Chapter 1

Improving Our Talking Life

Our manner of talking is so important a matter, not merely for getting along in this life but also for reaching the next, that the most flaming of the Apostles, St. Paul, fiery trail blazer to salvation, declared, "Your manner of speaking must always be gracious, with an edge of liveliness, ready to give each questioner the right answer."1 I should like especially to call attention to his requiring "an edge of liveliness" in a good Christian's conversation! It pleases me to interpret this to mean that a fellow who never lifts a coin from his mother's purse, but who uses up fifteen and then-s to tell how he talked the "cop" out of a traffic ticket, has a mighty slim chance of wriggling through that biblical "eye of a needle" that is the gate of heaven!

Quite probably the Holy Office would consider my interpretation of St. Paul's "edge of liveliness" in conversation too rigorous — and too demoralizing for the millions of talkers whose conversation rattles along on less than four cylinders and on gritty oil. The Holy Office always has to be ready and fit to watch that no Pauline enthusiast will read too much into such provocative dicta as that "Wives must be submissive to their husbands," and that all talk should have "an edge of liveliness" — or otherwise, presumably, subside into pinochle!

Nevertheless, the fact remains that the most fiery of the Apostles told his Colossians, one, to be gracious in conversation, two, to be lively, and three, to be ready and well informed. It is also well to stress that he lays down these requirements, not primarily to get on well in this world, but to become the sort of Christian who deserves heaven in the next. St. Paul's prescription for talking brings to mind that of the man about whom the world's greatest biography was written, the man whom I tend to regard as a great Protestant saint, Samuel Johnson. Boswell reports:

1 Col. 4:6, as translated by R. A. Knox, The New Testament (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1945), p. 435. In the following pages, New Testament references will usually be to the familiar, older Douay-Rheims version.

Talking of conversation, he said, "There must, in the first place, be knowledge, there must be materials; in the second place, there must be a command of words; in the third place, there must be imagination, to place things in such views as they are not commonly seen in; and in the fourth place, there must be presence of mind, and a resolution that is not to be overcome by failures" (Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. H. V. Abbott, Lake Library Edition, 1923, p. 456).

Here St. Paul's "ready to give . . . the right answer" becomes Johnson's first two points: knowledge and command of words; St. Paul's "edge of liveliness" becomes imagination and presence of mind. The great lexicographer, who has been accused of frequently mistaking conversation for a verbal prize contest, failed to mention the point which St. Paul calls graciousness. But another great English word-marshaler, Jonathan Swift, follows St. Paul in putting this first. In his "Hints towards an Essay on Conversation," he declares, "And surely one of the best rules of conversation is, never to say anything which any of the company can reasonably wish we had left unsaid." In his "Letter to a Very Young Lady on Her Marriage," he again stresses that "civility and good will . . . with the addition of some degree of sense, can make conversation or any amusement agreeable."

But so as not to have anyone imagine that it is only the men who lay down rules for conversation, and possibly that, while seeming to encourage it, they slyly want to hedge it so about with their rules that the sex which is said to talk as naturally as champagne bubbles might have its talk methodized into a mere fizz, I quote the dean of women essayists, Miss Agnes Repplier. In her essay, "The Luxury of Conversation," she insists, "People equipped with reason, sentiment, and a vocabulary should have something to talk about." This strongly underwrites Johnson's insistence on knowledge, command of words, and imagination. However, in "A Question of Politeness," she would appear to make St. Paul's graciousness the keystone of good talk. She says, "For to be civilized is to be incapable of giving unnecessary offense."

Elsewhere in the essay, she links good conversation, as St. Paul does, to our spiritual life. She says:

. . . the perpetual surrender which politeness dictates cuts down to a reasonable figure the sum total of selfishness. To listen when we are bored, to talk when we are listless . . . these things brace the sinews of our souls. . . . They discipline us for the good of the community.

There it is! Talking graciously and with "an edge of liveliness" braces the sinews of our souls and "discipline[s] us for the good of the community." That is why all of us, for the good of our own souls and for the good of our fellow men, who are our brothers in Christ, must ever try to become more ready talkers, more gracious talkers. We must keep whetting "the edge of liveliness" of our conversation!

The truth about this matter of talking is that, far more even than our eyes, our conversation is the reflection and expression of our souls, the mark of our personality. The conversation of any group of us together or, if you will, of Catholics or of Quakers or of Americans, when they are together, is the truest index of their culture. Just as truly as the Bible says that by their fruit you shall know them, can one say that by their words one can know them. Our words it is that strike others as sweet or sour, that move them to want more of us, or less.

The more one thinks about it the more one comes to feel that talk is life's visible spark and circuit, the magnetism that holds the human race together. Even deaf-mutes cannot live together without their sign talking. It is so important to human beings that, as their bodies cannot live without food and drink, their spirit likewise seems to wither without talk. That is why, next to outright mayhem and execution, the worst punishment governments know to inflict on human beings is solitary confinement. In retreat houses, the hardest mortification spiritual directors impose is silence. Those who have gone through the experience know that during a three-day self-imposed silence the very world seems to stop — and ideas turn upside down. The keenest joy after such a retreat is not the prospect of a good dinner, but the anticipation of a good talk.

The output of talk in the world is staggering. Even our Lord, who warned "that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall render an account for it in the day of judgment" (Matt. 12:36, 37), talked and preached so much that, it is estimated, if all His words had been set down, all the books then in the world could not have contained them. It is estimated that a person talks about 30,000 words a day. That means that you talk the equivalent in words of two lending-library novels a week. It means that you impose that number of words a week on your family, friends, and associates. It also means that during the time they listened to you, they could have read two good novels. Were you making an honest effort to give them their words' worth?

In theory they could have read two novels during the week in the time they listened to you, but not in fact. Life is so arranged that, in part at least, they had to listen to you or someone like you if they wanted to live at all. You, in the same way, have to listen to others. You can hardly buy a loaf of bread without talking or being talked to. Since talking is so integral, so inescapable, so throbbing a part of life, one can understand why St. Paul begged his Christians to learn to talk graciously and readily, and with an "edge of liveliness."

My reason for quoting Johnson, Swift, and Agnes Repplier right at the outset was not so much to overwhelm you with their rules as to make you feel that conversation is a subject that has agitated the best minds of many lands and ages. It should also agitate us. We should try to raise its level in ourselves and in others. Seeing the great writers trying to do so gradually led me to think that improving conversation was more important than slum clearance, for if a people's conversation is worth while enough and Christian enough, slums will get in its way. And in a contest between the slum and the word, the slum will lose. If the pen is mightier than the sword, then Christian talk is mightier than slums or white slavery or even war.

My first contact with the talk of the world outside my home was with the boys in a rural school. It was not pleasant. All the boys were too bashful to talk with the girls. And even among the boys, the younger and possibly also the nicer boys were usually too bashful to participate in the general talk sessions. And the talk of the others, the older boys, was not only painfully silly and repetitious but shockingly indecent. People simply will not bring themselves to believe this — but it is literally true — and I fear the same is still true in most nondenominational schools. I say this because when later many of us were transferred to a parochial school, even the rascals who were the most foulmouthed in the public school, directly after being under the constant shadow of heaven and hell, cleansed their speech.

But until I was so transferred, there had been no participating in the school talk. Among indecent people, one either has to have the personality to dominate the conversation along proper lines or be soiled in the common brew —or withdraw. At that age I did not have the needed personality. When play stopped and talk began, I quietly withdrew and took refuge in books. There I began to have my second contact with conversation, a theoretical one. I began to notice that writers generally complained about the dullness, silliness, and tactlessness of much conversation, lamented that conversation was not what it used to be in former times, and made remarks for its improvement. They seemed to consider conversation as the pleasure most adequate and worthy of man's exalted nature, and were distressed because it was usually so poorly done. They all seemed to echo Swift's words in his "Hints towards an Essay on Conversation":

I was prompted to write my thoughts upon this subject by mere indignation, to reflect that so useful and innocent a pleasure, so fitted for every period and condition of life, and so much in all men's power, should be so much neglected and abused.

I reflected much upon their attitude. By and by, however, I began to feel that these critics of conversation expected too much from the human race. As I got into the latter years of college and into graduate school, I found conversation an increasingly more satisfying pleasure. Nearly all of my schoolmates seemed to be people with whom one could, singly or collectively, have good talk. I began to suspect that what was irking the writers was that ordinary people talked about ordinary things, whereas these pen wielders probably thirsted for nothing but conversazione about sonnets, landscapes, and arias. I reflected that normal people cannot be expected to talk about these things, that their talk is probably all right and lively enough for their own tastes, that writers, teachers, and clergymen simply should accept the fact that the people of "Our Town" will confine their talk to measles, groceries, matrimony, and children, and that the intellectuals should therefore either go back to their books, lectures, and sermons, or hobnob exclusively with one another.

Being a college teacher myself, I tended in my talking life to act accordingly. However, two observations slowly forced themselves upon me. One was that some of the greatest bores in the world can be found among the "intellectuals," so that evidently it was not brains and learning alone that made the conversationalist. The other was that the conversation of the "intellectuals," even when lively, seems to be far more about groceries and matrimony than about lyrics and existentialism. While, it is true, the conversations that were most memorable for me personally were those mostly about cultural and intellectual topics, the post-mortem of the normally interesting conversations of cultured or educated persons tended to show that they were some 90 per cent about the average interests of normal people, and only 10 per cent about so-called cultural topics.

Nevertheless, whatever topics certain people talked about, it made for lively and interesting conversation. This led me to conclude that it is not so much the topic that makes for good talk — or the education of the speaker — but the handling of the topic. It was the manner of talking about it — possibly, as Johnson put it, the knack of placing "things in such views as they are not commonly seen in," that resulted in an "edge of liveliness." This impression was strongly confirmed by a stretch in army barracks. The talk of most soldiers most of the time was, of course, too indecent for comment or participation. But not all. There were enough conversationally decent fellows there of all degrees of education and talents to permit several observations. One was that bores were not confined to any profession or trade or nationality. Secondly, fellows with an "edge of liveliness" in their talk might be white or black, Catholic or Hindoo, plumbers or professors. Again, one felt that it was not so much the topics discussed as the manner and method that made the conversation either interesting or boring.

When anybody's method and manner clearly violated the recommendations set down in the subsequent chapters, it was easy to see why they were dull or irritating. But among people not obviously deficient, I could never conclusively put my finger on the precise factor that makes some people interesting to talk with and others not. I followed up every conceivable hypothesis. Now, if I have to commit myself, I say one finds a stranger uninspiring, even though well mannered, if he is narrow in his interests, if he has no enthusiastic interest in anything, and if he brings no new slant or special data on the topic or topics discussed. Conversely, one finds a stranger interesting, one is stimulated by him to continue the talk and the acquaintance, if he has a wide range of interests, if he has some particular enthusiasms, and if he seems to get underneath the surface of anything discussed. The latter is precisely the hardest to analyze. It seems to be the real secret. It is a sort of better grip on a subject than most have, a tendency to see it from more angles. It is most certainly the tendency to rise from the particular into the universal, to relate an instance to a law, a fact to a truth. A dull person will describe his aging father's ailments; an interesting one will go from his father's ailments to the problems of old people in general. That tendency seems to me the most definite single factor between tiresome talkers and stimulating ones.

Generally it is the people with the higher native intelligence, in the army those with the highest army classification scores, who have the keener and wider interests and the richer grip on their subjects. The level of intelligence tends to produce a corresponding level of grasp and variety for all topics of conversation. It is probably true that no satisfactory conversational rapport or affinity is possible between people of widely separated intelligence levels. Genius and moron would seem never to be conversationally compatible. A two horsepower mind can probably never develop sufficient range and depth to stimulate a six horsepower one. Friendship between people so divergent in talents is never likely to be conversationally stimulating enough to survive a common and specialized interest.

But our Lord spoke of a talent range of one to five. Hence, even if groupings or friendships between extremes are avoidable, groupings of people in adjacent talent ranges cannot well be and ought not to be avoided. In such, while there is certainly a divergence of talent, it is not so great that the right training in conversational method and manner, the proper cultivation of interests, cannot bridge the difference for a happy talking life. Aside from sex, what seems to draw people together more than anything else is their manner and range of conversation. And much which even in marriage passes for incompatibility is really nothing but conversational disparity, often a correctable disparity. Conversational compatibility is conditioned not merely by native intelligence but by many other things. It is a reflection of one's training, character, interests, experiences — all of which can be changed and improved, so that what once seemed to many a dull personality can come to seem an interesting one to virtually everybody. Everyone has heard it said of someone, "My, how he's improved. In high school he used to be such a drip. Now he is one of the sparks of the party." Whatever the change, it is certain that it is his manner of talking that is making it evident.

In short, it seems true to say that conversation is the most complete single expression of one's personality. It is the mirror of a person's and a group's and a country's sum total of decency, knowledge, and culture — their explicit, composite character. Hence, it is the duty and the lifelong job of everyone to keep raising its tone and liveliness — in himself and in his community. Within the boundaries of one's intelligence, everyone can improve his conversation in several ways. He can improve it technically — in grammar and rhetoric, diction and voice; in variety, richness, and liveliness; and, most importantly, in what St. Paul calls "gracious-ness," in Christian lovableness and good taste, so that whether he talks or listens, people are glad of it, and are better off for his being there.

To improve the reader in all these three ways, sometimes facetiously, generally seriously, as the spirit and the matter move, is the purpose of the following chapters. If you read them with reasonable will and attention, you ought to be laying a new foundation for a happier and richer talking life than you have ever enjoyed before. You ought in any case to pick up at random a great many hints and guides that will at least here and there correct a fault or increase a virtue. And in conversation even the smallest improvement, extended over a long talking life, becomes a significant gain. Your circle of friends and acquaintances, too, without perhaps ever realizing it consciously, should come to think of you as an even more charming and likable person than they probably already think you are. Even your family should consider it more than ever a treat when you relax and just talk with them.