Enter the sponsored novel

Some years ago, a play had come to town that I was keen on going to. A friend had free passes to a show that had been sponsored by a mobile phone company. The play, as expected, was first rate. The audience was not. All through the evening people chatted, passed food packets around, answered phone calls and let their children run wild in the auditorium. When the play ended nobody even bothered to clap.

The experience was one of the things that came to my mind when I read last week about Fay Weldon writing a sponsored novel for the Italian jewellers, Bulgari. The first thought was of course: “Fay Weldon?” In Weldon’s defence it is only fair to list her claims which are that: she had complete artistic control; that the brand has only a discreet presence in the book (in the title, as necklaces, showrooms and so on); it is as good as any she has written; that she would have turned down a similar offer from a less prestigious product such as Wrigleys chewing gum and; that it was intended originally for private distribution to an exclusive client list of 750. The last fact notwithstanding, now that the book is expected to be in the public domain it is only right that so should the debate over its propriety.

Various arguments have already been extended on the subject. The fact that art and patronage have always gone together (Weldon even claims that she thought the process of writing a sponsored novel would be like one between ‘a Renaissance sculptor and patron.’); the fact that advertising has entered every aspect of our lives; that product placement is commonplace; that global sales of fiction are falling, etc.

Yes, times are hard and one can understand that survival could demand compromises between art and commerce and that it is possible to have a discussion on where the line could be drawn. What none of them explains, is why a seventy-year-old widely respected and extremely successful writer (22 novels including the Meryl Streep starrer, Life and Loves of the She Devil, TV scripts and adaptations) should resort to such measures. Weldon’s defiant explanation is, lucre. It was a ‘nice amount of money for three months of work’ she says. A good enough reason perhaps for a time and a world when increasingly every kind of transgression and compromise is being condoned in the pursuit of money. Hearteningly most writers interviewed by the webzine Salon, disapproved. Author Rick Moody (Ice Storm), for instance, was scathing in his criticism: “uh, don’t your books sell enough copies already? Don’t be such a jerk!”

It could of course be asked why fiction writers should be considered more idealistic when, as we are repeatedly told, every aspect of our lives is being corporatised. At the risk of introducing the increasingly unfashionable idea that there are other motivating factors apart from money, I would say that there is a space that fiction writers and people involved in other creative endeavours occupy precisely because they respond to a call from within. That call presupposes first of all, complete freedom whether it is to do with choice of subject, setting, character or even the colour of a ruffle on a dress. As Marsha Hamilton, author of Staircase of a Thousand Steps expressed to Salon that in her view authors needed to insulate themselves against any marketing strategies for fear they might cripple the creative process. In her case, as she pointed out, her book would never have been written if she had gone by the conventional marketing wisdom that stories about Arabs who were ‘not terrorists’ and ordinary Palestinian villagers would never sell in the US. It also presupposes an omnipotence on the part of the writer to create the world as he or she sees it. As writer Elizabeth McCracken maintains: “I’m a fiction writer. I’m a control freak. I have delusions of grandeur. I am God.”

These are not the selfish and arrogant demands of a special breed of people but a basic human impulse. It is the eternal need for a vision of beauty and truth which is what leads to the continued demand for art in its various forms and ironically, its patronage by corporate entities. As Rabindranath Tagore said: “It is our imagination which in its fuller stage of development is peculiar to us. It has its vision of wholeness which is not necessary for the historical purpose of physical survival but for arousing in us a sense of perfection which is our sense of immortality.” When artists are encouraged to voluntarily and eagerly cash in that imagination in howsoever slightly perceived a way, it is not a matter of an individual decision but a surrender on behalf of humanity.

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