Ogilvy & Mather

Ogilvy & Mather was the London advertising agency where Salman Rushdie returned to copywriting after coming back from India with little money and a large, unfinished novel in mind. The part-time job helped sustain the writing of Midnight’s Children, and the agency’s offices became the unlikely setting in which he chose the book’s title.

Work and circumstances

Rushdie had previously worked for about a year as a copywriter at the agency. When he returned to England from India broke, the novel he wanted to write seemed likely to be long and difficult, and he could not afford to work on it without an income. He persuaded Ogilvy & Mather to rehire him on a part-time basis, working two or three days a week and sharing the arrangement with fellow part-timer and writer Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy.

The agency was associated with the demanding wit of its founder, David Ogilvy, whose maxim about respecting consumers Rushdie recalled, and with the eccentric English of creative director Dan Ellerington. Company lore told of Ellerington’s proposed milk-campaign slogan, “Milk goes down like a dose of salts.” The anecdote gives the workplace a comic texture, while also locating Rushdie’s literary labor in the practical, commercial world of advertising.

Writing alongside advertising

Rushdie’s working week divided his time between advertising assignments and the novel. On Friday nights he returned from the agency’s offices near Waterloo Bridge to Kentish Town, took a bath, and treated the transition as a way of washing the week’s commerce away before resuming the identity of a novelist. In retrospect, he described this routine as evidence of his younger self’s dedication: the part-time job paid the bills, but he tried to keep its demands from displacing the book.

Advertising also taught him discipline. Rather than waiting for an ideal artistic mood, he learned to carry out the task in front of him and came to treat writing as work. He recalled taking several hours away from campaigns for fresh cream cakes, Aero chocolate bars, and the Daily Mirror to resolve a problem that had followed him to his desk: what to call the novel. The commercial assignments and the literary decision occupied the same working life, not separate worlds.

Choosing the novel’s title

At Ogilvy & Mather, Rushdie tested two possible titles, Midnight’s Children and Children of Midnight, typing them one after the other repeatedly. He concluded that Children of Midnight was banal and that Midnight’s Children was the stronger choice. Settling on the title, he recalled, also helped him understand the book more clearly and made it somewhat easier to write.

The agency’s significance is therefore practical and creative at once. It was a source of necessary income, a place where routine sharpened the writer’s discipline, and the setting for a decision that clarified the novel’s identity. The tension between advertising’s commercial tasks and the book’s imaginative ambition became part of the circumstances in which the novel took shape.