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Talk of the Town: Converstion and Bloomsbury
Alexander Fabry
The average person speaks 16,000 words a day, nearly six million words a year, and a third of a billion words over the course of a life. A running transcript of one’s monologues, dialogues, diatribes, chats, exchanges, murmurs, and nothings contributing to that tally would quickly overflow volumes, shelves, even rooms. Written out, the volume of talk each day in America would equal the volumes of the Library of Congress; the transcripts collected over a month would fill every library in the country. Contained in this capacious encyclopedia of babel are the records of supermarket transactions, a telemarketer’s scripted sentences, weather-talk and idle gossip, the ubiquitous chit and replying chat; yet also engraved on the imaginary bible-paper leaves of my ever-expanding logorrheic chronicle are the dinner-table conversations, coffee-house discussions, heart-to-hearts and tête-à-têtes.
Conversation inhabits a peculiar position between frivolity and profundity. Talk fills up the empty spaces in our lives, seeping into the cracks of vacant time. Like whistling in the dark to dispel the night, it comforts against loneliness. (How many people talk of nothing but themselves only to soothe their insecurities?) Most talk on the circumstances of daily routine instantaneously sinks into the oblivion of memory. And yet, conversation is also a space for the meeting of souls and the search of truth. We feel that by talking we somehow unravel the kinked tangles of a question, or in a flash come to understand that they can be cut away like the knot of Gordias. Conversation is at once a pleasant diversion and something capable of carrying extreme importance. Who hasn’t yearned in the midst of idle chat to reach that conversational state where we feel we’ve said something important and true?
Yet whether frivolous or profound, conversation is ultimately enjoyable. As Samuel Johnson said, “There is in this world no real delight (excepting those of sensuality), but exchange of ideas in conversation.”
Dr. Johnson is counted among the greatest conversationalists of an era whose origins rest on dialogue. Habermas’s theory of the public sphere and Enlightenment ideals owed much to both Johnson’s broadsheet The Rambler and the jumbled conversation of the popular coffee- and tea-houses Johnson frequented. In an age of based on the frenzied exchange of words, Johnson—a lexicographer and master of words himself—was among the most celebrated voices. “Mr. Johnson’s conversation was to the talk of other men like Titian’s painting compared to Hudson’s [a minor English portrait painter],” wrote William Hogarth. James Boswell, the constant companion of Johnson, recalled of his friend: “His conversation was, perhaps, more admirable than even his writings, however excellent.” Boswell’s Life of Johnson is full of accounts of Johnson’s conversations—in many ways the book is itself one long conversation between Boswell and Johnson—yet it omits one spectacularly failed dinner party at which no spark of conversation broke the dismal silence. In the second volume of The Common Reader—the title itself a reference to Johnson’s exaltation of the “common reader” who, “uncorrupted by literary prejudices” must finally “decide all claim to poetical honors”—Virginia Woolf recreates the unsuccessful party. “Nobody spoke. Everybody waited for Dr. Johnson to begin. There, indeed, they showed their fatal ignorance, for if there was one thing that Dr. Johnson never did, it was to begin. Somebody had always to start a topic before he consented to pursue it or to demolish it. Now he waited in silence to be challenged. But he waited in vain. Nobody spoke. Nobody dared speak… Dr. Johnson sank into silent abstraction and sat with his back to the piano gazing at the fire.” For those familiar with Johnson’s figure, the silence seems incongruous; for almost whenever we read about Johnson we hear of what he said. Boswell once “complained of having dined at a splendid table without hearing one sentence of conversation worthy of being remembered,” to which Johnson replied, “Sir, there seldom is any such conversation.” Yet that scarce conversation is prized, remembered, and recorded; and that scarce conversationalist who seems to leave behind as a trail these sorts of conversations is remembered and mythologized.
This description of the failed dinner bears an uncanny resemblance to Woolf’s account of another awkward pause among the friends who would later become the Bloomsbury group, Woolf’s own literary circle. “They came in hesitatingly, self-effacingly, and folded themselves up quietly [in] corners of sofas. For a long time they said nothing. None of our old conversational openings seemed to do… Yet the silence was difficult, not dull. It seemed as if the standard of what was worth saying had risen so high that it was better not to break it unworthily. We sat and looked at the ground.” The “silent abstraction” of Johnson seems intimately connected to the description of Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, or Saxon Sidney-Turner folding their long tweeded limbs into the worn armchairs of Gordon Square. But unlike Johnson’s dinner, the gestation of this pregnant silence was only a prelude to the conversation. “Then at last Vanessa [Virginia’s sister], having said, perhaps, that she had been to some picture show, incautiously used the word ‘beauty.’ At that, one of the young men would lift his head slowly and say, ‘It depends what you mean by beauty.’ At once all our ears were pricked. It was if the bull had at last been turned into the ring.”
I was, for an afternoon last summer, at a small country farmhouse called Charleston Farmhouse, where members of the Bloomsbury group used to spend summers and later lived year-round. A kind lady, straight and sharp, though nearing old age, gave a tour of the house, which was nestled among the rolling chalk-downs of East Sussex. Her patterned skirt matched the jubilant prints and painted decorations added to the house by Bloomsbury artists, and as we entered the sitting room her mouth turned into an odd half-smile. “What I wouldn’t have given to have been a fly on this wall during their conversations! To have heard their wonderful talk each evening,” she said. These imagined conversations are treasured as if Lytton Strachey’s peculiarly accented voice—all biographers mention this accent, though none can describe it—was still echoing off the papered walls of the sitting room. These conversations are seen as somehow terribly important, meaningful and insightful: to have overheard them would not only have meant observing brilliant talk, but also seeing something of artistic and literary creation.
It is not only in viewing the past, however, that these conversations are imbued with special significance. In her essay Old Bloomsbury, presented to friends at an informal “Memoir Club,” Virginia Woolf describes the parties she and her sister held at their Gordon Square house. “These Thursday evening parties, were, as far as I am concerned, the germ from which sprang all that has since come to be called - in newspapers, in novels, in Germany, in France - even, I daresay, in Turkey and Timbuktu - by the name of Bloomsbury. They deserve to be recorded and described. Yet how difficult - how impossible. Talk - even the talk which had such tremendous results upon the lives and characters of the two Miss Stephens [Virginia and Vanessa] - even talk of this interest and importance is as elusive as smoke. If flies up the chimney and is gone.”
How can you document the ephemeral? Woolf herself doesn’t even try: in A Room of One’s Own, while describing a lunch party she attended at King’s College, Cambridge, Woolf acknowledges that brilliant things were said, but devotes her narrative attention primarily to intricate description of the food on her plate and secondly to her private thoughts. She describes conversations impressionistically, describing not what was said but the manner of saying: “Meanwhile the wineglasses had flushed yellow and flushed crimson again; had been emptied; had been filled. And thus by degrees was lit, halfway down the spine, which is the seat of the soul, not that hard little electric light which we call brilliance as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound, subtle and subterranean glow which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse.” For Woolf, the very possibility of mimetically recording a conversation seems slightly absurd. Even those writers—I am thinking mainly of Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy—who are best at capturing the exchange of dialogue as it bounces around the parlour, always seem to miss something: the barbed exchanges between Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy are brilliant but hardly strike one as examples of real speech. It seems futile to try to capture and, more importantly, to convey the flow of talk around a lively dinner table: the interjections, the lulls, the simultaneous sentences.
The field of conversation analysis has an intricate notational system that encodes in a transcript the human subtleties of conversation, the half-stutters, tonal changes, pauses, and laughs. The irony is that only a skilled practitioner can make any sense of the resulting tangle of symbols. Though Woolf abandons any attempt at depicting exactly what was said, let alone any of the information encoded by the conversation analyst, she manages to powerfully convey the experience of a conversation. Woolf in this sense is, like other members of the Bloomsbury group, heavily influenced by the post-impressionist painters, who founded a realism of another sort, based not on the exactness of reproduction but rather on the faithfulness to experience. In a key section of To The Lighthouse, the longest scene in the book, Woolf describes a dinner party given by the Ramseys. Re-reading that passage, I was swirled around the room, carried from end to end of the table on the hum of voices, catching scraps of inconsequential talk here and there (“Did you find your letters?” “Ellen, please, another plate of soup.”), and yet I was completely subsumed by the atmosphere. As a friend put it to me: Woolf creates the force field of a conversation, the vectored swirls and eddies that describe the way it feels to be there, but not the exact content of what was said. Mrs. Ramsey is ultimately the conductor of this fluid mix of voices at her table, “And the whole effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her.”
In both of Woolf’s mealtime conversations, the meal itself—the speckled sole and partridges at King’s College, and Mrs. Ramsey’s triumphant Boeuf en Daube—takes on a special solidity in contrast to the fleeting talk. As in nearly any meal, wittles, not wit, anchors the gathering. And yet part of the mythologizing of the Bloomsbury conversations was that they had no anchor, no chain limiting their scope. “We did not hesitate to talk of anything. This was literally true. You could say what you liked about art, sex, or religion; you could also talk freely and very likely dully about the ordinary doings of daily life. There was very little self-consciousness,” wrote Vanessa Bell in her memoirs. This sense of freedom is also remarked on by Vanessa’s son, Quentin Bell: “Now the character of the Misses Stephen was such that, from the first, it was taken for granted that the freedoms of Cambridge should be continued in London and that conversational petticoats should be discarded.” It wasn’t only conversational petticoats that were discarded. The group is renowned for its convoluted, verging on incestuous, relationships. (Quentin Bell’s half sister, Angelica, for example, was the daughter of the gay artist Duncan Grant, and she later went on to marry her father’s ex-lover David Garnett). Unlike the deeply repressed sexuality of the Victorian era, the freedom of Bloomsbury sexuality lay in its openness; and beneath physical freedom lay conversational openness.
Virginia Woolf related in Old Bloomsbury the moment of realization when they discovered that they could speak freely about sex, the moment when for them the chain of Victorian mores and morals was broken: “At any moment Clive might come in and he and I should begin to argue - amicably, impersonally at first; soon we should be hurling abuse at each other and pacing up and down the room. Vanessa say silent and did something mysterious with her needle or her scissors. I talked, egotistically, excitedly, about my own affairs no doubt. Suddenly the door opened and the long and sinister figure of Mr Lytton Strachey stood on the threshold. He pointed his finger at a stain on Vanessa’s white dress. ‘Semen?’ he said. Can one really say it? I thought and we burst out laughing. With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down. A flood of the sacred fluid seemed to overwhelm us. Sex permeated our conversation.”
At its origin, the word conversation carried sexual innuendo. Like the double meaning of intercourse, conversation was at once tame and explicit, connoting not just talk but also other uses of the mouth. Gloucester says in Richard III of the recently deceased Hastings:
So smooth he daub’d his vice with show of virtue,
That, his apparent open guilt omitted,
I mean his conversation with Shore’s wife,
He lived from all attainder of suspect.
This, of course, is not the innocent side of conversation with Shore’s wife. Daniel Defoe also makes use of this pun in The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders. When Moll, “twelve year a whore, five times a wife (and once to her own brother),” says, “We had a great deal of close conversation that night, for we neither of us slept much,” no nod or wink is necessary. Later, finding out she is in fact married to her own brother, she declares that from then on, “We shall have the honest part of conversation.”
Conversation and sex are not linked by etymology alone. Plato firmly joins the two together in his work of erotic conversation, The Symposium. For Socrates, eros lies in the use of words. Socrates, according to the accounts Plato gives, “overwhelmed and spellbound” all who heard him speak or who even heard reports of his words. He incites a pounding heart and frenzy “greater than that of the Korybantes” in everyone who listens. Alcibiades, deeply in love with Socrates, is nevertheless spurned: “Well, there we were, gentlemen, the two of us on our own. I thought he would immediately have the kind of conversation with me that lovers have with their boyfriends when they’re on their own, and I was pleased by that thought. But nothing like that happened at all. He had the usual kind of conversation with me and went away after spending the day with me.” At the symposium, the kylixes flushed crimson again and again, the red and black orgiastic scenes painted in the bowl revealed and hidden again as wine was drunk and the cup refilled. And yet, the dialogue retains the orderly quality of Plato’s other works until the very end (when “a large group of revelers came to the front door… There was noise everywhere, and all order was abandoned; everyone was forced to drink vast amounts of wine”): the dialogue is a search for truth. This is not that sparkling, ecstatic, electrical type of talk, but that earthy glow at the bottom of the spine.
Quentin Bell’s description of Bloomsbury conversation seems equally apt in describing the symposium of Socrates: “By judging from those and from report, I should say that the talk was not brilliant. By that I mean that there was not much in the way of pyrotechnics, none of that launching of mots, that conscious soaring scintillation.” Rather, in both, “there was a certain high seriousness in the conversation despite its gaiety, and there was quite as much argument as gossip, and that in argument it was supposed, at all events, that the contributors were looking for truth, not victory.”
Of the Bloomsbury conversations, almost nothing remains. “Nothing is more indicative of the character of a group that its talk, nothing is more difficult to reconstruct. Even to those later conversations in which I was privileged to join, little now remains,” Bell wrote. Conversation may have been at the heart of Bloomsbury, but their legacy was what they wrote. Likewise, it was against the spirit of Johnson’s remark that Boswell took the time to write down this aphorism: “The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered but a general effect of pleasing impression.”
back to Spring 2007 Table of Contents
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