Boldly meaningless genius
Andrew Gimson
THE COMPLETE UPMANSHIP by Stephen Potter Grafton, f6.95 Gamesmanship began, it will be re- membered, on 8 June 1931, when C. Joad and S. Potter, playing for Birkbeck Col- lege, were 40-love down in the first game of a match against two much younger, better players from University College. Joad had managed, at the second attempt, to make contact with a service, but vol- leyed it into the stop-netting behind the opposing pair. As the server was crossing to serve to Potter, Joad, at exactly the right moment (when the server was not less than one foot and not more than two feet beyond the centre of the court), called across the net, in an even tone: 'Kindly say clearly, please, whether the ball was in or out.'
Joad and Potter went on to win the match, and Potter, having discovered his sublimely anti-meritocratic theme, to de- velop it in four books: Gamesmanship (1947), Lifemanship (1950), One, Upmanship (1952) and Supermanship (1958). Rupert Hart-Davis published these as one volume in 1970, and they are now reprinted as a paperback.
Read together, the four manuals assume the air of a wildly experimental, brilliantly funny novel. The Complete Upmanship is not yet, so far as I know, a set book, but we cannot exclude the possibility that its au- thor will one day be described, by some gormless literary critic, as the Laurence Sterne of the 20th century. It has been said that Potter was disappointed not to achieve wider recognition for his more 'serious' works. It is, however, his comic master- piece which could give employment to countless post-graduate students, trying vainly to distinguish history from fiction in TCU.
Potter early defines his subject as 'The Art of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating' — and without, as he constantly implies, being much good at them. Accord- ing to turn,
The assiduous student of gamesmanship has little time for the minutiae of the game itself — little opportunity for learning how to play the shots, for instance.
The gamesman may make an attempt to win, but not by working at his game in the conventional way. Anything, it is sug- gested, is preferable to this sort of effort, which might in any case fail for want of natural ability. So the best shot to practise for snooker or billiards 'is undoubtedly the Imitation Fluke'. Turning to bridge, we find that 'Better than ten books on the theory of bridge are the ten minutes a day spent in practising how to deal,' and better still is `Meynell's misdeal', when you give yourself 12 and your partner 14 cards, Then pick up the cards and begin a wild and irrational bidding sequence.' Turning to motoring, we learn that Godfrey Plaste, the carman, was a bad driver, but spent nine months teaching himself to back, so that he could 'always approach one-way streets from the wrong end and then go up them backwards. "Saves time," he said.'
Whatever subject Potter considers, he shows his readers how to substitute wit for hard graft:
Our ten-days' course for young doctors how different, in its brevity, compression and point, from the seven years of grinding work in the more orthodox schools of medic- al education.
The expert is to be toppled, not by becoming an even greater expert but by employing disruptive gambits based on bluff, of which the even most famous bears repetition: 'Yes, but not in the South.'
This joke, of appearing good at things while being bad at them, runs with amazing vitality through three volumes. In the fourth, Supermanship, the only one with which I was not already familiar, the tone changes. It is more candidly admitted that only a failure needs to pretend to be successful. The volume opens with a beautiful description of the Founder's, or author's, almost total failure in life, and of a luncheon given in his honour at the Clapham Junction Hotel: 'The small tables for onlookers were only partially filled (the date clashed by chance with the arrival of the Brazilian Commission) . . . .' Later, he encourages his staff to sit down to write their autobiographies, only to find that nothing has happened to them and on the last page but one he refers to his own waning powers'. All is not lost. In an earlier volume we had given up Godfrey Plaste for dead, killed while reversing the wrong way up a one-way street:
There is no Plaste Memorial, but the simple, common nettles along the west side of our sports ground have remained uncut. He would have wished it.
In Supermanship, however, it emerges that Plaste is still alive: 'It may interest Maida readers to know that Plaste now lives not very far from Acacia Road, NW.' And Stephen Potter also lives, in every shout of laughter which his books will provoke, long after his references to En- glish customs from the 1920s to the 1950s have become impossibly obscure, the titles of the imaginary books to which he makes constant allusion are confused with real ones, and many of Colonel Wilson's illus- trations have come to deserve, more richly than ever, the compliment of being 'boldly meaningless'.
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