Posted by author Bill Peschel
I can’t help it. I love gossip. That’s why I wrote Writers Gone Wild: The Feuds, Frolics, and Follies of Literature’s Great Adventurers, Drunkards, Lovers, Iconoclasts and Misanthropes.
But gossip gets a bad rap. The Talmud warns wise men against gossiping, not even with their wives. George Eliot called gossip “a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it.” Erica Jong has her heroine, Isadora Wing, call it “the opiate of the oppressed” in “Fear of Flying.”
But at the core of its rapidly beating heart, what is gossip but stories? We love to tell stories. We’re social creatures. We want to gather in groups and talk. Those who don’t get cabin fever, move to the woods, and either write dull tracts or build bombs.
We’re better off together, where we can keep an eye on each other.
And if the stories are really good, is it fair to expect us to keep it to ourselves?
Take this story: you’re at a dinner party with a Notable Guest, someone respected and well-known.
A young man walks in, sees the NG, drops to one knee before him and kisses his hand.
During the dinner, the guest calls out to the NG "How does it feel to be a great genius, sir?" and "I am so excited at seeing you, sir, that I could weep." At the end of the evening, the guest climbs out the window and threatens to jump unless the NG’s wife said she loved him.
Great story, right? It’s even better when you’re told that the Notable Guest was James Joyce, and the young man was F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Now it’s not gossip anymore. It’s literary history.
Those are the stories that drew me to writing Writers Gone Wild. The fights, like the one-punch knockdown between recent Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The dramatic debuts of iconoclastic works, such as the performance of “Howl” that launched Allen Ginsberg’s career (brilliantly recreated by James Franco in the recent biopic). The interest Franz Kafka showed in pornography, which leads one to wonder what else is in that stash of manuscripts that was the subject of a recent court fight in Israel.
Even Jong couldn’t resist the lure of gossiping. In one memoir, she revealed how an eminent, unnamed “lizard” New York publisher seduced her with the help of a first edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
These are the stories ─ all of them are in the book, of course ─ that define the writers’ character, strengths and their weaknesses. They show the sources of their inspiration. They’re cautionary tales. In Writers Gone Wild, I wanted to show how they struggled, what they valued and what they rejected.
I wanted you to see them as human beings, warts and all, because it contrasts so well with what they accomplished on the page from the wellsprings of their imagination and creativity.
But also, because it’s great gossip.
Writers Gone Wild will be available November 2.
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