July 13, 2006
Alberto Manguel on conversation in the TLS
This week's Times Literary Supplement includes writer Alberto Manguel reviewing Stephen Miller's Conversation: A history of a declining art (Yale University Press), which I've dipped into occasionally over the past few months. It begins with a pair of personal anecdotes—a requisite for long-format reviews of popular non-fiction books, it seems. The first reads:
For many years, Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo got together in the evenings to talk. In the mid-1960s, through a series of trivial circumstances, I became the lucky witness to many of these conversations. For hours on end, over a dismal meal of boiled vegetables and overcooked rice, in Bioy’s vast and dilapidated Buenos Aires flat, the three would discuss an infinite number of subjects with intelligence, lightly carried erudition and wit. Listening to the three friends talking was like listening to a chamber orchestra playing an improvised concerto. One voice would suggest a theme, the others would pick it up and play on it, then abandon it in order to simultaneously attack several others, the whole peppered with quotations, anecdotes, tidbits of esoteric information and jokes. Bioy once made a list of the subjects he remembered they had discussed: it is three pages long and ends with “the autobiographical books of George Moore, Victor Hugo, Housman’s poems, Toulet’s contrerimes, and the formulation of ethical principles”. Whoever attended the dinner was forced either to enter the conversation according to implicit rules of subject and tone, or to drown in the flow of words. A third possibility (which I timidly chose) was merely to sit and listen.
To find out how Manguel himself comes across as an interlocuter, take a look at this long conversation conducted by diehard literary interviewer Robert Birnbaum. This also marks a good occasion to note that I've added Jenny Davidson to the blogroll, under "Miscellaneous" in the right-hand column. (She linked to the article here.)