Conversation

by ANN LEIGHTON

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CONVERSATION, like sex, is a universal human need commonly treated as a recreation. A life force without which civilization would perish, it is classed as a subject for serious discussion with remote elegancies like wines and manners. Essential to the well-being and sanity of mankind, it is dealt with in books not on medicine or religion or sociology but on etiquette. Never practiced, seldom taught, it is required of everyone. Prohibited only to certain monks, it is demanded of young girls in finishing schools who confuse it forever with balls and rapiers. As with cooking and the investing of money, it is made a cult whose initiates seek to terrify outsiders. Revered chiefly in its maimed form, the monologue, it is usually declared dead by those who think they know. Disjointed, denied, buried . . . the miracle of conversation is I hat it goes on.

And on and on — everywhere and all of the time. Anyone willing to listen will discover that conversation is what there is the most of. It is not necessary to eavesdrop or take notes or a census. One need only take a walk or a ride.

What interesting bits of others’ lives one collects for what paltry exchanges! What valuable pieces of information, freely given, may save us later in difficult situations now unforeseen, like knives in t he pockets of shipwrecked sailors. That bit about how to take a parrot by train across France. Call it a bicycle, the man said. And how to get a body out of Egypt. And the talisman from the crowded Washington taxi, driving away from a Senate hearing. . . . A tired listener said she supposed the die-hard isolationist meant well. “ Young lady!" snapped the epitome of nil Southern Colonels, “ my father said to me, ‘My son, remember this — Any man who means well and does not do well is just a damned fool—’ ” Worth the fare. Worth remembering as are most of the things people really say to each other.

For conversation is what people say to one another not being talked to, or at, or over. Good conversation is humanity at its best, in a disembodied way, a simple Paradise within easy reach, unlike other blueprints of eternity. To have someone to talk with eternally is enough promise of bliss for many people. See them, shut up in great houses, looking expectant on journeys, pretending to shop just to talk with others, and know that there go all of us. Change a word, any word, with me and I am the better for it. And so are you.

One of the commonest conversational openings about this country is that there is no conversation here, is there. The accepted answer to tins is that one about how we are such a young country, aren’t we. These dual untruths will pass as conversational coin among experts who will rule out a wealth of genuine treasure merely because of its subject matter. So many rejections have been made by those who constitute themselves judges that what is allowed by them to be conversation is often too oddly rare and beyond common speech. In the early twenties Sinclair Lewis and others prohibited anything said on a front porch, in a train, or at a country club. The subjects ruled out were invariably what the talkers knew most about — business, cars, crops, obstetrics, children. Cracker barrels and polities were allowed only as quaint survivals. Recently John Marquand has blacklisted reports of any conversational exchanges with the drivers of taxis, although, to many dinner guests, they may be the most rewarding eon versa l ion al encounters of the evening. And many clever and intolerant young people have ruled out anything not having to do with either art or sex and said off the floor, and have written books about themselves in which conversation is always reported as witty and shown in a trail of brilliant dots. But the real conversationalists never notice. They just go on talking.

Of course there are people who actively dislike conversation. One can hear them reporting the next day after an evening out — “And what do you suppose we did after dinner, my dear? Talked!“ Adolescents, particularly, have never been conscious of conversation’s joys. One of the grimmest sights known to modern society is a sit-down, formal party for the young to whom conversation seems an intoxication of the Spirit bordering on lunacy. With no intention of forgetting themselves for an instant in each other or anything less than a cataclysmic explosion, they sit side by side, male and female, eyes on their plates, hell in their hearts. Someone is expected to make a noise, a cheerful noise, an intelligent noise, any noise? Not I. How do I know anyone would answer? And, oh, the shame of being the only one to speak. Better to keep still. Still as unbroken ice.

It is for such wary unbelievers that little books on how to make conversation are written complete with questions and answers. For them elocution teachers breathe in and out about, oh, what beautiful roses. Lists of icebreakers are furnished, sure to freeze everyone to the chairs. “You have been in China? Tell me all about China!" or, “I hear you are an international banker. What do you think of international finance?" Ice is terrible for conversation, they say, and we must do anything we can to break it. The safer, the worse. To what end is it broken. . . . For falling through and drowning, thinks the adolescent. And refuses to break it.

But adolescents often grow up to talk brilliantly. And for those who do not, there is bridge and parlor games and the company of their own kind with the best of all hostesses — those who place their guests in the announced pattern of the evening and do not seek to create ever-fresh designs with everfading guests.

For it is one of the paradoxes of conversation that its chief enemies are its most ardent exponents. The monologuist who feels that the conversation is not good if anyone else speaks, the hostess who has been told (probably by the monologuist) that she is the type who should have a salon, those eager repeaters of the most trivial remarks of the truly great . . . all these prey upon conversation mercilessly. Theirs is a nightmarish, heraldic world where lions must rest quietly with many lambs, and even with each other, which is harder for them. Extra men who cannot talk become stags. And fabulous birds, just alighted from however brief flights to remote but vital spots, are coaxed to speak their pieces uninterrupted while sages who have lived there all their lives, but left earlier, become their meat. And wandering about, here and there picking up a kernel and preening their dull plumage, are the strange fowl who constantly repeat famous names with a casual familiarity. But this is not conversation. And it only looks like a salon.

To most of us who can put one word after another, conversation is most like a walk in the woods, enjoyable or wearing depending upon one’s companions and the terrain. It is not always easy to find the way, to settle upon a trail, to share the responsibility. There are always the conversational redskins who lie in ambush, arrow ready for the first misstep. And the professional walkers come down from above the timber line, their faces ruddy with winds from interstellar space, to assure us we are getting nowhere. For in conversation, as in life, there are more who chide than guide. And conversation can be extremely dangerous — more so than mountain-climbing. Hoped together bywords alone for remarkably long intervals across very slippery slopes, who will tell us where to put each fool, when to use the ice axe, when, even, to stop and breathe deeply at high altitudes?

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AND where, oh, where are the exports who make the rest of us ashamed to use our crampons from the very start, those dear, familiar clichés which give at least one firm foothold on the ice while we reach for the next step? Fallen, we hope, into deep conversational crevasses, frozen forever into their own slow-moving ice. For the world is, indeed, a small place, after all. And surrounded by a very great deal of weather, always constantly changing, so helpful to those first meeting each other. In fact, apart from the happy circumstances of everyone having the same number of fingers and toes, so that we may lose contact but never count, and business can become the basic medium of understanding, the changing weather is the first influence towards gracious, disinterested social intercourse. A well-turned cliché as a conversational opening is the back of the hand held out to a strange and apprehensive dog. Cliché by cliché is the way to begin.

And after that the general conversational technique can be decided upon. Even when the talkers are all of the same nationality and social habits this is not easy. How much more difficult it becomes when, say, they are only as far removed from each other as British and Americans. Due, perhaps, to a survival of frontier story-swapping, Americans generally prefer competitive narration. It may be this conversational habit that gave us our reputation for a country of boasters a hundred years ago. Cap that, is still a recognizable challenge today. Americans ready with an even bigger and better story feel sorry for the foreigner surprised without one in his turn.

But no sorrier than they feel for themselves in an evening of talk managed in the British way. For the traditions of fox-hunting hold in drawing-room conversation and the English love to hunt one subject until it is quite dead. The subject is chosen, usually by the oldest and most distinguished guest present, and then pursued through the hours. The thoroughness of English education has prepared them all to hunt any given subject down, through the years, through history, through the classics. . . . With gay haloos and Latin puns on they go. The American’s more superficial education is soon exhausted and so is he. Gladly would he change the subject and the course, happily tell his very best story, joyfully die. But such easy ways out are not allowed, particularly when the subject chosen has, most likely, something to do with American history, in his honor. After an evening like this no American ever wants to see an essay. Short shorts have been developed for his mental wind.

Which is odd because his humor is as long as the British is short, and as nobly conceived as their serious conversation. One of the characteristics of American humor, shared with no other country, is the willingness to become a fool to save a party. The Englishman will let any party die for all of him, but an American will leap once more into the breach and endear himself to his hostess. Better, the American feels, that others should laugh at him than not at all.

Even clichés, after the world and the weather, are not quite the same for both British and Americans. Englishmen often take too seriously the spontaneous American woman’s indication that she is willing to converse when she asks everyone what DO they suppose has just happened to HER? She, in turn, will wait politely when the Englishman says, Oh, I say — and then says nothing. But these are conversational aids not to be lightly dismissed. Even the habit of the well-traveled Englishwoman — of repeating the last three words just spoken by another as if they were very important — while reassuring to savages and upsetting to Americans, is a fine safely device which may stimulate conversation by simulating it, which is, as we say, half the battle.

And if we encounter such divergencies in the conversational habits of those who use the same words, what of all those languages we do not understand, whose very gesture for Come is ours for Go? Adolescents are no more assured and gay at their first party than their elders embarking on international discourse. Jericho fell from noise alone. Noise made by a stranger outside the walls. What if its inhabitants had made a noise, too? The right kind of noise.

As in conversation.