Janet Malcolm – an original mind inflected by psychoanalysis
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.
