Conversation is a group activity, and the participants should be thought of as a team, albeit with certain stars. The best teamwork is the result of practice. The best guests for good conversation are guests who’ve had good conversation with each other before. Their moves are polished. Mr. X will give lavish praise to some item of popular culture and pass the ball to Miss Y, who will say something pert.
Mr. X: “Smithereens is an artfully unattractive movie with a protagonist who’s purposely unsympathetic, and it has no scenes showing development of personal relationships because our imaginations are intended to fill in not what happened but what did not.”
Miss Y: “Things which require more than three negatives to praise never make money.”
The wit of the Algonquin round table had more to do with such drill than with the native genius of its habitués.
If you can’t invite the same group repeatedly or if you don’t know any such group to invite, then try to gather people who have something in common. But make sure what they have in common is not a point of vanity. Only an idiot would have two sports impresarios, two opera tenors, or two Supreme Court justices at the table.
Also make sure your guests don’t want to kill each other—a warning that should be unnecessary. But many hosts think it “interesting” to invite to the same fête, say, the head of a PLO faction and the prime minister of Israel or Norman Mailer and all his ex-wives. This is all right for cocktail parties, but at a small seated dinner it’s liable to result in stony silences or tossed gravy boats.
And do not invite people who have only one interest in their lives even if everyone else at the meal is similarly obsessed. Extended conversations on one topic quickly degenerate from ideas to opinions and from opinions to bigotries. Six fervent devotees of French Symbolist poetry will be fine through soup, but by cheese and fruit they will be yelling at each other.
“Verlaine’s clustered images suggesting mood and emotion stink like pigs!”
“Do not!”
And so on.
The one thing which has to be mutual among guests is not acquaintance, interests, or background but attitude. Good conversation takes place on a plane above mortal affairs. There must be sufficient detachment to banish the stupider emotions. The purpose of conversation—if something that’s so much an art can be said to have a purpose—is to learn how others see things, how others make sense of existence or make peace with its nonsensicality. Good conversation gives you the advantage of being Argus-eyed or Hydra-headed (though, it is to be hoped, with nicer heads).
Conversation is therefore no place to talk about yourself. Your guests can observe you perfectly well and don’t need help. What they want to hear is something they don’t know or haven’t thought of. Conversation is especially no place for the small and boring extensions of the self. Do not talk about your pets or infant grandchildren. By the same token, avoid being too personal with others. Some will think your inquiries rude, but, worse, the rest will jump to answer them. The disease of narcissism is not cured by spreading it around the table.
Neither has conversation room for awe or envy. Someone may be admired or praised, but an awestruck recitation of the powers and virtues of Fritz Mondale, for example, would put a damper on the evening. And a sudden outburst of jealous indignation that you aren’t he would bring talk to a shocked halt.
Bitterness and complaint also lower the tone of conversation, and violate a rule of general decorum besides: “A gentleman never complains about anything he is unable or unwilling to remedy.” Unless you’re going to dash from the table and balance Social Security’s income and outlay with a personal check, you should have another glass of wine and let the talk pass to outrageous defense expenditures.
The taboo against querulousness, however, should not be taken as a prohibition of damning things. Damning is a perfectly Olympian thing to do and has been a source of delight to great minds throughout history. You can damn the government up and down, call its every minion illegitimate progeny of slime mold, and say that a visit to Washington is like taking a bath in a tub full of live squid, so long as you don’t complain.
An attitude of egalitarianism is necessary, as well as an attitude of detachment. There is an unwritten law of dinner table democracy. No matter how famous and powerful some guests or how humble and obscure others, they’re all equal when they sit down to eat. Thus there should be no overt aggression or competitiveness. Evangelizing, pontification, and the telling of jokes are all wrong. An attempt to convert and an assumption of omniscience are both competitive acts. And a joke is a rhetorical device that renders the teller dominant and the listener submissive. If a joke is so appropriate to the conversation that you have to tell it, turn the joke into an anecdote.