The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [1]
Fewer of us complain that conversation, especially face-to-face—for thousands of years the core of human interaction—is being pushed to the sidelines. But we should. We are losing out on one of life’s greatest, certainly most useful, pleasures. One that has the power to slow and enrich the passage of time, rooting us in a shared moment as no other pastime can. Potentially.
Yet have you never sat at a dinner, waited for someone to speak, watched a glittering frost of smiles seal the silence, and wondered how innocent cutlery can sound so very like the theme from Psycho? What about Christmas with the family? Lunch with the boss? The mute couples who garnish restaurants, pre-cocktails, on Valentine’s Day?
Surely someone had something to say. Each had a life, and a pulse, presumably. It’s tempting to assume that they couldn’t be bothered. A more worrying possibility is that they hadn’t a clue where to begin.
If you haven’t toiled in such deserts, lucky you. In my experience conversation breakdown is increasingly common, and other people are bewilderingly tolerant of it. I have seen otherwise savvy professionals struck dumb at supposed celebrations; been interviewed by Trappists posing as publishers; witnessed parties lurch from awkward chat to addled oblivion, while hosts revolve the room like circus plate spinners, frantic to keep it moving, their efforts drowned out by the crashing of bores.
Extreme measures are being taken. A friend’s annual office jamboree, a fancy, candles-and-cleavage affair, was ruined by rude waiters. Until it was revealed that they were actors: the entertainment.
“But hey,” said my friend, “at least it gave us something to talk about.”
Fear is understandable. If great conversation enhances any situation, when it flounders, it can be hell. I love to hate my screw-ups because friends laugh at the retelling; however, alone, at night, ancient cringes still awaken spasms of shame.
So I feel for the man whom Samuel Johnson’s friend, Mrs. Thrale, mocked for having the ill-breeding to complain:
“I am invited to conversations, I go to conversations, but, alas! I have no conversation.”
(He had acquired a fortune in—whisper it—trade.)
In his era conversation was a status symbol. Thankfully we needn’t take it so seriously, at least, not so formally. Still, even casual chat requires a confidence that seems to be waning, and I’m sure that in many blue-chip companies the con artist unmasked in G. K. Chesterton’s The Club of Queer Trades could, with discreet marketing, coin it:
“A new trade,” repeated [the detective] Grant, with a strange exultation, “a new profession! What a pity it is immoral.”
“But what the deuce is it?” cried Drummond and I in a breath of blasphemy.
“It is,” said Grant calmly, “the great new trade of the Organiser of Repartee . . . a swindler of a perfectly delightful and novel kind. He hires himself out at dinner parties to lead up to other people’s repartees. According to a preconcerted scheme (which you may find on that piece of paper), he says the stupid things he has arranged for himself, and his client says the clever things arranged for him. In short, he allows himself to be scored off for a guinea a night.”
Winning witty points may be old hat, but conversation remains an art as well as a social duty. Somewhere along the way too many of us seem to have dropped the idea that it is something worth striving to be good at—as if we are either born great conversationalists or not. If only.
Conversation works in ways infinitely more various, and devious, than you might suspect. Take a closer look and you find an entertainingly candid portrait of the human animal, as well as a means to almost everything that you could wish for in life.
THE MULTITASKING MIRACLE
When it works, conversation can come close to heaven. Be it sharing a laugh with a stranger, transforming a contact into a friend; that joyful moment when you click, share a joke, or spark a new idea; or just letting off steam with someone who knows