What is good dialogue?

Idiom, ideology, temperament, and incident.

I was asked this question at a salon recently. Here’s my brief answer.

Good dialogue distinguishes the characters so clearly that you need no “said Susan” to tell you whose line it is. When reading a script, you ought to be able to hear that it is Falstaff or Garry Essendine speaking without needing to be told. Think of the characters of a drama as being huddled together and the drama being made of the tensions between them as they move away from their huddle: dialogue should get them as far apart as possible, without breaking the connections, so that tension and clarity are mutually maximising.

The two novels that have been most successfully transferred to television are Pride and Prejudice and Brideshead Revisited, which is because the dialogue is exceptional. Evelyn Waugh is probably the greatest writer of dialogue among the English novelists. At this point someone usually claims P.G. Wodehouse, but Wodehouse perfected a narrow art; Waugh wrote a splendid Wodehouse pastiche in Scoop, but there is nothing in Wodehouse to compare to the better pages of Vile Bodies, let alone Charles Ryder’s father. I’ll quote a long passage.

“My dear boy, they never told me you were here. Did you have a very exhausting journey? They gave you tea? You are well? I have just made a somewhat audacious purchase from Sonerschein’s—a terra-cotta bull of the fifth century. I was examining it and forgot your arrival. Was the carriage very full? You had a corner seat?” (He travelled so rarely himself that to hear of others doing so always excited his solicitude.) “Hayter brought you the evening paper? There is no news, of course—such a lot of nonsense.”

Dinner was announced. My father from long habit took a book with him to the table and then, remembering my presence, furtively dropped it under his chair. “What do you like to drink? Hayter, what have we for Mr. Charles to drink?”

“There’s some whiskey.”

“There’s whiskey. Perhaps you like something else? What else have we?”

“There isn’t anything else in the house, sir.”

“There’s nothing else. You must tell Hayter what you would like and he will get it in. I never keep any wine now. I am forbidden it and no one comes to see me. But while you are here, you must have what you like. You are here for long?”

“I’m not quite sure, Father.”

“It’s a very long vacation,” he said wistfully. “In my day we used to go on what were called ‘reading parties,’ always in mountainous areas. Why? Why,” he repeated petulantly, “should alpine scenery be thought conducive to study?”

“I thought of putting in some time at an art school—in the life class.”

“My dear boy, you'll find them all shut. The students go to Barbison or such places and paint in the open air. There was an institution in my day called a ‘sketching club’—mixed sexes” (snuffle), “bicycles” (snuffle), “pepper-and-salt knickerbockers, holland umbrellas and, it was popularly thought, free love.” (Snuffle) “Such a lot of nonsense. I expect they still go on. You might try that.”

“One of the problems of the vacation is money, Father.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t worry about a thing like that at your age.”

“You see, I’ve run rather short.”

“Yes?” said my father without any sound of interest.

“In fact I don’t quite know how I’m going to get through the next two months.”

“Well, I’m the worst person to come to for advice. I’ve never been ‘short,’ as you so painfully call it. And yet what else could you say? Hard up? Penurious? Distressed? Embarrassed? Stony-broke?” (Snuffle) “On the rocks? In Queer Street? Let us say you are in Queer Street and leave it at that. Your grandfather once said to me, ‘Live within your means, but if you do get into difficulties, come to me. Don’t go to the Jews.’ Such a lot of nonsense. You try. Go to those gentlemen in Jermyn Street who offer advances on note of hand only. My dear boy, they won’t give you a sovereign.”

“Then what do you suggest my doing?”

“Your cousin Melchior was imprudent with his investments and got into a very queer street. He went to Australia.”

You can see in the passage above that it is hard to say what is incident, what character; the two are all the same. In ‘The Art of Fiction’, Henry James says that the distinction between character and incident is over-stated.

What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? What is a picture or a novel that is not of character? What else do we seek in it and find in it? It is an incident for a woman to stand up with her hand resting on a table and look out at you in a certain way; or if it be not an incident, I think it will be hard to say what it is. At the same time it is an expression of character.

So much dialogue though insists on being incidental without being an expression of character, or vice versa; much of the worst sort of dialogue is the pure expression of character with no purpose. (That was the essence of what people disliked about Lauren Oyler’s essay collection, for example. All voice, no argument.)

Character has three essential aspects: idiom, ideology, temperament. Characters all speak in their own particular way, live by their own particular set of beliefs, and act according to our their inherent personality. From Shylock using the word “monies” to Mr. Jingle’s pre-Joycean fragments, to Mrs. Bennett’s nerves, to the narrator of Mating saying id est a lot, you can see great characters comprised of the these three traits.

Think of the famous line “A handbag!” It is funny because it meets all of these criteria: Lady Bracknell expresses her worst horrors at the sordid part of society with the smallest repetition (idiomatic), expresses her lofty ideas of class and station by taking so seriously something so idiosyncratic (ideology), and expresses her temperament as one only interested in the plain facts of English social realism. She is more of a Wodehouse-type caricature than a Waugh-esque character, but her dialogue is so famous and funny because she is made whole out of the cloth of her type.

Lady Bracknell: In what locality did this Mr. James, or Thomas, Cardew come across this ordinary hand-bag?

Jack: In the cloak-room at Victoria Station. It was given to him in mistake for his own.

Lady Bracknell: The cloak-room at Victoria Station?

Jack: Yes. The Brighton line.

Lady Bracknell: The line is immaterial. Mr. Worthing, I confess I feel somewhat bewildered by what you have just told me. To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. And I presume you know what that unfortunate movement led to? As for the particular locality in which the hand-bag was found, a cloak-room at a railway station might serve to conceal a social indiscretion—has probably, indeed, been used for that purpose before now—but it could hardly be regarded as an assured basis for a recognised position in good society.

Jack: May I ask you then what you would advise me to do? I need hardly say I would do anything in the world to ensure Gwendolen’s happiness.

Lady Bracknell: I would strongly advise you, Mr. Worthing, to try and acquire some relations as soon as possible, and to make a definite effort to produce at any rate one parent, of either sex, before the season is quite over.

This is not only applicable to dialogue. This inter-dependence of idiom, ideology, and temperament is why all characters are expressions of ideas just as all novels are novels of ideas; it is why Shakespeare is one of the greatest of thinkers.

And it is why obviously expositional dialogue is so dissatisfactory. Having an actor speak what amounts to a stage direction or programme note amounts to an abandonment of character in favour of a generic narrator whose lines are distributed among a group of people pretending to be characters.

When characters feel generic and flat it is often because their dialogue is all incident, and lacks the combination of idiom, ideology, and temperament that makes a true character. There is still a tendency to create character “types”, such as in Pixar movies, whereby what we get rather than idiom, ideology, and temperament are characters who conform to particular traits. The goofy one. The sarcastic one. Real characters are not so simple.

Lady Bracknell worked so well because she was a very local expression of a very real sort of English person, who shares much with Lady Catherine de Burgh at one end and the mother character in the sitcom Miranda at the other. It would be so easy to produce such standardised versions of this type that they are forgettable. What makes them work so well is that their dialogue expresses the peculiarities of an individual, the particularities of mood and perspective, with the specific sort of language that only they could use.

So, character is the combination of idiom, ideology, temperament, and incident.