How to Be Generous
[1] The word "gift" has got dangerously devalued of late. Saleen use so-called free gifts as bait and publicists use them as bribes; the wealthy can make "gifts" to their children, or to charities, with no more noble motive than saving tax. And anything labelled a gift shop, or catalogue, can generally be guaranteed to be full of curious, zany items like personalised solid silver back-scratchers and musical ashtrays, which are only classified as "giftware" because nobody in their senses would buy them to use themselves.
[2] We need to claim the word back this Christmas. We also need to claim back the word "generous": which too often gets used in the sense of over-large portions of food, hotel towels, the size of sheets, or women spilling out of their dresses. For generosity--the ability to make real gifts with modesty and love, expecting nothing back--is one of the things which most make us human. You do not find pigs or lions giving one another thoughtful little presents, do you? Monkeys, apparently, offer one another fleas at times, but not in any provable spirit of kindliness. We should honour generosity more than we do.
[3] Perhaps it has become suspect because of the tales of over-the-top generosity sometimes told in gossip about the very rich. The late Christina Onassis giving her daughter a personal zoo and a flock of sheep with their own shepherd, for instance; assorted tycoons flying their guests halfway round the world for birthday parties where there is an emerald bracelet or cufflinks on every place-setting; wealthy men paying off old girlfriends with houses, yachts and Ferraris. In this context, generosity has come to mean that you hurl money around like a drunken sailor. And there is always the suspicion that, like the sailor, you are doing it just to prove that you can afford it. That is not giving: that is showing off.
[4] But the real thing, when you meet it, is magical, and as a quality it belongs equally to rich and poor. Sometimes the poor--like the widow in the Bible who gave her mite--are best at it. Travellers in remote parts, from Poland to Peru, come home with stories of bread, shelter, even beds shared without question with the stranger on the peasant principle that "A guest in the house is God in the house". Nearer home, I loved the stories collected in memory of Katie Sullivan, the 23-year-old mental home care assistant who was murdered last year. Particularly the one about the day she was walking to the pub, and lagged behind, and her student friends caught a glimpse of her emptying her whole purse into a tramp's hands when she thought they weren't looking. Later in the pub they teased her about not drinking, trying to make her admit what she had done; but she steadfastly pretended she didn't want a drink.
[5] Another student I knew, a man, knew that his roommate couldn't afford an important textbook in his subject; a book which was very scarce in second-hand shops and impossibly expensive when new. His friend was far too proud to accept a loan, and so spent a lot of time trekking to the library in the rain to look things up. So the better-off student went to Blackwell's bookshop in Oxford, bought a brand-new copy for 35 pounds, dirtied it up a bit and tore off the paper cover, writing a fictitious name in the front. He even remembered to age the ink by putting it over a radiator, and made a few dogears and faint pencil-marks against what he thought might be significant passages. Then he went home in triumph claiming to have spotted the book in the second-hand bookshop and "beaten them down to two quid". He even got a receipt for the money by buying himself another book at the same secondhand shop. Talk about doing good by stealth: and in case you wonder, I heard the story from the poorer roommate, who had got suspicious and, ten years later, forced the richer one to confess.
[6] Tact is the key to real generosity: tact, and real thought for the person you are giving the present to. You can buy anyone a picture by a fashionable and expensive artist, if you can afford it; but it might be kinder to spend a tenth of the amount--and a bit of trouble on getting the framed original of a cartoon you know has cheered them up at a bad time. Anyone can buy a man a gold watch; but it takes a generous wife to do what one lately did, and track down an antique gold strap which precisely fits the old one he inherited from his beloved father.
[7] Conversely, it is not generous to keep pressing expensive drinks on people who really want a half-pint of bitter. ("Co on! Have another! Tell you what, have a double brandy! The best brandy!" ) It is harasent. So is refusing to let someone pay their half of the taxi if it makes them feel all. Buying someone a bottle of the very best champagne when they don't particularly like champagne is pointless; so is giving them a negligee, or sweater, which you would like to see them in but which they are going to hate. Until courting couples learn this rule, girls will go on ending up with drawersful of unwearable slippery camisoles in lurid colours, and men with racks of acutely embarrassing ties. On the other hand, this kind of present does give the recipient an opportunity to show another kind of generosity by selflessly pretending to appreciate it. In the Agatha Christie novel The Hollow, Henrietta displays remarkable kindness towards a shy, unintellectual woman who isn't fitting in to a sparkling houseparty. Greta is wearing a dreadful cardigan she knitted herself; Henrietta not only praises it, but asks for the pattern. Having got the pattern, moreover, she heroically knits the dreadful thing and wears it herself next time she meets Greta. That is what I call follow-through. So is the wedding present a friend got from a broke but domestic sister-in-law: she promised to bake her a loaf of special, delicious wholemeal bread every week for the first year of her marriage, and did so.
[8] You can give people to other people, too. Matchmaking for single friends can be done in a disastrously tactless way which makes both parties cringe; but there are circumstances--not necessarily romantic ones--when a well-timed introduction can be the best thing you can do for anybody. The best present you can give to a woman expecting her first baby, for example, is to introduce her to another like-minded pregnant woman, who lives reasonably close by. They will keep one another sane for the first chaotic year. And if you do happen to be of the type who networks professionally, and gives power dinner-parties, it would be a generous thing to remember sometimes to invite younger people in the field, who are looking for jobs or contacts or merely for stimulation and inspiration. One of the kindest things anyone ever did for me was an elderly, very distinguished don who introduced me to the world's most encouraging literary agent when I was 21. He shouldn't have gone to all the trouble, I said blushingly; but I was glad he had. And that is the test of any real present: the thoughtfulness, not the wrapping.
