The Man at the Turnpike Gate

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town there were two auctioneers, both well thought of, and the difference between their years was settled by men that neither of them knew at all well.

Two auctioneers in one market town, the same rostrum and the same five in the hundred.
Both were honest on the hammer and well liked by the men they saw often.
One spent his evenings among the dozen he knew best, and knew them better every year.
One spent an hour each month on men he hardly knew at all.
A year on, the second had twice the sales, most from families he had never met.
He was the less sociable man of the two. Why?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two auctioneers, in a town I have never named. Farm sales in spring, household clearances, a timber lot now and then. Both took five in the hundred, and both carried the same furniture of the trade out on a cart: the rostrum, the hammer of lignum vitae worn pale at the head, the clerk with his ruled book.

One difference. The first spent his spare hours among the men he knew best. The second spent an hour each month on men he hardly knew.

The first man's year was pleasant and not foolish. The same pew every Sunday, cribbage on Thursdays with the same six men, his place at the market dinner among the corn dealers. Ask anybody in that circle who should conduct a sale and you had his name at once. There were about a dozen of them, and by the fourth year they had told everybody they were ever going to tell.

Now the second man and his hour. He kept a book, not of customers but of people. A page each, and on it where they had met, what the man did and what he had said. The keeper of the turnpike gate on the north road. A schoolmaster three parishes off. A man he had sat beside through a long inquest and talked to about rhubarb. On the first evening of the month he took the book down and wrote four or five short letters about the thing each man had last told him, whether the orchard had taken or the boy had got his ship. In nine letters out of ten he asked for nothing whatever.

Eleven miles off, in a farmhouse kitchen, a widow and her two grown sons sat on a wet Tuesday deciding who should sell the stock and the implements. None of them had ever met an auctioneer, so they asked the first person who came to the door, and that was the keeper of the turnpike gate with a fortnight-old letter in his pocket. He gave them a name. He did not give them the other name, which he had heard once, because he could not then bring it to mind.

Be fair to the sociable man. His dozen friends were worth more to him, one by one, than any slight acquaintance would ever be, and they gave him every sale they could. But twelve men who all know one another are, for the purpose of carrying a name, very nearly one man. The other auctioneer had forty rooms, each held open by somebody who thought of him twice a year.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

The work you have not got is being decided in a room you cannot enter, and the person standing in that room knows you slightly or not at all. Which makes the useful question not how well you are known, but how widely, and by how many people whose circles do not touch.

Take the arithmetic. The people you see every week see each other. They read the same paper and know what you know, so a thing you tell one of them travels a short way and meets somebody who has heard it already. Your closest circle is one room with a dozen chairs, and within a year you have said everything in it there is to say. The man you know slightly is useful for the very reason he looks unpromising: his own forty acquaintances have never heard your name, and he is the only door between you and them. I have argued that your first customers come out of the people who already know you. This is the question of what comes after that ground is worked.

Notice how little you are asking of him. Naming a tradesman is no favour: the person asking wants the question gone, and the man who answers collects a small credit for knowing. He needs only to bring your name to mind in the four seconds while the question hangs in the air, which is settled by when he last heard it. What you keep up is therefore not affection but recall, and recall is maintained by being particular and recent rather than charming. A letter mentioning the thing a man told you in April proves you listened in April.

The rule is often put too strongly, as though a slight acquaintance were worth more than a close one, which is plainly false. A close friend will act for you and hand you work he could have kept; a slight acquaintance will at most mention you. The true claim is narrower: for the one purpose of carrying your name where you cannot go yourself, many thin connections beat a few thick ones, because the thick ones lead back into the same room. The advantage also stands in proportion to how separate your acquaintances' worlds are: none at all in a village where everybody is everybody's cousin, a great deal in a town or a trade of any size.

Two cautions. First, a slight acquaintance is somebody who knows you. A thousand names bought by the pound is no connection at all, and recall is the whole mechanism here. Second, do not industrialise it. Forty copies of one letter is a handbill and will be read as a handbill. The particular line to the particular person is the entire method. Which is also why the proportion matters: make every appearance an ask and you become a man people cross the square to avoid.

Three questions, and the first wants doing before the week is out:

1. Of the last ten jobs that came without your asking, who named you, and when had you last spoken to that person? Several will be people you have not spoken to in a year.
2. Of the dozen people you speak to most about your trade, how many know each other? If most of them do, your week is spent in one room.
3. Who knows you slightly and has gone cold? Twenty names is the figure to aim at. Former customers, people you once worked beside, the neighbour who moved away.

The Answer to the Riddle

He was the less sociable man of the two. Why?

Because he was not collecting friendship. He was keeping his name within reach of as many separate rooms as he could. Twelve close friends who all know one another carry a name to one set of ears, and finish in the first year. Forty slight acquaintances carry it to forty, and go on as long as they remember. The sociable man was the better liked. The other was the better placed.

The verse:

Your dearest friends all drink in one parlour,
And carry your name where your name has been.
A line to the man you have met about twice
Walks it into a room you have not seen.

Until next time. Go and write out the names of twenty people who know you slightly and have not heard from you in a year, then send four of them a plain line each today.

P.S. The letter you send in October produces a sale in May, by way of a conversation in a kitchen you will never see, and nobody comes to tell you which letter did it. So it fails every test you can apply in the month you do it, which is why most men stop after four.

Also in the archive: Who Sent You, Your Sister on the Lane and The Box of Offcuts.