Articles: Good Gossip

It’s official (sorta).
Juicy gossip is good for you, says a recent study at Harvard. Robert Frost would grumble in his gravely voice that he told us so long ago. Certainly in his case it made for some darn good (occasionally juicy) Yankee poetry.

Versailles-grade gossip.
Many years ago as a grad assistant it fell to me to read, arrange and roughly rate from PG to R to X a huge trove of letters between two other prominent poets of Frost’s generation. These letters had been safely stashed in a family drawer for decades until all lampooned and otherwise offended parties were dead. Versailles-grade gossip, let me tell you, buttered on with all the verbal dexterity of two world-class poet-grouches.

To injury,add fun.
Adding to the devilish fun these two guys where having poking into others’ intimate foibles and public pretensions was a parallel impulse to embellish their words with a profusion of pictorial hijinks, caricatures, doodles in the margins and just about every clunky graphic pretzel and romp a (hardly agile) typewriter could be induced to bend to. Typeovers, floral onomatopoeias, whole paragraphs merrily woodpeckered into being with just one letter as if anything proper, proper syntax, spelling, punctuation, were inadequate to convey human folly in all its wonderful richness.

Scribe Robert Crumb.
Of course, medieval scribes did no less. As scribe Pietrus is writing the word Whosoever somewhere in the gospel of St Mark, the ornate capital W morphs into a detested abbot’s bare bottom. When Lynne and I were in Florence several years ago we attended an exhibition (a voluptuous exhibition) of medieval manuscripts from the Medici collection and both of us marveled at the wacky and even salacious humor of those scribes. Robert Crumb has nothing on them.

Joy to the world (of paper).
Some fat-free gossip never hurt. But of greater interest here is the roguish and rule-disregarding sense of play we sometimes feel in the presence of a page of paper. Not just the urge to misspell, scribble, exaggerate, cross out, but to add some suitable adornment, a little graphic jewelry. Or a lot. I often sat, in graduate school, beside a guy who never took down more than four or five words from a lecture, but who, in the course of an hour or two, spidered over every inch of that page the most outlandish and baroque doodles. His mad pen never stopped once. Joy to that slight madness made when pen (or typewriter) touches paper!