In defense of Janet Malcolm (Part II)

Dan Rottenberg's explanation of why he considers the New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm "a ditz" is thoughtful and heartfelt. (Click here.) But, call me a "groupie" if you will (and Dan did), I remain her devoted admirer.

I'm a style junkie. Show me an original, compelling, well-constructed voice, like Malcolm's, and I will tolerate content that rankles others. (On the other hand, place before me unconsidered, turgid, lazy prose, and I don't care how significant the content; someone will have to explain it to me later.)

A favorite professor used to liken excellence in writing to conscious artistry, applying words to paper as painters apply pigment to canvas or composers notes to scores. That's how I regard Malcolm.

From Medea to Francis Bacon

Her word choice and placement and paragraph structure achieve a rhythm and tone whose simplicity and grandeur I like to ponder the way others contemplate a Rothko oil. I like the sharpness of the ideas that bristle through her prose and the variety of allusions and sources with which she enriches it: Medea to Francis Bacon, Count Dracula to Joe Gould, Roth's The Counterlife to Hervey Cleckey's "quaint and rather mad" (what a phrase!) Mask of Sanity.

As for Malcolm's content, I have an interest in most of her topics— writing and the law, in particular— without pre-existing, profound knowledge of any of the corners she elects to explore, leaving me receptive to hearing more about them. Malcolm's views on matters— like the nature of truth, the relationship of writers to subjects and the narratives trial attorneys construct— focus and expand my own thinking.

I thoroughly enjoy Malcolm's tracking how her books come into being, through descriptions of her encounters with the people she interviews. I envy her ability to characterize them through descriptions of their rooms and renderings of their speech. And, I confess, the sadist within me delights at the way Malcolm skewers those in her disfavor.

By now, Malcolm has built up such reserve of good will in me that I eagerly await her every publication and defend her from all disparagement. Of course, I also felt the same of Bob Dylan, and then he went and found Jesus on me.

Tolstoy's exaggeration

Dan faults Malcolm because, after beginning The Journalist and the Murderer with the assertion that "Every journalist... knows that what he does is morally indefensible," she fails to reflect upon what is a journalist's role. I treat Malcolm's admittedly over-reaching salvo more like Tolstoy's opening assertion, "All happy families are alike..." or Tom Wolfe's "That's good thinking there, Cool Breeze."

Are happy families truly similar? Did Mr. Breeze overlook certain possibilities? Do we shut Tolstoy or Wolfe because of these potential exaggerations? Of course not.

As Dan himself recognizes, Malcolm's lead "brilliantly seizes your attention." From there, didn't you find yourself pulled into the thrust of her narrative, bouncing thoughts against its revelations, whether accepting or rejecting her proposition, modifying perceptions in the process, recognizing that not every must to lead with the five Ws?

Duping a murderer

Of Malcolm's 11 books, Dan Rottenberg chose only to discuss The Journalist and the Murderer. This work deals with a fraud/breach of contract lawsuit brought by a convicted triple murderer, Jeffrey MacDonald, against Joe McGinnis, a best selling author. MacDonald alleged that McGinnis had claimed to believe in his innocence to dupe him into cooperating in the writing of a book that, upon completion, declared him a psychopathic killer. After five of six jurors voted in MacDonald's favor, a settlement paid him $325,000.

(Rottenberg posits that McGinnis may have changed his mind about MacDonald's innocence during the four years he worked on the book. But McGinnis is quoted as having said that he concluded MacDonald was guilty during the criminal trial. If so, he kept this to himself, while asserting and acting as if he believed the opposite for those years, seemingly to ensure MacDonald's continued cooperation.)

Malcolm uses the suit to discuss ethical questions that arise from the peculiar relationships that develop between writers and those about whom they write. (She was not talking about newspaper reporters— though they might benefit from her discussion— but writers of "long works of nonfiction.")

Seducing the subject

Her focus is the conflict that arises when the story the subject wishes to have told differs from that the journalist intends to write. She discusses the subject's wish to seduce the journalist to his point of view and the journalist's wish to seduce the subject into continued revelations. She notes the subject's need to hold the journalist's attention long enough to convince him of his cause, and the journalist's need to elicit from the subject enough to transform him into someone interesting enough to make readers keep turning the page.

She reflects upon the guilt pangs that follow the journalist when he returns from the often-jovial interactions with someone for whom he feels "affection" to his solitary room and the desk at which he must execute his subject. She addresses the burden that arises from weighing the subject's feelings against the text's needs. (She even admits to sometimes sacrificing the latter to spare the former herself.)

But Malcolm's basic question is the propriety of journalists lying to obtain a story. Is there a difference between what Joseph Wambaugh, one of McGinnis's witnesses, termed "an untruth," which is told in order to "get at the actual truth," and a lie, which is "told with ill will or bad faith"?

Rottenberg seems to find this distinction persuasive, for he faults Malcolm for failing to recognize that a journalist's responsibility is to his readers, not his subject. (That was McGinniss's defense: "My only obligation was to the truth.")

Hacking computers

I agree that this is a responsibility. But does it justify journalists hacking into computers, rifling through garbage cans, tapping telephones, printing classified documents and burglarizing psychiatrists' files?

As Gary Bostwick, MacDonald's civil attorney, told the jury: "We cannot do whatever is necessary. We have to do what is right." And as Malcolm concluded: "There is an infinite variety of ways in which journalists struggle with the impasse that is the subject of this book. The wisest know that the best they can do— and most practitioners easily avoid the crude and gratuitous two-facedness of the MacDonald-McGinnis case— is still not good enough. The not so wise...choose to believe that there is no problem and that they have solved it."