Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit
In response to an interviewer who surmised that she did not relish self-reflection, Elizabeth Hardwick once told the Paris Review, “In general I’d rather talk about other people. Gossip, or as we gossips like to say, character analysis.” Taking unwelcome personal attention and focusing it elsewhere had an appeal that Benjamin Franklin, who despite other callings was one of America’s first gossip columnists, recognized two centuries earlier. “Most people delight in censure, when they are not the objects of it,” Franklin noted, adding, “If they are offended by my publicity exposing their private vices, I promise they shall have the satisfaction, in a very little time, of their friends and neighbors in the same circumstances.”
Legal theorists and philosophers, less concerned with the joys of Schadenfreude, have celebrated gossip for upholding communal harmony. Every society has norms that must be followed, and when those norms are broken, society must act. But no one has an interest in seeing every violation of a norm resolved in a duel at sunrise; there are more convenient ways to discourage unwelcome behavior. The threat of being gossiped about is often just enough to keep people in line.
Joseph Epstein, the conservative essayist and editor, is not immune to the lure of his subject. In his new book, Gossip: The Untrivial Pursuit, he affirms Hardwick’s contention that gossiping is often a means to a perfectly understandable end: interpreting human behavior. He even literally recommends gossip as a way of meeting that high standard set by Henry James: to be “a person upon whom nothing was lost.”
