Read Between the Lines and You Might See Commercials

Not long ago, the English novelist Faye Weldon created a minor literary controversy when she agreed to write a novel commissioned by the Italian jeweler Bulgari. In return for a still-undisclosed but reportedly quite handsome fee, the writer promised to mention the firm’s products at least 12 times in the course of her narrative.

Actually, Weldon--who once worked for an advertising agency--exceeded the terms of her contract many times over, sprinkling Bulgari references through her plot like pave diamonds and crowning the exercise by titling the book “The Bulgari Connection.”

A predictable debate ensued. Weldon, a practiced controversialist, airily dismissed her critics. “Who cares?” she said, “I never win the Booker Prize anyway.”

The whole affair was sensibly summed up by her friend, the Booker-winning Australian novelist Thomas Keneally, who called Weldon’s arrangement “an act of defiance and mischief” intended to put the British literary establishment on notice that while a novel is “something imponderable, it’s also a commercial artifact, so don’t be so solemn about it.”

Keneally suggested that if he and his colleagues “took Faye’s option to the limit, we all could auction off our books, particularly the handsome parts, the characters who get all the sex and all the money.”

Nobody got the chance, however, since Weldon’s novel sold poorly, which seemed to put a period to the matter.

Or at least it did until a few days ago, when the Wall Street Journal reported that one of the world’s largest advertising holding companies, Interpublic Group, has hired an investment banking house to help it purchase a major literary agency. The ad conglomerate also hopes to buy a significant Hollywood talent agency.

Neither Interpublic nor its banker, Allen & Co., would comment, but their goal seems clear to analysts. Increasing numbers of viewers use new technologies to skip the ads on cable and free television, (a practice that one network executive recently argued amounts to theft.) As a result, advertisers have become preoccupied with weaving their products directly and visibly into films, miniseries and dramatic specials. Such “product placement” could be undertaken on an unprecedented scale by an ad agency not only able to control the content of books and stories through ownership of a literary agency, but also able to steer the right properties to its own talent agency and out the other end of the electronic pipeline. At each phase of the process, “the content” could be studded with clients’ products.

What might makers of cigarettes, soft drinks, automobiles or clothing pay for that kind of subtle and relentless access to consumers’ hearts and minds? A lot. Fortune 500 companies already pay major Hollywood agencies such as CAA and Endeavor major money for advice on just such marketing strategies.

Writers may soon get their chance to do just what Keneally laughingly proposed.

How does that prospect strike serious literary agents?

Georges Borchardt is one of that vocation’s elder statesmen. As president of the Georges Borchardt Agency in New York, his current clients range from Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel to English novelist Ian McEwan and California authors T. Coraghessan Boyle and Richard Rodriguez. The first author Borchardt represented was Albert Camus; the first book he ever sold was “The Stranger.”

So what does he make of Interpublic’s apparent aims?

“It sounds pretty dreadful,” Borchardt said. “I would view it as a form of prostitution. We put in our contract that publishers can’t place advertising inserts of any sort in our authors’ books. But at least ad inserts are clearly identified and readers who encounter them can always do what I do with them in magazines--which is to tear out the ads--and read the articles.”

Imagine, Borchardt suggested, what kind of mischief might be accomplished if an agency of such a mind were to gain control of an important “backlist” of previously published books. “They could sneak all sorts of things in,” he mused. “You might find a character in, say, Dostoevsky suddenly drinking a particular brand of vodka. It is bizarre.

“Unfortunately there is today a certain kind of novel--not the sort we’ve involved with--where every character wears brand-name clothes, smokes certain kinds of cigarettes and drives particular sorts of cars. I imagine the people who read those books begin to dream about wearing the clothes their favorite character wore. So, I suppose this thing would work--up to a point.”

And how would Borchardt respond if Interpublic’s bankers were to come knocking on his agency’s door?

“Normally, my honest answer would be that every man has a price,” he said. “But I also would have to tell them honestly that none of our authors would go for this and that they should go somewhere else. And I suppose they would.”

Work in Progress

Robert Pinsky, former poet laureate of the United States, is poetry editor of the online magazine Slate. His many books include a translation of “The Inferno of Dante:”

“I have a few things going. In the fall, Princeton University Press will publish a little 100-page book that collects the Tanner Lectures I gave there. It’s called ‘Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry.’ One of the things I engaged in those talks is the idea that poetry is definitely a vocal art, but not a performative one.

“My distinction is that while poetry should not be performed from a stage before an audience, it should--even must--be read aloud. You might read a poem aloud to yourself or you might, for example, read the poem to your mate. For a culture preoccupied by show business, the big point is that poetry is about intimate scale. That’s very precious to us when so many things in our society are on a mass scale. So, when I say ‘voice’ in that book title, I mean it quite literally. But the voice of poetry is not the voice of theater, the movies or rap music.

“The really nutty thing I’m doing right now is working on an opera, which is going to involve robots. I’m collaborating with the composer Tod Machover, who is affiliated with the Media Lab at MIT. We’re both working with a brilliant young roboticist there, as well. At the moment, we’re thinking that some of the roles will be played by robots and we’re also thinking that the libretto will borrow from ‘The Inferno of Dante.’

“We’ve already written an aria, which was performed not long ago at a dinner in Monaco for the Friends of the Monte Carlo Opera, who commissioned this work.

“There is an important question in the ‘Inferno’--and in life--of whether consciousness is always self-destructive. Do we in our cleverness always end up hurting ourselves? We’re going to take a sympathetic view of the robots.”