Talking aimlessly

Published : Jul 28, 2006 00:00 IST

Stephen Miller's book is a lament on and an elegy for the declining art of conversation.

IT is a damning censure on the emptiness of social life of pomp and show at a ritual dinner party, "where time flies amidst emptiness" and one returns home to "retake possession of our being and our home" and "put ourselves under strict arrest for having idly strayed amidst the fair of triumphant follies". Yet, there does exist "a select society, with doors scarcely ajar, where gaiety enters and sits down without ceremony, where everything within us expands in a warm feeling of comfort, a desire to talk in an... paradoxical but always high-toned conversation... [we] lull asleep our severity and habitual disgust... in the select company we meet refined partners with whom it is the greatest of pleasures to converse; we hobnob really with our brains with these same reserved visitors, so timid, dull, obscure and silent in great noisy assemblies, but so penetrating, subtle, complex and characteristic in a dialogue".

They do not write in this idiom any longer. But then, Octave Uzanne's book The Mirror of the World was published in 1840, when conversation was still valued as an art. It is a book hard to come by. Locating old or rare book shops is a reporter's job. Describing their role in the intellectual life of society is a scholar's task. Time there was when they served as a rendezvous for committed conversationalists.

There are books aplenty on the art of conversation written from the perspective provided in the seminal work of that great intellect Dale Carnegie, one of the most influential writers of his time. The essayist Stephen Miller's book is of an altogether different genre. Unlike that great man, Miller does not instruct the reader on how to get along in the world. His is a lament on and an elegy for a declining art, written with deep insight and a scholarship which an easy style cannot conceal. The book elevates the spirits and saddens one at the same. He begins with the age of Greece and comes down right to our times of "ersatz conversation" through the cellphone, SMS, the Internet, the iPod and other devices of "conversational avoidance". Chat shows on television do provide a forum for conversation or discussion. They are a meeting ground for trading yells and insults. In a split society, conversation as an art withers away.

In the United States, the barbarians are no longer at the gates. They took over the castle long ago. Vice-President Dick Cheney used the four-letter word on the floor of the Senate, which is supposed to be a forum of the dignified. The occasion reveals a lot of the prevalent clime and culture. Senator Patrick J. Leahy charged that contracts were being awarded in Iraq to Halliburton, a company Cheney headed before he became Vice-President and egged George W. Bush to attack Iraq. The Vice-President presides over the Senate. When Leahy went up to greet him, Cheney asked him to go "... yourself". The next day he justified it. He "felt better after I had done it... it was appropriate here" though "ordinarily" he uses better language, a claim which is debatable. The rightist columnist Charles Krauthammer lauded "Cheney's demonstration of earthy authenticity in a chamber in which authenticity of any kind is to be valued". It is not fashionable any longer to quote Bernard Shaw. But his brilliant remark bears recalling - a gentleman reveals himself in the midst of a quarrel. It was worse than language failure. It was a revealing exposure of a culture from which the spirit of compromise has fled; in which violent partisanship rules the roost; and scruples no longer exist. Brilliant repartees are a strain. In the 1890s the Speaker of the House of Representatives Thomas Reed disposed of a noisy member by saying that with a few more brains he could be a half-wit.

Miller's book is unlikely to be among the ones our booksellers tend to import. They should make a grab for this one. It might have escaped notice but for the legendary columnist Russell Baker's scintillating review in The New York Review of Books (May 11, 2006). In Britain, the art of conversation reached its acme in the 18th century with Dr. Samuel Johnson as its presiding deity. Baker recalls: "Two centuries later the American humorist Fred Allen, whose work compelled him to lunch frequently with corporate executives in New York, wrote to a friend about the progress of conversation in America. In Dr. Johnson's day, he said, big men sat around enjoying small talk; now small men sat around enjoying big talk."

That is the point. Conversation is not about striking a deal or achieving any aim, still less an intersection of monologues. The modern British philosopher Michael Oakeshott put it neatly: "Real" conversation is purposeless. It "has no determined course, we do not ask what it is for". Conversation "is an unrehearsed intellectual adventure. It is with conversation as with gambling; its significance lies neither in winning nor in losing, but in wagering." Oakeshott was himself a brilliant conversationalist.

Miller calls his book "an extended essay on conversation in Western civilisation". It makes "extensive use of recent scholarship on the history of scholarship". A long bibliographical essay at the end of the book reveals his own scholarship and wit. It is a study on private, not public, discourse. It is about everyday conversation.

Which is why it is so easy to go astray into argumentation, declamation, quotation or anecdotage; in short, display with a desire to impress, if not establish superiority.

This is not what Michel de Montaigne, the celebrated French essayist, had in mind when he said that "the most fruitful and natural exercise of our mind is conversation... the most delightful activity in our lives". He added "studying books has a languid feeble motion, whereas conversation provides teaching and exercise all at once". It is a good-natured sparring encounter among the civilised. Its enemies are bores and bigots; flatterers and ones eager to please; and the contrarians who cannot agree with any one, least of all themselves. To some the only agreeable interlocutor is the one who agrees with them. Not surprisingly, Montaigne found agreement can be intellectually deadening. Many a bright idea crops up in a lively contest, at once sharp and pleasant. Conversation, then, is for the well-bred and cultured. Raillery and banter lend spice to it; like spice, excess is ruinous.

Miller takes a dim view of academics as conversationalists. Joseph Epstein says that the academic world - where of course there are learned people in abundance - is not a place where conversation flourishes. "In academic life, in my experience, there is no real conversation; just various people waiting their own turn to hold forth." Miller's own experience - having taught for a decade at three colleges - is that "academics tend to be more dogmatic than other professional people, perhaps because they spend so much of their time lecturing to students" - that is, when they are not engaged in contests among themselves. Nehru found lawyers' company "not intellectually stimulating". Their conversation moves in a pattern. After a time, the pattern begins to pall, he found.

Montaigne's caveat must not be ignored: "Just as our mind is strengthened with vigorous and well-ordered minds, so it is impossible to overstate how much it loses and deteriorates by the continuous commerce and contact we have with mean or ailing ones." Passionate ideologues make bad conversationalists and are a bad influence.

The line between raillery and repartee is not easy to draw. But it exists and is discernible; especially when it is breached. Realisation dawns that conversation has lost its grace and charm. Good humour had turned sour. Compared to it, the bore's performance is tolerable. No one has spoken of him with greater wit than Arthur James Balfour, a talented conversationalist (and accomplished philanderer) whom the author ignores. Balfour advised a new Member of Parliament: "Speak often and speak for long and you will soon develop that contempt for his listeners which every bore has." V.K. Krishna Menon needed no advice on this.

What is conversation? Lawyers know that authorities on English criminal law dubbed adultery as "criminal conversation". Dr. Johnson's immortal Dictionary defined a whore as "a woman who converses unlawfully with men". When the Earl of Halifax died and left his beautiful mistress Catherine Barton a big legacy, a political enemy wrote that Halifax much appreciated her "excellent conversation".

Conversation also came to be synonymous with a meeting, or an informal group. It now means "a traffic of the mind; for by exchanging ideas, we enrich one another". When the purpose is something else it ceases to be conversation.

Genius is not destructive of charm though it does tend to be in some. It was written of Goethe: "The conversation was general, lively, and never came to a halt. Goethe led it in masterly fashion, but without ever restricting any one else." Another wrote of him: "He was all the more charming when he felt sociable and carried on a light-hearted discussion in some small circle, where everyone in turn contributed his mite. He was usually not ostentatiously witty or overflowing with ideas; indeed he even eschewed them, preferring for the most part a tone of good-humoured irony."

"Self-made" men and women with a past who love to proclaim their successes can be a bore. Johnson was compassionate of a former because, unlike others of his kind he admitted to his lack of social skills. Birkenhead was withering to one of the latter breed. Johnson said: "Man commonly cannot be successful in different ways. This gentleman has spent, in getting four thousand pounds a year, the time in which he might have learnt to talk; and now he cannot talk." A woman offered to tell Birkenhead, on a sea cruise, the secrets of her success. She was told: "I would rather we postponed the pleasure to a future occasion."

The reality is as inescapable. As the essayist Richard Steele said, "equality is the life of conversations; and he is as much out who assumes to himself above another, as he who considers himself below the rest of the society". It is not only in the more palpably class-ridden societies that this ugly reality appears. It is part of life.

The club is a typically English institution. It has failed to take root in India except as a place which provides amenities and facilities for shared use. There is no esprit de corps in the Indian club. Much as we rant about "exclusiveness" or "elitism", we do not realise that it alone ensures what the English club provides, be it in the party clubs or the "exclusive" clubs which admit only those found "clubbable".

In 1724, the author of A Journey Through England said London had "an infinity of clubs or societies for the improvement of learning and keeping up good humour and mirth". On a tour of England in the 1790s, a French writer said that clubs and societies are "one of the most sensible institutions". Johnson defines a club as "an assembly of good fellows, meeting under certain conditions". In Britain there were many different kinds of clubs - for scientific discussion or ones mainly for "modern midnight conversation" (heavy drinking).

Paris had its own distinctive institution presided over by a woman - the salon. It was more exclusive than the club and more restrictive in other ways too. Salons attracted French writers and thinkers like Voltaire, Montesquieu and Diderot, as also foreigners like Hume, Gibbon and Adam Smith. They denied and wined and even danced to music, but their main interest was discourse. Religion and politics were avoided as, indeed, they were in some London clubs. Salonnieres, the presiding women, feared informers for the king.

The salon had a major advantage over the club, which excluded women, until fairly recently, from its membership. Duc de La Rochefoucauld polished his celebrated Maximes at Madame de Sable's salon where he read them for refinement and criticism. No wonder he acclaimed women's conversation. "When they are intelligent I prefer their conversation to men's, for there is a kind of smooth ease about it that is not found in us men, and moreover it seems to me that they express themselves more clearly and give a more graceful turn to what they say." To him, "the conversation of well-bred people is one of the pleasures I enjoy most keenly. I like talk to be serious and mainly concerned with moral questions, but I can enjoy it when it is amusing." Rousseau, a man of passion, hated salons and "idle" talk. Invitation to a French salon was more difficult than membership of an English club.

The club had a rival in the coffee-house, however. The writings of Addision and Steele provided advertisements for coffee-houses. Tatler mentioned 17 of them; the Spectator, 48. A French visitor was most impressed by them. They "are extremely convenient. You have all manner of news there; you have a good Fire, which you may sit by as long as you please; you have a Dish of Coffee; you meet your Friends for the transaction of Business, and all for a penny, if you don't care to spend more." The mingling of different classes in coffee-houses also impressed many visitors. "What a lesson," the Abbe Prevost said, "to see a lord or two, a baronet, a shoemaker, a tailor, a wine-merchant, and a few others of the same stamp poring over the same newspapers. Truly the coffee-houses... are the seats of English liberty." They were a haven of equality in a class-ridden society. They provided newspapers and conversation was often about politics.

The coffee-house provided an independent space outside the state as well as the establishment. Johnson defined a coffee-house as "a house of entertainment where coffee is sold, and the guests are supplied with newspapers". Whether it was the pubs or others who inspired the attack, coffee was assailed on both sides. A woman argued that excessive use of that "new fangled, abominable, heathenish liquor called coffee... [has] so enuched our husbands, and crippled our more kind gallants"; adding a revealing admission - "they are become as impotent as age". A father threatened to prevent his daughter from getting married unless she agreed to stop drinking that terrible liquor. She agreed; only to sing whenever she was alone: "No suitor gets into my house unless he has promised me that I can brew coffee whenever I wish."

Coffee-houses had their detractors in the King's loyalists. One described a coffee-house as "an Exchange where Haberdashers of Political small wares meet, and mutually abuse each other and the publique with bottomless stories and headless notions".

It was to coffee-houses that Boswell repaired when he first came to London in 1762. "His love of conversation" drove Johnson to found a club in 1748. It was the Literary Club he established in 1764 which earned a place in history. It was also known as Johnson's Club or simply The Club. Its sole purpose was "solid conversation". The club survived its founder's demise in 1784 and continued into the 19th century for two decades.

Miller records: "The Literary Club had an extraordinarily distinguished membership. It included two of the leading writers of the age (Johnson and Goldsmith); the leading painter (Reynolds); the leading actor (David Garrick); the leading English historian (Edward Gibbon); the leading political economist (Adam Smith); the leading political writer (Edmund Burke); a major politician (Charles James Fox); the leading playwright (Richard Sheridan); and one of the leading scientists (Joseph Banks). It also included other distinguished scholars of law, literature, and music. In 1778 Sir William Jones, a club member who was the leading orientalist - he was the first to describe the connection between Sanskrit and modern Indo-European languages - wrote to a former pupil: `Johnson says truly that Europe cannot produce another such club, and that there is no branch of human knowledge, concerning which we could not collectively give the world good information.'" Jones founded The Asiatic Society in Calcutta in 1784.

It was Johnson who coined the word "clubbable". But he found it difficult to restrain himself whenever disagreeable political opinions were expressed. And yet no man valued contest more. "He that never compares his notions with those of others, readily acquiesces in his first thoughts, and very seldom discovers the objections which may be raised against his opinions; he, therefore, often thinks himself in possession of truth, when he is only fondling an error long since exploded." Johnson thought Milton was a great poet, but he said that Paradise Lost lacked human interest mainly because Milton "had mingled little in the world, and was deficient in the knowledge which experience must confer".

The Englishman, for all his love of clubs, is not a natural talker. Alexis de Tocqueville noted nearly two centuries ago that there is nothing that an Englishman enjoys more than "the pleasure of sulkiness - of not being forced to hear a word from anybody which may occasion to him the necessity of replying". That Englishman was much to be preferred to some of his brash and loud counterparts in Blair's Britain. The great diplomat Talleyrand found members of a London club suffering from "a very English taciturnity".

Miller's work has been written for a purpose - if not on a mission - to revive the dying art amidst all that threatens to destroy it. American "talk shows offer a variety of ersatz conversation". Indian exercises are no better. An excellent model is the British Broadcasting Corporation's Dateline London every Sunday evening, in which foreign correspondents participate and over which Gavin Essler presides with manners that remind one of a bygone era. Online conversation, e-mail, Instant Messaging and the like are only the beginning. "New conversation avoidance devices are continually entering the market." The telephone is a rude instrument. The cellphone is an insufferable boor.

The last chapter "The End of Conversation?" is thought-provoking. "Americans are not particularly interested in the art of conversation. Articles and books on conversation are mainly in the Dale Carnegie vein: how to develop conversational skills that will help you get ahead. Roxanne Roberts, the social reporter for the Washington Post, writes about the importance of being good at small talk. `The ability to connect in short, casual conversation can make or break careers, friendships and romances... If you don't believe me, there are thousands of consultants, authors and communication coaches who will (for a fee) share their wisdom and tips for breaking the ice.' Moreover, many Americans prefer to spend their leisure time taking courses or attending lectures. In search of advice and inspiration, they listen to motivational speakers, pundits, gurus, financial analysts, preachers, writers, and assorted experts. In search of psychological health, they talk regularly to psychologists, clinical social workers, and psychiatrists." In the U.S. "the prospects for conversation are not good".

Next to philistines the art is under attack from intolerant politicians, academics and journalists. Society has become politically polarised, thanks not a little to the neocons. There is another aspect to it. Like politics, conversation is the pastime of free men. On December 29, 1675, Charles II issued an edict calling for the suppression of coffee-houses. Almost exactly three centuries later, Sanjay Gandhi had New Delhi's famous Coffee House in Connaught Place shut down. The King withdrew his edict a fortnight later in deference to popular outcry.

Miller's book is about the art of conversation in "Western civilisation". He begins with Athens and Sparta and proceeds to record its fate in Rome. Russell Baker remarks in his review: "It would be interesting to know if complex ancient cultures in Asia and Africa evolved conversational traditions comparable to the West's."

Is he, indeed, unaware of the famous coffee-houses of Cairo and Beirut? Our subcontinent could, once, boast of established respected coffee-houses from Calcutta to Lahore. Bombay's counterpart was and is the Irani restaurant, an endangered species today.

It was in the secular composite Urdu culture of the North that conversation was regarded as a fine art till politics rent it apart. None described it better than that gifted conversationalist, the late Professor Mohammed Mujeeb in his classic work The Indian Muslims 40 years ago in a pen-portrait of Rafi Ahmed Kidwai: "He was brought up in an atmosphere in which ideas had the status of adolescent girls. They could appear in public only when arrayed in the garb of modest and restrained conversation, and could be snubbed or suppressed by a well-turned phrase or a superior frown. On the other hand, aptitude for mischief was considered a sure sign of intelligence and had great social appeal; the young man who preferred to study or avoided playing pranks being marked out for ridicule. A poker face, an ability to amuse, to provoke, to embarrass or to abash others with wit, irony and sarcasm was all that a young man needed to win admiration and social esteem. Rafi Ahmad Qidwai had those cultural gifts. His ideas and real sentiments observed the seclusion prescribed for them by Indian Muslim etiquette, his personal relations had all the expansiveness necessary for culture to display its rich capacity."

No democracy can be sustained if the leaders in government and the Opposition are not on speaking terms. Their talks will not be "conversations", of course. But if they can converse, democracy will be the richer for their talent. Especially, if they talk aimlessly.

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