Gossip (29 page)

Is this true? Who knows? But it is a fascinating speculation, and a fascinating speculation will almost always trump a dull explanation. "Fascinating speculation"—in that phrase we have yet another definition of gossip, one that accounts for at least half of all gossip. Like most surgery, gossip is by its nature invasive. As such, it seeks to penetrate the social skin we all wear as protection over our truer self in order to probe beneath to those psychologically tender places—pride, shame, fear of humiliation, insecurity, and the rest—that are likely, the hope of gossip is, to reveal that truer, less impressive, more genuine self. The social theorist Erving Goffman wrote a book called
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
in which he distinguished between the before-the-footlights, or public, self presented to the world, and the backstage, or private, self where we appear without makeup, hair down, in deshabille. Gossip seeks to reveal this inner, no doubt vain, fantasy-producing, pathetic, less than lovely self, and do with it what it wishes. And what it wishes is generally not benign.

Oppressive societies—Communist Russia and China, Nazi Germany, the Taliban, and others—have made strenuous efforts to block gossip, which can also be subversive. I don't know if anyone has ever written about it—it would be a complicated subject to document—but it is difficult to imagine a revolution from below taking place without the aid of roiling gossip. This would be the kind stirred by resentment and envy—look how our leaders, our clergy, our capitalists, live, the pigs!—featuring the decadence of the ruling class and the mistreatment of the underclass. Marie-Antoinette and her husband, Louis XVI, met the guillotine owing to such gossip. Gossip can be a powerful igniter of revolutions.

In times of anxiety or actual crisis, rumors naturally crop up with greater frequency, and gossip spreads commensurately to keep up with them. Stirring the muddy waters, gossip at such times is likely to be even more emphatic, hyperbolic, high-flying, and far-fetched, more distorted and distorting than old-fashioned backyard-fence gossip or artful Oxbridge common room or witty gay gossip. Some eras are more gossip-ridden than others. Different economic systems produce different kinds of gossip: socialist gossip tends to be about envy ("She has so much more than we do"), capitalist gossip about greed ("You'll be shocked when I tell you how much she inherited"). In Karl Marx's daydreams, once the dictatorship of the proletariat had come to power, such would be universal happiness, all gossip, like private ownership, would have been eliminated. Hasn't happened yet.

What might gossip's vast, oil-spill-like spread, in America and elsewhere, mean? One possibility is a dumbing down of cultural and intellectual life. We all suffer intellectual impatience, and it may be that the country itself, after decades of television watching, photo ops, quotable quotes, and the rest, has a much-reduced attention span. Gossip, after all, doesn't call for much in the way of attention or patience. Quite the reverse: its penchant is for the bottom line, going for the groin—who is sleeping with whom, who is stealing and how much, who is hiding the most bestial private behavior. Gossip serves it up straight; leave your subtlety or taste for complex reality at the door.

Economic arrangements in the United States have added to the strong flow of gossip by supplying many more people to gossip about. By "economic arrangements" I mean the numbers of people in certain professions—entertainment, sports, some of the arts, the financial world—making enormous amounts of money. The very rich acquire celebrity stature through the brute fact of their wealth. (The world awaits degrading stories about Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.) Fortunes create celebrity, and celebrities, playing the game skillfully with the aid of money managers, usually acquire fortunes. The number of celebrities has been growing for a long while. As far back as the 1920s, Virginia Woolf remarked, "This celebrity business is quite chronic." She would be appalled at how much more critical things in this regard are today.

Those of us bereft of vast fortunes or celebrity tend to be interested in those who have either, or sometimes both, in amplitude. Our interest is responsible for creating the extensive cadre of gossip professionals, men and women who make their living off this interest. The most canny among them realize that behind that interest runs the strong green thread of envy; and they know, too, that no form of gossip has wider appeal than that about the rich and famous, the naturally talented and beautiful, who have fallen on bad times. Schadenfreude, the pleasure taken from the misfortune of others, is one off which gossips, professional and amateur, have ever fed.

Good taste was once a partial prophylactic against gossip, but now less and less so. The triumph of therapy, in all its many branches and divisions, long ago snuffed out much good taste in the name of candor and health through confession. Under the reign of a therapy triumphant, inhibition has no place, repression is the enemy. Don't hold back, Jack; let it spill, Jill—such are the dominant if unspoken encouragements of therapy. No secrets permitted among friends; even one's friend's secrets bestowed upon one in confidence don't hold the weight they once did. This marks an enormous change in the etiquette of social life in our country, and a great boost for gossip.

"I hate gossip," proclaimed the philosopher A. J. Ayer, "but I do love truth." Ayer, you should know, was an ardent gossip, and used to meet with the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, and the classicist Maurice Bowra in lengthy sessions in one another's rooms at Oxford, in which, with artful malice reinforced by the gift of wild comic formulation, they tore apart colleagues, enemies and ostensible friends both.

Ayer's formulation—hate gossip, love truth—points up the epistemological problem about gossip, namely: What is its truth content, and how much can it be trusted? Here we come to both the fascination and the discouragement of gossip. For gossip is rich stories, tantalizing, sometimes titillating, often tremendously amusing, but in the end, because usually unascertainable, less than fully satisfying. Like astrology, psychoanalysis, and other pseudoscientific endeavors, gossip promises to provide significant secrets. Sometimes it does, but often it comes up empty.

Fascinating though gossip can be, to retain its charm it needs to be taken in modest portions. "You can have too much," as the novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer used to say, "even of kreplach," the Jewish delicacy that is a meat dumpling served in chicken soup. And with gossip we seem currently to have arrived at the too much stage and perhaps gone beyond it. Yet the appetite for gossip shows no signs of slackening.

Gossip may well have spread in the way it has because so few among us are any longer trained in the skill of ascertaining truthful statements. Or have most of us lost our belief in truth itself; found that truth is simply unavailable in contemporary journalism, print or electronic; think truth no longer a precise but a proximate, relative thing, and so, as in the game of horseshoes, close to the truth is good enough? Because of this we are more and more at home with what Matt Drudge calls "unedited information," of the kind one finds floating in the ether of the Internet, the appetite for which, as Drudge contends (and who is to say he is wrong?), grows greater and greater.

Once a secret vice, gossip threatens to become the chief way we obtain our information, and there doesn't appear to be much anyone can do about it. All very well to call gossip a moral blight, which in many ways it is. Yet it seems to come so naturally to most of us, who take such unalloyed delight in it. Who is to stop its torrential flow? The likelihood of getting people, through religious prohibition or moral suasion, to stop contributing to the immense fund of current gossip, or to cease enjoying such lively gossip as comes their way, is what mathematicians call a negative integer, or something less than zero. Gossip is here to stay, and figures to increase. "Live with it," as the kids say, and we may as well learn to do so, because living without the intrusions of gossip seems unlikely except in a Trappist monastery, and maybe, gossip has it, not even there.

If there is a single book on the subject of gossip with the ample pretensions to the one you have just read, I did not find it. As for those pretensions, they include the attempt to report for a general, intelligent reader on what gossip is, how it works, and how it has changed over the years. Instead there are many books—some academic, some popular, some plain vulgar—that set out to explore various aspects of gossip, or gossip in different realms of life: politics, show business, literary life.

I have leaned rather heavily on certain books for the biographical portions of my book: on the
Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon
for my portrait of the Duc; on Neal Gabler's solid
Walter Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity
for my portrait of Winchell; on Judy Bachrach's richly gossipy
Tina and Harry Come to America
for my portrait of Tina Brown; and on Barbara Walters's autobiography,
Audition,
for my portrait of her.

I do not list here the number of novels I read and found useful for my study of gossip, except those I specifically talk about in the pages of the book. Next to life itself, superior novels are the richest source of observation of the glory and antics of human beings we have. Novels have been at the center of my education, and remain there. When the Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle was asked if he read novels, he replied, "Yes, all six," by which he meant he read only the novels of Jane Austen, implying one needn't read many others. My own novel-reading habits are not so chaste, and there has rarely been a time in my adult life when I didn't have a bookmark in a novel in progress. And few of the novels I have read have not, in one form or another, pivoted on, played off, or otherwise made use of gossip.

Memoirs, diaries, and letters of famous and sometimes secondary people have been another rich source in the making of this book. Such forms are, by their nature, open invitations to indiscretion, which is to say, gossip-filled—and if they aren't, they are unlikely to be of great interest.

Gossip in print is almost as bountiful as gossip in conversation, and here is a list of the works—some immensely gossipy, some attempting to explain gossip—that I have drawn on for my own book:

 

Austen, Jane,
Persuasion

Bachrach, Judy,
Tina and Harry Come to America

Bergmann, Jörg,
Discreet Indiscretions: The Social Organization of Gossip

Bok, Sissela,
Secrets:
On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation

Braudy, Leo,
The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History

Brown, Tina,
The Diana Chronicles

Capote, Truman,
Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote,
edited by Gerald Clarke

Collins, Gail,
Scorpion Tongues: The Irresistible History of Gossip in American Politics

Coward, Noël,
The Diaries of Noël Coward,
edited by Graham Payn and Sheridan Moreley

Coward, Noël,
The Letters of Noël Coward,
edited and with commentary by Barry Day

Eliot, George,
Daniel Deronda

Gabler, Neal,
Walter Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity

Goodman, Robert F., and Aaron Ben-Ze'ev, editors,
Good Gossip

James, Henry,
The Reverberator

Lerman, Leo,
The Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo Lerman,
edited by Stephen Pascal

McKelway, St. Clair,
Gossip: The Life and Times of Walter Winchell

Pym, Barbara,
Crampton Hodnet

Rader, Dotson,
Tennessee: Cry from the Heart

Raphael, Frederic,
Byron

Schickel, Richard,
Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity in America

Solove, Daniel J.,
The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet

Spacks, Patricia Meyer,
Gossip

Sterling, Barbara,
Secrets of a Tabloid Reporter: My Twenty Years on the National Enquirer's Hollywood Beat

Suetonius,
The Twelve Caesars

Sunstein, Cass,
On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done

Trevor-Roper, Hugh,
Letters from Oxford: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson,
edited by Richard Davenport Hines

Tynan, Kenneth,
Diaries of Kenneth Tynan,
edited by John Lahr

Walls, Jeannette,
Dish: How Gossip Became the News, and the News Became Just Another Show

Walters, Barbara,
Audition

White, Edmund,
City Boy

Wilkes, Roger,
Scandal: A Scurrilous History

Williams, Tennessee,
Memoirs

ABC television,
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abuse, gossip about,
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academic environments,
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Access Hollywood
(TV show),
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accusations,
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See also
malicious gossip

"Accusations of Sex Abuse Trail Doctor" (
New York Times
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Addison, Joseph,
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Adler, Mortimer,
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AIDS,
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Aiken, Conrad,
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Alcibiades,
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Alexander, Brandy,
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Alexander the Great,
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Algren, Nelson,
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