Why does Christopher Hitchens care that Hemingway cares about Fitzgerald’s monty?

In his review of A Moveable Feast in this month’s Atlantic, Christopher Hitchens discusses the size of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s penis, Ernest Hemingway’s interest in that object, Gertrude Stein’s experience of something suggestive of anal sex, and the “secret” acts Hemingway enjoyed with his wife Hadley. Then he writes,
What is it exactly that explains the continued fascination of this rather slight book? Obviously, it is an ur-text of the American enthrallment with Paris.
Unless “Paris” is a new euphemism for sodomy, Hitchens’s review undermines his claim. Sure, Feast fascinates in part because Paris turns in a star performance in a supporting role, but Paris doesn’t star in Hitchens’s piece—gossip does.
And surely gossip explains some of the fascination with the book. A Moveable Feast is a book that gossips, especially in the new version, which restores passages considerately excised by Hemingway’s third wife, Mary.
In his review, Hitchens does what we all do when we gossip: he sweeps his own act of gossip under the rug. Hemingway gossips about Fitzgerald’s equipment, Hitchens argues, because “undue or conspicuous anxiety about such matters has been known to furnish a clue about the author himself.” Okay. So if Hemingway wrote about Fitzgerald’s manhood because he was worried about his own, why did Hitchens write about Hemingway’s?
Sorry, Christopher, but it’s your own argument, and it says something right about the human animal:
We are the species that gossips, and we do it out of anxiety, insecurity, fear. We gossip to bolster our lonely, anxious selves by forming alliances with lonely, anxious others through the persecution of some unfortunate outcast, until we have clearly established that the outsider is more lonely and anxious than the members of our little special group. It makes the anxiety go away, and it feels great! For everyone but the outcast.
Because it feels great to gossip, and because nearly everyone does it, gossip has many apologists. It also has many victims, and many of its apologists have been its victims. Some devote boundless, desperate energy to cultivating an advantage in the circulation of gossip, to be always an insider pointing out and never the pitiable outsider. You know who you are.
That utterly wasted energy, which might be spent writing, is the least of the harms gossip does to literature. Here’s an example of another:
Simone’s Derriere
Chicago recently celebrated the centennial of the birth of hometown writer Nelson Algren, who had a storied affair with Simone de Beauvoir while she was married to Jean-Paul Sartre. A Columbia College panel on Algren featured his friend Art Shay, a Life magazine photographer who captured hundreds of phlegmatic portraits of the author in melancholic pool halls, card rooms, and Chicago streets.
Asked which of those photographs of Algren he favored, Shay mentioned one that doesn’t depict Algren at all: a famous picture of Simone de Beauvoir, shot from behind, standing nude before a bathroom mirror.
“I think it was that shot of Simone de Beauvoir’s derriere,” Shay said. “After all, it was a place Algren knew well.”
The audience laughed.
“And so did a lot of other people,” Shay added.
The audience gasped.
A more high-brow commemoration was held a few weeks later at the Steppenwolf Theater. It featured Don DeLillo, Russell Banks, and Willem Dafoe. It included more chatter about Simone de Beauvoir, which Chicago Tribune critic Chris Jones summarized in this phrase: “endlessly repeatable puncturing of the pretensions of de Bouvoir and all those who had it easier in some other town.” And yes, that’s how he spelled her name. Perhaps he was thinking of the word boudoir?
After she published The Second Sex in 1949, Beauvoir was scorned and outcast in Paris, a sentence executed largely through gossip. She was a pioneer of women’s rights who certainly never had it easier in any other town.
She also wrote stunning portraits of Chicago that rival anything composed by Algren. Even though it’s now a thing to be a Chicago writer, and Chicago literature is now a thing to study, no one has noticed Beauvoir’s contribution. Chicago has been focused, like Shay’s lens, on her derriere.
Clearly, gossip is not the sole perpetrator, but is a tool of sexism—probably a larger tool than the one wielded by Fitzgerald.
So that’s what gossip does to established writers, and here’s how it affects beginners:
False Friends
Aspiring writers tend to form cliques to support each other, and such cliques may be necessary. Creative writing workshops emulate them, to some extent, but successful workshops operate professionally, not socially, meaning they cohere around a set of standards instead of following the process by which human groups normally form: by setting themselves off from some unfortunate outcast.
Human groups persecute outcasts initially through gossip but occasionally through more vile acts. That’s why, when Slavoj Zizek refers to the outcast that allows a society to cohere, he uses the abstract term, “the Jew.”
But the outcast isn’t the only victim of the clique of writers. Members of the clique suffer harm when social values supplant literary ones. Work may be valued not primarily on its merits, but because its author is popular or socially adept or a lethal gossip. This matters not a wit to the canon, for time has the final say on literature, but false values can hinder a young writer’s development.
Essentially, you can’t trust what your clique says about your work unless your clique contains extraordinarily talented (but not necessarily throbbing) members, like Fitzgerald, Stein, and Hemingway.
Christopher Hitchens’s review in The Atlantic of the restored edition of “A Moveable Feast.”
Chris Jones’s Chicago Tribune review of the Algren celebration at Steppenwolf, spelling errors still intact.
A sample of Beauvoir’s Chicago writing can be found in the third section of this story I wrote for Newcity Magazine.