Journalism

Creative Review - Self Promotion

I take a long lunch from my freelance gig and meet Will Self at Bar Italia. In his Paul Smith shirt, jeans and loafers, he looks every inch the creative director. And, in a way, this is true. He's head of a one-man agency that only sells one product, its own product. His campaigns are ubiquitous, embracing radio, TV and press. And successful: I knew the brand long before I’d read a word of his work. So I’m not surprised when he orders his coffee black, sits with his back to Frith Street and lights a cigarette held in a plastic filter.

‘So young man,’ he says, ‘what do you want to talk to me about?’

Well, firstly I want to ask him about a short story called ‘Prometheus’ from his last book of fiction Liver. It’s set in an ad agency, ‘Titan’, which he locates somewhere near Brick Lane, in a building equipped with ‘conversation pits of the kind favoured by imprisoning reality TV shows’ and ‘pods where the creatives [are] coddled by a warm albumen of piped in pop culture’. I feel like I’ve worked there, but what made him want to write about it? ‘It was obvious a theme [for Liver] was emerging. A modern retelling of the Prometheus story is an obvious feed. I thought, what’s the equivalent of incredible divine inspiration in the modern world? Well it’s kind of advertising in that one line can generate vast amounts of economic activity. There’s something magical about that.’

Magical, but obviously not alien to him; his description of agency life is confident. In fact advertising is in his blood. His brother ran a DM agency called Self Direct (‘Brothers divide everything up. He did money.’) and his uncle worked on Madison Avenue. ‘He seemed like a very exotic creature indeed, ‘ Self tells me, ‘very loud clothes, and great agate ring and an Indian head mother of pearl dollar clip. Obsessed by gold, a real wiseacre. My mother deeply disapproved of him, as a sort of wide-boy. He was enormously successful, he died a couple of years ago and his obit was in the New York Times. He created the Pilsbury Dough Boy.’

Although he describes himself as ‘an old commie’ and ‘a sort of Unabomber of the city’ something like a grudging admiration for the industry persists in his work. ‘A killer end-line,’ says the narrator of “Prometheus”, ‘should be like a garrotte applied to any consumer’s faculty for making a rational calculus of price and benefit’. Clearly Self believes in performativity, the power of words to make people do things. Advertising has made a deep impression on both him and, by proxy, his characters. Simon Dykes, borne away by the chimp orderlies in Great Apes finds himself thinking ‘Monkeys. Like a fucking P.G. Tips advert. Monkeys in shorty white coats.’

‘But this is the world we live in,’ says Self, ‘The average adult Briton watches four hours of television per day. So any responsible naturalistic novelist who wanted to write about ordinary people in Britain would have to write long scenes which went: “They watched Ashes to Ashes. He went and got some Pringles from the cupboard. She farted.” You never do read that because novels are written by people who read too many novels about people who read too many novels.’

Even if he recognises their importance, Self won’t do ads. He mentions that he was once approached by an agency on behalf of a big car brand. ‘They wanted a public intellectual, a writer.’ He told them to ask Salman Rushdie.

Gingerly I offer a titbit of my own, a pet theory: advertising creatives are the priests of capitalism, mediators between the public and the ideology of time. ‘Sure,‘ he says, ‘it’s like what Mary Douglas the anthropologist said about money: that it’s only a specialised form of ritual, so you could argue that advertising is part of a wider ritual. It mediates between value and ideas. Between the individual and the commonality. Yeah, absolutely you are, I mean look how priestly you look.’

I straighten my dog collar and point out some of the things we might have in common, the novelist and the adman. The love of epigrams, the twisting of cliché, the use of animals behaving uncannily – all Self tropes, all things that a copywriter might well have in his book. It’s a notion I can imagine certain writers would bridle at, but Self only nods philosophically, ‘Well, maybe I am a copywriter that’s gone to the dark side, I don’t know.’

As he cycles off into Soho I consider that our jobs are more similar than they might look. As Dave Trott certainly wouldn’t agree, we are both ‘manifesting the psychic content of late capitalism.’ I just happen to do it for brands. The only difference, it occurs to me as, passing a billboard bearing one of my headlines, is I’m probably slightly more widely read.