by Toby Litt
All this machismo fed in to my pre-Culver House fantasies of becoming a soldier.
‘My father,’ I used to tell my friends, ‘was in the army.’
He enjoyed it, but left as soon as he could – these were not his best days. Those came quite a bit later.
*
My father was only ever ‘Dave’ to Australians, and down Flitwick Squash Club, where ‘Davids’ were completely unknown.
I was ‘Tobes’, my sisters ‘George’ and ‘Charl’, and my mother (as she winced) ‘Hell’.
This isn’t to say my father isn’t good at informality. He can talk to and get on with anyone – that’s his best gift. I think he shares this character trait with William. They both liked to get on with everyone they met. With William, I think it was almost a mania – and one that eventually undermined him.‡‡ With my father, it seemed something natural and relaxed. On family holidays in France, he would embarrass my sisters and I by chatting (in French) to the patissier and the boulanger, and anyone else who happened to be in the shop. He would make them smile and laugh and nod, we – hanging around over towards the door – didn’t quite know how or why.
‘Da-ad, come on.’
Within the antiques trade, which can be extremely bitchy and factional, he had fallings-out but – as far as I know – he did forty years business without making an enemy. Perhaps this was because he was never quite as successful as he might have been.
The great What If? in my father’s career was what if he had taken or gone shares on a shop in London – some eponymous emporium, halfway along the Fulham Road. This would have meant moving up from brown furniture and, instead, buying and selling the gilded, the inlaid and the lacquered.
There were offers and opportunities (dealers love to talk about trading up), but Dad never really wanted to risk making the leap. He’d kept the Dunstable Street shop in Ampthill, and also capitalized on the pine craze by opening another shop, Yesterday’s Pine. Later on, he switched from selling English to French furniture. It was easier to get hold of. For years, he had a stand at Battersea Decorative Antiques & Textiles Fair. This chi-chi event takes place in spring, autumn and summer in a permanent plastic tent near the Peace Pagoda, beside the muddy Thames.
And it’s in Battersea, I believe, that my father had his best days – on the stand, just chatting away. He would charm rich Americans, and rich English. They were, he says, ‘very nice people’.
Within a couple of minutes, they had ceased to be customers and he – like the very best salesmen – had ceased to be a salesman. I often watched this, proud and slightly awed at my father’s likeability.
The little group of them would stand, close together, surrounded by stock, mirrored in the lichen-like mottle of Louis XVI glass, talking about schools or holidays or dentistry and – oh, yes, we’ll take it – somehow, without it being difficult or even a decision, the deal would be done. Almost without having been spoken, the price was agreed. Everyone was happy, laughing, nodding.
A few days afterward, my father would deliver the chandelier or candlesticks to some very large residence – to an American wife or, sometimes, to Lady this or Viscount that. And he’d have a cup of tea, and continue to chat. His customer would close the door on him feeling better – they’d feel like his friend, because that’s what they were. And in this way, he paid for my food, clothes, and the second half of my education.
‘I had some wonderful customers,’ Dad says, with emotion. ‘We had some in the South of France – we more or less furnished their house.’
What it comes down to, this gift, is simple: my father likes people, and so people like him back.
But not so much they start to call him Dave; they’re not generally that sort. His customers were relaxed, polite and keen to get on with everyone.
Unlike some people I could mention.
* Wrestling and Wrestlers: Biographical Sketches of Celebrated Athletes of the Northern Ring, Wordsworth Press, 1893, p. 65.
† Years later, in one of his Letters on Canada, No. 3, William refers to ‘such a laborious life as tilling the ground’.
‡ Wrestling and Wrestlers: Biographical Sketches of Celebrated Athletes of the Northern Ring, Wordsworth Press, 1893 p. 65.
§ Wrestliana, 1st ed., p. 48; 2nd ed., p. 32.
¶ Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success, Little, Brown, 2008.
|| Matthew Syed, Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice, 4th Estate, 2010.
** Susanna Blamire, The Muse of Cumberland, ‘Stoklewath; or, the Cumbrian Village,’ from The Poetical Works of Miss Susanna Blamire, collected by Henry Lonsdale, M.D., 1842, pp. 11–12.
†† Most of the translations will be published in Impossible Green Country, Jantar Press, 2018.
‡‡ There is evidence that William’s brewing business failed because he was too generous in his terms. The Memoirist says, ‘he refused nobody who thought proper to favour him with an order’ and that ‘his book debts soon became very heavy’. I think William was afraid to ask men to pay him back what they owed him, because then they would like him less.
7
ONE OF THEM LOSES
‘When two men say Hello in the street, one of them loses.’
I say this once, slowly and clearly, and then – the only statement I ever repeat immediately – I say it again, with exactly the same intonation.
‘When two men say Hello in the street, one of them loses.’
I want it to sound a little intimidating, but also mock-macho. My teaching style needs to fit what I’m teaching, and this sentence is one I use when I am teaching dialogue.
In the creative writing class, I identify three kinds of dialogue: Winning, Hiding and Ignoring. Two Men Say Hello is my best example of Winning. What it demonstrates is how little is needed for a decisive shift in power relations to take place. This is the kind of dialogue you often hear between armed, up against it men, in Hollywood movies.* ‘I’m top dog.’ ‘No, I’m top dog.’
In How to Write a Blockbuster Screenplay manuals of the less thoughtful variety, the student is advised to rack up the conflict in each scene – particularly if the scene feels pointless or flat. If you can get the characters screaming at one another, the theory goes, the truth of who they are and what is at stake between them will come out more clearly and entertainingly.
In a restaurant, all the other customers will pretend to ignore a couple bitching at one another at conversational level, but if the couple start screaming everyone is granted permission to turn and gawp.
After a few months in the British Library, I had moved on from historical research to research into wrestling – specifically Cumberland and Westmorland wrestling. It was taking me over. I was starting to think of everything in terms of wrestling.
Speech was wrestling. Pursuing any kind of a career was wrestling. Getting a sentence into proper shape – wasn’t that wrestling, too?
As I tried to get to know William better, I thought about what we had in common.
William had been a writer. With his novel, Henry & Mary, William had entered into competition with the great novelist Walter Scott, and he’d lost.
With Wrestliana, William had written a book that people still wanted to read two hundred years after it was published. Would I manage that, or would he beat me?
For several years, I attributed the Two Men quote to Norman Mailer. I remembered reading it, or something like it, and I remembered it being something to do with the hyper-machismo of Norm. It didn’t appear in, but was very much in keeping with, the rest of Martin Amis’s wonderful profile of the great American novelist and plonker, republished in The Moronic Inferno.† Here Amis tells how Mailer got into a fight with two sailors whilst walking his poodle in New York. The sailors called Mailer’s poodle queer, and nobody called Mailer’s dog queer. Mailer returned home, having taken a hell of a beating, his left eye practically hanging out, but ecstatic, on cloud nine. The implication is: Mailer only took his poodle for a walk – that
Mailer only had a poodle, in order to get into fights.
After a while, I became uneasy about using a quote I couldn’t locate – particularly because some students took offence to what it implied about men, about human beings, about a general lack of human niceness. It made them feel awkward, particularly in the coffee break that usually followed this part of the session. A humanity that is seen as speaking this way is all about the Will to Power. Winning dialogue can seem to turn everyone into Hitler.
I once got into an argument with the writer John Boyne. ‘All that “one of them loses” stuff,’ he said, ‘It’s crap – it’s just crap.’ We were in a bar in Norwich. This was years after we both attended Malcolm Bradbury’s creative writing MA. In John Boyne’s novels – such as The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas and Crippen – straightforward self-sacrificing goodness exists, and characters often speak to one another without attempting (in the words of chess Grandmaster Nigel Short‡) to ‘trap, dominate, fuck’.
But when I’m teaching dialogue, I am trying to stop students writing second gear novels – and I am trying to help them avoid the worst kind of dialogue, that in which it is obvious that the characters are speaking not to one another but out of the page, directly at the reader, on behalf of the writer. (I want to get this piece of information across, the writer thinks, but I don’t want it to be some heavy chunk of exposition, so I’ll have X and Y take a drive through some symbolically meaningful scenery and talk it all through, even though they’re both saying stuff they know the other already knows.)
On my website, I used to have a page called A S K I N G S, where I went fishing for answers to questions such as:
If a human body were dumped from a spaceship, what would happen to it in terms of decomposition? Would it freeze, desiccate and then shatter?
Where does that fluffy, scummy stuff come from, that seems to end up in the bottom of a glass of water in which home-made ice cubes have melted?
Why is nothing that we eat in England made out of pigs’ milk?
Did dinosaurs get cancer?
What is the shortest English word containing all the vowels, a e i o u, in that order and also in any order?
I put up the Mailer quote in 2004, with a plea to help me identify it. Three years later, after Mailer died, web-friend Iain Campbell pointed out that ‘in his recent obituary in The Guardian, they mentioned that quote though the exact phrasing is different. They give it as: “When two men pass another in the street and say ‘Good morning,’ he once said, ‘there’s a winner and a loser’.”’
In 2012, another email, this time from James Scudamore, came telling me that ‘I’ve just read this in Advertisements for Myself:
If anyone can pin Tolstoy, it is Ernest H. Somewhere in Hemingway is the hard mind of a small-town boy, the kind of boy who knows you have a real cigar only when you are the biggest man in town, because to be just one of the big men in town is tiring, much too tiring. You inspire hatred, and what is worse than hatred, a wave of cross-talk in everyone around you. You are considered important by some and put down by others, and every time you meet a new man, the battle is on.
Mailer’s sentences are diffuse and un-hard-hitting. (I prefer my version.) But the thought, and the sentiment, are pure American machismo. (I’ll come back to this, and to the dire consequences it has for pencils.) The moral, though, could be derived from any episode of any great English TV sitcom – ‘I’m Alan Partridge’ or ‘The Office’ or ‘The Thick of It’. Each utterance however small is, in the mind of its speaker, for the win. Every single word is intended to be the last word.
Even when they’re not wrestling, men are always wrestling.
When the dialogue class resumes, I get the students to write a dialogue in which two men (I make it men to keep it simple) are talking about a subject that is not the real issue between them. Their subject might be how they wash their cars or the latest X-Men movie, doesn’t matter. What the student needs to ensure is that, with every new thing that is said, by one man or the other, there is escalation – the conflict must increase, the stakes must get higher. The both of them want to end up as Top Dog.
And then, when all the students have had time to write a page, usually in a room that has suddenly energized, I get some of them (the ones who sniggered as they scribbled, or looked particularly appalled at what they were allowing themselves to put on paper) to read their dialogue aloud.
Before they start, I ask the others in the class to listen out for any hint of conciliation or backing down. Are there any lines where one of the men says ‘Maybe’ or ‘You might be right about that?’ If so, cut ’em. Within this model of dialogue, these lines need to be crossed out in heavy black marker. They’re not getting us where we need to be going – which is not just conflict but violence.
Hopefully, someone within the group will have been forced – due to the level of conflict their dialogue has reached early on – to have A or B make a physical threat, or throw a punch, or – best of all (for teaching purposes) – produce a gun. This will allow me to go smoothly into a digression on Quentin Tarantino’s addiction to Mexican Standoffs.
It’s no accident, I’ll say, that in the first four scripts of QT’s that made it to the screen – Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, Pulp Fiction, Natural Born Killers – there is a Mexican Standoff. Meaning, that everyone in the scene – five, six or seven characters – has a gun, draws it, and points it at the person who is pissing them off the most. (This is a trick Tarantino, at least in part, took from Hong Kong cinema of the 1980s. It’s still there in his more recent films, too – the ones I haven’t bothered seeing.)
When someone pulls a gun, I tell the class, they take off from speech – the argument is over. Speech has been outdone. The gun-pointer may not have won the argument, but they are winning the exchange. They are Top Dog. The defeated man is likely to speak a line to the effect of, ‘Hey, anything you say, buddy.’
With a gun at my temple, if the bearer requires, I will admit that 2+2=5, that I know the combination to the safety deposit box, that my mother was a whore and that I like nothing better than sucking dick, etcetera. Anything to make it alive into the next moment.
Who is Top Dog? It’s the guy with the biggest gun.
The problem for the screenwriter (Bonjour, Quentin) is that, once that first gun is out of the holster and pointing at the first head, you’ve reached a definite highpoint, so how do you get out of the scene? Do you allow an anti-climax, or do you try to find an even higher high?
Answer, more guns. Two, three, four, five, six, seven.
Answer, Mexican Standoff.
A rapid succession of better and better tooled up Top Dogs can be thrilling—
click, ‘I win’
click, ‘No, I win’
clunk, ‘No, I win’
ker-CHUNK, ‘I think you gentlemen will find that I win.’
As Sean Connery’s character in The Untouchables puts it, definitively: ‘He pulls a knife, you pull a gun; he shends one of yoursh to the hoshpital, you shend one of hish to the morgue.’
All together now: ‘Thatsh the Schicago whey.’
Brilliantly macho dialogue from master of brilliantly macho dialogue, David Mamet.
And so, the logical outcome of employing the Winning model of dialogue is the Mexican Standoff. If you keep escalating conflict, you’ll pretty soon get to guns. Or you’ll get to the arch-villain with his finger on the red button of his Doomsday Device.
Not all Winning dialogue gets here, outside Hollywood. Mostly, dialogue stays on the level of truth-telling. What’s beneath it is the question, ‘Who is right, you or me?’
In a simplistic way, within these limits, Knowledge is Power. What tactics does X use to defeat Y? He tells Y something Y didn’t know. ‘You think you know everything? You are such a sap.’ Or, in philosophical language, ‘My world-picture is fundamentally more accurate than yours.’ For example, ‘It’s not just that I drive a better car than you. All this time you think you’ve had a happ
y marriage, your wife’s been sleeping with Z.’
Serious, John Boyne-type disgust can occur, within students, at this point. ‘But people just aren’t like that.’ This often means Men may be like that but women aren’t like that.
*
Often, to teach is to provoke. I don’t expect students to accept this model of dialogue as accurately describing all human interactions.
But after reading this chapter, I invite you to watch any Hollywood movie. Could Winning dialogue explain why the characters seem to be so unnecessarily pissed at each other? Why are they always trying to teach one another lessons?
Dismiss my conjecture – then, when you’re feeling smug, listen to the next conversation behind you on the bus, or between two children in a shop. Tell me no one was trying to win.
I once heard a horrible news story, about a fatal shooting in America. Two young men had gotten into an argument about whether Paris was in France or France was in Paris. This doesn’t seem worth dying over, though there’s clearly a right and wrong answer. But that wasn’t the issue – it was whether X or Y had the truest picture of the world. And everything depends on that.
The loser of any exchange can still depart the scene, believing they are right – unless they are dead.
Being in the wrong is right next to being wrong and being wrong is just another way of saying Loser.
