Bernard Shaw and Modern Advertising Read online

  If Shaw critiques the spin engineered by the disciples to promote the early church, Jesus is for him a figure who brilliantly self-advertises, an example of how essential marketing is to the playwright’s lauded world-betterers. Accordingly, “Caesar’s victories” are for Shaw “advertisements for an eminence that would never have become popular without them.” 57 For true supermen, advertising is a key tool to employ towards realizing and maintaining a healthy collective. Confucius in Back to Methuselah outlines the process of evolution starting with the gathering of the long-lived:Each of them believes that he or she is the only one to whom the miracle has happened. But the Archbishop knows better now. He will advertise in terms which only the longlived people will understand. He will bring them together and organize them. They will hasten from all parts of the earth. They will become a great Power. 58

  Again, there is no better illustration of this principle than Shaw himself with his creation of “G.B.S. ” He discovered early on that assiduous promotion was the engine of enduring revered eminence:In England as elsewhere the spontaneous recognition of really original work begins with a mere handful of people, and propagates itself so slowly that it has become a commonplace to say that genius, demanding bread, is given a stone after its possessor’s death. The remedy for this is sedulous advertisement. 59

  He applies the cure liberally, writing in 1907 that “the English are only too anxious to recognize a man of genius if somebody will kindly point him out to them [and I have] pointed myself out in this manner with some success.” 60 Later, he declares, “I have advertised myself so well that I find myself, whilst still in middle life, almost as legendary a person as the Flying Dutchman.” 61

  In the Preface to Major Barbara , Shaw characterizes himself as a “comparatively insignificant Irish journalist … leading them by the nose into an advertisement of me which has made my own life a burden.” 62 One of the playwright’s biographers wrote in 1969,To say that George Bernard Shaw had two quite distinct personalities is not to suggest that he was in any way schizophrenic. He was fully aware of the difference and always able at will to make the transition. … The public image, he confessed, “I manufactured myself.” 63

  Like Oscar Wilde , Shaw with intention “emblazoned [himself] in the public imagination for combinations of [his] distinct public [personality] and wardrobe, as much as [his] literary prowess.” 64

  In public discourse and especially in relation to trendy issues of health, politics, and the arts, the playwright mined opportunities for self-advancement with mercenary vivaciousness, and his early biographers often felt they had to defend the playwright’s propensity for publicity against charges of crude self-aggrandizement. Establishing a distance between the public and private Shaw was always the first step, as drama critic John Palmer shows in a 1915 essay for the London Saturday Review when he espouses the “fallacies” associated with Shaw:It is not true that Bernard Shaw is an immensely public person. Or perhaps I should put it this way: Bernard Shaw whom the public knows is not an authentic revelation of the extremely private gentleman who lives in Adelphi Terrace. The Bernard Shaw whom the public knows might more accurately be described as a screen. 65

  The next step was to provide an apologia for the dogged campaigning. The actor Maurice Colbourne , for example, justified Shaw’s zealous initiative by arguing that,having no money to advertise his wares, he could only capitalize himself. Accordingly, in cold business blood, the man Bernard Shaw engaged the wit Bernard Shaw to advertise Bernard Shaw the philosopher and preacher. [His] success as a salesman [was that] he could charm publicity out of an egg-shell. His beard, his diet, catching cold, moving house, the tailoring of his coat, nothing is too trivial to be grist to his mill. 66

  In 1910, G. K. Chesterton addressed accusations of “vulgar self- advertisement,” calling Shaw “a great cheap-jack, with plenty of patter and I dare say plenty of nonsense, but with this also (which is not wholly unimportant), with goods to sell. … At least the cheap-jack does advertise his wares, whereas the don or dear-jack advertises nothing except himself.” 67

  Augustus Hamon characterized the playwright in 1916 as a perpetual huckster:Never did there live a greater advertiser than Shaw. Wherever he could, and in every possible way, he proclaimed that he was a genius, and that the wares he had on offer were the best in the world, better than those of Shakespeare . He was his own Barnum; he puffed himself, and he continues to do so. Don’t waste your breath by calling him a charlatan, for he will glory in the name. 68

  That being said, Hamon went on,It is certain that this unbridled advertisement, this deliberate and ceaseless blowing of his own trumpet, have notably contributed to Shaw’s world-wide renown. It is perhaps thanks to his methods of advertisement that it took him ten years to arrive. Now that he is famous he does not cease advertising himself, for he enjoys the practice all the more in proportion as it shocks public opinion. “Stop advertising myself!” he said the other day. “On the contrary, I must do it more than ever. Look at Pears’ Soap. There is a solid house if you like, but every wall is still plastered with their advertisements. If I were to give up advertising, my business would immediately begin to fall off. You blame me for having declared myself to be the most remarkable man of my time. But the claim is an arguable one. Why should I not say it when I believe that it is true?” 69

  Robert Lynd , writing in 1919, also stood up for the playwright: “His critics often accuse him in regard to the invention of the Shaw myth, of having designed a poster rather than painted a portrait. And Mr. Shaw always hastens to agree with those who declare he is an advertiser in an age of advertisement.” 70 Even Bertolt Brecht , in 1926, approvingly stated that Shaw “knows that the tools of an honest man must always include boisterous self-advertising.” 71

  Later scholars and biographers felt Shaw’s self-promotion less problematic. Michael Holroyd , for instance, suggests that “G.B.S. was not only a vegetarian but a living advertisement for vegetarianism,” 72 while Sally Peters envisions the playwright as “an immaculate walking mannequin, an elaborate advertisement for the hygienic way of life.” 73 For Fintan O’Toole , the G.B.S. campaign is not only a virtue but the preeminent quality of his genius and “one of the great achievements of the history of advertising ”:[Shaw] was one of the great masters of self-invention [who intuitively seemed] to grasp the possibilities of mass media and the age of mechanical reproduction for the creation of a different kind of power in the world [and was among] the first to understand that in this mass media age, performance is not just what happens on the stage, it is everywhere. 74

  What he was marketing of course was not simply himself but a Shavian intellectual and physical way of life, consistent with his political aims. Just as patent medicine copy sells the dream of perfect health, the rhetoric of Shaw’s publicity was animated by a utopic social vision. In general, Fabians “deplored what they saw as the wasteful proliferation of retailers, wholesalers, and middlemen under the capitalist system, attacked advertising as creating further waste by deceiving consumers, and believed that the sovereignty of the private consumer in a market economy was characterised by anarchic irresponsibility.” 75 Yet Shaw did not advocate banning advertisement. In fact, in the preface to Heartbreak House , the symptoms of “war delirium” through which the “ordinary war-conscious citizen went mad [with] the conviction that the whole order of nature had been reversed” included that “no advertisements must be sent to the newspapers.” 76 Instead, as Shaw would later advocate in the preface to Farfetched Fables , advertising needed to be purified of its toxicity and directed towards more salubrious ends.

  In a utopian vein of a 1914 tract, Shaw’s fellow Fabian Sidney Webb integrated purified advertising into his vision for a healthy collective; he maintains that “the elimination from [advertising] of all motives of personal self-interest and private gain, and the bringing of it under Democratic public control,” will transform it into “public gramophones,” prophesizing thatthe advertising of the future w
ill … not be decided on by irresponsible individuals, intent only on their own pecuniary profit, and not even pretending that their statements are either true or for the common good. The advertising of the future … will aim, in all cases, in so far as Collectivist organization prevails, at what is believed to be some advantage to the community as a whole; it will not be swayed by any considerations of individual gain; it will be directed by persons acting only as the servants of the particular branches of public administration concerned; and it will be controlled not by private capitalists but by the representatives of the community. 77

  An earlier Fabian tract put it more succinctly: “The modern municipality can no more dispense with advertising than can the soap man.” 78 For the superman, then, self-promotion is an imperative.

  If Shaw was eager to perform the role of self-advertiser, he sometimes discussed his dramaturgy in similar terms, as he does in the preface to Man and Superman , when offering a rationale for the inclusion of the dream sequence:I have resorted to the trick of the strolling theatrical manager who advertises the pantomime of Sinbad the Sailor with a stock of second-hand picture posters designed for Ali Baba. He simply thrusts a few oil jars into the valley of diamonds, and so fulfills the promise held out by the hoardings to the public eye. 79

  Shaw claims, in his “easy device,” that the “valley of diamonds” is his “perfectly modern play” and the “oil jar” is the extraneous third act. Frank Duba rejects Shaw’s claim, calling “the bait and switch of the theatrical manager” a “particularly inapt analogy” since, while both Arabian Nights stories “differ in subject not in kind,” the Dream sequence is unlike anything else in the play or various versions of the myth. 80 Shaw’s explanation though does provide insight about how he conceptualizes the ways in which his plays work in marketing terms, in relation to their promotional tactics and the “G.B.S.” branding. In the preface to Three Plays for Puritans , Shaw presents himself as “a very old-fashioned playwright” and attributes his success on the modern stage to critics who “find originality and brilliancy in [his] most hackneyed claptraps.” 81 The source of this novelty derives partly from their infusion with “the advanced thought of [his] day,” but he postulates their success as a marketing coup, a direct result of what he terms his “trumpet and cartwheel declamation”:The trumpet is an instrument that grows on one; and sometimes my blasts have been so strident that even those who are most annoyed by them have mistaken the novelty of my shamelessness for novelty in my plays and opinions. … The critics were the victims of the long course of hypnotic suggestion by which G.B.S. the journalist manufactured an unconventional reputation for Bernard Shaw the author. 82

  Of course, one of the fundamental dictates of the copywriter’s art is to strive for total self-effacement. Advertising Copy, a 1924 American manual, makes clear that “the personality of the copywriter ordinarily does not enter the equation at all”.

  The less he thinks about self-expression and the more he strives for self-effacement, the better chance he has for making the desired impression. He is not supposed to be selling himself or his copy, and the less obtrusive his personality is, the more distinctly the merits of the subject appear. He does not want his readers to say “That’s a good ad,” but rather “That must be a good article.” 83

  The two exceptions to the copywriter anonymity rule, according to Advertising Copy, are (1) if the copywriter “is the proprietor of his business and its success has been built about his personality” and (2) “if he is an author of some repute who has been engaged to write a series of advertisements [with] the added weight of his signature and his characteristic style.” 84 Both cases of course apply to Shaw, a formerly nameless scribe who escaped anonymity by honing marketing tactics to become not only a copywriter who did sign his name to his work but one whose signature was vigorously sought after for product endorsement purposes. In another sense, though, Shaw’s understanding of his work did retain a certain element of the copywriter’s position. That everything in advertising is creatively subordinate to a single overarching purpose, which transcends the specific names of the copywriters, agencies, and manufacturers involved, might well be an articulation of Shaw’s artistic credo. John Bertolini claims the playwright’s self-referential moment in The Doctor’s Dilemma that “appears to vaunt himself only to erase himself” perfectly epitomizes Shaw’s ambivalence about the artist’s identity: “the artist is at once everything and nothing. … The paradox by which self-advertisement becomes self-effacement conforms perfectly to Shaw’s sense of the artist’s working in the service of the Life Force and not for himself or herself.” 85 Shaw has, as Stephen Spender put it, “faith [that he] will direct the powers of the surrounding world from evil into better courses through the exercise of the superior social or cultural intelligence of the creative genius, the writer prophet.” 86 For him, the product to market was Creative Evolution, and he was its copywriter as well as its living copy.

  His initial experiment with product endorsement began in June of 1885 when he purchased his first Jaeger woolen suit and affirmed what would become a lifelong brand loyalty. Shaw’s commodity performance of Jaegar’s woolen system became integral to his G.B.S. persona and the lifestyle it envisioned; as G. K. Chesterton observed in 1909, “his costume has become a part of his personality; one has come to think of the reddish brown Jaegar suit as if it were a sort of reddish brown fur, and, were, like the hair and eyebrows, a part of the animal.” 87 This self-transformation into embodied copy served Shaw’s purposes but also gave an enormous boost to the Jaeger brand which had opened its first London outlet only the year before. Company chairman H. R. Tomalin claimed, after Shaw’s death, that “the growth and success of the Jaeger Company throughout the world is very largely due to the support given to the Jaeger Movement in the 1880’s by Bernard Shaw and certain other prominent people.” 88 A 1937 Commercial Art essay that focused on the evolution of Jaeger from the “Health Gospel of 1884” into the “Fashion Movement of 1937” included a picture of a young, en-woolened Shaw (“pioneer of the Jaeger cult”) underneath a photograph of one of Jaeger’s “new art” shops. The article’s author, Malcolm McKenzie , focuses largely on the company’s changes in its marketing of the “house of Jaeger” over the course of a half century, noting that, while Oscar Wilde “conducted parties of ladies to the premises,” it was Shaw who “proceeded on his way up Oxford Street … thus attired [in his] remarkable suit made for him in brown knitted wool … complete from sleeves to ankles in one piece.” 89 Besides portraits of three generations of Tomalins (the company’s founder and successive managing directors), Shaw is the only human being pictured in the article among photographs of shops and display windows as well as numerous facsimiles of periodical adverts and brochure designs. A living mannequin indeed.

  A half-century after his merger with Jaeger , a more grotesque synthesis of G.B.S. and product apparatus is extolled by L. Fritz Gruber in a 1938 feature for Gebrauchsgraphik: International Advertising Art entitled “English Shop Windows”. In it, he highlights a London display demonstrating “the pleasant effects of softened water” on behalf of the Permutit Company that inscribes the product’s distinction and value by literally merging it with another well-known brand. Standing at the display’s center is “Bernard Shaw’s head, larger than life-size in brass” and insistently cylindrical to resemble the central container of a water treatment apparatus. “In his hand,” Gruber describes, “is a card on which Shaw has expressed his satisfaction with Permutit.” 90 The Shaws had installed a Permutit purification/softener at Ayot, 91 and the card contains the playwright’s signature and handwritten address underneath an endorsement in typescript.

  This kind of radical hybridizing of personality and product became a trend in marketing, beginning in the 1920s, when, according to Jackson Lears , “more professionalized advertising aimed to animate the inanimate commodity with the appearance of life, and sometimes explicitly with magical powers.” 92 If testimonial endorsement sou
ght to associate the product with a well-known celebrity, the goal of this more animistic tactic was to endow the product itself with personality, “taking up instead the discourse of simple objects, foods or places, described subjectively and through language intentionally framed to provide new perspectives.” 93 Shaw’s high-profile success at personality branding made him a figure of considerable interest within the industry, and references to him in trade papers and the field’s own self-promotion abound. For instance, in an early 1930s advert in a trade magazine, W.S. Crawford Ltd. , a mid-sized British agency that flourished in the 1920s, used Shaw to demonstrate how “British Trade Can Win Through – by Constructive Advertising”:As the public responds to a vigorous and masterly personality in a statesman or actor or author, so it responds to a vigorous and masterly advertising campaign. But Bernard Shaw must remain Bernard Shaw. … And that is why, when Crawfords have created out of the cold facts of a product a vivid advertising personality, they concentrate every word and every line of every advertisement, every piece of sales literature, every penny of expenditure, on keeping that personality warm and alive in the public mind. 94

  If the manufacturer provides the commodity, the function of the modern advertising agency is to provide the personality. That Shaw is a chosen illustration of “masterful” celebrity underscores how much that “vigor” and “mastery” is a part of the “G.B.S.” brand. (A 1926 Commercial Art feature on “Motor-Car Posters” characterizes French manufacturer Ettore Bugatti as “the Bernard Shaw among motor-car designers” in that “all his models show the finger-marks of a strong personality.” 95 ) Sounding very Shavian indeed, Crawford in the copy faults other agencies for their “lack of this concentration on a single purpose,” namely to “[drive] a single sharp wedge into public opinion.” 96 In the ad, a large black dagger inscribed with the Crawford name and its London, Paris, and Berlin addresses dominates the page, and the copy boldly asserts its founder’s concise summary of their marketing ethos: “three words – concentration, domination, repetition.” 97 The agency itself is thus figured as a dominant personality, and the Fascist undertones of the advertisement text are hard to ignore.