The journalist Janet Malcolm had a low opinion of biography: ‘The narratives called biographies pale and shrink in the face of the disorderly actuality that is a life.’ Her archival notes describe biography as ‘a gap’: ‘What people think to themselves and never write down is what their lives are about.’ In her study of Anton Chekhov, she confirms ‘the inviolability of the private life’. She compared biographers to professional burglars ‘breaking into a house’. The ‘voyeurism’, shared by writer and reader, is screened by ‘an apparatus of scholarship designed to give the enterprise an appearance of banklike blandness and solidity. The biographer is portrayed almost as a kind of benefactor.’
Her denunciation of biography and its inherently transgressive methods goes on for almost a page in her biographical study of Sylvia Plath, The Silent Woman. She identifies, unsparingly, biography as a collusion between writer and reader ‘in an excitingly forbidden undertaking: tiptoeing down the corridor together to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the keyhole’.
She didn’t think much of autobiography either. She gave up on her own, finding it ‘autistic’ in its indiscriminate fascination with banal memories, ‘its passion for the tedious’. Still Pictures, published post-humously, concentrates instead on annotating a selection of photographs – oblique autobiography. Which provides Eve Sneider with her juiciest morsel, a brisk account of Malcolm’s infidelity with Gardner Botsford, her New Yorker editor and eventually her second husband. We know their trysts took place in a rented one-room apartment in the West Fifties. It was, she wrote, ‘the turgid American cheating-on-your-spouse-and-feeling-awful-about-it-kind-of-thing’.
Otherwise, the thrust of Sneider’s biography is that Malcolm’s writing will inevitably disclose her self. As a child she went to the movies assiduously and made dolls’ houses out of orange crates. We learn ‘she had a garden to tend to, a young granddaughter to dote on, health issues to contend with. Her mother died. She had a string of beloved cats’. Malcolm was ‘extremely attentive to her plants’. Slim pickings.
Sneider’s strategy is pre-empted by Malcolm’s explicit denial in her afterword to The Journalist and the Murderer: ‘Some readers were nevertheless able to think of the present book as being veiled autobiography.’ What can we really know of Malcolm? I recently saw James Graham’s play about Maynard Keynes, The Standard of Living. Rory Kinnear gave an accomplished, plausible version of Keynes. He was, however, upstaged towards the end by a large projected photograph of Keynes’s face, from which it was clear that you can’t act intelligence. Super-intelligence can’t be impersonated. What is available to students of Malcolm is her unique, various, dispassionate, subtle, forthright mind as we find it in her writing. Not the elusive ‘personal’ stuff, not what W.B. Yeats called ‘the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast’. Rather, the original mind in action. A mind inflected by psychoanalysis – which is different from just an interest in psychoanalysis.
A few examples – none discussed by Sneider in her account, which is worthy and restrained, if tinged with desperation. In her review of Ann Thwaite’s biography of Edmund Gosse, Malcolm refers to a review of Gosse’s error-strewn From Shakespeare to Pope: An Enquiry into the Causes and Phenomena of the Rise of Classical Poetry in England. It was written anonymously by John Churton Collins, a former friend of Gosse and an unjustly overlooked figure. Henry James subsequently referred to Gosse’s ‘genius for inaccuracy’, but Gosse remained curiously unscathed. The literary world, after the initial pile-on, rallied around Gosse. He carefully preserved letters of support from, among many, James himself, Swinburne, Tennyson, Browning and Hardy – ‘an authoritative primer on how to write comforting bullshit on demand’.
Now for the shrewd Malcolm contribution to Thwaite’s account. Why, she asks, did Gosse make all these errors? Fact-checkers, she argues, imply that inaccuracy is common: ‘To quote a passage from a text and get every word right seems utterly beyond the capacity of all but the most nuttily obsessive among us.’ And she cites Thwaite’s five errors of transcription from a Gosse letter that Malcolm had a holograph copy of – ‘most of them trivial, but one rather serious (she skips several pages and creates a sentence Gosse never wrote), and another that ruins Gosse’s grammar’. Malcolm’s characteristic vernacular (‘bullshit’, ‘nuttily’) sanitises her exacting scholarship and makes its one-upmanship casual: ‘I happen to have a copy…’
Her final contribution is fascinating, provocative, original and owes everything to psychoanalysis: ‘It is as if we all need in some way to take possession of whatever passes through our hands, to leave our mark, to show that we have been there. What may look like mere sloppiness is in (unconscious) fact a studied assertion of personality.’ Shrink-rap.
Janet Malcolm gave up on her autobiography, finding it ‘autistic’ in its fascination with banal memories
Her attitude to psychoanalysis was various and nimble. She was interested but never its slave. In her essay on Freud’s case study ‘Dora’, she goes through the psychoanalytic hoops respectfully and meticulously before launching an Exocet: ‘Freud fools us into believing that we are in the face of unmediated reality.’ Commentators refer to the external facts ‘as if such “facts” could be looked up in some archive. But there is no archive. Everything we know about Dora and her father and the K.s is what Freud has chosen to tell us.’ The narrative is rigged. As it is in Freud’s Psychopathology of Everyday Life. There are no documents.
‘The Purloined Clinic’ is a review essay of a book by Michael Fried about the painter Thomas Eakins and the writer Stephen Crane. There Malcolm floats the idea that Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’, 40 years before Freud, is a quintessential allegory of psychoanalytical therapy (and literary deconstruction). In the story, the protagonist hides a letter by throwing it on his cluttered desk-top. It is hidden in plain sight. It’s like the end of Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Conversation: the Paris police twice ransack the house, removing floorboards, testing hollow table legs – and find nothing.
Why is this a figure for psychoanalysis? Malcolm doesn’t spell it out. She asserts it only, perhaps believing it to be self-explanatory. The talking cure is a long process, an extended sifting, an epic of recollection – everything on the desktop, as it were, or almost everything – with the premise that the crucial thing is there somewhere. So, psychoanalytic therapy knows the letter is there in theory. However, we may never find it. Malcolm wants both possibilities to be equally true – the answer is there and effectively not there. Which is a classic piece of deconstruction – two equal but opposite readings of the same thing.
Her essay on J.D. Salinger is fearlessly contrarian, written against the growing hostile consensus that Salinger, after The Catcher in the Rye, disappeared down a rabbit hole of narcissism and self-conscious charm. Malcolm finds the two interconnected stories of Franny and Zooey ‘no less rewarding than The Great Gatsby’. She recognises that originality is what contemporary criticism inevitably fails to appreciate. Buddy Glass knows the Glass family get up people’s noses. ‘These works,’ Malcolm writes, ‘are fables of otherness – versions of Kafka’s Metamorphosis.’ There is a special kind of reading going on here. It is a form of listening, carefully, like a shrink. She pays attention and is rewarded. The essay ends by dismissing ‘the crass, vengeful memoirs of, respectively, [Salinger’s] former girlfriend, Joyce Maynard, and his daughter, Margaret’.
Malcolm quotes, against their testimony, a letter to The New York Observer, written by Salinger’s younger son, Matt – ‘a small flag of protest’. It ends: ‘She [Margaret] remembers a father who couldn’t “tie his own shoe-laces” and I remember a man who helped me learn how to tie mine, and even – specifically – how to close off the end of a lace again once the plastic had worn away.’ That final addendum has irrefutable authority. It is like the meticulously described cigarettes in Salinger. It is exact. And Malcolm hears, brilliantly, conclusively, the ‘singular and instantly recognisable sound of Salinger’. We are persuaded by her ear, by her attentive intuition.
Writing about the pianist Yuja Wang, Malcolm homes in on the signature short dresses. Obviously, they’re sexy. But Malcolm’s forte is to look beyond the obvious. Is there something hidden in plain sight? Grand pianos are huge – great, winged Assyrian bulls – so Wang is a kind of Pasiphae, tiny, nearly naked, vulnerable, likely to be overwhelmed, but in fact victorious, conquering. Her pianism is magnified by her minimalist dress. The hemlines, the sequins are on the couch – shrunk.
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