Journey of Rejection Ends at 162

If Dick Wimmer follows the standard advice to authors, “Write what you know,” his next novel will be about rejection. In fact, his next several books could be about rejection.

Wimmer’s first novel, “Irish Wine,” was published last month after being turned down 162 times. The Agoura Hills man insists there is not a shred of exaggeration in the number, which was accumulated over a 27-year period.

“It’s really that many,” Wimmer said. “I counted rejections from agents and publishers. Sometimes the same house rejected it over and over.”

The novel, the story of the reunion of an exuberant Irish painter and a would-be writer from America, was finally bought by Mercury House in San Francisco for a $3,000 advance. Wimmer, 52, admits to wavering between euphoria and despair.

“It’s been such a strange odyssey,” he said while sipping lemonade in his paneled living room recently. “I was in a bookshop not long ago when it struck me as sad that I went through all of this for one slim volume.”

But Wimmer also has a satisfying sense of vindication. He always believed that the book, which is set in Ireland and London, was good enough to be published. And he is elated that a London house, Picador, is putting out a British edition.

“I’m in their catalogue along with John Fowles and Tom Wolfe,” Wimmer said.

The 162 rejections are, unofficially at least, the most ever for a book that was eventually published. The Guinness Book of World Records lists the most-rejected book as “The Inevitability of Patriarchy” by Steven Goldberg, which was turned down a mere 69 times before it was bought.

The record for a manuscript never published, Guinness says, is 204 refusals.

How does it feel to be history’s most-rejected published novelist?

“When Mercury House wanted to highlight it, I was reluctant,” Wimmer said. “I would like the book to hold up on its own merits. I don’t want it to be a freak of fiction. But I realize that books are a business. If it’s going to help sales, then so be it.”

Wimmer started “Irish Wine” while on a trip to Europe in 1960. An admirer of novelist J. P. Donleavy, he stayed for a time in London with the writer’s brother, painter T. J. Donleavy.

“He was fantastic, larger than life, a marvelous raconteur who drank and talked and drank and talked,” Wimmer said. “He became the model for my character Seamus Boyne, and I came back from Europe with 700 pages.”

But the published book is only 128 pages, the result of a major rewrite Wimmer performed after 80 or so rejections. Both versions are in a present-tense, stream-of-consciousness style. But in the rewritten book the action unfolds at a breakneck pace, as when Boyne escapes from some creditors:

“Knocking over this table in my haste and scattering dry noodles all over the place, apples and pears bounding by me as I burst out the door, sprinting through these puddles round the corner--and O Jesus, there goes the bus to Dublin!

“Signalling and frantically waving it down in my pink tutu and crown--Wong Fat, Fanning, and Dennehy now joined in hot pursuit, the corps de ballet behind them--a kindly ballerina tossing me my slicker as I scramble aboard, grabbing onto this door--and the bus goes roaring off up the hill, a blur of them back there fading in our wake!

“ ‘Ah, turned out to be a grand mornin’, didn’t it, sir?’ The driver just smiling without dismay, eccentric painter out to play. . . .”

The effect might be described as Buster Keaton meets James Joyce. It is often lyrical and quite funny, although occasionally the slapstick gets a bit thick. No one can go near the Thames, for example, without falling in.

The story is told in alternating first-person chapters. Boyne hears the voice of 19th-Century landscape artist William Turner and is obsessed with having a painting hung in the Tate Museum. It seems someone is trying to kill him.

The second character, Gene Hagar, grieves that seven years ago he went into his family’s exterminating business in Great Neck, N.Y., instead of moving to Ireland to write and live with a Dutch beauty, Ciara. He returns to Great Britain to visit Boyne and perhaps pick up life’s lost artistic thread.

Wimmer shares some biography with Hagar. He hails from Great Neck and worked in his father’s exterminating business. But Wimmer pursued writing more doggedly than did his character. He has finished four other novels and hopes that his new standing as a published author will ignite interest in them by agents or publishing houses.

Clearly, Wimmer feels a tenderness for “Irish Wine.” In his book-lined garage, where he writes, there is a seven-foot-tall collage of people, places and objects he associates with the story. James Joyce is there, and a beautiful Dutch girl, and famous painters. Joyce is a major influence, said Wimmer, who named his dog Molly Bloom after the character in “Ulysses.”

Also dear to him are favorable comments that appear on the book’s jacket from Malcolm Cowley, Anthony Burgess and other writers. No wallflower when it comes to self-promotion, Wimmer collected the comments by sending the unpublished manuscript to various literary figures. Their encouraging responses helped him persevere with publishers.

The letters also influenced Mercury House, said Alev Croutier, executive editor. “One of the most impressive things about the book was that it came highly recommended,” she said. “Irish Wine” was an “over-the-transom” book, sold without an agent.

Croutier termed Wimmer a unique writer with “a very expressive, manic, energetic style.” She said that a review in the New York Times, tentatively scheduled for Sunday, could help sales considerably if favorable.

“You never really know if something like this will sell,” she said. “If it does, it will be because it builds a reputation from good reviews. It won’t be because it’s sensational.”

The first printing runs about 6,000 copies, Croutier said.

If “Irish Wine” is “an uncommonly fine first novel,” as Cowley writes, why was it rejected 162 times?

“Over the years publishing has changed,” Wimmer said. “They’re taking less and less chance on literary books. It wasn’t commercial. Plus, nobody reads anymore, especially first novels.”

Last year Wimmer had a nonfiction book published. “Baseball Fathers, Baseball Sons” chronicles a trip the divorced father made with his teen-age sons to spring training camps, where they met many of the game’s famous players.

“It’s ironic,” Wimmer said, “because I knocked out that book in three months and had it published without any problem.”

Wimmer, a teacher of creative writing at Moorpark College, said he and a student, Vicki Pounds, are working on a sequel to “Irish Wine.” The book picks up the Boyne character 10 years later, when he is rich and famous.

Wimmer does not have a deal to publish the book, but he intends to seek one. If necessary, he can take some rejection.