The Art of Conversation: A good chinwag!

Rachael told me she'd read about this book in The NZ Listener. Seems like just our kinda topic.

Where do our relationships go without conversation?
How do we understand and respect each other without conversation?

While some will reduce it to a formula, I prefer the concept of conversation as art. We rarely get it right at first. Takes some time, attention and practice.

From Guy Somerset's article in The NZ Listener:

Blyth tells of an exchange involving an old friend: “They were on a train, heading to an academic conference, sharing pleasantries and peanuts. Then, having inhaled the nuts, the other man picked up his book (almost certainly by Schopenhauer) and handed my friend the empty packet, saying, ‘This is all our conversation is. Exchanging rubbish.’”

The joy of talking - from Big Brother to Henry James By Elizabeth Day in The Observer, Sunday 9 November 2008

Elizabeth writes, "I wanted to hate this book, I really did. A while back, a friend and I had the same idea: to write a nifty little guide to the lost art of conversation, preferably in time to seize the Christmas market and make our fortunes. Then we heard that Catherine Blyth was doing it, so that put a stop to our daydreams of becoming the new Ben Schott or Lynne Truss.

Buy The Art of Conversation at the Guardian bookshop

Anyway, I tried my hardest to dislike The Art of Conversation, but it is hard to dislike anything that quotes Chanelle from Big Brother in the same breath as Andrew Marvell and Henry James. Chanelle is used to exemplify how a person can fashion a spoken exchange to hear what they want to hear, rather than what is actually being said. So when her reluctant on-off boyfriend Ziggy admitted in the prime-time glare of reality television that he wanted 'to finish this', she cannily shot back: 'This conversation?' It took him, Blyth notes, a further week to dump her.

But the book is less about Chanelle-esque manipulation (although a chapter is devoted to acerbic putdowns) and more about resurrecting the simple joys of talking to each other. Blyth argues that, while face-to-face communication is essential to human intimacy and development, we are now presented with fewer and fewer opportunities to converse. We're all too busy emailing each other emoticons and using our BlackBerrys to update our Facebook statuses to bother with the old-fashioned practice of everyday chatter.

'Historically,' Blyth writes, 'the periods when conversation was most revered have been among the most fruitful for reason, invention and respect for the individual; times when people believed their opinions could change the world... just as Jimmy Connors raised John McEnroe's game, so Coleridge spurred on Wordsworth, so the Almohad court propagated scientific and cultural advance.'

Blimey. For the Almohadly challenged among us, Blyth offers a 15-chapter crash course in how to get the most out of conversation by various means, including sincere flattery, careful listening, judicious flirtation and, if none of the above is working, a lethal retort. Take as your cue radical journalist John Wilkes who, when told by Lord Sandwich that he would die 'either of the pox or on the gallows', quickly responded that it would depend 'on whether I embrace your mistress or your principles.'

The Art of Conversation wears its erudition with similar levity, splicing advice with historical bons mots. It has clearly taken a great deal of careful research and, occasionally, Blyth's sentences try to cram too much in, becoming overloaded with ideas. When analysing the term 'quality time', she writes: 'Such language is also a licence to dole it out grudgingly, as if to convince us it is proper most hours should be distracted, second best or negligible; a warrant to neglect that we like to imagine is benign.' In other words: the idea that some time is 'quality' means we feel free to waste the other minutes of the day that aren't valued so highly. But it took me several rereadings to get there.

Blyth is at her best when casually revealing valuable nuggets of information. In a section on the value of silence, we learn that when Solon, the founder of Athenian democracy, was asked to remove the best and worst bits of a sacrificed animal in a test of wits, he selected a single item: the tongue.

Sometimes, the book's structure feels unnecessarily limiting, as if it could not quite decide whether to be a self-help manual or a chatty polemic of the Eats, Shoots and Leaves variety. There are sporadic attempts to reduce complex and subtle ideas to an equation, such as 'Attention + Interest = Conversation' or 'Incongruity x Credulity = Surprise!' as if we are sitting through a powerpoint presentation at a motivational management seminar. This sits uneasily with Blyth's natural tone of elegant drollery.

But perhaps, as Woodrow Wilson once opined of the US President Warren Harding, I am simply in possession of 'a bungalow mind'. I hope that reading The Art of Conversation has furnished me with a staircase or two.

See also Carnegie on Conversations posted here on Conversations@Intersections on 14 January 2009.

Or for an example of a bad conversation go to A Conversation?