A Spectator's Notebook „ C/ ne Of the jeremiads most often directed

at the Present age bemoans the supposed disappearance of the art of conversation killed, it is said, "Y the hurry and anxieties of life, or by the Pularity of bingo, the cinema or the telly. thIS is nonsense. There is no reason to think that conversation has been debased by any of these causes and I have been fortunate to know rleast two conversationalists of such bril,!ance and versatility that they would, I believe, have rivalled any of the great talkers of the etghteenth century, that age of wit and elegant sPeech.

One of them was the late Compton Mackenzie. He, as I have written elsewhere, had everything. He could discuss a point of serious criticism without being a bore; he could cir01) into superb mimicry, a hereditary gift Perhaps; he could be hilariously funny without .fle heavy-handed malice which is a characteristic of much modern conversation, or vividly reminiscent. His range was immense, with a

telling with a knowledge of period and touches of

lack, startling actuality. He had — what many of us I sadly recognise — a sense of compassion Which never let him score the easy victories of Tite and allowed him the more genial effects 4,,,t came from a gift for ridicule. He one was particularly entertaining on his B"..11terhporary writers, Hugh Walpole, Francis '_ett-Young, D. H. Lawrence, Norman Doug4(7, but several of the set pieces in his firework usPialr were dedicated to Henry James and caine. SnIne of the stories he told me have appeared !14.)) Life and Times, but not, I choose to "eve, with quite the verve of the speaking volice. The art of the raconteur dies with him, Whatever recordings may have been made, for owes something to the listener, to the l'easIon, perhaps to the provocation, and it _rises even more in the written version. You may read Monty's stories of D. H. Lawrence, „may even by recorded, but nothing can ,,Pensate for the physical presence of the larrator, the mimicry with which he repro

"ueed the voice with its gentle North Country ac

„scent and the elfin glee with which he told „'erri, not as a rehearsed effort but as a natural Part of a long conversation. SDarklets

Noo

4., • Coward, the other most scintillating rlker r have known, had very different gifts and I remember his conversation as a contins throwing-out of sparklets to be picked up, rhathher than a collection of large gems. This t„.44es most attempts to communicate his 1cular kind of wit fail, as they do in those inoll stories told in theatrical circles with bad initations of 'The Master's' voice. „These two men died within a year of one a alther and it is absurd to think that more than Cony 'ew delightful expressions of the art of rsation died with them. There will always th 'nen and women who delight their fellows by h: Spoken word, though perhaps nowadays we owve ta be more tolerant of specialists in their , n fields and remember that one man's bore is r`o,Other's enchanter. Though you may not be th'erested in gastronomy, say, or golf, there are vvicie Who are keen to learn an original recipe of itb renders eatable the less expensive joints distirleat, or who listen breathlessly to a story of 8ster on the seventeenth. 13041111Y when some subject is carried to the t of obsession should we rebel. Frequent refeallIllg of an Extraordinary Dream, the merits ° a favourite football team, the recent

speeches of Heath or Wilson, the cleverness of its owner's dog — these I admit may earn helpless yawns from most of us. I remember going into a Cheltenham pub one summer evening and being confronted by a man who looked up from his evening paper and asked, "Well, what do you think of Kent?" I was caught off my guard and began to talk of the shame of the unchecked growth of its suburbs or the splendours of Canterbury Cathedral to see the man looking at me as though I should be certified. They skittled Surrey out for 87," he said with reproach and some alarm before returning to a study of his evening paper. I understood and sympathised but I do not think such single-minded enthusiasms make for really wide-ranging conversation. But I admit that I am easily pleased by other topics. I can listen to book-collectors recounting their triumphs over a rare first edition, though I am no longer a collector myself. I can even nod with what I hope seems to be sympathetic enthusiasm when I hear a man unkindly called a wine bore telling improbably how he found an exciting yin du pays in an Alpine village, and I have learned to smile understandingly when someone sketches the plot of the latest best-selling novel and try to remember that at least the speaker is attempting conversation and not silently sulking over a crossword puzzle or a game of patience.

Old books

Speaking of book-collecting I was delighted to find during a recent visit to Oxford that it is flourishing among undergraduates who seem to spend their grants and allowances on first editions of twentieth-century novelists in mint condition or an item of incunabula regarded with pride. This is encouraging, though an element of canny investment in a rising market, a consideration almost unknown in my collecting days, guides their selection. What is more, I find the English authors whom we treasured and wrapped in cellophane are 'wanted' still and that the first editions of Conrad, Huxley, Lawrence, de la Mare, Norman Douglas, Hardy and C. E. Montague are among the Most sought after desiderata, as they were when I used to boast to Bertram Rota of my finds. There are new fields for the collector, early technical manuals, early railway timetables and reference books, books on nineteenth-century sport have come into their own, while the bottom has fallen out, as they say in the trade, of the market in early Bibles, black-letter theology and certain _modern authors best not named.

No bargains

Still, there is no lack of keen bibliophiles, while Early English watercolours, which I also avidly collected once, ane scarcely to be" found outside the salerooms. This is a pity since for many years, right through the last century and the firsthalfofthis, theyprovideda form of collecting which could be practised by people of modest means who reaped magnificent rewards both aesthetic and financial. It seemed for many years that in the world at large and particularly in the United States there was surprising ignorance of the fact that the art of painting in watercolours, an art for which the climate and "quiet colours of Britain were singularly well suited, flourished here in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century to a perfection unknown in any other country at any other time and it was possible to buy, sometimes for no more than a pound or two, original examples of the work of David Cox, John Sell Cotman, Samuel Prout, Michael 'Angelo' Rooker, John Varley, Thomas Girtin and even in rare instances Constable or Turner. Those days are gone and the fading but masterly watercolours on our walls are displaced by lurid prints of Van Gogh landscapes or Picasso's 'Blue Nude'.

Collecting obsolescence

There are other more freakish forms of collection, made in the hope of a rise in the market or to invest in something material, or to attract, by their singularity, interviewers and cameramen from television. Of such are the infinite varieties of bottle labels or match boxes, beer mats, Iron Crosses and other Nazi relics, railway tickets, advertising posters, cigarette packets and a mass of other impedimenta without any of the intrinsic beauty or historical significance possessed by postage stamps and coins.

Another kind of collection seems to be for the benefit of our future archaeologists, that of obsolete household articles in which the Victorians and Edwardians were particularly rich. Some of them I can remember from my own childhood home, articles hideous in design and quite superfluous, unfunctional oddities recommended in Mrs Beeton's Household Management. They have the quaintness of the absurd when seen in these days (of no less hideous plastics and chromium) and none of the homely beauty of such things from the eighteenth century. There were brass roasting jacks, called `bottle jacks', wire meat covers, colossal weighing machines with a set of weights from 1/4 oz to 14 lb, turbot kettles, brawn and tongue pressers, grid irons, mangles and wringers, knife cleaners consisting of large wooden wheels in the interstices of which the knives were inserted, the whole worked by a handle, banister brushes, marrow scoops, beetle traps, crumb brushes, butter prints, and paste jaggers.

It is difficult to see how a full set of these articles could be assembled unless by some freak of chance a middle-class home was furnished and fully equipped but never occupied, or unless some passionate domestic archaeologist spent a great deal of money in collecting them. There are those, I am sure, who would find such a collection worthwhile particularly if they could add the labels from packets of Reckitt's Blue, Black Lead and Wellington Knife Polish with the Duke's head depicted on it. More interesting surely, if less profitable, than the acquisition of identical gold sovereigns.

Rupert Croft-Cooke