news": she discovered that his friend Nezhdanov is in love with Marianna, her niece and the object of her brother's love, and that Marianna, moreover, is in love with Nezhdanov. "She was not repeating gossip," Turgenev recounts Valentina Mihalovna adding, "but had seen it all with her own eyes and heard it with her own ears. Markelova's [her brother's] face grew dark as night." What Valentina Mihalovna writes to her brother is factually true; and it is true, too, that she really did witness what she reports. Does the truth factor, then, justify Valentina Mihalovna's claim that she is not indulging in gossip?
Is truth a defense in gossip as it is in libel cases in the United States? If one is telling something that, though it has all the other components of gossip, is true, does it cease to be gossip and instead become that more dignified phenomenon, information? Things would be much less complicated if it were, but it isn't. Just because something is true does not indemnify the person who passes it along from the charge of gossiping; just because it is true doesn't mean it isn't also gossip. In gossip, intent counts for a great dealâsometimes for everything.
In the example from Turgenev's novel, Valentina Mihalovna dislikes her niece Marianna and has not had her own usual success in charming Nezhdanov, her son's tutor. She is, strictly speaking, telling the truth, but she obviously takes much more pleasure in the truth she has to tell than simply passing along information normally brings: by telling her brother this sad news, she is also diminishing in his eyes his friend Nezhdanov and the woman he loves, thus scoring points off both. Valentina Mihalovna is, in a game she is entirely aware of, happily throwing the darts of gossip. Malice here is aforethought and brings her genuine pleasure; and it is this mixture of malice and the pleasure she takes in it that is behind the gossip she brings her brother. Pure gossip it is, malevolent division.
When Tina Brown's book about Princess Diana,
The Diana Chronicles,
was published in 2007 more than one reviewer mentioned the romance novelist Barbara Cartland's speculation, reported in Brown's book, on the breakup of Diana's marriage to Prince Charles: "Of course," Miss Cartland said, "you know where it all went wrong. She [Diana] wouldn't do oral sex." The old admirable English reticence is apparently done for; in England fellatio, or the absence thereof, is being spoken about openly, and by the upper classes. But more to the point, is what Barbara Cartland reported true?
What led her to this gaudy speculation? One possible motive is that she wasn't invited to Diana and Charles's wedding, because, Tina Brown recounts, she and her daughter Raine were deemed too garish for so grand an event. But motive aside, how could Cartland know whereof she spoke? Might Princess Diana have told her about this little problem she had? Might, much less likely, the Prince of Wales have lodged a complaint with her about his wife, or in her presence? Might it have been someone whom one or the other told and who subsequently told Cartland, who then told Brown? (The notes on sources in
The Diana Chronicles
do not help on this point.) Might Barbara Cartland, the author of more than seven hundred novels of the sort known as bodice rippers, and hence a woman not without sexual imagination, have made it up? Whatever the case, as a gossipologist one has to admire the aesthetic perfection of the item itself, suggesting as it does a certain girlish squeamishness in the young princess, a brutishness in her older husband.
The item has everything, featuring as it does the Prince and Princess of Wales, two of the most prominent face cards in Europe. Terribly intimate it is, too, about as intimate as gossip can get. Does it have the feeling of plausibility? A sophisticated woman I mentioned it to said she doubted it. "Diana was a very modern girl," she added. But it is a bit of gossip that does not admit of
Is truth a defense in gossip as it is in libel cases in the United States? If one is telling something that, though it has all the other components of gossip, is true, does it cease to be gossip and instead become that more dignified phenomenon, information? Things would be much less complicated if it were, but it isn't. Just because something is true does not indemnify the person who passes it along from the charge of gossiping; just because it is true doesn't mean it isn't also gossip. In gossip, intent counts for a great dealâsometimes for everything.
In the example from Turgenev's novel, Valentina Mihalovna dislikes her niece Marianna and has not had her own usual success in charming Nezhdanov, her son's tutor. She is, strictly speaking, telling the truth, but she obviously takes much more pleasure in the truth she has to tell than simply passing along information normally brings: by telling her brother this sad news, she is also diminishing in his eyes his friend Nezhdanov and the woman he loves, thus scoring points off both. Valentina Mihalovna is, in a game she is entirely aware of, happily throwing the darts of gossip. Malice here is aforethought and brings her genuine pleasure; and it is this mixture of malice and the pleasure she takes in it that is behind the gossip she brings her brother. Pure gossip it is, malevolent division.
When Tina Brown's book about Princess Diana,
The Diana Chronicles,
was published in 2007 more than one reviewer mentioned the romance novelist Barbara Cartland's speculation, reported in Brown's book, on the breakup of Diana's marriage to Prince Charles: "Of course," Miss Cartland said, "you know where it all went wrong. She [Diana] wouldn't do oral sex." The old admirable English reticence is apparently done for; in England fellatio, or the absence thereof, is being spoken about openly, and by the upper classes. But more to the point, is what Barbara Cartland reported true?
What led her to this gaudy speculation? One possible motive is that she wasn't invited to Diana and Charles's wedding, because, Tina Brown recounts, she and her daughter Raine were deemed too garish for so grand an event. But motive aside, how could Cartland know whereof she spoke? Might Princess Diana have told her about this little problem she had? Might, much less likely, the Prince of Wales have lodged a complaint with her about his wife, or in her presence? Might it have been someone whom one or the other told and who subsequently told Cartland, who then told Brown? (The notes on sources in
The Diana Chronicles
do not help on this point.) Might Barbara Cartland, the author of more than seven hundred novels of the sort known as bodice rippers, and hence a woman not without sexual imagination, have made it up? Whatever the case, as a gossipologist one has to admire the aesthetic perfection of the item itself, suggesting as it does a certain girlish squeamishness in the young princess, a brutishness in her older husband.
The item has everything, featuring as it does the Prince and Princess of Wales, two of the most prominent face cards in Europe. Terribly intimate it is, too, about as intimate as gossip can get. Does it have the feeling of plausibility? A sophisticated woman I mentioned it to said she doubted it. "Diana was a very modern girl," she added. But it is a bit of gossip that does not admit of
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