Chapter 4

The Background for Good Convesation

John Locke, the English philosopher, said, "Before a man can speak on any subject it is necessary to be acquainted with it." We recall that Samuel Johnson said that for conversation "There must, in the first place, be knowledge, there must be materials." One cannot get out of a sack what isn't in it. Since conversation is the communicating of facts, ideas, and feelings, one must have them to talk them. The most devastating charge that can be brought against anyone is, "He doesn't know what he is talking about." Rhetoric, diction, voice are important, of course, but one must never forget that they are important not as ends but as tools. They are not the goods, they are merely the express that delivers them.

If the express is streamlined, if we exercise good judgment in starting and stopping and braking, we can avoid being boresome or disagreeable. But only a cultivated personality, only one who really "has something to say," can become an interesting and worth-while conversationalist. Bruce Barton  wrote, "My observation is that, generally speaking, poverty of speech is the outward evidence of poverty of mind." Someone in the Saturday Evening Post wrote, "The underlying trouble with conversation is lack of curiosity ."

To be a really good conversationalist, one must be an interesting person. But an interesting person can only be one who is interested in many things. The hero of a novel who found his wife becoming more and more dull remarked, "It was a long time before I realized that she had no intellectual curiosity ." Curiosity is not a profound sense , but it is a kind of self-starter toward knowledge, learning, and wisdom . I cannot help feeling that a person who is not interested in learning more and more about many things, or at least about some thing, resembles a mere vegetation, a mushroom, and that a person who is intellectually alert, who knows what is going on, who probes into things, who is ever in quest of better knowledge, acts very much in the image of the God who made him. It was this God, our Lord Jesus, who told the stern Parable of the Talents .

i This chapter on background is rewritten directly from the author's article, "Background for Conversation" in the Marianist , May, 1948. Many sentences and paragraphs are identical with it.

In this parable our Lord reminds us that it is our duty to employ our capacities fully — be they large or small. In this parable, the master gave one servant five talents, another two, a third one. The fellow with only two talents used these just as energetically as the one with five, and though he, of course, never achieved more than two fifths as much as the first, the master said to him exactly as to the first, "Well done, good and faithful servant." But the third, backward with his one talent, had buried it altogether, and the master called him a "wicked and slothful servant," and ordered him "cast out into the exterior darkness"  (Matt. 25).

Surely this parable should mean that since the Lord has  given   us   mind  and  memory,   which   are   the  warehouses of conversation, He expects us to employ them to their full capacity. True, in his unfathomable wisdom, He has ordained that some have few talents, many average, and only a few superior ones. This means that not all people, no matter how nobly they try, can become especially brilliant conversationalists, any more than they can become great poets or grand architects. But within their talent range, they must do the best they can — and that is enough to get them to heaven — and to be charming and agreeable among men.

"Knowledge is a form of life," says St. Thomas Aquinas; "it is a process of becoming, of becoming alive." An interesting talker must be alive, he must know things. The difference between a conversationalist and a chatterer is that the one has something to say — he talks facts, sentiments, ideas, whereas the chatterer thinks he has to say something — he talks mere words. The conversationalist is interesting because one always gets something from him, either new facts or ideas, or a deeper appreciation of old ones. Good conversation satisfies the deep, eternal, but little recognized thirst for knowledge in man. .The Parable of the Talents requires this search for "more light." The writer, the teacher, the good conversationalist are all part of the vast campaign to inform the human race and bring it nearer to divine Truth. All further "the end of learning," which John Milton writes, "is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright" (Tractate on Education). It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the most essential ingredient of good talking is the contribution of some new or worth-while information or insight. If some persons seem to be interesting conversationalists but yet seem to contribute no noticeable information, it is because, like the personal essayist, they contribute what is much better than facts, namely, a deeper wisdom and understanding. They subtly ennoble attitudes and deepen appreciation. A close analysis probably would reveal that much knowledge, wide reading, and deep reflection lie behind their interesting but seemingly light observations.

It is important not to think of knowledge as confined to things learned from school or from books. The most interesting writer in the world, Shakespeare, had very little formal schooling and quoted few books. But he seemed to know every bird and flower in England. A researcher found that in his plays he referred to 62 different kinds of birds more than 600 times. He understood hunting, hawking, and angling; he knew the ways of bishops, lawyers, and soldiers; and he knew the feelings of children, and the feelings of their fathers and mothers. He used all this knowledge gained from everywhere and nowhere, sometimes directly, more often indirectly, in innumerable strange and beautiful comparisons. For example, he used his knowledge of the sea for 200 images illustrating all sorts of things. A scholar, G. B. Harrison, asks,

How did Shakespeare come by the incident of the ship boy sleeping in the crow's nest during the storm? It can only have been in one of three ways. He read of it, or he heard of it, or he saw it (Shakespeare, Harcourt, Brace and Co., p. 5).

That is the key to conversational background: one reads it, hears it, or sees it —- whatever explains or describes man and his world and all that creeps, swims, and grows in it. Where one gets it does not matter, but if one has much of it,  one has the background for  good conversation.

The first symptom of a good conversationalist is that he knows a lot about his own vocation. He knows not only its skill, but also its history and lore. In Dallas, Texas, on the direct route to Little Rock, I asked a gasoline vendor the distance to the latter place. He did not know. Offering to look it up, he was overheard by another attendant, who said, "It's 340 miles. You'll be going through Tex-arkana, halfway between. There you will be farther from El Paso than from Chicago." He knew not only the price of gasoline at his station, but also his geography. A good conversationalist can always be depended upon to know a lot of assorted facts about his job, his place of work, and his associates.

Avocations are excellent suppliers of conversational material. A plumber who is a gardener on the side is more interesting than one who knows only pipes and wrenches. Every avocation enlarges one's vocabulary, widens one's circle of friends, and enriches one's personality. The founder of the Catholic University physics department, the late Dr. Daniel W. Shea, had made birds his avocation. I remember how surprised and thrilled I was during a trip through New England to come upon him in his summer home in Maine, observing and writing about birds. It made him much more interesting for me than any restricted physicist, no matter how atomic, could have been! A salesman who sings in a quartette, and a bookkeeper who plays the choir organ are, all other things being equal, more interesting to talk with than those who don't have such avocations.
One of the most interesting men I remember was a goateed cotton dealer in San Francisco. When I first noticed him at a Holy Name meeting, I did not guess that I should ever want to know him better. But during the social hour someone asked him to recite some Shakespeare. To my astonishment, he got up and rendered Hamlet's "To be or not to be," and Jaques' "All the world's a stage." It seems he had enriched his cotton-trading life by making the reading and memorizing of Shakespeare an avocation. He proved to be the most interesting member of our Holy Name Society in that San Francisco parish, the only one whom I will never forget.

Similar to avocations are hobbies. Almost any hobby makes a person more interesting as a talker. During one financially harried semester in high school, I was a stamp collector. This dip into philatelism, while it made my parents investigate my sudden extravagance, has a thousand times given me conversational bonds with people when no other common ground had yet been reached. It also made me forever capable of understanding and sympathizing with the collector's urge that "afflicts" so large a portion of mankind! A hobby is not essential for good conversation, but in the absence of a weightier interest, it does agreeably undergird it.

Sports and games are well nigh indispensable as backgrounds for general conversation. From a vocabularly standpoint alone, so many expressions and figurative phrases come from them that anyone totally unacquainted with them is hardly fit, dictionally speaking. Such expressions as handicap, fish for compliments, tackle a subject, foul things up, set one's sights high, hit the bull's eye, right off the bat, checkmate, just a pawn, in the rough, fourflusher, and the pathetic "New Deal" are all derived from games and sports. There are hundreds more like them, and new ones coming up every year, which one might not use at all or use fumblingly if one is totally unacquainted with the sports that spawn them.

Everyone should know as many games as possible and should play at least some. Parents should throw as many sports in their children's way as they can, not that they may shine in them, but that they may get the feel and terminology. Students should try to understand the various sports on the campus. A girl who has doubts about a "forward pass" is much more to be pitied for it than if she confuses an hypotenuse with the mighty-nosed Nile mammal. To pass as a true Englishman, it is more important for an Oxfordian to know cricket than Greek. For an American to be admitted into the social register, some knowledge of the mashies and niblicks of golf, the slices and hooks, is virtually a sine qua non!

Sometimes, regrettably, I think one must know poker, too. I have often been inconvenienced socially, and even literarily, for not knowing this pestilent game. One of the first books I ever bought, ordered at fifteen from Montgomery Ward, was Hoyle's Card Games. I remember learning Rummy, "Schafskopf," Sixty-Six, Pinochle, Five Hundred, Skat, and Auction Bridge. Knowing these has been of much conversational help to me. It was a pity that Whist was not among these. This deficiency I feel keenly whenever I read or teach Charles Lamb's "Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist." In that essay I cannot fully appreciate his comparing Whist with Quadrille and with Cribbage, which latter Mrs. Battle scorns as an "ungram-matical game," for it employs such "solecisms" as that's a go, and two for his heels! But not having learned poker (owing to a latent fear of gambling) has been an even worse conversational liability. I calculate it has cut my talkability by 5 per cent! Many a time, while poker enthusiasts held forth, I had to endure in silent ignorance such poker commonplaces as a straight flush, three of a kind, baseball, and, may Mrs. Battle support me, spit in the ocean!

One need not, and indeed should not, indulge in every sport, but for conversational purposes one ought to know about most of them. Two sports I do not recommend are horse and hound racing. To the latter I contributed only once. It was in Clonmel, Ireland, on a sad seventh of July, 1932. Since then, however, whenever I come upon Shakespeare's "I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips," I get a better meaning and keener thrill from those lines, so that I feel entitled to console myself with the inference that the Old Bard had no doubt been to the tracks, too, but probably with better luck! As for horse racing —it is too painful to relate what I learned from it! I will merely pause to remark that my old Dublin-born English professor used to say that one could not properly appreciate English literature if one hadn't ever "touched" a friend for a loan with which to make a last try for a comeback by putting "a few pounds on the nose." But I prefer to change the subject, not however before declaring that what Dr. Patrick J. Lennox said of steeplechases is certainly true of chess. Who doesn't know about rooks and pawns and checks has an Achilles' heel in his conversational equipage! And if he doesn't know any sports at all, I rise to maintain that he cannot qualify even for a sandlot, conversationally!

Avocations, hobbies, sports, all these give us conversational small coin. But the gold of conversation comes from travel and observation and its jewels come from reading and thinking. The talk value of travel is too well known to need emphasis. Even newlyweds customarily realize that to start off their union with things to talk about they ought to spend what is left after the wedding ceremony on a honeymoon trip! The only trouble with travel is that it is expensive. Nevertheless, wise persons will so manage things that they get in some traveling. At a pack a day, denying oneself cigarettes, saves enough for a trip to Europe every ten years. In my own case, when most of my friends bought a car, I went to Europe for three months, and waited two more years for the car. So far I still think I chose the wiser part. Travel, especially foreign travel, is a conversational gold mine — and one ought to do it young enough to draw interest from it during a long life.

But more important than traveling is the habit of exact observation, the tendency to select significant details and to mark them. Sir Walter Scott once rode a hundred miles to note exactly what kinds and how many flowers and shrubs surrounded a cave he wanted to describe in a novel. The eye for news in the journalist is the eye for the picturesque, the exceptional, the different in the conversationalist. It isn't the mass of flowers that make for conversation but the rare one or unusually large one, or the artistic arrangement of the mass. People do not go to a circus to see calves but a two-headed calf. Whether one likes it or not, that is how God made human nature — and a good conversationalist must recognize it. He must go about observing the news-worthy things. After all, every talk is a sort of newspaper in miniature. If he reports merely the sensational but worthless, he is a police gazette; if he reports the unusual and helpful, he is a good news magazine. If in reporting the exceptional and helpful he also adds interpretation and thought, he is a literary magazine, he is in fact live literature.

All this means that a good conversationalist must see what is going on, must note what is out of the ordinary, and must try to relate it to common problems. Anything new and better is especially good conversational grist. A new way to prepare spinach, to polish a car, to attach storm windows, to get roses to grow — these are the observer's quarry and the talker's prizes. Similarly anything antique or odd, an ancient log house, a curiously twisted tree, a singularly beautiful altar, a rare old book are the conversational catches of the good observer. A good talker does not look at everything; he sees what has news value, what is interesting and worth while, and he remembers it.

The habit of exact observation is the best imaginable machine for increasing your vocabulary along with your knowledge. If you have the nose for news, you note the things you do not know. You then ask their name and use. The ease with which one can in this way learn things was brought home to me during my first trip abroad, in Spain, where among other things I wished to learn Spanish. Walking into a market to buy a vegetable I could name, I asked the attendant the name of all the others on her stand. In an astonishingly short time I had learned the names of innumerable objects in this way. I even realized in dismay that I now could name some vegetables in Spanish which I had sometimes seen here in the United States but never learned to name. Every time we note a strange thing and get its name we have added another brick to our conversational structure.

But experience and observation, while best in themselves, are perhaps hard and inadequate teachers, in that they take time, are haphazard, and do not cover as much of man and his world as a good conversationalist needs. One cannot, for example, experience man's past history. Therefore, they need to be supplemented by reading. This is the quickest way to acquire conversational wealth, and the surest way to avoid painful gaps in our knowledge. It also gives us vicarious experience. Life is too short to do all the things and see all the places one should be able to talk about. Reading about them (or seeing plays or motion pictures about them) is our best recourse. One must read to be up to date, to know, and to feel.
 
Current events are the preliminaries of most conversation. One must therefore keep abreast of them by reading a newspaper for local news, and a news magazine or the equivalent for national and international events. Through them and other general magazines one learns about prominent personalities, scientific progress, cultural activities — all valuable matter for conversation. Shakespeare said, "The man that hath not music in himself ... is fit for treasons, strategems, and spoils." One can as truly say that the man or woman that knows nothing about music, art, and literature, and about their creators is not prepared for refined conversation.

In addition to the keeping-up-to-date reading, there must be reading for permanent knowledge and for emotional adjustment. The former is best derived from the class of nonfiction books. There is something in the hard cover of books, as distinguished from the paper cover of magazines, which justly symbolizes enduring values. To be a worth-while conversationalist, one must read books: histories,    biographies,    travelogues;    books   on    religion, economics, psychology, and philosophy. I am not a scientist, but even one general book about scientific progress and science personalities, DeKruif s Microbe Hunters, has given me a hundred conversational supports. Nor should one rationalize that because one may not have time to finish a book one had better not start it. Nonfiction reading may well be done in parts and starts. The greatest readers are those who not only choose their books but also of many books choose only such portions as give them most for their time or solve their particular problem.

It is for emotional adjustment that one must read literature proper — poetry, drama, and fiction. To describe their full value is beyond the scope here. Their true function is to give us wisdom, balance, emotional perspective and calm. They give us vicarious experience, they make us sympathize with the other fellow, and they help us to see ourselves as others see us. As philosophic books should give us peace of mind, as religious books should give us peace of soul, so poems, novels, plays should give us peace of heart. Since the soul never fully rests, as St. Augustine wrote, until it rests in God, this triple peace — of mind, of soul, of heart — cannot in this "vale of tears" be fully realized. But even the smallest progress toward such peace is an enormous gain — for ourselves and for those with whom we associate. That poetry, drama, and fiction further peace of heart is the feeling of the collective wisdom of the human race, which I wish the reader, would here accept on my word. Peace of heart cannot be weighed and measured, nor can it be whistled on or whistled off. It is a development. Nor, while one can trust to some effect, can one say precisely how much any one good novel does affect it.

But the recognized great books do have some easily observable conversational values. They are themselves worth talking about and are often talked about. Furthermore they are regular warehouses of lively facts and incidents. Who reads Sinclair Lewis' Arrow smith or Cronin's Citadel can talk of doctors and medicine as he could not before. Who reads Keys of the Kingdom can talk better about missionaries. Who reads Norris' novels, the Octopus and The Pit, can talk of wheat and commodity speculations.

For every problem there are books, and for every theme there are novels and plays. Sometimes I think that the information we get from the novels is by far the best part of our knowledge. It seems to endure best and catch the heart of the matter better. I do not remember how many books and articles I have read about Switzerland, but when that name comes to mind what comes along with it is the vast panorama of Scott's Anne of Geierstein, read in high school. Sometimes I think that gave me the essence of Switzerland even better than my tour of that beautiful land in 1931. Oh, I hope I can convince everybody who wants to be an interesting and worth-while conversationalist that he must have worth-while facts, feelings, and ideas — and that books, including especially good literature, are the readiest and greatest sources for these things.

But it would be false not to insist that after getting whatever information, whether from observation, experience, or books you must think it through, must make it your own before it will sound truly convincing in conversation. You must integrate what you see and read with your own personality before it is a finished conversational product. The person who mulls about his experiences and observations with an eternal why and wherefore, who looks for the causes of things, who tries to see their interrelations, is giving himself the finest conversational background of all. Thomas Aquinas spent months puzzling about the definition he had read of God — and became the great doctor of the Church. Thinking things through for ourselves gives us what is called originality. It helps us "to place things," as Johnson said, "in such views as they are not commonly seen in."

Perhaps when the last word is said, the greatest conversationalist is the one who comes nearest to the truth of things. And the truth comes from hard, honest, fearless thinking. Johnson's conversations, in the last analysis, live on, not because of their word order, but because of the originality of their thought. Asked about the proper training for children, Johnson remarked that a gentle bringing-up is better than a hardy and rugged one. Someone has rightly commented,

Here, at a moment's notice, are ideas of infantile hygiene being thrown off, that go far beyond the purview of the eighteenth century. It was ninety-two years after this conversation that Herbert Spencer was to rediscover, and state at considerable length, the doctrine that Johnson here condenses into two or three sentences — and in the England of 1861, Spencer was considered almost impossibly advanced (Esme Wingfield-Stratford, Good Talk [London: Lovat Dickson, 1936], p. 223).

If Goethe's Conversations with Eckermann are still remembered and quoted, it is not so much for their language as for their profound, noble, and advanced ideas. Wingfield-Stratford says,

Imagine any modern countryman of his capable of uttering such a sentiment as: "National hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture." Even to the modern reader his talk is a mine of instruction (ibid., p. 167).

Let us go further and imagine the average Englishman or American saying today what Goethe said in 1830. How many of them said during the late war, "How could I write songs of hate without hating"? The Sermon on the Mount lives because it is the truest, the most advanced, the most final set of ideas ever spoken.

The greatest conversation is that which produces the greatest, the truest ideas, which help mankind see a bit less darkly through life's dark glass. It is the thinker who produces such ideas. A student who, being told that boarding school and army life are the same in principle, ponders this contention until he sees that there is one radical difference. In the army, he notes, if one breaks a rule one goes to the guardhouse, but in boarding school if one does so the worst punishment is the invitation to leave. If he then concludes that therefore they are in principle the exact opposites, the enforced and the voluntary, he is growing into a Johnsonian conversational stature. If he thinks things through like that on many subjects, he is bound to talk often and to be thought a significant conversationalist.

As Johnson said of the great orator and proponent of reconciliation with the Colonies, "Burke's talk is the ebullition of his mind; he does not talk from a desire of distinction, but because his mind is full" (Boswell's Life of Johnson, op. cit., p. 456). Of course, as the Parable of the Talents suggests, not everyone can get as much into his mind as Burke or Johnson or Goethe. Not everyone has the talents to become a brilliant conversationalist. Nevertheless, each within his own capacity can greatly improve his conversation and become more interesting company, if he will make a real effort to play and to work at a variety of things, to observe carefully, to read intelligently and widely, and to think about it all to the full extent of the talents God gave him. It is a moral as well as a social duty to use one's talents in this respect to the utmost. And the rewards will be a richer personality, a fuller life, and more joy in, and for, one's fellow man.

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