You’re not to know this, of course. But there’s something about her voice that makes you suspect. Every time you ring her you apologise at length for wasting her time – and waste minutes more of it in the process.
All this is bad enough, for a sensitive person like yourself. But then something even worse happens. A terrible day comes when you phone, and she’s not there. She’s left the organisation. Probably she made a mess of the Pacific Basin expansion programme, thanks to perpetual distractions and interruptions. Your magic formula no longer works. Your pass has been cancelled, your thread into the labyrinth has snapped.
You get put through instead to someone whose name you don’t catch. You tell them your name. They don’t catch it. You explain what you want. They sigh. You ask them humbly who else you should speak to. They don’t know. You are out in the cold again.
And now your phone’s ringing, and there’s someone called Sandra Sprott on the line for you. ‘I’m terribly sorry to bother you – I know how busy you must be.’ You are very busy, it’s true, but you don’t like to say so because there’s something vaguely familiar about the name – you have a feeling that she may be the relative of a friend, or the friend of a relative. ‘No, no,’ you lie, and you have to wait while she wastes yet more time on expressions of gratitude before she explains that her children are doing a project at school on the Industrial Revolution, and that she remembered your name because you were something to do with history …
(1994)
Save it for the stairs
Esprit de l’escalier is a maddening form of cerebral activity; but politesse de l’escalier is a good deal worse. I’m an expert on all branches of the subject; I think of pretty well everything in life, from witty replies to fundamental moral attitudes, only afterwards, on the way downstairs, and it’s the belated realisation of my failure to have made the appropriate polite remarks which casts me into the greatest despair of all.
It’s not only on escaliers that the point comes sickeningly home to one, of course, but in the rue, the bain, and perhaps most frequently of all, in the lit, in the milieu of the nuit. Suddenly the faulty connection sparks, and a dismal shock goes through one. Oh, God – one never asked O. J. Sprout how his poor wife was! Holy heaven – one never thanked Christopher and Lavinia Crumble for putting one in touch with that marvellous little man of theirs in Market Strayborough! One never congratulated Thorsten Trouncer on the birth of his son! Never asked Diminua Pinn if she’d got that job she was up for! Never evinced any surprise or pleasure to see Mrs Haddock out of hospital again!
And once more it’s borne in upon one what an insufferable egotist one is – indifferent to other people’s triumphs and sufferings, forgetful of their kindness as soon as one has made use of it. How hurt all those poor souls must have felt, as they struggled bravely to smile and talk about politics, when all they really wanted was to hear some passing word of interest in the size of their family, some grudging expression of sympathy on the state of their pancreas!
Except, of course, that they almost certainly wanted nothing of the sort.
Because the odd truth about the expression of polite interest – impossible as this is to believe when one has failed to offer it – is that people really don’t want to be on the receiving end of it. It’s not pleasing but irritating to have to explain for the twentieth time why one’s hand is in bandages; not gratifying but embarrassing to announce for the thirtieth time that one got the job, or the prize, or the nomination; and not soothing but humiliating to have to report, for the fortieth time, that one failed to. Pregnancy is a great condition for attracting polite interest, various women have told me. They have sometimes felt, they said, that if one more kindly inquirer asked politely when the baby was due they would fall into screaming hysterics and give birth on the spot.
In fact, as modern politeness analysis shows, the principal – and often the only – beneficiary from the expression of polite interest is the interest-taker, and not the subject of the interest at all. The subject is merely being exploited to increase the interest-taker’s sense of psychosocial well-being. Or so some of us at the Self-Justification Research Centre feel.
Let us examine a typical case in our records. ‘James,’ a chronically inadequate interest-taker, has been subject since childhood to politesse de l’escalier and subsequent bouts of remorse. In a recurring situation, he finds himself up against ‘Oscar,’ a skilled and relentless interest-taker with deeply sympathetic eyes and a forehead already wrinkled with altruistic anxiety. The following typical encounter makes it fairly clear which of them it is who is gaining the greater psychosocial profit from the relationship.
‘Are you feeling better?’ asks Oscar as soon as they meet, with a specially solicitous smile.
‘Better?’ queries James nervously. ‘Better than what?’
‘Better than you were last time we met. You had a dreadful cold, if you remember.’
‘Oh, did I?’
‘Oh, a terrible one. You still look a tiny bit under the weather, as a matter of fact. How do you feel?’
James starts to explain that he does have a slight but tiresome catarrh, and is still coughing a little. Oscar nods earnestly, evidently appalled by every symptom. Then suddenly James’s tone becomes a little uncertain. He has just been struck, as any competent politeness analyst would realise immediately, by the faint but troubling recollection that Oscar himself is a martyr to some very serious and painful disease.
But before he can remember exactly what it is, Oscar is asking him how he enjoyed his recent trip to Boulogne. James holds forth at some length on the amusing ubiquity of English fish and chips in the town, etc., etc. – when suddenly the ancedotes falter, and a strained look comes over his face. The uneasy suspicion has just come to him, as we politeness analysts see at once, that Oscar has just got back from Peru. Or is just off to Peking. Or was born and brought up in Boulogne. Or …
But already Oscar is asking if James’s son enjoyed his birthday the previous week. Open alarm seizes James. Does this mean that Oscar sent a present, he thinks, and that I’m supposed to thank him for it? Did I send his child a present on its birthday? Does he have children?
‘And that reminds me,’ says Oscar, his brow wrinkling anxiously once more. ‘How is Deirdre, your second cousin once removed? Has she recovered from that rather nasty fall she had the year before last?’
James mumbles in incoherent consternation. What fall? What second cousin once removed? How does Oscar know more about his family than he does himself?
‘You were telling me about it,’ says Oscar helpfully, ‘when you came to dinner last (and I really must thank you once again for your kindness in coming). Remember?’
Almost certainly not. But he will, Oscar, he will. On the escalier afterwards. Together with the fact that you got a Nobel Prize last week, are just about to swim the Atlantic single-handed, and have still not had back the dinner-jacket, the electric drill, and the copy of ‘Finnegans Wake’ you lent him.
But it’s James, as we at the Self-Justification Research Centre believe, who will go to heaven.
(1967)
School of applied art
There’s a lady in Kensington, according to the papers, called Mrs Thorne, who runs conversation classes ‘for the sophisticate who finds small talk difficult.’ In seven hours, at 10 guineas the course, she teaches her case-load of sophisticates to get round their incapacity by talking about art.
We sophisticates have long known about the old art dodge, of course. The trouble has been up to now (if my own case is typical) that while we find small talk difficult, we don’t get on too well with the big stuff, either. This has cost some of us dear in lost opportunities for business and romance.
Mrs Thorne has hit upon two great complementary principles which make big topics accessible to small talkers. ‘It’s just a question of learning what to say,’ she insists; and, ‘It doesn’t matter what people say as long as they say something.’
Arm
ed before and behind with these two weapons of war, the sophisticate advances into any social gathering and merely looks round the room until his eye falls upon a picture. If it happens to be a Constable, Mrs Thorne advises that you should mention you have just come back from the Constable country. If it’s a Van Gogh, she suggests greeting it with a remark like ‘I always wonder what sort of painting he’d have done if he’d been entirely sane.’ (If you want to know what to say if it happens to be a Vermeer or a Leonardo, or a Guardi or a Braque, take your 10 guineas along and ask Mrs Thorne.)
Anyway, it’s clear that Mrs Thorne is providing in seven hours what at the universities it still takes three solid years to acquire – a thorough practical grounding in the humanities, of the sort which years of experience have shown to fit graduates for a career in industry or government, for the management of scientists, and for the selection of a wife or husband.
Take the case of Harley Sparrowdew, bachelor and sophisticate. In the documentary film I am preparing on the Thorne system for Unesco, we see him at a brilliant gathering of industrialists, playwrights and Cabinet Ministers, a vodkatini in one beautifully manicured hand, gazing profoundly at a rather unsophisticated painting of a yellow chair. Suddenly be becomes aware that the lovely sophisticate Soignée Cheroot is standing silently beside him, lost in contemplation of the picture, too.
‘What I always wonder,’ breathes Soignée raptly, ‘is what sort of painting he’d have done if he’d been entirely sane.’
Sparrowdew turns and gazes at her. For a moment the world seems to stand still.
‘You wonder that?’ he asks softly. ‘Because so do I. Always. Night and day I ask myself, “What kind of thing would this man have done if he’d been normal?”’
‘I know. I know. The question haunts one. Oh God, I know the feeling!’
‘It seems to me that if he could just have got away from this terrible sick obssession with chairs, he might – who knows? – have painted something quite normal. A table – a sideboard.’
‘Yes! Or a hatstand, or a cocktail-cabinet. Something clean and wholesome! Something that says yes to life!’
‘Yes! That’s it exactly …’
A century later – or is it only 10 minutes? – they have slipped away from the vacuous social throng, and are sitting at a sidewalk café beneath the stars. Somewhere, soft music is playing.
‘I realised you were an Old Thornian, too, from the first moment,’ Sparrowdew is saying, gazing into her eyes. ‘I felt at once that we had the same background, that we were interested in the same things. I felt – oh, I don’t know – we spoke each other’s language. When you said that wonderful thing about Van Gogh – “I always wonder,” you said (I shall never forget it), “what sort of painting would he have done if he had been entirely sane” – when you said that I felt somehow it was all preordained. I felt as if our whole thing was written down somewhere in some great book. You know what I mean?’
‘Yes! I feel that if I hadn’t said it first you would have said it yourself.’
‘I feel that, too. It’s your tenderness, your deep concern for Van Gogh, that moves me.’
‘Our education taught us both to ask questions.’
‘To wonder. To have a sense of wonder.’
‘Yes! And the tremendous freedom with which one learnt to speak!’
‘The feeling that it didn’t matter what one said – all that mattered was the act of saying, the act of being articulate!’
They sit in silence for some minutes, absorbed in the thoughts they have conjured up.
‘It was terrible when one first came down from Mrs Thorne’s,’ says Sparrowdew slowly. ‘One’s first contact with the real world outside. It seemed so – so bleak and grimy. One went from party to party, and nowhere did one see a Constable or a Van Gogh on the wall. One’s education seemed wasted, irrelevant.’
‘I felt exactly the same. Exactly!’
‘The odd Piper lithograph, perhaps, the occasional Colquhoun sketch. The phrases one had learnt sounded hollow in one’s mouth.’
‘But gradually …’
‘Gradually it began to make sense. People listened. Personnel officers – managing directors. Older and wiser heads than one’s own saw the advantage of having a man with a sense of curiosity about Van Gogh in charge of research.’
‘Or on the Board.’
‘Slowly everything fell into place. One perhaps bought one’s Constable or one’s Van Gogh. Bit by bit, with maturity, the point of it all became clear. All one lacked was someone who understood to share it with.’
‘Until tonight …’
‘Until tonight … Did I tell you I’d just come back from the Constable country, incidentally? I’ve got one or two slides I took of it, if it’s not too late to come back to my place and have a look at them …’
(1965)
Scrapbook for 1964
It was a wonderful summer that year. Everyone seemed to be at the seaside, enjoying the long sunlit days without a care in the world …
It was the year of the Mods and Rockers … of ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ and ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’. Everyone was dancing the Shake, the Block and the Blue Beat. In America a man brought out a two-piece swimsuit with only one piece …
But over it all hung a shadow. For this was 1964 – the twenty-fifth anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War. In grim sunless offices all over Europe hard-faced men in shirtsleeves were plotting to unleash upon the world the most terrible campaign of war memoirs, war films, war poetry, war photographs, war histories and war reappraisals that mankind had ever seen …
Among the crowds in Britain as the crisis drew on that fateful summer was one man who sunbathed and danced the Shake with a somewhat pensive expression. From time to time he would stop singing ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’ for a moment, and thoughtfully jot down something on a scrap of paper. A perfectly ordinary man, you might have said, jotting something down on a perfectly ordinary scrap of paper …
But what he was writing was a diary – a minute-by-minute account of his experiences in that fateful year. His intention was to place it in a sealed envelope for publication on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the outbreak of the Great Memoir War, as a form of endowment assurance for his old age. We are privileged to be able to publish it now, twenty-five years ahead of its time.
Thursday: Lunch at Reggie Tooth’s with the Dicky Dymchurches and Sandy Troon. The talk is of nothing but the crisis – the papers are full of it every day. Only the Daily Express strikes a more hopeful note – ‘No War Anniversary This Year’. They argue that only a hopeless pessimist could believe that the silver anniversary of the Second World War would fall in the same year as the golden anniversary of the First. They say the conjunction must be the result of some official muddle.
I ask Reggie, who has highly placed contacts in the diary and calendar industry, if he thinks there might be anything in this. He says he thinks not, and I’m afraid he is right. We have managed to turn a blind eye to the ominous events of the last few years – we did nothing about the anniversary of Caesar’s invasion of Britain in 1945; we looked the other way in 1955, when we were faced with the 500th anniversary of the outbreak of the Wars of the Roses. But I’ve met no one who doesn’t think we’re in for it this time.
Friday: Sunshine, ripe corn, red apples warm to the touch – the grim old portents of impending war memoirs are everywhere. I cannot help recalling with a shudder the blazing summer of 1959, when we numbly watched the remorseless approach of the 105th anniversary of the Crimean War.
Spend the afternoon looking at the grey, sunless holiday snaps of happier years.
Saturday: Down to the Dymchurches’ place for the weekend, with Reggie, Arthur Wissop, Eddie Nockstruck, and some of the Bewers-Loadwater crowd. Over lunch Arthur says the situation is even more serious than we suppose – he has private information that 1964 is also the 225th anniversary of the War of Jenkin’s Ear.
Eddie suggests that there might still
be a chance to avoid it, if the Government took the bold step of going over to the duodecimal system, which would make it only the 189th anniversary.
‘That would merely postpone the evil day, Eddie,’ said Reggie wisely. ‘We should soon be landed with the 200th duodecimal anniversary. You have to face up to these things one way or another.’
Eddie began to mutter something under his breath. ‘What was that?’ asked Reggie sharply. ‘I said it’s exactly 2,182 years since the outbreak of the Second Punic War,’ replied Eddie. ‘Why aren’t you worrying about that?’
‘Dammit, Eddie,’ said Reggie coldly, ‘there are some rules in this game.’
Sunday: Gathered around the Dymchurches’ television set after dinner to watch for the latest bulletins. A queer, tense atmosphere. After the news Huw Wheldon broadcasts to the nation. ‘It is my duty to inform you,’ he says, his voice almost breaking, ‘of two grave new developments in the situation. It is now clear that this year is the 140th anniversary of the First Burmese War, and the 125th anniversary of the China War of 1839. We must all be ready for celebrations at any moment.’
After the broadcast we sit in silence for some minutes, each absorbed in his own thoughts. Then Reggie says levelly that we have a long haul ahead of us – he mentions among other things the centenary of the Franco–Prussian War in 1970, and the bicentenary of the American War of Independence in 1975. Eddie begins to say that he can see no earthly reason for commemorating the American War of Independence, since we lost it, but even his friends shout him down. I do not think he speaks for Britain in her new mood.
Monday: Spend the day on war memoir work, patrolling the streets recording the hours of sunshine, and looking for apparently ordinary men doing apparently ordinary things. Meet Guppy Trottle outside Boodle’s. ‘Do you realise,’ he says, ‘that it is now exactly twenty-four hours since this time yesterday?’ Make a note of it. Seems of little meaning or consequence now, like everything else, but one knows how solid and significant it will appear when it is recalled twenty-five years hence.
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