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Ghostwriting and its Contradictions, Or: Meet the Trumps

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Spaces of Dissension

Part of the book series: Contradiction Studies ((COSTU))

Abstract

This contribution explores ghostwriting as a cultural practice marked by contradictions. It takes as its example the case of Donald J. Trump’s ghostwritten memoir titled Trump: The Art of the Deal from 1987. Following Trump’s announcement to run for the U.S. presidency in 2016, the ghostwriter of his memoir, Tony Schwartz, publicly announced that the book had not been written by Trump but by him instead, thus contradicting Trump’s claim to the authorship of the book. The debate around this disclosure points to one aspect of contradictions discussed in the chapter: the ghostwriter’s act of contradicting the pact between author and ghostwriter according to which the latter remain in the background. The chapter further highlights how the book itself delineates and mobilizes various dialectical contradictions, arguing that the text straddles various contradictory fault lines concerning the relationship between fact and fiction, the in/authenticity of the content of the book, the in/visibility of its ghostwriter, and the power/lessness of both author and ghostwriter in the cultural field. Hence it is argued that the practice of ghostwriting is a paradigmatic case of deploying contradictions as a constitutive element of (American) literature and cultures and their theorization.

If a president has a ghostwriter, who’s the president?

Dennis Kucinich (qtd. in Meadows 2004, p. 12) (Dennis Kucinich is a U.S. politician who was a candidate for the Democratic nomination for U.S. President in the 2004 and 2008 elections)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    According to Mayer (2016), the book sold “more than a million copies, generating several million dollars in royalties.”

  2. 2.

    Cesar Chelala notes in a 2016 article in CounterPunch titled “The Real Donald Trump” that the memoir is “a book that […] catapulted Trump’s fame among the general public.”

  3. 3.

    “Donald J. Trump has regularly boasted about ‘The Art of the Deal,’ his best-selling autobiography, as a business bible that demonstrates the sharp negotiating prowess he would bring to the presidency” (Rappeport 2016).

  4. 4.

    This exchange echoes Dennis Kucinich’s statement “If a president has a ghostwriter, who’s the president?” (qtd. in Meadows 2004, p. 12), in which Kucinich boasted that he, in contrast to other candidates, had written his own campaign book during the Democratic nomination for presidency in 2013 (Brandt 2007, p. 549).

  5. 5.

    In 2009, the Supreme Court of the United States held a mock trial over the authorship of Shakespeare’s works, conducting hearings over the question whether the works ascribed to Shakespeare were actually composed by Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. For further discussion, see Garber 2010, p. xiv. The hearings can be accessed under: http://www.c-span.org/video/?618-1/shakespeare-author-pseudonym.

  6. 6.

    Dumas himself started out his writing career as a ghostwriter, copying and writing texts for the Duc d’Orléans as an employé surnuméraire (untrained employee) (Mielke 1995, p. 111).

  7. 7.

    In the footnote of a broadside published in 1795 by Jonathan Plummer (1761–1816) titled “Dying Confession of Pomp,” Plummer advertises his services in “various branches of trifling business,” offering to write “Love-letters in prose and verse furnished on the shortest notice.” Plummer was “one of the first authors to try to earn a living with his pen in the years following the American Revolution” (Hutchins 2004).

  8. 8.

    While Dyson does not specify to which of Du Bois’s three autobiographies he refers, it is most likely Du Bois’s third autobiographical text, The Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (1968). At the time of its publication, Capote had established himself as a well-known writer; his writing career had not yet set off in 1940, the year that saw the publication of Du Bois’s second autobiography Dusk of Dawn. If Dyson is correct, The Autobiography would constitute a case of fully covert ghostwriting: Du Bois makes no mention of Capote as co-author or ghostwriter.

  9. 9.

    John Sutherland refers to Tom Clancy’s novels as products of the “Clancy factory”: Tom Clancy “pastes his name happily on works by a platoon of writers as invisible to the reader’s eye as his Ghost Recon force is to the enemy they invariably defeat. As Clancy’s publisher unblushingly puts it: ‘Tom Clancy creates the ideas for these series, and the writers execute Clancy’s ideas’” (2011, p. 190).

  10. 10.

    McCrum notes, interestingly, that most ghostwritten books fall into the genre of “misery memoir,” life stories containing episodes of a tragic childhood, followed by celebrity autobiographies and “true-crime memoirs” (2014).

  11. 11.

    Ghostwriting in the U.S. falls under the so-called “Works for Hire” section of copyright law, which states that “If a work is made for hire, an employer is considered the author even if an employee actually created the work. The employer can be a firm, an organization, or an individual” (United States Copyright Office 2012). As Deborah Brandt explains, “[o]n the one hand, this provision underscores the indivisibility between writers and their work (one can give for hire only that which one controls). On the other hand, the law makes authorship, at least as a legal status, thoroughly severable from actual composing. You may be considered the author without having written a word. This is what allows a public personality to put his or her byline on the cover of a commissioned book while often relegating the name of the ghostwriter to a smaller font or to the acknowledgement page, or, in some cases, to oblivion” (2007, p. 553).

  12. 12.

    The monetary compensation of a ghostwriter often entails intense negotiations and can vary widely, as different sources indicate. As Paul Farhi explains for a large New York-based ghostwriting company, fees for books written for professionals (businessmen, doctors, etc.) may start at $15.000 per book but can go up to $500.000 and higher for a celebrity bestseller (2014). Robert McCrum sets the conventional price at 33% of the advance (plus royalties), yet indicates that it can go as low as 10% (2014). Prices are either negotiated per page or project; in Germany, this can vary between 50 and 300 Euros per page (Lukaßen 2016, p. iv).

  13. 13.

    The meaning of the term “principal” as we use it here corresponds to that of the same term in Erving Goffman’s elaborations on “footing”: “someone whose position is established by the words that are spoken, someone whose beliefs have been told, someone who has committed himself to what the words say” (1979, p. 17).

  14. 14.

    As Lois J. Einhorn comments, “[a]lmost every statement spoken today by major political, business, and academic leaders was written by someone else” (1991, p. 115), a notion that is particularly prevalent (and well known) for American presidents, as extensive research by numerous scholars has shown. As Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson note, “virtually all presidents had collaborators in creating their rhetoric” (1990, p. 10). Indeed, as William N. Brigance showed as early as 1956, ghostwriting can be traced back to the beginnings of the American presidency.

  15. 15.

    [‘Überall dort, wo Wörter zu Papier gebracht werden, finden sich auch sogenannte Ghostwriter. Längst schon ist diese Gruppe aus der schreibenden Zunft nicht mehr wegzudenken’] (Lukaßen 2016, p. iv); also see Stockman and Mureithi 2019.

  16. 16.

    In a similar vein, Robert McCrum of the Guardian has noted: “To a degree that might astonish the reading public, a significant percentage of any current bestseller list will not have been written by the authors whose names appear on the jackets.” As Jack Hitt specifies for the U.S., “[o]n any given week, up to a half of any nonfiction best-seller list is written by someone other than the name on the book. Add those authors who feel enough latent uneasiness to bury the writer’s name in the acknowledgements and the percentage […] reaches as high as 80.”

  17. 17.

    We are reminded here of Toni Morrison’s call in the late 1980s to consider and question the representational absence of a nonetheless constitutive and ubiquitous presence of African American culture in the literary canon and in much ‘white’ canonical literature —her plea for examining the “‘unspeakable things unspoken’; for the ways in which the presence of Afro-Americans has shaped the choices, the language, the structure—the meaning of so much American literature,” her plea, in short, for “search[ing for] the ghost in the machine” (1989, p. 11). Without intending to de-referentialize Morrison’s agenda, we regard her invocation of the logic of an absent presence as a useful conceptual lens through which to grasp the tensions among which the figure of the ghostwriter moves.

  18. 18.

    Accordingly, Robert McCrum (2014) sardonically remarks, “the ghost is advised never to forget that, at the end of the day, he or she ranks somewhere between a valet and a cleaner.”

  19. 19.

    We refer to Roland Barthes here, who formulated his skepticism about an author’s autonomy and intentionality perhaps more poignantly than others in his famous essay “The Death of the Author” (2001/1967).

  20. 20.

    For an excellent overview of theoretical debates on authorship , see Bennett (2005).

  21. 21.

    The number of “more than a million copies” sold (Mayer 2016) presumably increased after Trump’s successful election.

  22. 22.

    See Mandeville 1989.

  23. 23.

    The fictitiousness of the fable is corroborated, for example, in Wayne Barrett’s book Trump: The Deals and the Downfall (1992) as well as in Timothy L. O’Brien’s TrumpNation (2005). Trump’s father, in fact, had a major impact on the success of Trump’s dealmaking, both in terms of monetary support and networking. As Barrett says in an interview with Jane Mayer: “The notion that he’s [Trump is] a self-made man is a joke. But I guess they couldn’t call the book ‘The Art of My Father’s Deal’” (Mayer 2016).

  24. 24.

    As Mayer writes in response: “Howard Kaminsky, the former Random House head, laughed and said, ‘Trump didn’t write a postcard for us!’”

  25. 25.

    Mayer relates an anecdote that lead to the signing of the book contract. A representative of Random House apparently pursued Trump, wrapping a “thick Russian novel in a dummy cover that featured a photograph of Trump looking like a conquering hero; […] Trump was pleased by the mockup, but had one suggestion: ‘Please make my name much bigger.’” Not only is the book contract thus based on a fake, but what is even more noteworthy here is the implicit assumption that the prestige of canonized Russian novels might rub off on Trump’s to-be-ghostwritten memoir so that the producers and author might capitalize on the project.

  26. 26.

    See https://assets.donaldjtrump.com/MeredithStatement.pdf. The former link now merely reads “Thank you for your support.” For her full statement, see Diamond (2016).

  27. 27.

    [“Was halten Sie vom Plagiat in der Rede von Trumps Frau Melania? Ich glaube, dass man für ihre Rede bewusst bei Michelle Obama plagiiert hat. Wäre dem nicht so gewesen, hätte später die Überschrift vielleicht gelautet: ‘Wie kann man dieser Frau aus einem ehemals kommunistischen Land vertrauen?’ So, wie sie rüberkommt, ist sie für viele Amerikaner ein reiches Ex-Model aus Ex-Jugoslawien, das nichts mit ihnen gemein hat. Davon hat diese Geschichte abgelenkt. Es war ein klassischer Internet-Coup.”] (Wiele 2016, p. 16).

  28. 28.

    Schwartz wrote What Really Matters: Searching for Wisdom in America (1995) as a reaction to his work as a ghostwriter of Trump: The Art of the Deal. He has also co-authored books with Michael Eisner (Risking Failure, Surviving Success, 1998), Jim Loehr (The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy Not Time, 2003), and Jean Gomes and Catherine McCarthy (The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working: Fueling the Four Needs that Energize Performance, 2010).

  29. 29.

    As Jason Horowitz notes: “Ms. McIver is considered part of the extended Trump family. ‘She is terrific, she’s a terrific woman,’ Trump said […], ‘She’s been with us a long time.’”

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. TU Dresden, Dresden, Germany

    Carsten Junker

  2. University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Marie-Luise Löffler

Authors
  1. Carsten Junker
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  2. Marie-Luise Löffler
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Correspondence to Carsten Junker .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Geography, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Julia Lossau

  2. German Linguistics, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Daniel Schmidt-Brücken

  3. German Linguistics, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Ingo H. Warnke

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© 2019 Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature

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Junker, C., Löffler, ML. (2019). Ghostwriting and its Contradictions, Or: Meet the Trumps. In: Lossau, J., Schmidt-Brücken, D., Warnke, I. (eds) Spaces of Dissension. Contradiction Studies. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-25990-7_3

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