The Other Side of You, part three

Part one is here and part two is here.

This was all thrown into sharp relief the next morning, as, in reading Anthony Trollope's Can You Forgive Her? (1865), I came across the following passionate discussion, which runs along similar lines to some of Thomas and Elizabeth's conversations. George Vavasor talks here with his cousin, Alice, to whom he had once been engaged and whom he had treated badly, about her impending marriage to a quiet country farmer:

"Between you and me there can be no necessity for falsehood. We have grown beyond our sugar-toothed ages, and are now men and women. I perfectly understood your breaking away from me. I understood you, and in spite of my sorrow knew that you were right. I am not going to accuse or to defend myself; but I knew that you were right."

"Then let there be no more about it."

"Yes; there must be more about it. I did not understand you when you accepted Mr Grey. Against him I have not a whisper to make. He may be perfect for aught I know. But, knowing you as I thought I did, I could not understand your loving such a man as him. It was as though one who had lived on brandy should take himself suddenly to a milk diet,--and enjoy the change! A milk diet is no doubt the best. But men who have lived on brandy can't make those changes very suddenly. They perish in the attempt."

"Not always, George."

"It may be done with months of agony;--but there was no such agony with you."

"Who can tell?"

"But you will tell me the cure was made. I thought so, and therefore thought that I should find you changed. I thought that you, who had been all fire, would now have turned yourself into soft-flowing milk and honey, and have become fit for the life in store for you. With such a one I might have travelled from Moscow to Malta without danger. The woman fit to be John Grey's wife would certainly do me no harm,--could not touch my happiness. I might have loved her once,--might still love the memory of what she had been; but her, in her new form, after her new birth,--such a one as that, Alice, could be nothing to me. Don't mistake me. I have enough of wisdom in me to know how much better, ay, and happier a woman she might be. It was not that I thought you had descended in the scale; but I gave you credit for virtues which you have not acquired. Alice, that wholesome diet of which I spoke is not your diet. You would starve on it, and perish."

Though I'm only about a third of the way through Can You Forgive Her?, and I suspect that George may not ultimately be entirely trustworthy, I do think that here his speech is sincere. Whereas Thomas's pleadings to Elizabeth all seem rooted in his desire to further his own aims, George's to Alice, though they may have that effect, seem just as strongly rooted in a real desire for truth and an understanding of his cousin. Am I mistaken? Michael Dirda's not the only person, after all, who praised The Other Side of You--could this just be a very personal reaction to a couple of particular characteristics that Vickers has assigned to her character? From what I've provided here, do you see any difference in tone between the men as presented by Vickers and Trollope?

I'll close this too-long post with one last point against those who celebrate their own rudeness as having some inherent, iconoclastic value. I think Stephen Miller was dead-on in his Conversation: A History of a Declining Art (2006) when he wrote:

In popular culture rude people are celebrated as authentic, and those skilled at the art of conversation are often depicted a superficial or effeminate or dishonest (or all three).

Conversation as combat

Simply by chance, I followed Stephen Miller’s Conversation with A House and Its Head (1938) the first novel I’ve read by Ivy Compton-Burnett , who wrote almost entirely in dialogue, telling stories of utterly self-involved, ethically bankrupt turn-of-the-century English families. Compton-Burnett is in her singular way a descendant of Jane Austen, brutally analyzing the gap between what is said and what is meant in polite society, baring the cruelty underlying banal pleasantries. But whereas in Austen there’s always some hope, and a heroine, Compton-Burnett’s world is utterly unredeemed. Power and self-interest trump all.

Anthony Powell, in an obituary appreciation in the Spectator in 1969, wrote:

She saw life in the relentless terms of Greek tragedy, its cruelties, ironies, hypocrisies—above all its passions—played out against a background of triviality and ennui.

Dead-on, but awfully bleak. So why read her? Well, she can be as perceptive as Jane Austen, more brutal than Evelyn Waugh, and, at times, as precise and funny as Wodehouse. For example, in this exchange, some friends are talking about the central family in A House and Its Head, the Edgeworths, which has just lost its matriarch:

“Ellen’s family! What a beautiful and intimate sound! That is how I shall think of them. I shall not feel it presumptuous, kept to the confines of my own mind.”

“It will be narrowly restricted,” agreed her brother.

Later, the widower’s daughter, speaking to the governess about her father’s grief, says:

“Well, I would rather be myself than him just now.”

“Why?” said Cassie.

“Cassie, you must know he was not kind enough to Mother. It does no good to pretend to forget.”

“I should have thought it would do a great deal of good.”

After the father remarries, the neighbors, who serve as an impressively uninformed Greek chorus, discuss the new bride:

”Did Mr. Edgeworth seem very attached?” said Miss Burtenshaw at the same moment.

“Yes,” said the men together.

“As much as to the first Mrs. Edgeworth? “

“Yes.”

“How could you tell?” said Miss Burtenshaw.

“Well, you must know of ways, to ask the question,” said Oscar.

That’s more or less how the manner of the whole book. Line after line of cutting dialogue, veering from funny to horrifying to painful, the difference sometimes being as little as a change of a word or two. The dialogue—like the situations themselves—is too stylized to be realistic, yet it has a fractured quality that feels particularly modern, even contemporary. Characters mutter under their breath, interrupt, don’t listen, and talk over one another. With each exchange, even between supposed friends, points are scored—and kept. Barbara Pym, in a 1938 letter to her friend Robert Liddell, asked,

Does one ever make consciously Compton-Burnett remarks in situations where they would be most fruitful I wonder? I must have the courage to try someday.

Instead, she would go on to write some.

Only two of Compton-Burnett’s twenty novels are currently in print, with the New York Review of Books continuing its heroic publishing efforts by reissuing recently her Manservant and Maidservant (1947) and A House and Its Head. Not being part of any real school or fashion has probably played a part in her falling out of favor, as would not being known for any one particular book above others.

But I think the most important reason she is little read these days is that, as Arnold Bennett put it in reviewing her third novel, Brothers and Sisters (1929), she is “by no means easy to read.” Like Jane Austen (or Penelope Fitzgerald, who took after both Austen and Compton-Burnett), she demands that her readers pay very close attention or risk missing everything. Important shifts in emotion—and even key plot points—are conveyed only through dialogue, buried beneath exaggerated late-Victorian indirection.

Yet, as Arnold Bennett argued later in that same review, Brothers and Sisters was “original, strong and incontestably true to life.” Odd and claustrophobic as Compton-Burnett’s vicious, astringent world is, after twenty or thirty pages it comes to seem very real. I think Anthony Powell was right when he wrote, later in that same obituary,

My reason for thinking [the world of her novels] is not wholly extinct is partly on account of the vitality of the novels themselves—if people were ever like this, there must be people always like this; partly because one will suddenly be confronted—in a railway carriage, for example—with a great burst of overheard Compton-Burnett dialogue.

And, as Barbara Pym put it in another letter to Robert Liddell, two years later,

The influence of Miss Compton-Burnett is very powerful once it takes a hold, isn’t it? For a time there seems to be no point in writing any other way, indeed, there seems not to be any other way, but I have found that it passes (like so much in this life) and I have now got back to my own way, such as it is. But purified and strengthened, as after a rich spiritual experience, or a shattering love affair.

It’s worth picking up one of her novels and reading a few pages. You’ll know pretty quickly if she’s for you.

Conversation: A Declining Art?, Part Two

Part one, which is full of praise for the first two-thirds of the book, is here.

In the last third of Conversation: A Declining Art , Stephen Miller attempts to track what he perceives as the decline of conversation in twentieth-century America. He begins with a flat and fairly perfunctory consideration of the laconic hero in twentieth-century American literature and film. But while he points to Hemingway and John Wayne in order to demonstrate that the strong, silent type was the American ideal in this period, he ignores substantial contrary evidence, everything from screwball comedies to the golden age of radio to Dorothy Parker.

He uses evidence selectively like that throughout the closing chapters. The worst is when Miller attempts to blame the most recent downturn in the quality and place of conversation in American life on fifties and sixties counterculture. He considers Easy Rider at length, then spends more time than anyone ought to spend these days on Norman Mailer. His critique boils down to this: neither privileging visceral experience nor doing drugs makes for good conversation. That’s not news (Garry Wills, for one, manages a much more interesting and nuanced critique of those aspects of sixties youth culture, in passing, in Nixon Agonistes), and by using that as the crux of his argument Miller takes ignores the fact that the late sixties were also a time of contentious private and public discussions about how society should be structured. Serious conversations, in groups large and small, were central to that reconsideration.

Then we get pages and pages on possibly the most over-analyzed subject since Madonna, talk shows, and suddenly we’re back to “conversation avoidance mechanisms.” I’ll spare you the details; as I said before, anyone who willfully misrepresents the purpose of an iPod as a barrier to conversation has no authority to speak on the subject.

But once Miller gets to the present, the details are less important. The real reason his arguments about conversation’s decline fail is that he's writing about our era, and I think he’s flat-out wrong. I live in a world of great conversation. No, I don’t want to talk to strangers on planes, or on the L (though I'm a shameless eavesdropper), and I don’t spend time chatting with strangers in coffeehouses or bars. But within my circle of friends and family, conversation is the basis of our relationship. When my friends get together, we talk. We cook and talk, we eat dinner and talk, we have drinks and talk. We tell stories, discuss work and family life, talk politics. When we go to baseball games—or when we watch the playoffs at my house throughout October—we analyze the game, gossip about the players, and chat. Even when we watch a TV show, it’s frequently a group event, and we talk and talk about the show afterwards. I don’t think we’re that unusual.

One of my favorite adult memories is of a night in January of 2005 when my parents were in town and we invited half a dozen friends to dinner. Dinner turned into an hours-long conversation, running well past bedtime, about our perplexity over George Bush’s reelection. My parents brought a downstate, rural perspective; most of their neighbors had voted for Bush. My friends and I came at the question as residents of the city that had given Kerry his largest plurality. The conversation was impassioned, serious, and interesting. It was a real attempt, by all of us, to understand something we feared was inexplicable. I think we all experienced the exhilaration that Hazlitt describes following a good talk, “feelings lighter and more ethereal than I have at any other time.”

And, while there are plenty of times when I am an awkward conversationalist, I have friends whose conversational facility, with everyone and in every situation, regularly amazes me. This description by Hazlitt of his friend, painter James Northcote, could easily apply to my friend Becky:

He lends his ear to an observation as if you have brought him a piece of news and enters into it with as much avidity and earnestness as if it interested himself personally. . . . His thoughts bubble up and sparkle like heads on old wine. The fund of anecdote, the collection of curious particulars, is enough to set up any common retailer of jests that dines out every day; but these are not strung together like a row of galley-slaves, but are always introduced to illustrate some argument or bring out some fine distinction of character.

I greatly admire, deeply envy, and hopelessly aspire to her talents as a conversationalist. And I have many other friends like her.

Maybe Miller doesn’t have such friends. Maybe he’s stuck in an academic environment, where talk, as in the novels of Barbara Pym or Ivy Compton-Burnett, can be more combat than conversation. Maybe he is paying too much attention to young people and teenagers—as, it seems, do many cultural commentators—forgetting that, while they’re certainly different from us adults, they’ll also soon, as adults, be different from what they are now. They might turn out to be able to have good conversations, even with a curmudgeon like Miller.

I’m not saying the state of conversation in America is perfect, but just as the golden age was never that golden, the fallen present is certainly brighter than Miller makes it out to be. If he’s ever in town, I’ll gladly introduce him to people who, I hope, will make him see my side. I’ll gladly make the martinis and sit back and listen.

Conversation: A Declining Art?

In the Introduction to his Conversation: A History of a Declining Art, Stephen Miller decries the rise of “conversation avoidance mechanisms,” by which he means such devices as iPods and video games. I picture his grandchildren rolling their eyes as he tells them, “Don’t bring any of those conversation avoidance mechanisms to my house!” Such an intentional, perverse misunderstanding of the reasons people use—and like—such devices served to make me skeptical of Miller’s credibility from the start, which is not how you want to start reading a book.

For more than two-thirds of its 300 pages, however, Conversation is great fun, a digressive, anecdotal history of the role of conversation in Western society. Miller begins in ancient times, with the Bible (which is nearly devoid of actual conversation), then the Greeks and, in particular, Plato’s Symposium, which tells of a drunken conversation after a dinner party gets out of hand: “There was noise everywhere, and all order was abandoned; everyone was forced to drink vast amounts of wine.” I’ve been to a fair number of parties like that, but none has produced any conversation as odd and fascinating as the one recorded in the Symposium. Socrates seems to be a necessary catalyst. As Miller says,

Socrates is an unsettling conversationalist. . . . Alcibiades describes his mixed feelings about Socrates: “Often I’ve felt I’d be glad to see him removed from the human race; but if this did happen, I know well I’d be much more upset. I just don’t know how to deal with this person.”

You simply never knew where a conversation with Socrates might end up. In that regard, Plato’s reconstructions of his dialogues frequently resemble late-night dorm-room conversations, with vastly more rigor, and without that one evangelical Christian kid who always ruined everything.

The discussion of Greek conversation is really just a prelude to the heart of the book—and Miller’s area of expertise—the eighteenth century, “the age of conversation.” It’s the era of the Paris salon and of the coffeehouse in Britain. It’s the time of Dr. Johnson, Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, and William Hazlitt. For the intellectual men of London, coffeehouses were second homes, offices, and debating halls, and Miller gives a good sense of their place and their ambience. A French visitor to London writes,

Some coffee houses are a resort for . . . scholars and for wits; others are the resort of dandies or of politicians, or again of professional newsmongers; and many others are temples of Venus.

As that suggests, coffee wasn’t the point of the coffeehouse, of course, just as in coffeehouses today. The men were there to talk, hash out ideas, and engage with the thinkers of the age—and often, it seems, to complain about them to one another. Of the poet Thomas Gray, Horace Walpole says,

He is the worst company in the world—from a melancholy turn, from living reclusively, and from a little too much dignity, he never converses easily—all his words are measured, and chosen, and formed into sentences; his writings are admirable; he himself is not agreeable.”

And Johnson agrees,

Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull every where. He was dull in a new way, and that made people think him GREAT. He was a mechanical poet.

It’s hard not to assume that most coffeehouse conversations were, like most bar conversations today, full of blowhards spouting ill-informed opinions. But there was clearly greatness there, too, at least on occasion. As Johnson, no fan of fools, told Boswell, “For spending three pence in a coffee house, you may be for hours in very good company.” On a good day, the company must have been impressive, from Hazlitt, with whom, it seems, everyone eventually quarreled (“Hazlitt suffered for his lack of politeness. He once said: ‘I want to know why everybody has such a dislike of me.’”) to Thomas De Quincey, of whom Jane Welsh Carlyle said, “What one would give to have him in a box, and take him out to talk!”

Throughout this section, Conversation is a truly wonderful book. Miller isn’t trying very hard to make an argument; he simply wants to plunge us into the intellectual and social life of the eighteenth century, and he does so with the texture, color, and goofy detail available only to someone who’s read deeply and widely in the period. We learn that John Adams described the life of Benjamin Franklin as “a Scene of constant dissipation,” and that Boswell, to cure a hangover, went to the King’s Arms Coffee House and ate “a basin of gravy soup, and a basin of pease soup.” Conversation is exactly the sort of writing that made me start this blog; without the blog, I would at some point have been unable to avoid reading aloud to friends the argument of an anti-coffee pamphleteer, who wrote that

The excessive use of that newfangled, abominable, heathenish liquor called coffee . . . [has] so eunuched our husbands, and crippled our more kind gallants, that they are become as impotent as age.

But then Miller enters the twentieth century and begins to attempt to put forth an argument rather than just retailing anecdotes, and the book goes off the rails. As this post is already too long, I’ll explain more tomorrow.