The Bitter Truth of Gossip

...Peck (to say nothing of Benjamin Bradlee, Barbara 10 The American Spectator October 1978 Howar, and Iago) is at heart a puritan is an open question...

...In fact, the "Deep Throat" connection with Watergate has the effect of authenticating a story which is otherwise woefully lacking in gossipy departures from traditional sexual norms...

...interests, guided by justice, counsel...

...Paul's conviction that "We see now through a mirror in an obscure manner...

...The Star, like all tabloids in its class, can hardly exist without gossip...

...But there is this complication: We know in our hearts that without good systems we are lost, and that good systems require extraordinary people...

...In any event, the dialectics of gossip can be complicated...

...Let me note only that according to Rollo May's Love and Will (a book that is hard to classify as gossip), puritans are likely to appear where one least expects them...

...If he had shown up at Sandstone (disguised and, of course, without the suspicious Hera), he would have preferred a private room, and Tom Hatfield would have disapproved of him for the same reasons that he disapproved of Gay Talese...

...in the meantime, however, society's confusion about human sexuality is a mirror of its confusion about apparently unrelated issues...

...In effect, it also aimed to remove sex completely from the world of gossip...

...In its notes on U.S.-Soviet affairs, the Advanced International Institute summed up: "Carter's Annapolis speech...evoked a Soviet frontal assault on all major areas of U.S...

...But I can also imagine him motivated by a burning desire to get himself (however discreetly) into a gossip-inciting situation...

...There are occasions, in other words, when we devour iconoclastic gossip less to humanize our "betters" than to keep them from dehumanizing us...

...But all of these objections are beside the point once it is clear (from the enthusiastic response to it) that the report performs the same public service that gossip does...

...Indeed, the original meaning of the word—close friend, companion—is some indication of the essential humanity of the activity...

...V The Greeks, one might say, had few illusions about their deities, which may be why they seem to us to have so few illusions about themselves—fewer at least than we have about ourselves...

...Nevertheless, it may be a mistake to take confessors like Henry Miller, Casanova, Rousseau, or Krull himself, at their own evaluations...

...It may be, as we are often enough told these days, that we are experiencing a revolution of consciousness as a consequence of our conflicts over sexual identity...

...did not 'mend its ways.' " The gist of the "frontal assault" was that the "objective reality" is now a preponderance of military and ideological power in Soviet hands, and short of initiating a suicidal nuclear holocaust, there is nothing the United States can do to prevent the USSR from accomplishing its world revolutionary mission...

...Paul's obscuring mirror...

...The quotidian and earthbound noises of the mere human creature are all too easily drowned out by the prose of Christopher Lasch, I.F...

...The argument then does not reach so high a moral level...

...Few human bodies fulfill classical possibilities of form...

...Candor of this sort routinely becomes a way of dramatizing oneself in order to heighten or relive experience...

...On the other hand, they speak of being "trapped," of "having been given a different nature...

...their answers are given out and received as eternal...

...The result is our ambivalence toward people who are, or who at least seem to be, truly extraordinary...

...If it is perceived as role-playing, it incites gossip of the most sophisticated kind...

...So there are really two different possibilities involved...

...Contemporary gossipers, hounded as they are by the conviction that life is fundamentally a con job, a cosmological ripoff even, tend to be uptight gossipers, and the themes of their gossip tend to coalesce into one grand theme: that the real truth about everyone and everything is most likely to prove ugly or unpalatable to all but those with the strongest stomachs (the true heroes), and that the ultimate truth-of-truths will probably be, like the vision behind Bluebeard's locked door, utterly unobscure and utterly appalling...

...Something like this happens when we learn that Heinrich Himmler, Hitler's Gestapo chief who believed that the extermination of Jews was "a glorious page in our history," as a boy loved nature, collected stamps, and wrote poetry...

...Unfortunately, he says, they want to give answers, and "the answers are all temporary, while those who give the answers see them as eternal...

...Male infants have a hurdle to jump—I speak as a nonscientist—which females do not have to jump: viz., a transference of their sexual identity away from their mother, with her sensual closeness, to their father...

...The argument then concerns whether such choices ought to be encouraged or discouraged...

...In Tom Hatfield's view, the Sandstone experiment—which, if it had been entirely successful, would have resulted in a gossip-free society—was an immensely humanizing one that has to be understood, along with the human-potential movement generally, as a reaction against the depersonalizing forces of the contemporary world...

...John, that the truth will make us free...

...that Hemingway wrote his daily blood-pressure readings on the bathroom wall...

...Analogously speaking, Nixon and his book-writing confederates were motivated more by the Playboy than the Sandstone spirit...

...This is not the perspective on the nature of our nature that we get from the late C.S...

...The role-player hides a great deal of the total truth about himself behind the role he assumes, which is why puritan critics of the Elizabethan theater referred to actors as hypocrites...

...The objections to which The Hite Report is vulnerable are obvious enough...

...Surely true confession is just as likely now as it ever was to be a brag or a fabrication—an effort to intensify and authenticate experience by presenting it to the public as gossip...

...Candor can be practiced, just as the Rolling Stones were supposed to have gone to Switzerland for a few weeks before one of their American tours to practice their spontaneity...

...but by jealously guarding the gossip they dig up they refuse to perform one of the most vital functions of the gossipmonger...

...Thrale that we get from Boswell...

...Looked at this way, there can be no doubt that pornography has a redeeming social value, since it makes possible the economy of response without which even extraordinary people sometimes go mad...

...Washington strategists would be well advised to understand this...

...In other moral traditions, however, the limitation of Michael Novak, Ledden Watson Distinguished Professor of Religion at Syracuse University, is currently a Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...

...you aren't ruled by 'hormones' or `biology.' " And here once more we see the paradox of gossip...

...This is no less true of Virginia Woolf s own To the Lighthouse than of Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel, Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, Budd Schulberg's The Disenchanted, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Aldous Huxley's Point Counterpoint, Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night, Kerouac's On the Road, or Mailer's The Naked and the Dead...

...At Annapolis in June he warned the Soviet leaders against further adventurism in Africa...

...Yet its editor has been quoted as saying, "Our readers are interested in people who don't play roles but are perceived as playing themselves...

...Indeed, the thing one would really like to know—what sort of people under what circumstances even bother to answer a questionnaire of this sort—is forever unknowable...

...It must be made in the jungle world of sovereign nations, where foresight, purpose, and resolve are more productive of peace and progress than noble visions and moral impulses, where firm actions speak louder than fair words, and where—in the end—mind more than heart, and might more than right, decide the fortunes of nations...

...It is significant that the success of the action in All the President's Men depended crucially on an insider dopester called "Deep Throat," with the implication that any honest effort to discover the truth must in some sense or other have a vital connection with the pornographic...

...Perhaps he is one of those many people who secretly resent not having been given at least a walk-on part in Capote's Answered Prayers...

...We are so appalled with the level of competence necessary to succeed in the upper levels of politics, business, religion, sport, or entertainment, with the degree of sheer good luck necessary to manage great endowments of wealth, personal charm, or beauty, that we willingly cooperate in the business of turning achievers into super-achievers, stars into super-stars, if not legends in their own time...

...It is, in fact, the most acceptable kind of gossip about sex at the present time, and insofar as it attempts to revise the norms of sexual conduct downward, its affinity is with malicious gossip...

...Gossip is not about issues or ideas or systems but about people, and on this score alone it is a great comfort: So long as there is gossip there are people, and so long as there are people there is hope against the systems...

...It is in this light that one should consider the reports of the various inside dopesters about sex in America: those of Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, and, more recently, Shere Hite...

...Thanks to Malcolm Cowley's Exile's The American Spectator October 1978 11 Return, we had the inside dope about Harry Crosby (and the lost generation generally) long before Geoffrey Wolff s Black Sun...

...We want them on display in the Sandstone living room while they prefer the privacy of their Playboy enclaves...

...In our time nothing has been more gossip-inciting than Watergate and the hugger-mugger operations of the FBI and CIA...

...The more homosexuals come candidly out of the closet, the easier it is to believe that the closet remains a very crowded place...

...First, if homosexuality is a matter of choice or preference, it lies in the realm of freedom...

...A distance must be established between the male and the mother, and an identification made with the father...

...Similarly, there is comfort in the knowledge that the lustful, arrogant, and ruthless Cesare Borgia liked popular sports, and that the violent anarchist Mikhail Bakunin was entranced with the music of Beethoven...

...Jones is what malicious or black gossipers always are: fanatic reductionists...

...No doubt, the fear that the legal availability of pornography is crucial to the availability of basic human rights generally often masks the fear that if this answer is not available the burden of sex, to say nothing of the burden of sexual identity, will be insupportable...

...It makes people suffer, but does not make happiness or moral courage impossible...

...Elizabeth Ray's Washington Fringe Benefit is probably no more a roman a clef than Bellow's Humboldt's Gift...

...Zeus as model of husband-father-playboy is no threat to the most ordinary of mortals...

...Jones of Capote's Answered Prayers is the ideal narrator-observer for these times...

...Hite herself concludes from her gossipy evidence that "There is no standard of sexual performance 'out there,' against which you must measure yourself...

...Pittsburgh Area, gay, professional male, 34, interests opera, ballet, ideas, travel, seeks same...

...peculiar paradox emerges from recent debates about homosexuality...

...Washington "is not taking into account the growth of the forces of World Socialism," and when it does, it will see that "the concept of confrontation holds no promise in the long term...

...VI And on the note of the fanatic and the eternal we arrive at the pornographic, which is where Othello arrives once Iago destroys his romantic world with malicious gossip...

...Michael Novak Men Without Women Meditations on the half-life of the homosexual...

...Indeed, in this view Bluebeard's horrors, no less than P.B...

...Like the prophets of old, they are never in doubt...

...This is why P.B...

...They were, like Gay Talese, on the side of romance...

...They must choose, he said, between "confrontation and cooperation" (whatever that meant...

...But this, of course, may turn out to be Capote's point—if he ever gets around to finishing a work the suspended nature of which has itself become a subject of gossip...

...Whether this means that Ms...

...The Hite Report might function like gossip for its readers, and might in fact keep some of them sane, but the norms of sexual conduct that it advocates are as hostile to the spirit of gossip (to say nothing of the spirit of romance) as was the Sandstone experiment...

...We are no less dependent on the press agent than on the muckraker and scandal-monger, and we are in collaboration with both...

...In these circumstances, pornography is the simplifying black gossip about sex—the eternal and fanatic answer about it...

...Henceforth, America has no choice but to accept detente—and peace—on Soviet terms...

...that the Earl of Oxford, thought by Freud (among others) to have written the plays attributed to Shakespeare, was so embarrassed after breaking wind in Queen Elizabeth's presence that he stayed away from the court for seven years...

...handled things much more humanely...

...that Elizabeth Taylor once gave Richard Burton a complete set of Everyman bound in calf and costing $10,000...

...This kind of pretense is bound to be attractive in a culture that, for whatever reasons, has come to place great emphasis on candor...

...as were Woodward and Bernstein, whose All the President's Men, like all good romances, leaves the reader with the sense that vast reservoirs of gossip remain untapped...

...I don't see how to write a book without putting people in it," Virginia Woolf once wrote to Gerald.Brenan...

...Of course, if Capote gives his P.B...

...The more celebrities confess to adulterous affairs, the harder it is to believe that those who do not confess are as faithful to their spouses as they appear to be...

...Still, there are those who believe that our romance with black gossip will have, after the fashion of romances, a happy ending: that we are witnessing something like the cleansing of the Augean stables of the American psyche...

...I have no difficulty believing that the "partially married" Baltimore male reads and enjoys Robert Heilbroner...

...Jones enough rein his effect may be in the same direction...

...This is the way it is with gossipers, especially black gossipers...

...And in reprisal for Moscow's treatment of its own nationals, and ours, he called off several American technological missions scheduled to visit Moscow, cancelled the sale of a giant computer, and imposed an export-licensing system on sales of oil-related equipment...

...Is the apparently courageous, nonconformist admission of sin only a device to conform with those bolder transgressors one would like to consider one's peers...

...This is also true of most contemporary inside dopesters, who, often with the best will in the world, must not only compete with but must move towardthe fanatic simplicities of pornography...

...To emphasize further their displeasure, the Soviets charged F. J. . Crawford, a Moscow-based executive of International Harvester, with illegal currency manipulation and popped him into prison...

...The moral argument about this second alternative is sometimes simply expressed as "Do what comes naturally," or "To yourself be true...

...But they were not hounded by our compulsion to discover the invalidity of our pieties and the venality of our betters...

...However, I have never found it hard to believe that there are real,even suffering people behind the personals—people who instead of seeking the humanizing inside dope about others are moved to publish it anonymously about themselves, with the implied promise that they are quite willing to enter into gossip-risking relationships with other people...

...Hite's statistical tables) add up to anything more than themselves...

...Aristotle pointed out long ago that nature does not work flawlessly, but only "for the most part," i.e., with considerable looseness and randomness, producing a spectrum of individuals from the nearly flawless to the seriously aber14 The American Spectator October 1978...

...Certainly they knew that most people are prisoners of illusions, just as they knew that most people are ordinary (and their super-achievers in philosophy, literature, and drama did what they could to correct these deficiencies...

...the end of hypocrisy, that is a good thing...

...C.S...

...Even the disparity between the tone of the personals and the high seriousness of the non-anonymous part of the NYR has its humanizing aspect...

...Jones' obscenities, might seem to be the grim product of our sin-obsessed and therefore perversely anti-Aquarian culture—which, having induced us to misconceive the nature of our nature, now suffers the Nemesis of an obsession with black gossip...

...This may turn out to be the case, but in the meantime Capote's P.B...

...It is some gain for humanity to learn that Nero, who had his mother executed and may have had his wife murdered, wrote prize-winning poetry and music...

...These people tell it like it is, get it all up front, and let it all hang out...

...The novelist Elie Wiesel, who experienced the fanatic reductionism of Auschwitz—that thesaurus of the blackest of black gossip—has suggested that the world might be a better place if people were willing to share questions rather than answers...

...The late Arnold Gingrich, in whose Esquire excerpts of Answered Prayers have been published, wrote of the third excerpt (a bit nervous, perhaps, about the reaction to the second, "La Cote Basque, 1965") that "it is now evident that this is the work of a serious and gifted writer...

...They seem to have anticipated St...

...Here are typical entries: Baltimore Male, handsome, intelligent, and all those other things, 40, partially married, would enjoy meeting pert and pretty lady for discreet pleasures...

...We might have learned from the Greeks, who, especially in their mythology...

...But at the same time he reiterated his devotion to detente ("the road to peace and progress") and his desire for the consummation of a SALT treaty that is "fair to both parties...

...On the one hand, proponents of homosexuality speak of "sexual preference" and "alternative choices...

...At the same time, of course, it removed sex from the world of romance, which, because of its dependence on withheld information, is a gossip-inciting world (and so we have the great gossip incited by the Tristan-Iseult and LauncelotGuinevere affairs...

...that Hermann Goring, who was the chief of the Luftwaffe, also sailed model boats and played with model trains...

...that Henry James ate his lunch while walking around his house...

...But since whatever he did in that room would be in character, the gossip he incited would not be malicious or unsettling to his worshipers...

...She might have noted that it is in the nuclear family that children themselves learn this histrionic art, the implication of which is that the family as an institution, with its structural dependence on role-playing, is not only gossip-inciting but is the seedbed of the gossip impulse...

...This fact has to be kept in mind by anyone who tries to understand the national preoccupation with the iconoclastic, black, or malicious gossip that in recent years has caused us to revise downwards the public images of such achievers as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Billy Hargis, Wilbur Mills, Wayne Hays, Bishop James Pike, and Babe Ruth...

...But it is possible II that the Star editor really meant that his readers were interested in people perceived as "playing themselves," which is only a refined kind of role-playing—the kind that Iago is so good at...

...that Rudolph Valentino's mesmerizing glance was at least in part nearsightedness...

...In the Soviet view, America can no longer "choose war or peace," as U.S...

...Those involved are not really free to choose an alternative...

...One can easily imagine the outcry that would greet the contention that 3,000 male responses out of 100,000 haphazardly-distributed sex questionnaires (actually, less than 2,000 figure in Ms...

...for in our society, to be in a position to be gossiped about is to have proof of one's significant existence...

...The accusation has far-reaching consequences...

...We can know so much about everyone and everything that interests us, and yet our knowledge can be such a jumble of half-truths, contradictions, and mutually irrelevant fragments that it is hard to have that sense of a clear picture without which we cannot feel truly at home in the world...

...His view of reality is simple and clarifying: It relieves ordinary people of the burden of mystery that the world of their betters imposes on them, and it suggests that other burdens of mystery will yield to the same economy—that the world which seems so bewilderingly extraordinary may turn out to be, when all the gossip about it is in, a place quite commensurate with the capacities and lusts of ordinary people...

...An especially interesting example of the humanizing dimension of gossip is supplied by the "personals" in the back pages of the New York Review of Books...

...Ellen Peck, founder of the National Organization for Non-Parents, has pointed out the extent to which the actions of parents must hypocritically contradict their true feelings because they cannot be their honest selves...

...that we are beginning at last to face up to our true nature...

...whether, in a word, homosexuality is a good choice...

...It is probably important to distinguish between male and female homosexuality...

...Author-Lecturer, married, will respond discreetly and sincerely to mature woman seeking a relationship, occasional or ongoing, for mutual pleasure...

...One might as well attempt to construct an adequate image of male sexuality by examining the anonymous and candid graffiti in every twentieth toilet stall in American railroad stations...

...His gratifyingly uncomplicated view of human nature and human relations suggests not the view of the serious novelist that he would like to be, but the ferocious tunnel-vision of the IRA Provisionals or the Symbionese Liberation Army...

...But if Lewis proves to be right, the Aquarian Frontier, for all its glorious promise, will turn out to be one more chimera land...

...Here, to be sure, is the wisdom of the Old World, a wisdom that accepts the limiting condition of St...

...that Allen Ginsberg was once crowned King of the May in Prague...

...Shakespeare's Iago sums it up for both of them: "Men should be what they seem...

...In addition, one anticipates the probability that the natural endowment—hormonal, neural, emotional, whatever—of a certain percentage of children will not follow the norm...

...Both agencies are in the gossip business, clearly enough, since they are sophisticated seekers-out of hidden information...

...One would probably have to include as humanizing gossip a vast amount of relatively trivial information that, while it does not cause us to revise our opinion of them in any major way, still has the effect of lessening the distance between ourselves and the great ones of the earth...

...In some traditions, homosexuality is such a flaw...

...This is why, when all concessions have been made to the gossip impulse—that it is humanizing, that it is entertaining, that it is a means of surviving with at least a minimum of virtue—it must finally be considered as economy...

...In terms of available frames of reference into which information can be placed and the number of perspectives from which events can be viewed, we live in a spendthrift environment...

...In the meantime, however, he connects with the economy of pornography in all directions...

...Soviet human-rights dissidents, and several Jews who had agitated to emigrate, were given show trials and sentenced to long years in prison, or hard labor in the Gulag...

...Suppose we had to make do with a Goethe unenlivened by Eckermann's Conversations and so did not know that in his seventy-fourth year the author of Faust experienced a violent affection for a young lady of Marienbad...

...But this should not blind us to the fact that the gossip impulse itself has always had humanizing effects...

...Americans have been learning the hard way—thanks to Soviet actions in the last year—a lesson that it is not yet too late for President Carter to learn: that the foreign policy of a great nation cannot be made "in the realm of the spirit...

...Each of us carries serious flaws...

...Linking the current appetite for gossip with the spirit of the late sixties, he has been quoted as saying: "It seems to me you can't pretend anymore to be something you're not...

...Washington Post editor Benjamin Bradlee apparently inclines to the first explanation...

...Greek mythology, particularly when contrasted with Christian theology, is almost entirely gossip—is, in fact, a primitive form of Answered Prayers...

...Black gossip is an understandable attempt to manage the confusion of our times by an almost puritanic principle of economy, thanks to which it is possible to have repeatedly and with relatively little effort the exhilarating and enlightening experience of getting to the rock-bottom truth about things...

...But the Soviets could be wrong...

...that Lenin was a bad loser at chess...

...Perhaps he has more than this to say about the subject (certainly the Bradlee of All the President's Men would have had more to say), but the statement as we have it is hard to take a stand against: If we have indeed come to John P. Sisk is professor of English at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington...

...So Talese turned out to be a gossip-inciter, but at least (what else would one expect...

...Such are the complexities of the human idol- and myth-making compulsion...

...and that we have some reason to expect conditions of authentic life, which are now realities only for those intrepid few who are able to realize their essential innocence along what Theodore Roszak has called the Aquarian Frontier...

...They suffer from a diminished range of freedom...

...If at the same time this makes for good entertainment (the sort of pratfall comedy that the least subtle can appreciate), if by affording us the luxury of an easy moral indignation it becomes possible for us to back into 12 The ArtericaniSpectator October 1978 virtue (we may be ordinary but we're not that bad), then so much the better...

...On the other hand, the candid revelation—being, like the traditional "true confession," a kind of reverse gossip ("I will tell it before anyone else gets a chance to and so get all the credit myself")—can be effectively gossip-inciting: It leads one to suspect that those who do not confess have dirty secrets to hide...

...One need only think of the extent to which gossipers, by creating a vast body of "personality journalism," have humanized the world of literature for us...

...that Marianne Moore was a baseball fan...

...Barbara Howar agrees: "Let public officials be just what they represent themselves to be, or let them take the consequences...

...The President has responded to all of these developments with a few small slaps on the mailed fist of the Kremlin...

...Unfortunately, when Gay Talese arrived at Sandstone for a visit (having been lured there by God knows what false promises) he brought with him the heretical Playboy spirit: On party nights he took women into the privacy of his own room, "leaving their partners," says the shocked Hatfield, "to wonder where the girls are, what they are doing, and with whom...

...But their confidence in the ultimate triumph of a Soviet-dominated world is based on the belief that the American people have lost the will to resist, and that our leadership is too confused, vacillating, and indecisive to develop policies, strategies, and capabilities to restore the balance of power to the West...

...One must appreciate the fact that, in a percentage of cases, this transition will be handled very rudely...

...The inside dope he reveals about the best, brightest, handsomest, and richest is that they are mainly motivated by lust...

...We know this in our hearts, too, despite a flattering tiadition of American extraordinariness...

...The fact of a fall from virtue in high places may be less important than the need to believe in it as an ongoing possibility, lest those in high places put spotlights on our ordinariness by posing models of excellence we simply cannot live up to...

...Truman Capote may be indulging in special pleading, but he also has considerable tradition behind him when he says of his partially published Answered Prayers that it "isn't gossip except in the sense that all literature is gossip...

...According to Robert Rimmer, author of The Premar Experiments, the defining opposite of Sandstone is "the artificial sex-tease atmosphere of a Playboy club," and he wonders what the United States would be like "if one day Holiday Inns were transformed into Sandstones...

...IV Gossip, in short, has become an important survival device in a complex, media-rich society in which it is easy to see the media as existing primarily for the convenience of those forces that threaten to extinguish the person...

...One must imagine that such people have very congruent personalities, of the sort much favored by psychologists in the Carl Rogers-Abraham Maslow class...

...The Sandstone experience, especially as reported in a book by Tom Hatfield and as seen in a widely-distributed documentary film, is a good example of this new candor in sexual relations...

...Committed to open, honest, natural, and carefree sexuality among consenting adults in its spacious and luxurious living room, Sandstone aimed "to destroy the myth that sex was something dirty...

...he was on the side of romance...

...Stone, and Robert Heilbroner...

...People publish personal ads for the same reason that they go to places like Sandstone or Esalen or read the "Ear" column in the Washington Post: to get relief from the complication, specialization, abstraction, bureaucratization, and mechanization of modern life...

...America's leaders do not seem to realize that America has "lost its strategic supremacy...

...that Ludwig Wittgenstein was a Betty Grable fan...

...He is the inside dopester as economizer of information...

...When you put people in books, especially fiction, you are bound to have gossip, whether the books are written by Jacqueline Susann or William Faulkner, and the fictive gossip is likely to be grounded on real gossip...

...The Soviets do not ignore the reality of the vast potential strength of the U.S...

...What motive of self-aggrandizement, of sheer vainglory, is behind the confession that one is a lesbian, an adulterer, or a swinger...

...There is real gain in learning that Wordsworth suffered from insomnia...

...We owe to Sheilah Graham our knowledge that F. Scott Fitzgerald died thinking not about his unfinished Last Tycoon but about the Princeton football team...

...Second, if homosexuality is a matter of nature, it lies in the realm of necessity...

...policy towards the USSR....The keynote of this assault [a Pravda editorial] contained unparalleled overtones of arrogance and contempt, as well as •Shortly after this, however, the administration approved the sale of a Dresser Industries welding machine to the Soviet Union.threats to peace if the U.S...

...that Hitler himself played "Uncle Adolf ' to the children who romped about his Berchtesgaden retreat...

...The FBI and CIA are more ambiguous...

...There is a strong, stubborn current in America of anti-Communism which has now begun to surface again...

...What admirer of that fabulous poet-historian-adventurer, Walter Raleigh, could do without Anthony A. Wood's remark that Sir Walter fell out of favor at court "for devirginating a maid of honor" ? Suppose our image of Samuel Johnson lacked the humanizing, gossipy details about his relations with Mrs...

...And The American Spectator October 1978 13 surely it is naive to assume, in the absence of other controls, that anonymity of response guarantees candor, or that candor is the same thing as truthfulness or accuracy...

...Like the President himself, we are too enamored of the ideal of peace to focus on the idea of our own security—though it has now become a question of our survival...

...At times they are bores, and at other times they are undeniably refreshing to have around, but at all times, having nothing to hide, they are hardly gossip-inciters...

...and by the same token they did not have our need of black gossip...

...There are those for whom the personals are the comics of the NYR, just as there are those who are convinced that they are written by a member of the staff with a view to lightening what would otherwise be an excessively sober-sided publication...

...Karen Durbin, writing in Mademoiselle, is convinced that the report establishes a new definition of normal in female sexuality...

...Yet, as the political scientist Andrew Hacker has contended, most of us are ordinary: deficient in talent, ambition, discipline, and character...

...that Hugh Hefner is hooked on Pepsi Cola...

...Indeed, the fact that a man in Hayward, California, advertises a pamphlet on "How to Write an Effective Personal Ad" suggests that personals are anything but an editorial hoax...

...The humanizing effect of gossip-level information is particularly clear in its tendency to reclaim an otherwise villainous subject, if only momentarily and in a minor way...

...Lewis, who once remarked: "To know how bad we are in the condition of mere nature is an excellent recipe for becoming much worse...

...so also few human psyches...

...Thomas Mann's confidence man, Felix Krull, wonders, "What moral value or significance can attach to confessions written from any point of view except that of truthfulness...

...They kept their gods and goddesses from getting threateningly beyond human capacities by imagining their Olympian environment to be a gossip-inciting one to begin with...

...And two American Moscow correspondents, from the New York Times and the Baltimore Sun, were accused of slandering the Soviet state and fined for failing to reply to a Soviet court order to publish retractions...

...Lewis With this subject one must begin by conceding what must be conceded: Gossip, whatever else must be said about it, is an expression of the urge to tell the truth with the expectation, following St...

...freedom involved in this alternative constitutes a moral defect, like kleptomania, pyromania, or other "natural" psychic flaws...

...They are, in fact, gossip-inhibitors, and for that reason threats to the Star, just as what Newsweek has called the "new candor" is a threat to professional scandal-mongers and muckrakers...

...Thus they induce a great sense of frustration in the public, which is then likely to consider the operations of these agencies immoral less because of the means they use than because they are inside-dopesters who refuse to deliver all the inside dope they owe us...

...It is easy enough, after reading Madame Bovary, to imagine its author standing aloof from his creation with Joycean irony, paring his fingernails...

...To put it another way, the Greeks could afford to be more relaxed about their gossip...

...If, as everyone seems to agree, we are living in a particularly gossipy time, then the likely thing is that the desire to know the truth is a special mark of this time, or that this desire is especially easy to satisfy at this time, or both...

...He makes it clear that black gossip, by being a form of fanaticism, is also a form of censorship: It invalidates or makes unthinkable any other interpretation than its own...

...that Beethoven liked billiards...

...What Bradlee and Howar are doing is relating gossip to everybody's put-down term, "role-playing...

...This is why it is possible to say that if Thomas Jefferson did not have a black mistress he should have had one...

...John P. Sisk The Bitter Truth of Gossip "To know how bad we are in the condition of mere nature is an excellent recipe for becoming much worse...

...but once read the Goncourt's report that "while working on the end of his novel, he had been obliged to get up and go find a handkerchief, which he soaked with his tears," and Flaubert becomes a suffering human being again...

...The perspective from this position, if one can believe Professor Roszak, yields an image of human nature radically different from that suggested by Bluebeard's gossip-inciting chamber of horrors...

...no doubt, should he meet his pert and pretty lady he will spend at least part of his time discussing macroeconomics with her...

...And that's good...

...Out of an apprehension of our own deficiencies we idolize and mythologize, but in the act of doing this we only more clearly define our deficiencies...