Sold! A Literary Soul, Now Mud

“I don’t care,” the novelist Fay Weldon decided.

As the New York Times quoted her, she had misgivings at first: “Oh no, dear me, I am a literary author. You can’t do this kind of thing; my name will be mud forever.”

Then she changed her mind. There was, after all, money to be made: “I don’t care. Let it be mud.”

So Ms. Mud leaped to sign a contract with a foppish jewelry manufacturer, stipulating that she would mention the company a dozen times in her next novel. The company reportedly had final rights of approval over the manuscript and rewarded her with an undisclosed wad of lucre. In other words, the writer was bought and paid for.

Mud, the author of more than 20 novels--including one with the prophetic title “Worst Fears”--apparently enjoyed her dirty delights. She far exceeded the required 12 advertising blurbs. I mean, just think of all the company press releases a writer could draw from.

The opening scene of her forthcoming book occurs in one of the company’s stores. The title of the book includes the name of the company, which I omit so you won’t wonder whether I have a contract on the side to assist in this promotional crime. Besides, I think this jeweler’s wristwatches are as garishly ugly and overpriced as anything ever made for the logo loonies, the kind of heavy trash that airheads need to keep them from floating off into thin air.

So another standard has fallen. Grown-up literature will become like children’s literature: a snake pit of commercialism.

“The sky is the limit,” gushed Mud’s agent as he looked ahead to the possibilities of liquor and cigarette companies, fashion labels and all the others who will soon be paying for “product placement” in literature. Mud’s mainline publisher in Britain joined in the rah-rah. An executive enthused, “It gives me a lot of ideas.”

I wonder what they would have paid John Steinbeck to rewrite “Tortilla Flat” so that it began: “This is the story of Danny and of Danny’s friends and of Danny’s house and Danny’s gaudy gold wristwatch.”

At this stage of the game, shock is the merchandisers’ most effective weapon. The deeper they can wallow in the sty of bad taste, the more likely they will stir up a peep of controversy that will somehow draw attention to the product they sell. For those selling vulgarity, all they need is attention.

There is a notorious sneaker company that spends millions to devise TV commercials intended to offend and thus be certain to make news. After howls of protest reach an unbearable volume, a company spokesman strides forth and pulls the ad as if it was all a mistake. It is the corniest of strategies, but we fall for it every time. It’s called leveraging your advertising budget.

Books somehow escaped this, at least books for adults. But sooner or later, I guess, it was inevitable that a writer with awful judgment would be tempted by a jeweler with awful taste. For what is surely an investment of peanuts, this lamentable twosome will receive far more publicity than they could ever earn on their merits. For her part, Mud said her books weren’t going to win a literary prize anyway, so why not?

Indeed, I wonder if Willa S. Cather would have altered the closing of “My Antonia” for a few quick bucks: “Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past--and of course our matching gold wristwatches.”

Once the shock value is exhausted, product placement in literature will become just another phenomenon in the mercantile bordello that is our culture.

Books had been refuge. Authors, at least as I have regarded them, were people whose judgments we could count on to be their own. The secret of books is their intimacy. That’s why we have the cliche about “curling up” with a book. You cannot curl up with a movie.

We expect our authors to be honest with us. If Ernest Hemingway says he wrote with a No. 2 pencil, I trust it’s because he found magic in a No. 2 pencil. If Ms. Mud, with her supercilious, what-me-worry grin, tells me she writes with a Waterman fountain pen, I’ll know she’s just another shift worker in the big bordello.

That’s what a single sellout writer has done. Every work of modern literature hereafter will be suspect and thus diminished. To the time-honored motives of enlightenment and entertainment, literature has become another marketing ploy for hucksters.

Thanks to Ms. Mud, every time we curl up with a new book we’ll have to wonder whether we’re consorting with a literary prostitute.