A Note on Gossip

by James Como (June 2016)

Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit
by Joseph Epstein
Mariner Books, Nov. 2012
256 pgs.

 

Always in season, a practice as popular as it is proscribed has been engagingly unraveled by Joseph Epstein, in Gossip: the untrivial pursuit. Coming upon the book as I browsed a shelf at the Corner Bookstore on Madison Avenue, I at first did not notice that it was by Epstein. If I had, I would have begun at the beginning. Instead I went directly to the index and spent the next twenty minutes cherry-picking. Reading that way the book seemed a big bowlful of nothing but cherries, for example Vidal on Capote and he on Vidal. But there is much more. Epstein examines the history of gossip, its media and manifestations, its venues and forms, and its practitioners. Chapter titles (there are eighteen) provide, not so much the flavor of the book (Epstein’s distinctively relaxed voiced cannot be so reduced) nor its argument (which is subtle and implicit), but its direction.  

Its three large divisions are Private Gossip, Public Gossip, and Private Becomes Public (important and insightful enough to warrant a book of its own). Within these are, for example, “How it Works,” “In the Know,” “Literary Gossip,” “Gay Gossip,” “Caught in the Net,” and “Whores of Information.” At the end of each chapter are Epstein’s “Diary” entries, personally informed vignettes that either report, or are, instances of gossip. Interspersed among these are four Great Gossips of the Western World, short essays on the Duc de Saint-Simon (the Sun King’s authoritative, capacious, and elegant gossip), Barbara Walters (was she really that banal?), Tina Brown (yes, she really is this banal) and, especially, Walter Winchell. At the end is a valuable bibliography.

Epstein notes the many motives for gossip, including this one: “perhaps because he senses that conveying this bit of information will increase the intimacy between him and the person with whom he is gossiping,” which too often tempts us outside that Middle Domain of manners, where “obedience to the unenforceable” (to use Lord Moulton’s formulation) ought to prevail. It seems, as the gossip columnist Earl Wilson put it, that gossip “is hearing something you like about someone you don’t.” Or, as Epstein puts it, “the most enticing gossip is that which is highly feasible, often uncheckable [my emphasis], and deeply damning of the person who is its subject.”

The rhetorical vectors of gossip are so many and variable that the concept itself is one of the most amorphous in the inventory of human behavior. There are content (salacious? useful? true – or probably so?), intent (malicious?  innocent?  practical?), tonal coloring (sarcastic, savoring, nonchalant, urgent), status of the teller (reliable, reluctant, compulsive), gathering (one other person, a few, many, massive), occasion (festive, sad, social, business), response of the victim (anger, denial, laugh-along, ignorance), persistence of the tale both in breadth of circulation and time, and especially the listener: the wrong interlocutor can be disastrous (like all intimacy). Could gossip-spotting be more subjective, rather like pornography? And always lines are blurred, between legitimate news (pubic or private), necessary intelligence, and idle chatter (malicious or not, true or false).

Gossip tends to make me uneasy, as does anything that renders me clueless: what do I say to it? What do I do with it now? Perhaps nothing. Epstein allows that gossip “may be the simple appetite for analysis of other men and women, friends included . . . .” And I (like most people, whether they know it or not) like characters and stories, so a good anecdote – complex, revealing, well-told – might hook me. The teller could even change the names: it wouldn’t matter as long as those names are at least vaguely familiar. That is, gossip must somehow connect us to others, a connection, after all, at the heart of conversation in all its modes. 

God + sibb ‘relative’ (see sibling). Extended in Middle English to ‘a familiar acquaintance, a friend, neighbor’ (c. 1300), especially to woman friends invited to attend a birth, later to ‘anyone engaging in familiar . . . talk’ (1560s). Sense extended 1811 to ‘trifling talk, groundless rumor.’” It seems to take a village.

Or not. Decades ago I found myself on our cafeteria line next to the provost’s secretary, a  condescending and deceptive woman who arrogated to herself all the authority and malice of her boss. I greeted her cordially, and she said, “so what do you make of D’s and S’s tumbling, right there in your department [which at the time I chaired]?” I had no idea what she was talking about and told her so, at which she actually became angry, accusing me of coyness.  “I’m supposed to believe that you don’t know what everybody else does? They’ve been screwing for two years!” Well, no, I did not, nor did I care, and when I told her (nonchalantly) that I had no interest, she read me (correctly) as being dismissive. Not my village.  

If there is a recurring theme rumbling like a bass line throughout the book it is narcissism. Christopher Lasch first caught the scent of this rising trend – now a tsunami – forty years ago in his landmark The Culture of Narcissism. But he could not have predicted its exponential rise owing to the hegemony of the internet. For example, “the line between ‘reporter’ and ‘blogger’, ‘gossip’ and ‘news’ has blurred almost beyond distinction” – that’s Epstein quoting Times writer Alex Williams, who continues, “blogging has become a career path in its own right, offering visibility, influence, and an actual paycheck.” (One of those sites, Don’t Date Him Girl, seems especially noisome.) 

The change of tone was a slow one, an accumulation of many bridges being lowered, gates opened, walls allowed to crumble. When was the first time an athlete said ‘pissed off’ or ‘kick ass’ on television, a woman said, ‘fuck’ at a middle-class dinner party table, kids took to using the phrase ‘it sucks’ for things they didn’t like, permission given to run ads for Viagra . . . on prime time television? . . . the first time a comedian  . . . did skits about cunnilingus on cable television . . . the first time The New Yorker permitted . . . phrases such as ‘cunty fingers’ (thank you John Updike) in its fiction.

Well then, is Samuel a gossip, providing a sort of academic adhesive? He certainly does not generally lend himself to rumor for its own sake. Rather, he will perpetrate some enormity, always an enormous enormity, than which, he believes, his listener should, within a few heartbeats, know better, and then – he watches. He expects his listener to get the joke, indeed to share its hearing with as much cheer as there was in its telling: risky business to be sure – for anyone whose choice of interlocutors is less astute than Samuel’s.

In his section on Walter Winchell, Epstein quotes Winchell biographer Neal Gabler, tossing off a most trenchant insight, powerful for its applicability far beyond Winchell: “Vaudeville made Walter an entertainer for life and in life. Growing up in vaudeville as he did, he not only absorbed its diversity, its energy, its nihilism, and then deployed them in his journalism, but he learned how to create his journalism from them: journalism as vaudeville.” Just watch: we’re looking at a five-month run.

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James Como is the author, most recently, of The Tongue is Also a Fire: essays on conversation, rhetoric and the transmission of culture . . . and on C. S. Lewis (New English Review Press, 2015).

 

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