The Book of Great Conversations, ed. Louis Biancolli
mark beyer
Michelangelo: “You are not as patient with me as I am with you. Try to listen a few moments and then perhaps you will calm down.”
In 1948, Louis Biancolli, known as a classical and operatic music critic for the New York World-Telegram, and sometimes radio program presenter, compiled sixty-three written conversations of famous historical figures. Writers, artists, generals, poets, politicians, despots, thinkers, and musicians, these men had been captured “in a train of thought” by various diarists, documentarians, and letter writers. Biancolli found these dialogs through research, both simple and arduous, depending on the circumstances. In some cases—such as the conversations between Wagner and Rossini, Napoleon and Fleury, Goethe and Luden—Biancolli did the translations himself, and so for the first time these appeared in English.
The result was The Book of Great Conversations. Long out of print, but available through online used book searches, this little fat volume is a select encyclopedia. A list of “participants” is essential here: Socrates, Michelangelo, Frederick the Great, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Casanova and Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Goethe, Napoleon, Shelley and Trelawny, Byron and Trelawny, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Alexandre Dumas, Stendhal, Victor Hugo, Heinrich Heine, Thomas Carlyle, Wagner and Rossini, Lincoln, Bismark, Ernest Renan, Flaubert and Gautier and Zola (et al), Tennyson, Tolstoy, Whitman, Wilde, Hardy, Anatole France and Auguste Rodin, Shaw and Chesterton, Masaryk, Clemenceau, and to round out the list H.G. Wells and Joseph Stalin.
Some voices are bitchy or whiny (Michelangelo and Rousseau), others wise (Johnson, Voltaire), a few mundane or preachy (Clemenceau, Stalin). Yet all present a window on the psyche of famous minds. We’ve read their works, viewed their art, despised their politics and rule, heard their music. Therein we have also wondered what they might have talked about while in friendly (or otherwise) company. Who are these people, really? It is only through conversation, it has been argued, can the real person be discovered.
Biancolli has compiled such a sample, reading published and long-forgotten diaries of the not-so-widely-famous with the eye (and ear) to find the famous chronicled within. “For while the great biography joins the portrait gallery of history, the dialog remains a breath of real life, the candid close-up of the subject, snapped during the greatest sport of all—Talk.” This book is not a scholarly work, per se, however Biancolli writes introductions to each that, in and of themselves, are readable portraits. We get a bit of the why, the when, the where—the how is in the recorder’s rendering. While some of language is stilted, with archaic constructions, we can appreciate the memoranda as spontaneous.
Here we find Frederick the Great teasing an aide for believing in life after death while they sit in a tent at night between battles:
Frederick: Do you know, sir, that I shall become annoyed with you if you keep me another time until ten o’clock, I who am usually up at three!
De Catt: We must not then debate any more those questions on which I have not the good fortune to agree with Your Majesty.
Frederick: Ah, I see, I see! You are afraid that I shall sink your religious system.
De Catt: I do not fear so at all, Sire.
Frederick: But confess to me, you would think it a great pity if Catt were not immortal. You are pleased at the idea of immortality. It tickles you, and so you believe your soul to be immortal.
De Catt: It is not at all, Sire, because I desire it that I believe it immortal, but because this is founded on proofs which will never be destroyed. And suppose even that I believe it because I desire it, would Your Majesty wish to tear from me this pleasant hope, to annihilate this mainspring of my actions, and to take away from me what is a consolation when I am being attacked by those evils to which we are so much exposed in this life?
Frederick: Ah, my dear sir, since you speak in this tone, I will take good care not to take away from you an illusion that pleases you, or to destroy your hopes and reduce you to despair.
And in another conversation, we find Napoleon in a fix. After The Little Corporal is routed at Waterloo (and having attempted suicide but found it disagreeable) he yet has ideas for his own freedom, and so speaks with a French cabinet secretary, Fleury de Chaboulon, in Paris awaiting foreign armies to move in:
Napoleon: To be sure, difficulties lie ahead, but a good wind and luck ….
Fleury: Luck! Ah, Sire, that’s not for us! Besides, where will Your Majesty go?
Napoleon: I shall go to the United States. They will give me some land, or else I shall purchase it, and we will cultivate it. I shall end the way man began. I shall exist on the products of my fields and my flocks.
Fleury: That’s all very fine, Your Majesty. But will the English leave you in peace to cultivate your fields?
Napoleon: Why not? What harm can I do them?
Fleury: What harm, Sire! Has Your Majesty by any chance forgotten how you made England tremble? As long as you live, Sire, or as long as you remain free, England will fear the consequences of your hatred and your genius.
[…]
Napoleon: Very well! Then I shall go to Mexico! I shall find patriots there and place myself at their head.
Fleury: Your Majesty forgets they already have leaders of their own.
These dialogs are not written from imagination, that much is clear. As clouded as memory can be, we can see the honesty in the chronicling process. This is what all these conversations display. Some are Great by virtue of the intelligence they demonstrate; others are Great because of who is captured in conversation. I’d have left out a couple of Johnson’s short episodes because they just don’t say much, or at least fail to translate well to our 21st Century ear. On the other hand, to read Michelangelo’s extended reasoning behind why he thinks Cassius and Brutus were wrong to kill Caesar (“It is an act of great presumption to set out to kill the head of a state, whether he be just or unjust, for no one knows for certain what good can come of his death…”) is to look into the mind of a thoughtful genius.
One great misfortune in The Book of Great Conversations is its omission of all famous women in history. Doubtless Biancolli could have found at least one or two—George Eliot, Elizabeth I, even Mae West would have been something to wrap our minds around. There is some salvation: several of the diarists-documentarists were women, sometimes themselves involved in the conversation, but not quite famous enough to be the headliner.
The age of the soundbite has virtually eliminated quality recorded conversation. We seldom have a chance, as Biancolli puts it, to hear “a giant thinker in a train of thought.” So much is staged, read from printed pages (news broadcasters read the news to us), and compressed for alloted time “segments.” Worse, television gives us talking heads yelling at each other across a divide. This is our conversation? There was a time when conversation was indeed theater. The theater staged in a parlor or the salon of a row house or stately mansion—or the back room at a bar. It didn’t matter which. People sat around an open space, talking to each other, arguing topics of the day. Today there seems to be too much distraction. Entertainment has replaced conversation. A pity, really.
As I noted, The Book of Great Conversations is long out of print. However, a quick Amazon search found more than two dozen copies available from its nationwide Used Book collective. Some of the volumes go for just $2. You can’t get this kind of conversation for the price of designer coffee today.
The Book of Great Conversations
ed. Louis Biancolli
Simon & Schuster, 1948
578 pages; used price varies
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