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Shake the Hands That Shook the Hand of Brendan Gill
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17134 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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12 / 1990 |
1,456 Words |
| Author
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Willard R. Espy
Willard R. Espy is the author of the highly praised family
memoir Oysterville: Roads to Grandpa's Village. His fourteen
other books celebrate the pleasures of language. They include
An Almanac of Words at Play, Words to Rhyme With, and most
recently, The Word's Gotten Out. He lives in New York City and
in Oysterville, Washington. |
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
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