Where Barzun conversation

Jacques Barzun on Conversation

In private life, the counterpart of public debate is conversation. The word sounds old-fashioned and its meaning is blurred, because in the years since conversation was given a name and made an ideal, its nature has changed as much as that of public debate — and for the same reasons. Yet whether we use the word to mean all forms of verbal exchange or, more narrowly, the sociable sifting of opinion for pleasure, conversation is the testing ground of manners. This is so because manners are minor morals which facilitate the relations of men, chiefly through words. When those verbal relations are deliberately staged, for no other purpose than pleasure, men find themselves engaged in an intellectual exercise that is one of the delights of life. Manners, therefore, are not solely a clue to the deeper moral assumptions of an age, they are also a strong or weak guardian of Intellect at its most exposed.

Conversation being difficult, the reality of it has always been inferior to the ideal. We can nevertheless deduce almost as much from the ideal — or the lack of it — as from the audible reality. The reader will have noticed that I did not speak of sociable conversation as the exchange, but as the sifting of opinion. The 'exchange' view is a nearly correct description of modem practice: A delivers an opinion while B thinks of the one he will inject as soon as he decently can. It is an exchange in the same sense that we 'exchange' greetings: we offer a formula and are offered another, but generally go off with our own.

In this rudimentary game Intellect plays a small role. It contents itself with finding words adequate to the belief or impression of the moment, while navigating a passable course among other ideas suspected of being afloat in the vicinity. The genuine exercise or true conversation sifts opinion, that is, tries to develop tenable positions by alternate statements, objections, modifications, examples, arguments, distinctions, expressed with the aid of the rhetorical arts — irony, exaggeration, and the rest — properly muted to the size and privateness of the Scene.

In modern life this discovery of opinion by conversing is supposed to have more than pleasurable uses. We are addicted to 'panels' and 'forums' and 'round tables' on given topics. When broadcast, such performances are supposed to interest, and even instruct, millions of listeners and viewers, also in living rooms. That these conversations in public most often fail is a proof of the lack of conversational skill among the educated. After one such failure on a national net work, an introspective member of the group, a psychiatrist, tried to state the causes, for the use of program directors. He blamed the latter as well as the speakers: 'Every one . . . did a bad job. Our inept efforts at discussion reminded me of a lot of falling down drunks trying to shake hands.' He then listed the requisites of success: 'not a group of yes-men, but of men who are on a par in their knowledge of the field . . . so that they can communicate without such purely verbal confusions as clouded our interchange. I will say flatly that unless any panel . . . is given lots of prebroadcast time for free discussion, and repeatedly, the group cannot be expected to talk effectively in front of the camera. . . . An unrehearsed poly-disciplinary group lack a common language. . . . We had assembled for an hour and a half before the broadcast, but failed to take advantage even of that meager time. This was because after about ten minutes of groping talk, further discussion was halted lest we become stale. . . . Similarly, during the conduct of the discussion, just as we would begin to join issue around some problem, our moderator would abruptly change the topic. . . . Everybody on the panel felt increasingly frustrated and the audience was confused and unenlightened.'

Most participants in public conversations would agree with the critic and would welcome one or two hours of warming up. But in a practiced conversationalist a prolonged rehearsal would kill interest and spontaneity before the broadcast. The director's fear of staleness was therefore justified; his error was to suppose that his experts — lecturers and writers though they were — were conversationalists. Our use of panels and other discussion groups offers a curious instance of a social form that does not produce its adepts. The cause must lie in the existence of a stronger contrary force. In a discussion of 'Political Communication and Social Structure in the United States,' Mr. David Riesman makes clear that the eliciting of opinion, notably by interviewers, is universally considered the very opposite of conversation. That name is reserved for 'chit-chat about health, personal relations, the job.'

A German writer, noting recently that in the title of the latest edition of Brockhaus, the term ‘Konversations-lexicon' has been dropped, attributes the general decay of conversation to the lack of an idle class, or more simply, of leisure. But leisure is increasing, and enough time, surely, is spent by persons with a college degree in 'exchanging' ideas, on social as well as on public occasions. It cannot be our material circumstances alone that hamper us, but rather our manners, that is to say, at bottom, our emotions.

For the starting point of conversation is contradiction, and this democratic manners do not tolerate. Contradiction implies that one or another of the conversing group must be wrong, and under modern manners, as I said earlier without trying to explain it, peculiar feelings cling to error. Perhaps science has made small accuracy sacred to all, though everybody thinks that to be caught in a mistake is necessary to prove that one is human. Or again it may be that business and industry lead us to overestimate the interest of facts, about which contradiction is foolish. I think it more likely that the fear of being wrong which prohibits contradiction has in view, not error as an intellectual mishap, but the punishment that follows a breach of group unity. If your hostess says that the latest play by Mr. Kentucky Jones is very fine, and you contradict her, no matter how sweetly, one of you will have the majority in opposition. And this, regardless of who is the odd man out, nobody will enjoy. The reasoning goes: you are one against several = you are wrong = you are a fool. In some companies, the series of inferences would run: perverse = showing off = a snob; and the rejection would be no less complete.

In either form, the syllogism is bound to be hard to refute when the first premise of a society is that the voice of the people, ascertained by majority vote, is the voice of God. All the great men since Socrates may have asserted the contrary, but their assertion was evidently self-serving. Virtue in modern politics is against the solitary dissident. It is assumed that he too wants the backing of a majority, and having gained it will enjoy power. This is never allowable in a populist culture. Even in the Soviet Union the 'cult of personality' has been denounced, which is comic but indicative.

By confining conversation to facts or to the exchange of bland opinions, trouble is avoided. This is elementary self-protection in a system where the absence of fixed place and privilege puts one at the mercy of the group. When we quote what Tocqueville said: 'I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America,' we must not ascribe wholly to timidity what is in part sensible self-restraint. Even in the great days of militant liberalism it was decreed that politics and religion should be excluded from general conversation. This is a tribute to 'the power of words, in that people take them as the signs of instant action, of treason, rape, sacrilege. One does not know whether to wonder more at the imagination of the listener who is so readily hurt and alarmed, or at the skill of the speaker who over a cup of tea can with a few phrases produce flushed faces and the grim ardor of a militia defending hearth and home. However it comes about, the motive of curiosity about ideas, the play of mind, is not accounted a social possibility. But subversion is.

That is why full democracy has simply extended the no-politics-or-religion rule to any strong opinion. Yeats, moving in circles full of intellectuals and full of ideas, could yet long for the conversation of a society, for gaiety of mind and the fantasy that prepares matured convictions, for the kind of agreement that comes with, and not instead of, the free play of Intellect. What he found and what we have is the political judgment of dissidence carried into the living room and using the threat of mild or harsh ostracism to prevent even the shadow of conflict.

In putting first the political, I do not mean to overlook other impeding emotions. Good conversation, like any game, calls for equals in strength. But in a social system where movement is easy and frequent, one meets mostly strangers, whose equality other than legal and abstract has to be presumed. To safeguard that presumption, democratic manners prevent a jousting in which somebody might appear stronger, brighter, quicker, or richer of mind. This is not to say that democratic society is without snobbery. But like our public opinion, our accepted snobbery seldom ventures outside the tangible. It relies on differences that are not subject to dispute, such as disinfected wealth or descent from a famous historical event. Otherwise, the assumption of social equality indispensable to our life is preserved by blinking or suppressing all signs of the contrary.

This description may suggest that underneath its amiability the democratic group hides ugly sentiments. This is rarely true. Whatever his unconscious fear of Intellect, the democrat's conscious desire is philanthropic; he wants love to prevail; he wants to add friends to friends and find them friends to one another, as in Euclid; he wants, above all, that everything and everybody should be agreeable, by which he means interchangeable, indistinguishable — like a prefabricated part — until the taste for human encounters is purified and uplifted from the social to the gregarious. The highest merit and pleasure is to love people, to want to be with people, to be 'good with people.'

Only a churlish man could profess insensibility to so much warmth and such regal indifference to the marks, precisely, of difference. For the true-born democrat, origin, education, and intellect matter no more than clothes, speech, and deportment. He no longer sees them, or he feels remorse when the thought of them breaks through his proper manners to his conscious mind.

The philanthropic motive thus generates its atmosphere and chooses its goals. The hope being to found unity on a simple similarity among men, the search is for essences. Not externals, depths. The taste for psychologizing takes it for granted that depths are more real than surfaces, and since depths will be shown only to the face of love, each person seeks out the other's heart. No longer does anyone think or say of a new acquaintance: 'I disliked him, but we had a fine conversation.' Rather, we guard against this discrepancy by prefacing the slightest reference to disagreement with: 'Please understand, I'm very fond of Ted, but I think he's wrong about transplanting irises.' Face to face, we say: 'I entirely agree with you, but-' This means, surely, that knowing the weakness of our intellects, we confess that we might disagree unreasonably, out of dislike. So strong is the belief that to differ is to endanger the budding love of new friends, that the word 'candid' has become synonymous with critical: 'I was candid with him. I told him — ' As everybody knows, the desire for personal rapport knows no bounds or season; it is just as passionate in the committee meeting as in the living room. Indeed, who can now tell the two places apart by manners or subjects of discourse? On the occasions called sociable, the sought-for communion untroubled by ideas — that is, the discovery of the stranger's essence — brings forth the ultimate praise: 'She's a real person,' 'I found him very real.'

To reach that reality quickly, the preliminaries must be reduced to a 'minimum — hence the supreme 'duty of informality, the casual style. Its contrary, politeness, would be sniffed at as 'formal manners,' rebuked as 'aloofness' and 'reserve,' or condemned as 'superiority.' This is one more reason to bar Intellect, which incurs all these disapprovals: it has and is form, and it is superior to nonintellect as any skill is to the corresponding incapacity. Aware of the burden, some possessors of Intellect try to mask or apologize for it. They exhibit a rough, boisterous simplicity, or they belittle mind, disclaim it, and patronize by turns. In this self-consciousness begins, that shuffling which is the characteristic manner produced by our manners.

Shuffling is what one cannot help doing when one is pulled by contrary feelings or chaotic perceptions, and unwilling or unable to make any prevail. To occupy this position might be mistaken for the self-awareness I call an attribute of Intellect. But there is a distinction between the shuffling of the self-conscious and the act of choice of the self-aware. The conventions that informality condemns were invented to facilitate this choice until it becomes second nature. To the lack of such habits under the reign of casualness can be attributed the painful extremes of tact and rudeness that characterize the modern scene.

To be sure, the rudeness exists only from the point of view of Intellect. Its opponents find natural the use of conversation for quick intimacy through probing and diagnosis. They scarcely attend to what you say in their eagerness to discern what you are. Their antennas and instincts are at work and not — as is soon plain — their ears and their reason. This accounts for the incoherence of the panel discussion and for the difficulty of maintaining general conversation among six or eight people. They break up into tête-à-têtes for mutual auscultation. Odd little indelicacies follow: people do not hesitate to ascertain your circumstances in full detail. They expect the same interviewing in return, to which they say: 'That's a good question.' You are evidently a bright, engaging specimen; they are noting down points. They remark: 'You said something just now that interested me'; i.e., the rest was useless for my purpose. No one thinks it improper to personalize in this way, but would deem it stiff and artificial to address himself to a theme that, like an object in the midst of the conversing group, stood at a distance from each participant.

It being accepted practice to start conversation by asking people what they do, one hears what is uppermost in their minds, and one is not always pleased. The lawyer's or the doctor's case, the businessman's or housewife's worry, can be as trying in talk as in reality. But it is wrong to conclude that shop talk is boring and should be ruled out. People seldom object when the shop is their own — the men on one side 'exchanging' stock-market rumors and opinions; the women on the other comparing children, schools, and clothes. These concerns being the stuff of life may be talked about in society, provided the speaker keeps his distance from them and makes something of his facts or views. He must, that is, mix the raw material of experience with some thought that gives a handle to further thought, to disagreement, to speculation — Yeats's 'phantasy.' Any subject — a lost button — then becomes matter for conversation and a source of delight.

Achieving this calls for effort and a practice we now lack. Even if the personal view of sociability did not bar impersonal Intellect, the exercise would prove too taxing for minds atrophied on the side of reasoning, helpless to judge what is fitting. Sometimes in a gathering an idea does emerge in spite of everybody, stopping all other talk. One then sees how unprepared for this virgin birth intelligent people can be. They have thought the thought but never reflected on it. They are forced to improvise; but their span of attention hardly takes in one or two modifiers, and their faculty of inference stumbles over every fallacy. Try, for example, to advance the proposition discussed here, that for true sociability being agreeable is not enough: five indignant voices will exclaim, 'So you like disagreeable people!' A nicely articulated idea, neither conventional nor perverse, nor charged with ulterior motive, seems an unknown species in society — for every educated person must frequently meet one in his reading. In society, it may be surmised, everyone is made more delicate, fine grained, and impressionable by the presence of others; and since impressions strike at random and exclude their rivals, each person is engulfed in the confusion of the senses, hence self-conscious rather than self-aware, oppressed by a surfeit of personality, his own and others'.

At other times, a vestige of the desire to not merely report but comment on life will produce the accepted substitutes for conversation — the anecdote of the raconteur and the quasi-lecture of the expert. Both may be, like any other thing, good or bad of their kind, but at their best they still are not conversation, even though either may be so much preferred by intellectual, people to the usual small-talk-in-depth that they always invite a known 'entertainer' for the evening. Whatever 'the burden of his monologue, his presence implies the other guests' known inadequacy — especially if his words purport to inform or instruct. For conversation — as must be said of most good things in this infatuated age — is the antithesis of education. Before conversation begins, the participants must be finished and polished persons; what must be 'real' about them is the possession of their intellectual resources. They must know their own minds and have taken care to furnish them, deliberately, with tenable ideas-Yeats's 'matured convictions.' With opposing views they must deal briskly, lightly, and in evident pleasure — Yeats's gaiety of mind. The result is a spectacle the beauty of which is the subject of a famous passage in James's Psychology:

'When two minds of a high order, interested in kindred subjects, come together, their conversation is chiefly remarkable for the summariness of its allusions and the rapidity of its transitions. Before one of them is half through a sentence, the other knows his meaning and replies. Such genial play with such massive materials, such an easy flashing of light over far perspectives, such careless indifference to the dust and apparatus that ordinarily surround a subject and seem to pertain to its essence, make these conversations seem true feasts for gods to a listener who is educated enough to follow them at all. . . .

'But we need not go as far as the ways of genius. Ordinary social intercourse will do. There the charm of conversation is in direct proportion to the possibility of abridgment and elision and in inverse ratio to the need of explicit statement . . . some persons have a real mania for completeness, they must express every step. They are the most intolerable of companions, and although their mental energy must in its way be great, they always strike us as weak and second-rate. In short, the essence of plebeianism, that which separates vulgarity from aristocracy, is perhaps less a defect than an excess, the constant need to animadvert upon matters which for the aristocratic temperament do not exist.'

If James is right in his terms as well as in his description, it is not surprising that democratic manners spoil conversation and make it the last resort of the socially marooned. But where he says 'aristocratic' he might more aptly say 'patrician,' for he is thinking of the nineteenth-century blend of lordly and upper bourgeois manners, and not of politics and the prerogatives of class. The aboriginal aristocrat is certainly' not a causeur, much less an intellect; he is a fighter, not a reasoner. It was the high middle class that historically wedded knowledge and elegance, reasoning and politesse. This compromise excluded pedantry, on one side, and arrogance on the other, while retaining a pleasurable echo of both conflict and learning. From which it follows that the problem of manners for democratic societies-supposing that modern men and women desired conversation-would be to add the democrat's good will and brotherliness to the earlier ingredients without upsetting their balance within the ideal.