MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
IN a Sunday newspaper last week I was quoted as saying that only one man in a thousand was really a bore and that he was interesting as being one man in a thousand. I do not recollect having made this remark, but I hope I did. It has a pretty rhythm and contains an element of truth. Yet if it is to be anything more than a verbal jingle, it requires qualification. What I meant, I suppose, is that nobody becomes a bore by just being dull ; I often find dull people the most agreeable of companions and can honestly feel that homo sum, humani nihil and so on. The defect which differentiates a bore from an ordinarily dull person is that he interrupts ; if there is nothing or nobody to interrupt, then he is not a bore at all. It is not merely that he is insensitive to the fact that you may wish to listen to general conversation, to read a book or a newspaper, or even to make a few remarks on your own. It is that the whole force of his personality is concentrated on preventing you from expressing your own thoughts or having access to the thoughts of others. He will drive this obsession with the pertinacity of an auto- matic drill ; he may even become aware that you are seeking to escape from his insistence, and edge you into a corner or even seize you by the lapel of the coat. This has, since Horace first observed it, been one of the most unmistakable symptoms of the bore, and it is one which drives the ordinary social man into helpless despair. The only solace for this form of suffering is to surrender to his insistence, to retire into the recesses of one's own mind, and to realise that one is faced with a perfect specimen of that curious phenomenon, the natural bore. He may be a gifted and even a learned man ; he may have much information to give and many profound ideas to communicate ; but the element of insistence which he brings into his converse creates atmospherics and blurs reception. The only form of escape is to pull down the blinds of one's brain and to indulge in an interior monologue upon the nature, the warped nature, of bores in general.
, * * * * I am a patient listener. I enjoy stories of personal experienCe, even if they be long and detailed stories, even if I have heard them before. My appetite for such stories is in fact insatiable. I agree with Dr. Johnson that a true story is " an idea the more." " The value," he said, "of every story depends upon its being true. A story is a picture, either of an individual or of human nature in general. If it be false, it is a picture of nothing." It is for this reason that I have a dislike of fabricated stories of the messroom or Stock Exchange variety. It is for me a cause of distress when a friend asks me whether I have heard what he calls " the latest." It may be an imaginary conversation in a railway train between a Scotsman and a Welshman or it may have about it a touch of lubricity. I watch these stories coming towards me with increasing gloom. If I receive the story with overt sadness, then I cause offence and am regarded as an asocial being. But if I titter and giggle at such jokes I am being guilty of insincerity. The experience is one which is always painful to me and which I strive by every means in my power to avoid. In England these ordeals are not unendurable, since even the Stock Exchange stories strive to be short and sharp. In the United States, the club-car stories trundle along like freight trains, hooting their whistles, clanging their bells, and skittering over the sleepers with wearisome iteration ; they take a good half-hour to pass by. Yet I should not define the tellers of such stories as bores ; they are merely dull men with adolescent minds. They do not seize one by the throat and force one to listen to the bitter end. A bore, I repeat, is a phenomenon apart. * * * * There is some sense therefore in saying that a bore is one in a thousand and as such a subject for curious study. He possesses an abnormal passion for self-expression, which may, for all I know, be due to some glandular disorder, to an enlarged condition of the thyroid or the pituitary. The psychologists would tell us that he suffers, poor man, from a desire to compensate for his own feelings of inferiority and that he is for this reason to be forgiven, even as
we lovingly forgive the timid, the stutterers and the absent-minded. His distressing habits may arise from some quirk in the artistic temperament, and the urge which forces him to recount to us his opinions upon current or forgotten problems is the same urge which gave us Endymion or Battersea Bridge. This may well be true. I have no desire to be unjust to bores, even as I have no desire to be unjust to juvenile delinquents. Yet although modern psychology, that diverting pastime, has taught us not to pass moral judgements upon glandular disorders, it does not oblige us to care for things or people which or whom we dislike. All that it does provide is a greater readiness to take an interest in people who might otherwise not arouse our attention. We have certainly acquired a greater awareness in such matters than our fathers possessed, and we derive a gentle pleasure from observing the eccentricities of our friends and from ascribing them to causes which were not dreamt of by our ancestors and which we in all probability interpret incorrectly. Thus, whereas the all too apparent defects of the natural bore may be ascribed to an exaggerated desire for self-expression, we can find in the unaccountable irritations of our friends and ourselves a symptom of psychological disturbances which are varied, delightful and increasingly less obscure. The patterns of behaviour which we observe and examine around us are as varied as those of a kaleido- scope; but whereas the nineteenth century ignored variations and concentrated upon types, we dote on eccentricities and analyse them playingly.
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I have a friend who gets cross with waiters and their like. He is a man bred in the highest traditions of our territorial aristocracy ; a man who has hunted with the Quorn and who wears, or wore, an I Zingari ribbon on his straw hat ; a man of wide culture and profound linguistic attainments ; a man who, in ordinary human intercourse, is equable, considerate and urbane. He is the sort of man whose suits, even though they have just arrived from Savile Row, never look new ; whose tweeds, even if bought at Inverness in 1910, never look old ; whose cigarette case flashes resplendent but unobtrusive as he draws it slowly from his pocket ; who wears a modest signet ring of lapis lazuli upon his left hand. Polished this man is, able without self-consciousness to discourse accurately and with speed in French and Italian, versed in all the elegancies of five capitals ; and yet he gets cross with waiters and their like. I have observed him screaming aloud when ill served at Florian's or Larue ; I have seen him shaken with passion, waving hands aloft, upon the café terraces of Bordighera or Salzburg. What is so interesting about him is that he is conscious of his sin. He feels the wind of the wings of his insanity upon his cheek ; he struggles valiantly against it, clasping hot hands below the table ; and then the flame descends, the fire bursts, and shrieks echo along the Mediterranean shore. The other day, he confessed to me, he had an incident in Genoa railway station. The porter led him to the cloak-room where he had deposited his baggage. He insisted that the counter at which he had handed in his bag was not the same counter to which the porter led him. The porter continued on his way. The eruption occurred ; his cries echoed through the railway station, out to Albaro and beyond to where Portofino extends its cape into the sea. The porter touched him gently on the arm. "There are moments," he said, "when we all become nervous. The counter it which you deposit your bag is, I agree, different from that at which you retrieve it." Shaking with spent rage, my friend got his bag.
* * * I find that an interesting story, since it is a picture of an indi- vidual. Why should this mild distinguished man become suddenly so cross? Glands, of course, just glands. But why should he get cross with porters and I only with women who fumble in their bags for change ? And why should Mr. So-and-so, although not really a stupid man, be unaware that he is acquiring all the rodent and insistent habits of a bore ? It is foolish to become distressed by these glandular manifestations ; we should just get interested.
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