The Wit’s Guide to Jealousy

Or, obsessively inaccurate details

Flirtation and Jealousy, Roman Osteria by Wenzel Tornoe. Oh, how I hate him!

Can anything good come from staring directly into the green eyes of jealousy? Patricia Highsmith, the creator of the deeply covetous psychopath Tom Ripley and thus the high priestess of literary jealousy, thought not. As she wrote in her diary:

“Jealousy never inspired a poet to write a good poem, or a painter to paint a good picture. I feel myself strangely free of it. I progress rapidly from suspicion (if confirmed) to hatred, whereupon I drop the subject.”
— Patricia Highsmith

A quick leap to hatred may be further than most of us can jump. Jealousy is more likely to fester, and happily for our purposes, ferment into something interesting. But first, let’s define the term:

“Envy concerns what you would like to have but don’t possess, whereas jealousy concerns what you have and do not wish to lose.”
— Peter van Sommers (though also Homer Simpson)  

The most jealous people, then, are those who doubt their grasp on what they have. And what’s more slippery to hold onto than literary fame? It isn’t even measured in a quantifiable currency, as any author will tell you that only trash tops the bestseller list. All you have is the ephemeral respect of a hypothetical public that doesn’t have time to read anyway. (Unless it’s Colleen Hoover; they always make time for her!)

“Jealousy is no more than feeling alone among smiling enemies.”
— Elizabeth Bowen

In a 1961 Vogue essay with the irresistible but unanswered title “Jealousy: Is It A Curable Disease?,” Joan Didion observed the “dreary stream of forlorn women … stammering the same great tale: Her name was Sally, the first one, she was nothing, he met her at a motel outside Salinas, you know the one, on the San Luis road, the one with the swan on the sign. (That passion for the documentation of irrelevant detail is characteristic of the afflicted.)”

“The knives of jealousy are honed on details.”
— Ruth Rendell

And who better to document details than a novelist? “Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone,” Mark Twain said of Jane Austen, tacitly admitting to rereading her. But what more would you expect of “a hack writer who would have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tried out a few of the old proven ‘sure-fire’ literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy,” as William Faulkner said exactingly of Twain. 

“Chill the champagne and polish the crystal goblets!
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am glad.”
— Clive James

Jealousy, argued critic Parul Sehgal in a TED talk, makes us all amateur novelists. “When we feel jealous, we tell ourselves a story about other people’s lives,” she explained. It trains us to look with “intensity and not accuracy,” and thus helps us make up all sorts of wacky stuff. Marcel Proust? So jelly he could be spread on toast.

“Even the most reclusive of cave monks will have the desire to be known the world over as the most reclusive of cave monks.”
— Bruce Wagner

And pretending you’re not jealous, Highsmith style, probably just means you’re probably harboring deeper delusions. “I’ve never really experienced jealousy,” Amelia Tait recently explained in an amusing New Statesman essay, “because I’ve always thought of myself as the greatest person who ever lived.” If reality doesn’t match that view, it’s just a matter of time: “Tomorrow will be the day that people run down the street to ask breathless questions about my opinions and burst into applause wherever I go.” Just one more sleep!

“To jealousy, nothing is more frightful than laughter.”
— Francoise Sagan

I admire McKinley Valentine’s excellent newsletter The Whippet, but am I jealous of her? Well, maybe of this perfect throwaway line about how if Mark Rothko had been completely honest in his title, his abstract painting No. 14 would be called “My enemies, who have always despised me, lie crushed beneath the weight of their own jealousy.”

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Your Weekly ReccoMention!

Like McKinley Valentine’s The Whippet — did I mention how good it is? — I take great pains to avoid the news in this space each week. She launched her newsletter in 2017 as a way to avoid the Trump-Brexit media sinkhole by sharing “intellectually engaging stuff, just not repetitive and depressing.” But occasionally, as with this week’s ReccoMention (a weekly critical pick available to my wonderful paid subscribers), events have a way of wittily intruding. 

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Your Monthly Riposte Card!

Here’s Isaac King’s broody doodle, the Official Riposte Card of February. Your hand would sweat too if it had teeth! His composition is rich with Steinberg trademarks and his personal and professional obsessions, and the result is a delight. My Founding Subscribers should have already received three (3) blank pressings of the above 10.16 cm x 15.24 cm artwork it in the mail, and you too can join them! For a mere C$80/year, you get twelve (12) original artworks mailed to you and help me commission wonderful people to illustrate great lines. 

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Quote Vote

“I look very beautiful in the dresses and you will perhaps feel a tiny twinge of jealousy when you gaze upon me, but the artist in you will be so delighted at the sight of such a perfect union of clothes and woman that you will stifle your jealousy at once and rejoice with me.”
— Zora Neale Hurston

Thank you once again for rejoicing with me this week. By the time we meet again, we’ll be more than halfway through February. And we’ll be ruminating on whichever of the following subjects you choose.

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Get Wit Quick No. 240 looks back upon GWQ No. 41 with admiration. How did that particular issue make the top of the most popular list? What does it have that I don’t? Ah well, tomorrow will be different! Everyone will discover my book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting and they will fall over each other in the rush to tap the ❤️ below. So long No. 41! Enjoy the plummet to obscurity!