Senior Moments

by Willard Spiegelman

  The hostess’s seminar plan inhibits spontaneity. It serves, indeed guarantees, a forced equality. Everyone, moving clockwise or counterclockwise, has his or her say. Planning the conversation is the equivalent of arranging the place cards. One wants to leave nothing to chance, so one scripts the talk. I’ll take my stand with Joseph Mitchell, who was a great writer in part because he was a great listener. He said, “The best talk is artless, the talk of people trying to reassure or comfort themselves.” Elizabeth Bishop, riding on a bus from Nova Scotia to Boston (in her poem “The Moose”), overhears something similar, “an old conversation /—not concerning us, / but recognizable, somewhere.” Revelations, wisdom, and courtesies come about at least as much by accident as by deliberation.

  Natural, active, engaging talkers sometimes bridle or even freeze up when required to perform. And every table needs at least one good listener; not everyone needs to talk to ensure the steady flow. Talkers play to both their sparring partners and their silent admirers. Is there a perfect number for dinner conversation? Experience suggests six to eight. With that number, you can indeed have a single conversation without military rigor or without the enforced etiquette of old-fashioned dinner parties at which the hostess begins by turning to the guest of honor on her right and speaks to him while the host, at the distant other end of the rectangle, turns to the leading lady at his right and does the same. Everyone follows suit. As if by clockwork, the perfect hostess knows to adjust her tempo and turns to the gentleman at her left for the next course. Counterclockwise and then clockwise: it seldom works with symmetrical results, but you get the idea. By this model, dinner conversation is more like a dance, a pas de deux, than an honors seminar. But it is work, not play.

  Food and drink are helpful, if not always required, to loosen tongues. Whether in the aristocratic salons of Paris or the coffeehouses of eighteenth-century London, the bar on television’s Cheers, where everyone knows your name, or the late-night drink in a hotel where you chat with the guy on the adjacent stool and reveal truths to someone you will never see again precisely because you will never see him again, civilized consumption and civilized conversation are mates. The mouth is an erotic organ. We use our mouths for lovemaking, but that is private activity. Talking and eating are equally oral but social too. Food is a stimulant, and wine a lubricant, to conversation. Candlelight creates a more than visible glow. It enlightens and enlivens the talkers.

  Above all, difference, or what goes by the name “diversity” today, counts for a lot. Birds of a feather may flock or eat together, but only polite disagreement, moderate dissension, can make for conversation. Someone old, someone young, someone exotic, someone refined, someone naive: the blend can vary, but it is necessary. W. H. Auden dedicated his poem “Tonight at Seven-Thirty” to M.F.K. Fisher. He prefers a table of six, with no doting lovers, no children, and no malcontents on hand. A god of any sort would be inappropriate, because he’d probably bore everyone. A genius or a prima donna might overwhelm everyone. (I once had dinner with a great man of music, at a table for six. There was only one topic of conversation, and it was not merely music itself.) Auden asks for

  one raconteur, one gnostic with amazing shop,

  both in a talkative mood but knowing when to stop.

  My own preference would include tablemates of different ages and backgrounds. Even more, I want a table where the subjects of conversation will include language itself, where different tongues can speak on behalf of different cultures as well as sensibilities, and where linguistic cognates and differences give rise to wonder and laughter. At a country dinner party, my longtime partner and I were seated among six older, richer WASPs, who had all the worldly experience, manners, money, and breeding of their class. The conversation turned to idioms from one language that are virtually untranslatable into others. The hostess gave an example from Hungarian. That set the bar very high for the rest of us. Someone else, who had worked for the Foreign Service, offered an example of something in Arabic. I tried, with less panache, to work with the concision of Latin’s ablative absolute, which requires longer English phrases to reproduce. Other people contributed examples from garden-variety Spanish and French. And so it went, until (my) Ken played the trump card. In Yiddish.

  “My grandfather used to say, in moments of annoyance, to my grandmother, ‘Minnie, don’t hock me a chinick.’” The other guests leaned in, eager for enlightenment. Ken explained patiently. “A ‘chinick’ is a teapot; ‘hock’ is to chop.” Someone, although no one at this party, might have recognized a cognate in “gehochte leber,” “chopped liver.” “Don’t chop, bang, or knock me a teapot” means “Get off my case; leave me alone.”

  One lock-jawed, well-traveled preppy lady of a certain age said through her gleaming teeth, “Oh, I like that one.” And she turned to her husband of many decades and said gleefully, “Louie, don’t hock me a chinick.” I doubt that the formulaic phrase entered their subsequent tête-à-têtes.

  I have long since forgotten what we ate at that meal. I do remember what we said. Some people have the capacity to remember what they put into their mouths. I work the other way. I remember what I have uttered and what I have heard.

  Language, it has often been said, is the most astonishing creation of humankind. We must have invented it at the same time we invented God. Language allows us communication with those we confront. Having a deity encourages us to address someone we can never see or know but only talk to. He does not reply, for the most part, which is just as well. Job, hearing God speaking from the whirlwind, does not actually have a conversation with him. And Job’s earlier conversation with his three comforters, sadists all, provided him with little solace. Face-to-face talk is still, for the most part, preferable to the telephonic variety. “What are you wearing?” begins Nicholson Baker’s short novel Vox, about phone sex. Like phone sex, talking on the phone is not as good as the real thing, but it has its place. Can we like the online voice better than the one attached to a person we can see at the same time? I cast my vote for the fuller engagement, person to person and in three dimensions.

  Conversational tics such as stuttering and interrupting that do not offend or irritate us in person may seem exaggerated and more offensive when you cannot see the person with whom you are talking. A phone conversation resonates differently from a live chat. Looking and seeing complement listening, hearing, and speaking. This psychological or neurological difference has made for changes in socializing. One young friend recently told me that he and his contemporaries, making dates via the Internet, tend to observe one strict rule: no phone conversations before a face-to-face meeting. Text first, talk later. And I often wonder whether the better way to enjoy opera is at a live performance, where you get to see action, drama, sets, and costumes, as well as hear the music, or on the radio, stereo, or computer stream, where you get only the voices and are not distracted by your eyes. In the first option, you have the total experience, but in the second you have the undistilled, pure pleasure of sound. You can hear better when you are only listening.

  In “Losing Track of Language,” one of her great poems of travel, Amy Clampitt tackles the issue of conversations with strangers in public places, but with a twist: the languages are foreign. For someone like Clampitt or me, getting something wrong in a foreign tongue can be as much fun as getting it right. Linguistic competence and the pleasure of chance encounters work together. Her poem recounts a train trip between the South of France and Italy. Clampitt and her companion “sit wedged among strangers” in a train compartment. As the landscape changes, “words fall away, we trade instead in flirting / and cigarettes; we’re all rapport with strangers.” She thinks of Petrarch, that earlier pilgrim in the Vaucluse, who perfected the sonnet and immortalized his beloved Laura therein.

  Their Italian compartment mate hears “Petrarch” and responds enthusiastically:

  A splutter of pleasure at hearing the name

  is all he needs, and he’s off

  like a racehor
se at the Palio—plunging

  unbridled into recited cadenzas, three-beat

  lines interleaving a liquid pentameter.

  What are words?

  Words are, of course, all that we have of Petrarch, of Laura, of all the dead: “Whatever is left of her is language,” says the poet, before restarting in a different key:

  —E conosce (I ask it to keep the torrent

  of words from ending, to keep anything

  from ending, ever) anche Sapphò? Yes,

  he knows, he will oblige. The limpid pentameter

  gives way to something harsher: diphthongs

  condense, take on an edge of bronze. Though

  I don’t understand a word, what are words?

  But of course she understands. She intuits the tone beneath the words, the meanings within the ancient Greek that she knows only through translations of Sappho’s fragments. Landscape and language both fall away, but the poet has made contact, via her two dimly understood foreign tongues, with this stranger on the train. Loss has been her subject, but gain has been her accomplishment.

  The poem ends as it began:

  The train leaps toward Italy; words fall away

  through the dark into the dark bedroom

  of everything left behind, the unendingness

  of things lost track of—of who, of where—

  where I’m losing track of language.

  Amy Clampitt, by her own admission, was a “garrulous creature.” She loved language; she loved long, mouth-filling words. She wrote poems that often send a curious reader to the dictionary. She was aware that everything fades and disappears but also that the hold of language, however tenuous, is the strongest thing that binds us together.

  Any language lover knows the comedy of miscommunication when trying to master a foreign tongue. And also the thrill of improvised successes. Many years ago, at a beach in the Algarve, I—in my pathetic attempt to weave something like Portuguese out of strands of French and Spanish—charmed a couple of Portuguese boys by explaining to them W. C. Fields’s reason for preferring gin to water and for abjuring the latter. “Non bevo acqua,” I said, “perchè in acqua pesce fucka-fucka.” Nothing was lost in translation. The young men knew just what the great comedian meant. And we ordered more vinho verde.

  And years later, at a large dockside restaurant in Genoa, where one sat at large tables with strangers dining on the fruits of the Ligurian Sea, we began chatting with two young Italian sailors, who by this point were rollicking with high spirits and a lot of wine. “Siete marinati?” I asked, noticing their sailors’ uniforms. They guffawed. “Certo!” My mistake: “sailors” is marinai. Marinati means “marinated,” “pickled,” “dead drunk.” And those marinai were ben marinati.

  And once, on an Italian train, squeezed like Clampitt into a small compartment with five other travelers, I used literature—as the poet herself did—as a way of opening up a brief conversation. Auden might have been right: six is the perfect number for talking at table. In the hot car chugging from Florence to Parma, I sat between an older Chinese couple, clearly Italian residents, on one side, and, on the other, a well-coiffed lady of a certain age who spent the trip on her cell phone talking to her daughter in Rome. Across from her sat a middle-aged priest who was deeply immersed in the sports pages of Milan’s Corriere della Sera. Across from me, an Italian university student dozed a bit. I had taken for my leisure reading Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard. Published in 1958, this great elegiac novel reads like something from the previous century. Luchino Visconti’s sumptuous film starring Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon, and Claudia Cardinale only increased the glow of the book itself. I looked up and saw that the girl across from me had awakened and was also reading: Il gattopardo. I interrupted her and said, “Noi leggiamo lo stesso libro!” This alerted the Chinese couple, the glamorous signora, and even the priest. Everyone had memories of reading it at school. They all loved it. Auden was wrong when he said that “poetry makes nothing happen.” In our case, a shared literary experience caused a momentary coming together of people who would never see one another again.

  Some things go without saying, or without the need of a known language. I can never forget the annual Christmas visits of the woman whose daughter married my brother-in-law. Carina, an exotic French-Algerian model, the kind of woman who literally turned men’s heads when she walked down the street, had taken up with Philip, a savvy, handsome New York rogue. Their daughter arrived shortly afterward, a little early. At that point, Rose, the French grandmother, began her pilgrimages to visit the blessed child. At Christmas in the West End Avenue apartment of my in-laws, Grand-mère Rose and Nanny Evelyn, her American counterpart, spent the holiday week cooking, decorating a tree, and billing and cooing over the child. From infancy through adulthood, Yasmine had the total attention of the grandmothers. The rest of us were superfluous. Rose spoke no English. Evelyn had no French. They understood each other perfectly. They spoke the international language called Grandmother. This language consists of exclamations, verbs of admiration and exaltation, and adjectives in the superlative. No translation was necessary.

  Emerson said, “No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby—so helpless & so ridiculous.” I have always prided myself on attempting rudimentary remarks in the language of any country I visit. In Japan (see pages 63–66), becoming a great baby gave me pleasure as well as stimulation. But wanting to learn language—any language, indeed every language—must have had its origin in those first babblings from my mouth and the mouths of my extended family. I moved quickly from talking to reading to writing, from language in the air, and the ear and mouth, to language on the page. I stayed in school because I was good at school. I learned foreign languages. Had I been born later, I would have taken advantage of semesters abroad and the chance to perfect my speaking of those languages. I have had to satisfy myself with schoolboy forays into semi-competent French, Italian, and German. I became a university professor of English.

  And then, for an unplanned, entirely unexpected learning experience, I moved to Texas, where both language and everything else seemed, initially, foreign.

  DALLAS

  One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it’s left behind.

  —DICKENS, Little Dorrit

  Here is a formula for staying young well beyond the days of youth: Grow old in a place where you do not think you belong. You will feel like an adolescent, because adolescents always consider themselves outsiders. Then, after decades, just as you have gradually habituated yourself to your surroundings, pack up and leave. It is time for another, perhaps the final, beginning.

  * * *

  On a broiling, torpid, sweat-inducing day (there is no other kind in north Texas from June through September) in August 1971, I alighted at Love Field, the in-town airport that served Dallas before the completion, three years later, of the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. DFW, celebrated for being larger than the island of Manhattan, was appropriately Texas-size. But in 1971, I was twenty-six years old, timid, and not sure I was ready for the big Wild West. Luckily for me, a smaller airport made for an easier, warmer welcome. I had never ventured farther south than Mount Vernon, Virginia, or farther west than Chicago except for a job interview in Dallas seven months earlier. Western Europe I knew. The western United States, real America, I knew not. I found my way to a car rental agency. While filling out the necessary papers and providing credit card information, I chatted with the woman behind the desk. Her hair, piled high, was shellacked, helmeted, and of a shade of blond never seen in nature. Her nails could have cut through wire. She had more color on her face than a rainbow. And her alarmingly perfect teeth—well before the age of ubiquitous dental cosmetology—glistened like pearls.

  Henry Higgins could do justice to regional Texas dialects, but I cannot. Besides, they have now largely gone the way of most other local accents, owing to migration
patterns and the homogeneous speech of television newscasters. I retain a fondness for those voices that exist mostly in my memory. No orthography can capture this woman’s pronunciation. Every syllable contained a diphthong of practically infinite, honeyed duration, and there was not a pure vowel to be heard. “How yew?” she asked.

  “I’m fine,” I replied. “How are you?”

  “Ahm doin’ good, mahty fahn. Whatcha cummin’ down heah to doo?” she politely inquired.

  “I’m going to be an assistant professor at SMU,” I said, still wet behind the ears and already beginning to get plenty wet all the way through, in spite of the air-conditioning.