Topical Guide 75
Mark Dorset
Salesmanship
To make certain that no potential buyer was overlooked, Guppa kept a card file with information about everyone in Babbington who might eventually be made, in one way or another, to become a Studebaker owner. Guppa had a lot of confidence in himself and in Studebakers. He would eliminate a person from the file only if he was convinced that there was no hope whatsoever of an eventual sale. I know, for instance, that he kept a small stack of cards with the names of the crippled and blind in the pocket of his Sunday suit, and he would take these out after communion and say a silent prayer for the cure of each.
Guppa believed that every one of the people in his active file would buy a car from him sooner or later, and that belief was the real secret of his success. It was, as he saw it, just a matter of catching the prey at the right moment or using the right lure.Little Follies, “The Static of the Spheres”
The inept salesman or saleswoman has the wrong mental image of himself or herself and his or her product, something like a huckster at a sideshow in a traveling circus might have: he or she feels that what he or she sells is inferior, an embarrassment. He or she imagines that he or she could be a much better huckster if the fat lady were fatter, the rubber man more limber, the dog-boy more slavering. But the best huckster, the genius huckster, begins by selling him- or herself on the merits of his or her commodity and so finds it not merely easy but intellectually satisfying, even morally gratifying, to persuade the rubes or inform the consumers that slim fat ladies are the rage, arthritic rubber men the rarest, dry-mouthed dog-boys the marvel of the age. The natural genius salesperson, whether he or she peddles books, cars, furniture, jewelry, pocket calculators, or investment schemes, is a carrier of his or her own infectious self-deception.
Edward Huxtable The Person in Your Mirror Is You (quoted in Herb ’n’ Lorna)
Ego, Egoism, Egotism
I was pleased and thrilled to discover, the first time I did this work for Guppa, that there was a card for me, with my own name lettered across the top in Guppa’s wavy block letters.
Little Follies, “The Static of the Spheres”
To write about one’s childhood is comparatively simple. One’s life has a natural defining frame. One knows who one is; in childish egotism, one supposes people have a relationship only with oneself. But after the age of twenty, the frame is uncertain, change is hard to pin down, one is less and less sure of who one is, and other egos with their court of adherents invade one’s privacy with theirs. One’s freedom is inhibited by their natural insistence on themselves; also, the professional writer who spends his time becoming other people and places, real or imaginary, finds he has written his life away and has become almost nothing. The true autobiography of this egotist is exposed in all its intimate foliage in his work.
[more to come on Thursday, August 26, 2021]
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