The Ploy Boy

SUPERMANSHIP (128 pp.)--Stephen Potter--Random House ($3).

One of the triumphs of democratic, middle-class civilization is that anybody can be a snob about practically anybody else. In darker ages, one man's ability to make another man feel like an ignorant peasant was thought to be an inborn talent of the aristocracy. Nowadays, anyone can learn the trick, and there is no better instructor than Britain's Stephen Potter, a kind of arsenical Dale Carnegie and master planner of social insecurity.

In his treatises on Lifemanship and Gamesmanship (TIME, Sept. 6, 1948), Potter developed his brilliant theories about how to be always one up on everyone through such ploys as the Canterbury Block* and Cogg-Willoughby's Anti-Suntan Gambit./- Potter's latest does not reach these heights, but there is highly useful advice on how to make cribside visitors feel like germ carriers, how to write an autobiography though nothing has ever happened in one's life, and how to devastate an author in a book review ("If you don't know what it's all about by Page 12, it is perfectly fair to say that the book is 'slow getting started' ").

A major contribution of Potter's new handbook is the appearance of a bearded character known only as The Lawrenceman. It was never certain that he had ever actually read the works of D. H. Lawrence, but he had got hold of a few phrases and made brilliant use of them. There was, for instance, the occasion when a tweedy iconoclast named Cornelius Sticking loudly criticized a county family for putting on their best clothes to go to church on Sundays. The Lawrenceman merely looked out over his beard and asked mildly: "Is that a badness?" Sticking only managed to mutter something about "remarkably little to do with Christianity." The Lawrenceman went on placidly, with wide-open eyes staring into the distance: "Perhaps. Yet there is a ceremony of departure, a sacrifice. On the hill they lit the wood fire to the morning."

Sticking was never the same again.

Perhaps Supermanship's greatest merit lies in the fact that it should stimulate readers to develop Lifemanship ploys of their own. The first to practice with is obviously Counter-Potters. The possible scene is a cocktail party. Hostess: "And now I'd like you to meet Mr. Potter, the author." Apprentice Lifeman: "Crocker, did you say? Are you the fellow who writes all those cookbooks?"

Crude, perhaps, but it will do for a start.

* A widely traveled expert holds forth on conditions in Italy. The practiced Canterbury blocker stops him cold simply by saying: "Yes, but not in the South."

/- Envious of quick-tanning athletic types, milk-faced Cogg-Willoughby fought back at weekend parties by muttering about how easy it is for Mediterranean types to acquire a tan, managing to imply that the bronzed fellows probably had a touch of the tarbrush in their ancestry.

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