In previous newsletters I’ve offered up items from my back catalogue, works in progress, and things that are just never going to see the light of day (and if you’d like to upgrade your subscription level you can also read the ongoing serialisation of my first finished but unpublished book, a travelogue about living in Madrid called Going Native).
So this week I thought I’d let you have a sneak preview of something that won’t be published until next year, an article for the Idler magazine in my regular column devoted to idler champions (previously features have been the likes of Richard Linklater, Jack Favell (from Rebecca), Ian Fleming, Cosima von Bonin, Margaret Atwood, Hugh Conway (from Lost Horizon) and Izaak Walton). Happy idling!
It would be something of a push to describe Stephen Potter (1900 -1969) as an idler. Yet this English lecturer at Birkbeck who was also a novelist, the author of the first book on DH Lawrence, an advertising copywriter, and a BBC radio producer was also the man who brought us the theory of ‘oneupmanship’.
The key text in what became a series of books on the subject was his first, The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship: Or the Art of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating. Published in 1947 with illustrations by Frank Wilson, it was an immediate success.
This and later ‘–manship’ books (especially Lifemanship in 1950, and One-Upmanship two years later, all of which I bought as a teenager from Ken Spelman’s secondhand bookshop in York) were parodies of self-help books, with usefully detailed explanatory diagrams. As the subtitle indicates, the focus is on strategems for getting ahead in life without chicanery or being a blaggard. These are ploys which might not actually win you a game of chess, but do help you appear to be well read when you are not or how to talk about wine “without knowing a Hock from a Horse’s Neck”.
Potter claims in the introduction that he was inspired to develop the theme by a game of tennis in 1931 in which he partnered the philosopher and broadcaster C.E.M. Joad. Losing to a couple of younger and more talented players, Joad asked their opponents after very obviously hitting a ball long: “Kindly say clearly, please, whether the ball was in or out.” Without acusing them of cheating, they consequently felt their sportsmanship was maybe a little poor, a sensation which affected the quality of their play, and which led directly to Potter and Joad winning the match. In later life, Potter and his wife used to play doubles at their Red House home near Aldeburgh against Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears who later bought it from them.
Underwriting all these pieces of advice is an idleresque determination to do well while at the same time not putting in what politicians like to ludicrously describe as “the hard yards” (thus, ‘Donmanship’ is “the art of criticising without actually listening”). It’s mostly a question of psychology, suggesting to your ‘opponent’ that they are in some, however small, way inferior to you to gain yourself a minor advantage. They are, in poet Stephen Spender’s description of the earlier works, “two of the most illuminating books about the English character ever written, and perhaps they apply to far more than the English”.
Those not aware of the books themselves may in fact be familiar with some of the leading ruses. In addition to a series in the1970s featuring Richard Briers called One-upmanship, they also appeared in School for Scoundrels, the marvellous 1960 comedy starring Alastair Sim as Potter, Ian Carmichael as the nice young chap in need of some street savvy, and Terry-Thomas in excellent form as a terrible cad. Carmichael’s character learns how to take down his bumptious chief clerk a peg or two, beat mildly crooked secondhand car salesmen at their own game, and win the hand of the apple of his eye (spoiler: he does this by subverting all the tricks he’s learnt along the way). Sim’s character pithily explains that “the purpose of your life must be to be one up” on the basis that “he who is not one up is one down”.
Ruper Hart-Davis, Potter’s publisher, acknowledged the success of the concept but wrote privately to his friend and former master at Eton George Lyttelton that he found Potter’s manuscripts tiring to correct, not least because his manuscripts were “a mass of dirty bits of paper, vilely typed, corrected in illegible biro, episodic and half-revised.” Sounds very familiar.
While some may question if, despite the disclaimer, much of the advice essentially does fall under the definition of cheating, it’s still hard to dislike the chap who wrote a short pamphlet in 1965 called Relaxmanship in which he suggested getting one over fellow air passengers who immediately flock to the centre aisle on landing by remaining seated and opening a book of Pascal’s Pensées.