The Morals of Gossip

By LANCE MORROW

Gossip has always had a terrible reputation. A sin against charity, they said, quoting St. Paul. The odd, vivid term sometimes used for it was backbiting. The word suggested a sudden, predatory leap from behind--as if gossip's hairy maniacal dybbuk landed on the back of the victim's neck and sank its teeth into the spine, killing with vicious little calumnies: venoms and buzzes.

Gossip is rarely that wild. From the morning of the first individual folly of the race, gossip has been the normal nattering background noise of civilization: Molly Goldberg at her kitchen window, Voltaire at the water cooler. To say that gossip has been much condemned is like saying that sex has sometimes been held in low esteem. It is true, but it misses some of the fun of the thing.

Gossip has always been one of the evil pleasures. It is unworthy, nosy, hypocritical and moralistic, a sort of participatory nastiness. But does it play a heroic moral role hitherto unnoticed? Is gossip merely a swamp that breeds mosquitoes and disease? ("Each man walks with his head in a cloud of poisonous flies," wrote Tennyson.) Or does it have higher functions in the ecosystem?

Large claims have often been made for homely old salacious gossip--the sort of assertions, one might think, that sweating pornographers used to make in court about the "redeeming social value" of their work. All storytelling, hence most of literature from Homer onward, rises from gossip's fertile lowlands. Even the deepest primordial myths are essentially gossip: "Zeus and Hera are fighting again?" "Per shirr!"

What we hear in Tolstoi or Flaubert or Dickens or Proust, wrote Novelist Mary McCarthy, "is the voice of a neighbor relating the latest gossip." Literature coalesces out of base gossip, from Suetonius to Boswell's Journals to Diana Trilling's new account (Mrs. Harris) of the Scarsdale Diet doctor's murder.

The highly vulnerable Oscar Wilde went so far as to say that all history is gossip. Such gossip, unlike history, tends to evaporate. Gossip is certainly an instrument of power; Lyndon Johnson understood the magic leverage to be gained from intimate personal details, artfully dispensed. He made it a point to know the predilections of friends, the predicaments of enemies. He orchestrated whole symphonies of power upon the Moog of his own ego.

Conversely, gossip seems to cherish a democratic, even subversive impulse: it likes to knock down authority a little. That is why royal families make their servants sign oaths not to write (gossip) about what goes on in the private quarters.

In the late 20th century, technology has immeasurably complicated the business of gossip. Television, radio, the people pages of newspapers and magazines have all conspired to create international class gossip. This macrogossip detaches the usual human taletelling from its local roots. The result is sometimes a resonant emptiness, the feeling of futility that might overcome the soul after watching Bob Hope and Brooke Shields host a television special. Macrogossip tends to be exemplary, cautionary, ceremonial and merely entertaining--like public hangings.

But microgossip--the myriad back-nipping, back-fence, kitchen-table, men's-room exchanges all over the world, the low animated buzz of dirt-dishing that emanates from the globe--is the kind of gossip that may perform a kind of social mission. Microgossip keeps tumbling in like the surf, a Pepysian lounge act:

routines about Sylvia, about to be fired, and Karl, who can't get a divorce, and Dorothy's Valium.

Perhaps most of the world's gossip--both macro and micro--is done for the interest and entertainment of it. At certain dinner parties in Georgetown and Beverly Hills and East Hampton (cannibals' picnics, nights of the long knives), the gossip is a combination of dispassionate vivisection and blood sport: reputations are expertly filleted and the small brown pits of egos are spit out decorously into spoons and laid at the edge of the plate.

Gossip goes in for the negative, not the positive. It is no doubt meanspirited. "If gossip favors, even enjoys, dirt (the failings of character)," wrote the critic John Leonard, "it is because we suspect ourselves, and the suspicion is a shrewd one." Yet, oddly, people do not seem to object to being gossiped about as much as they once did. After all, as macrogossip has instructed, any gossip is a form of attention, a sort of evanescent celebrity. Even gossip works to keep away what Saul Bellow called "the wolf of insignificance." Privacy is not the highest priority; on the contrary, a certain emotional exhibitionism has been gaining ground. Of course, it can get out of hand: a man happy enough to be gossiped about as the office philanderer might grow queasy at learning that gossip is calling him a sadomasochist.

If much gossip is retailed merely for the enjoyment of the exchange, the simple human interest in the passing pageant of follies, it also has subtler purposes. Gossip--which concerns people, while rumor concerns events--is usually an instrument with which people unconsciously evaluate moral contexts.

"Did you see that Glen and Carolyn got out of the same cab at work this morning? And Carolyn was wearing the same dress she had on yesterday?" In gossiping about, say, an office adultery, gossipers will weigh and sift and test the morals involved. Gossip is intimate news (perhaps even false news), but it is also a procession of ethical problems. In gossiping, people try to discover their own attitudes toward such behavior--and the reactions of others. It is also a medium of self-disclosure, a way of dramatizing one's own feelings about someone else's behavior, a way of asserting what we think acceptable or unacceptable. In a book called The Moralities of Everyday Life, to be published early next year, Psychologists John Sabini and Maury Silver write that "gossip brings ethics home by introducing abstract morality to the mundane.

Moral norms are abstract. To decide whether some particular, concrete unanalyzed action is forbidden, tolerated, encouraged, or required, principles must be applied to the case."

If that is so, then gossip (whatever its individual destructiveness, which can be awesome--ask Othello) also serves as a profound daily act of community. In her novel Happy All the Time, Laurie Colwin has a character who prefers to call gossip "emotional speculation." Right. Through the great daily bazaar of bitchiness (men can be just as bitchy as women) passes a dense and bewildering parade of follies. They involve sex and money and alcohol and children and jobs and cruelty and treachery:

mostly variations on the seven deadly sins. Gossip is a safe way of sorting out this amoral brawl. It is a form of improvisational daydreaming. "Both the virtue and vice of gossip," write Sabini and Silver, "is that one doesn't confront accusers, or demand proof.. .

Gossip is transitional between things merely said, or even half said, and positions taken in the public domain. Gossip is a training ground for both self-clarification and public moral action."

Gossip is the layman's mythmaker and moralist, the small, idle interior puppet-theater in which he tries out new plays, new parts for himself.

--By Lance Morrow

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