SIR ISAIAH BERLIN, a Latvian-born Oxford philosopher who died in 1997, may well have ranked among the greatest conversationalists who ever lived. According to Robert Darnton, a Princeton historian, Berlin's friends would “watch him as if he were a trapeze artist, soaring through every imaginable subject, spinning, flipping, hanging by his heels and without a touch of showmanship”. Darnton reckoned that Berlin's only match in relatively modern times might have been Denis Diderot, an 18th-century French Enlightenment philosopher. By one account Diderot's conversation was “enlivened by absolute sincerity, subtle without obscurity, varied in its forms, dazzling in its flights of imagination, fertile in ideas and in its capacity to inspire ideas in others. One let oneself drift along with it for hours at a time, as if one were gliding down a fresh and limpid river, whose banks were adorned with rich estates and beautiful houses.”

Churchill was another magnificent talker, perhaps the greatest of the 20th century, but often a poor listener. Virginia Woolf was given, in the words of one biographer, to “wonderful performances in conversation, spinning off into fantastic fabrications while everyone sat around and, as it were, applauded”. A short list of the greatest living conversationalists in English would probably have to include Christopher Hitchens, Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, Sir Tom Stoppard, Studs Terkel and Gore Vidal.





Courtesy counts

The Brown and Levinson model says, roughly speaking, that Person A probably does not want to be rude to Person B, but in the way of things, life may sometimes require Person A to contradict or intrude on Person B, and when that happens, Person A has a range of “politeness strategies” to draw on. There are four main possibilities, given in ascending order of politeness. The first is a “bald, on-record” approach: “I'm going to shut the window.” The second is positive politeness, or a show of respect: “I'm going to shut the window, is that OK?” The third is negative politeness, which presumes that the request will be an intrusion or an inconvenience: “I'm sorry to disturb you, but I want to shut the window.” The fourth is an indirect strategy which does not insist on a course of action at all: “Gosh, it's cold in here.”

The first three of those options are plain instrumental speech, and are the sort of approaches that the conversation manuals warn you against. The fourth one alone leads into the realm of conversation as such. Here the purpose of speaking is not so much to get a point across, more to find out what others think about it. This principle of co-operation is one of the things that sets conversation apart from other superficially similar activities such as lectures, debates, arguments and meetings. Other qualities which help to define conversation include the equal distribution of speaker rights; mutual respect among speakers; spontaneity and informality; and a non-businesslike ambience. The last of these was well caught by Johnson when he defined conversation as “talk beyond that which is necessary to the purposes of actual business”.

If conversation, and politeness, do have common features across time and culture, it is not all that surprising that newer manuals will find little to add in terms of fundamental principles. They can, however, offer specific tips which are useful in the right circumstances, and these, too, change little with the years. “Never recount your dreams in public,” wrote the anonymous author of “Maximes de la Bienséance en la Conversation”, one of the first manuals of conversation published in France, in 1618. Margaret Shepherd, author of “The Art of Civilized Conversation”, a manual published in America in 2006, offers the same prohibition. Among the ill-judged remarks that she calls “saboteurs of small talk”, she includes “self-absorbed comments like ‘I had the strangest dream. You were in it. Uh, let me try to remember it'.”

The more modern the manual of conversation, the more concrete its advice is likely to be. Ms Shepherd offers seven quick ways to tell if you are boring your listeners, which include: “Never speak uninterrupted for more than four minutes at a time” and “If you are the only person who still has a plate full of food, stop talking.” Her checklist of things best not said to the parent of a newborn baby should be memorised for future use. It comprises: “What's wrong with his nose?” “Should he be that colour?” “Isn't he awfully small?” “Shouldn't you be breast-feeding?” “Did you want a boy?” “Is he a good baby?” “He looks like Churchill!/She looks like ET!” “It's really cute!”

It is easy enough to see the usefulness of such tips, but they capture none of the joy which comes from the mastery of conversation. For enthusiasts conversation is an art, one of the great pleasures of life, even the basis of civilised society. Mme de Staël, a great talker and intellectual of the French ancien régime, called conversation “a means of reciprocally and rapidly giving one another pleasure; of speaking just as quickly as one thinks; of spontaneously enjoying one's self; of being applauded without working...[A] sort of electricity that causes sparks to fly, and that relieves some people of the burden of their excess vivacity and awakens others from a state of painful apathy”.


 Old French mastersBridgeman

The second golden age of conversation, among the French elites in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, is much better documented. Historians associate the rise of conversation at this time with the prestige enjoyed by women in French high society, which was perhaps unique in Europe before or since. Women ran the salons where the culture of the time was created, and their presence civilised the men they invited there. Another factor was the leisure forced on the French aristocracy by an absolute monarchy. Their political ambitions thwarted, the upper classes turned their energies towards entertaining themselves. A man without conversation was liable to find himself devalued, whatever his other qualities: “In England it was enough that Newton was the greatest mathematician of the century,” wrote Jean d'Alembert, a French philosopher and mathematician; “in France he would have been expected to be agreeable too.”

The conversation of the French salons and dinner tables became as stylised as a ballet. The basic skills brought to the table were expected to include politesse (sincere good manners), esprit (wit), galanterie (gallantry), complaisance (obligingness), enjouement (cheerfulness) and flatterie. More specific techniques would be required as the conversation took flight. A comic mood would require displays of raillerie (playful teasing), plaisanterie (joking), bons mots (epigrams), traits and pointes (rhetorical figures involving “subtle, unexpected wit”, according to Benedetta Craveri, a historian of the period), and, later, persiflage (mocking under the guise of praising). Even silences had to be finely judged. The Duc de La Rochefoucauld distinguished between an “eloquent” silence, a “mocking” silence and a “respectful” silence. The mastery of such “airs and tones”, he said, was “granted to few”.

Conversation was also flourishing across the channel in the early 18th century, but for a different reason. This was the golden age of the British coffee house. Whereas the French salon excluded politics from polite conversation, in the British coffee house politics was a main preoccupation. Foreign visitors remarked both on the free range of speech there and on the mingling of classes and professions. A modern German sociologist, Jürgen Habermas, linked the coffee houses with what he called the “rise of a public space” outside the control of the state, or, as we might say now, civil society.


But if British liberals were keen on free speech, they were much less preoccupied than their French contemporaries were with its forms and flourishes. Dr Johnson was considered so great a talker that a contemporary compared his conversation to Titian's painting. But he also could sit stonily silent through a dinner that bored him, or contradict and interrupt in defiance of all common etiquette. Even Boswell, his devoted note-taker, acknowledged his “dogmatic roughness of manner”.

Strong and silent

Johnson was far from the only Englishman to have matched a love of conversation with a reputation for occasional difficult silences. As he himself said: “A Frenchman must always be talking, whether he knows anything of the matter or not; an Englishman is content when he has nothing to say.” In his book “Democracy in America”, Alexis de Tocqueville refers to the “strange unsociability and reserved and taciturn disposition of the English”. But for Charles Dickens, another foreign visitor to America in the 19th century, it was the Americans who seemed taciturn. He blamed this on a “love of trade”, which limited men's interests and made them reluctant to volunteer information for fear of tipping their hand to a competitor. The idealisation of silence remained strong in American culture into the 20th century: think of the laconic heroes of Western films, or of Hemingway's novels.

More recently it has been neither trade nor taciturnity, but the distractions of technology, which have seemed to threaten the quality of conversation. George Orwell complained in 1946 that “in very many English homes the radio is literally never turned off. This is done with a definite purpose. The music prevents the conversation from becoming serious or even coherent.” The television attracted similar comment when it became commonplace two decades later.

In 2006 an American essayist, Stephen Miller, published a book called “Conversation: A History of a Declining Art”, in which he worried that “neither digital music players nor computers were invented to help people avoid real conversation, but they have that effect.” A reviewer of Mr Miller's book found it “striking” that past generations would “speak of conversation as a way of taking pleasure, much as a modern American might speak of an evening spent browsing the internet”.

 Still talkingBubbles

Conversation has survived worse challenges (Johnson thought it might be killed by a return of religious zealotry), and it will doubtless survive more. For evidence that it thrives still, go into any smart New York restaurant, where the noise level will be deafening. Or go into a Barnes & Noble or Borders bookshop and look at the shelves of manuals on how to talk better. Most of them are aimed at people who want to talk more persuasively and engagingly in order to get on in their careers, not at people who want to engage in conversation for the sheer pleasure it affords. But these motivations are far from exclusive. Making friends and influencing people, to borrow the language of Dale Carnegie, amount in the end to much the same thing. Both of them require charm, courtesy and the desire to understand the ideas and opinions of others. And whatever the strategic objective, those will never be bad tactics.