How literature’s greatest can help us relearn the lost art of conversation

What I’ve missed so much – I can acknowledge it now only because, slowly, it’s starting to return – is conversation. Not those endless Zoom chats that take real effort. Not waiting on mute, as your expression hovers in forced neutrality, so that your personality starts to feel blanched and wrinkled like toes left too long in the bath. What I’ve been missing is real-time, real-space, proximate and personalised chitchat, yarn-spinning and banter.

I long – maybe you do, too – for the company of my closest friends. James, who hugs me, thumps my chest when he’s telling me something I need to know and generally gets in my face when we convene once a month at our favourite dive bar. I miss, too, the look on my friend Jeremy’s face when the ironies in the story he’s telling – which he knows I can see without him having to spell them out – have become so heavy, and the pileup of mishaps so funny, that the groans they trigger get in the way of him completing the story and we both collapse in high-pitched mirth.

Or the expression of Ben, who is 82 and enduring tough times with incredible grace, when he remembers a story about one of his kids when they were the age my kids are now. Ben’s face is mischievous, fond, melancholy and full of love. He emits all this from his quick-witted face, from his body, from the relationship between his watery eyes and his shape-shifting eyebrows. You have to be there, you have to be sitting right next to him, to see it all working in concert.

Right now, in the public sphere – have you noticed? – conversation has become difficult. People seem to be shouting, talking in slogans. One side keeps alienating the other. If you are immersed in the feedback effect of your favourite news source or your social media bubble, it might feel like your cause, or your idea of reality is being reinforced, even advanced. You may feel confirmed that you, and your side, are in the right.

And perhaps you are. But it’s also true that being right (as the painter Franz Kline once said) “is the most terrific personal state that no one else is interested in”. When parents fight in front of their children, they are both trying to be right. But victory for either one of them doesn’t interest the children, and for good reason. The better approach, as everyone knows, is to stop shouting, to refrain from tweeting in all-caps or writing carefully honed posts that drip sarcasm like blood from a murder weapon, and to try to find other conversational modes.

The kind of conversation I’m missing is about mutual sympathy, I guess, but it’s not always about perfect understanding. Because even with your closest friends, you’re always missing each other, aren’t you? You’re always failing to comprehend, getting the ostensible point of it wrong.

But maybe that’s OK. Because even as you get things wrong, I find, you’re often approaching a deeper kind of complicity. Toni Morrison, in Beloved, wrote about “sweet, crazy conversations full of half-sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be”. And Alexander Pushkin seemed to be celebrating something similar in Eugene Onegin when he suggested that conversation is most arousing when it is fitful and spasmodic: “No, incorrect and careless chatter,/ Words mispronounced, thoughts ill-expressed/ Evoke emotion’s pitter-patter,/ Now as before, inside my breast.”

One of my favourite accounts of a conversation was written by the English novelist Ian McEwan after he met Philip Roth. McEwan, the author of Atonement, was young and had published only short stories at that point. Roth was the famous author of numerous novels, including Portnoy’s Complaint. After preliminaries, the two of them embarked, wrote McEwan, “on a long conversation oddly compounded of intimacy and abstraction”.

Roth admitted he was experiencing a creative crisis and feeling generally bewildered. In response, wrote McEwan, “I tell him how difficult I’m finding it, writing a novel. Perhaps I’ll never write one. He says, Of course you will. You don’t have any choice.”

Roth’s manner, he continued, “is quizzical, teasing, vaguely avuncular. Gentle, courteous, but with a manic gleam, a taste for mayhem. We talk about sex. The cycle of relationships, passion disintegrating into friendship. How to make love and work fit. I tell him I’m in love. He asks if it interferes with writing. I say, Of course. We talk about the fear of loneliness.”

open image in gallery

Roth “talked himself out of one affair,” continued McEwan, “because he couldn’t imagine himself having children. I say that I too cannot imagine being a father. He says he can easily imagine me as one...”

In the best conversations, one thing leads to another in just this way. McEwan’s account is matter-of-fact, but it captures the feel of truly memorable conversations – the kind that are embodied, that purl out over several hours and have their own textures and rhythms. Each thing said seems to skim above a deep pool of the unsaid.

“It’s very easy to like Philip Roth,” McEwan concluded. “The intelligence is warm, with a touch of cruelty to keep you alert. Easy to imagine women falling in love with him. His pillow talk is probably an enchantment – funny, obscene, fond.”

You can easily imagine that for part of the time Roth and McEwan may have stopped speaking altogether and that this, far from being awkward, would have sealed their intimacy.

Something like this once happened between the philosopher Michel Foucault and the Swiss filmmaker Daniel Schmidt. When Schmidt visited him (they had never previously met), “we discovered after a few minutes that we really had nothing to say to each other”, wrote Foucault.

“So we stayed together from about three-o’clock in the afternoon to midnight. We drank, we smoked hash, we had dinner. And I don’t think we spoke for more than twenty minutes during these ten hours. From that moment a really strong friendship started. It was for me the first time that a friendship originated in strictly silent behaviour.”

open image in gallery

Silence is one form a conversation can take. Another can be carried on without any interlocutor at all. Morrison (in Beloved again) spoke of “the interior sounds a woman makes when she believes she is alone and unobserved at her work: a ‘sth’ when she misses the needle’s eye; a soft moan when she sees another chip in her one good platter; the low, friendly argument with which she greets the hens. Nothing fierce or startling. Just that eternal, private conversation that takes place between women and their tasks”.

Morrison is reminding us that the true task of conversation is to unravel the idea of “closure”. Dialogue continues – that is its chief attribute. “The important thing, rather than the subject,” wrote John Updike in one of his short stories, “was the conversation itself, the quick agreements, the slow nods, the weave of different memories; it was like one of those Panama baskets shaped underwater around a useless stone.”

The best conversations proceed in a mode of agreement. In The Comfort of Strangers, one of many novels McEwan went on to write, it was agreement as “a rhetorical mode” that allowed his two characters, Mary and Colin – a married couple on vacation in Venice – “to move through so many topics with such patience, that caused them to be still talking in low voices on the balcony at four in the morning”.

Before their trip, with their marriage foundering, Mary and Colin had always taken opposing sides in conversation, assuming that this was more conducive to analytic rigour. But what tended to happen was that “subjects were not explored so much as defensively reiterated, or forced into elaborate irrelevances, and suffused with irritability”.

Now, however, “freed by mutual encouragement they roamed, like children at seaside rockpools, from one matter to another.”

This same childlike quality is captured in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, as Levin and Kitty are at last about to overcome the obstacles to their loving union. It’s one of the greatest descriptions of a conversation ever written. But when Levin and Kitty arrive at the few brief minutes of exchange upon which the rest of their lives will hinge, what passes between them is not spelt out. Or, not fully.

At the crucial moment, when everything is at stake, their avowal of love becomes akin to a children’s game, played with chalk at a table. Levin cannot put what he needs to ask Kitty in words, so he writes the first letters of each word, and leaves it to her to guess the meaning.

When she writes: “i, y, c, f, a, f, w, h,” (meaning: “if you could forgive and forget what happened”) Levin intuits the meaning immediately. He snatches the chalk from her “with nervous, trembling fingers” and writes his immediate reply: “i, h, n, t, f, a, t, f; i, h, n, c, t, l, y”: “I have nothing to forget and to forgive; I have never ceased to love you.”

“’I understand,’ she said in a whisper.”

© The Washington Post