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| 'I cannot go on' The second volume of TS Eliot's fiercely guarded correspondence reveals the terrible strain he was under caring for his wife and editing the Criterion. By Stefan Collini'I have written nothing whatsoever for three years and I do not see any immediate likelihood of my writing. The writing of poetry takes time and I never have any time." That, alas, is an all-too-accurate summary of TS Eliot's life during the three years covered by the second volume of his correspondence. Its 800 pages document in dispiriting detail the life of a writer who was not doing any writing. There was just too much else to do, and much too much else to worry about.There was, to begin with, his wife, Vivienne. As a lonely, shy American graduate student in philosophy at Oxford, Eliot had married Vivienne Haigh-Wood in June 1915, not many weeks after meeting her. By 1923, the disastrousness of the marriage for both parties was becoming all too apparent. Vivienne was plagued by almost constant ill health, often severe; it may now be impossible to say how much of this was psychosomatic, and it may not really matter. The signs of mental instability were by this point hard to explain away. Eliot, with a highly developed sense of his responsibility to provide for his wife, repeatedly made himself ill worrying about her, looking after her, and needing to get away from her.Then he had to worry about international exchange rates, the bond issues of foreign governments and the payment of war debts. Eliot, it may be timely to remember, was a banker. Since March 1917 he had worked in the colonial and foreign department of Lloyd's Bank in the City, rising to a position of some responsibility, overseeing the analysis of information about the financial activities of European governments. By 1923 the strain of his divided life was becoming unendurable, and various possibilities were canvassed that would buy him out of the black-coated army, but the regular salary from the bank, and even the distant pension prospects, mattered more and more as Vivienne's future became increasingly uncertain.And then he had to worry about the Criterion, the intellectually ambitious literary and cultural quarterly review that he edited, more or less single-handedly, in his "spare time". The review had been launched in October 1922, financed by Lady Rothermere, wife of Harold Harmsworth, first Viscount Rothermere. (Harold had helped his brother Alfred, Lord Northcliffe, establish the press empire whose flagship was the Daily Mail.) Eliot aspired to make the Criterion the most prestigious literary review of the day, promoting his favoured blend of modernist literature and reactionary politics, but he soon discovered the scale of the labour this required. After a while, a typist was taken on to handle some of his correspondence, and there was a brief period during which the poet and translator Richard Aldington acted as his assistant but, as the successive deadlines rolled remorselessly around, it was Eliot who seemed to be responsible for everything from commissioning contributions to correcting proofs and arranging payments.It was all too much. "I am worn out. I cannot go on," he lamented a little histrionically as early as March 1923, but he still had a long way to go on. February 1925 found him "at the blackest moment of my life", but in reality there were blacker moments still to come. "So life is simply from minute to minute of horror," he wrote to Virginia Woolf the following month, perhaps hearing a draft line of poetry forming itself somewhere in his mind. But, as far as we can tell from these letters, during these years not many lines of poetry were forming in the mind of the figure who was arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century.It is Eliot's poetry, of course, that represents his principal claim on the modern reader's attention, for all his influence as a critic, playwright, editor and cultural commentator. Only last month, he was voted Britain's favourite poet – perhaps a surprising choice when one considers the notorious difficulty of his verse, but maybe less so when one remembers that his light-hearted Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats provided the inspiration for the hit musical Cats. His standing as a poet does not, of itself, account for the frisson of anticipation that has for some time been building up in advance of the appearance of this second volume of his letters. The mild sense of drama attending the publication (writers and publishers lead sheltered lives, for the most part) has been heightened by Faber's unusually elaborate security measures, with reviewers having to sign legal agreements binding them not to reveal any of the contents of the volume to "any third party" before the day of publication.A brief historical recap may help to explain some of the fuss. In 1957, when Eliot was 68, he married his secretary, Valerie Fletcher, who was 38 years younger (Vivienne had died 10 years earlier). Following Eliot's death in 1965, Mrs Eliot and the publishing firm of Faber & Faber (of which he had been an active director for almost 40 years) controlled his estate, carefully regulating both the reprinting of published work and citation from unpublished material, including letters. In 1971 Mrs Eliot published her facsimile edition of The Waste Land, complete with Ezra Pound's annotations. She had also undertaken the huge task of collecting and editing his letters, the first volume of which (covering the years up to the end of 1922) finally appeared in 1988. In the introduction to that volume, she explained that she had intended it to go up to 1926, but that there had proved to be too much material for a single volume. Therefore, she announced, the second volume would be published "next year". The literary and the scholarly world waited, but "next year" never seemed to come.This delay was particularly unfortunate because, in the four decades following Eliot's death, many scholars had difficulty in getting permission from the estate to consult or quote from unpublished material. When Peter Ackroyd published what is still the only serious approach to an adequate intellectual biography of Eliot in 1984, he had to record: "I am forbidden by the Eliot estate . . . to quote from unpublished work or correspondence." (He had to paraphrase his sources.) Some individual scholars were more fortunate – I was given permission some years ago, I should record, to quote from a few letters in an essay about Eliot's social criticism – but a policy that could seem to be somewhat capricious was obviously an unsatisfactory situation, especially when it was known that the estate held or had amassed a considerable collection of material, not all of which had yet been seen by scholars. Just recently there have been encouraging signs of a thaw. Plans have been announced for a multi-volume edition of Eliot's prose, under the general editorship of Ron Schuchard, to be partnered by a complete edition of his poetry, edited by Christopher Ricks. And now, at long last, 21 years after its predecessor, we have the second volume of the letters, co-edited by Hugh Haughton, with the project henceforth under the general editorship of John Haffenden.Given this history, the stock phrases about a book having been "eagerly awaited" or its publication being "a major literary event" are in this case understatements. For, in addition to the considerable interest in Eliot's poetry and criticism, other aspects of his life and his views have attracted broader media attention and even controversy in recent years. It has, for example, been widely known that Eliot suffered acute anguish over his decision, first, to separate from Vivienne and, second, to have her committed to a "sanatorium". His responsibility for his wife's physical and mental problems has sometimes been assessed in hostile terms, a line of popular speculation fuelled by Michael Hastings's 1984 play Tom and Viv, which was subsequently turned into a film. In addition, Eliot came in for some rough handling in the wake of Anthony Julius's 1995 book, TS Eliot: Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, which mounted, with great forensic vigour, the case that Eliot's oeuvre as a whole was irremediably tainted on account of a handful of allegedly antisemitic references. These controversies cannot have been welcome to the Eliot estate, and may have fuelled its apprehension about the possible public response to any further revelations.Anticipation has been increased by the fact that the first volume of the letters was full of matter for those with a serious interest in Eliot's work and career. It covered the years in which Eliot, arriving in England in 1914 as an unknown 26-year old graduate student, emerged as the most startling poet of his time, from the publication of Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917 up to The Waste Land in 1922. This was also the period in which he established himself as the critic most admired by the intellectually serious young, notably through the publication in 1920 of The Sacred Wood, a slim volume of critical essays that managed to be at once offhand, exciting and authoritative. The letters, therefore, had allowed us to glimpse the inside story of nothing less than the making of modernism. What could the second volume offer that would be of comparable interest?"Not a lot" is the short and only partly misleading answer. After all this fanfare, these letters will, I fear, be a disappointment to many readers. Though they document the tribulations of his and Vivienne's illnesses and unhappiness in heart-bludgeoning detail, they contain no great revelations, nor are most of them captivating pieces of writing in the way in which, say, the recently published selection of early Beckett letters is. Eliot scholars, not a small tribe, will doubtless mine them for illustrative or corroborative detail, but in truth they throw little light on the poetry, not least because he was not writing any (except for sections of "The Hollow Men" and the verse-drama Sweeney Agonistes, written towards the end of this period). Nor did he write any of his major critical essays during these years, and the letters say very little about his own critical, as opposed to editorial, practice. However, if what you want is a practical handbook on how to edit, single-handedly, a high-end cultural and literary periodical, this is an essential guide. Overwhelmingly, the letters from this period were written by Eliot in his capacity as editor of the Criterion and, if this is something that interests you (I must warn you that it interests me a lot), then this volume is rich in fascinating detail.Much of Eliot's editorial correspondence deals with what, to anyone who has any experience of literary journalism, will be bound to appear as the familiar constants, almost the universals, of the trade. Here, over and over again, is the desperate last-minute scramble to meet (or sometimes not quite to meet) the deadline for the current issue, followed by repeated resolutions to have the material ready in good time for the next issue. Here, in dispiriting quantity, are examples of the various ways of sucking up to eminent potential contributors, of well-meant evasiveness with lesser supplicants, and of tactful dealings with imposssibly difficult authors (Wyndham Lewis wins the prize). Here, too, are the familiar grumblings about the inefficiency of printers, the usual unrealistic fantasies about circulation and the vehemently expressed regrets at ever having taken on such a doomed and life-destroying enterprise in the first place.Apologising to one contributor for the fact that, a year after being accepted, his article had still not been published, Eliot tried to enlist his sympathies: "I can only say that there are others – in fact nearly all of my contributors at one time or another – whom I do not dare to meet in the street. Conducting a review after 8pm in the back room of a flat, I live qua editor, very much from hand to mouth, get myself into all sorts of hot water and predicaments, and offend everybody. At the end, the review is squeezed together somehow, and is never the number that I planned three months before." In this case, he promised the article would be published "early next year"; in the event, it never appeared.Hand-to-mouth it may have been in practical terms, but Eliot had a pretty clear idea of the kind of review he wanted to produce. It appealed, he insisted without any defensiveness, only to "the cultivated": he reckoned that there were only about 3,000 such persons, though the basis for this high-handed piece of intuitive sociology is not clear. It was to be essentially a literary review, but "Its scope is wide enough to include almost everything of interest to people of culture with the exception of economics and contemporary politics." Lady Rothermere, who had hoped for something with rather more appeal to the beau monde, is reported as finding the journal "a little high-brow and grave" (well, if you appoint TS Eliot as editor . . .). Though it is true that the Criterion did not deal with day-to-day party politics, it nonetheless had a very marked political character. It was explicitly intended to provide a counter to "the usual Whig and semi-Socialist press of London". It was hostile to all forms of liberalism, Whiggism, romanticism and subjectivism; in its severe, aloof way, it upheld what Eliot came to call "classicism". It is from this standpoint that we find him here dismissing Arnold Toynbee as "a noxious humanitarian" and sneering at John Middleton Murry as "this apostle of suburban free thought".In trying to establish the reputation of the new journal, Eliot had to perform the usual delicate balancing act: he wanted to publish high-quality original work of the kind he admired, but he also needed contributions from established names, which sometimes meant accepting work that was neither high-quality nor original. The correspondence of any editor might catch him out saying different things to different people, but there are some arrestingly immediate juxtapositions in these letters. When, as the editor of a new journal, he is sedulously courting the 77-year-old George Saintsbury, Eliot hastens to tell him that he is "the most eminent English critic of our time"; two years later, the journal now established, he frankly confides to another correspondent: "Saintsbury, for all his merits, now has little point." Similarly, Eliot is to be found writing to several authors in flattering terms explaining that he may be able to double the normal rates of payment to a truly exceptional contributor, "one of whom is, of course, yourself". Having already confided this, in turn, to Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and Virginia Woolf, he then writes to WB Yeats's agent, saying: "For such an important contribution from so distinguished a writer I would make an exception" to his usual rates and pay double. "This is the only occasion on which I have ever offered more than the standard rate; but I have very great admiration for Mr Yates' work . . ." and so on, a profession whose sincerity, already doubtful, was made more doubtful still by his misspelling of Yeats's name.The question of two-facedness surfaces most awkwardly in his tricky friendship with Leonard and Virginia Woolf. While jockeying to establish himself in literary London, he had been grateful for the Woolfs' patronage: their Hogarth Press published The Waste Land in book form (after it had appeared in the first number of the Criterion), and in 1924 they were to publish three of his review-essays as a Hogarth pamphlet entitled Homage to John Dryden. In 1923 the Woolfs seem to have helped to persuade Maynard Keynes to offer Eliot the position of literary editor on the Liberal weekly the Nation. The position, though attractive, would not have provided Eliot with the financial security he needed, but it is not clear whether the paper's uncongenial political identity played a part in his eventual refusal (Leonard Woolf himself took on the post).At a less public level, Eliot shared some common ground with Leonard as a man who had considerable experience of handling the moods of a mentally unstable wife, but his direct relationship with Virginia was always shot through with distrust and a kind of literary rivalry. Neither Eliot nor Virginia Woolf gets high honours for consistent candour, and the very full annotations to these letters indicate a little of the discreditable backbiting that went on off-stage. Having cajoled Virginia to publish her (soon to be celebrated) essay "Character in Fiction" in the Criterion for July 1924, Eliot enthuses to her that the presence of her piece alongside those by Proust and Yeats means "The July number will be the most brilliant in its history". But some months later he praises the next issue to Lady Rothermere by saying: "There is nothing of the costly showiness of Proust and Virginia Woolf (neither of which I cared much about myself)."At one point Woolf confides to her diary (quoted in the editorial annotations) the conviction that "There is something hole-and-cornerish, biting in the back, suspicious, elaborate, uneasy, about him." There was truth in this, though there was more than a touch of pot and kettle, too. At the end of this volume, Eliot leaves his job at Lloyd's to join Geoffrey Faber's new publishing firm. Part of his private understanding with Faber was that the new firm would henceforth publish Eliot's books, beginning with Poems 1909-1925, which included The Waste Land. Eliot continued to write to the Woolfs in affectionate terms while somehow managing not to tell them that the Hogarth Press had just lost one of its star authors.But it must be said that Eliot, by fair means or by sharp professional practice, made a success of the Criterion during those years. He was justified in boasting in October 1924: "I think that at the end of the third year it will have as brilliant a record of contributors as any magazine could have in the time." He had secured original contributions from most of the leading modernist writers of the time, including Joyce, Woolf, Pound, Lawrence and Wyndham Lewis, and the review could boast a particularly impressive array of European contributors, a deliberate policy on Eliot's part, one that was not matched by the habitually parochial established journals. The critical essays and, later, the book reviews generally maintained a high, if at times highly ideological, standard. Publication in the Criterion's pages, he informed prospective contributors, ensured "more intelligent attention than a contribution to any other review". Only the circulation remained stubbornly resistant to Eliot's blandishments, sales never exceeding 800 to 1,000 copies per issue.Beyond documenting his life as an editor, these letters add a little thickening detail to some of the already well-worn themes of Eliot biography and criticism. There is, for example, his view (to be trusted no further than several other ostensibly revealing confessions in these letters) that there were only "about 30 good lines in The Waste Land". It is somewhat more winning to find him acknowledging that his own prose has "a rather rheumatic pomposity", and a knowingness about his early critical perfomances is suggested by his advice to a young would-be review essayist: "You must begin by being or pretending to be an authority on some subject or other." Every so often the letters will contain some remark in the lapidary style of his best literary journalism: "Good verse is only recognised after five years at least. Good criticism is noticed at once. The cultivated public prefers critical to creative work." His correspondence with his mother and brother over investments shows him fully sharing the family penchant for cautious capitalism (even though he was a banker). Part of his qualification for becoming a director of Faber's new firm was that, in addition to being one of the best-connected writers and editors of his day, he was "a man of business". And, inevitably, we get a few asides about "Jew publishers" when his dealings with his American publishers were particularly vexed. No one could pretend that the writer of these letters emerges as consistently likeable or admirable, but it is hard not to feel sympathy for a man so cornered by personal unhappiness, financial anxiety and professional frustration.Eliot often affected the identity of the "resident alien"; perhaps he came to feel that that label accurately described his relation to earthly existence as a whole. As a young man, he was not short of reasons to feel ill at ease in the world, and many of those who met him during his early years in London remarked on this characteristic. Alternating between shyness and attitude-striking, he made others feel ill at ease with him, uncertain how far they could trust this now smooth, now angular chameleon. Disguise, camouflage, adaptation: Eliot was rich in the strategies of self-protection. VS Pritchett later called him "a company of actors within one suit". Several members of the company are on show in these pages; the one constant is the suit, literally as worn to the bank every day, metaphorically in the pinstriped casing of so much of his epistolary prose.If all of Eliot's surviving letters are to be edited on this lavish scale – and, as he became more famous in later years, presumably even more letters will have survived – one has to ask whether the enterprise is well judged. With almost 40 years of his life still to go, there could, at this rate, be a dozen volumes of similar dimensions to come, perhaps more. One cannot help wondering whether the needs of scholars might be more economically met by an electronic edition, or whether there might not be a case for a more lightly annotated edition or a volume of selected letters. Eliot is, beyond question, a hugely important writer and an intriguing man, but the spirit does not leap at the prospect of some 10,000 pages of elaborate politeness.This edition, it should be emphasised, presents Eliot's own letters; it does not provide both sides of the correspondence, even where such replies exist. But just occasionally the text of a letter from one of his correspondents is included, and the gain in our sense of the exchange is immediate. There are, in addition, a few impressive letters from Geoffrey Faber, setting out the terms on which Eliot was to work for the new publishing firm, as well as Faber's own conception of the kind of periodical the new Criterion was to be (quite like the old, as it turned out). And there are several letters from Vivienne to other correspondents which vividly illuminate Eliot's predicament, though it is not immediately obvious why they and not others have been included.Vivienne's letters have both a directness and an incoherence that rip apart the smooth surface of life, which Eliot's guarded prose was always trying to maintain. Two of these raw, disturbing scribbles, from late 1925, suggest something of what Eliot had to contend with, but both are also mind-searing in the glimpse they give us of Vivienne's tortured, disturbed, unendurably miserable life. The first is to the Eliots' maid, Ellen Kellond, a desperately inappropriate choice of recipient; it is a panicked and plungingly despairing wail from a woman who found herself held in a sanatorium against her will, keening for the love she believed her husband had withdrawn, and ending: "I mean to take my life . . . It is difficult here, but I shall find a way. This is the end." The second is to Eliot himself. It begins calmly enough but soon degenerates. Amid illegible words and inconsequential remarks about various possessions, she suddenly throws herself into an anguished apology: "I am sorry I tortured you and drove you mad. I had no notion until yesterday afternoon that I had done it. I have been simply raving mad. You need not worry about me." But he did worry about her, ceaselessly, and this great slab of mostly unrevealing, practicality-driven letters depicts in harrowing detail a man almost drowning in the busyness he needed to stop himself from being driven mad.TS EliotBiographyguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Interactive: A journey around the True North Guardian photographer Christopher Thomond captures the spirit of the north in his images of rolling hills, winding motorways and the ever-changing population of this vast region. Leeds-born journalist and editor of True North: In praise of England's better half, Martin Wainwright, discusses what the photographs mean to himMartin WainwrightChristopher Thomond feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Notes and queries What it means to be a badger; why there are no zombies, only zombified peopleIs a dead badger still a badger? A dead badger is a still badger.Helen Holt, BournemouthTo paraphrase Monty Python, "it is an ex-badger, it has ceased to be".Max Barnes, Guildford, SurreyThe short answer is no. We all become flesh, fur and faeces in the end, even badgers. If the badger has cubs her genes will be passed on, but as a badger in her own right she ceases to exist when she is dead.However, the ideal badger always exists and cannot be splattered across the road. Badger images abound in advertising campaigns for English wildlife, and the badger plays an important role in children's literature as a steady character. Where would Rupert Bear be without Bill Badger?If you take the 172 bus in south London you will pass the Badger Bakery. You will probably have at least one badger-in-the-snow card among your Christmas cards. Some of us even grew up with badgers as soft toys. We are very fond of the badger. Perhaps this is because its face and podgy body resemble that of a long-nosed bear, although, as my wife points out, in reality it looks more like an oversized rat.Calix Eden, London SE26 Legally speaking, there's no difference between a dead badger and a live badger. It's a criminal offence to own a badger, a dead badger, or part of a badger, dead or alive.Jenni Warren, Basingstoke Could be, if it was Schrödinger's badger.Robert Clewlow, Blackpool Yes, but it's a dead one.Susanna Farley, London SE14He would certainly be un-sett-led.Joan Norton, Little Neston, ChesHow do zombies know not to eat each other? What would they do if there were no non-zombies left? Your contributor's comment that zombies aren't cannibals because zombies don't eat their own kind (N&Q, 2 December) raises intriguing questions.A biologist who knows logic would say that zombified me must be the same thing as living me because of the 100% material continuity of the organism. This is what identity is: the thing that persists across time. In the case of zombie me, the thing persists in the absence of certain temporary and coincident attributes, and with extra ones (eg zombie me ceases to have a psychology when it becomes a zombie, it acquires the instinct to eat human flesh, loses the desire to not want to eat people, etc). So since these aren't essential attributes that constitute the identity of the thing, zombie me is the same thing as I am.The only argument I can see to the effect that zombies are not cannibals and do not eat their own kind is the argument that a person's identity is somehow constituted by a separate soul or spirit that exists wholly independently of the body; and there are no good arguments for that proposition, as we know of no cases where people continue to exist separately from their bodies.The upshot of this is that there are no zombies, only zombified people, that zombies are people, and that some people must therefore be cannibals and so are zombies. None of this means that if you see a zombie you shouldn't destroy it with a sharp blow or gunshot blast to the head.In a round about way this also answers the question about whether a dead badger is a badger (of course it is!), so that's two in the hole for me. Can I have a Guardian pencil or coffee mug?Adam Gatward, BristolWhat happened to the piece of paper Neville Chamberlain brought back from Munich? Can we view it somewhere?I suppose Neville Chamberlain's piece of paper is in the National Archive. However I have always wondered how he got away with saying, "Czechoslovakia is a faraway country of which we know nothing". Even I, as a seven-year-old, knew Bata shoes came from there.David Bentley, Egham, SurreyYou can easily see this. Go to your bathroom and have a look at the roll of paper next to the toilet.Patrick Russell, London W5Why is it that I can always solve the Guardian's easy and hard sudokus, but never manage to complete the medium ones?No idea, but I have the same problem, so I hope someone comes up with a reason.Sue Leyland, Hunmanby, North YorksAny answers?French ĂŞtre, but je suis, not je ete; German sein, but ich bin, not ich seie; English to be, but I am, not I be. Why are the verbs for "to be" so irregular?Chris Callender, Wilmslow, ChesCan vegetarians eat jellyfish? (They have no brain or heart, but they do have a nervous system.)Mark Forster, London E17Send questions and answers to nq@guardian.co.uk. Please include name, address and phone number.WildlifePhilosophyHistoryguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
New words of 2009: the year tweetups and snollygosters arrived Staycation and zombie bankers catching on along with jeggings and simples, say lexicographersA year of snollygosters, jeggings and tweetups marked the end of the 21st century's first decade, according to word enthusiasts who have spent Christmas burrowing into Britain's biggest linguistic database.The three words lead the list of hundreds of new English coinings in the Oxford English Dictionary in the last 12 months, along with novel uses for familiar words, such as simples, unfriend and zombie banking."It has been another rich year," said Susie Dent, the lexicographic specialist from the TV show Countdown, who led the comprehensive scanning of more than 2bn words. "Last year, we found that 'credit crunch' was the most familiar new word, and the effect of the recession has stayed with us through 2009."Staycation – a money-saving holiday in the UK – is an example, an elision of words that caught on immediately. The zombie bankers are only one of a rich vocabulary from the fallout of the City's near-meltdown: paywalls, freemiums (free service providers with paid-for premium extras) and bossnapping, to oppose sackings or pay cuts, are other popular newcomers.The overwhelming influence of the internet also continued unbridled, with unfriend coming from the practice of dropping a contact from a Facebook site. Voted the word of the year by the New Oxford American Dictionary, it shares the honours in the UK with the alternative defriend, which is nearly as widely used.Tweetup has prospered via the more friendly social networking practice of organising gatherings through Twitter, using the rhyme with "meet" in the traditional way of creators of new words. Simples, meanwhile, comes from an older-fashioned source."It appeared on the 'compare the meerkat' TV adverts for insurance and quickly become a catchphrase said by anyone [to] mean something very easy to achieve," said Dent. "It really seems to have captured the public's imagination in 2009."Jeggings, another top scorer in usage terms, comes from the traditional word-marrying school of new terms – mixing jeans and leggings to describe new clothing style. Snollygosters, meaning "shrewd, unprincipled people", is actually an old word revived: first recorded in 1855, it fell into obscurity until the first stirrings of election fever in the early autumn.The survey also notes new words in overseas English, including hatinator (hat and fascinator) to describe the latest headwear craze in Australia, and hohum, a New Zealand coining for those who prefer to observe rather than act.Words and languageMartin Wainwrightguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Naomi Klein on how corporate branding has taken over America Ten years after the publication of No Logo, Naomi Klein switches her attention from the mall to Barack Obama and discovers that corporate culture has taken over the US governmentIn May 2009, Absolut Vodka launched a limited edition line called "Absolut No ÂLabel". The company's global public relations manager, Kristina Hagbard, explained that "For the first time we dare to face the world completely naked. We launch a bottle with no label and no logo, to manifest the idea that no matter what's on the outside, it's the inside that really matters."A few months later, Starbucks opened its first unbranded coffee shop in Seattle, called 15th Avenue E Coffee and Tea. This "stealth Starbucks" (as the anomalous outlet immediately became known) was decorated with "one-of-a-kind" fixtures and customers were invited to bring in their own music for the stereo system as well as their own pet social causes – all to help develop what the company called "a community personality." Customers had to look hard to find the small print on the menus: "inspired by Starbucks". Tim Pfeiffer, a Starbucks senior vice-president, explained that unlike the ordinary Starbucks outlet that used to occupy the same piece of retail space, "This one is definitely a little neighbourhood coffee shop." After spending two decades blasting its logo on to 16,000 stores worldwide, Starbucks was now trying to escape its own brand.Clearly the techniques of branding have both thrived and adapted since I published No Logo. But in the past 10 years I have written very little about developments like these. I realised why while reading William Gibson's 2003 novel Pattern Recognition. The book's protagonist, Cayce Pollard, is allergic to brands, particularly Tommy Hilfiger and the Michelin man. So strong is this "morbid and sometimes violent reactivity to the semiotics of the marketplace" that she has the buttons on her Levi's jeans ground smooth so that there are no corporate markings. When I read those words, I immediately realised that I had a similar affliction. As a child and teenager I was almost obsessively drawn to brands. But writing No Logo required four years of total immersion in ad culture – four years of watching and rewatching Super Bowl ads, scouring Advertising Age for the latest innovations in corporate synergy, reading soul-destroying business books on how to get in touch with your personal brand values, making excursions to Niketowns, to monster malls, to branded towns.Some of it was fun. But by the end, it was as if I had passed some kind of threshold and, like Cayce, I developed something close to a brand allergy. Brands lost most of their charm for me, which was handy because once No Logo was a bestseller, even drinking a Diet Coke in public could land me in the gossip column of my hometown newspaper.The aversion extended even to the brand that I had accidentally created: No Logo. From studying Nike and Starbucks, I was well acquainted with the basic tenet of brand management: find your message, trademark and protect it and repeat yourself ad nauseam through as many synergised platforms as possible. I set out to break these rules whenever the opportunity arose. The offers for No Logo spin-off projects (feature film, TV series, clothing line . . .) were rejected. So were the ones from the megabrands and cutting-edge advertising agencies that wanted me to give them seminars on why they were so hated (there was a career to be made, I was learning, in being a kind of anti-corporate dominatrix, making overpaid executives feel good by telling them what bad, bad brands they were). And against all sensible advice, I stuck by the decision not to trademark the title (that means no royalties from a line of Italian No Logo food products, though they did send me some lovely olive oil).Most important to my marketing detox program, I changed the subject. Less than a year after No Logo came out I put a personal ban on all talk of corporate branding. In interviews and public appearances I would steer discussion away from the latest innovation in viral marketing and Prada's new superstore and towards the growing resistance movement against corporate rule, the one that had captured world attention with the militant protests against the World Trade Organisation in Seattle. "But aren't you your own brand?" clever interviewers would ask me endlessly. "Probably," I would respond. "But I try to be a really crap one."Changing the subject from branding to politics was no great sacrifice because politics was what brought me to marketing in the first place. The first articles I published as a journalist were about the limited job options available to me and my peers – the rise of short-term contracts and McJobs, as well as the ubiquitous use of sweatshop labour to produce the branded gear sold to us. As a token "youth columnist", I also covered how an increasingly voracious marketing culture was encroaching on previously protected non-corporate spaces – schools, museums, parks – while ideas that my friends and I had considered radical were absorbed almost instantly into the latest marketing campaigns for Nike, Benetton and Apple.I decided to write No Logo when I realised these seemingly disparate trends were connected by a single idea – that corporations should produce brands, not products. This was the era when corporate epiphanies were striking CEOs like lightning bolts from the heavens: Nike isn't a running shoe company, it is about the idea of transcendence through sports, Starbucks isn't a coffee shop chain, it's about the idea of community. Down on earth these epiphanies meant that many companies that had manufactured their products in their own factories, and had maintained large, stable workforces, embraced the now ubiquitous Nike model: close your factories, produce your products through an intricate web of contractors and subcontractors and pour your resources into the design and marketing required to project your big idea. Or they went for the Microsoft model: maintain a tight control centre of shareholder/employees who perform the company's "core competency" and outsource everything else to temps, from running the mailroom to writing code. Some called these restructured companies "hollow corporations" because their goal seemed to be to transcend the corporeal world of things so they could be an utterly unencumbered brand. As corporate guru Tom Peters put it: "You're a damn fool if you own it!"For me, the appeal of X-raying brands such as Nike or Starbucks was that pretty soon you were talking about everything except marketing – from how products are made in the deregulated global supply chain to industrial agriculture and commodity prices. Next thing you knew you were also talking about the nexus of politics and money that locked in these wild-west rules through free-trade deals and at the WTO, and made following them the precondition of receiving much-needed loans from the International Monetary Fund. In short, you were talking about how the world works.By the time No Logo came out, the movement was already at the gates of the powerful institutions that were spreading corporatism around the world. Tens and then hundreds of thousands of demonstrators were making their case outside trade summits and G8 meetings from Seattle to New Delhi, in several cases stopping new agreements in their tracks. What the corporate media insisted on calling the "anti-globalisation movement" was nothing of the sort. At the reformist end it was anti-corporate; at the radical end it was anti-capitalist. But what made it unique was its insistent internationalism. All of these developments meant that when I was on a book tour, there were many more interesting things to talk about than logos – such as where this movement came from, what it wanted and whether there were viable alternatives to the ruthless strain of corporatism that went under the innocuous pseudonym of "globalisation".❦In recent years, however, I have found myself doing something I swore I had finished with: rereading the branding gurus quoted in the book. This time, however, it wasn't to try to understand what was happening at the mall but rather at the White House – first under the presidency of George W Bush and now under Barack Obama, the first US president who is also a Âsuperbrand.There are many acts of destruction for which the Bush years are rightly reviled – the illegal invasions, the defiant defences of torture, the tanking of the global economy. But the administration's most lasting legacy may well be the way it systematically did to the US government what branding-mad CEOs did to their companies a decade earlier: it hollowed it out, handing over to the private sector many of the most essential functions of government, from protecting borders to responding to disasters to collecting intelligence. This hollowing out was not a side project of the Bush years, it was a central mission, reaching into every field of governance. And though the Bush clan was often ridiculed for its incompetence, the process of auctioning off the state, leaving behind only a shell – or a brand – was approached with tremendous focus and precision.One company that took over many services was Lockheed Martin, the world's largest defence contractor. "Lockheed Martin doesn't run the United Slates," observed a 2004 New York Times exposĂ©. "But it does help run a breathtakingly big part of it . . . It sorts your mail and totals your taxes. It cuts Social Security cheques and counts the United States census. It runs space flights and monitors air traffic. To make all that happen, Lockheed writes more computer code than Microsoft."No one approached the task of auctioning off the state with more zeal than Bush's much-maligned defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. Having spent 20-odd years in the private sector, Rumsfeld was steeped in the corporate culture of branding and outsourcing. His department's brand identity was clear: global dominance. The core competency was combat. For everything else, he said (sounding very much like Bill Gates), "We should seek suppliers who can provide these non-core activities efficiently and Âeffectively."The laboratory for this radical vision was Iraq under US occupation. From the start Rumsfeld planned the troop deployment like a Wal-Mart vice-president looking to shave a few more hours from the payroll. The generals wanted 500,000 troops, he would give them 200,000, with contractors and reservists filling the gaps as needed – a just-in-time invasion. In practice, this strategy meant that as Iraq spiralled out of US control, an ever-more elaborate privatised war industry took shape to prop up the bare-bones army. Blackwater, whose original contract was to provide bodyguards for US envoy Paul Bremer, soon took on other functions, including engaging in combat in a battle with the Mahdi army in 2004. The sprawling Green Zone, meanwhile, was run as a corporate city-state, with everything from food to entertainment to pest control handled by Halliburton. Just as companies such as Nike and Microsoft had pioneered the hollow corporation, this was, in many ways, a hollow war. And when one of the contractors screwed up – Blackwater operatives opening fire in Baghdad's Nisour Square in 2007, for instance, leaving 17 people dead, or Halliburton allegedly supplying contaminated water to soldiers – the Bush administration was free to deny responsibility. Blackwater, which had prided itself on being the Disney of mercenary companies, complete with a line of branded clothing and Blackwater teddy bears, responded to the scandals by – what else? – rebranding. Its new name is Xe Services.❦The Bush administration's determination to mimic the hollow corporations it admired extended to its handling of the anger its actions inspired around the world. Rather than actually changing or even adjusting its policies, it launched a series of ill-fated campaigns to "rebrand America" for an increasingly hostile world. Watching these cringeful attempts, I was convinced that Price Floyd, former director of media relations at the State Department, had it right. After resigning in frustration, he said that the United States was facing mounting anger not because of the failure of its messaging but because of the failure of its policies. "I'd be in meetings with other public-affairs officials at State and the White House," Floyd told Slate magazine. "They'd say: 'We need to get our people out there on more media.' I'd say: 'It's not so much the packaging, it's the substance that's giving us trouble.'" A powerful, imperialist country is not like a hamburger or a running shoe. America didn't have a branding problem; it had a product problem.I used to think that, but I may have been wrong. When Obama was sworn in as president, the American brand could scarcely have been more battered – Bush was to his country what New Coke was to Coca-Cola, what cyanide in the bottles had been to Tylenol. Yet Obama, in what was perhaps the most successful rebranding campaign of all time, managed to turn things around. Kevin Roberts, global CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi, set out to depict visually what the new president represented. In a full-page graphic commissioned by the stylish Paper Magazine, he showed the Statue of Liberty with her legs spread, giving birth to Barack Obama. America, reborn.So, it seemed that the United States government could solve its reputation problems with branding – it's just that it needed a branding campaign and product spokesperson sufficiently hip, young and exciting to compete in today's tough market. The nation found that in Obama, a man who clearly has a natural feel for branding and who has surrounded himself with a team of top-flight marketers. His social networking guru, for instance, is Chris Hughes, one of the young founders of Facebook. His social secretary is DesirĂ©e Rogers, a glamorous Harvard MBA and former marketing executive. And David Axelrod, Obama's top adviser, was formerly a partner in ASK Public Strategies, a PR firm which, according to Business Week, "has quarterbacked campaigns" for everyone from CableÂvision to AT&T. Together, the team has marshalled every tool in the modem marketing arsenal to create and sustain the Obama brand: the perfectly calibrated logo (sunrise over stars and stripes); expert viral marketing (Obama ringtones); product placement (Obama ads in sports video games); a 30-minute infomercial (which could have been cheesy but was universally heralded as "authentic"); and the choice of strategic brand alliances (Oprah for maximum reach, the Kennedy family for gravitas, and no end of hip-hop stars for street cred).The first time I saw the "Yes We Can" video, the one produced by Black Eyed Peas front man will.i.am, featuring celebrities speaking and singing over a Martin Luther Kingesque Obama speech, I thought: finally, a politician with ads as cool as Nike. The ad industry agreed. A few weeks before he won the presidential elections, Obama beat Nike, Apple, Coors and Zappos to win the Association of National Advertisers' top annual award – Marketer of the Year. It was certainly a shift. In the 1990s, brands upstaged politics completely. Now corporate brands were rushing to piggyback on Obama's cachĂ© (Pepsi's "Choose Change" campaign, Ikea's "Embrace Change '09" and Southwest Airlines' offer of "Yes You Can" tickets).Indeed everything Obama and his family touches turns to branding gold. J Crew saw its stock price increase 200% in the first six months of Obama's presidency, thanks in part to Michelle's well known fondness for the brand. Obama's much-discussed attachment to his BlackBerry has been similarly good news for Research In Motion. The surest way to sell magazines and newspapers in these difficult times is to have an Obama on the cover, and you only need to call three ounces of vodka and some fruit juice an Obamapolitan or a Barackatini and you can get $15 for it, easy. In February 2009, Portfolio magazine put the size of "the Obama economy" – the tourism he generates and the swag he inspires - at $2.5bn. Not at all bad in an economic crisis. Rogers got into trouble with some of her colleagues when she spoke too frankly with The Wall Street Journal. "We have the best brand on earth: the Obama brand," she said. "Our possibilities are endless."The exploration of those possibilities did not end, or even slow, with the election victory. Bush had used his ranch in Crawford, Texas, as a backdrop to perform his best impersonation of the Marlboro man, forever clearing brush, having cookouts and wearing cowboy boots. Obama has gone much further, turning the White House into a kind of never-ending reality show starring the lovable Obama clan. This too can be traced to the mid-90s branding craze, when marketers grew tired of the limitations of traditional advertising and began creating three-dimensional "experiences" – branded temples where shoppers could crawl inside the personality of their favourite brands. The problem is not that Obama is using the same tricks and tools as the superbrands; anyone wanting to move the culture these days pretty much has to do that. The problem is that, as with so many other lifestyle brands before him, his actions do not come close to living up to the hopes he has raised.Though it's too soon to issue a verdict on the Obama presidency, we do know this: he favours the grand symbolic gesture over deep structural change every time. So he will make a dramatic announcement about closing the notorious Guantánamo Bay prison – while going ahead with an expansion of the lower profile but frighteningly lawless Bagram prison in Afghanistan, and opposing accountability for Bush officials who authorised torture. He will boldly appoint the first Latina to the Supreme Court, while intensifying Bush-era enforcement measures in a new immigration crackdown. He will make investments in green energy, while championing the fantasy of "clean coal" and refusing to tax emissions, the only sure way to substantially reduce the burning of fossil fuels. Most importantly, he will claim to be ending the war in Iraq, and will retire the ugly "war on terror" phrase – even as the conflicts guided by that fatal logic escalate in Afghanistan and Pakistan.This preference for symbols over substance, and this unwillingness to stick to a morally clear if unpopular course, is where Obama decisively parts ways with the transformative political movements from which he has borrowed so much (the pop-art posters from Che, his cadence from King, his "Yes We Can!" slogan from the migrant farmworkers – si se puede). These movements made unequivocal demands of existing power structures: for land distribution, higher wages, ambitious social programmes. Because of those high-cost demands, these movements had not only committed followers but serious enemies. Obama, in sharp contrast not just to social movements but to transformative presidents such as FDR, follows the logic of marketing: create an appealing canvas on which all are invited to project their deepest desires but stay vague enough not to lose anyone but the committed wing nuts (which, granted, constitute a not inconsequential demographic in the United States). Advertising Age had it right when it gushed that the Obama brand is "big enough to be anything to anyone yet had an intimate enough feel to inspire advocacy". And then their highest compliment: "Mr Obama somehow managed to be both Coke and Honest Tea, both the megabrand with the global awareness and distribution network and the dark-horse, upstart niche player."Another way of putting it is that Obama played the anti-war, anti-Wall Street party crasher to his grassroots base, which imagined itself leading an insurgency against the two-party Âmonopoly through dogged organisation and donations gathered from lemonade stands and loose change found in the crevices of the couch. Meanwhile, he took more money from Wall Street than any other presidential candidate, swallowed the Democratic party establishment in one gulp after defeating Hillary Clinton, then pursued "bipartisanship" with crazed Republicans once in the White House.❦Does Obama's failure to live up to his lofty brand cost him? It didn't at first. An international study by Pew's Global Attitudes Project, conducted five months after he took office, asked people whether they were confident Obama would "do the right thing in world affairs". Even though there was already plenty of evidence that Obama was continuing many of Bush's core international policies (albeit with a far less arrogant style), the vast majority said they approved of Obama – in Jordan and Egypt, a fourfold increase from the Bush era. In Europe the change in attitude could give you whiplash: Obama had the confidence of 91% of French respondents and 86% of Britons - compared with 13% and 16% respectively under Bush. The poll was proof that "Obama's presidency essentially erased the battering the US's image took during eight years of the Bush administration," according to USA Today. Axelrod put it like this: "What has happened is that anti-ÂAmericanism isn't cool anymore."That was certainly true, and had very real consequences. Obama's election and the world's corresponding love affair with his rebranded America came at a crucial time. In the two months before the election, the financial crisis rocking world markets was being rightly blamed not just on the contagion of Wall Street's bad bets but on the entire economic model of deregulation and privatisation that had been preached from US-dominated institutions such as the IMF and the WTO. If the United States were led by someone who didn't happen to be a global superstar, US prestige would have continued to plummet and the rage at the economic model at the heart of the global meltdown would likely have turned into sustained demands for new rules to rein in (and seriously tax) speculative finance.Those rules were supposed to have been on the agenda when G20 leaders met at the height of the economic crisis in London in April 2009. Instead, the press focused on excited sightings of the fashionable Obama couple, while world leaders agreed to revive the ailing IMF – a chief culprit in this mess – with up to a trillion dollars in new financing. In short, Obama didn't just rebrand America, he resuscitated the neoliberal economic project when it was at death's door. No one but Obama, wrongly perceived as a new FDR, could have pulled it off.Yet rereading No Logo after 10 years provides many reminders that success in branding can be fleeting, and that nothing is more fleeting than the quality of being cool. Many of the superbrands and branded celebrities that looked untouchable not so long ago have either faded or are in deep crisis today. The Obama brand could well suffer a similar fate. Of course many people supported Obama for straightforward strategic reasons: they rightly wanted the Republicans out and he was the best candidate. But what will happen when the throngs of Obama faithful realise that they gave their hearts not to a movement that shared their deepest values but to a devoutly corporatist political party, one that puts the profits of drug companies before the need for affordable health care, and Wall Street's addiction to financial bubbles before the needs of millions of people whose homes and jobs could have been saved with a better bailout?The risk – and it is real – is that the response will be waves of bitter cynicism, particularly among the young people for whom the Obama campaign was their first taste of politics. Most won't switch parties, they'll just do what young people used to do during elections: stay home, tune out. Another, more hopeful possibility is that Obamamania will end up being what the US president's advisers like to call "a teachable moment". Obama is a gifted politician with a deep intelligence and a greater inclination towards social justice than any leader of his party in recent memory. If he cannot change the system in order to keep his election promises, it's because the system itself is utterly broken.It was a conversation about changing the system that many of us were having in the brief period between the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in November 1999 and the beginning of the so-called war on terror. For the movement the media insisted on calling "anti-globalisation," it mattered little which political party happened to be in power in our respective countries. We were focused squarely on the rules of the game, and how they had been distorted to serve the narrow interests of corporations at every level of Âgovernance – from international free-trade agreements to local water privatisation deals.Looking back, what I liked most was the unapologetic wonkery of it all. In the two years after No Logo came out, I went to dozens of teach-ins and conferences, some of them attended by thousands of people, that were exclusively devoted to popular education about the inner workings of global finance and trade. It was as if people understood, all at once, that gathering this knowledge was crucial to the survival not just of democracy but of the planet. Yes, this was complicated, but we embraced that complexity because we were finally looking at systems, not just symbols.In some parts of the world, particularly Latin America, that wave of resistance spread and strengthened. In some countries, social movements grew strong enough to join with political parties, winning national elections and beginning to forge a new regional fair-trade regime. But elsewhere, September 11 pretty much blasted the movement out of existence. What we knew about the sophistication of global corporatism – that all the world's injustice could not be blamed on one rightwing political party, or on one Ânation, no matter how powerful – seemed to disappear.If there was ever a time to remember the lessons we learned at the turn of the millennium, it is now. One benefit of the international failure to regulate the financial sector, even after its catastrophic collapse, is that the economic model that dominates around the world has revealed itself not as "free market" but "crony capitalist" – politicians handing over public wealth to private players in exchange for political support. What used to be politely hidden is all out in the open now. Correspondingly, public rage at corporate greed is at its highest point not just in my lifetime but in my parents' lifetime as well. Many of the points supposedly marginal activists were making in the streets 10 years ago are now the accepted wisdom of cable news talk shows and mainstream op-ed pages.And yet missing from this populist moment is what was beginning to emerge a decade ago: a movement that did not just respond to individual outrages but had a set of proactive demands for a more just and sustainable economic model. In the United States and many parts of Europe, it is far-right parties and even neofascism that are giving the loudest voice to anti-Âcorporatist rage.Personally, none of this makes me feel betrayed by Barack Obama. Rather I have a familiar ambivalence, the way I used to feel when brands like Nike and Apple started using revolutionary imagery in their transcendental branding campaigns. All of their high-priced market research had found a longing in people for something more than shopping – for social change, for public space, for greater equality and diversity. Of course the brands tried to exploit that longing to sell lattes and laptops. Yet it seemed to me that we on the left owed the marketers a debt of gratitude for all this: our ideas weren't as passĂ© as we had been told. And since the brands couldn't fulfill the deep desires they were awakening, social movements had a new impetus to try.Perhaps Obama should be viewed in much the same way. Once again, the market research has been done for us. What the election and the global embrace of Obama's brand proved decisively is that there is a tremendous appetite for progressive change – that many, many people do not want markets opened at gunpoint, are repelled by torture, believe passionately in civil liberties, want corporations out of politics, see global warming as the fight of our time, and very much want to be part of a political project larger than themselves.Those kinds of transformative goals are only ever achieved when independent social movements build the Ânumbers and the organisational power to make muscular demands of their elites. Obama won office by Âcapitalising on our profound nostalgia for those kinds of social movements. But it was only an echo, a memory. The task ahead is to build movements that are – to borrow an old Coke slogan – the real thing. As Studs Terkel, the great oral historian, used to say: "Hope has never trickled down. It has always sprung up."• Extracted from a 10th anniversary edition of No Logo to be published by Fourth Estate on 21 January. Obama administrationStarbucksBusiness and financePoliticsNaomi Kleinguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |