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Chattering Classes

Conversation An enjoyable article in the Economist (subscription link – see file below). Will try to have a proper post later.

"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.

Great brilliance, fantastic powers of recall and quick wit are clearly valuable in sustaining conversation at these cosmic levels. Charm may be helpful too—although Samuel Johnson, one of the most admired conversationalists of 18th-century England, seemed to manage without much of it. For those of more modest accomplishments, but attached to conversation as one of life’s pleasures and necessary skills, there is a lively market in manuals and tip-sheets going back almost 500 years, and a legacy of wisdom with an even longer history. One striking thing about the advice is how consistent it remains over time, suggesting that there are real rights and wrongs in conversation, not just local conventions."

No fear though – people will keep talking, no matter what new gadgets inundate our lives and vie for our attention. But sparkling conversation doesn’t have the same rules in all parts of the world. I can’t help recounting here what an Israeli friend said to me years ago after a dinner party in her home for her new American friends. When I asked how the evening went, she replied, "I don’t think they enjoyed themselves much. The conversation was not flowing well – the guests DIDN’T interrupt each other."

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2 responses to “Chattering Classes”

  1. Dean C. Rowan

    This reminds me of comments I’ve read about the late Rogers Albritton. I have no familiarity with his work, but an article by Lindsay Waters, Scholarship and Silence, in the Journal of Scholarly Publishing, v.36, no.1 (2004) pp.15-22, mentions him and prompted me to learn a bit more. A memorial to Albritton by one of his colleagues at UCLA remarks:

    Rogers exercised his power as midwife and torpedo fish both in conversations – frequently lasting all night no matter when they began – and in lectures crafted right down to the gesture which yet made visible his day-to-day and minute-to minute wrestle with the problems on which he focused. The conversations helped shape the views of almost every colleague at UCLA as well as those of such former students and colleagues as Stanley Cavell, Marshall Cohen, Saul Kripke, Thomas Nagel and Hilary Putnam. The lectures made legends of his HUM 5 at Harvard and his Phil 1 and Phil 7 here at UCLA.

    So I imagine Albritton was a superb conversationalist. The Waters article, which urges scholars to refrain from writing—an ironic stance, given Waters’ position as an editor at Harvard University Press—shares this little anecdote about Albritton:

    A story that hit me hard was about Rogers Albritton, a philosopher who taught at Harvard and UCLA and who just before he died spent some of his precious time shredding all his lecture notes so that kind friends would not edit them and bring them to someone like me to publish. Earlier in his career his friend Donald Davidson conspired with several other admirers of Albritton to put him in a situation where he had to publish something: They campaigned to get him elected the President of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association. One duty of the President is to deliver an address at the annual meeting. Those addresses are always published in the proceedings, and so Albritton was tricked into publishing.

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  2. Ruchira Paul

    Thanks, Dean. It is funny about the publishing / conversationalist angle.
    My parents (who were a bit older than Albritton) used to speak effusively about their own college professors who according to them, read everything that was in print, had steel trap memories, were polymaths and could authoritatively hold forth on wide ranging subjects – and not just in the classroom but often in the university coffee house and yes, sometimes through the night. Yet those scholars spent all their lives teaching and with a few exceptions, hardly anything of their scholarship remains as published material. Their students would sometimes later record tid-bits of their wisdom in their own publications.
    I am currently reading the autobiography of a leading Indian historian which is being serialized in a Bengali periodical that I subscribe to. He too says the same thing about the lack of publications by scholars of yore.

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