Broadcast December 1948
From CBC audiotape reference no. 820303-9 (4), transcribed by Monika Lee; the title is the CBC’s. This was a panel discussion between University of Toronto professors Northrop Frye and Lyndon Smith and students Anthony Wallace and James Reaney, led by host Lister Sinclair, on the subject of the “lost art of conversation.” It was part of the Varsity Story series, broadcast on the CBC, December 1948. James Reaney later became a well-known Canadian poet and professor of English at the University of Western Ontario.
ANNOUNCER: What has become of conversation? Is it a lost art? Is it, in fact, an art? Those are the questions that concern the five people who meet tonight as CJBC unfolds another chapter in the “Varsity Story.” The University of Toronto and the CBC present the “Varsity Story.” To discover what has become of conversation, there follows a conversation. Now our chairman, Lister Sinclair.
SINCLAIR: We often hear that university days are a paradise. But nowadays some people think that the university paradise is like the one at the end of Goethe’s Faust, where the indescribable now is done, as far as the faculty is concerned, and the eternal feminine leads us on, as far as the student body is concerned. I think this is a very mistaken view, however, and to show you that, we’ve tracked two members of the faculty at the University of Toronto and two of the students, one undergraduate and one graduate, and we propose to get them to talk to you about the lost art of conversation. Sitting here on my left is Mr. Lyndon Smith, professor of Church History at Trinity College. Next to him is Mr. Anthony Wallace, fourth-year English student and editor of the Trinity Review. Next to him is Mr. Northrop Frye, a professor of English, author and critic, editor of the Canadian Forum, and next to him, finally, is Mr. James Reaney, graduate student in English, poet, and fiction writer. I’d like to begin this talk about the lost art of conversation by seeing if we can get a definition of conversation. I think it does no harm to know what it is we’re supposed to be talking about. Mr. Frye, are you prepared to offer us a definition of conversation?
FRYE: Certainly not, Mr. Chairman. A literary critic of experience never defines anything. I can define only by instances and I suppose a negative instance is better than a positive one. If one looks over English literature, one sees, for example, Dr. S. Johnson and his circle …
SINCLAIR: The late Dr. S. Johnson.
FRYE: … the late Dr. S. Johnson, regarded as a conversationalist, and yet I’ve never been able to understand that that is conversation.
SINCLAIR: Why not, Mr. Frye?
FRYE: Because Dr. Johnson is lugged into the conversation for the sole purpose of annihilating it. Somebody feeds him his lines and his lines constitute the end of the conversation. Do you think, Dr. Johnson, that Christopher Smart is a better poet than John Dyer? Sir, says Dr. Johnson, it is no good arguing the comparison between a louse and a flea.1 That is not conversation. That is the art of murdering conversation.
[The other panellists have some difficulty finding an example of positive conversation. Smith suggests Plato’s Dialogues as a model; Reaney praises the brilliance of Oscar Wilde’s conversation while admitting he might be considered a monologist; and Wallace says that ordinary talk such as is overheard on a streetcar is not a conversation but a dialogue.]
SMITH: When do we know we are eavesdropping on a conversation then?
SINCLAIR: That seems a very good point, Mr. Smith. Would you care to tell us?
SMITH: Well, I suppose that one of the conventions in a conversation is that you are trying to persuade someone, gently perhaps and pleasantly, but persuade them to accept your point of view and they gently and pleasantly, but firmly, refuse to be persuaded, and so you have a conversation.
SINCLAIR: I see an evil glint behind your glasses, Mr. Frye.
FRYE: Well, I just wonder if the motive for persuading him is fundamentally to persuade him to stop talking. I wonder if, in a competitive society like ours, every normal person doesn’t feel that in order to make a conversation brilliant, it is necessary to do all the talking himself.
SMITH: Well, that seems to me to destroy conversation, actually, but, on the other hand, are you going to get anywhere a conversation without competition? Isn’t it necessary for a person to be inspired by some degree of enthusiasm, some deep feeling, before you can have an entertaining conversation?
WALLACE: I question that very strongly, because the very necessary background for any form of conversation, which is not an argument and which is not a battle, is going to be an urbanity, a lack of enthusiasm. I should feel that enthusiasm in conversation as conversation is something that should be curtailed hotly.
[Reaney suggests that conversation is much lighter and more delicate than an attempt to persuade someone to a point of view.]
FRYE: I suppose you would locate conversation somewhere between a discussion of a serious subject, which is a form of conversation, and prattle, or the exchanging of clichés, which is a form of conversation too, but at the other extreme. I suppose what we’re looking for is somewhere in the middle.
SMITH: You can deal with serious subjects in a conversation.
FRYE: Yes.
SMITH: It’s the method by which you deal with them that determines the quality of the conversation.
SINCLAIR: What is the method, Mr. Smith?
SMITH: Lightness of treatment, even if the subject is serious.
SINCLAIR: Lightness without frivolity, perhaps.
SMITH: Lightness without frivolity. And the subject doesn’t need to be light. It can be extremely ponderous.
FRYE: Yes, Mr. Wallace mentioned the word “urbanity.” I think that’s very important in overcoming a distinction between the light and the serious.
[Wallace and Smith discuss the need to have ideas in common, and Smith remarks that “clear thinking and happy expression” are necessary.]
SINCLAIR: Yes, I think that’s a very good suggestion. I do also think that there should be a certain flow to the proceedings.
FRYE: The qualities of good conversation are essentially the qualities of good swearing. It requires an inexhaustible vocabulary and a good sense of rhythm. I think rhythm is of an extraordinary importance in a conversation. You cannot have a conversation where each person is in so much of a panic for fear he is going to be interrupted that he cannot complete his sentence. So many people talk in a series of semicolons and dashes and occasionally they will end a sentence with a kind of apology for having uttered it in the first place, like.
SINCLAIR: Yes, there are too many conversations in which all the contestants seem to be retreating into the woodwork backwards, as it were, while they’re talking. I would differ with you, by the way, Mr. Frye, about the qualities of swearing. It seems to me that an extensive vocabulary is not required, but what is required rather is a sense of arrangement. However, …
FRYE: With plenty of repetition, of course …
SINCLAIR: It seems to me that we are getting a sort of feeling about what a good conversation should be. The sense of lightness, the sense of wit, urbanity, perhaps courtesy also. I think, however, we’ll probably settle our ideas a good deal more firmly if we can decide what is, after all, the object of a conversation. Why do men sit down to converse, rather than simply to talk about something or to tear a subject to tatters? What is the purpose of a conversation? Mr. Smith, you are looking so judicious, I can’t resist.
SMITH: It’s a very solemn thought, because conversation begins almost naturally, but the analogy that springs to my mind is playing a game. You have a pleasant competition. The game is unbalanced and unsatisfactory. One is superlatively better than the other. On the other hand, you play to win, but only because that’s a necessary convention. You feel satisfied if the game has exercised your wits.
[This notion of conversation as a game is discussed further, Wallace maintaining that winning is not a very important component and Sinclair saying that it is.]
FRYE: How do you win a conversation?
SINCLAIR: Well, I didn’t suggest there was a game. Mr. Smith did.
WALLACE: It’s Mr. Smith’s pigeon, I feel.
SMITH: How do you win a conversation? The conversation comes to an end, no doubt, when everyone is persuaded to agree with you. So a game comes to an end when you have won, but it is the length and the skill with which the game is played, the exercise, that gives the feeling of satisfaction afterwards.
FRYE: So the feeling of satisfaction in a conversation is derived from the fact that everybody has gone to sleep except one person who is still talking.
SMITH: That wouldn’t be the end of the game unless possibly a boxing bout.
SINCLAIR: As in Plato’s Symposium.
FRYE: As in Plato’s Symposium.
[There is further discussion in which Reaney disputes the analogy of the game.]
SINCLAIR: I see Mr. Frye brooding darkly on this subject.
FRYE: I’m in labour with profound thought, Mr. Chairman. It seems to me that when people get into a conversation, they do so because each one is an individual and wishes to contribute his individuality to a group. [There is a gap in the tape here, where Frye presumably mentions “a vision of the form of society,” alluded to below.] I should say that a conversation dramatizes the form of society and that is the motive for conversation on the largest possible basis.
SMITH: Is that from the point of view of a spectator or from the point of view of a participant?
FRYE: I wouldn’t draw a distinction there between the spectator and the participant. I think that talkers in a conversation listen to what is going on. It’s like a jam session, partly improvising and partly listening.
SMITH: And it is a successful conversation if the person emerges from it with a sense that they have grasped a vision of society?
SINCLAIR: A vision of the form of society. What exactly do you mean by that, Mr. Frye? Society—do you mean the society in which the conversation has taken place or society in its widest sense, or how?
FRYE: I think that the society of the conversation dramatizes, and is an example of, society as a whole. You notice how many conversations have for their subject the cursing of some person who is absent or the talking over or gossiping about some person who is absent. [Mr. Wallace’s laughter overtop] The reason for that is that he serves as a scapegoat. That is to say, the conversers draw together in a closer unit by all throwing stones at somebody who is not there.
SINCLAIR: Is that a satisfactory conversation?
FRYE: It is a profoundly satisfying conversation.
SINCLAIR: How do we distinguish then, Mr. Frye, conversation from abuse? This particular kind of conversation, I should say.
FRYE: I should say that abuse is an extremely articulate form of conversation. It is necessary, of course, for the person abused to be absent, because if he’s present then the whole urbanity of conversation relaxes.
WALLACE: The high tone of the proceedings.
FRYE: The high tone of the proceedings, yes.
SMITH: But when you have finished abusing your absent friends, you have a vision of our society.
FRYE: You have a rather cosy feeling of being integrated with the group that you are talking to and you are thanking your lucky stars that you are not the person absent.
WALLACE: Are you not feeling also that you are putting off the evil day when you are going to be absent and providing that cosy little feeling for those who are left?
FRYE: That is true. That is why you keep on with a form of society.
SMITH: It’s a shocking picture of hatred being the common ground on which we must meet for conversation.
REANEY: Yes, Mr. Smith, but aren’t games often common ground for hatred too?
SMITH: Ah, yes, but they cease to be games. Urbanity disappears.
SINCLAIR: And Mr. Frye’s insisting that conversation appears under these circumstances. No, I’m sure he wouldn’t say that it would necessarily require these circumstances.
FRYE: No.
SINCLAIR: I would like to ask you this question, Mr. Frye. If we have a conversation between a party of rebels, outcasts, and revolutionaries sitting in a cellar with a powder keg marked “this side down,” is that not a conversation? Does that represent a view of the form of society?
FRYE: That is more likely to be, from my experience of such circles, the sort of thing which Mr. Wallace spoke of earlier in connection with streetcar talk, which is really a series of competing monologues, in which A will put up with B’s monologue in order to hand his own out in exchange later on.
SINCLAIR: The form of society seems to me to be a very good point; in other words, you feel, Mr. Frye, that conversation mirrors life and life arises from our surroundings?
FRYE: Oh, yes.
SMITH: Economic determinism, Mr. Frye?
FRYE: I wouldn’t push it to the point of determinism, but the conversation is itself a kind of surrounding, I suppose.
SMITH: What are the indispensable physical accompaniments of a successful conversation? Good food? Aside from people.
FRYE: Not food necessarily, rather something to do with the hands. The hand should be curved around a cigarette or a glass.
SINCLAIR: A full glass or a glass whose contents, perhaps, varies as the evening progresses.
WALLACE: There’s one point there that I question. Surely nothing is more distressing in a conversation than watching some members of the conversation knitting. And that is distracting; … I mean, that is something for their hands, but it is taking away from the mental comfort of those around.
SMITH: More suitable for the foot of the guillotine.
FRYE [among several voices]: Yes.
SINCLAIR: Though, mind you, the conversation at the Arts and Letters conference … very few of the members knit …
WALLACE: I am not a member.
SMITH: Seems such a pity.
REANEY: I find a necessary ingredient of persons in conversation is a small grain of hypocrisy. I mean they should be truthful, but there should be enough hypocrisy to make them at least pretend to agree with everyone.
WALLACE: I’m glad you brought that up, Mr. Reaney. That’s a point I feel very strongly about, that it’s not necessary to be entirely sincere in a conversation and it is often a great help to a conversation and of great interest if you adopt a position that you don’t necessarily subscribe to.
FRYE: I don’t get that altogether. I think that that is more of a debate than a conversation, and it seems to me that you certainly have to be polite, but I should avoid the society of a conversationalist that I have to be hypocritical to. It seems to me that courtesy is more important, and that it is discourteous not to be sincere, not to say what you mean.
REANEY: Well, I said a small grain of hypocrisy, not heaping tablespoons full.
WALLACE: Well, I said heaping tablespoons full, I gather.
[The talk turns to the question of subjects it might be necessary to exclude in order to have a good conversation.]
SINCLAIR: Sex, religion, and politics have notoriously been excluded from the conversation of officers’ messes, theoretically, at any rate, though any officer’s mess I’ve been in seems to talk … well let’s say very little about religion. [laughter] However, it seems to me that we have something of a point there. Mr. Frye, what do you say about this question of sex, religion, and politics? In other words, major subjects that strike deep.
FRYE: It seems to me that those three subjects constitute a great proportion of all intelligent conversations whatever, and the only thing to be guarded against is to carry them to the point at which the conversational group splits in two. If you are discussing sex to the point at which the conversational group splits with all the men on one side and all the women on the other, then the conversation breaks down. The same thing is true of religion and politics. If the people talking suddenly line up in two opposite camps, then you’re done for.
[This topic is pursued a little further by the other participants.]
SINCLAIR: Here we are with our time nearly up, and we haven’t really discussed the lost art of conversation. We’ve certainly amused ourselves, at any rate, by talking about the art of conversation, but is this art of conversation lost? In other words, can we find it nowadays in the places where we would expect to find it? Where would we expect to find it? That seems to me to be the first thing.
SMITH: One should find it in a university circle, I should think.
WALLACE: One should, but one doesn’t necessarily do so.
SMITH: I have occasionally found conversations, which, if they are not worthy to rank with the greatest in the world’s history, because no one has taken them down, nevertheless, seem to leave me with a feeling of satisfaction.
SINCLAIR: Let’s divide this up quite clearly. Mr. Smith and Mr. Frye, as far as the faculty are concerned, do you know of any conversations going on at the university at present?
FRYE: It seems to me that an inarticulate professor certainly suffers from a formidable occupational disease. I have been around this university for about twenty years as student and as member of staff and I can’t say that, in the whole of that time, I have ever suffered from any particular lack of conversation or that I’ve felt that it was, in particular, a lost art. It’s true that not all my evenings are passed in composing Platonic dialogues with my friends, but neither, I suspect, were the evenings in Athens in Plato’s time.
SINCLAIR: And how about you, Mr. Smith?
SMITH: I feel that I have taken part in conversations where the art of conversation is not entirely lost.
SINCLAIR: Among members of the university?
SMITH: Among members of the university faculty.
[Wallace and Reaney, speaking for the students, admit to having had some satisfactory conversations at the university. They and Sinclair agree that “forced conversations” between a professor and a group of students are apt to be deadly. Sinclair recalls one such event.]
SINCLAIR: We all sat in an enormous ring, staring at each other.
SMITH: It corresponded to a form of society.
SINCLAIR: Yes.
FRYE: There was also the Oxford don who used to invite a colleague and a group of students to breakfast in the morning and start conversation on a picture of Queen Victoria which hung opposite him on the wall. Unfortunately, he asked the same student twice (it was a friend of mine) and went through the same identical conversation on two successive Sundays. That was the form of society in that particular Oxford college, I think.
SINCLAIR: I’m afraid we don’t have too much more time. It seems to me—I don’t know how you feel, gentlemen—that we have given some feeling, perhaps, of the art of conversation. Words like “persuasion,” “courtesy,” “urbanity,” “likeness” seem to have been bandied about a good deal. In spite of Mr. Smith’s very eloquent remarks, it seems to me that the idea that conversation is a game has not been altogether approved of, though I must say that I have a grudging admiration still at the back of my mind for some of things he said. The idea that a conversation should lie between an argument and a prattle seems fairly clear and it seems also that some of the great conversational reputations of the past do not entirely fit in with our ideas of conversation, as we’ve been expressing it tonight. The subject of conversation we settled fairly well. We even, I think, settled the object. To mark out the form of society seems to me to be the most striking remark on that—Dr. Frye’s remark—and even sex, religion, and politics came into the thing. Finally, we did, I think, say that conversation can be found where today we would expect to find it, in the university.2