It's good to talk
Sir, – Alberto Manguel’s review of Stephen Miller’s book Conversation: A history of a declining art (July 14) contains one of the best descriptions of conversation I have ever read. He describes the conversations he sat in on in the mid-1960s between Jorge Luis Borges and two friends in Buenos Aires as being like “a chamber orchestra playing an improvised concerto”. He contrasts this way of talking with another kind which he listened to at the Café de Flore in Paris; the participants were Roland Barthes and friends. He claims that these, despite their brilliance, were not conversations but “intersecting monologues” (a phrase coined by Rebecca West). Unlike the talk in Buenos Aires, “here nothing mingled and became one”. Manguel concurs with Miller that the art of conversation is being lost. He claims that we have forgotten “how to weave our ideas into a common strand”. I disagree. As a sociolinguist, I have been recording the talk of single-sex friendship groups for over twenty years, and I have found evidence of both types of talk, the “improvised concerto” type and the “intersecting monologues” type.
What is intriguing is that the former is found in talk involving women friends, while the latter is common in talk where participants are male friends. Maybe the reason that Miller and Manguel are both so pessimistic about conversation is that they are unaware of the “jam sessions” enjoyed when women friends spend time together. I have written about this phenomenon in various places (in particular, in my book Women Talk), but this is the first time I have read a matching account from someone who is not a linguist. The question remains, why is it that much of what passes for conversation today is actually a sequence of monologues? And why the gender difference?
JENNIFER COATES
English Language and Linguistics, Roehampton University, London SW15.
Sir, – Aside from the silliness of thinking that the eighteenth century was the great age of conversation – that great age of pronunciamentos and self-conscious witticisms – and that all the ancient civilizations did not have a major investment in conversation, I want to contest another point made by Alberto Manguel, and that is the idea that the world of email, of “virtual conversation”, is a world of “by and large, the semblance of exchange” rather than true exchange. This seems to me profoundly false. In my experience, email has created and expedited a great many excellent and genuine conversations. It allows for much more spontaneity and immediacy than any other non-oral means of communication, and has been an immense boon to separated friends and communities. All these laments for the lost great times should be more careful.
RICHARD STRIER
Department of English, University of Chicago, 1115 East 58th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637.
Harvard
Sir, – Martha Nussbaum’s strangely disjointed review of the former Dean of Harvard College Harry R. Lewis’s Excellence Without a Soul (July 13) misconstrues his book and indulges her own conflicting but unacknowledged views of Harvard. She chides Lewis for writing too little of Harvard’s recent, controversial President, Lawrence Summers, but then chides him for writing too much about Harvard, whose “importance for the world” she claims he “overestimates”. She also claims that Lewis, “a distinguished computer scientist”, misunderstands the purposes of instruction in the humanities because, she claims, he urges closer mentoring of undergraduates by scholars chosen more for “character” than for intellectual discipline.
All this is unfair to Lewis, who (Nussbaum doesn’t inform us) was Dean of the College from 1995 to 2003, when Summers, who arrived in 2001, ousted him for challenging the new regime’s market-driven, public relations-besotted debasement of liberal education. Reasonably, Lewis’s book reprises emblematic controversies he faced as Dean and argues that colleges such as Harvard, unlike larger research universities that sometimes house them, should be forges of civic- republican leadership for undergraduates, not career factories and cultural gallerias for a global ruling class accountable to no polity or moral code. Against the restrained dignity of Lewis’s few references to Summers, Nussbaum commends Richard Bradley’s more “balanced assessment” in Harvard Rules but doesn’t inform us that Lewis is one of the heroes of Bradley’s scathing exposé of Summers’s reign.
Nussbaum devotes her longest paragraph to what she considers a “large problem”, “peculiar to” Harvard: it “tenures far fewer people from within than its peer institutions”. Reproving Lewis for not mentioning this after chiding him for writing too much of Harvard, Nussbaum herself doesn’t mention that Harvard’s Classics Department denied her tenure – unjustly, I think – when she taught there in 1991.
JIM SLEEPER
24 Highland Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06511.
Wanton ringlets
Sir, – One oddity in Adam Smyth’s review (May 5) of Jason Scott Warren’s Early Modern English Literature, his assessment of Oroonoko, has already been noticed (see Letters, May 19). For older readers, another might be the statement that “the highlight of the chapter on gender and desire is a reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost that successfully makes the considerable leap from Eve’s ‘naturally curly’ hair to the Fall of Man, arguing that Eve’s ‘wanton ringlets’ ‘whisper sin’ and register ‘a teasing play of concealment and disclosure which runs counter to the purity of pre-lapsarian femininity and sexuality’”.
This “considerable leap” was achieved long ago, though it did not take the form of suggesting that Eve’s “wanton ringlets” “whisper sin”. Sixth Formers read of it in my 1966 book on Paradise Lost in Macmillan’s Critical Commentary series (pages 35–6), as more than one of them, by then graduates, told me in the early 1970s. Three years earlier, Christopher Ricks had treated the subject beautifully in Milton’s Grand Style (see the section titled “Words, Actions All Infect”); furthermore, Ricks acknowledged Arnold Stein’s Answerable Style (1953). And, of course, the question of fallen language had not escaped commentators on the Bible, as Ricks’s quotation from The Common Expositor by Arnold Williams makes clear.
ALAN RUDRUM
Department of English, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia.
In defence of SOE
Sir, – As the daughter of Richard Pinder, an SOE (F Section) agent, I look forward to reading That Sweet Enemy by Robert and Isabelle Tombs, which your reviewer Henri Astier (May 12) says recognizes “the crucial support the French underground received from the Special Operations Executive”: a welcome change from other recent histories of wartime France.
My father was operative between Limoges and Toulouse and, before he was caught in a forced labour round-up on May 11, 1944 (he survived eleven months as a slave labourer), had helped set in train plans for the huge arms drop at Loubressac, Operation Cadillac, which came on July 14, 1944: seventy US flying fortresses accompanied by 200 British fighters dropped 1,000 parachutes with 525 (some said 600) containers or 110 tons of weapons and explosives. It is hard to imagine that that number of aircraft and airmen, and that amount of matériel would have been expended if it were really true to say that “where the Germans decided to crush the Resistance, they could always do so” (Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944, p550). At least the valiant maquisards of the Quercy (Lot) did not meet the fate of their brothers and sisters at Vercors. If they were so insignificant, why did the SS Panzer division Das Reich bother to massacre the inhabitants of Oradour, or hang 120 mostly young men from the lamp posts and balconies of the rue du Pont Neuf at Tulle on June 9, 1944? Why waste the manpower to do that?
It is certainly true that de Gaulle was loath to acknowledge any part played by SOE. I look with a certain irony at a signed photograph he gave me at a 1944 Christmas party at Carlton House Terrace for the children of Free French officers in London – my indomitable mother, Jessie Pinder, had somehow forced her way in. She told me that in handing it to me, he said “La France est reconnaissante”. Later, my father’s contribution was recognized by the Croix de Guerre avec palme.
CAROLINE PINDER CRACRAFT
850 North Dewitt 16K, Chicago, Illinois 60611.
Goethe and happiness
Sir, – In reading Paul Bishop’s review of John Armstrong’s Love, Life, Goethe (April 7), I was struck by a number of similarities with my monograph Dare To Be Happy: A study of Goethe’s ethics (1993). My book’s major focus, an exploration of the interrelation of happiness and resignation (renunciation) in Goethe’s autobiographical as well as fictional works, corresponds to Armstrong’s discussion in a few of his chapters.
With much more evidence than Armstrong provides, I show (in my words) that “the equation of human happiness with virtue or the designation of pleasure, rightly understood, as the goal of life, is amazingly prevalent in Goethe’s oeuvre” , a conclusion that seems to have particularly impressed your reviewer as original in Armstrong’s book.
Like Armstrong (p344), my book has a heading entitled “[A] Life According to Nature”; and discusses the voluntary “Resignation for the Artist and Scientist” to promote achievement (Prandi, pp78–84; Armstrong, p343) as well as “Forced Resignation” (Prandi, 87–104) as a measure to protect one’s happiness, as Armstrong puts it, “in the face of things we cannot change and over which we have no control” (342). We both have chapters on the importance of Spinoza’s resignation model for Goethe (although our views differ substantially on this), and the salutary effect of close studies of objective, individual things (Prandi, 34, Armstrong, 295).
That being said, the books are very different as a whole; and I trust these similarities occur by chance. Those looking for many more Goethe quotations on these issues or for a detailed analysis of happiness and resignation motifs in specific works might be interested in perusing my volume.
JULIE D. PRANDI
Department of German, Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington, Illinois 61702.
Ayesha
Sir, – In his review of Barnaby Rogerson’s The Heirs of The Prophet Muhammad (July 7), Anthony Sattin describes a “rival axis of influence” between Ali, “Muhammad’s cousin, son-in-law, confidant and champion” and Aisha, “Muhammad’s second wife”. This is stated to have given rise to two accounts of the period after Muhammad’s death – one as told by Shias, the other as believed by Sunnis.
Henry Rider Haggard spent four years in South Africa between 1875 and 1879, and serialization of his novel She – the name given to an all-powerful woman called Ayesha – began on October 2, 1886. Leo Michael in She: An allegory of the Church (New York, 1889) considers that Haggard’s novel is a religious allegory. Has this possible genesis of the novel been further explored?
RICHARD JACKSON
52 Gordon Road, Edinburgh.
‘Le Jour se lève’
Sir, – An absurd and damaging implication in Pierre MacKay’s letter (July 7) concerning Le Jour se lève needs to be corrected. He writes, “RKO sent agents into Vichy France to gather up all the prints they could find and to burn them”. The Hollywood studios may have been venal, but they were cognizant of the Second World War. Reputable accounts state that RKO purchased the rights to Marcel Carné’s film after the war, in 1946, and went about its dastardly business during peacetime.
ROBERT SKLAR
284 Lafayette Street, #6B, New York 10012.
