Bernard Shaw and Modern Advertising

by Christopher Wixson

  Even other fields noticed. A regular column called “London Letter” in Photo-Era Magazine: The American Journal of Photography covered the campaign and paraphrased the letters (“their answers were not put as plainly as this”), bemoaning that, although it “commands many of the most skilled workers,” photography has “failed to press the most important literary lights into its service.” 67 On the continent, the September 1929 edition of avant-garde design magazine Gebrauchsgraphik: International Advertising Art included a feature that reproduced all three letters with commentary, entitled “The Tables Turned or Harrods and the Three Great English Authors.” Its author, H. F. J. Kropff , speaks to what he calls the “unsolved problem” in Europe that “wide circles of the public, including artists, authors, and publishers, tend to reject advertising.” 68 Particularly in Germany, he goes on, even when “publisher and author – whether moved by political enthusiasm or erroneous economic conclusions, allow themselves to be persuaded to lend their personalities to any cause, … usually the thing is a failure” (47). In contrast, Kropff argues, with proficient authors behind them, “these three negative replies were a great success for Harrods’ – ‘the greatest advertising trick of recent times’, an American said” (47). He urges readers to “recognize the gulf that yawns between normal German advertising copy and the high achievement of many a German commercial artist” and that “the consciously cultivated copywriter is an essential of commercial art” (51). Citing Shaw’s response as the “most interesting” and “most biting” (47), Kropff uses the Harrods campaign to make a case for the importance of high-quality copywriting and for creating university courses of study in Germany to train writers in the “psychology of advertising” and “the art of salesmanship” (51). Similar to many of the Advertiser’s Weekly respondents, McVoy , in his Printed Salesmanship piece, goes further, arguing that merely being a good journalist or writer with a university degree isn’t enough, thatthe most successful copy writers of the future as far as securing result-bringing advertisements and sales-creating literature generally are concerned, will be men who have actually … had to sell goods or services himself. … Nine advertisements out of ten today are not as productive of business as they might be … because they lack salesmanship. 69

  Again and again, the objection is raised that literary authors were venturing “into an expert profession with their inexpert methods, offering in the place of trained skill in writing ‘selling’ copy their fame won in another field.” 70 Just as it did for copywriting as a trade, the campaign provided an occasion for advertising to assert its integrity and status as a legitimate professional field; as Advertiser’s Weekly put it, “advertising cannot but be gratified that its status has risen so vastly that it is possible for such a question to be put and that three eminent writers can bring themselves to write on the subject in so sympathetic a manner.” 71

  In the midst of extensive discussion about the efficacy of the endorsement technique in general and the appropriateness of using literary authors as copywriters, some trade publications went to prominent American writers to provide anti-testimonial testimonials. In their May 1929 issue, the Chicago-based Magazine of Business carried a piece by James Thurber , who would later go on to provide illustrations for advertising campaigns. “Now that testimonial writing has become a greater sport than baseball,” the author claims it “high time that some rules for the game were adopted” and advocates for the creation of a National Rules Committee “to establish a board of censorship to edit testimonials before they are printed.” Seeing little chance that the advertisers or profitable endorsements will cease, Thurber proposes a compromise since, “apparently, it doesn’t make a difference in sales what the [personality] says, as long as he keeps the name of the product before the people.” He envisions a cigarette ad in which a famous athlete encourages children not to smoke and expresses his desire that the act be banned. “The children’s admiration for their hero will be kept intact [and] the cigaret’s sales will grow, because the elements in this great land which won’t stand for the prohibition of anything will quietly buy the cigaret in large quantities.” 72

  The American journal Advertising & Selling published a long missive by Sinclair Lewis in their May 15, 1929 issue against personality marketing in “these Advertised States of America.” 73 Using Ford car ads as positive examples, Lewis praises copy that avoids “nauseating slush” (60) and provides “definite information” about “what [the product] costs” and what specific virtues … it possesses” so as to provide “definite reasons why I, and not some snob celebrity should buy it” (60, 62). Extremely critical of the testimonial in all of its forms, he mockingly dissects a number of current campaigns that employ the technique, leaving aside “the more obvious and vulgar advertisements – the boisterous assertions that Douglas Fairbanks, Chief Officer Manning, George Gershwin, and a few score opera singers owe their success to smoking Lucky Strike Cigarettes” (66). He concludes,I want to protest, as a layman, against … the testimonial advertisements which differ from the old-fashioned medical advertisements only in being printed on better paper [and] the snob advertisements which suggest that I must buy something because Mrs. Umptidink of Paris and Terre Haute has bought it. … I know! My advertising-agency friends tell me that a lot of these accounts have hugely increased their sales by just the sort of advertising to which I object. … But my hunch is that there are quite a few million people who resent the valet swankiness as much as I do. And it is not a hunch but a certainty that when you get twenty soaps or shoes or cars all advertising against one another on the snobbish-and-testimonial basis, they will all cancel out, and the successful advertiser will be the man who tells factually what he has to sell, at what price, and why, with no extraneous pictures or would-be smart copy. (66)

  The Harrods campaign even had an afterlife in professional memory. Frank Swinnerton , the London correspondent for the Chicago Daily Tribune, noted in his column in early January of 1931 that Shaw’s comments about the Fortnum & Mason catalogues had spawned the creation of a volume entitled Let’s Forget Business by H. Stuart Menzies :A short time ago, Bernard Shaw, when invited to write an advertisement, said that he read with gusto, and made point of collecting, the little brochures issued every few weeks by a London firm of provision dealers. … Mr. Shaw is not alone in this habit, and I foresee a day when the brochures will be valuable collectors’ items. They represent a particularly Anglo-American type of nonsense, the kind that is illustrated by “Alice in Wonderland,” or, more simply, by certain of the old nursery rhymes, and because they are so entertaining, they must be good advertisements.

  Following upon Shaw’s puff, a collection has been made of these brochures for those who have not been on Messrs. Fortnum & Mason’s mailing list for the last few years. 74

  Two months later, Advertising & Selling reran virtually all of Swinnerton’s text in their “The 8pt. Page” column, arguing for the aesthetic quality of commercial advertising:some of this Fortnum & Mason advertising has been reproduced in A. & S. from time to time. Nothing else so good is being done on either side of the Atlantic, to my way of thinking. Fortnum & Mason “first editions” may well one day command fancy prices among collectors: they are literature of a high order. 75

  Five years after the original ads appeared, in 1934, Gerald Blake published a humorous essay in Advertising & Selling that evoked the memory of “one of the cleverest publicity stunts of the decade.” Musing what some of the greatest canonical authors might have produced if they were “weak enough to succumb to temptation,” Blake furnished copy from a “typical advertisement currently being run by a nationally known flour mill” and then imaginary variations on it produced in the style of Chaucer, Shakespeare , Thomas Carlyle, Dickens, Proust, G. K. Chesterton , Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. 76 A decade later, in 1945, Newspaper World & Advertising Review issued a call for “somebody [to] take the trouble to find out and give details (possibly in anthology form) of advertising’s associations with li
terature.” As an example, the piece asks,Do you remember a gallant attempt made by a famous London store to induce writers of the eminence of Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett , and others to write advertisements on the store’s behalf? No direct advertisements were forthcoming, but, when printed with the author’s photograph, the graceful prose in which the invitations were declined made a much-talked-of series. 77

  When Wells died in 1946, Printers’ Ink ran a eulogy of sorts that discussed his representation of the adman in his writings and concluded by recalling the Harrods series, “his one practical connection (or near-connection) with the art of copy writing” that helped produce “advertisements which were not only better than they would have been in the first place but also for free!” 78 The campaign even became part of Harrods mythology; in 1949, during the store’s centenary celebrations, The Newspaper World and Advertising Review devoted two paragraphs in a feature entitled “How Advertising Has Helped to Build the House of Harrods” to that “daring prestige move in 1929” that resulted in “world-wide editorial publicity in addition to that obtained through the actual announcements.” 79

  Besides the profession, the campaign also created ripples in scholarly circles. Unusually, Publishers’ Weekly took notice, quoting a paragraph from each author’s letter and complimenting Harrods for gaining “for itself, and for department stores in general, excellent publicity by printing” them. 80 However, if the advertising world found the campaign innovative and game changing, literary critics felt it confirmed how out of step Wells , Bennett , and Shaw were with modern times. Francis Hackett begins in the present tense in his March 1930 essay entitled “The Post-Victorians”: “I open a noted English paper, the Sunday Observer, to see three full-page advertisements, each with a huge familiar portrait, and each with a great literary name attached.” 81 He characterizes all three authors as “the most eminent of post-Victorians and anti-Victorians [who] have done the most to form the minds of our generation”:And yet, eminent as they are, they are already merging with the past. The epoch is waning. A new epoch is arriving. … We who owe most to them, who have been most formed by them who have been deepest in subjection to them, are obliged to be candid with ourselves as to the degree in which we are shedding them or trying to shed them. … We must repudiate them in order to fulfill our own temperaments. 82

  Hackett outlines a cycle in which each generation “must detach [their] allegiances and scrutinize [their] origins,” eventually discarding the influences that governed their “years of immaturity” in favor of those who speak more resonantly to and from the present moment. 83 In the essay, he is nostalgically reverent, especially towards Shaw, that “Niagara of intellectual monologue,” that “heroic giraffe who has pushed himself out of the mental undergrowth[,] elongating his neck until he could crop the heads of the tallest trees.” 84 Nonetheless, in the end, “when it came to 1914–1918,” the “attitudes” of Wells , Bennett , and Shaw “did not measure up to the war.” 85 Pointedly deploying the language of commodity marketing, Hackett claims that Shaw “invented a sort of couch-by-day-and-bed-by-night, three-in-one, patent combination corkscrew-and-toothpick religion which has no alcoholic content and is half the price.” 86

  Accordingly, the “crystal common sense” the playwright provided only works “from the chin up” and produces the “revolting experience” of being “cheated of tragedy”: Shaw has allowed his vivid social sense to compel him to create a mask, an artificial, superficial personality, so that the writing man and the real man have never tragically merged. [That is to say,] the one person whom Bernard Shaw never seems to have seen in his nakedness is Bernard Shaw. 87

  From the outside looking in, Hackett maintains, the creation of G.B.S. cost Shaw his humanity, and, after the upheaval of the war, he turns to another Irish writer whom he feels truly “bared himself”:No Irishman … has succeeded in relating himself to the human adventure with complete emotional absorption until the coming of James Joyce [whose] heartrending cries [reveal far more] than Bernard Shaw’s firework display. The blackness after Shaw’s dazzling is worse than ever, while in even a little of Ulysses you first gaze into the horror and stagger into daylight afterwards. 88

  The essay argues that, because “the anti-Victorians … were in the heroic niches without being sufficiently heroic[,] out with them.” 89 For Hackett , the authors’ appearance in the Harrods advertisement seemingly confirms their seminal importance only so that it may be disavowed as prewar enthusiasm, conferring upon them the perishability of an expired shelf life.

  Thirty years later, Stephen Spender , in his book The Struggle of the Modern, draws upon the same campaign (“an almost forgotten episode of the late 1920’s [that] fascinated [him as] a boy”) to demonstrate further why the three authors cannot be considered Modernists. 90 To him, the overlap of literature and commerce embodied by the campaign reveals a crucial difference in sensibility. Shaw, Wells , and Bennett all understand a writer’s obligation to “accept responsibility to the world of public interests and materialist values even if they oppose the economic system as such.” 91 Spender finds “something innocently disingenuous” about the authors’ refusals that he sees as “really disguised acceptances” in that all three knew that they would eventually be printed. 92 All three conceive of themselves as members of the marketplace, producing wares and competing for public consumption; even if “the principles of Wells and Shaw were not the same as those of Harrods … they were those of business (if publicly owned).” 93 In contrast, Spender argues,the “moderns,” Joyce , Lawrence, Eliot , Woolf would feel that their responsibility towards themselves was as artists [and] would have treated [Harrods’ offer] sniggeringly if they did not repudiate it disgustingly [out of an obligation to] a past which had been degraded by commerce, a past of realer values betrayed by advertising. 94

  Jackson Lears suggests that Spender’s “division is a little too neat [since] technocratic modernists were not always uncritical celebrants of commerce [and often offered] a plainspoken critique of commercial chicanery.” 95 Nonetheless, the Harrods campaign becomes essential for both Hackett and Spender in reifying that larger authorial program of impersonality marketing as constitutively Modernist at the expense of writers formerly known as modern. Indeed, such demarcation between authors like Eliot , Pound , and Wyndham Lewis and authors like Shaw and Wells who forged authorial personae via popular media and testimonial commerce in the name of public advocacy becomes a tipping point in literary history.I suppose men such as Ford, Edison and Marconi were landed for the Simmons [mattress] campaign because those gentlemen were told they would be doing humanity a good turn if they preached the gospel of more and better sleep.—Anonymous ad executive, 1931 96

  Luce’s essay in Time , recognizing the transatlantic success of the Harrods campaign, concluded with a sentence assuring its readers that, despite dipping a toe in the commercial pond, “the honor of literature was preserved, and the purity of what Harrods termed ‘three of our greatest Masters of the Written Word’ remained unsullied.” Following the statement, an asterisk appears, disclosing the caveat that “Mr. Wells has allowed his picture and a little sermon on Sleep to appear in testimonial advertisements for Simmons Beds” and adroitly undercutting the writers’ claims of separation from commerce. 97 His reference is to a November 1928 ad for Beautyrest mattresses that featured Wells and his views on sleep and insomnia. Less than a month after the Harrods ads ran, in May of 1929, Shaw too appeared in the same series, entitled “Making the World ‘Sleep Conscious’: Fifteen famous men talk on sleep through Simmons Advertising.” Shaw and Wells are the only two literary authors included on a list of “distinguished sleepers” alongside Henry Ford, Gordon Selfridge , Harvey Firestone, Thomas Edison, Guglielmo Marconi, and Com. Richard Byrd, among others. 98 All, according to the JWT staff newsletter, “for the past two years, in behalf of the Simmons Company,” were asked about their slumber habits and “have allowed their answers to be published in Simmons advertising.” 99 The article m
akes clear thatin this series of advertisements our distinguished men do not endorse Simmons products. They tell how important a factor sleep has been in maintaining their health, poise, and vitality, and in attaining success and even wealth! … [Alongside their remarks] appear small captioned illustrations of Simmons famous Beautyrest Mattress and Ace Box Spring. A paragraph of Simmons institutional matter is inserted, but disassociated from the interview, and the Simmons logotype is used. 100