In defense of Janet Malcolm (Part i)

In his recent quartering of the film critic David Denby, BSR's Dan Rottenberg took a gratuitous swipe at another New Yorker writer, Janet Malcolm. (Click here.) Rottenberg's swipe leveled two charges. First, Malcolm is "incurably ditzy"; and second, her articles "usually wind up reflecting more on her than on her subjects."

Ditziness is a term usually associated with "wacky," "dizzy," "fuzzy-headed" (usually) women "“ think Katherine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby "“ and as such is a difficult accusation to rebut. But a look at the topics Malcolm has tackled should cast reasonable doubt about its applicability in her case. One can hardly imagine Hepburn's "Susan Vance" producing works on photography, psychoanalysis, Anton Chekhov, Milan Kundera, Sylvia Plath, Gertrude Stein, the New York art scene, and the American criminal justice system.

Rottenberg and various other detractors notwithstanding, Malcolm has been widely acclaimed as, among other things, "a virtuoso stylist and a subtle exciting thinker" (Salon); "among the most intellectually provocative of authors" (Boston Globe); "the most morally illuminating literary journalist in the country" (Slate); and "completely brilliant" (London Times).

"'Morally indefensible'

But Malcolm antagonized many journalists with her book, The Journalist and the Murderer, an account of how Jeffrey MacDonald, a Green Beret physician convicted of murdering his wife and two daughters, was allegedly duped by the author Joe McGinnis into co-operating in the writing of the bestseller Fatal Vision by falsely claiming to believe in the doctor's innocence. That book famously began: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible."

Malcolm added to her class of offendees in her book on Sylvia Plath, The Silent Woman, when she likened biographers to "burglar(s) breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers... and bearing (their) loot away." (If that was not enough, she went on to accuse them of practicing "voyeurism and busybodyism" in order to produce badly written tomes that read like "listening to backstairs gossip and reading other people's mail.")

Malcolm has spoken openly about the "timorousness" of journalists, their "aggression and malice" and their "rascality." In her most recent book, Iphigenia in Forest Hills, she broke one of her craft's cardinal rules, involving herself in her story to an unprecedented extent (even for Malcolm). Having interviewed a key prosecution witness in the trial of Mazeltov Borukhova, a physician from Uzbekistan and an Orthodox Jew of the off-beat Bukharan persuasion, who had been accused of murdering her husband, and heard this witness reveal himself as delusional, paranoid, and, quite likely, "nuts," Malcolm passed this information to Borukova's attorney in the hope of discrediting the witness's testimony.

Malcolm sympathized with the defendant, confiding to Katie Roiphe in a Paris Review interview, that, if a member of the jury, she would have voted "not guilty."

Truth as Silly Putty

Why, then, do I readily forgive this unconventional journalist and eagerly await her every new work? From my perspective, Malcolm's work has been shaped by her uniquely acute awareness of the malleability of narrative and the Silly Putty quality to "truth." (It stretches; it snaps; it sags; it bounces high; it picks up coloration easily; and, when heated, it emits offensive fumes.)

All words, she suggests, serve the purpose of the person who utters them. They fail the standards set by God or Plato or Anthony Scalia.

Journalists seek to win the trust of people they interview to adduce from them quotes that will support the story the journalist wishes to tell, not the story the speaker hopes to seduce the journalist into printing. Attorneys garb their witnesses and guide their declamations to advance the version of events they wish twelve-men-tried-and-true to believe. Biographers scour discarded drafts, once-locked diaries, and the recollections of offended relatives, cast aside friends, and discarded lovers for the nuggets that will attract, like a hooker's red leather mini, attention and shoppers.

Laying herself out

Malcolm's response to this realization has been to lay her beliefs about narrative and truth directly on the page. She recognizes that as a journalist whose work is lengthy, exhaustively researched and designed for sustained reading and reflection, she is similar to an expert testifying in court. Each has a point of view to sell, though the journalist isn't expected to favor the line advanced by the side paying her bill.

And just as all forensic experts must expose their credentials so their testimony's strength can be weighed and their biases measured, so an honest journalist will reveal to her readers where she is coming from. The "self" Malcolm bares is a step toward meeting this end.

(Malcolm once wrote that, in journalism, "The "'I' character is almost pure invention," but more recently she told Katie Roiphe of Paris Review that she now believes that "there is no such thing as a dispassionate observer... every narrator is infected by the narrator's bias." When she writes about "Janet Malcolm," she is also writing about her subject, since this "subject" is what this "Malcolm" created.)

The pose of objectivity

Malcolm says she believes that writers have the obligation to probe and the duty to judge. She researches extensively. (One subject of a New Yorker profile says Malcolm interviewed her weekly for a year and a half.)

If one gains such extensive knowledge and the insights that follow it, the quality of Malcolm's work asks, why should one not share it? And why should the conclusions the author has drawn be masked by a pose of objectivity, the "neutral" tone, the "balanced" points-of-view, while the author's viewpoint is subtly revealed by the details and quotes selected for recording, the placement of paragraphs, the last words allowed?

As befits a writer with the temerity to judge Chekhov and Stein, Kundera and Plath, Malcolm has imposed high standards upon herself. She reaches to render characters akin to those of the great figures in literature (as Robert Boynton of New York University has observed). She plumbs them to the depths of their drives and desires and presses these against the walls of their times and worlds.

She loves the ephemeral dance of ideas and the exposure of the idiocy of certain of their concretized realizations. She honors those of excellence and good heart and condemns the foolish and mean.

That is the macro view. In my view, in the micro of Malcolm's word-by-word, sentence-after-sentence construction, she achieves a perfection of pitch and cadence and needle-in-the-eye-and/or-ear excellence, that makes me— impaled through the heart by my own literary limitations— continually drop the page to whisper, worshipfully, "Wow."
To read Bob Levin's follow-up, click here.