The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [71]
Indirect bitchery is therefore socially acceptable, provided you mask it; preferably, as bitching about an alleged Bitch. Direct bitchery is riskier (notice nifty Keisha Buchanan kept hers oblique: you laugh at her cheek, so are less inclined to condemn her). But always a guilty pleasure to watch.
Tactics: Don’t mess with her: Bitch about her and win new friends.
Pluses: It’s no fun being her scratching post, but eminently informative. She has a surgeon’s eye for victim’s vanities. Might she have a point?
11
THE FINE ART OF FLATTERY On Love in Measured Doses
Confucius said:
Soft words and ingratiating expressions are rarely paired together with humanity.
But what did he know? Demi-deities have little call for compliments, being in the business of persuading us that their wisdom is superior. In mortal endeavors, to neglect them is less than human, and not a little daft.
Flattery fine-tunes conversational overtures and is an unparalleled instrument for making us feel good. Yet few aspects of interaction are so maligned. Why? There are suspicions of insincerity and manipulation, yes, but the underlying problem is difficulty.
Compliments require diplomacy as delicate as for buying presents. Every gift, by word or deed, reveals its giver’s opinion, or misunderstanding, of the receiver. Indeed, compliments stake a claim for a relationship, by boldly assuming reciprocity. Better to give than receive; all the same, who doesn’t expect something back?
➺ Rule one: Artful compliments are never too great to be returned
Flattery shouldn’t be confused with bootlicking. Minimal effort and imagination can throw out delicious back-scratching hooks to bind people closer to us. To show you’re listening approvingly, emulate octogenarian charmer Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, who talked with
great economy and clarity, albeit punctuated with sudden bursts of flattery—“You are so right!” “Absolutely spot-on!”
Incompetents think that more is more and overdo it, causing embarrassment, killing talk (if the flatteree doesn’t know you, or is speechless, she will struggle to say anything back). It is worth remembering that flattery, far from self-abasing, is, as novelist Benjamin Markovits remarked, “sometimes the sincerest form of arrogance” and highly assertive. After all, to offer a compliment is to presume you are qualified to give it. Novelist James Salter mischievously downplayed his inclusion in critic Harold Bloom’s hit list, The Western Canon:
The question is: does [Bloom] know anything? . . . In the end, flattery is wonderful so long as you don’t inhale.
By contrast, Chaucer, father of English letters, well understood that writing his own Troilus and Cressida, a tale told and retold by the great classical authors, was a status-grabbing act, claiming a literary title for himself as much as his vulgar native tongue. But lest readers miss the point, toward the close he commanded his “litel bok” to go “kis the steps” where Virgil, Ovid, Homer, Lucan, and Statius had walked—an act of obeisance that, by implication, anointed himself their worthy successor.
➺ Rule two: If flattery is self-serving, it should hide it
The underlying concept of flattery as indirect power play is best expressed in the musty phrase to “curry favor.” To grasp fully its metaphorical sense, picture not a vat of simmering “favor” stew; instead imagine Favor, a handsome steed, being groomed with a curry-comb. Never a straight bow of humility, paying homage is courtship, designed to massage the homagee’s feelings and steer his responses in your favor. Ride him too hard, you’ll both be saddle sore.
Heed the example of those repositories of royal caprice, court favorites, who only survived if they trained a discriminating eye on their job’s two-way political function: as lightning conductor (on hand to be blamed by lesser courtiers for a monarch’s whims, as a bad influence) and as