🍽️ "The Dinner Party," Part Two
Excerpted from one of my favorite essays by Phillip Lopate, "Against Joie de Vivre"
Read part one here first:
Welcome back for part two of my favorite delightfully curmudgeonly personal essay from the inimitable Phillip Lopate. These two excerpts (headings my own) represent one section from his titular essay and book, Against Joie de Vivre.1 May this offer you some humor for the holiday season!
🍽️ 2. The Dinner Party (Continued)
Excerpted from “Against Joie de Vivre” by Phillip Lopate; read part one first
. . . The group is asked to repair to the table. Once again they find themselves marveling at a shared perception of life. How delicious the fish soup! How cute the stuffed tomatoes! What did you use in this green sauce? Now comes much talk of ingredients, and credit is given where credit is due. It is Jacques who made the salad. It was Mamie who brought the homemade bread.
Everyone pleads with the hostess to sit down, not to work so hard—an empty formula whose hypocrisy bothers no one. Who else is going to put the butter dish on the table?
For a moment all become quiet, except for the sounds of eating. This corresponds to the part in a church service that calls for silent prayer.
I am saved from such culinary paganism by the fact that food is largely an indifferent matter to me. I rarely think much about what I am putting in my mouth. Though my savage, illiterate palate has inevitably been educated to some degree by the many meals I have shared with people who, care enormously about such things, I resist going any further. I am superstitious that the day I send back a dish at a restaurant, or make a complicated journey somewhere just for a meal, that day I will have sacrificed my freedom and traded in my soul for a lesser god.
I don’t expect the reader to agree with me. That’s not the point. Unlike the behavior called for at a dinner party, I am not obliged, sitting at my typewriter, to help procure consensus every moment. So I am at liberty to declare, to the friend who once told me that dinner parties were one of the only opportunities for intelligently convivial conversations to take place in this cold, fragmented city, that she is crazy. The conversation at dinner parties is of a mind-numbing caliber. No discussion of any clarifying rigor—be it political, spiritual, artistic, or financial—can take place in a context where fervent conviction of any kind is frowned upon, and the desire to follow through a sequence of ideas must give way every time to the impressionistic, breezy flitting from topic to topic.
Talk must be bubbly but not penetrating. Illumination would only slow the flow. Some hit-and-run remark may accidentally jog an idea loose, but in such cases it is better to scribble a few words down on the napkin for later than attempt to “think” at a dinner party.
What do people talk about at such gatherings? The latest movies, the priciness of things, word processors, restaurants, muggings and burglaries, private versus public schools, the fool in the White House (there have been so many fools in a row that this subject is getting tired), the undeserved reputations of certain better-known professionals in one's field, the fashions in investments, the investments in fashion. What is traded at the dinner-party table is, of course, class information. You will learn whether you are in the avant-garde or rear guard of your social class, or, preferably, right in step.
As for Serious Subjects, dinner-party guests have the latest New Yorker in-depth piece to bring up. People who ordinarily would not spare a moment worrying about the treatment of schizophrenics in mental hospitals, the fate of Great Britain in the Common Market, or the disposal of nuclear wastes suddenly find their consciences orchestrated in unison about these problems, thanks to their favorite periodical—though a month later they have forgotten all about it and are on to something new.
The dinner party is a suburban form of entertainment. Its spread in our big cities represents an insidious Fifth Column suburbanization of the metropolis. In the suburbs it becomes necessary to be able to discourse knowledgeably about the heart of the city, but from the viewpoint of a day-shopper.
Dinner-party chatter is the communicative equivalent of roaming around shopping malls.
Much thought has gone into the ideal size for a dinner party—usually with the hostess arriving at the figure eight. Six would give each personality too much weight; ten would lead to splintering side discussions; eight is the largest number still able to force everyone into the same compulsively congenial conversation. My own strength as a conversationalist comes out less in groups of eight than one-to-one, which may explain my resistance to dinner parties. At the table, unfortunately, any engrossing tête-à-tête is frowned upon as antisocial. I often find myself in the frustrating situation of being drawn to several engaging people in among the bores, and wishing I could have a private conversation with each, without being able to do more than signal across the table a wry recognition of that fact. “Some other time, perhaps,” we seem to be saying with our eyes, all evening long.
Later, however—to give the devil his due—when guests and hosts retire from the table back to the living room, the strict demands of group participation may be relaxed, and individuals allowed to pair off in some form of conversational intimacy. But one must be ever on the lookout for the group’s need to swoop everybody together again for one last demonstration of collective fealty.
The first to leave breaks the communal spell.
There is a sudden rush to the coat closet, the bathroom, the bedroom, as others, under the protection of the first defector's original sin, quit the Party apologetically. The utopian dream has collapsed: left behind are a few loyalists and insomniacs, swillers of a last cognac. “Don’t leave yet,” begs the host, knowing what a sense of letdown, pain, and self-recrimination awaits. Dirty dishes are, if anything, a comfort: the faucet’s warm gush serves to stave off the moment of anesthetized stock-taking—Was that really necessary?—in the sobering silence that follows a dinner party.
❤️
Phillip Lopate is a retired Columbia professor and the author of several craft books that opened up the writing world for me: The Art of the Personal Essay and To Show and To Tell. Mr. Lopate, if you see this and would like me to take it down, please write to me here!
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Oh Philip..What analysis! Please decline all future invitations to dinner. Obviously you feel still the 'solitudinous outsider.' Not all such gatherings are so shallow as you have implied.
Not all are concerned with media driven conversation..Yes, as foodies all, we discuss and cuss various dishes. But with tolerance. And pleasure. and discuss our mutual efforts. How's that for inclusivity?
Re: the break up. I am usually first to the bathroom! We have a few, and as overeating causes digestive mobility, most guests take advantage at some point. And I find six to be an ideal number of guests, mainly due to the amount of food that must be prepared! The higher velocity of verbal give and take in the smaller group seasons the meal as well.
Perhaps you would be better served to only join activities consisting of other isolated social
critics and outliers similar to yourselves. Then you would all have something in common, to
discuss that has actual meaning to you.
I know it is difficult to have an emotional investment in conversation with relative strangers.
Especially in respect to subjects you care nothing about or have disdain for.
I have that same difficulty myself, as another outlier. I am not mainstream, and certainly not an academic such as yourself. My interest universe is much smaller than some other persons.
I find discussions of the small success and failures we admit to...and the grit and reality, and common truths of everyday life, much more interesting than any less substantive conversations.
Perhaps there are others like yourself that you could make a closer connection to, or perhaps you could put on a dinner yourself, with guests you hand selected for commonality of interests..
I wish you every success..
Phil
Phillip Lopate's 81st birthday celebrated on Substack! https://bestamericanessays.substack.com/p/happy-birthday-phillip-lopate