THE GENTLE ART OF BLUFFING

C. L. R. SASTRI

“What cannot you and I perform upon

The unguarded Duncan? What not put upon

The spongy officers?”

–Macbeth

To bluff, or not to bluff–that is the question: whether ’tis nobler in the mind to bluff away the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to wage an honest battle against a sea of troubles and, by opposing, end them? To bluff–to win: to bluff, perchance to be found out: aye, there’s the rub. For in that bluffing what painful risks we may run must give us pause. That’s the respect that induces us to deal fairly with our fellow-humans and not systematically to try to “put it over them” and thereby gain a treacherous advantage. The choice, of course, is immensely difficult: most often it is decided at our “nativity”. On this reasoning some must be judged to be born bluffers and some, by taking thought, to achieve bluffing. There remains the third category: those on whom bluffing is thrust–willy-nilly, as it were.

Just as the bombs fall on the just and on the unjust alike, so, also, it might be argued, bluffing may, on occasion, be forced on the habitually truthful no less than on the congenitally false. Circumstances, as we know, alter cases: and instances have not been lacking when persons that could be presumed to have imbibed the Beatitudes with their mothers’ milk subsequently developed into very creditable imitators of a Nicolo Machiavelli or a Benvenuto Cellini. These things happen: nor do we know why they happen.

The Artists

All, it goes without saying, do not bluff alike. There is, in my opinion, no one art of bluffing: there are as many arts as there are persons to practise it. A few, indeed, are such pastmasters of bluffing that it may be said of them that age cannot wither nor custom stale the infinite variety of their bluffing. They are the real maestros, the real artists. Bluffing comes to them, as reading and writing came to Dogberry, by nature. We can imagine them bluffing at all hours of the day and in all seasons of the year. They bluff without respite. They bluff rain or shine, in “cold wars” no less than in “hot”, and they can be discovered on either side of the “iron”, or the “bamboo”, curtain and in any stratum of society. They bluff and bluster, as Falstaff ran away from the battlefield, “on principle”.

They are the “diehards” and the “last ditchers “ of bluffing. The poet, with his eye in a fine frenzy rolling, has visualised the rose that died of aromatic pain: these gentlemen may be found, by those who care to watch them, to be dying at their posts–with a last bluff on their lips. In life, we may presume, they bluffed assiduously–and, while dying, they ceased not to bluff equally assiduously! They are, it will be seen, at the opposite pole of the man who was such a born non-bluffer that when, as what Mrs. Malaprop called an “unscrupulous”. Providence would have it, he acted the role of Othello in a dramatic performance, he deemed it incumbent on him to black himself all over. It is evident that not all the wealth of the Indies could ever have tempted him into even a reasonable semblance of bluffing. He, it is clear, was the prototype of the youth who bore, ‘mid snow and ice, the banner with the strange device.

No Hard and Fast Rules

Again, bluffing may differ according to the latitude and longitude. What is, for instance, sheer honesty above the 38th Parallel may be pure bluffing below it: just as what is merely cussedness in the captain is supposed to be rank blasphemy in the soldier. Have we not been told that what is meat for one man may be poison for another? (In the Cannibal Islands, it is conceivable, what is a meat for one man may, similarly, be poison for another!) In some places people may take in their stride what in others compels their neighbours to raise their eyebrows and to shrug their shoulders. By the same token, in some situations a code of conduct may be followed with impunity that will hardly be tolerated in some others. The same rules, obviously, do not apply in war and peace. Those who are regarded almost as angels in the piping times of peace are apt to become devils incarnate–“red in tooth and claw” –when Armageddon is let loose on the human scene.

Then we are confronted with a revolutionary change of values. Is not everything fair in love and war? During the pendency of a war the end is presumed to justify the means: the end being so noble (both the parties to the dispute blandly proclaiming that they, and they alone, are on the side of Right), the means that are employed to achieve that worthy end may, it would seem, very well be as ignoble as possible! like the independent trooper Tomkins, in Sir Walter Scott’s novel, Woodstock, the contestants on either side imagine themselves to be “above such matters as Ordinances.” They are living on a plane where these petty things just do not apply.

Evil, be Thou my Good!

When humanity is caught in the toils of war-hysteria it is not only freed from all traditional inhibitions but, like the trooper Tomkins aforementioned, gloats self-righteously over that newly-won freedom. Thus it comes about that we elect ourselves to be our own law-makers and, sitting in judgment over the most abominable atrocities that we have committed, absolve ourselves from the least little taint of moral infamy and of spiritual apostasy. Even what are commonly called the beasts of the field and the vultures of the air and the monsters of the deep may not descend to such acts as have, in Hamlet’s memerable phrase, “no relish of salvation in them” as we (that preen ourselves to have been created in God’s own image) habitually commit in times of hostility: yet somehow we contrive to exculpate ourselves from censure of any kind!

It is, however, not only the soldier on the battlefield that is liable to go berserk and generally to make a thorough nuisance of himself: the civilian sitting cosily at home or in his office is prone to no less mischief in his own modest and unostentatious way. It is he who sets the ponderous machinery of propaganda in motion, and there is not, it appears to me, much to choose between the ravages of insidious propaganda and the malefactions of actual fighting. If anything, the pen being, proverbially, mightier than the sword, the propaganda arm of war is more baleful in its effects on the enemy than the fighting one. No holds are barred in either, to be sure, but the former has this supreme advantage over the latter: namely, that, like the Rumour of Shakespeare, it is a person “painted full of tongues” who “stuffs the ears of men with false reports” and is thus, as we might say, one up over the other. And propaganda is nothing if it is not political salesmanship at the height of its ability, at the meridian of its splendour.

It is aimed at nothing less than leading the enemy a veritable dance of conjecture, of speculation, as to our own next move, or manoeuvre, in this long-drawn-out game. If he laps it up he finds himself ignominiously trapped: if, on the other hand, he shies away from it like a startled mustang, he may find himself equally ignominiously trapped–truth sometimes being stranger than fiction and what had been presented to him in this instance, at any rate, being the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth!

Tight-Rope Walking

This is really tight-rope walking with a vengeance, as it were. The enemy is left guessing all the while: he does not know whether what he beholds is a mask hiding the truth or truth itself parading in the open for him to make the most of, if, that is, he has the requisite gumption. I am inclined to fancy that the biggest bluff of all, the Pillars of Hercules of mortal bluffing, so to speak, is this parading of truth itself leading the enemy to imagine that what is thus being so wantonly exhibited in its stark, staring, nudity cannot, in the nature of things, be what it so blatantly professes to be but its direct, its diametric, opposite. But, to quote a line of Matthew Arnold’s, “it needs heaven-sent moments for this skill”. The common, or “garden,” variety of bluffing is the mask hiding the truth; and the success of this depends on the canniness with which we design the mask. Very often it is the popular press of a country on which devolves the patriotic duty of devising the mask. The popular press is the chief medium of propaganda. Thus it can be asserted, without any exaggeration whatsoever, that the journalist quietly sitting at his desk in his newspaper office is a combatant in the field to a much larger extent than is generally imagined. It follows that they also serve (in war) who merely sit and scribble. The “new” journalism being gazed to publicity more efficiently than the “old”, is as much to be reckoned with by the embattled foe as the ponderous military machine itself which faces him at every hour of the day and night. This being conceded, it needs only the emergence of a Goebbels (let us say) to

“coach the whole multitudinous orchestra of the Press to carry out the vast conceptions of some consummate conduct–or, splendide mendax. From each instrument under his baton this artist would draw its utmost contributive aid to immense schemes of concerted delusiveness, the harping of the sirens elaborated into Wagnerian prodigies of volume and complexity.” (the late C. E. Montague)

Some day an interesting and instructive article needs to be written entitled: “The Journalist as Bluffer.” If, as I earnestly believe, bluffing is an art, the journalist, predictably enough, is the artist par excellence.

Where Bluffing is Bliss

Bluffing may strike the same individual differently at different periods of his growth. Many a staid old man of the present day who smilingly tightens his belt one notch more at the sweet behest of his Food Minister and wins prizes in his parish for the number of “ghost” ration-cards he has not accumulated, might conceivably have been a bluffer of the first water when the blood ran more gaily in his veins, and time seemed to stand still:

“And at the rainbow’s foot lay surely gold,

And hope was strong, and life itself not weak.”

Then, again, bluffing may differ widely in men and women. Talk of the equality of the sexes! In the matter of bluffing women begin where men (the poor mutts!) leave off. The most consummate bluffer among men is a mere child, “a six years’ darling of a pigmy size”, as Wordsworth so happily puts it, in comparison with a member of what is, euphemistically, called the “gentler” sex. A woman (God bless her!) is born to bluff as the sparks fly upwards. Someone has perspicaciously remarked that the word, “honour,” is conspicuous by its absence in women’s lexicons. This being so it is not surprising that they have brought off, in every age and clime, some of the rawest of deals, some of the meanest of coups. But, perhaps it can be said in favour of bluffing that, where bluffing is bliss, ’tis folly to be straightforward and to act in obedience to the maxims embodied in the Sermon on the Mount and the Bhagavad-Gita and the Upanishads and the Saiva-Siddhanta. Women naturally act on the principle enunciated by the seventeenth century poet, Matthew Prior:

“The merchant, secure his treasure,

Conveys it in a borrow’d name:

Euphelia serves to grace my measure,

But Cloe is my real flame.”

These lines are the Locus classicus on the subject of bluffing: their author has given pointed expression, a local habitation and a name, as it were, to the truth about it for all time. It is not known, however whether he was himself a paragon of bluffing in real life, treading like a puff’d and reckless libertine, the primrose path of dalliance, or only pretended to be what he was not. He might merely have wished to strike an attitude, to cut a dashing figure, and his bark might very well have been worse than his bite!

A Bluffee, not a Bluffer

An essay, understandably, admits of autobiographical touches, and I have to confess, at the very outset, that try however 1 might, I have not been able to come up to the standard of bluffing outlined above. That target, alas, I have not been able to hit. I am a tragic misfit in this age which is, pre-eminently, the age of Bluffing. It surprises me how an adult like myself could have come by such colossal indigence in the matter of bluffing. Actually, I have been more bluffed against than bluffing. I have been the unfortunate victim of bluffing by others not the perpetrator of bluffing myself on those others: the bluffee, not the bluffer, I have never bluffed–at least not consciously not with maltce prepense. I may, now and then, have deviated into bluffing by the exigencea of circumstances–nothing more. My best friends and warmest admirers cannot say more than that, at the most, I am only an amateur in the line. My bluffing, such as it is, can be very easily seen through: not perhaps, by other amateurs in the line, but by the professionals, the big guns, the high priests. This is why I feel that I am initially handicapped as far as writing an essay on the gentle art of bluffing is concerned. But I have derived no little encouragement from the celebrated French aphorism that a sculptor need not himself be made of marble: besides is it not the outsider who is credited with seeing most of the game?

The finest Example

I believe that the finest example of bluffing that occurs to the memory is the fantastic story of the “ Emperor Without Clothes”. The Emperor, as we know, went in the procession under the Splendid canopy. And all the People in the streets and at the windows said: “Bless us what matchless new clothes our Emperor windows said: “But he hasn’t anything on, cried a little child, “Dear me, just listen to what the little innocent says”, observed his father and the people whispered to each other what the child had said. “He hasn’t any clothes on!” they began to shout at last.

“This made the Emperor’s flesh creep, because he thought that they were right: but he said to himself, ‘I must keep it up through the procession anyhow’. And he walked on still more majestically, and the Chamberlain walked behind and carried the train, though there was none to carry.”

The moral of this parable is plain for all to see: it is that a child can see through the most consummate bluffing imaginable,

If, according to Hindu philosophy, this world that we see around us, the sun, the moon, and the stars, “this vast o’erhanging firmament, this majestic roof fretted with golden fire”, is nothing but a mirage, a will-o’-the wisp, an ignis fatuus, a figment of the imagination, maya, illusion, what you will, their Architect must be–not to put too fine a point upon it–The Greatest-Bluffer Of All!

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