Winning the Game of Life

The Lifeman is listening to the Expert, who is just back from a trip to Florence and is showing off his newly gathered bits of intelligence. "And I was glad to see with my own eyes," the Expert says, "that this left-wing Catholicism is definitely on the increase in Tuscany." To which the Lifeman replies: "Yes, but not in the South."

Friends and admirers of British Humorist Stephen Potter, who died in London last week at 69, will recognize Lifeman's rejoinder as the Canterbury Block, a devastating all-purpose ploy. "Yes, but not in the South," as Potter went on to explain in Some Notes on Lifemanship, is a phrase that "with slight adjustments, will do for any argument about any place, if not about any person. It is an impossible comment to answer." Lifemanship can take many other directions. One gifted practitioner, cited by Potter in the same volume, dedicated his book "TO PHYLLIS, in the hope that one day God's glorious gift of sight may be restored to her"--thereby precasting as villains any critics unfeeling enough to pan the book. They could not know, to be sure, that Phyllis was the Lifeman's 96-year-old great-grandmother.

Annoying Ploy. British humor can be highly perishable, and its point is often so obscure as to defy detection --except perhaps, by the British themselves. But Stephen Potter's wry and understated advice on how to win games, including the game of life, with losing hands endeared him to readers on both sides of the Atlantic. Any of his satirical books, from the first (Gamesmanship, or The Art of Winning Games

Without Actually Cheating) to the last (Golfmanship), can easily be absorbed at one sitting. In any of them, it is impossible to miss Potter's point: that anyone can triumph over all the pompous types who hog the center of the stage --the long-winded bore, the authority, the physician, the superior competitor. How? By using stratagems of such seeming innocence and such Machiavellian obliqueness that the victim scarcely knows he has been pinked. Thus one day, playing golf with a friend, Potter asked "a bit of a favor" on the third hole. But he delayed revealing what he wanted until the 16th. By this time his companion, anxiously speculating on how many pounds--ten? 100?--Potter was going to touch him for, was dubbing every other shot. As it developed, all Potter requested was the loan of a razor blade, a gambit that ruined the remainder of his friend's game. "Relief," added the author, "creates a tendency to pull."

"An intensely annoying ploy often used by doctors," Potter wrote, "is to treat Patient as if he were as ignorant of all anatomical knowledge as a child of four." He will, for example, "refer to the blood corpuscles as 'the white fellows and the red chaps,' " and will inquire of a constipated lady patient: "How are the bow-wows this morning?" An effective way to reduce such nonsense before it starts, Potter advised, is to cast doubt on the doctor's professionalism: "I am, I suppose, right in calling you Doctor?"

Potter's gentle fun stealthily infiltrated even the halls of diplomacy and government. Some suspect that the late John Foster Dulles' brinkmanship policy could only have been borrowed from Potter's pages--as was, no doubt, that unforgettable confession of Presidential Adviser Jack Valenti, who said that he slept better nights because "Lyndon Johnson is my President. For I know he lives and thinks and works to make sure that for all America, and indeed the free world, the morning shall always come." Yes, but not in the South.

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