What's in a name? famously declares Shakespeare, in Romeo and Juliet. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. It would appear that history's jury has found Mr Shakespeare to be correct on the second part of his quotation but awarded him nul points for the first part. What's in a name these days? Well, a lot more than in the Elizabethan pre-advertising era, especially if you've been paid to put that particular name into the title of your latest novel.
News broke this week that the writer Fay Weldon has accepted money from an Italian jewellery company, called Bulgari, to mention it at least 12 times in her new book, which is entitled The Bulgari Connection. Not only did she fulfil this quota, she decided to do it with bells on, and mentioned it some 30 odd times in total, including that one very important appearance in the title. The title, of course, being the vital bit that people tend to see, even if they never open the book, let alone (God forbid) actually read it.
Sub-editors had a predictably jolly time of it, pulling every glittering pun out of the jewellery box of sterling cliches. Sparkling prose and literary gem featured most often in the headlines, while the hacks meditated beneath on Weldon's news with varying degrees of haughty detachment and grudging admiration for the double digited insouciance involved. The Guardian probably got it right, when it described the literary world as being divided between shock and hilarity at the news.
Because, of course, the story does have such scope for hilarity. First of all, one could reasonably ask, just who are these jeweller geezers Bulgari? Tiffanys, now - there be diamonds, Truman Capote's novel, Breakfast at Tiffanys, and the gorgeous film of same. Top banana in the style department, in fact. Bulgari, however, you will notice, rhymes beautifully with Vulgari.
There is also the prospect of endless fun in matching certain books with suitable sponsors. Publishers could become redundant, with sponsors stepping in to fund both new titles and reprints. For instance, we could have: Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, courtesy of Pronuptia; Raymond Carver's Where I'm Calling From, brought to you by Eircom; Eoin McNamee's The Blue Tango from Colour Me Beautiful; Seamus Heaney's Electric Light from the ESB; and Richard Ford's The Sportswriter from the GAA.
The current larks began when Weldon was approached by the Italians to write a book which would mention them within it, and which they intended to circulate privately among their poshest clients. The books were then given as gifts to invited guests at parties in New York and London.
Weldon attended the London party at the Dorchester Hotel, wearing £1 million worth of jewels borrowed from the Italians for the occasion. The truly ironic thing is that Weldon herself admitted that several guests departed without bothering to take the book, which would seem to render the entire enterprise a fantastic waste of time and resources.
However, despite the sparkling prose being left behind to curl up with the canapes, so delighted were the Italians, and Weldon's agent, Giles Gordon, with the book that the publishers HarperCollins have now decided to make it available for the likes of you and me. A spirited Weldon told the New York Times: "When the approach came through I thought, `Oh no, dear me, I am a literary author. You can't do this kind of thing; my name will be mud forever'. But after a while I thought, I don't care. Let it be mud. They never give me the Booker prize anyway."
Weldon, now 70, is the author of several novels, including The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil and The Cloning of Joanna May. She also coined the famous phrase: "Go to work on an egg" in the days when she worked in advertising. Presumably, if she wrote that phrase now she would have people trotting to work either on a Cadburys egg (the plebs) or a Faberge egg (the posh).
Perhaps the real surprise in the whole circus, however, is that Weldon is the first high-profile writer to endorse a product in this way. Product endorsement is nothing new per se: James Bond movies are famously synonymous with cars, for instance, and sports stars have long donned gear emblazoned with logos. However, Weldon has pushed back the boundaries quite a bit more: deliberately weaving product references into a work of creative literature seems far more contrived than appearing on a tennis court in a pair of branded sneakers.
Nobody mentioned vanity publishing in their coverage, but actually, Weldon's latest wheeze is a straightforward subversion of that wretched genre. When people cannot get their (inevitably dreadful) work published by a mainstream publisher, some choose to use vanity publishers.
This means they pay someone a lot of money to make shoddy and expensive copies of their work, which are usually regarded as the untouchables of the literary caste system, since such books are usually not stocked by shops and are seldom, if ever, reviewed.
In Weldon's case, the vanity is all on the side of those who have commissioned her to endorse their baubles, while she giggles all the way to the bank. The result is the first openly sponsored novel of our times.
Merriment aside, the question people have to be asking is, where could it all end? It's perfectly possibly, for instance, that a multinational could in the future approach a writer - and the more famous, the better - to mention them in a positive light in their next opus, for an agreed fee. The reader can only end up being manipulated.
Her agent, Giles Gordon, clearly delighted at the acres of free publicity, asked rhetorically: "Just explain to me why it is more contemptible to be paid by an Italian jeweller than by HarperCollins? It's still money."
Oh Giles, do you really think we all came down in the last power shower? What would a jeweller have to say if an editor arrived in from some publishing company, thinking they could design a few necklaces on the side? Writers need editors and publishers like a fish needs water, but they need a jeweller like a fish needs a bicycle.
