Gossip (10 page)

Some years ago, precisely this story was brought to me about a friend, someone I didn't see often but liked a lot, a woman who lived in another city. My own reading of the hard evidence was that her husband probably was brutish, and that she, who was then in early middle age and had two grown children, had moved out into the apartment of a female friend until she could set things up on her own. After all, I concluded, if I had to move out of the apartment lived in by a wife from whom I was separating, there was every chance that I would, temporarily at least, move in with a bachelor friend. I thought any other reading of these events was pure gossip. In the event, I was quite wrong. My friend, after more than twenty years of marriage, had decided she was lesbian, and lesbian she has happily remained. The moral of the story, if moral there be, is that more daring speculation was called for; things were not as on the surface they appeared; and a commonsense explanation turned out to be the wrong one.

The act of speculation is itself hedged all around with personal sentiment—or, to use the less euphemistic term, bias. I recently read the memoir of a writer named Ann Birstein, who was the third wife (of four) of the literary critic Alfred Kazin. Their marriage of thirty years was tempestuous, and that is putting it gently. Birstein published her memoir,
What I Saw at the Fair,
in 2003, five years after Kazin's death, and it chronicles all of the couple's domestic storms, hurricanes, monsoons.

Ann Birstein's book is motivated, I do not think it going too far to say, by hatred for her former husband, a hatred grounded in deep disappointment and it is no doubt justified. She was a novelist married to a powerful literary critic who seems never to have expressed any appreciation, or scarcely any interest, in his wife's writing. Twelve years older than she, he was more experienced, more in demand, more famous. He was also inconsiderate of her own ambition to the point of cruelty.

But all these things, unpleasant enough in their way, are as nothing compared to Birstein's claim that her husband used to beat her fairly regularly, sometimes with sufficient force to knock her to the floor. "We'd be making love. I'd be happy. Then Alfred would suddenly say that I didn't know how to do it, and fly into a rage. During other arguments he would rip the sleeves out of my bathrobe ... or tear at my hair, which the next day I would comb out in bunches. Always after these episodes, Alfred would cry, say he had never hit any other woman but me."

This information, if true, makes Alfred Kazin not merely a brute but a sick brute. It also makes for very rich, if also repulsive, gossip. I say "if true," but is there any reason to doubt its truth? One reason might be resentment on Ann Birstein's part. Hers has not been a glittering literary career; her published novels have not caused much comment. While married to her, Alfred Kazin could have helped gain attention for them, but didn't in the least bestir himself to do so. Birstein has a more general complaint. She is a feminist, whose feminism takes on the heavy freight of victimhood, so that reading her one senses her feeling that much of the failure of her career is owing to a system badly rigged against women writers.

What we have in Ann Birstein, as they might say in a courtroom, is a hostile witness. You also have in me an all too credulous juror, for I thought Alfred Kazin a creepy character before reading his third wife's account of his bullying brutishness. What made Kazin creepy, I always thought, was his confident presentation of his own superior virtue. No matter what he wrote about, he always seemed to position himself as better than his subject and his audience. He made himself seem the only man who understood the true meaning of the Holocaust, the only man who knew the importance of radical thinking in America, the only man genuinely worried about nuclear war, the only man who kept his own purity when everyone around him was selling out. On his left, the red hordes; on his right, the Black Hundreds; in the middle, one good man, standing alone, you'll never guess who: Alfred Kazin. So it is all the jollier, all the juicier, to discover that this self-proclaimed good man was a wife beater, and a weepy one at that.

Why did Ann Birstein wait until her husband's death to defame him so enthusiastically? Perhaps she feared direct revenge when he was alive. (When Philip Roth's second wife, the actress Claire Bloom, wrote about what a wretched husband and stepfather Roth was, he responded by drawing a crushingly cruel portrait of her in a thinly veiled novel called
I Married a Communist.
) Perhaps, who knows, she feared more beatings, or litigation. But she has given that small portion of the world that cares about her and her dead ex-husband much in the way of richly vicious gossip to contemplate, and I now seem to be passing it along.

The rise, some have called it the triumph, of psychotherapy in modern life has provided people one more subject—along with sex, money, and moral hypocrisy—about which to gossip: that of a person's psychic state. As amateur therapists, gossips analyze other people for their psychological weaknesses, not to say deformities. "She's very insecure," two people might casually say about a third. Or "He's obviously paranoid." Or "His relationship with his mother has always been fundamentally skewed." Or "She exhibits all the behavior patterns of the nymphomaniac." All this kind of talk, even in the hands of a professional therapist—and "therapist," if you insert a space after the
e,
spells "the rapist"—is pure speculation. In the hands of a gossip, it can also be speculation with intent to wound.

If much of gossip is speculation, almost all of it requires interpretation. One must examine a piece of gossip as one would a novel; the more subtle the gossip, the more subtle the interpretation needed. Some gossip is crude, its intention obvious, and no training in literary criticism is required to unpack its meaning. Other gossip can be Proustian in its subtlety, and calls for refined interpretation.

Nearly all human acts outside the most basic ones call for interpretation. One recalls here Metternich, the great Austrian diplomatist who, when informed that the Russian ambassador would not be attending the Congress of Verona because of his death, asked, "I wonder why he did that?" Not all speculation need be as cunning as Metternich's, but certain incidents, events, and bits of randomly acquired information call forth speculation of a kind aligned to gossip. "Perhaps the urge to participate in gossip comes from knowledge of the impossibility of knowing," writes Patricia Meyer Spacks in
Gossip,
her study of the connections between gossip and literature. "We continue to talk about others precisely because we cannot finally understand them."

Speculation is nearly inseparable from gossip. One sees a married man in what appears to be intimate conversation with an attractive woman much younger than he, and one must, it strikes me, speculate on who she might be and what is the nature of their relationship. One has a neighbor, a man in his forties, who doesn't seem to go to work yet lives exceedingly well: travels frequently, dresses expensively, has tickets to lots of concerts and other cultural events. What is he living on? An inheritance? A trust fund? Earnings from something illicit? A woman in her early thirties has had a number of affairs with men her age, living serially with them for extended periods. She has often talked about wanting children but is not ready to do so without a husband. What is it about her that has made finding a husband, at least thus far, impossible? Invitations to gossip, under the banner of speculation, all of these.

It may well be that our married man with the younger woman is in reality meeting his attractive niece, the young man living large with no visible means of support is a skilled day trader, the woman in her thirties with serial lovers has less wrong with her than is wrong with so many men in midlife who are terrified of commitment. It may well be, in other words, that all one's gossipy suspicions were flat-out wrong, proving that a dirty mind never sleeps but perhaps from time to time ought to.

But is it a dirty mind or, less balefully, a merely curious one that invites such speculation? Encountering unconventional or ambiguous behavior, one naturally seeks an explanation for it. The search often requires knowledge of facts that are unavailable, which leaves one having to settle for speculation about these unknown facts.

Curiosity—"one of the lowest of the human faculties," E. M. Forster said—more often than not trumps honor, and does so most frequently in the form of gossip, which in turn is ready to betray secrets, circulate slander, and violate privacy, all to satisfy the beast of curiosity. At any sophisticated level, curiosity operates under the assumption that appearances and reality are usually very different, and gossip, often with the aid of daring speculation, sets out to fill in the discrepancy between the two. Sometimes it does so accurately, sometimes mistakenly yet charmingly, and sometimes meanly and disastrously. But whatever its intention, whatever its subtlety or want of subtlety, whatever its effect, whether it issues out of envy or voyeurism, revenge or the desire to entertain friends, gossip will not be suppressed.

Gentlemen, if you continue to publish slanderous pieces about me, I shall feel compelled to cancel my subscription.

—
GROUCHO MARX
to Confidential magazine

 

O
NCE A LEISURE-TIME
pursuit, an activity carried on between individuals in the agora or the forum or the drafty halls of Versailles or (much later) over the backyard fence in small towns, gossip officially went public with the advent of the printing press, the rise and spread of literacy, and the resulting proliferation of newspapers and journals, most of which were only too pleased to carry it. Once print, in the form of journalism, became available to larger and larger segments of every national population, gossip ceased to be entirely a mouth-to-ear private transaction and became more and more a public business. Gossip itself soon became professionalized: people made their livelihood by gathering and spreading it.

As this happened, gossip also became strangely impersonalized. The best gossip, as far as the gossip writers were concerned, wasn't about the family next door, but about the famous: royalty, the rich, politicians, successful artists, great athletes, and, in our time, movie stars. But before gossip in the newspapers became democratic breakfast fare for the family, it had to overcome considerable resistance from people who valued their privacy. For at the level of journalism, gossip is, always and everywhere, an invasion of privacy.

Gossip has played a central role in many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels. But the first novel in which, in its professionalized role, it occupies a central place is
The Reverberator
(1888), one of Henry James's lesser novels on the subject of his international theme: Americans abroad in their exchanges with Europeans and their older, more complexly layered culture. The Americans in the novel are one of those solid but unsophisticated, invariably well-to-do families, the Dossons, from Boston, consisting of a father and his two daughters on an extended visit to France. In the early pages, the Dossons are accompanied around Paris, shown a few of the velvet ropes, by a go-get-'em American named, appropriately, George Flack, who is a society reporter for a newspaper in the United States called the
Reverberator.

Far from being in any way ashamed of his work, Flack feels he is on to a very good thing, the coming thing, the Next Big Thing in fact. He tells Miss Francie Dosson, on whom he has romantic designs, that the paper for which he works is "a big thing already and I mean to make it bigger: the most universal society-paper the world has seen. That's where the future lies, and the man who sees it first is the man who'll make his pile. It's a field for enlightened enterprise that hasn't yet begun to be worked." Flack before long will demonstrate how far he is willing to go to work it. He also believes that privacy is dead, and remarks: "It ain't going to be possible to keep anywhere out of the light of the press. Now what I'm going to do is to set up the biggest lamp yet made and make it shine all over the place. We'll see who's private then."

Flack learns that the Dosson girls have made a connection with the Proberts, an older American family that has been living in France since the time of Louis-Philippe, who was King of France between 1830 and 1848, and have assimilated themselves entirely to French culture. He sets out to get the Proberts' story and write it up for the
Reverberator.
He will subsequently be aided in this plan when Francie Dosson becomes engaged to young Gaston Probert, and, in her American innocence, blithely tells Flack everything he wants to know about the exclusive Probert family, including the fact that one of its members suffers from kleptomania.

Francie supplies Flack with precisely what he wants: "genuine, first-hand information, straight from the tap." He, as his job requires, goes on to write it up for the
Reverberator
's large American audience. When word of this unwanted publicity gets back to the Probert family, they are devastated. As Mme. de Brécourt, one of Gaston Probert's sisters, puts it, "Everything is at an end, we have been served up to the rabble, we shall have to leave Paris." The story is the old Jamesian one of two sets of people operating under different standards of conduct: the Europeans greatly value their privacy, and the Americans don't quite see the problem in losing it.

The working out of the plot is of less interest—Francie Dosson and Gaston Probert do, after much fairly conventional Sturm und Drang, marry—than the mechanics of gossip illustrated by the story. As Delia, the other Dosson sister, says, not so much in defense as in explanation of the behavior of George Flack: "He says that's what they like over there [in America] and that it stands to reason that if you start a paper you've got to give them what they like. If you want the people with you, you've got to be with the people." All too true, as the history of American and British journalism has borne out. Between the privacy that dignity requires and the publicity that newspaper reading requires, privacy goes down to defeat nearly every time.