence that the controversy does not bother him and has, in fact, helped his sales, Sulitzer sounds more and more exercised and infuriated as he talks about it. He denounces Pivot as an “ayatollah.” He likens him to a Soviet censor. He says Pivot and people like him want to impose a state culture on France, armed with the authority to decide who is good and who is bad.

Plays Down Importance

While defending himself, Sulitzer insists he is not trying to exaggerate the importance of his books.

“I don’t want to be a Marcel Proust,” he said. “I don’t want to change the language. . . . Look, I never went anywhere saying that I was Marguerite Duras or St. John Perse. I never said such a stupid thing. I always said that I was like a good writer, a good novelist like Robert Ludlum or Sidney Sheldon, writing best sellers . . . with quality.”

Many book reviewers believe that Sulitzer’s success can be ascribed to a new French fascination with financial success.

Jacques-Pierre Amette, book editor of the weekly news magazine Le Point, said: “Not so long ago, nobody talked about sex or money. Now, everybody does. Sulitzer has become the symbol of money. There is no longer any shame in making money. A taboo has been broken. . . .

Success a Source of Pride

“For a long time, people used their bank account just to deposit and withdraw funds. But banks, for the last 10 years, have been trying to persuade people to use their money like professionals, to invest a little to earn a lot. Money has become an adventure. Sulitzer, taking advantage of a trend, has developed that idea in his books.”

Jeanick Jossin, book editor of the weekly news magazine Nouvel Observateur, said: “Sulitzer’s books came at a time when the French government was trying to revive a sense for excellence, for success, for competition in France, to make France move out of its economic malaise.

“Sulitzer communicates something. His books are closer to journalism than to literature. But he knows how to introduce characters who succeed. He tries to persuade readers that it is not shameful to be successful. His books are far different from what we call serious French literature, which usually features mixed-up characters who have a hard time living.”

Sulitzer agrees with these assessments. His success, he said, came because of “a change of mentality . . . a change of period, a new way of approaching money.” In France in the past, he said, “to speak about money at dinner, you would look very vulgar, you would look parvenu. . . . French society was so old, so blocked.” Young French have broken away from this attitude, he said.

Quit School at 16

Sulitzer was born in Boulogne, just outside Paris, in 1946, the son of a Romanian Jewish immigrant who had made a fortune in lumber and real estate. The elder Sulitzer died when Paul-Loup was 10, leaving no will and a host of squabbling heirs. Sulitzer inherited very little and quit school at the age of 16 to make his own fortune.

He quickly cashed in on a French penchant for collecting souvenir key rings by organizing a “club” that sold and exchanged key rings. He then began importing comical gadgets from the Far East--electric back scratchers, for example--and by the time he was 20 he was hailed as the youngest chief executive of a corporation in France. In two years’ time, he had earned his first million dollars and become a celebrity.

A publisher asked him in the late 1970s to write his memoirs and, according to his critics, also introduced him to Durand, the alleged ghostwriter. Sulitzer decided that a novel made more sense than a memoir, and “Money,” the novel that set the pattern for his “financial westerns,” was born.

The hero of “Money,” Franz Cimballi, the son of an Italian father and an Austrian Jewish mother, has been cheated of his inheritance by the business partners of his father. They embezzled the money before his father’s death. Cimballi avenges himself by amassing a new fortune and using it to break the business partners, driving some to madness and some to suicide over their losses.

Quick Financial Lessons

Cimballi is not afraid to worship money. When he earns $900 in a single day, he spreads it out on his bed in a hotel in Mombasa and gazes at it, “incredulous, elated, fascinated.” He then jumps on the bed and collapses on “the carpet of money.”

The action takes place in Mombasa, Paris, Hong Kong, St. Tropez, London, the Bahamas, Zurich, Geneva, Rome, Japan, Curacao, San Francisco, Death Valley, Las Vegas, Florida and New York. Along the way, the narrator treats the reader to quick lessons on holding companies, gold buying on term, real estate leverage, public tender offers.

This first novel was relatively short and simple. As Sulitzer became more popular, the novels became longer and more complex. Making money still dominates the plots. In 1983, for example, he published “The Green King,” the story of Reb Michael Klimrod, the son of an Austrian law professor and a Polish Jewish mother, who rises from the hopeless depths of a Nazi extermination camp to become the richest man on Earth.

The controversy over a ghostwriter has been bruising. For one thing, the word in French for ghostwriter is negre, the same as the word in French for nigger, or black slave, so there is a suggestion of exploitation when a writer employs one.

A Dual Effort

Pivot, whose book discussion program is one of the most popular on French television, fanned rumors by inviting the 54-year-old Durand to the show and then describing him, despite Durand’s denials, as the author of Sulitzer’s books. Pivot then published a long expose of “the Sulitzer system” in his literary magazine, Lire.

In the expose, journalist Pierre Assouline said that Sulitzer began a book by writing a story or a scenario--”a synopsis of anywhere from 15 to 200 pages”--and then turned it over to Durand to fashion into a novel. Without Sulitzer’s strong story, Assouline went on, Durand’s dialogue and construction would be worthless; without Durand’s carpentry and writing skill, Sulitzer’s story would not work.

In anticipation of the expose, Sulitzer discussed the role of Durand in an interview with Paris-Match a few weeks earlier. Sulitzer said that Durand was the most important of his friends who checked the manuscript carefully and made suggestions. Later, however, Sulitzer acknowledged that Durand’s role in editing and rewriting was more important than that. He told Assouline, the author of the expose, that Durand had entirely reworked the construction of “The Green King.” But Sulitzer insisted that he alone was the author of the novels.

Popularity Remains High

Pivot said he had published the expose in the name of truth. Although Sulitzer has certain qualities that made the books possible, Pivot went on, “he is not, however, what he has claimed for a long time to be: a writer, an author.”

French law requires food manufacturers to detail the contents of their packages, he said, and added, “Why should we be less exacting with a book than a can of peas?”

Sulitzer’s latest book, “La Femme Pressee” (“Woman In a Hurry”), was published in the midst of the controversy and rose immediately on the best-seller list. Even Pivot’s magazine, Lire, lists it as No. 3.

“Despite the fact that Pivot showed that Sulitzer was deceiving everyone,” said Anne Pons, the book editor of the news magazine L’Express, “everyone rushed out to buy the book.”

Sulitzer, muffling his anger with cockiness, said, “If we were starting all over again and there was a question of whether to have a controversy or not, I would pay Pivot to start it.”

Editorial researcher Alice Sedar in Paris contributed to this article.