Storyboard (22 page)
Authors: John Bowen
Then there was a young man in a white coat with a stethoscope protruding from the pocket, a man much younger than Dr. Harrison, but carrying with him that smell of cleanness and competence that belongs to all doctors in their professional setting, and the sensible part of Sylvia began to test and tug at the strings of control again, and the strings began to answer. “I’m very sorry,” Sylvia said. “I’ve been so upset. It’s probably made me rather hysterical.”
The young man drew the blanket away from Stephen’s chest. On the upper part of his body, the
calamine
had been blotched and streaked by rain, when Sylvia had carried him into and out of the taxi. “Scald, is it?” the young man said. “Any fever, Nurse?”
“A hundred and three, Doctor.”
“We shall have to take him in. Has his own doctor seen him?”
“No,” Sylvia said. “Doctor’s still on his rounds. I waited …”
“When did it happen?”
“This morning. About ten-thirty.”
“Did you phone the doctor at once?”
“No.” Why hadn’t she? It hadn’t been serious then. “I put him to bed. I didn’t begin to get … I phoned the doctor just after twelve, and he wasn’t in.”
“When you gave the message, did you tell them at the other end what time the accident happened?”
“I didn’t think of it.”
“I see. Have you given him anything?”
“Two Anadin to help him sleep. Three.”
“And you’ve put calamine lotion on the blisters?”
“Yes. Was that wrong? Did I——?”
“No harm in it. He’ll have to go to the theatre, Nurse. Will you see to the form of admission?”
“Operating!” Sylvia was frightened, and it showed.
“No, Mrs. Bates. Just a dressing. I’m afraid he’ll have to stay here for a while. He’s been badly shocked. There isn’t much point in your waiting. You’d better go on home, and try to relax a little. Is your husband——?”
“He’s at work.”
“Would you like us to telephone, and ask him to come home?”
“No. No…. I’ll talk to him. He’s been very busy
today
. He doesn’t know.”
“Whatever you think best. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I must make sure that everything’s ready for the child.”
The young man in the white coat left the room.
People
came and took Stephen away. He did not know her, and suffered quite passively what was being done to him. She said (though what was the point if he did not hear, could not understand?) “Mummy’s coming to see you soon, Stevie. I’ll bring Madgie and your Dinky toys, and daddy will bring a surprise in his pocket,” and the little West Indian nurse politely pretended not to hear this private message. Then Sylvia was taken to
Admissions
, and filled out a form for Stephen, and there was nothing left for her to do at the hospital; she was of no use there. On the wall, to her right, was a large poster, headed “Accidents in the Home”. It showed a child much younger than Stephen, sitting on his mother’s knee at the tea-table, and engaged in knocking over the teapot. There were cakes on the table, and bread and butter, and a bottle of sauce, and the artist had shown a shaft of liquid coming from the spout of the teapot
towards
the child, and had even drawn in a little puff of steam above it. A smaller picture inset showed the same child lying in a hospital bed, its face marked with scars. The poster was like an attack, and the sensible part of Sylvia was too weak to withstand it. Sylvia began to weep again. “He won’t be scarred, will he?” she said to the little West Indian nurse, ashamed of the weak, weak tears that flowed again unchecked, as if she had abnegated all control, and did not care any longer how she looked, or what she said, or to whom. “Tell me, he won’t be scarred for Life,” and went, still weeping, into the rain to find a taxi and return to her empty home.
*
They had all gone. They had shaken hands, and gone congratulating the Agency and each other on this major breakthrough, this fruitful exercise in co-operative work,
this successful meeting. Keith was so tired that he was not even sure any longer what the Agency had agreed to do, but no doubt it would all be in Tony’s notes. Phrases for the contact report began to form in his mind:
‘The mood of the advertisements should strongly portray that the
occasion
, while being in a sense everyday, should also be essentially very special.”
The daughter was still in the commercial, at least for the time being, but so was a shot of the soap in use. They could keep the Woman’s Voice, but must make it punchier. No ring round the bowl, but the Agency had promised to think about including a
night-club
or its equivalent. Revisions to be put in hand for the next meeting. Was this victory?
He would have to tell Hugh and Sophia, but not now. “Better than we might have expected. You did very well, Keith. Got to treat these fellows firmly, once in a while. See you in the bar.” P.A. said, and stomped away down the corridor, the old warrior, the leader of men. Yes, he could tell them tomorrow, when he was clearer in his mind.
There was a message for him in the office. His wife had asked him to ring as soon as he could. Something up? Sylvia almost never rang the office, and disapproved of wives who did. Still, whatever the problem was, it couldn’t have anything to do with advertising, and that would be relief enough. He pressed the buzzer on his phone, and said, “Prudence, will you get me Mrs. Bates, please.” Soon know what it was all about. Soon know.
A
t the offices of
The
Radical,
Ralph was talking to
Harvey
Bodge about Foundation Soap.
“Well now, Ralph, come on in,” Harvey Bodge said. “I’ve been reading this article of yours. You’ve got some interesting stuff here.”
“Oh yes?”
“And I’ll be frank with you, Ralph. You wouldn’t want me to be less than frank; I know that. This article is not right.”
“Oh?”
“I don’t mean it’s badly written. It isn’t. I don’t mean it’s not cogent. It is. But it’s not right for The Radical, and I’ll tell you why. There’s too much opinion, and not enough fact.”
“I’m sorry. I’ll can it, then.”
“Do that if you want to. Or rewrite it if you want to.”
Ralph had been wary from the moment he entered Harvey Bodge’s office. He’d heard of this sort of thing. He hadn’t expected it from a paper like
The
Radical,
but he’d heard of it often enough. The party line! How sickening it was to a scholar! He was an academic, he had told himself, politically Left perhaps as a human being, as a citizen, but as an academic totally apolitical; a scholar’s only duty was to scholarship. Because he was writing for a paper with a policy, he had put himself out
to be particularly fair in this, his first extended article for the paper. It had been difficult to write; it was even, he would concede, a little difficult to read, so freighted was it with balancing clauses. But it was academic; as a scholar he need not be ashamed of it, and he would not agree to slant it in any way, just so as to suit the editorial policy of Harvey Bodge, and that was flat. Ralph had guessed from Bodge’s manner to him over the last few days, and from the length of time Bodge seemed to be taking to have it set in type, that something of this nature was possible, and he had bristled even at the thought of it. “Rewrite it?” he said, with a calculated evenness of tone. “I don’t think there’s much point in that, do you?” His throat was dry. His voice shook a little; the evenness was difficult to hold. He was nervous; that was understandable. But he was conducting the interview so far with a most scholarly control.
Harvey Bodge said, “I don’t know. Depends how arrogant you are about your own work.”
“Arrogant? Surely that’s not in the case?”
Harvey Bodge smiled. “My dear boy,” he said. “If you’re going to be pompous about rewriting, there’s no future for you as a journalist, even our kind of journalist. Yes, I know you’re an academic, but you can’t live at it unless you’re prepared to go to Sweden or the Gold Coast, or sink your Oxford scruples and teach at
Stockton
. I’m an older man than you are, Ralph, and I hope you’ll give me the privilege of being rude in a friendly way. The old have less control than the young, in some ways. We indulge ourselves more, and I can’t keep up this icy politeness game, so I’m going to enjoy the luxury of Speaking freely, eh?”
“By all means.”
“Look at you. You’re all prickly because you think
I’m going to rape your academic virginity. But I’m not Ralph; I’m not. It’ll go some day, I suppose, and you can say you lost it playing tennis, but I’m not after it. We have to be as accurate in our way as any scholar, Ralph; I told you that when I asked you to do this job for me. We have to be fair … balanced … all that sort of thing. Only, I may as well say it right out and get it over with, the one thing we can’t afford to be is bloody unreadable. You can write a good piece in every other way, and still be unreadable; you know that.”
“But——”
“Oh, yes, I know we are unreadable sometimes, in spite of what I’m saying. If I want an article from a Privy Councillor, I have to print it as written. And I’ve got to put up with clotted prose from reviewers if they’re eminent enough and specialist enough. But I can ask my own staff to write readably, Ralph, and by God I do. This is good stuff you’ve given me, good in its place, but when I look at it I see footnotes in six point at the
bottom
of the page. Listen.” And, choosing the place at
random
, he began to read:
“One cannot doubt that the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising is most deeply concerned with maintaining the highest professional standards of behaviour. When knowledge of the American experiments in subliminal
advertising
became public, the I.P.A. made it a condition of membership that such practices should never be
undertaken
by Agencies in this country. Similarly, the I.P.A. is at pains to advise its members against the use of false claims, particularly in the field of proprietary medicines, and in the opinion of many advertisers working in this field (in which faith is at least as important as drugs) is almost over-cautious in its attitude. But by the conditions of its institution, the I.P.A. is and must be committed. It cannot distinguish between professional standards and the wider moral issues of advertising, except not to be
concerned with such issues. The moral issues of
advertising
are complex, and any scholar engaged in their study must often stop to ask himself, ‘What is truth?’, and must do so in the knowledge that it is a question which does not admit any one answer.”
“If something’s a lie, it’s a lie,” Harvey Bodge said. “But if your academic convictions lead you to believe otherwise, I won’t quarrel with you. Only you mustn’t take two pages of
The
Radical
to tell our readers that you’ve nothing to tell them.”
“We may find many examples of the complexity of this question in the advertising of proprietary medicines. Let us take as one instance any of the many specifics put out for the use of rheumatism-sufferers, since rheumatism is a disease of which the manifestations, it is now thought, may be psycho-somatic among many sufferers. X, the advertiser does not say in so many words that his medicine will cure rheumatism, because he is not permitted to do so, but his advertising implies cure. He does not present his medicine as giving no more than symptomatic relief for a limited period, for if he did, he believes, the public would not buy it; instead, the advertising presents
symptomatic
relief as if that were the same as cure. X, the advertiser, therefore, has implied a lie, and knows it. But Y, the sufferer, believes X, and since what Y has been needing is an excuse for self-love, for the narcissistic pleasure of taking medicine, regular application or
ingestion
of X’s medicine cures him for all practical purposes. Was the lie a lie for Y? If Z, who suffers from headaches brought about by stress, reads and believes an
advertisement
for a new analgesic which claims to relieve
headaches
more quickly than ever before, and implies that such relief will be almost instantaneous, then does it
matter
to Z that the difference in speed may, even under laboratory conditions, be only minimal, and the claim ‘more quickly than ever before’ specious? If Z believes, then the symbolic act of taking the analgesic is already effective in dissipating much of the tension under which he suffers, so that the blood vessels in his brain become
less distended, and the relief does indeed come almost instantaneously. Is the implied claim, therefore, a lie for Z?”
‘
Is
rheumatism psycho-somatic? I can’t believe that. Everybody over a certain age gets rheumatism when the weather’s damp. I get it myself. You’re not accusing
me
of self-love, eh? Everything’s psycho-somatic
nowadays
. They go too far,” said Harvey Bodge.
“Perhaps the people most immediately damaged by advertisements may be those who write them, since their daily business is to suggest what they must often know not to be true. Yet is a barrister so damaged? Advertisers will often suggest that their profession is similar to that of a barrister, who will not either lie himself nor induce
witnesses
to lie in favour of his client (again, a professional code forbids such a practice), yet who is not called upon to state the case for his opponents, and may go a long way to
suggest
an innocence which is, at the least, in dispute. Most advertisers, it would appear, are not in fact morally damaged by their profession, since they do not feel guilt in engaging in it, and, as modern psychologists believe, it is the guilt and not the sin itself which damages the psyche. Only very occasionally, and then usually on the specific issue of the morality of a particular campaign rather than on the general issues of the morality of advertising itself, will such a person suffer a crisis of conscience.
“What is, indeed, more likely to damage the
personalities
of those who actually ‘create’ advertising (that is, the writers and artists) is the persistent waste of their efforts. A truly sensitive person who has used, for the purpose of creating advertising, talents which might otherwise have been employed in teaching or the arts, and who has
suffered
day by day the changes, the disappointments, the postponements, the compromises such as no artist in any previous age has had to make with a patron, and who realizes at the end that all this ‘expense of spirit and … waste of shame’ has gone only to produce a thirty-second filmlet dedicated to the sale of margarine, or has perhaps never reached the public at all (since not all advertising
campaigns are accepted by the manufacturers for whom they are devised, and it is often customary to devise two campaigns by different writers and artists to the same end, so that one of them is bound to be rejected), then indeed such a person may feel an acute sense of personal waste, and the guilt which must accompany such a waste. On the other hand, it may be said that nobody is forced to
engage
in advertising, and many sensitive people do, in fact, leave the profession to teach or to practise the arts. We may blame ourselves, not the advertisers, that teachers and artists are among the least rewarded members of our community, so that the decision of such persons to leave may often be taken with difficulty, and some married men with children may not take it at all.”
“There’s a sentence in that paragraph, towards the end there, Ralph, that’s long beyond all bearing. Faulkner may be able to get away with that sort of thing, but we don’t believe in it here. It’s not the language of fact. Mind you, you’re right. Teachers are bloody underpaid; no doubt of it. Millions for the H-bomb, and nothing for education. We’ve always said that, and it can’t be said too often.”
“Let us return, however, to the concept of the ‘
necessary
’ lie, a concept familiar to students of literature in the works of Ibsen, Pirandello and O’Neill, and indeed T. S. Eliot himself has said, ‘Humankind cannot bear too much reality’. If we accept the comfortable values of a materialist society as they are presented to us by
advertising
, we may in the short run be a happier people, and being happy, being presented only with
attainable
objectives
, may produce more of the material objects on which our society and others like it depend. I do not propose here to contrast this state of affairs with one in which material values are opposed, and transcended by ‘
spiritual
’ values, since for me ‘spiritual’ is not a meaningful word, but I may, I think, suggest that, even in terms of human life as we know it, a comfortable society is a society in danger; the concept of the interdependence of men
upon one another is practical; yet it is more than material, and it may be thought essential to the survival of
mankind
. Furthermore, if men are given only as much truth as makes them happy, it is likely that, as time goes on, they will want less and less of it, and adversity may find them without resources, since in adversity truth is
something
which we cannot always avoid, and comfort
something
which we must often do without. A selfish materialist society may also be a soft society, and these are not the societies which survive.”
“Opinion,” Harvey Bodge said fretfully. “It’s all opinion, Ralph.”
“We have seen that the media of mass communication depend on advertising for their existence. What is less
frequently
stressed is that advertising depends on the media of mass communication, and would disappear without them. Even those media much in demand by advertisers because they guarantee large audiences, while they may avoid such penny-catching devices as special supplements to attract special advertisers, are nevertheless afraid to take any positive action that might offend advertisers—we have seen a film distributor refuse for Saturday
morning
showings to children a film sponsored by the
Government
and warning that addiction to cigarettes may end in lung cancer. Yet media-owners, if only they would
combine
, could perform a service to the public by making general on a very wide scale the sort of information
already
made available by such public services as the
Consumer
Advisory Bureau, of whose existence the mass of the public is not consciously aware, and whose modest subscriptions many people might find too expensive. Media-owners might confidently do this without risk of reprisal, but in the current competitive situation it is
unlikely
that they will, and Government action in this
direction
might be more effective than the taxes on advertising which are often mentioned, but which might, in the long run, only succeed in raising prices, or in hastening still further the process by which the smaller firms are
disappearing
from the market.”
“Might be something in that.”
“… On the question of motivation research and what is called ‘depth’ advertising, we must of course agree that, from the manufacturers’ point of view, there is very little point in advertising their goods except in the terms on which consumers buy such goods. If a conventional
researcher
were to ask S, a woman leaving a confectionery shop, for whom she has bought the halfpound box of chocolates she carries under her arm, she might very well be disinclined to answer, ‘For myself’, even if she had in fact done so, because it is often thought to be greedy and self-indulgent to buy sweets for oneself, particularly if one should be a woman, for whom, it is conventional to
believe
, chocolates are more usually bought by a man. If she were to answer, ‘For myself’, then, she would be
confessing
to greed and to sexual failure, and she is more likely to lie. Similarly the sufferer from rheumatism, Y, in the example I have already quoted, may have as his his ‘real’ reason for buying the proprietary remedy, not that he wanted symptomatic relief from rheumatism, but that he wanted something to rub on himself or for
somebody
to rub on him, and anything would do provided it gave a valid excuse for the rubbing.”