Don’t confuse conversation with dialogue or quips

Catherine Blyth says that conversation is an art: its essence is the acrobatic business of reading and changing minds — talking with people, not at them How would you feel if you arrived at a dinner party to find your plate garnished with a menu? Impressed, irritated or inspired to discover a new level in social intimidation? Imagine that menu listed not dishes, but conversation topics to wash down each course, such as, ‘Which of my ambitions is likely to remain unfulfilled?’ or ‘Is sex overrated?’ According to Alain de Botton, writing in Standpoint, topic menus promise the salvation of the art of conversation. Sartre reckoned hell is other people. To me, hell is other people’s utopias, and I can picture few visions more gob-stopping than de Botton’s.

Like him, I love conversation, and admire his efforts to do for philosophy what Jamie Oliver has done for cooking. However, the faintly bullying concept of pre-fab talking points — pioneered at public dinners in Oxford by the academic Theodore Zeldin — seems a real turkey twizzler. Simultaneously lofty and naive, it’s a recipe for self-consciousness. Although I suppose, if dinner parties are forums for status display, their success might be measured by the angst they cause guests.

De Botton is right, conversation is in decline, increasingly seen as a chore. But it can’t be forced, and the idea that good talk is a couture activity, available only at meals with tickets, seems misguided. The essence of conversation is engaging and paying attention — whether in a queue, at a party, or over the negotiating table. Like anything else, conversation can be done better or worse, which is why I decided to write about it to celebrate the pleasures and possibilities, taking a guided tour of the mysteries, as well as timeless techniques. I’m as interested in how Elizabeth I shut up her courtiers as in how Dolly Parton bamboozles interviewers and Tommy Cooper made us laugh.

Conversation enriches the passage of time as no other pastime can. However, as I’ve found, if you want to congeal one, reveal you are writing a book on the subject. Automatically people feel put upon, assuming that I’m on a mission to teach them to talk proper, or harking back to mythic days when gentlemen spangled their perorations with Attic tags. Some put me on the spot, testing my repartee. Sometimes I try the defence that, by analogy, you needn’t be a grandmaster to write about chess.

‘No,’ replied the novelist Tim Lott. ‘But you’d better be bloody good at it.’ De Botton reckons, ‘An evening comes alive when we meet people who seem to express our very own thoughts, but with a clarity and psychological accuracy we could not match.’ Yes, few joys are as giddy as clicking with a stranger. On the other hand, there is something strange, even narcissistic, in the idea that the height of conversation is finding an echo to our own views. De Botton is talking about the qualities we look for in a writer, that crystalline moment of recognition in a well-turned phrase. Is he, like so many men, talking about himself?

I wouldn’t be surprised. Sexism is ingrained. In my experience, only men believe they’re entertaining you by not asking a single question. All their lives they have been encouraged to perform — on the sports field, in the boardroom. They puff out their feathers, as if showing an interest in us, like asking directions, would constitute a show of weakness. Whereas, on the solitary occasion I met a woman who talked only about herself, I didn’t think, as of a man, ‘Pompous bore (but my, he’s confident).’ No, I felt sorry for her. Well, obviously: she’s insecure.

Mind you, numerous writers succumb to their trade because they long to speak uninterrupted, and bludgeon interlocutors with armour-plated anecdotes. Virginia Woolf’s biographer Hermione Lee writes, apparently approvingly, of the novelist’s amazing ‘flights of fancy, her wonderful performances in conversation, spinning off into fantastic fabrications while everyone sat around and, as it were, applauded.’ Leave it out. They want theatre? Let them buy a ticket.

Oscar Wilde is the quip-spouting poster boy for the notion that conversation is a synonym for ‘talk’ — a misconception at the heart of so many insecurities. To call it an ‘art’, to me, implies not performance or ‘artifice’, but that there are ways to do it better. However, place all the emphasis on speaking, and it’s understandable that ‘art of conversation’ conjures the image of a verbal gymnasium in which participants must surmount stultifying etiquettes, wearing bridles for the tongue and corsets for the mind.

Yet the wonder of conversation is its capacity to achieve precisely the opposite: to inspire those serendipitous discoveries that transform encounters into adventures. It should interest even mercenary souls, since other people are the shortest route to anything you might desire. As Malcolm Gladwell observes in The Tipping Point, friends ‘occupy the same world that you do’. Whereas acquaintances ‘know something that you don’t’. Your dinner party neighbour could be — or lead to — a new friend/boss/the love of your life. Small talk can be a big deal.

Of course, to click requires relaxation — unlikely, in a topic-ticking showcase. Such an approach overlooks the fact that after a conversation, we remember less what was said than how the other person made us feel. Harmony stems from keeping the ball rolling — not easy, when mentally rehearsing the next verbal flourish.

Free-flowing conversation is under threat from another obdurate new orthodoxy: dialogue. For instance, a friend of mine in an ailing corporation attended a ‘dialogue workshop’. This event, convened at vast expense by communication consultants, was led by a moderator (possibly inspired by opium-addled Thomas de Quincey, who propounded the idea of ‘symposiarchs’ to whip the dinner-party drones).

The moderator invited participants to air their discontents by handing them a banana. If someone else wished to speak, first they had to ask nicely for the banana. Only the banana-clutcher could talk at any time. So much for spontaneity. Despite its conjugated gaucheries, this practice (presumably, devotees call it ‘praxis’) is growing in popularity. However, as any artful conversationalist knows, deft interruptions are vital to percolate ideas.

A Victorian lady captured the difference between captivating talkers and heart-stealing listeners, comparing two prime ministers: ‘When I left the dining-room after sitting next to Mr Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But after sitting next to Mr Disraeli, I thought I was the cleverest woman in England.’ But I’d rather take Lord Rendel, Gladstone’s diplomatic friend, who could ‘with the most innocent suggestion; some challenging remark, casually interposed’, moderate a policy.

I’m sick of people who talk at, not with me. And, worse, those human blanks with whom conversation is like shoving money into a fruit machine that doesn’t even cough up the flashing lights. Yet there are means to detonate bores.

Great conversation is about technique, the acrobatic business of reading and changing minds (Latin’s conversus means ‘turned about’). What would Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and chums have been, had they not hung out at the Mermaid Tavern, where talk fizzed with the ale, ‘so nimble, and so full of subtle flame’ as if everyone ‘had meant to put his whole wit in a jest’? What if Francis Crick and James Watson hadn’t bantered over the mysteries of DNA? What if they had sat, awkwardly debating topics over dinner, wondering how cutlery scraping plates can sound so very like the theme from Psycho?

No instant messaging system is as informative, or nuanced, as another person’s face and tone of voice. However, inferring and implying shades of meaning requires practice. Today, those who make the effort seem more exceptional. I share La Fontaine’s vision of the perfect conversationalist: another endangered species, the bee, ‘who gathers honey alike from every different flower’. In less distracted times, when conversation happened automatically, it was less worth talking about. A wired-up world is all very well, but only conversation wires the mind.