Gossip (17 page)

Come to think of it, aren't the assumptions behind gossip similar to those behind Freud's? Everyone has something to hide—like as not, something very important—and it is gossip's job, like Freudian psychotherapy's, to ferret it out and spread it around; to be sure, for purposes of damnation, titillation, or simple entertainment rather than the melioration of suffering, as Freud wished. But not only do Freudians, literary biographers, and gossips tend to believe that the truth is hidden; so pervasive is the notion, we almost all do. "I found myself," the Oxford wit Maurice Bowra wrote to a friend after traveling in Italy, "a horrible discovery. I have been trying to lose myself ever since."

Every memoirist, autobiographer, and interesting letter writer presumes to report that he has something to tell us that is hidden. Like a good gossip, all are committed to indiscretion. In the twenty-first century, it has become fashionable to write memoirs about one's own addiction, incest, abuse, and madness. Memoirs have also begun to be used to pay back parents or husbands or wives, featuring their egregious mistreatment of the memoirist. Might telling such stories about oneself be the last refuge, or perhaps the first defense, not of the scoundrel but of the gossip?

Gay Talese, the author of
Thy Neighbor's Wife,
an investigative journalist's account of the sexual revolution, is currently writing a book about his marriage. The interest in his marriage, one gathers, has to do with how and why his wife, a woman better born socially than he and of some reputation in New York publishing, allowed her husband so many liberties in order to research his book, which required him to hang around public baths, massage parlors, orgy rendezvous, bordellos, and other steamy venues. The question, one gathers, is going to be How did the Talese marriage survive the husband's research? Perhaps in this new book Talese will reveal his love affairs, and perhaps he will reveal his wife's (if any) love affairs. The reigning assumption behind the book, though, is the dubious one that lots of people care.

The slick magazines love such material, and have for some while. As long ago as the early 1970s, a friend of mine was taken to lunch by an editor of
Esquire
to discuss the possibility of his writing an article on Robert Lowell. "How thoroughly ought I to go into Lowell's poetry?" my friend, no naïf, asked after his second glass of wine. "Oh," said the editor, "not all that thoroughly. I suspect the readers of
Esquire
have a good knowledge of Lowell's poetry already in hand." What
Esquire
wanted, of course, was the dish on Robert Lowell's many nervous breakdowns—he was manic-depressive—and his extramarital affairs during his manic swings. My friend suggested another bottle of wine.

He never wrote the article, and it was just as well, for Lowell pretty much did the job himself, on himself, in his poetry. In a book called
The Dolphin
(1973), Lowell wrote a series of not very good sonnets in which he recounts his breakdowns ("
The hospital.
My twentieth in twenty years ..."), quoting letters from the wife he deserted (Elizabeth Hardwick), dragging his then thirteen-year-old daughter and the effect of his desertion on her into it all, and setting out some of the details of his life with a new wife (the Guinness brewery heiress Lady Caroline Blackwood). Such self-gossip, aired in public print, doesn't leave much for the professional gossips.

What Robert Lowell wrote became known as confessional poetry—among others strong in this line have been John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and scores of younger, lesser practitioners—which gave self-gossiping the imprimatur of art. But this habit of nonreligious confession has long since spread further. Only the other day I received an e-mail from a younger writer telling me that I wrote something too critical of a deceased novelist who was kind to him when he, the younger writer, suffered a manic crash from his bipolar disease. As part of the e-mail, he included an account of one of his manic episodes, which he apparently delivered before an audience. Now why should I need to know that this man, who has no connection with me, has this sad illness? What makes him so pleased to let me know about it—a pleasure tantamount to that which, in another day, some vicious gossip might have found in telling me of it? Very strange, all of it, and all but officially part of our culture.

I prefer the time when well-told gossip was itself an art, not a sloppy confession told out of the confessional box (a different spin on the phrase "thinking outside the box"). Gossip as pure art form is handsomely on display in
Letters from Oxford,
the letters being those that then young historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote to entertain the much older art connoisseur Bernard Berenson, pocketed away at I Tatti, his opulent Florentine villa, where he held court for an unending round of distinguished visitors. "Now all this is gossip," Trevor-Roper writes early in their correspondence, "and you know that I (like Logan)"—Pearsall Smith, Berenson's brother-in-law—"hate gossip." He is of course being ironic; Logan Pearsall Smith himself said, "Hearts that are delicate and kind and tongues that are neither—these make the best company." Later Trevor-Roper asks, "Now what new indiscretions can I offer you?" A bit further on he writes, "But I see that I am getting (as I easily do) malicious. I must stop at once, before I exhibit the worst side of my character."

Trevor-Roper deals chiefly in intellectual gossip, which is what old Berenson wants to hear. He informs him that Lewis Namier, who is, in his opinion, "the greatest living historian writing in English," is also, "without doubt, the greatest living bore. And for that distinction the competition, I'm afraid, is even hotter." Trevor-Roper compares Maurice Bowra, the warden of Wadham College, to Long John Silver and notes that he "boomed out of existence all conversation but his own." (Meanwhile, one learns from a recent biography of Bowra that in a letter to Evelyn Waugh he pronounced Trevor-Roper "a fearful man, short-sighted, with dripping eyes, shows off all the time, sucks up to me, boasts, is far from poor owing to his awful book [
The Last Days of Hitler
], on every page of which there is a howler.")

When the actor John Gielgud is caught propositioning a young man in a public bathroom, Trevor-Roper announces "the
jihad
" that respectable English society is on against homosexuals, remarking that "now, I am told, in the panic fear which has swept through the brotherhood [of homosexuals] the plainest of women are finding themselves in great demand, feminine company being, in society, the only protection against grave imputations." He writes of the social and intellectual climbing of the publisher George Weidenfeld, "whose social ascent still continues: having graduated from the world of journalism to the world of literature, he has now risen (according to some standards of hypsometry) still higher, and from literary duchesses has ascended to the world of pure duchesses, duchesses who, so far from even dabbling in literary fashions, are totally illiterate."

Gossip is here played as a grand game. And so Trevor-Roper fills Berenson in on Oxford intramural battles over appointments, elections, reputations. When he has run out of such gossip, which is never for long, Trevor-Roper writes apologetically to Berenson that "we shall have to confine new conversation,
faute de mieux,
to the Good, the True and the Beautiful." Berenson's enjoyment of young Trevor-Roper's gossip did not stop him from taking the latter's own measure in his diary, describing the historian as "cock-sure, arrogant, but without insolence ... Seldom starts, but when cranked up goes on endlessly with infinite detail, and detective awareness and marvelous capacity for taking trouble to convince himself and to convince his hearers ... A fascinating letter-writer, indeed an epistolary artist, brilliant reviewer of all sort of books, very serious historian and formidable polemicist."

The need to take the measure of people, a trait of the British intellectual of a certain day, seems naturally to issue in gossip. "Life is not worth living," the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote, "unless one can be indiscreet to intimate friends." In an interview with his biographer, Berlin noted: "I have a natural tendency to gossip, to describing things, to noticing things, to interest in human beings and their characters, to interplay between human beings, which is completely independent of my intellectual pursuits."

This interest in human character, leading naturally to gossip, is connected with the English appetite for bringing people down a peg, which adds a piquant touch of malice to the proceedings. In the hands of a gossip artist, with comic genius at his service, such as the novelist Evelyn Waugh, one gets gossip that is art deftly mixed with pure malice. When told that Randolph Churchill, the raucous son of Winston Churchill, went into the hospital for a tumor that turned out to be benign, Waugh told people that "the one thing about Randolph that isn't malignant and they removed it." Or, in a letter to his friend Nancy Mitford, he reports that Graham Greene, sitting in a hotel lobby in New York, discovered blood pouring from his penis and fainted. "'Well [the doctors reported to him], we can't find anything wrong at all. What have you been up to? Too much womanizing?' 'No, not for weeks since I left my home in England' [Greene replied]. 'Ah,' they said, '
that's
it.' What a terrible warning. No wonder his books are sad."

Nancy Mitford, Waugh's friend and correspondent, gave as good as she got, reporting that the literary critic Cyril Connolly caught his two mistresses cheating on him and said, almost in tears, "It
is
hard, here I have been absolutely faithful to 2 women for a year, they've both been unfaithful to me." Gossip among such people was an entertainment, and hence a gift, best wrapped in amusing language. And it is of course even better when it seems disinterested, devoid of personal ill will, told for the pure delight it brings to its auditors.

Nothing nowadays quite exists on the Trevor-Roper/Waugh/Mitford level of gossip as an art form. One has to go to older books to find it, the way diehard moviegoers, unable to take deep pleasure in current movies, have to live off the swell movies of the past.

Two sophisticated women meet on the corner of Seventy-ninth Street and Madison Avenue in Manhattan. One reports to the other that she has heard gossip that the
New York Post
columnist Max Lerner is soon to marry the still young, still ravishing Elizabeth Taylor. Since Lerner is far from comely, and his writings are crushingly boring in a way that suggests their author must be also, the second woman asks, "Are you sure about this?" The first woman replies that it comes from a very reliable source. "My Lord, Elizabeth Taylor and Max Lerner," says the second woman. "Well, I guess I'd rather fuck him than read him." Which has always seemed to me the most devastating criticism of an author I have ever heard.

Go to a gossip's feast, and go with me: After so long grief, such festivity.

—
SHAKESPEARE,
The Comedy of Errors

 

M
ARCEL PROUST AND
his beloved mother, when gossiping together, which they did frequently, used to refer to "the full biography" when talking about people they knew. The full biography meant the real story, the reality behind the appearance, the true dish, the richest gossip. Proust's appetite for personal details, conveyed with the greatest precision, was unslakable. He loved gossip in and for itself, but he also had a professional interest in it, for he was a novelist, the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, and he understood that gossip and the novel were inextricable, that gossip undergirds almost all novels.

Many novels turn on gossip—that is, on characters in the novels finding out things that they are not supposed to know about other characters' secrets, hidden opinions, hitherto unknown motivations. This information causes blinders to fall away, so that insights result, with the consequence that some characters grow wiser, and narratives march off in unexpected directions, making it possible for novels, or at least the better ones, to come to unpredictable though plausible conclusions.

Each of Jane Austen's six novels, set as they are mainly in smallish English towns, pivots on some crucial piece of gossip that, once revealed, changes the action of the novel decisively. "Indeed, Mrs. Smith, we must not expect to get real information from such a line [from gossip, that is]," exclaims Anne Elliot, the heroine of Austen's
Persuasion.
"Facts or opinions which are to pass through the hands of so many, to be misconceived by folly in one, and ignorance in another, can hardly have much truth left." Although some say that the character of Anne speaks as much as any of her characters for the author herself, my advice is not to believe what I have just quoted Anne Elliot saying. Even when gossip is mistaken, its importance cannot be gainsaid, and Jane Austen knew it. The same Mrs. Smith reports to Anne: "Call it gossip if you will; but when nurse Rooke has half an hour's leisure to bestow on me, she is sure to have something to relate that is entertaining and profitable, something that makes one know one's species better. One likes to hear what is going on, to be
au fait
as to the newest modes of being trifling and silly. To me, who lives so much alone, her conversation I assure you is a treat." Now that sounds closer to Austen's true view of gossip. And in
Persuasion
it is just such a bit of information, which begins in gossip but turns out to be truth, that resolves the complication of all that has gone before in the novel.

Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brontës, Edith Wharton, and Henry James, novelists who had a strong interest in gossip and made good use of it in their fiction, understood both gossip's attractions and its literary value. So, too, did writers whom one doesn't think of as primarily social novelists. Gossip plays a strong hand in
War and Peace
and
Anna Karenina,
as it does in the novels of Balzac, Dickens, and Flaubert. A critic named Homer Obed Brown has gone so far as to say that "it is probable that part of the pleasure we derive from the classic novel is a pleasure similar to that derived from gossip." Speculation on character, curiosity about other worlds, an interest in social status, the unveiling of secrets, nice discriminations, revelations of hidden motivations, moral judgments—so many of the constituent parts of gossip are also often at play in novels. One difference, of course, is that novels sometimes have didactic purposes, but then, who is to say that sometimes gossip mightn't, too?