A curious collection of essays was published last year by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), a London-based organisation dedicated to broadening ?the public understanding of a free economy.? Titled The Representation of Business in English Literature, the collection contains a foreword by John Blundell lamenting that capitalism has received ?three centuries of bad press? from writers of fiction.
To fix this, Blundell proposes such measures as outreach programmes that send writers to ?a factory or similar capitalist institution? and offering financial incentives for novelists who treat business as ?an honourable, creative, moral and personally satisfying way of life.? He even proposes endowing an Oxbridge Chair of Literary Capitalism. Poor Blundell. Someone should tell him that polemic is second only to unalloyed virtue in sinking a novel. Next he will be asking novelists to write about happy families.
It is certainly true that, in recent years, British readers have spurned intelligent representations of business in fiction, preferring instead the narrowly personal or entertainingly exotic. (Novelists and editors, alert to fashion, have given them what they wanted.) But, as other contributors to the IEA book reveal, the bias against business is patently not ?centuries? old. Beginning with Daniel Defoe, novelists have been serving up treatments of commerce that are as varied and complex as the subject itself.
Probably the best-known fictional business figure is the comet-like Augustus Melmotte in Anthony Trollope?s The Way We Live Now (currently being played by David Suchet in a new BBC adaptation). Melmotte, who eventually commits suicide, is a study in overreaching ambition. But Trollope doesn?t make him a figure of contempt. Melmotte, as his faithful servant Croll says, was ?passionate, and did lose his ?ead; and vas blow?d up vid bigness... ?E bursted himself.? But the real villains are the gormless, blue-blooded fops who sneer at Melmotte while taking advantage of his prosperity. Nearly as ghastly are their husband-hungry female counterparts and the unscrupulous writers and editors whose finagling fuels a subplot. Trollope wanted to illustrate venality in all its venues, not just the City.
If Melmotte is a comet, then Theodore Dreiser?s post-American civil war magnate Frank Algernon Cowperwood is a sun that shines steadily through an entire sequence of American novels: The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914) and The Stoic (1947). Cowperwood is a corner-cutter and opportunist in the Melmotte mould but Dreiser, a journalist by training, was not interested in passing judgment or being satirical. He admired aspects of his hero, understood but did not excuse his faults. The result is an adamantine portrait of a money man. No other book so well brings to life the truth of Calvin Coolidge?s remark, ?the business of America is business.?
Rivalling Melmotte and Cowperwood in double-or-nothing risk-taking is Octave Mouret, the pioneer department-store merchant in Emile Zola?s The Ladies? Paradise (1883). A marketing and public relations genius, Mouret sees himself as being in the business of creating desire. Not for him anything so plebeian as satisfying customer need; he wants Parisian women to swoon with covetousness. To that end, he devises window displays which are hypnotic in their allure, heaps expensive merchandise in grandly careless piles, and holds sales that are downright orgiastic. Mouret is one of Zola?s most triumphant creations: the ultimate seducer.
At the turn of the last century, in Tono-Bungay, HG Wells created another master marketeer: a roly-poly chemist named Uncle Ponderevo. He concocts a quack medicine, calls it Tono-Bungay, adroitly advertises it??are you bored with your Business? Are you bored with your Dinner? Are you bored with your Wife???and makes a fortune. His nephew, George, joins him in the enterprise and discovers the satisfaction that can be found in making business ?hum.?
A dabbler in socialist politics, George is not without his qualms and tells his uncle that Tono-Bungay is ?a damned swindle... selling the cheapest thing possible in the dearest bottle.? Uncle Ponderevo rebuts him: ?I?d like to know what sort of trading isn?t a swindle in its way. Everyone who does a large advertised trade is selling something on the strength of saying it?s uncommon... The point is, George, it makes trade. And the world lives on trade. Commerce! A romantic exchange of commodities and property. Romance. ?Magination. See?? As he prospers, Uncle Ponderevo makes the transition from commerce to finance, from humble abodes to ever larger mansions, and therein his downfall. Like Melmotte, he ?bursted himself.?
When William Dean Howells wrote The Rise of Silas Lapham in the 1880s he was beginning to embrace socialism. Thinking of the urban poor who crowded in Boston tenements, their numbers swelling with waves of immigrants, Howells wrote in a letter to his father, ?I wonder that men are so patient with society as they are.? Yet it didn?t affect his ability to create in Silas, his braggardly Boston paint manufacturer, an ultimately moral businessman for whom readers can feel empathy. (Likewise, HG Wells, an out-and-out socialist, could describe Uncle Ponderevo?s activities with relish.) Flawed though they may be, Melmotte, Cowperwood, Mouret, Lapham, and Ponderevo have reserves of energy and drive, a capacity for self-invention and outsized dreams, an ability to cut to the chase and gauge the future. Ponderevo puts it best when, early in Tono-Bungay, he says of the inhabitants of the sleepy village where he has a pharmacy, ?they?ve no capacity for ideas, they don?t catch on; no Jump about the place, no Life. Live! They trickle? It doesn?t suit me? I?m the cascading sort.?
One could continue in this vein through the 20th century. Some outstanding Anglo-American novels contain businesspeople who spill over with ambition: Sinclair Lewis?s Babbitt (1922); Upton Sinclair?s Oil! (1927); Christina Stead?s House of All Nations (1938); Frederic Wakeman?s The Hucksters (1946); Sloan Wilson?s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955); John Braine?s Room at the Top (1957); and Louis Auchincloss?s The Embezzler (1966). These writers may have been making larger statements about avarice, conformity, social class, boosterism, the rat race, yes-men and so on, but their businesspeople are not straw dolls or cartoon characters; even that uber-schmuck, Babbitt, is portrayed with warmth and acuity.
Gradually, though, as the century progressed, business fiction was all but abandoned by serious novelists. In fact, the problem in the last 25 years is not one of novelistic bad press, but of hardly any press. There have been a number of satires, some brilliant, that fall under the business-novel rubric: Martin Amis?s Money (1984); Tom Wolfe?s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) and A Man in Full (1998); David Lodge?s Nice Work (1988); Bill Morris?s Biography of a Buick (1992); Douglas Coupland?s Microserfs (1995); Po Bronson?s Bombardiers (1995); Julian Barnes?s England, England (1999); and Kurt Andersen?s Turn of the Century (1999). Nothing wrong with satire, but when it gets too broad, too silly, played only for yuks, it loses resonance. Set these aside and sober treatments of business, such as Philip Roth?s American Pastoral (1998) and Richard Powers?s Gain (1998), look scarcer than Republicans for big government.
What happened? Around the turn of the century, taste in fiction began to change. HG Wells had a long-running argument with Henry James over what constituted ?the proper stuff? for novels: Wells championed discursive novels about the larger world and James, ?the intensified rendering of feeling and characterisation.? Wells, commenting on Tono-Bungay, said that it was ?extensive not intensive. That is to say, it presented characters only as part of a scene.? James won, you might say, as did Virginia Woolf. She labelled Wells a ?materialist,? concerned with ?the body and not the spirit?: ??the sooner English fiction turns its back upon the materialists and marches, if only into the desert, the better for its soul.? Legions of novelists obeyed her and James?s call and marched into the desert. They rejected ?scene? and focused instead on dysfunctional families, psychological malaise, affairs of the heart, on eccentricity, freaks.
The slack has been taken up by non-fiction writers using fictional techniques. Business is ?covered? by writers like Connie Bruck, Michael Lewis, Joseph Nocera and Ken Auletta. Good as they are, their books are no substitute for an unflinching work of fiction that engages our public and private selves, our intellects and emotions. Neither are memoirs. Becoming a memoirist instead of a novelist, as Mary Karr declared last year at a New Yorker debate, is like ?wanting to be a great lover and winding up a gynaecologist.?
Our current glut of memoirists and inward-looking novelists is the result of universities discovering the profit in teaching creative writing. Budding novelists now head off to these writing schools and then progress to teaching in them as a way of supporting themselves until, they hope, they write the breakthrough book. Earlier generations of novelists sought experience rather than tenure; they learned trades, entered professions, took to the road or the sea, became journalists or magazine editors. Trollope was a post office administrator; Wells was a draper?s apprentice and then a science teacher; Howells a printer. The old dictum ?write about what you know? should now be amended to ?get out into the world and then write about what you know.?
When John Blundell suggests outreach programmes to send writers to factories, he is on to something; except that David Lodge has already made hay with the idea in Nice Work, one of the best of the 1980s satirical business novels. Robyn Penrose, a leftist semiotician who specialises in the 19th-century industrial novel, is ordered, as part of a chamber of commerce initiative, to shadow Vic Wilcox, the managing director of a gearbox casings factory. Despite her ability to wax at length on the phallocentricity of industrial capitalism, Robyn is ?a virgin factorywise.? The comedy that results from the collision of Robyn and Vic?s world-views is sidesplitting.
Philip Roth makes the same point about unfamiliarity with the means of production in American Pastoral when Swede Levov, a Newark glove manufacturer, is interviewed by a young woman, Rita Cohen: ??my father is the leather scholar. He?s who you should be talking to, but he?s living in Florida. Start my father off about gloves and he?ll talk for two days. That?s typical, by the way. Glovemen love the trade and everything about it. Tell me, have you seen anything manufactured, Miss Cohen??
?I can?t say I have.?
?Never seen anything made??
?Saw my mother make a cake when I was a kid.??
Cohen turns out to be interviewing him in bad faith. She is an associate of his radical daughter, Merry, who has gone underground after blowing up the local post office, in the process killing the town?s doctor as a protest against the war in Vietnam; she?s already made up her mind about Swede. In his turn, Swede launches a tirade against the self-satisfied intellectuals who sheltered Merry after she committed her crime: ?these deep thinkers were the only people he could not stand to be around for long, these people who?d never manufactured anything or seen anything manufactured, who didn?t know what things were made of or how a company worked, who, aside from a house or a car, had never sold anything and didn?t know how to sell anything, who?d never hired a worker, fired a worker, trained a worker, been fleeced by a worker?people who knew nothing of the intricacies or the risks of building a business or running a factory but who none the less imagined they knew everything worth knowing.?
American Pastoral is the blistering story of an American family that makes good in three generations and then, with the fourth generation, has the worm turn with a vengeance, as it did to the utter incomprehension of so many well-meaning strivers during the 1960s: ?for Merry, being an American was loathing America. How could a child of his be so blind as to revile the ?rotten system? that had given her family every opportunity to succeed? To revile her ?capitalist? parents as though their wealth was anything other than the unstinting industry of three generations. The men of three generations, including even himself, slogging through the slime and stink of a tannery. There wasn?t much difference, and she knew it, between hating the US and hating them.? This private tragedy is mirrored by the decline of Newark, New Jersey, as an industrial centre. ?Used to be the city where they manufactured everything. Now it?s the car-theft capital of the world,? Swede tells Nathan Zuckerman, Roth?s alter-ego narrator, who had made the mistake of thinking that Swede, an old classmate, is ?a human platitude? the embodiment of nothing,? because he is, well, a good guy and a glove manufacturer.
David Lodge has resurrected the term ?Condition of England? novels to describe books like Tono-Bungay, where the narrative is shaped by social and economic issues. American Pastoral, then, could properly be called a ?condition of the US? novel, as could Richard Powers?s Gain. Two stories are juxtaposed in Gain; one relating the rise of Clare Soap and Chemical Company from its humble origins as a chandler, the other about Laura Bodey, a real-estate broker in a Clare company town, who develops ovarian cancer, which might or might not have been caused by using Clare products or living near a Clare plant. A writer of formidable intelligence, Powers creates from the two stories a novel of enviable impact and imaginative energy.
The vast conglomerate, Clare Soap and Chemical was founded by three brothers whose father, Jephthah Clare, was a merchant trader. Chance leads the brothers to chandlery and to a medicinal herb that gives their soap its marketing advantage. Persistence causes the firm to shoot up ?like a backwoods boy fed on bear meat.? However, unlike Silas Lapham and Uncle Ponderevo, the Clares are a cautious lot: ?our wives know us. Our children will answer to us. And we?ll never get mixed up in social caprices.? Even more important, they distrust ?extreme profit. Too fat a margin meant something was wrong. Today?s excess spelled tomorrow?s liability. Profit bred complacency, and complacency bred the death of endeavour. Advantage existed only to be reinvested.? Guided by this philosophy, they prosper, weathering economic downturns, to the point that Power says of one Clare that his death certificate might have stated natural causes but ?he died, in fact, of fulfilment.?
Eventually Clare Soap and Chemical adopts a charted management structure and incorporates. And there we have it: a family-owned company one century, a corporate colossus the next, paralleled by characters dying of fulfilment, then environmentally-caused cancer. Powers, though, like Dreiser, is not judgemental; he is inclined to wistfulness, not anger. If only it hadn?t had to end this way, he seems to be saying, with the Clare brothers? legacy of prodigious mercantilism marred by the murky issue of corporate accountability.
In their wide-armed embrace of economic history and their narrow-bore focus on feeling and motive, American Pastoral and Gain are both extensive and intensive in execution, combining the best qualities of Wells and James. In this respect, these works differ from early business novels. At their core, however, is the theme that has always driven business narratives: the effect of rapid economic change on people?s lives. This can help give readers nuanced ways to think about social change and stimulate understanding of the people who are leading it.
If only more novelists would follow the example of Roth and Powers and engage in the big economic issues of our time. Instead, subjects of great importance?globalisation, technology, multinational corporations?and riveting (and riven) personalities?Bill Gates, George Soros, John Malone, Phil Knight?go begging. Michael Crichton ventures into this territory, but he leans toward caricature and sensation. Yet he is at least alert to another overlooked aspect of the genre: the pure storytelling pleasure to be had from the extraordinary business dramas unfolding around us. As Uncle Ponderevo says, ?commerce! A romantic exchange of commodities and property. Romance. ?Magination. See??
