Gossip (2 page)

So much easier, so much more entertaining, to talk about the decaying marriage of an acquaintance, the extravagant pretensions of in-laws, the sexual braggadocio of a bachelor friend. Most gossip, or most of the best gossip, is about dubious if not downright reprehensible behavior. The best of it is about people with whom one has a direct acquaintance. Served with a dash of humor it can be awfully fine stuff, even if one has never met the person being gossiped about.

Years ago a friend in London told me that the playwright Harold Pinter wrote rather poor poems—my friend called them, in fact, "pukey little poems"—that he sent out in multiple Xerox copies to friends, then sat back to await their praise. One such poem was about the cricketer Len Hutton, the English equivalent of Joe DiMaggio; the poem, in its entirety, runs: "I knew Len Hutton in his prime,/Another time, another time." After Pinter had sent out the copies, its recipients, as usual, wrote or telephoned to tell him how fine the poem was, how he had caught the matter with perfect laconic precision, how touched and moved they were by it—with the single exception of a man who made no response whatsoever. When Pinter hadn't heard from this man after two weeks, he called to ask if he had in fact received the poem. "Yes," said the man, "I have indeed." Unable to hold back, Pinter asked, "Well, Simon, what did you think of it?" Pausing briefly, the man replied, "Actually, I haven't quite finished it."

This is gossip on the model of a joke—gossip with a punch line. What is of greatest interest about it as an item of gossip is the continuing need on the part of its subject, a world-famous playwright, a Nobel Prize winner, for these driblets of praise. It is a story about pathetic vanity. One might think so successful a writer had already had more than his share of praise, but no scribbler seems ever to have had enough of what Thomas Mann called vitamin P. This is gossip as analysis, or test, of character, with the character, as in almost all good gossip in this realm, failing to pass.

I'm not sure that merely insulting someone behind his back, a variant of the catty remark, constitutes gossip. Another friend of mine not long ago wrote to me of an acquaintance of ours that his "appalling wife Janice made him the most famous cuckold in New York, but who can blame her?" I had known about my acquaintance's wife leaving him for another man, so this insult scarcely constituted news. Yet it is unclear whether the material of gossip always has to be new. Some gossip, of the species known as backbiting, can be about no more than two people rehearsing the already well-known failings or sad tribulations of a third person.

"Well, I do a lot of talking and the 'I' is not often absent," the writer Elizabeth Hardwick told the man who interviewed her for the
Paris Review.
"In general I'd rather talk about other people. Gossip, or as we gossips like to say, character analysis." Isaac Rosenfeld, a writer who was one of the New York intellectuals of the 1940s and '50s, used jokingly to call such gossip "social analysis," and in this group the analysis was of a kind that took the skin off the person being gossiped about. The New York intellectuals brutally mocked one another's ambitions, sex practices, self-importance, and pretensions, all done behind the back, of course, and with much vicious inventiveness.

"Who is more devoid of human interest than those with nothing to hide?" asks a character in Frederic Raphael's recent novel
Fame and Fortune.
Some of us have grander things to hide than others; others may have very little to hide; but very few of us are free of being gossiped about, at least insofar as being criticized behind one's back constitutes gossip. Not long ago I was with a man who said that he had arrived at a point in life—he was soon to turn eighty—where he feared no gossip. True, he had no addictions, unless that of collecting books; had never cheated on his wife; was a good father; no scandal of any kind attached to him; he was modest in his pretensions—in all, led an honorable and quiet life. Yet, as I told him, he wouldn't in the least like it if I went about behind his back saying that his taste in food was atrocious (he prided himself on finding excellent, generally inexpensive ethnic restaurants), that his intellectual judgment was poor (he had enormous admiration for five or six writers, all social scientists except for Samuel Johnson), or that his opinions about music and movies were hopeless (he would not infrequently report on how much he enjoyed a concert or a new film). I can of course easily see people doing a similar job on me, attacking my writing, the way I dress, my own less than modest pretensions. If it were to get back to me that someone said that I was ungenerous, or coarse in my aesthetic judgments, or disloyal, it would sting, however low the truth quotient of the accusations. Nobody, the point being, is impregnable to gossip.

One definition of gossip is "bits of news about the personal affairs of others." These personal affairs are a man's or woman's stock of secrets; their ostensible secrecy is after all what makes them personal. Georg Simmel, that most brilliant of sociologists, claims that the secret is "one of the greatest achievements of humanity." By this I assume Simmel means that societies have erected rules, implicit and explicit, so that we are permitted freedom from intrusion on the part of others into our lives, and without this freedom to protect what we hold personal and most dear, all our lives would be a vast deal poorer. That which is most secret about us—our dreams, our hopes, our small vices, our fondest fantasies, however outrageous or unrealistic they may be—is often what is most significant to us. Intrusive gossip, given the chance, would make a sloppy meal of these, which is why it can be so damaging.

Not all gossip is engaged in for the purpose of hurting people. Gossip can be wildly entertaining. Sometimes analyzing the problems, flaws, and weaknesses of friends, even dear friends, sweeps one up and carries one away in sheer exuberance for the game. The philosopher Martin Heidegger, not everyone's idea of a whimsical fellow, thought gossip trivial and shallow and falsely authoritative, denying that it had much educational value. Yet I have been in gossip sessions where people delved into the motives of others in a manner that provided more in the way of knowledge than the highly opaque works of Herr Heidegger. Heidegger himself—notably his siding with the Nazis and then trying to cover it up, his love affair while married with his student Hannah Arendt—was the subject of some scorching, demoralizing, and highly entertaining gossip, and there was even more so after his death.

If ever there was a mixed bag, gossip provides it: it can be mean, ugly, vicious, but also witty, daring, entirely charming. It can be damning, dampening (of the spirits), dreary, but also exhilarating, entertaining, highly educational. It pops up in backwater villages among primitive tribes and in great cultural capitals. The only thing missing from the Garden of Eden was a third person for Adam and Eve to gossip about. Despite much railing against gossip, it doesn't look to be going away, not now, probably not ever.

Late on the dark afternoon of a cold day, I stepped into the Peet's coffee shop down the block from my apartment. Book in hand, I was expecting to read while sitting alone drinking my coffee. But then I saw'S. L., the one person I taught with in the English department at Northwestern University for whom I retained a high regard. Still attractive, she had been twice divorced and had no children. She had a reputation for seriousness and for fearlessness; for academics, fearlessness meant saying precisely what one thought, a rare thing. She was said to be a no-nonsense teacher of whom students were at first terrified and then came to reverence. Although we were never close—never met alone for lunches or drinks, never really engaged in extended conversation—I hoped that she respected me as I did her.

She was by herself at a table near the window. She spotted me, and I waved from my place in line. When I was given my coffee, she signaled me to join her, which I did. I had retired from teaching four years earlier. She, though my contemporary, was, I gathered, still at it.

"Miss teaching at all?" she asked after I had taken off my coat and sat down across from her.

"Not a bit," I said. "I had a fairly decent run, but enough is enough. A teacher, as I suspect you've noticed, is a person who never says anything once."

"I have noticed," she replied with a slight sigh, "though I prefer the definition of a teacher as someone who talks in other people's sleep. Auden said that, I think."

"The same cast of immensely attractive characters still at work in the English department?" I asked.

"Yep," she said, "the three D's, as I like to think of them: the depressed, the disappointed, and the deranged."

"Speaking of the latter, is it true that poor Ardis Lawrenson committed suicide?" I asked.

"Yep. She'd been an alcoholic for years, and they found her dead in her bathtub. Like Seneca, she had opened her veins."

"Jesus!"

"Yes, Jesus, mother, and Mary. I thought she was merely another secret academic drunk. I wouldn't have guessed she was wacky enough to take her life."

"Is Baumgartner still around?" Louis Baumgartner was one of the great figures in the department, a short man with muttonchops, a Renaissance English scholar whom a fatuous dean had been able to pry away from Stanford twenty or so years ago.

"Yes," she said. "Baumgartner and the missus, the Bummies, the dreary duo."

"Did you know that the students used to call Lily Baumgartner, with her considerable avoirdupois and her black bangs and her more than a hint of a mustache, 'Ollie,' after Oliver Hardy?"

"I never heard that one," she said. "The little bastards can be cruel, but here is a touch of creative cruelty I much admire."

"I suppose Baumgartner is by now too old to arrange for further offers from other universities, which he used to do to leverage up his own salary."

"No man—or woman either—is ever too old to be greedy and crummy," she said, "especially academic men and women. But did I ever tell you my story about Erich Heller and the Baumgartners?" Erich Heller was a Czech literary critic, Jewish and gay, of deep Teutonic culture, who taught in the German department and until his death was one of the most distinguished people at the university.

"No, never. I liked Erich a lot. Toward the end of his life, I used to go to lunch with him every three weeks or so. Even his snobbery—he used to talk about his good friend Isaiah Berlin a bit too much and with too great reverence for my taste—didn't bother me. But tell me about Erich and the Baumgartners."

"We were at lunch together not long after the Baumgartners arrived at Northwestern. Erich leaned over and asked me if I knew the Baumgartners, which in his thick accent came out sounding like 'the Bum's Gardeners.' I said yes, that I had met them a time or two.

"'Last night I was with them at Rudy's [the dean of the arts college at the time],' Erich said, giving the
R
a pretty good workout, 'and I was seated next to this Mrs. Bum's Gardener. An excruciatingly boring woman, let me assure you. What a creature! I am not an unimaginative man, but try though I might, I couldn't imagine making love to such a woman. I couldn't imagine it, I tell you, I just couldn't.' His voice grew shrill. He seemed terrified at the prospect of being thrown in bed with Lily Baumgartner. I patted his hand. 'Don't worry, Erich,' I said to him. 'No one is ever going to ask you to do so.'"

"The story suggests to me," I said, "that perhaps Baumgartner deserved all those raises for nothing more than sleeping with Mrs. Baumgartner all these years."

We went on to talk about the other people in the department. S. L. knew where all the bodies were buried. She anatomized the extravagant vanity of the poets—turning out, as she said, "their hopeless little dribblings." I mentioned the poet who regularly sent out e-mails announcing he had won some new negligible prize.

"God, yes," she said. "All his dubious achievements must be made known. I keep waiting for him to send a university-wide e-mail announcing that he had an excellent bowel movement over the previous weekend."

She went on to puncture the exaggerated pretensions of the "so-called" (her qualification) scholars in the department. She knew who had attempted suicide, who was living with a lesbian partner, who had a secret drinking problem, who spoke against a putative friend at a closed meeting who was up for tenure, who attained to new heights of pomposity and unreality in his or her behavior. I added my own, on the whole less rich, bits to this splendid stew of gossip.

We were at this game for perhaps an hour and a half. S. L. served up her items with a fine rinse of cold irony. I laughed as I listened to her take the air out of many of my former colleagues' pretensions. (Had she ever, I couldn't help for a fearful moment wondering, turned in a similar demolition job on me?) Over ninety or so minutes not a positive word was uttered, no attempt at fair assessment ventured; it was purely slash and burn, with lots of salt poured on wounds.

I couldn't remember when I had had such a delightful time.

If people really knew what others said about them, there would not be two friends left in the world.

—
BLAISE PASCAL

 

T
HE MOST ARRESTING
news, at least as journalists tend to look at the matter these days, is what someone doesn't want known. Hence all the current interest in investigative journalism, which is a dignified phrase for the activity of muckraking, whose goal is exposé. Gossip is very close to, and all but perfectly congruent with, this conception of the news: it, too, is almost always about what someone doesn't want known. In its baldest sense, gossip is revealing the secrets of others, though, as we shall see, it is not that alone.