|
|
Shake the Hands That Shook the Hand of Brendan Gill
| Article
# : |
17134 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1990 |
1,456 Words |
| Author
: |
Willard R. Espy
|
It is only fair to preface these comments about Brendan Gill's latest book, A New York Life: Of Friends and Others, with the confession that I have not seen it. I have not typed the paragraphs now before you, nor have I checked any references they may contain. I am for the moment, though only for the moment, quite blind, recovering from a minor procedure on the one eye I have left. My wife has done the reading - in my good ear. She has looked up the quotations. She is typing the manuscript at my dictation. Clearly since I have neither read the book nor written the paragraphs that follow, I can take no responsibility for any faults you may find. Blame my wife.
By profession as well as inclination, Brendan Gill is a student of the oddities of the human animal. In the book at hand, he examines forty-five individuals of a subspecies, easy to identify but remarkable in its variations, that makes up what some call the culturocracy and others the sociocracy of the city of New York. They troop through these pages as unaware of observation as wild hogs in a PBS nature show. Brendan Gill is an old hand with the zoom lens.
I know exactly where to store this book on my shelf. It will stand between the Bible and Pepys' Diary, and the category will be Gossip. Brendan Gill has been writing for more than fifty years for the New Yorker, that most sophisticated and antic of reviews. He is today a veritable reincarnation of the legendary Eustace Tilley, whose lorgnetted likeness annually graces the cover of the magazine. Eustace Tilley is the patron saint of gentlemen gossips. This book would have melted in his mouth.
Man is the gossiping animal. Fish swim; birds fly; men, women, and children gossip. The third chapter of Genesis reports that Jehovah drove Adam and Eve from Eden for eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge; surely someone, probably the serpent, had gossiped into the Lord's ear. The descendants of Adam and Eve have gone on gossiping about that expulsion ever since. What in the world, we ask, could the pair possibly have done to merit such punishment?
The word gossip itself originated in heaven. It first meant "a relative of God - His emissary to mankind." Sponsors at baptism, today called godparents, were known as gossips half a thousand years ago.
Gossip sets you and me apart from the beasts of the field far more conclusively than does the monstrous size of our brains, the uprightness of our posture, or the opposition of our thumbs to our forefingers. It dooms us to explore whatever comes to our attention even if it is none of our business. We poke our noses into the private affairs of atoms and come up with physics; or of words, and come up with poetry. We spy on ants and grasshoppers and draw ethical conclusions. Gossip sets us high challenges to meet and noble precedents to follow. It will one day lead us to the stars - if it does not kill us first.
Until that day, it is going to stay around. The constitutional right to privacy we hear so much about these days will meet its match if it ever comes up against the right to listen to tales told out of school.
A New York Life ranges at pleasure between low and high gossip - Brendan Behan's incorrigible drunkenness, as against Ellen Stewart's selfless mothering of aspiring
...
Read Full Article
|
|
