On April 11, 1819, John Keats, on his way to meet his publisher, ran into one of his former medical-school teachers, Joseph Green, who introduced him to his companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, one of the famous talkers of his day. Sad to report, one of the means to becoming a famous talker is being an infamous non-listener. On this count, too, Coleridge qualified. Keats joined the two men for a two-mile walk toward High-gate, during which time he failed to get in a word edge- or any other which-wise. In a letter to his brother George in America, Keats wrote: “I heard his voice as he came toward me — I heard it as he moved away — I heard it all the interval — if it may be called so.”
Many of the world’s great talkers have been men whose minds were overstuffed with erudition and general information. It is as if they must find a way to release it, lest they burst from sheer overload. My own list of great talkers includes Samuel Johnson, Coleridge, Lord Macaulay, and, closer to our own day, Andre Malraux, Edmund Wilson, Sir Isaiah Berlin, and the art historian Meyer Schapiro. A man I know reports that Schapiro once stopped him in the street and detained him for a little more than forty minutes with an uninterrupted one-way flow of talk, before remarking, as they parted, “I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed our conversation.”
The great talker is generally also a fast talker. Samuel Johnson didn’t need to talk so quickly, but then, in Boswell, he had the perfect straight man — a human appliance no great talker should be without — feeding him subjects and eliciting opinions. Macaulay was described by a contemporary as a talking book, but, unlike a book, he couldn’t be shut up.
Edmund Wilson, no un-Sanfordized violet himself, wrote of Andre Malraux’s conversational style that “he likes to talk on his feet and jump around. His expositions are punctuated by bon! and bien!, nailing the point just made before rushing on to the next step.” One imagines Wilson himself as more sedentary, more relentless, at the head of a table, pouring out booze and talk, neither with a light hand. Everyone who knew him speaks of the speed of Isaiah Berlin’s talk, a veritable Gatling gun — rat-a-tat-tat — of chat.
The only great talker I have known well, my late friend Edward Shils, also had a speedy and unhesitant delivery. Well into his eighties, he never needed to stop to recall a name or the title of a book. He spoke fast for the obvious reason that he wanted to get everything in — or, rather, out. Like the few truly great scholars I have known, Edward had a powerful memory. One thing led to another and that to yet another. Lest he monologize through the night, I had to learn the not always gentle art of breaking-in. He never upbraided me for doing so.
The combination of powerful memory and high IQ makes for the rapid speech of the great talkers: Their minds, so well stocked, work quickly. Information must be released speedily, for more is on the way. They tend to be polymathic, knowing not one but several things well. Great talkers are tolerable — and at their best, of course, much more than tolerable — because they really do have great talk, comprising wide knowledge, deep insight, brilliant formulation, wit, and impressive anecdotes.
Great talkers may already be a thing of the past. Men with the intellectual power, conversational style, and social energy to set up as great talkers may soon become rarer than authentic 1960s heroes. There are still some amusing talkers, whose whimsy and original point of view confer pure pleasure. But amusing talkers are vastly out-numbered by bores — if I may shift abruptly into diatribe here — heavy-breathing, preening, world-class bores.
I dined out twice last week and ran into two such bores. The first was a dirty-joke-telling bore. Mixed company causing him to lose not a step, he gurgitated an endless stream of Viagra, lawyer, and fellatio jokes. He seemed to take a certain pleasure in making everyone else at the table edgy: the bore melting neatly into the boor. He at least seemed greatly to approve of his own performance.
My other bore was of the academic variety, a man to whom, it soon became plain, one could tell nothing. He was the evening’s designated teller. He pretended to listen, but one sensed that he really was only waiting — waiting to continue his own endless campaign to bring us the real lowdown, the truth, the gospel, his version.
One’s heart went out to his wife, who revivified the term “long-suffering.” No doubt he returned home and, in bed, before turning out the light, remarked to her that the other people at dinner had seemed to him, on balance, rather dull.
Confident bores give talk, even great talk, a bad name. Should Dan Aykroyd ever choose to make a movie called Borebusters, he’d have my eight bucks in a flash.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
