University of Wisconsin– Madison

Henry Barnes

Description

• cours - matière potentielle : content
• cours - matière : chemistry
• cours - matière : law
• expression écrite

University of Wisconsin– Madison

• nursing nursing school
• physics atmospheric
• public universities u.s.
• studies anthropology
• leadership
• engineering
• history
• physics
• life sciences
• science

Sujets

• Content
• Chemistry
• University of Wisconsin?Madison
• Interior
• Landscape
• cours

Informations

• Publié par: odwo
• Nombre de lectures: 48
• Langue: English

Extrait

DYLAN THOMAS
THE ART OF CONVERSATION:
A LECTURE WITH ILLUSTRATIONS & A MORAL
1(Noise of audience settling down. Rustling of programmes; creaking of chairs;
coughs; sneezes; blowings of noses; conversation in whispers)
LECTURER: (speaking through the noise) Ladies and gentlemen. (The noise
increases slightly. He speaks more loudly) Men and women. (Noise rises again. He
speaks very loudly) Chatterers and gossipers of both sexes. (Immediate silence) Thank
you. The subject of my lecture this evening is the Art of Conversation, to be
illustrated by what I may – I may? Thank you – call the lantern slides of sound, at
considerable expense, and with the aid of innumerable mechanical devices, I have
arranged for microphones to be set up in the private (and public) houses of many of
the most typical of today’s tame – but, in some cases, none the less dangerous -
conversationalists. A cross-section – and, in some cases, very cross – of English
intimate talk from Oscar Wilde the poet, who could talk the hind legs off a horse, to
Mr Humphrey Clack, the armchair-strategist, or carpet-general who could probably
have talked the hind legs off a Wilde. I intend that you shall hear the voices of the
famous paradoxical and platitude-inverting monologuists of the Yellow past; the
drones and rumbles of the best club bores wrestling, at St. James’s windows, with an
inadequate vocabulary and an open copy of The Times; the noises of vanity,
exhibitionism, pique, and desire to please; the rasp, or saw-voice of ‘that dreadful
woman who always holds the floor’; the whinny of the self-congratulatory and
facietious raconteur; the jolly bluster, or verbal backslap, of the blind-man-bluffer or
wishful-blinker; the squeaks and clacks of the cliques of the hearsayers and
professional rumourists; and the non-stop monotonous mince and moan of those queer
English natives beating, across the suburban wilds, their peeping Tom-Toms of
credulity, suspicion, and misinformation.
(Chattering and whispering, soft)
Now let us go back, through the whispering galleries of time, to a more dignified, but
hardly a less talkative, century than our own, when Victoria, and peace, reigned over
England and Oscar Wilde held quite another court. Please observe that one of the
principal sources of conversation at this time was – Conversation. Now Conversation.
. .
(Fade into chatter, the popping of corks and the clinking of glasses)
WILDE: Conversation, my dear Aubrey, is the art of putting the cart before the horse
and then putting it in a nutshell. Will you pass the decanter? I must confess, the grape
has a lot to answer for, but fortunately most of its conversation is off the point. Thank
you, no more. Too much is quite enough for anybody. Too much is as good as a feast.
BEARDSLEY: What leads to the road of excess, Oscar?
WILDE: The influence of inferiors, and one foot in the grave. I speak from long
inexperience. The art of conversation resembles in many ways the art of excess. In
both you leap before you look and in neither do you listen to any voice but your own.
Always take your own advice, which is invariably wrong. Excess and conversation
should be conducted as a game of skill against an opponent doomed to lose from the
beginning, one’s better self.
2DOWSON: Do you believe, then, in Conscience?
WILDE: Conscience, my dear Ernest, is the still, small voice that invites the wolf in
through the door. I should no more disbelieve in Conscience than I should in the
Devil. Did I tell you of my extraordinarily uninteresting dream last night? I have been
sleeping with such extravagance lately, that I never seem to have a wink awake. I
dreamed I went to Hell with the Marquese d’Orioli and Miss Plimsoll, and the Devil
took us all out to tea. Or it may have been ether. He was always a devil for the ladies.
I met his second wife only yesterday, impersonating Lady Matlock in the Strand. An
infernally good figure. The eyes of Helen. . .
BEARDSLEY: . . . Or Hell in the eye. . .
WILDE: Neat, Aubrey, neat. Too neat. You need a little soda-water in your wit, to
make it bubble. However, I shall remind myself to think of your remark,
spontaneously, tomorrow. Conversation. . .
(fade into the noise of whispering and muted chatter)
LECTURER: Conversation, ladies and gentlemen, is the politest art, pedantic,
dogmatic, abusive, cantankerous it may be, but always it must be polite. When the
great Dr. Johnson went out to dinner. . .
(whispering fades into)
DR JOHNSON: When I go out to dinner, Madam, I regard the tenderness of the
feelings of the company as studiously as I do that of this most excellent meat. Though
I set upon it with knife and fork, as heartily as a penurious scandalmonger upon a
reputation hitherto thought unassailable, I do not neglect to keep in mind the question
of cut and grain. Why, it would be barbarous indeed to inflict a wound except upon
that part which is most properly and eminently woundable: the pride and folly of
one’s neighbours.
MRS THRALE: Why now, Doctor Johnson, would you have the company think you a
wounding man?
DR JOHNSON: Madam, I wound nobody but myself if I set my wit upon the
goodness of a neighbour; my wit would go blunt, for virtue is unpiercable as Sir John
Hawkins’ generosity: it would buckle a butcher’s knife, for it has grown a double hide
to thwart the ravening appetite…
MRS THRALE: Then pride and folly you must find tender, Doctor? I confess, I find
them tough enough. . .
DR JOHNSON: It is the resilience of despair, madam; for cut you deep enough, and
in the right grain and, to be sure, folly is tender as a sucking pig, though in no ways so
sweet. Folly is nurtured in adiposity, and is as lean itself as the goodwill of a Scotch
dunce. . . You may converse with a Scotchman about everything under the sun save
charity and sense. Conversation. . .
3(fade into whispering etc which fades into)
LECTURER: Conversation of men of letters of the past has become familiar to the
serious student through the indefatigible labour of their attendant satellites. But what
of the voices of our men of letters of today? Must we remain satisfied that, always at
their elbows, go the Eckermans and Boswells, the Thrales and the Burneys of these
more strident, disrespectful times? Or shall we pay a visit, now and for posterity, to
the conversaziones of the modern intelligensia? Whatever your answer, it has all been
arranged. At this very moment, two established novelists of middle-age – both have
had recent publications selected by the Backward and Forward Book Clubs – are
talking in a well-appointed study not a book’s throw from Hampstead Underground
Station. If only there were television! One novelist, in an old corduroy smoking-coat
and a pair of ink-stained flannels, woolen tie carefully disarranged, is smoking a large,
curved pipe and skimming through his proofs; the other wears thick, horn-rimmed
glasses and enough hair to cover a sheepdog. There is sherry on the occasional table:
the best sherry.
(whispering etc fading into)
NOVELIST I: I always say this is the best sherry in London, Jack.. Lord knows what
you’ll do when it comes to an end. This uncivilised war. . .
NOVELIST II: I’ve got some rather good claret to carry me over the invasion.
Gordon left it to me. “To a sensitive mind and a rare palate”. Perhaps you read his
will in the Bookworm?
NOVELIST I: He left me an ebony-handled stick, you know “To a man with all
Sussex in his heart. Good walking!” It moved me. . . I’m not interrupting you, am I,
old man? See you’re pretty busy with the galleys. . .
NOVELIST II: Just skimming over ’em, Tom. Salmon and Finch want ’em for the
winter list Through the Dark Tunnel. It’s all rather topical. . .
NOVELIST I: Good terms?
NOVELIST II: One and a half on the first five thou. . . I think the Book of the
Second Club’ll take it up. I saw Glossop yesterday about it. . .
NOVELIST I: Hear he’s getting a commission.
NOVELIST II: Yes, and just when he’s coming round to using the bracket properly
for the first time. He’s pretty sick, I can tell you. After years and year of work. . .
NOVELIST I: I know, I know. I had exactly the same trouble with my colon. Rather
a good smoke this. Handmade?
NOVELIST II: I know a little place off Villiers Street. . . HG introduced me. . . only
12/6 a hundred. . . rather good value…
(whispering etc fading into )
4LECTURER: Not very good value. One expected perhaps a little less of the
commercial spirit, a little less insistence upon the minor luxuries of life and a more
explicit attitude to the intellectual and spiritual problems which must confront the
contemporary artist. Let us see what the younger men are up to. When the light
behind my head turns first pink and then green, I shall tune you in to a meeting, held
in the cocktail bar of the Blitz, of some of our most advanced poets. Not one of them
will see twenty one again. Several are sober. . .
(fade into )
POET I: No, but soberly speaking, Alistair, don’t you agree with Bryan that Peter’s
new poem leaves The Waste Land looking like an allotment in Barrow-on-Furness or
somewhere?
POET II: I have an uncle in Barrow-on-Furness. . .
POET III: Yes and no. You mustn’t underrate The Waste Land. Dialetically, it
appeared at the precisely important moment. All the Georgians were d