When I saw the transcript of that G8 conference conversation between President Bush and Prime Minister Blair, my first thought was that it read not so much like a conversation between statesmen as the phatic gruntings of a pair of teenage Kevins. But on reflection I think this may be unfair to Kevins. As I write I can hear, drifting in from the street where my teenage son and his friend are playing a desultory game of football, scraps of a conversation they are having about the eccentricities of their respective teachers, and very elegant it is, too, with a lively use of simile and metaphor and (so far) not a single cuss-word. What’s more, when I told my son about the Supreme Leader of the most powerful country in the world apostrophising his ally with the words “Yo, Blair,” what the son said, after a moment’s thought, was: “Tragic. Utterly tragic.”
So all right, they didn’t sound like teenagers. But they didn’t sound much like statesmen either. So opaque and telegraphic (or, as The Times put it, “clipped and familiar”) was their exchange that when it was published in the papers it had to be extensively footnoted just for ordinary mortals to understand it. Which might just be a sign of how well the two great men get on — so intimate and comfortable with one another that they’ve taken to chatting away in fragmentary half-sentences like some dear old long-married couple. Or it might, if you are of a gloomier cast of mind, support the theory explored in a fascinating new book by an American writer, Stephen Miller.
Miller’s book (published by Yale University Press) is called Conversation, and subtitled A History of a Declining Art. In it he conducts a sort of grand tour of that greatest and most ephemeral of civilised human pursuits, via Socratic dialogue, the golden age of English 18th-century conversation, the table talk of 19th-century America and the punishingly abstract cerebrations of the Cambridge Apostles (oddly, that nest of conversational wasps, the Algonquin Round Table, doesn’t get a mention), before concluding sadly that conversation is dying, poisoned by those twin toxins of modern discourse, confrontation and solipsism.
You have only to turn on Jerry Springer or Big Brother to see that he has a point. Big Brother, especially, has the power to fix my attention like a rabbit’s on a stoat, wondering how it is that, with days and weeks on end with absolutely nothing else to do but talk — no books, no games, no telly — the housemates still contrive never, ever to have an actual conversation, but to communicate exclusively in what Rebecca West called “intersecting monologues”. Still, if conversation is declining (and on the whole I’m inclined to agree with Miller that it is) I think there is a third factor in its demise, and that is the punishing busy-ness of 21st-century life. Those Ancient Greeks and urbane Whigs didn’t just sit about chat-chatting all day because telly hadn’t been invented yet. They did it because they had the leisure in which to conduct the serious business of being civilised. Proper conversation takes time — not a lunchtime here or an evening there, but great, expansive tracts of time in which to allow ideas to develop, mutate and expand.
The last time I had a conversation like that I was an undergraduate, neglecting my studies in favour of hanging about in my friend Tom’s rooms and talking endlessly. When my degree result was published it looked as though conversation had been the ruin of me. But now I am grateful for the instinctive good sense of my younger self. The books I didn’t read will still be there for me to catch up with when I’m 90, but nothing could replace the great word-hoard of talk and friendship that I accumulated in those three misspent years.
These days, my friendships are conducted by e-mail; I meet my closest friends at intervals of months or even years, even though we live only a few miles apart; and when we do meet — always for “a quick lunch” — the conversation takes the form of a frantic exchange of the headlines of our lives — births, death and marriages — before we dash off in separate directions towards the next urgent chore. It is hard on the soul to live like that. And perhaps not just on an individual level. Stephen Miller notes that several of the conversational giants of the 18th century — Hume, Addison and Johnson — believed in a connection between conversation and political stability. If one goes, so does the other. Let’s hope they were wrong, because if not, we’re all, to borrow President Bush’s elegant phraseology, in the shit.
Residents and council poles apart
Talking of failures of communication, we have just discovered that a pole-dancing club is about to open in this little patch of East Greenwich. Even though it’s only a couple of hundred yards from our doors, none of us was invited to join the consultation process. The first we knew of it was when an anguished letter arrived from the people living in the quiet street on which this club is to open, announcing that Greenwich Council had granted the place a licence and asking for our support in lodging an appeal. Which, of course, we’ll give, although it is hard to initiate a dialogue around a fait accompli.
Next to where the club will open is the vast building site that was the old Greenwich hospital and is now, according to the developers, English Partnerships, “A New Heart for East Greenwich”. The site hoardings are attractively decorated by local children with scenes from Greenwich past, present and future. Stout workmen are shown toiling to build a brighter future for East Greenwich: affordable flats for key workers, libraries, swimming-pools — all sorts of recreation after honest toil . . . . Oddly enough, they forgot to include the image of a sweating businessman thrusting a note into the garter of a writhing girl.
A buzz in the air
Trying to calm down, I step in to the garden, but cautiously, because the place is alive with bees. The lavender along the front path is so full of them that the postman has taken to handing my letters over the front gate rather than expose his beshorted knees to the buzzing swarm.
Watching them lurch about, drunk with nectar and so laden with pollen that they can scarcely fly, I can’t help wondering where they all come from. Somewhere near here there must be several hives full of delicious organic honey, made from my flowers. And I’d very much like to know where.
