Louis Roney: The gift of gab

What powerful magic lies in human speech!

Dr. Samuel Johnson, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and Mark Twain are some of the people who have made “how they said it” as memorable as “what they said.”

What makes a great extemporaneous conversationalist?

The wise speaker starts by concentrating on important aspects of something he knows a lot about. Expert speakers are able to create “good theater,” which can, when just right, seem to be improvised, and free of inhibition. Such “dramatic flair” is to a great extent a talent that improves with frequent use.

During an average day, countless stimuli invade our consciousness through our five senses. These stimuli imprint themselves within us via the high-speed-film camera and sound recorder that combine the past and the present in the library of our minds.

Some of these images are immediately discarded as trivial or worse and are consigned to obscurity in an extra-cranial ashbin. Others remain available to be acted upon in the sometime, somehow, somewhere that is present in our stream-of-consciousness flux of thinking. The strongest stimuli stick in our minds and increase our life’s king-size grab-bag of memories. Still other things are stowed away below the mind’s conscious level, only to surface in our thoughts at unrelated times without any rhyme or reason.

Most of us have known extraordinary people who were astounding talk “sources” whether being called upon to embellish eloquent public speaking, or to entertain us in sparkling conversation across the dining table.

The intellects of favorite talkers I’ve known were memorable for having stored away treasure-trove “reference libraries” of facts to be recalled on the spot while the speaker was speaking:

Dr. Douglas Southall Freeman was my neighbor in Richmond, Va., for several years.

Dr. Freeman was the literary guru of the Richmond News Leader and the Richmond Times Dispatch and was a monumental Virginian, Pulitzer Prize winner, writer, publisher, historian and conversationalist.

His ad-lib radio talks on the news each morning started our days with his kindly erudition. I cherish several signed historical books by Dr. Freeman written about Robert E. Lee and George Washington. Sitting in a rocker on his front porch and talking with him was for me an education and a delight.

And then there was Henry Miller. Miller’s books spoke to me as a fellow ex-patriot American artist abroad during my singing days.

In the 1960s, I spent a couple of snowy winter months in Brussels, where I was singing Hoffmann in Maurice Béjart’s production of “The Tales of Hoffmann” at the Théâtre de la Monnaie.

At the end of a long afternoon of rehearsing in the theater, I trudged the six icy blocks back to the Plaza Hotel, stopping off at a bookstore to pick up something to read in bed that night. Too worn out to wrestle with more French, I bought a green paperback book in English. The book was “The Tropic of Cancer,” by an American I had heard about, but never read.

Ex-patriot Henry Miller was an artist to the core. He had struggled vainly to survive in New York, before coming to Paris where he was at last published by the Obelisk Press, and began to win passionate international acclaim.

Miller openly detested dilettantes who “infest the arts,” self-serving ignoranti who, in Miller’s words, “basked in the reflected glow of true artists.”

I have written of the time when Henry and I played Ping-Pong all day in Frankfurt-am-Main, where I was entertaining him as a favor to a friend of mine who asked me to keep him sober for a radio interview that evening.

Henry hee-hawed at my suggestion that dilettantes might be needed to support the arts. His wildly scatological vocabulary in his writing and speech communicated joyously the freedom that impelled him in his artistic life.

Henry Miller heightened my sensibilities and enriched my world as a performing artist. Such is “the gift of gab.”