chattering classes _ the economist

Bridgeman

Special report:

The art of conversation

Chattering classesThe rules for verbal exchanges are surprisingly enduring

Dec 19th 2006 | From the print edition

SIR ISAIAH BERLIN, a

Latvian-born Oxford

philosopher who died in

1997, may well have

ranked among the greatest

conversationalists who

ever lived. According to

Robert Darnton, a

Princeton historian, Berlin's friends would “watch him as if he were a trapeze artist,

soaring through every imaginable subject, spinning, flipping, hanging by his heels and

without a touch of showmanship”. Darnton reckoned that Berlin's only match in relatively

modern times might have been Denis Diderot, an 18th-century French Enlightenment

philosopher. By one account Diderot's conversation was “enlivened by absolute sincerity,

subtle without obscurity, varied in its forms, dazzling in its flights of imagination, fertile

in ideas and in its capacity to inspire ideas in others. One let oneself drift along with it for

hours at a time, as if one were gliding down a fresh and limpid river, whose banks were

adorned with rich estates and beautiful houses.”

Churchill was another magnificent talker, perhaps the greatest of the 20th century, but

often a poor listener. Virginia Woolf was given, in the words of one biographer, to

“wonderful performances in conversation, spinning off into fantastic fabrications while

everyone sat around and, as it were, applauded”. A short list of the greatest living

conversationalists in English would probably have to include Christopher Hitchens, Sir

Chattering classes | The Economist http://www.economist.com/node/8345491/print

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Patrick Leigh Fermor, Sir Tom Stoppard, Studs Terkel and Gore Vidal.

Great brilliance, fantastic powers of recall and quick wit are clearly valuable in sustaining

conversation at these cosmic levels. Charm may be helpful too—although Samuel

Johnson, one of the most admired conversationalists of 18th-century England, seemed to

manage without much of it. For those of more modest accomplishments, but attached to

conversation as one of life's pleasures and necessary skills, there is a lively market in

manuals and tip-sheets going back almost 500 years, and a legacy of wisdom with an even

longer history. One striking thing about the advice is how consistent it remains over time,

suggesting that there are real rights and wrongs in conversation, not just local

conventions.

The principle that it is rude to interrupt another speaker goes back at least to Cicero,

writing in 44BC, who said that good conversation required “alternation” among

participants. In his essay “On Duties”, Cicero remarked that nobody, to his knowledge,

had yet set down the rules for ordinary conversation, though many had done so for public

speaking. He had a shot at it himself, and quickly arrived at the sort of list that self-help

authors have been echoing ever since. The rules we learn from Cicero are these: speak

clearly; speak easily but not too much, especially when others want their turn; do not

interrupt; be courteous; deal seriously with serious matters and gracefully with lighter

ones; never criticise people behind their backs; stick to subjects of general interest; do not

talk about yourself; and, above all, never lose your temper.

Probably only two cardinal rules were lacking from Cicero's list: remember people's

names, and be a good listener. Each of these pieces of advice also has a long pedigree. At a

pinch you might trace the point about names back to Plato. Both found a persuasive

modern advocate in Dale Carnegie, a teacher of public speaking who decided in 1936 that

Americans needed educating more broadly in “the fine art of getting along”. His book

“How to Win Friends and Influence People” is still in print 70 years later and has sold

15m copies. To remember names, and to listen well, are two of Carnegie's “six ways to

make people like you”. The others are to become genuinely interested in other people;

smile; talk in terms of the other person's interests; and make the other person feel

important.

Cicero's rules of conversation seem to have been fairly common across cultures as well as

time, if varying in strictness. It might reasonably be said that Italians are more tolerant of

interruption, Americans of contradiction and the English of formality, for example. These

rules of conversation also intersect with those of politeness more generally, as formulated

by two American linguists, Penelope Brown and Steven Levinson, the pioneers of

“politeness theory”.


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Courtesy counts

The Brown and Levinson model says, roughly speaking, that Person A probably does not

want to be rude to Person B, but in the way of things, life may sometimes require Person

A to contradict or intrude on Person B, and when that happens, Person A has a range of

“politeness strategies” to draw on. There are four main possibilities, given in ascending

order of politeness. The first is a “bald, on-record” approach: “I'm going to shut the

window.” The second is positive politeness, or a show of respect: “I'm going to shut the

window, is that OK?” The third is negative politeness, which presumes that the request

will be an intrusion or an inconvenience: “I'm sorry to disturb you, but I want to shut the

window.” The fourth is an indirect strategy which does not insist on a course of action at

all: “Gosh, it's cold in here.”

The first three of those options are plain instrumental speech, and are the sort of

approaches that the conversation manuals warn you against. The fourth one alone leads

into the realm of conversation as such. Here the purpose of speaking is not so much to get

a point across, more to find out what others think about it. This principle of co-operation

is one of the things that sets conversation apart from other superficially similar activities

such as lectures, debates, arguments and meetings. Other qualities which help to define

conversation include the equal distribution of speaker rights; mutual respect among

speakers; spontaneity and informality; and a non-businesslike ambience. The last of these

was well caught by Johnson when he defined conversation as “talk beyond that which is

necessary to the purposes of actual business”.

If conversation, and politeness, do have common features across time and culture, it is

not all that surprising that newer manuals will find little to add in terms of fundamental

principles. They can, however, offer specific tips which are useful in the right

circumstances, and these, too, change little with the years. “Never recount your dreams in

public,” wrote the anonymous author of “Maximes de la Bienséance en la Conversation”,

one of the first manuals of conversation published in France, in 1618. Margaret Shepherd,

author of “The Art of Civilized Conversation”, a manual published in America in 2006,

offers the same prohibition. Among the ill-judged remarks that she calls “saboteurs of

small talk”, she includes “self-absorbed comments like ‘I had the strangest dream. You

were in it. Uh, let me try to remember it'.”

The more modern the manual of conversation, the more concrete its advice is likely to be.

Ms Shepherd offers seven quick ways to tell if you are boring your listeners, which

include: “Never speak uninterrupted for more than four minutes at a time” and “If you

are the only person who still has a plate full of food, stop talking.” Her checklist of things

best not said to the parent of a newborn baby should be memorised for future use. It

comprises: “What's wrong with his nose?” “Should he be that colour?” “Isn't he awfully

small?” “Shouldn't you be breast-feeding?” “Did you want a boy?” “Is he a good baby?”


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Old French mastersBridgeman

“He looks like Churchill!/She looks like ET!” “It's really cute!”

It is easy enough to see the usefulness of such tips, but they capture none of the joy which

comes from the mastery of conversation. For enthusiasts conversation is an art, one of the

great pleasures of life, even the basis of civilised society. Mme de Staël, a great talker and

intellectual of the French ancien régime, called conversation “a means of reciprocally and

rapidly giving one another pleasure; of speaking just as quickly as one thinks; of

spontaneously enjoying one's self; of being applauded without working...[A] sort of

electricity that causes sparks to fly, and that relieves some people of the burden of their

excess vivacity and awakens others from a state of painful apathy”.

The Athens of Socrates and Plato, in the 5th and 4th centuries BC, is often seen as home

to a first golden age of conversation. That view has relied mainly on the writings of Plato,

whose dialogues, often with Socrates as speaker, constitute “a search among friends...for

the divine ideas of the true, the beautiful, the good”, says a modern French scholar, Marc

Fumaroli.

The second golden age of conversation, among the

French elites in the late 17th and early 18th

centuries, is much better documented. Historians

associate the rise of conversation at this time with

the prestige enjoyed by women in French high

society, which was perhaps unique in Europe

before or since. Women ran the salons where the

culture of the time was created, and their presence

civilised the men they invited there. Another factor

was the leisure forced on the French aristocracy by

an absolute monarchy. Their political ambitions

thwarted, the upper classes turned their energies

towards entertaining themselves. A man without

conversation was liable to find himself devalued, whatever his other qualities: “In

England it was enough that Newton was the greatest mathematician of the century,”

wrote Jean d'Alembert, a French philosopher and mathematician; “in France he would

have been expected to be agreeable too.”

The conversation of the French salons and dinner tables became as stylised as a ballet.

The basic skills brought to the table were expected to include politesse (sincere good

manners), esprit (wit), galanterie (gallantry), complaisance (obligingness), enjouement

(cheerfulness) and flatterie. More specific techniques would be required as the

conversation took flight. A comic mood would require displays of raillerie (playful

teasing), plaisanterie (joking), bons mots (epigrams), traits and pointes (rhetorical

figures involving “subtle, unexpected wit”, according to Benedetta Craveri, a historian of


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Bridgeman

the period), and, later, persiflage (mocking under the guise of praising). Even silences

had to be finely judged. The Duc de La Rochefoucauld distinguished between an

“eloquent” silence, a “mocking” silence and a “respectful” silence. The mastery of such

“airs and tones”, he said, was “granted to few”.

Conversation was also flourishing across the channel in the early 18th century, but for a

different reason. This was the golden age of the British coffee house. Whereas the French

salon excluded politics from polite conversation, in the British coffee house politics was a

main preoccupation. Foreign visitors remarked both on the free range of speech there and

on the mingling of classes and professions. A modern German sociologist, Jürgen

Habermas, linked the coffee houses with what he called the “rise of a public space”

outside the control of the state, or, as we might say now, civil society.

But if British liberals were keen on free speech,

they were much less preoccupied than their French

contemporaries were with its forms and flourishes.

Dr Johnson was considered so great a talker that a

contemporary compared his conversation to

Titian's painting. But he also could sit stonily silent

through a dinner that bored him, or contradict and

interrupt in defiance of all common etiquette. Even

Boswell, his devoted note-taker, acknowledged his

“dogmatic roughness of manner”.

Strong and silent

Johnson was far from the only Englishman to have matched a love of conversation with a

reputation for occasional difficult silences. As he himself said: “A Frenchman must always

be talking, whether he knows anything of the matter or not; an Englishman is content

when he has nothing to say.” In his book “Democracy in America”, Alexis de Tocqueville

refers to the “strange unsociability and reserved and taciturn disposition of the English”.

But for Charles Dickens, another foreign visitor to America in the 19th century, it was the

Americans who seemed taciturn. He blamed this on a “love of trade”, which limited men's

interests and made them reluctant to volunteer information for fear of tipping their hand

to a competitor. The idealisation of silence remained strong in American culture into the

20th century: think of the laconic heroes of Western films, or of Hemingway's novels.

More recently it has been neither trade nor taciturnity, but the distractions of technology,

which have seemed to threaten the quality of conversation. George Orwell complained in

1946 that “in very many English homes the radio is literally never turned off. This is done


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StilltalkingBubbles

with a definite purpose. The music prevents the conversation from becoming serious or

even coherent.” The television attracted similar comment when it became commonplace

two decades later.

In 2006 an American essayist, Stephen Miller, published a book called “Conversation: A

History of a Declining Art”, in which he worried that “neither digital music players nor

computers were invented to help people avoid real conversation, but they have that

effect.” A reviewer of Mr Miller's book found it “striking” that past generations would

“speak of conversation as a way of taking pleasure, much as a modern American might

speak of an evening spent browsing the internet”.

Conversation has survived

worse challenges (Johnson

thought it might be killed

by a return of religious

zealotry), and it will

doubtless survive more.

For evidence that it thrives

still, go into any smart

New York restaurant,

where the noise level will be deafening. Or go into a Barnes & Noble or Borders bookshop

and look at the shelves of manuals on how to talk better. Most of them are aimed at

people who want to talk more persuasively and engagingly in order to get on in their

careers, not at people who want to engage in conversation for the sheer pleasure it

affords. But these motivations are far from exclusive. Making friends and influencing

people, to borrow the language of Dale Carnegie, amount in the end to much the same

thing. Both of them require charm, courtesy and the desire to understand the ideas and

opinions of others. And whatever the strategic objective, those will never be bad tactics.

From the print edition: Special report


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chattering classes _ the economist

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