Some Tediums of Conversation

I COUNT it among those mercies for which I should be daily more thankful, that I am not easily bored. Plebeian though my immunity may be, I announce it with pride rather than confess it with humiliation, for I hold that man whom most things bore to be as one subject to so many diseases shutting him out from the enjoyment of life.

But, not to give a false impression, I should add without delay that my own comparative freedom from ennui is an acquired, and not an innate, virtue. Perhaps the truth is, after all, that I am more than usually sensitive to boredom, and suffer so acutely in its clutches that I struggle desperately to keep out of them, usually with success.

If, for example, I were obliged to confess that I am very frequently bored in a conversation, I should have every reason to be heartily ashamed of myself. The admission would be a damaging one, not only in revealing me incapable of real friendship, but in exposing my total lack of imagination. Aided by a lively imagination and an adroit use of questions, no man need despair in almost the most arid of conversations. Of course, if one is too stupid, or too proud, or too willful, or merely too lazy, to exert his imagination, he has no one but himself to blame if he is bored well-nigh to death. Like a quarrel, it takes two to make a complete state of boredom.

I allowed myself the loophole of an ‘almost ’ in saying that one never need be bored in a conversation, for I must frankly allow that there are some few subjects of talk, not altogether uncommon, that have hitherto resisted all my efforts to extract profit or amusement from them. Unfortunately, these arc not subjects peculiar to natural or professional bores. The wittiest and most charming of talkers occasionally so far forget themselves as to launch into them. If this mild remonstrance should fall under the eyes of any such, I hope that it may not be altogether offensive and profitless.

The first tedium of conversation that I wish to deplore is the common habit of retailing at more or less length a summary of the plot of a novel or play. The trouble is, the making of a clear synopsis of an involved story is a very difficult thing to do, even for a professional author; yet very few hesitate about jauntily setting out on the enterprise. How often have I suffered from such a summarizing! All goes well for the first minute or two. Then in the full flood of narration some such statement as this comes out: —

‘ So you see this common sailor turned out to be the count she met in Venice.’

‘But what count do you mean? ' I interpose mildly.

‘ Oh, don’t you remember? I told you all about him, did n’t I? — the one she met on the yacht, you know,’ replies the narrator, with a shade of irritation in his voice.

Now, in nine cases out of ten it will prove that he has not so much as mentioned the count or the yacht before. Or if he has, it has been in such a casual way, and in the midst of such a hodgepodge of names and incidents, that they have merely gone in at one ear and out at the other.

Of course, my friend has in his own mind all the time the full course of the story as he saw it unfolded, on the stage, let us say, and he seems to expect me to carry along this background, too, in order to supply the gaps in his narration. But, as a matter of fact, the whole long remainder of the story after this (to me) inexplicable sailor-count transformation is a mere welter of meaningless names and incidents. I venture no further questions, but keep up a politely hypocritical nodding of, ‘ Yes,’ and, ‘ I see,’ when what I mean is, ‘ No,’ and, ‘ I don’t see at all.’

Or, in recounting the plot of a novel, the narrator will make an impressive pause, and then come out with,—

‘ And the long-lost letter, telling who the woman really is, he had kept hidden in that very tobacco-jar all those years! ’

‘ Well, you don’t seem so very much surprised,’ he will add, a bit pettishly, seeing that I do not go off into a transport of amazement. But in Heaven’s name what is there to be amazed at! My impressions of what the letter is, or ‘who the woman really is,’ or of why the tobacco-jar should be called ‘that very ’ one, are of the haziest description. It has all been a mere flux of names to me.

My protest applies with diminished force to summarizers of the arguments of books of philosophy, social ethics, and the like. But here the task is easier; there are not so many cumbering details. Yet, often enough, my informer manages to leave out an important hinge of the argument, an omission that leaves me groping for the rest of the summary.

I am inclined to believe that it is by no accident that so large a proportion of the tediums of conversation occur in talks about books. Books are at best but second-hand versions of life, and become but third-hand ones when criticized in their turn. I would not for a moment be understood as saying that all talk about books tends toward the tedious. Some of the best talk in life is about them. It is merely this summarizing and synopsifying of them, without illuminating criticism, that I object to.

I usually find that when incidents of real life are being narrated, there is more chance for a saving exercise of the imagination. The hearer has real events to fall back upon, and re-create for himself, independently of the narrator’s version. And, with all but the most hopeless talkers, one can accomplish much by a judicious questioning, which serves the double purpose of showing one’s own interest in the talk, and eliciting details which are more interesting than any which the narrator would give us of himself. The experience becomes a sort of unequal contest between a desire to be profiled and an inclination to bore, and the very battle is diverting.

It is for this reason that I withdraw from the damning category of boredom some of the subjects usually counted most tedious. I am never bored by mothers talking about the virtues of their children, for instance. In spite of all that is said to the contrary, no two mothers, especially if questioned properly, talk about their children in quite the same way. Wonders of enlightening details on the ways of mothers and children may be drawn forth by the right sort of interrogation. So also the returned traveler, often accounted such a bore, may be turned into a fount of information if occasionally turned aside from his flood of enthusiastic platitudes.

But, unfortunately, my theme is of the hopeless tediums of talk, not of the possible modes of extracting interest. Two other themes of conversation occur, which have hitherto been hopeless wastes to me. One of these is money considered in and for itself, made the pivot round which all incidents turn. I have in mind a certain man, a globetrotter, whose tale is always of what he paid at such a hotel, for breakfast, dinner, and supper, candles, bath, and fees to boots, waiters, and chambermaids, with interminable comparisons with those found in other places, and so on and on to insufferable weariness. It is almost impossible to turn the flow of his talk from dollars and pounds, francs and thalers. I remember I once asked him in desperation what the peasant children looked like in a certain town in Brittany, of which he had only detailed to me the impositions of the innkeeper.

‘Oh, they were beautiful little tots,’ he said, with momentary enthusiasm, and I thought I was saved, until he added, ‘ I got a number of pictures of them, had to pay a franc apiece for them, while in Italy — ’ And he was off again.

Just one other theme I wish to enter in my black list, and I am done. This is the detailed recounting of dreams, — of some dreams, I had better say, for in my time I have heard dreams narrated in consummately fascinating fashion. But the average dream told in the average way is only a confused upturning of life, a welter of incidents without reason, connection, or sequence, leading nowhere. Here again the listener has no real events to fall back upon, while the narrator has the color and vividness of the dream as he experienced it poignantly in his mind.

By this time I fear that some reader of the Atlantic may feel moved to interrupt me and ask if I regard my friends and acquaintances as so many entertainers, and purveyors of information to please my royal pleasure. But though I may have given the impression of deserving this condemnation, I really do not, for as I said in the beginning, I am one of the hardest persons in the world to bore.