Gossip Page 7
Diary
I wasn't particularly nuts about J. V.'s first wife. She was tall, stately, handsome rather than beautiful, but too intense for my taste, especially about politics, at which she had worked professionally, fundraising for local and statewide candidates. She could be rebarbative, frosty, off-putting. From the middle distance, which is as close as anyone viewing other people's marriages can hope to get, J. V., after some years of heavy drinking early in the marriage, seemed reasonably content with his wife.
Then she was discovered to have cancer. Her death was a slow one, with lots of false hope along the way, adding that extra touch of torture that cancer brings to so many of its victims still in midlife. I had lost touch with J. V. during those black days, though he must have come through all right, for he remarried, in his middle fifties, to a woman about whom everyone who met her said was a dear, dear person, kind and generous. My friend J. V. had apparently swum into safe harbor.
Much though I liked J. V., I saw him only infrequently, and I never met his new wife. Along with her reputed sweetness of character, she was supposed to have been wealthy. J. V. had himself done well, and retired early. So there they were, two very nice people, neither of whom had children, who had found each other, living out their days together without known complications, a happy ending, or as close as one gets to one in this life. Or so everyone thought, until J. V. turned up in California, the word among his friends being that his idyllic marriage was over.
The question of course is Why? Behind that question an expansive field of gossip opened up. Was J. V. drinking again? Was he cheating on her? She on him? Did they argue about money, even though they were thought to have more than a sufficiency between them? The possibilities are endless.
A friend told me that J. V.'s new wife suffered from depression. But so do lots of people, and I find it difficult to believe that J. V. would leave someone he had married late in life for a condition he must have known about before he married her. Then another friend, who is bipolar, reported having dinner with her, and he revealed that she takes the same drug he takes for his bipolar condition. Bipolarity is not easy to live with, not only for the persons who suffer from it but for those close to them. Might it be that the many problems that his second wife's bipolar condition brought on proved too much for J. V., who was in his mid-sixties when the marriage broke up and who might have looked forward to spending his final years sailing calmer waters? Possible.
Now yet another friend told me that the wife of a friend of his, who grew up with J. V.'s second wife, told her that she, the second wife, complained that J. V. had done her out of lots of money in the divorce. This seemed to me highly unlikely, for not only was J. V. himself wealthy, as I've mentioned, but he was not a man for whom money seemed to mean very much. He was also thoroughly honorable. Did his second wife really say this? If not, what would be the motive for someone else saying it?
What was going on here? The need for speculation is irresistible. And speculation leads naturally to gossip, which can be completely stilled only by an accurate, convincing, and finally true explanation of what happened, which is never going to be offered. And besides, let us not fail to remember, it's really no one's goddamn business.
7. Need Gossip Be Trivial?
What they [certain readers of fiction] want is "the story behind the story." It's gossip that they want. The thrill of the voyeur. To be told what really happened to you in your life rather than what you subsequently wrote about in your books. To be finally informed, without any window dressing or bullshit, who really did what with whom, and how, and how much. Give them that and they're happy. Give them Shakespeare in love, Thomas Mann telling all ...
—AMOS OZ
EVERY PERSON'S LIFE may be said to exist on three levels: how the person's life seems to people who know him from the middle distance (his neighbors, coworkers, tradesmen he deals with), how he seems to those who are close to him (his family, his dear friends), and finally how he seems to himself. Some among us want all three versions, or at least to come as close as we can to acquiring all three.
"The version of ourselves we present to the world," wrote the English writer William Donaldson in his diary, "bears no resemblance to the truth. If we knew the truth about each other, we could take no one seriously. There isn't one of us could afford to get caught. That's all life is. Trying not to be found out." Gossip, of course, tries to find out.
Some of us, while zealously wishing not to be found out, nonetheless want to find out all we can about others. "Enquiring minds want to know," the low-swinging National Enquirer, our very own leading American gutter-press rag, once blared in a popular television ad. Despite the source, the sentiment is true: enquiring minds really do want to know what people are truly like. Often they want to know what the people they regularly deal with are like; sometimes they want to know what historical figures were like. Was Virginia Woolf anti-Semitic, Leo Tolstoy a wretched husband? How is it that the capacious Winston Churchill, with his immense appetite for work, cigars, whiskey, and talk, seemed to be happy with one woman? Are these trivial questions? I don't happen to think so. Such information speaks to character, and the correct judgment of people the world deems important is itself significant.
The rap on gossip is not only that it can be mean, which it certainly can be, but that it is also trivial. The English novelist Ian McEwan has called novels "the higher gossip." What makes it higher is that one of the things novels attempt to do is show us human character as it views itself, in all its grandeur, illusions, joy, sadness, and not least secrets, some of which people won't even confess to themselves. At its highest level, gossip is after something similar.
Nor must one discount all the brilliant people who have not merely enjoyed but adored gossip. Take, for example, Sydney Smith (1771–1845), the clergyman who was one of the founders of the Edinburgh Review. Locked away for much of his adult life in country vicarages, Smith yearned for news of the great world, and gossip was his chief mode of acquiring it. He was in correspondence with some of the most clever women of the age, to one of whom he wrote, "Refresh my Solitude with Rumor's agitations." To another he wrote, "I am panting to know a little of what passes in the world." And to yet another, "I long to know the scandal." To Lady Mary Bennett, he implores, "Pray send me some treasonable news about the Queen ... and don't leave me in this odious state of innocence, and make me as wickedly instructed as yourself." He understood that in the realm of gossip it is important to give if one is to receive. To Lord Grey he wrote: "I will send Lady Grey the news from London when I get there. I am sure she is too wise a woman not to be fond of gossiping; I am fond of it and have talent for it."
And here is Sydney Smith delivering the goods with his characteristic light touch to J. A. Murray, who worked on the Edinburgh Review: "As I know you love a bit of London scandal learn that Lady Caroline Lamb stabbed herself at Lady Ilchester's Ball for the love of Lord Byron, as it is supposed. What a charming thing to be a Poet. I preached for many years in London and was rather popular, but never heard of a Lady doing herself the slightest mischief on my account." If one panned gossip the way one pans gold, this particular item would constitute a perfect nugget. Lord Byron, for God's sake, now that's a name worth gossiping about!
As Sydney Smith well understood, candor, where possible spiced with humor, is the proper conversational note for gossip. When gossiping, people are presumably leveling with each other; it will not do to hold back, or appear to hold back, or seem to make the other party tease the information out of one. Part of the delight of gossip, after all, is, to use an old-fashioned word, its naughtiness. One is telling tales out of school, tattling, hanging out dirty linen, blowing the whistle, doing all sorts of things one isn't supposed to be doing. Engaged in such activities, it is no time to hang, or hold, back. "And another thing..." is one of the most welcome transitions known to lovers of gossip.
Gossip is only truly trivial when it descends too low—too low not in content so much as i
n subject. When I was a teacher at Northwestern, I had an acquaintance who used to call me to report on the foolish behavior of certain colleagues about whom I hadn't the least interest. "Gossip about X is lower than I wish to go," I would tell him, forcing him to desist, "especially at eight-thirty a.m." Only as I write this last sentence does it occur to me that one of the meanest things one can say about another person is that one finds him intrinsically too uninteresting to be worth gossiping about.
Diary
I was at lunch with a young critic who had put together a book of essays about Lionel Trilling, perhaps the most subtle and penetrating American literary critic of his day. I asked him if in connection with his book he had had any contact with Trilling's wife, Diana. He said he had met with her a few times. "She was crazy, you know," I said, which got his attention.
Some time after her husband's death, Diana Trilling wrote a memoir called The Beginning of the Journey, in which she described her husband as a depressive with a drinking problem. In the book, she also described her husband's bouts of unexplained fury, frequently directed toward her.
Portions of a diary Lionel Trilling kept were also published, earlier, in the magazine Partisan Review, in which Trilling reveals that he felt himself something of a fraud as a teacher because he had no genuine scholarship, knew no foreign languages. What he really had wanted to be was a novelist, but, though he published a single novel called The Middle of the Journey and a few short stories, something kept him back from risking a career writing fiction. This conflict, of living one kind of life and longing for another, is, in the conventional view, thought to be the reason for Lionel Trilling's depression.
Later, in 1999, Trilling's son, James, published an essay in which he asserted that his father suffered from attention deficit disorder. James Trilling had ADD, and he claimed to find all the major symptoms of this mental problem also present in his father: the disorganization, the inability to finish things begun, the unwillingness to make clear decisions, the rage—all the symptoms that he, James, had found in himself.
But, as I told the writer sitting across from me, I wonder if the real source of Lionel Trilling's problem wasn't depression or ADD but his marriage and family life. Both Diana and Lionel Trilling were devotees of psychoanalysis, and Diana was a genuine neurotic: afraid of heights, afraid of crowds, and a person easily slighted, touchier than an open wound. When her still quite young son James, her only child, was afraid of elevators, she wrote to the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson to report that she thought what the boy was truly afraid of was what the elevator represented to him: the dark embrace of the vagina.
I then went on to describe her behavior as a member of the editorial board of the American Scholar when I was its editor. Her performance was that of the outrageous diva, all temperament, no rationality whatsoever. A friend told me that she stopped reading around 1957, and when I knew her, in the middle 1970s, there was no reason to dispute this. This didn't stop her from pontificating about nearly everything in the culture. She once ruined an editorial board meeting by rattling on pointlessly about an anodyne article on her husband in the magazine. No one could stop her. She would sometimes call me with ridiculous requests. She was preposterous. "Nuts," I said, "she was plain nuts."
"My point," I told the young writer, "is that Lionel Trilling's problem probably wasn't that he was doing work that, though it brought him great prestige, he didn't really believe in. His problem was that every night of his adult life he went home to this nutty woman, and to a son who had his own problems. No, Trilling was depressed for the reason that he had married the wrong woman and stood by her through, you might say, thin and thin, and it must have weighed on him terribly. No wonder he was depressed, no wonder he drank, no wonder he would fall into rages directed at their proper target, his wife. He had made an enormous mistake in marrying Diana, and it destroyed his life."
Was this, I asked myself as I went rattling on, setting the record straight or gossiping about the dead? Since it is both derogatory and speculative, my guess is that most people would find it the latter. Which only goes to show that not even death provides a release from being gossiped about.
8. Pure Speculation
The sorrows of our heroes and heroines, they are your delight, oh public! their sorrows, or their sins, or their absurdities; not their virtues, good sense, and consequent rewards.
—ANTHONY TROLLOPE, Barchester Towers
EPISTEMOLOGY, THE DICTIONARIES tell us, is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from mere opinion; it also has to do with the theory of knowledge. Gossip is indisputably a form of knowledge. The chief question about it, always, is How reliable a form of knowledge is it?
Some gossip is based on discernible facts, hard evidence, from which people can go on to construct more or less interesting hypotheses about the behavior of a person or the meaning of an event. A woman leaves her husband is such a bit of hard evidence; she is gone, moved out. Another hard fact is that she has moved in with another woman. Here the speculation that is intrinsic to gossip begins. Has she moved out because of mistreatment on her husband's part? Or has she moved out because there is someone she loves more than him? As for her moving in with another woman, is this merely a stopgap arrangement? Has she, that is, moved in with a friend until such time as she can get her own apartment and her life back in order? Or is the friend more than a friend, in fact a lesbian lover?
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 Birs
tein'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.