The Polish Exit

Manners and beauty

‘A Woman in Black Skirt Walking Down the Stairs’. Photo by Kokyo K via Pexels.com

Amongst the thousands of characters who have crossed my path and made brief appearances in my life, Dave from Blackburn occupies a fairly unique place in having remained in memory due to the manner of his farewell.

During the week of my 18^th birthday, I went to a place called Villier’s Park, near Oxfordshire, to participate in a primer week for smart state school kids who wished to shoot for Oxbridge. I remember several things, above all the views across the Oxford countryside from the big modern windows in the main study area, and once making an inappropriate joke at dinner.

And I remember meeting two friends who stayed friends for a long time thereafter but not until now.

I also remember Dave. To be clear, I don’t remember much about Dave; he was personable, average height, dark brown hair. What I do distinctly remember is that, when before parting we all began writing our contact details in each other’s notebooks, this still being a time of paper – I remember that Dave refused. Dave, and it seems salient to mention here again that he was from Blackburn and oriented himself around an inherited notion of bluntness, went round having the same conversation with everyone, which ran something like, ‘I’m not taking your details because I’m not going to see you again – have a nice life, tho,’ and I’ve got to say, Dave, called it.

I often think about Dave’s gesture, whether it was genius or, in its paradoxical way, egotistical and attention-grabbing. Of course, Dave was on the substance of the point right; the whole swapping of addresses and numbers was overwhelmingly for show, and, with a fair few exceptions, none of us did in fact see each other again. That avowal to ‘stay in contact’ was performative; it was not a serious promise, it was an action of the moment, designed to show that the week we had passed together was significant to us, and also to forge the idea of us as a special group, as students with good prospects. Dave’s action did perhaps show up some of the phoniness of that and make us feel more free in future to eschew such ritual hypocrisies.

On the other hand, there were indeed genuine friendships which sprung out of that week away, in my case even sexual ones; Dave, with his refusal to even engage in the ritual of exchange, precluded himself from all that. He put himself out of the running. In the final analysis, who was Dave to know better than the chance of life?

There is always a school of thought which presents rudeness and a refusal of social convention as charming. The person who flounces out of the group chat with words like ‘Guys, this is boring’; the person who calls out at the play ‘This is crap’ to a round of laughter and applause. Or from my old hometown, the legendary Berliner Schnauze, Berlin snout, a big-city wit founded on being vaguely unpleasant to strangers, like the taxi driver there who responded to my use of the South German dimunitive ‘ein bissl’ with ‘Es heisst ein Bisschen’. And this is someone I was paying.

Blackburn Dave was also following in an established tradition of refusing conventions of leave-taking. You have the English phrase ‘an Irish goodbye’, which refers to leaving a party without saying cheerio to anyone.

Of course, with habitual irony, the phrase refers to different nationalities in different languages; in French they call it ‘le sortie anglais’, meanwhile in Portugal the term is known as ‘sair à francesca’, to leave in the French style. Then in Polish we have it down again as ‘wyjść po angielsku’, to leave in the English way. It is amusing to think that the nations of Europe universally evoke the idea of an impolite guest via the spectre of a different nationality. Don’t you know the English/Irish/French are so rude?

The Germans, BTW, know this as the ‘Polnischer Abgang’, and seem to have an almost sensual relation to the concept. For some Germans I know the concept of going to a party and leaving without saying goodbye to anyone seems to represent the apotheosis of style. Like indestructible white goods or Korfball, it really seems to hit some sort of German cultural sweet spot. I suppose it fits with the general – and in my experience generally refreshing – value Germans put on honesty and plain-speaking, a country where telling your host that the food they have cooked for you tastes bad is worse than lying to pretend its good.

I dislike the concept personally. There is after all such a thing as being a good guest, and I dare say thanking your host, even if you have had the dullest of dull times, would form part of that. I also dislike the way that a guest sneaking off without farewell, if remarked, is cultivating some kind of Ronin, free-from-convention view of themselves, particularly if their decision to sneak off without goodbye is remarked upon by other guests. In short, I dislike its air of ‘fuss’.

Now, I speak as an unusually polite individual; after I suffered mental unravelling in my early 20s, one of the way I got back into shape was by learning languages, and that meant adopting once again the formalities of politeness as I learnt them again from scratch. It made me feel protected to come with a little more formality to the world. I also decided, given that my humbling was in part because I was an excessively prideful man, that anything to dampen down my natural arrogance was a good idea, including the gentle self-abnegation of manners. Also I’ve read a lot of Henry James.

As such, I think both Dave and our departing Poles/English/French are missing the point as to why we embark on these flourishes of farewell. They are a stylization of everyday experience. Manners, I'd argue, are the aesthetics of human behaviour. We may never use those scrawled numbers on paper, tho we might, but they can still be worth exchanging even without that; they mark a moment in time, they mark a respect for others. Likewise saying goodbye to everybody at a party. When my French friend Olivia hosted a while back, she went to the door with every departing guest for a quick farewell chat. There was something agreeably républicain, in the French sense, about that.

For seven-and-a-half years I was immersed in Chinese culture. To an outsider said culture can appear liberatingly blunt; to stereotype, it revels in insults and mockery of personal appearance. My Chinese spouse didn’t suffer fools gladly, and being from there meant she had an awful lot of fools to deal with.

At the same time, it seems a culture marked by extreme levels of social niceties and the need to show others respect. Embodied in rituals of gifting and drink sharing are not just hierarchies but, oddly for such a collectivist culture, respect for the individual; an embodiment of the old Thomas Rainborough line during the Putney debates of the English Civil War that ‘the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he’. And here we have it – manners, given they are to be extended to everyone, are egalitarian. It is their refutation which is individualist, not least because the refusal of politeness rituals by an individual requires others to maintain them in order for that refusal to obtain any transgressive power.

Dave has stuck in my mind but above all through an act of individualism. He wouldn’t have understood it at the time, but trying to refuse niceties like that was a deed of ego. Just shut up and write your address, Dave. Go with the flow.

I advise people to embrace manners; say goodbye, swap your address, write that thank you note. Send a postcard to the people who hosted you at the weekend. Compliment. Make everyday behaviour a little kinder and more beautiful and sweet. In the final analysis, Dave’s act of renegade bluntness doesn’t seem to me to be very Blackburn at all in ‘Lancashire as I understand it’; it rather evidences a need to just get over yourself, man.