Advertising
Inside every adman...?
Philip Kleinman
One Sunday I saw passing beneath my window several carts decked out with legs of ham. In the carts were men dressed up as sausages sitting in circles in mock frying pans made out of cardboard. I burst out laughing, it was such a comical sight. Suddenly one leg of ham, bigger than the others, raised an arm towards me and called out: 'Mademoiselle, come and eat me.'
"It was Roger; he had organised this promotion for a local firm, where he worked and which was to become the Korvex company. Later I went out shopping and came across the procession, which had drawn up outside the railway station. Roger recognised me; we decided to meet again that evening. That's how I became his wife. He was ambitious, intelligent; he worked sixteen hours a day. He put up the sales of pigmeat in the area in a spectacular fashion."
These grotesque words of love are spoken over the body of her dead husband by a character in a recently published French novel, L'Imprecateur, by Rene-Victor Pilhes. The novel, which received the Prix Femina, is a best-seller in Paris. It is a satirical story of intrigue and disintegration within a large company, and the passage I have quoted is typical of the style in which it is written.
It also perhaps indicates the influence on the author's sense of humour of his profession. For M.
pilhes is an advertising man and has been for fifteen years. Starting as a copywriter, he worked his way up to creative director of Publicis, one of France's Big Two ad
agencies. In tact that was the position he held until a month or
so ago, when he gave up his post to devote more of his time to his literary work, though for the time being he remains with Publicis as a consultant.
There is, of course, nothing strange about an advertising copywriter graduating to novel writing, though not all admen score as great a success with their literary efforts as M. Pilhes has done. Indeed there was a time when the standard joke — if it was a joke — was that every copywriter had an unpublished novel at the bottom of his drawer.
That was in the days when advertising tended to be regarded, as far as their creative departments were concerned, as a well-paid alternative to intellectually prefer able jobs. More recently a more professional attitude has developed among creatives, and now there is no dearth of clever copywriters who actually enjoy making ads and don't think of themselves as failed literary gents, who in fact have no wish to produce books at all.
Nevertheless, there are still plenty of admen who write novels.
London agencies have their fair share of them. The creative director of Masius Wynne-Williams, for instance, Desmond Skirrow, has built himself a respectable reputation as an author of thriller-type novels. John Bowen, the novelist and playwright, was an adman for much of his life (working for J.
Walter Thompson and other big agencies), though he is one no longer. No contemporary British adman-author, however, has achieved the commercial success that the onetime Bensons copywriter Dorothy Sayers did. There have been a number of novels written about advertising agencies (Bowen produced one, , called Storyboard), but I don't recall reading any which used the language of advertising and marketing to create a literary effect in the way that Rene-Victor Pilhes has done in the passage I started with. That seems to me a pity, since I think many novels could benefit from it as much as some commercials benefit from being written like miniature James Bond movies.
M. Pilhes protests that his literary and advertising activities are completely separate from each other, but a glance at his book rather disproves that. He promises a novel of his own about advertising agency life. It should make an interesting read.
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