THE FATE OF GOOD CONFERSATION

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33816, 12 April 1975, Page 12

THE FATE OF GOOD CONFERSATION

(By

Cynthia Davidson)

“Conversation has fallen upon evil days.” So declares A. Whitney Griswold, president of Yale University.

“It is drowned by advertisers’ anouncements,” he said. “It is hushed and shushed in dimly lit sittingrooms by television audiences who used to read, argue and even play bridge

— an old-fashioned card card game requiring speech." Is this true? Well, the London “Evening Standard” in a recent article on our general decline in literacy goes even further, declaring: “Language has ceased to be the most vital element in communication. Good conversation is dying out.” It is easy to blame this decline on the pace of modern life,- on television and its effect socially, on

vague changes taking place in our ever-changing world. Surely more to the point is our growing disregard for our native tongue at all levels of society, which can only eventually undermine both the English language and its literature. Above all is the widespread refusal to take the trouble to think lucidly and to express thoughts clearly, interestingly and in kindly fashion to those about us. “You know” has already become a universal substitute for mental effort.

To jettison what Sydney Smith aptly termed “one of the greatest pleasures in life” is to destroy the possibility —- perhaps for generations — of enjoying an art at once harmless, rewarding and simple to practise.

When there is conversation it is so often little more than a competition — either to boast about one’s achievements or those of one’s children, or to force one’s point of view across.

“People talk right past one another,” says one public opinion analyst. “Fathers talk past sons, mothers talk past daughters, teachers talk past students. Too often conversation is a competitive exercise in which the first person to draw a breath is declared the listener." True confessions

But true conversation, as James Nathan Miller tells us, “is a partnership, not a rivalry. Put the most articulate, best-informed conversationalist against a nonlistener, and the result is as if you tried to bounce a ball against a feather pillow.”

The essence of good talk may indeed be “a ready pair of ears,” but only if those ears are linked to a willingness to participate and advance the conversation further and to the point in due course. The socalled “good listener” may all too often be thinking of something else. Equally, to succeed, conversation must roam around, never be confined to one single boredom-producing topic; it must always, in Alexander Pope’s words, “steer happily from grave to gay, from lively to severe.” And, of course, rewarding conversation, the friendly give-and-take needs more than just yes-men (or yeswomen). Agreement too swiftly and without thought kills it stone dead. There is also required an indefinable sense of being able, as it were, to “listen between the lines.”

As a seasoned psychiatrist pointed out some years ago: “When two people talk to each other, a good deal of what is said is never heard. Too many people forget they must compete with the inner voice of the person they’re addressing. To be really understood, we must learn to handle the emotional aspects of communication.”

Small talk None of this is small talk — the futile, time-filling vacuous chat between people who wish they were elsewhere. As James Nathan Miller points out: “Subject an ordinary, run-of-the-mill ‘dull talker" to the gentle exploratory probing of a good listener, and he often turns out to have wells of interest and information that nobody has bothered to tap.” That, indeed, is often the measure of our loss when conversation falters or is by-passed by something else. Very few human beings are totally boring; most have had interesting, amusing, unusual or bizarre experiences to recall; almost all have individual fields of interest that they are more than willing to expound on, elven the chance.

Miller adds: ‘'Conversational give-and-take is among the most enjoyable and rewarding of mental activities. Like strdy, it informs; like travel it

broadens; like friendship nourishes the soul.”

It calls, however, ’or a willingness to alternate the role of speaker with that of listener, and it calls for occasional “digesfve pauses” by both. Such, then, is conversition — at its most mode? level a simple and rewarding oiling of the wheels of life.

At its best — ? Well. A. Whitney Griswold reminds us: “Conversation laid the foundations of civilisation. It was conversation from which the New Testament, the greatest teaching ever recorded, was composed. Great books, scientific discoveries, works of art, great perceptions of truth and beauty in any form, all require great conversation to complete their meaning; without it they are abracadabra — colour to the blind or music to the deaf. Conversation is the handmaid of learning, true religion and free government.” Clearly we discard it at our peril.