TLS: The art of conversation

by Alberto Manguel

review of Stephen Miller's CONVERSATION: A history of a declining art
368pp. Yale University Press. £15 (US $27.50).
0 300 11030 8
TLS July 12, 2006

For many years, Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo got together in the evenings to talk. In the mid-1960s, through a series of trivial circumstances, I became the lucky witness to many of these conversations. For hours on end, over a dismal meal of boiled vegetables and overcooked rice, in Bioy’s vast and dilapidated Buenos Aires flat, the three would discuss an infinite number of subjects with intelligence, lightly carried erudition and wit. Listening to the three friends talking was like listening to a chamber orchestra playing an improvised concerto. One voice would suggest a theme, the others would pick it up and play on it, then abandon it in order to simultaneously attack several others, the whole peppered with quotations, anecdotes, tidbits of esoteric information and jokes. Bioy once made a list of the subjects he remembered they had discussed: it is three pages long and ends with “the autobiographical books of George Moore, Victor Hugo, Housman’s poems, Toulet’s contrerimes, and the formulation of ethical principles”. Whoever attended the dinner was forced either to enter the conversation according to implicit rules of subject and tone, or to drown in the flow of words. A third possibility (which I timidly chose) was merely to sit and listen.
Similar in appearance, but utterly different in their essence, were the gatherings of Roland Barthes, Severo Sarduy and François Wahl around a table at the Café de Flore in Paris. These were never communal undertakings: here nothing mingled and became one. Their talks had the feel of oral essays, of recitations and quotable repartee. I can remember whole chunks of these talks: Barthes on the new Drugstore that had opened on the rue de Rennes, and on the lamented removal of the Paris pissotières; Sarduy on Manuel Puig’s belief that Julia Kristeva was a pseudonym for Julie Christie; Wahl on the metamorphosis of the magazine Tel Quel into Change (“plus ça change, plus ça reste tel quel”). Brilliant as the talk was, it was not a conversation, rather what Rebecca West, quoted by Stephen Miller in his new book, Conversation, called “intersecting monologues”. On the other hand, I would find it impossible to recapture the conversations at Bioy’s flat, except for a few words here and there which I probably read later in an interview or an essay. Perhaps proof of the success of a conversation is the very fact that it cannot be reproduced. A conversation at its best exists solely as it happens, in the moment in which it is spoken.
Miller sets out to chronicle the history of this ungraspable thing, no doubt as old as language itself, which began around a campfire some 50,000 years ago. He suggests that, in the beginning, conversation must have been slow. Our Palaeolithic ancestors, busy with hunting and gathering, had little time to lounge around and talk, and it wasn’t until they began to sow and reap that they found enough leisure for the pleasures of conversation. His point is not convincing: farmers are not known to be more gregarious than hunters, and both types would stop their business at night when the common activities of cooking and eating would lead to chit-chat about the scarcity of mammoths or the length of the Ice Age. This hardly matters, however, because it wasn’t until the creation of the first Sumerian city-states that the art of conversation came into its own. Miller notes that one of the oldest Sumerian poems, the Babylonian Theodicy, is in the form of a conversation in which the various speakers discuss “why bad things happen to good people”, anticipating the arguments of Job and his friends.
Miller recounts that “In the civilizations of Mesopotamia and ancient Greece people were more interested in prophecy and divination than in conversation”. Can this assertion be justified? Certainly, divination was an important part of everyday life in the Ancient World (and even the not so Ancient: every other page of Ammianus Marcellinus’ history of the Later Roman Empire, for instance, has a reference to some kind of fortune-telling) but this doesn’t mean that people were less fond of conversing. Miller himself brings literary examples to bear on the constancy of conversation, notably Plato’s Dialogues, in which conversing becomes synonymous with thinking. In Augustus’ Rome, conversation was seen as a means of keeping the body politic well balanced. Cicero, Miller rightly points out, was “the first writer to make a case that liberty might lead to violent civil discord if the educated classes lacked the art of conversation”; though the sophisticated talk that blossomed centuries later, in the Paris salons before the French Revolution, and in the soirées of St Petersburg before the October uprising, does not perhaps support Cicero’s forecast.
“Did conversation suffer during the Middle Ages?” Miller asks, and replies: “It is impossible to answer this question”. But is it? From the dialogues in the sagas and narrative poetry of the early centuries, to the lengthy conversations in works such as Celestina and Évangiles des quenouilles of the later ones, examples of medieval conversations abound, and it would be surprising if the literary models did not reflect, to some extent, a common social custom. And yet, as Miller notes, conversation as an art began to flourish only in the sixteenth century, reaching its prime in the eighteenth, “the Age of Conversation”. Early manuals of civility, such as Castiglione’s Libro del cortegiano (1528) and Giovanni della Casa’s Galateo (1558) offer basic advice to the prospective conversationalist. “You should pay attention to someone who is speaking”, instructs the latter, “so that you will not have to say, again and again: ‘Eh?’ or ‘What?’” More than fifty manuals were published in the first half of the eighteenth century on the art Fielding called “this grand Business of our Lives, the Foundation of every Thing, either useful or pleasant”. Not surprisingly, a good third of Miller’s book is devoted to the masters: Swift, Addison, Pope, Boswell and Johnson, all of whom shared Johnson’s view that “There is in this world no real delight (excepting those of sensuality), but exchange of ideas in conversation”. Miller also explores the shadow realm of those who shun what Hume called “the conversible world”. There were those who mocked learned society, like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Pope’s sworn enemy, who kept his books, together with those of Swift and Bolingbroke, in her commode, to enjoy (she said) “the satisfaction of shitting on them every day”. There were those who despised polite conversation, like Rousseau, who felt that he had “never been truly fitted for social life”. And finally there were those who simply hated talking, like the “anti-conversationalist” Thomas Gray, whose only notion of a pleasant chat was reading a classic author or, as he called it, “conversing with the dead”. Accordingly, Walpole thought Gray “the worst company in the world”. Pace Walpole, a friendly conversation can consist mainly of silences. Borges, in one of his stories, speaks of “one of those English friendships that begin by excluding confidences and very soon omit dialogue”. With Wortley Montagu and Gray begins what Miller sees as conversation’s decline: talk that does not engage with others, speech for the sake of self-profit, misanthropy disguised as melancholy. Emerson described Thoreau’s “conversation” as follows: he “goes to a house to say with little preface what he has just read or observed, delivers it in a lump, is quite inattentive to any comment or thought which any of the company offer on the matter, nay, is merely interrupted by it, & when he has finished his report, departs with precipitation”. I would add to Miller’s argument that perhaps, even more than lecturing disguised as exchange, a number of lesser elements may even more effectively wither a conversation. Max Beerbohm, trying to explain why Dr Johnson might have snapped at an unnamed curate during a perfectly convivial dinner (an episode mentioned in Boswell’s Life), suggests that the culprit was the curate’s high-pitched voice rattling the good doctor’s nerves. Tone as much as pitch can be obnoxious. The long-winded drone, the story interrupted by cackles of self-amusement, the muffled voice that gives the listener the impression of being deaf, the followers of the Bellman’s rule in “The Hunting of the Snark”, “What I tell you three times is true”: all these are fatal to a good conversation.
Miller is at his best in analysing the decline announced in the subtitle of his book. He sees Dale Carnegie’s famous How To Make Friends and Influence People (first published in 1936) as essentially different from the works of his eighteenth-century predecessors in that Carnegie thinks of conversation as instrumental, not as a means of winning friends but merely of influencing people, and conversation, Miller rightly says, “is not a means towards an end”. He finds that the growing anger in the United States of America makes conversation impossible, and leads to the social forum being, instead of a theatre of exchange, a place of monologues, of individuals walking about seemingly talking to themselves, attached to a mobile or plugged to an earphone. Montaigne, Miller reminds us, approved of conversation with oneself but only as “an occasional thing – a temporary retreat from the conversible world”, not as “a way of life”. Neither is television a place for conversation, since all it offers are “semiscripted performances that are concerned with winning and influencing viewers and boosting audience ratings”, in which the hosts provide both the questions and the answers. To these realms devoid of conversation, I would add political panels and university symposia in which each participant puts forward his own view, blind to the arguments of his peers. In the end, Miller ascribes the success of a good conversation to politeness, and its decline to a loss of good manners. “Conversation avoidance devices”, he writes, “are enemies of politeness insofar as they make it difficult for people to be attentive listeners.” And of course, Miller reflects on the world of virtual conversation in which, by and large, the semblance of exchange replaces true exchange. He confesses to checking his email six times a day, reading the New York Times online morning and afternoon, and frequently Googling people he has only met or read about – “simply out of idle curiosity”. He quotes a 2005 study according to which (in the USA at least) children pack “roughly eight and a half hours of media exposure into six and a half hours each day, seven days a week. (They often have several media going at the same time)”. A children’s party in which nine-year-olds were asked to bring a computer so that they could play video games is mentioned. In such a world, the engagement with the other is merely formal: the screen allows us to avoid commitment. At the same time, Miller admits the obvious benefits that certain kinds of conversation can draw from the electronic technology, especially in countries where talk is censored: email exchanges in China (in spite of Microsoft’s betrayal of its internauts), SMS messaging during the Ukraine Orange Revolution.
Technology set in opposition to social intercourse is not a new idea. Van Wyck Brooks suggested that Jefferson’s improvement of the argand lamp had dampened the brilliance of conversation in early nineteenth-century Boston, because “those who had excelled in talking took to their books and writing-desks”. Orwell (as Stephen Miller reminds us) thought that the radio undermined conversation, preventing it from becoming serious or even coherent. Today, the person sitting in a café with a mobile in his right hand, a laptop at his left, a television screen flashing in front of him and music blaring from a loudspeaker behind him, is not likely to engage in any rich conversation. In the developed world at least, we have forgotten how to listen to our thoughts and to those of others, and how to weave our ideas into a common strand. One of the original meanings of the Latin conversari was “to live together”. That too, we have forgotten.