The Secret to a Good Conversation
A new cultural history embraces talk as an open-ended source of temporary delight.
The claim that conversation is a dying art has become itself a familiar conversational topic. As with many laments of cultural decline, the charge is most often levied by the old against the young. Our loquacious forebears, we are told, spent their time chattering away in smoke-filled drawing rooms, coming up with such ideas as human rights, constitutional government, and modern art. Today’s young people, in this telling, have ushered in the tyranny of the tongue-tied. Stupefied by our phones, we shirk face-to-face contact. When we are roused to banter, we find ourselves regurgitating political talking points or desperately summarizing a half-remembered television show. A burgeoning industry of card games featuring conversational prompts (“Can love really cure all?”) tries to supply training wheels for basic skills of human interaction. Maybe ChatGPT will end our misery by drafting our conversations for us. Its remarks could hardly be more hackneyed than what we say ourselves.
But is discourse really in the doldrums? Complaints about the decline of conversation have a long history, extending far beyond present-day hand-wringing about the numbing influence of technology or the banal comforts of sectarian echo chambers. And attacks on empty talk, conventionally directed at women or the young, can also strike at the powerful. The satirist Jonathan Swift, for example, took aim at the vapidity of upper-class banter in his 1738 treatise A Complete Collection of Genteel and Ingenious Conversation. Having observed how often, in company, “the Conversation falls and drops to nothing, like a Fire without Supply of Fuel,” Swift’s speaker presents a collection of eloquent “Questions, Answers, Repartees, Replies, and Rejoinders” in the hope of remedying this linguistic deterioration. Conversation cards, likewise, are nothing new. Eighteenth-century dinner-party hosts would enliven the discourse in the parlor with cards featuring aphorisms such as “Wedding a Woman for her Beauty, is like eating a Bird for its Singing,” among other surefire discussion starters. The great age of conversation was also a great age of anxiety about conversation.
Paula Marantz Cohen’s Talking Cure: An Essay on the Civilizing Power of Conversation is one of the latest entries in this somewhat cranky genre. Delightful conversation, Cohen argues, requires mutual vulnerability and a willingness to engage, in unhurried fashion, in the fortuitous rhythms of verbal improvisation. As is customary for books of its kind, Talking Cure is saturated with nostalgia for a golden age of gab. An English professor at Drexel University, Cohen looks to literary history for idealized models of talk—cupping her ear against the door of the salons of the French Enlightenment, listening to Samuel Johnson’s stentorian voice ring out against the tavern walls in 18th-century London, and eavesdropping on the radical sexual candor of Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury Group, among other canonical sites of discourse.
Along the way, she explores what makes for a vivacious meeting of minds rather than a drab rehearsal of rote positions or an awkward misfire. The impediments to vigorous discussion that Cohen singles out—groupthink, misinformation, excessive drinking on campus—are familiar enough. (So, too, is the moralistic notion that in the fight for conversation in an age of “rampant incivility,” civilization itself is at stake.) Yet the very things that might make us anxious about speaking with others, Cohen shows, also make it exciting. Conversation contains an element of risk. In the flow of talk we reveal our character, our learning, our wit or lack thereof. We are also sure to encounter difference, to feel our sensibility pushing against someone else’s—at times pleasurably, at times abrasively. Successful dialogue, Cohen proposes, turns these variances in temperament, attitude, and experience into sources of joint gratification.
Good conversation can, of course, take many forms: It can be somewhat pugilistic, as the French essayist Michel de Montaigne put it, likening conversation to a sparring match in which an opponent “will attack me on the flanks, stick his lance in me right and left; his ideas send mine soaring.” But, as Cohen writes, it can also stem from a gentler sense of equality among participants, a “mutual openness, even vulnerability” that helps conversation unfurl. Atmosphere, too, is key. A comfortable setting and good food and drink provide favorable conditions for the mysterious chemistry by which personalities mingle in talk “like ingredients in recipes, heightening or diluting each other, or producing some felicitous new combination.” For Cohen, conversation is “not about winning or losing but about connectedness and elaboration.” It is a form of open-ended play through which we satisfy our social and intellectual needs.
A major threat to conversation, Cohen argues, is groupthink, which leads to what she calls “grouptalk”: implicit rules for speech that forbid the expression of dissent. In an atmosphere that encourages conformity, people tend to give up the free play of conversation in favor of platitudes or pieties. Although Cohen laments this sort of recycled talk as dull and deadening, her critique on this front is far from fresh, filled with such chestnuts as “We have become a nation of factions and tribes,” with seemingly little concern for whether some “factions” may be more distant from the truth than others. Unlike some critics who worry about the demise of spirited, good-faith debate, however, Cohen resists advancing “persuasion” as the goal of discussion. She prizes conversation as an end in itself, its value residing not in the achievement of any particular outcome but in the pleasure of fluent verbal interchange.
This is not to say that Talking Cure underestimates conversation’s importance as a route to knowledge. Cohen praises Plato’s dialogues, in which interlocutors pursue truth by means of careful question-asking, as a crucial template for conversation. And her celebration of the college seminar as a training ground for talk leads her to argue for increased seminar offerings in STEM fields as a way of helping those disciplines come alive for a broader swath of students. The habits of perceptive listening and imaginative testing of ideas, modeled in the college seminar, prepare us to treat more casual exchanges as chances to learn. But again, she grants priority to pleasure, and the delights of knowledge and intellectual discussion are only some of conversation’s many satisfactions. Her tour of literary salons and other glamorous conversational milieus credits gossip, banter, and flirtation as modes of verbal intercourse that can run parallel with philosophical disputation. In talk at its most glittering, knowledge and delight are mutually supporting.
Whether meandering or narrowly targeted, conversation is, at heart, a fleeting activity. “It flies up the chimney,” Woolf once remarked, “and is gone.” Cohen offers that the best conversations surrender to this ephemeral quality, and that understanding the transience of talk can help us speak with one another more deeply. It is “precisely the nonutilitarian and leisurely nature of conversation,” she writes, “that makes it so valuable as a humanizing activity.” Conversations, in other words, most often produce nothing. But in the twists of talk, we open ourselves to others and allow our interior to be subtly reshaped.
Conversation is commonly called an art, a tribute to the musical rhythms of speech, the gratifications of verbal play, and the ingenuity we enlist when we exchange stories, examine ideas, and evoke images in the minds of our interlocutors. But it is also a craft. In the most blissful conversations, we lay words down like bricks to construct, in turns, an elaborate architecture—structures held up momentarily through the pressure of our attention and imagination. A phone buzzes; a siren blares; our palace in the air falls to pieces, vanishes into vapor. But we built it nevertheless.
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