Quiet, and quite happy
Lying is a skill that can be learned
“A little quiet but appears to be quite happy,” is what my report card for Autumn Term, 1973 read. That was my House Tutor’s assessment, at least, and John Bairstow was renowned for his Yorkshire bluntness. One word strikes me only now, 50 years on: but. Can a boy not be quite happy and a little quiet?
It depends where happiness comes from. Do others make us happy, or do we make ourselves happy? What contributes to our happiness is the well-founded thought in our own minds that others care enough about us to want us to be happy.
In Shakespeare’s play Henry IV Part 2, the king appears at one point in his nightgown and launches into a soliloquy directed at “sleep, nature’s nurse”:
“Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast Seal up the ship-boy’s eyes, and rock his brains In cradle of the rude imperious surge, And in the visitation of the winds, Who take the ruffian billows by the top, Curling their monstrous heads and hanging them With deafing clamor in the slippery clouds, That with the hurly death itself awakes? Canst thou, O partial sleep, give then repose To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude, And in the calmest and most stillest night, With all appliances and means to boot, Deny it to a king?”
I’m not sure what, besides status, heady business and heavy burdens of responsibility, distinguishes a young ship’s look-out from a king, such that the one can sleep atop a mast in roaring gales, whilst the other cannot get a wink, even in the luxury of more regal accommodations. What’s clear is that status as top dog won’t itself make for happy reveries. Those are born not of position, be it high—atop a mast—or low—in the king’s landed realm. Henry traditionally delivers the speech wearing his crown, so afeared is he of the nocturnal thievery by which he himself acquired it. What affects Henry’s slumbers that doesn’t hinder a ship’s boy’s is that the latter has no blood on his hands.
Nonetheless, the assumption will always be that a quiet boy isn’t happy, and kings always sleep soundly, even notwithstanding Shakespeare’s admonition: “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”
If you’d like to compare Gielgud to my own humble efforts, you may do so here (says he, lying to avoid hurting anyone’s feelings, the reference to which will be apparent in just a few paragraphs’ time).
If you ever saw the BBC TV series Porridge, set in a prison and starring Ronnie Barker, you’ll recall that two warders feature prominently: Mr Mackay, played by Fulton Mackay: a strict disciplinarian of the old school who brooks no high jinx (and inevitably ends up with egg on his face); and Mr Barrowclough, played by Brian Wilde: of meek character, favouring persuasion over force, never relinquishing his anchored belief that every criminal is capable of reform. Team-builders recognise that, while teams need a range of skill sets to function efficiently, none will function that is composed of only a single character type. It’s a conclusion to be drawn from Myers-Briggs personality profiling, which essentially concludes that, whether you’re a quiet boy or an extrovert, your happiness will stem from something else: being part of a well-run outfit.
“Yesterday I paused to take stock of my life and counted all the people, both in my professional life and personal life, who I haven’t got along with. I have a list of 45 names. I start out fine and then somewhere along the way things turn bitter.”
Thus a question to The Guardian’s agony aunt, Philippa Perry, in today’s paper. We’ll get, anon, to Ms Perry’s advice to the agonised reader, but one question that she doesn’t answer is this: would the reader be happier if these 45 people were, instead, in his or her life? That’s not such an easy question to answer, for it hypothesises, and the mere fact that the hypothesis exists at all pretty much rules out its ever being realised. We always assume that unhappiness can be remedied with happiness; but what if unhappiness is itself happiness, compared to what could be?
I’ve attained a certain standard as an actor—London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, grade 8, Gold Medal Acting, with distinction. I’ve been in a few theatre programmes. Even if they’d had them, the theatres in ancient Greece wouldn’t have written actors’ names in programmes, since the very fact of portraying someone who you are not was such a mind-bender for them that they acted wearing masks. It was Thespes who was the first actor to come out from behind his mask, and he could count himself lucky he wasn’t executed for his audacity. The problem back then was that audiences would associate the words of the character with the actor himself (especially if they were any good), and, if the play happened not to particularly impress the king, revenge would be exacted on the actor who’d spoken the words. Back then, they hadn’t yet heard of don’t shoot me, I’m only the piano player.
Anyhow, my name has been on a few programmes and I’ve trodden a few stages. But I never particularly felt happy acting in the offstage arena. The difference between acting onstage and acting offstage is that, onstage, and if you don’t fluff your lines, you can’t ever make an error; offstage, as the master of your own script, the potential for error is that much greater.
I don’t know if the list of people I haven’t got along with stretches to 45 and, the more I think about it, the more the agony complaint intrigues me: first, who (aside, obviously, from the reader in question) sets themselves down and draws up a list of people I haven’t got along with? (The letter starts: Yesterday I paused to take stock of my life: that too I find interesting—is life something we take stock of, or is it something about which we are rattled into realisations?) What’s perhaps instructive is the observation that everyone with whom the individual didn’t get along also (presumably) didn’t get along with him or her. Getting along is, after all, a two-way street.
Second, given the reader is in their 40s, I would say that a list of 45 is likely, first, to be arbitrary, second, to lack a standard against which one might judge it high or low or whatever, and, third, in fact is probably a figure most of us would arrive at, or thereby, were we, too, to set ourselves down and draw up a similar list. Forty-five in 40 years is just over one interminable bore a year. Perhaps the reader should be counting themselves lucky? The question Did we get along? is moreover somewhat nebulous: if you or I wrote up our own list, how much of a match would there be between the reader’s and our own measures of getting along?
Leaving that aside for the moment, let me now turn to the sage observations and the advice—sage or otherwise—proffered by Ms Perry. First, the observations, which I think are right:
For some, getting on with people just comes naturally. They know when to smile, when to nod, how to be interested and how to lie to avoid hurting anyone’s feelings. They can naturally read people. Not everyone instinctively has these skills. Some of us must learn them. Those who have these skills, often called “people skills” or “soft skills”, may mistakenly assume that those of us without them are being deliberately offensive.
Never is that more the rub than where the purported deliberate offence is delivered precisely in response to the superficial exercise by the consummately-at-ease-liar under the guise of people skills. Classing the innate ability to lie as a skill is a capability that is most vaunted … is it not among confidence tricksters and insurance salesmen? My intrigue is now heightened. Not because I believe the advice some of us must learn these skills is ill-placed (when is lying ever ill placed?) But because I believe they are, in the end, unlearnable.
A recently acquired friend of mine is a member of the local branch of a political party. One of its illuminati was involved in a military procurement scandal back in the 1990s and resigned his government post as a result. When I said to my friend that I wanted her to tell me about her political party, so I know who to vote for next year, but that there will always be some fly in every political ointment, she did not deign to engage. I don’t accuse her of the corruption, or indeed her party, except that one of its leading lights still carries its baggage. If a member of a political party is unable to address issues, and takes offence at my raising them, is that indelicate? The answer is: yes, it is indelicate, and rightly so in my book; and wrongly so in others’ books.
If being offensive entails being true to oneself, then, it’s not deliberate, it’s innate, just as much as being oneself is innate. But what most definitely is deliberate is onstage acting. We do months of rehearsals to get it right, learn our lines and our cues, instil muscle memory and emotion memory; we carefully retouch our make-up, adjust our wigs and brush our costumes. All for the big show. When we go to that level of trouble in our real lives, we can be fairly sure that any offence that is given is unquestionably deliberate.
In Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting For Godot, the character Pozzo has a view on the extent of the world’s happiness and unhappiness:
“The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. Let us not speak well of it either. Let us not speak of it at all.”
Quite what moves Pozzo to add that last sentence, I cannot say (and I have played the part on stage). What strikes me about this speech is the juxtaposition. First, those who weep cause others to be happy, and not vice versa (on the model of the Sermon on the Mount: blessed are the weepers, for they shall make the unhappy happy). And, our generation is no unhappier than past generations. And therefore we should not speak ill of it; nor well of it; nor of it at all. Why not of it at all?
Because we have failed in this generation to right the unhappinesses of prior generations? Have we in fact failed? If we can divine where unhappiness comes from, then surely we can divine where happiness comes from? We needn’t even, in that, feel ourselves constrained, as Pozzo does, to take a global balance sheet. No, what applies for a global balance sheet applies also for our own, personal balance sheet: our divisional balance.
Balance sheet is a term used in commercial accountancy. A balance sheet must balance. But it needn’t, in fact, balance globally, and it is with the same dismissive disinterest that we also view the balance sheets of other enterprises, other people, other countries, other whatevers. As long as our own balance sheet is healthy, what do we care about that of others? Well, what we care about might be our own personal taking stock, in which we write off 45 supposed friends as liabilities, for which we perhaps do indeed have corresponding assets, be they tangible or intangible, that would otherwise have been forgone, just as long as the globe ceases to be of relevance past our own front-door step. Fact is, the globe does exist out there, in the real world. And every balance sheet has as many liabilities as it has assets. Isn’t that so?
What Ms Perry concludes with is advice. She’s an agony aunt and that, if nothing else, is what she’s there to offer. She is clearly a consultant rooted in an understanding of psychology, and her advice is not be be dismissed out of hand. But, strangely, her advice attunes with what John Bairstow wrote about me 50 years ago: that it is surprising that a boy who is quiet should be quite happy. Perry gives practical stepping stones for conquering the reader’s problem: Just because it is a skill you must develop rather than something that comes naturally, doesn’t mean you cannot learn it. Indeed, acting is something that can be learned.
When I studied legal practice at university, Alan Paterson came out with a stunningly obvious statistic that has never quit me: fifty per cent of lawyers don’t win their case. On the contrary, I think that’s actually wrong. Not 50 per cent. One hundred per cent. There are those who lose because they suck. And there are those who lose because the law’s against them. But those who win: do they win, or does the law win the case for them? I know what you’re thinking; and I know what you want to be thinking.
Is it the Guardian reader’s problem? Well, of course it is. Aren’t all problems the other guy’s problems?
One thing in 50 years hasn’t changed. I’m still quiet, and I’m still quite happy. But John Bairstow is no longer.