Looking over my notes for this career-spanning essay on Janet Malcolm, I find many of them less helpful than I hoped, consisting as they do mostly of phrases like “hell yeah,” “absolutely beautiful,” “brilliant writing,” “so so so perfect,” “how does she do it,” and so forth. Practitioners of a certain type of literary nonfiction speak her name in hushed tones and with a sense of holy awe. Katie Roiphe, who has quite consciously positioned herself as Malcolm’s inheritor, called her “the only living writer who terrified me.” Her New Yorker colleague Louis Menand, normally the picture of Yankee pragmatism, displayed uncharacteristic fanboyishness when asked about Malcolm, referring to her as his “idol.” “To read Malcolm remaking the profile,” wrote Wyatt Mason of the New York Times Book Review, “is both a lesson for readers (I am learning so much!) and a tacit reproach to fellow practitioners (I am wasting my life!).”
It’s difficult to avoid this sense of reverence, and difficult not to feel, in the cool perfection of Malcolm’s style, the sense of subtle reproach to one’s own efforts that Mason mentions. It is not only that her sentences are taut, her eye for the telling detail is keen, and her paragraphs are rhythmic and satisfying. She seems to be able to evoke some je ne sais quoi in her writing that the rest of us cannot. Those of us who revere Malcolm also work in the shadow of great magazine journalism and criticism of the 20th century, which distinguished itself primarily through voice and personality. There was Wolfe, peppering the page with exclamation marks, Mailer’s virile blustering, Didion and Thompson and Sontag and Wolcott and all the rest. These writers filtered experience through style; their goal was not only to describe the thing, but how it felt to be a specific person experiencing the thing. The more singular and easily recognizable one’s work was, the more one became not just a reporter or a critic but a star, an early version of an influencer.
Malcolm plays in a different key, and as I was trying to put my finger on what it was, I thought of one of her tics — her tendency to repeatedly draw comparisons from the work of three writers: Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Henry James. Though she wrote about many 20th-century writers, she never says “It reminded me of something from Herzog” or “It echoed the passage in The Sun Also Rises,” but always “It evoked the scene from The Aspern Papers” or “It brought to mind a moment in The Lady with the Dog.” Suddenly, it snapped into focus: she is a woman out of time. While remaining a modern writer who deals with modern subjects, she somehow manages, alone among her peers, to evoke the singular feeling of absolute authority, of control over every detail and texture, that one otherwise only gets in the great 19th-century realists.
Take this passage discussing the difference between fiction and nonfiction writing from the epilogue of The Journalist and the Murderer, with its Dickensian good sense and delight in elaborate metaphor:
Why should the writer in one genre enjoy more privileges than the writer in the other? The answer is: because the writer of fiction is entitled to more privileges. He is master of his own house, and may do what he likes in it; he may even tear it down if he is so inclined (as Roth was inclined in The Counterlife).1 But the writer of nonfiction is only a renter, who must abide by the conditions of his lease, which stipulates that he leave the house — and its name is Actuality — as he found it. He may bring in his own furniture and arrange it as he likes (the so-called New Journalism is about the arrangement of the furniture), and he may play his radio quietly. But he must not disturb the house’s fundamental structure or tamper with any of its architectural features.
Or take the wickedly funny opening to Two Lives, her book about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, which I read over and over again, trying to figure out how something so apparently simple could be so resoundingly perfect:
When I read The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book for the first time, Eisenhower was in the White House and Liz Taylor had taken Eddie Fisher away from Debbie Reynolds. The book, published in 1954, was given to me by a fellow member of a group of pretentious young persons I ran around with, who had nothing but amused contempt for middlebrow American culture, and whose revolt against the conformity of the time largely took the form of patronizing a furniture store called Design Research and of writing mannered letters to each other modeled on the mannered letters of certain famous literary homosexuals, not then known as such.
“Not then known as such” — how delightful, how Austenian. The brilliantly antiquated “ — and its name is Actuality — ,” who would ever think, writing in the New Yorker, to deploy such diction? But it is not just her surface style that reminds one of these great novelists, but her keen insight into the deepest and most unconscious realms of human motivation. We feel she just sees more than we do, intuits more, knows more.
Born Jana Wienerová in Prague, Malcolm arrived in New York in 1939, at age five, one of the wave of Jewish émigrés whose influence shaped the golden age of American publishing and media. It is hopefully not too much of the kind of lazy biographical inference that she would abhor to say that her old-world background contributed something to the elegant, precise, and quietly aristocratic critical sensibility of her first book: Diana and Nikon, a collection of her New Yorker essays on photography. The pieces in Diana and Nikon set up a subtle dichotomy between the rigorously formalist studio photography of the early 20th century, which Malcolm covers in fine essays on Irving Penn, Edward Weston, and Richard Avedon, and the “snapshot turn” of the 1960s, exemplified by photographers like Robert Frank and Gary Winogrand. Though Malcolm respects the snapshot artists and elsewhere has positive things to say about them, in the title essay, a review of a critical anthology called The Photographer’s Eye, in which journalistic and amateur snapshots are mixed with work by well-known professional photographers, she shows her cards:
A surprising and disturbing impression emerges from this mélange of artistic and non-artistic photographs. One would expect the artless pictures to suffer when compared to the conscious works of art that surround them, but, oddly enough, they do not. The picture of the Indian chief [by a 19th-century photojournalist] is as beautiful and as moving as the Weston portrait; the moment captured by the photographer in front of the barbershop is no less decisive than Cartier-Bresson’s in the ruins . . . . Perusing The Photographer’s Eye is a shattering experience for the advocate of photography’s claims as an art form. The accepted notion that in the hands of a great talent, and by dint of long study and extraordinary effort, photography can overcome its mechanical nature and ascend to the level of art is overturned by Szarkowski’s anthology, whose every specimen is (or, as the case may be, isn’t) a work of art.
The search for a greater truth in photography, the urge to emerge from the confines of the studio and capture the world as it is, has accidentally uncovered a disturbing secret, which its discoverers have no choice but to largely ignore: “If every family album and historical society and old copy of Life is a source of art photography, then what is all the trade in, study of, fuss over, writing in, pains taken on with photography about?” Photography has run into the problem Duchamp introduced to sculpture, but while painting and sculpture had thousands of years to come to terms with the knotty question of what, exactly, counts as “art,” photography has had only a few short decades. Yet, with this destabilizing knowledge hanging in the air, the galleries, shows, academics, critics, collectors, and photographers themselves have nothing to do but continue nervously on. Conundrums of this sort will recur again and again in Malcolm’s work.
In 1978, Malcolm wrote her first piece of longform journalism for the New Yorker, “The One-Way Mirror,” on family therapy, and found the form she would work in for the rest of her life. Her interest in therapy and psychoanalysis soon spawned two books: Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession and In the Freud Archives. Psychoanalysis alternates testimony from “Aaron Green” (a pseudonym), a witty, astringent, self-critical New York analyst, with background detail on the history of Freud and psychoanalysis. Green’s insights into the cloistered world of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, whose relentless inquests into the mind have in no sense rendered them immune from petty scandal and gossip, are interesting — the reader learns that analysts only socialize with other analysts, that, like a royal family, their claim to legitimacy rests on the lineage of their great founder (my analyst was analyzed by x, who was analyzed by y, who was analyzed by Freud), and that common pitfalls of the profession include the patient’s falling in love with or developing a deep hatred for the analyst. But if you’re not already convinced of the value of psychoanalysis, the Freud sections, with their long discussions of transference and counter-transference and true selves and false selves, can read like medieval theologians haggling over the true nature of the Trinity. Though Malcolm is fair-minded and reasonably skeptical, she clearly does believe in the efficacy of analysis and she often asks the reader to take the truth of foundational Oedipal trauma as a given, a difficult task for those of us who have never been analyzed or who don’t happen to be New Yorker subscribers in the therapy-mad 1970s.
Psychoanalysis is Malcolm’s least successful book, somewhat tentative and sometimes boring. But while I was reading it, I did find myself paying closer attention to my conversations, noting even in the most casual interactions my own evasions, feints, and buried hostilities. It was a fascinating sense of temporary awareness, a sort of sixth sense or mental divide that allowed me to witness what I was doing, even as I could not stop myself from doing it. And so, whether one is an orthodox Freudian or not, it seems undeniable that immersion in the psychoanalytic world was a step Malcolm had to take in order to develop the precise observation, cool judgment, and sly humor that characterizes the first summit of her art: In the Freud Archives.
In the Freud Archives dives back into the world of inter-analyst drama, following Jeffrey Masson, a dashing, flamboyant former Sanskritist-turned-Freud scholar, and his falling out with Kurt Eissler, “one of the grand old men of contemporary psychoanalysis.” Eissler is the guardian, along with Freud’s daughter, Anna, of the titular Freud Archives, to which only the chosen few are allowed access. I cannot resist quoting in full Malcolm’s introduction of him, one of her great, Jamesian character sketches:
He is tall, gaunt, and unmistakably European. He speaks with an accent whose dominant tone of Viennese asperity is incongruously coupled with and (one realizes on closer acquaintance) rendered all but pointless by an underlying, insistent, almost pathological kindheartedness. There is a class of people, however, to whom this kindheartedness does not extend. These are the enemies of Sigmund Freud (as Eissler sees them) for whom he has nothing but fierce enmity and a kind of bewildered derision. Eissler has thin gray hair, very thick glasses, and a full mouth, whose flat, downward-curving upper lip is startlingly familiar: one has seen this mouth in German Expressionist art — on the faces of the writers and intellectuals in the drawings of Pascin, the paintings of Kokoschka, the photographs of Sander. Recently speaking of his first meeting with Masson (whose letters he no longer answers), Eissler said bitterly “I realize now that there was something already wrong. He came up to me in the lobby of the hotel and said ‘Dr. Eissler?’ How did he know who I was?” But (as Masson points out) how could it have been anyone but Eissler? Who else would have looked like that? Eissler stands out from American analysts the way a lady’s slipper leaps out at you in the woods.
One pauses to genuflect in awe. Malcolm goes on to narrate the story of Masson’s charming of — one might even say seduction of — Eissler, who took on Masson as practically a surrogate son, making him his confidant and naming him inheritor of the archives, and Eissler’s subsequent fury when he realized that Masson had betrayed him; he was not an orthodox Freudian, but a heretic. Masson intended to upend psychoanalysis by claiming that Freud’s “seduction theory,” a precursor to his later theory of infantile sexuality and the Oedipus complex, was in fact the correct one, and that all successive Freudian psychoanalysis derived from an error. If his theory were to prevail, Masson says, “They would have to recall every patient since 1901. It would be like the Pinto.” He also says, outrageously, that under his stewardship the museum he planned to establish at Freud’s old London residence would have been not just “a center of scholarship” but “a place of sex, women, fun.”
That “sex, women, fun” crack would come back to haunt Malcolm as one of the bases for Masson’s subsequent libel suit against her. Furious at Malcolm’s portrayal of him as the frivolous playboy of the psychoanalytical world, he dragged her into a legal battle that lasted nearly 10 years. Again and again, he would claim he had never said something, Malcolm would produce a tape proving that he did, and he would file a new case with a different quote, eventually turning up a few lines that Malcolm could not provide sufficient evidence for his having said (Malcolm claims that the exculpatory notebook with the quotes later turned up, pulled out of a shelf by her granddaughter, where it had been sitting for 11 years). The court eventually found the suit to be baseless, but Malcolm v. Masson had done its work. The charge that Malcolm had fabricated quotes from Masson continued to dog her — as anyone whose name has been smeared knows, the quiet footnote of exoneration doesn’t linger in the mind like the blaring neon of accusation. “It is an unnerving experience,” she wrote, referring to a New York Times article that implied she had conceded to fabricating quotes, “to pick up the venerable newspaper you have read all your adult life, whose veracity you have never had reason to doubt, and read something about yourself that you know to be untrue.” Masson’s lawsuit had permanently tainted her, made her “a kind of fallen woman of journalism,” and for the rest of her life she would have to negotiate a reputation that painted her as, if not an outright liar, a kind of icy mistress of the poison pen. It had also given her the two topics — the legal system and the relationship between journalist and subject — that would form the basis of her most famous and controversial book: The Journalist and the Murderer.
To even quote the first sentence of The Journalist and the Murderer, which has been reproduced in every profile, obituary, ode to, and criticism of Malcolm, feels like betraying her example, reducing her to one of those single phrases — “hard gemlike flame,” “hobgoblin of little minds,” “man is born free and everywhere he is in chains” — that serve as inadequate shorthand for the output of a great mind. Yet not to include it in an essay about her would be like trying to mount a production of Hamlet that skips “to be or not to be.” The overfamiliar passage must be intelligently dealt with, not timidly avoided. So here it is: “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.”
That striking sentence kicks off another exploration of betrayal, this time between Jeffrey MacDonald, a man convicted of a gruesome family murder, and Joe McGinniss, a journalist who wrote a book, Fatal Vision, about the MacDonald case. McGinniss became very close to MacDonald during his trial, moving into a fraternity house with MacDonald and his defense team and spending countless hours interviewing everyone involved with the case. After his conviction, McGinniss swore to MacDonald that he believed in his innocence and continued his interviews under the pretense of gathering material with which to exonerate him. But when Fatal Vision came out, MacDonald was surprised to find himself portrayed as a cold psychopath. MacDonald sued McGinniss for fraud and breach of contract, and, remarkably, managed to extract $325,000 from his publisher in an out-of-court settlement. “Five of the six jurors,” Malcolm notes, “were persuaded that a man who was serving three consecutive life sentences for the murder of his wife and two small children was deserving of more sympathy than the writer who had deceived him.” The strange MacDonald-McGinniss case becomes a catalyst for Malcolm’s intriguing, uncomfortable questions. Was McGinniss justified in lying to MacDonald? Does a journalist have a responsibility to his subject, even if that subject has been convicted of a monstrous crime? Or is he justified in behaving unethically, as long as his higher duty is toward telling the truth? Malcolm’s famous opening passage goes on to talk about the “catastrophe suffered by the subject” of a journalistic profile. “On reading the article or the book in question,” she writes, “he has to face the fact that the journalist — who seemed so friendly and sympathetic, so keen to understand him fully, so remarkably attuned to his vision of things — never had the slightest intention of collaborating with him on his story but always intended to write a story of his own.” All journalism in some sense rests on this deception, and Malcolm believes that journalists have a responsibility, if not to solve this problem, then at least to take it into account.
Malcolm, who clearly believes McGinniss acted unethically and whose disdain for him is apparent throughout the book, at first seems like an impossibly rigid moralist. Surely if MacDonald was guilty of what he was convicted of, then he essentially forfeited his right to be treated with the courtesy we would extend to the rest of society. No one, after all, blames undercover policemen for lying in order to advance the cause of justice — they have a higher duty, just as journalists have a higher duty to the truth. But the achievement of The Journalist and the Murderer is to cause the reader to question these initial assumptions. As it delves into the particulars of the MacDonald-McGinniss suit, interviewing expert witnesses and members of the jury, the book begins to read like a strange, bleak, near-nihilist parable. Everywhere, what seems like steadfast due process and stern, consistent application of legal and journalistic principles turns out to be chaotic, resting on the purported reliability of liars, charlatans, blowhards, and cranks. The lone jury holdout for McGinniss in the fraud case turns out to be a bizarre old woman who passes out animal rights literature in the jury room, believes the income tax is unconstitutional, and refuses to deliberate because McGinniss gave her a “strong impression of goodness.” An expert witness, a psychotherapist who testifies for the defense, believes he can credibly diagnose MacDonald as a psychopath purely through his portrayal in McGinniss’s book. An anonymous juror in the original murder case comments that the evidence “just seemed confusing,” but “there was something about the sound of [MacDonald’s] voice” that convinced the jury of his guilt. The question of MacDonald’s guilt or innocence is not the subject of the book, but MacDonald’s story — that his wife and child were murdered by evil hippies who chanted, “Acid is groovy, kill the pigs,” — and McGinniss’s story — that MacDonald’s already-psychopathic character was exacerbated by “amphetamine psychosis” brought on by diet pills. Both sound equally unbelievable, giving the reader the dismal feeling that the truth will never really be known.
When The Journalist and the Murderer came out, to great controversy, Malcolm was attacked as a glib postmodernist, even a nihilist. It is true that the hangover of the Masson lawsuit may have led her to adopt a particularly pessimistic view of the justice system. But when the book is read carefully, one is not left with a sense that nothing matters. Instead we feel sympathy for her stance: that it is unacceptable to lie to a subject or to lead them on, even if they are a convicted murderer. If it is indeed the case that the systems set up for finding the truth are fundamentally unreliable, and that even simple questions open up vast, dizzying chasms of confusion, all one can do is cling to one’s own principles and deal with others in a spirit of courtesy, forthrightness, and honesty. This moral also provides another clue as to why reading her feels so much like reading one of the great 19th-century realists: What critics mistake for coldness or severity is actually an almost Victorian sense of honor and propriety, which Malcolm maintains even as she navigates a 20th-century world of relativism and uncertainty. She is Dorothea Brooke living in the world of Josef K.
The Journalist and the Murderer may be Malcolm’s most notorious book, but her follow-up, The Silent Woman, is her masterpiece. It marks her turn to the last of her great preoccupations: the art of literary biography, through an exploration of the biographers of Sylvia Plath and their relationship with the estate of her former husband, Ted Hughes. The Silent Woman echoes many of the structures of In the Freud Archives. There is the distant subject (the dead Plath and the still-living Hughes), the self-appointed guardian of that subject’s reputation (in this case, Hughes’s sister Olwyn), and a host of scholars and researchers all vying for the guardian’s affection, trying to placate and cajole her into giving them access to her treasure (permission to quote from Hughes and Plath’s poetry, letters, and diaries). But where In the Freud Archives is essentially a comedy, The Silent Woman is a gothic romance, with Malcolm as the heroine entering the old, dark, secret-filled house beneath a damp and drizzly English sky. Her writing takes on a new cast; something eerie and phantasmagorical is added to her usual tone of cool rationality, as in this passage, which has no counterpart in any of her other work:
When Bitter Fame [a biography of Plath] appeared, and raised the stakes of the game, I decided to become a player. Like all the other players at the table, I have felt anxious and oppressed by the game. It is being played in a room so dark and gloomy that one has a hard time seeing one’s hand; one is apt to make mistakes. The air in the room is bad; it is the same air that has been breathed there for many years. The windows are grimy and jammed shut. The old servant’s hands shake as he brings watery drinks. Through a door one sees an open coffin surrounded by candles. A small old woman sits in a straight-backed chair reading a manual of stenography. A very tall man with graying hair, dressed in black, comes through the doorway, having to duck his head, and stands watching the players. The door to the street suddenly opens, and a tall woman bursts in. She whispers something into the tall man’s ear; he shrugs and returns to the room with the coffin. She looks after him, then gives the card table a malevolent little shove, so that drinks spill and cards scatter, and leaves, slamming the door. I look at my cards and call the bet.
Bitter Fame catches Malcolm’s attention because of its poor reception; it is denounced as a piece of anti-Plath, pro-Hughes propaganda and its author, Anne Stevenson, is caricatured as a puppet of Olwyn Hughes, the Cerberus guarding her remote and reserved brother. But it is nowhere near that simple. As Malcolm journeys across England, through an uncharacteristically cold winter (the frozen pipes, silent streets, and delayed trains wonderfully enhance the gloomy atmosphere of the book), we learn of Stevenson’s contentious relationship with Olwyn, who wanted to control every aspect of the book, and of the many players involved in the afterlife of Plath and Hughes, all of them with their own agendas and biases. We also learn Malcolm’s opinion on the art of literary biography, an enterprise she considers even more ethically suspect than journalism. It is “the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world.” The biographer is “a kind of burglar,” and the reader “believes that he is having an elevating literary experience, rather than simply listening to backstairs gossip and reading other people’s mail.”
Harsh words — somewhat bombastic, even — but choosing Plath and Hughes as an example helps to underline her point. Here was someone — Hughes — who suffered a series of unimaginable tragedies, not only Plath’s suicide but the later murder-suicide of his lover and their child, and the literary public’s response was to create an entire industry of books arguing over whether he was a difficult but misunderstood man or a cruel Bluebeard whose insensitive philandering drove poor Sylvia to her doom. That industry continues dutifully pumping out new products to this day, all based on the letters, journals, and unreliable memories of those involved, none of which can ever capture the true particulars of a relationship or a life. And unlike normal celebrity gossip, which is at least universally admitted to be tasteless, rifling through the skeletons in Hughes’ closet has a veneer of academic respectability; the worst moments of his life are continually relitigated not in supermarket tabloids and gossip columns but in tweedy university panels and the pages of the London Review of Books.
Hughes never appears directly in the book (save in the appendix of a later edition, which reproduces a letter he wrote to Malcolm correcting an error), but his letters to others, which Malcolm quotes extensively, are magnificent: eloquent, regal, wounded, and tragic. Reading them, we feel great pity for him and his family and great disgust at those who would use his tragedies to further their own base agendas: gaining professorships, securing book contracts, or rising within the cloistered, incestuous world of London literary society. Here he is writing to Stevenson, as quoted by Malcolm:
I have never attempted to give my account of Sylvia because I saw quite clearly from the first day that I am the only person in this business who cannot be believed by all who need to find me guilty. I know too that the alternative — remaining silent — makes me a projection post for every worst suspicion. That my silence seems to confirm every accusation and fantasy. I preferred it, on the whole, to allowing myself to be dragged out into the bull-ring and teased and pricked and goaded into vomiting up every detail of my life with Sylvia for the higher entertainment of the hundred thousand Eng Lit Profs and graduates who — as you know — feel very little in this case beyond curiosity of quite a low order, the ordinary village kind, popular bloodsport kind, no matter how they robe their attentions in Lit Crit Theology and ethical sanctity . . . . I’ve accepted all that long ago but, Anne, please don’t expect me to accept it gladly. Or to make no effort, now and again, to surround the children and my wife and myself with a wall of astral fire.
Yet, though Malcolm admits to being on Hughes’ side (and by extension Olwyn’s, imperious and difficult as she may be), she admits that there are complications. Hughes’ pleas to be left alone are complicated by his role as “Plath’s greatest critic, elucidator, and (you could almost say) impresario.” He is “a man trying to serve two masters,” and his attempt to “disentangle his life from the Plath legend while tending its flame is a kind of grotesque allegory of the effort of every artist to salvage a piece of normal life for himself from the disaster of his calling.” Malcolm notes that though Hughes has been criticized for censoring and editing Plath’s journals, and for famously burning the ones written in the lead up to her death, what is interesting is not what he takes out but the extraordinary intimacy and candor of what he chooses to leave in. He is helpless before its great literary value. It may reflect poorly on him, but it is simply “too interesting” to the side of Hughes utterly devoted to his and Plath’s art to leave out, though the part of him that is a quiet family man may protest.
So too with Malcolm. If she has such disdain for literary biography, why has she written a book so full of hitherto-unpublished letters and anecdotes? Why has she produced a biography of the biographers? Why does she find herself skulking around the house where Plath died, and even around Hughes’ present-day residence? She may take a skeptical view of the art of biography, just as she does of journalism, but her — and our — impulse to construct a simple, satisfying narrative out of the subjective memories and hastily-written letters of others remains, and it is this internal tension that propels the book.
I have never had any particular interest in the Plath/Hughes story, and no real opinion on who was the hero and who was the villain in their tragedy — as Malcolm points out, one can admire the epistolary persona of Hughes while acknowledging that the “Ted Hughes” speaking in them is as much of a literary persona as the Plath of “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus.” Yet there is some intangible quality about The Silent Woman — the atmosphere, the odd gothic touches, the sheer quality of Malcolm’s narrative voice — that makes it one of the most gripping books I have ever read. Before preparing this essay, I had already read it three or four times, the last time as recently as February of this year. When I sat down one morning with my copy, intending only to skim through and refamiliarize myself with the broad strokes and best passages, I ended up reading the whole thing straight through once again. And after this particular read, lured as we all are by the siren call of voyeurism, I ordered a copy of The Selected Letters of Ted Hughes.
The Silent Woman was followed by Malcolm’s return to the arcane world of the law in The Crime of Sheila McGough, an odd and overlooked book in her oeuvre. In tone it reminds one of the unclassifiable late Shakespeare; if The Journalist and the Murderer is Macbeth and The Silent Woman is Hamlet, The Crime of Sheila McGough is Coriolanus or Measure for Measure — baroque, cynical, and somewhat farcical, funny in a menacing sort of way. The titular character is a disbarred lawyer, “a woman of almost preternatural honesty and decency” who is also “maddeningly tiresome and stubborn.” McGough was involved in the defense of a small-time con man, and over the course of the trial became implicated in one of his incredibly dense and complicated schemes, this one the selling of fake insurance companies. She was tried as an accomplice, found guilty, and sent to prison for several years. Malcolm argues convincingly that McGough was innocent, and was convicted because of her preternatural honor — her refusal to say anything that would implicate her former client, even after he was found guilty — and because of her extreme long-windedness and inability to communicate simple ideas, which drives even the cool and collected Malcolm to the brink:
I don’t know if I’ve ever had a more irritating subject. I know I have never before behaved so badly to a subject. I have never before interrupted, lost patience with, spoken so unpleasantly to a subject as I have to Sheila — to my shame and vexation afterward. I have never before dreaded calling a subject on the telephone as I have dreaded calling Sheila. To my simplest question she would give an answer of such relentless length and tediousness and uncomprehending irrelevance that I could almost have wept with impatience. I took notes of these phone calls, and among them I have found little cries of despair. One of them was: “Help, help! I’m trapped talking to Sheila. She won’t stop. Save me.”
“It seems scarcely possible that in this country someone could go to prison for merely being irritating,” Malcolm writes, “but as far as I can make out, this is indeed what happened to Sheila McGough.” In The Crime of Sheila McGough, we find the legal system running up against the limits of someone who would dare to take it entirely seriously and, as in The Journalist and the Murderer, we discover that justice is not blind, as we would would hope, but influenced by the most frivolous, surface aspects of our appearance and our mannerisms.
Malcolm wrote The Crime of Sheila McGough after speaking before a jury at Masson’s libel lawsuit, for which she visited a public speaking coach and learned to dress in (as she wrote in a later essay on the trial) “pastel-colored dresses and suits, silk stockings and high heels, and an array of pretty scarves” rather than the unassuming dark clothes of the New York intellectual. One feels that she sees a kindred spirit in McGough, if an intensely annoying one. I was struck by a moment in The Crime of Sheila McGough in which Malcolm calls one of the victims of the con man McGough defended:
Then he said, “I am a public figure. I don’t want anything to appear in print about me that won’t contribute to my good reputation. I will cooperate with you only if I know that your story won’t be slanted the wrong way.” I said that my story probably would be slanted the wrong way, and prepared to hang up.
Obviously, it is Malcolm telling the story, but nevertheless this small moment made it clear to me that she really does believe in the principles of journalistic conduct she espouses in The Journalist and the Murderer; it isn’t just a rhetorical exercise or a bombastic pronouncement. The Crime of Sheila McGough is too complicated and its central figure not quite fascinating enough for the book to rank among Malcolm’s best, but as an insight into the psyche of Malcolm herself, as well as another fascinating exploration of the American legal system, it deserves to be rescued from its relative obscurity among her work.
After The Crime of Sheila McGough, Malcolm’s books begin to tread familiar territory. Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey and Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice apply the Silent Woman approach to Chekhov and Gertrude Stein. Reading Chekhov adds the twist of being structured around Malcolm’s trip to Russia, which functions as a parody of the in-the-footsteps-of narrative, “the absurdist farce of the literary pilgrim who leaves the magical pages of a work of genius and travels to an ‘original scene’ that can only fall short of his expectations.” It also features a typically Malcolmian moment of literary detection in which she looks at the same scene as depicted in several different biographies and realizes that several of them have lifted details about Chekhov’s last days from a short story by Raymond Carver. Two Lives discusses Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’ time in occupied France, investigating the question of how the two elderly Jewish lesbians did not fall into the hands of the Nazis. Malcolm spends some time with Stein scholars, who, the reader will not be surprised to discover, are just as neurotic and dysfunctional as those who study Freud or Sylvia Plath. Her last work of crime reporting, Iphigenia in Forest Hills, again concerns a difficult woman on trial — in this case, Mazoltuv Borukhova, a woman accused of hiring a man to murder her husband over a custody dispute and a member of the tiny, insular Bukharan Jewish community in Queens (in an odd coincidence, Jeffrey Masson of In the Freud Archives is also of Bukharan Jewish descent).2 Like Sheila McGough, Malcolm finds herself identifying with Borukhova, who “couldn’t have done it, and must have done it,” and like The Journalist and the Murderer, her investigations into the purportedly rational progress of the law in fact reveal a deep irrationality — the family lawyer who took Borukhova’s child from her care turns out to be a deranged conspiracy theorist, and the hanging judge, with his “faux-genial manner that American petty tyrants cultivate,” pressures the trial to come to a quick end so he can go on his scheduled vacation in the Caribbean. No one who has read her earlier work will find many new ideas about biography or the law in these slim volumes, but it is nevertheless always a pleasure to spend some time in her mind.
Lastly, we must briefly take note of Malcolm’s mastery of the essay form in her three published collections, The Purloined Clinic, Forty-One False Starts, and Nobody’s Looking at You. Forty-One False Starts is especially notable for its essays about the art world and for “A House of One’s Own,” a majestic, 50-page treatise on Bloomsbury and the phenomenon of literary scenes. Were I not afraid of repeating myself, I could write several paragraphs on my love for “A House of One’s Own,” a piece that taught me that all you need for a great literary essay is one memorable set piece (in this case, Malcolm’s visit to the house once occupied by Vanessa Bell and other peripheral Bloomsbury characters) and a willingness to read absolutely everything published on a subject, with no shortcuts.
The essays Malcolm wrote in the last 10 years of her life, collected in Nobody’s Looking At You, have a genteel, autumnal feeling. The claws still occasionally come out, as they do when she feels compelled to again defend Ted Hughes against Jonathan Bate’s biography, with its “cluelessness about what you can and cannot do if you want to be regarded as an honest and serious writer.” But her essays on subjects like the fashion designer Eileen Fisher, the legendary New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, and the owners of the Argosy Book Store, while as perceptive as ever, are her most straightforwardly appreciative pieces of writing: evocations of a disappearing, more civilized, old-world New York, a New York of middle-class émigré sophistication, of the Metropolitan Opera and rare book stores, Central Park in the springtime, Cole Porter and Rogers & Hart.
Malcolm died in 2021, at the age of 86, and a fragmented memoir of sorts, Still Pictures, appeared in 2023. Still Pictures provides one last glimpse of her New York in a series of brief essays, each focused around a photograph, most of which are of Malcolm’s parents and their friends. She uses these snapshots as an opportunity to reminisce about growing up among the city’s Czech immigrant community, and to muse on the seemingly random nature of childhood memory. It is a lovely, perceptive book. Yet she, of course, knows that her audience never wanted something “lovely” and “perceptive.” She has given us so much, yet we hunger for more. “For Christ’s sake, don’t tell us about your Aunt Jiřina!” we moan internally. “Tell us about your journalistic technique! Tell us about your legal battles! Tell us about Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker! Tell us how you wrote all those great books!” With 20 pages left in the book, she flashes forward 30 years and suddenly we are reading about her extramarital affair with Gardner Botsford, the New Yorker editor who would become her second husband. Given the brief glimpses of her life we have been afforded up to now, salaciousness lands like a grenade tossed into a room full of delicate landscape paintings. Then, just as quickly, it is gone.
I suspect this moment is something of a final tease from beyond the grave, a recapitulation of her belief that it is impossible to really know someone through the medium of the written word, just as it is impossible to ever get the whole truth in a trial or capture the whole of reality in a photograph. No memoir or biography, no matter how revealing, can ever quite explain her extraordinary powers of insight, her 19th-century textures, or the combination of early influences, efforts, and lucky breaks that made her, at least in my view, the best journalist of the 20th century and the most exhilaratingly precise analyst of human character since Henry James. Her secrets are gone with her. Only her voice remains, in her work, in her influence, and in her elegant and eternal mystery.
Henry Begler writes the Substack newsletter A Good Hard Stare. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.
Though this reference to Roth seems to violate the claim that Malcom never draws from current literary references I make in the above paragraph, in the preceding paragraph of The Journalist and the Murderer, she is explicitly discussing trends in contemporary fiction — it doesn’t come out of left field, as it were. I leave it in the quote as a tribute, because she would have hated for me to smooth over a complicating detail.
Here is where I document another odd thing I don’t know what to do with. Isn’t it strange that the most consequential figures in Malcolm’s professional life, the ones who made her reputation, all share the initials JM? Jeffrey Masson, Joe McGinniss, Jeffrey MacDonald, not to mention the title The Journalist and the Murderer. Her biggest journalistic influence, who she wrote about several times, was Joseph Mitchell. Malcolm was married to New Yorker editor Gardner Botsford for many years; one of MacDonald’s lawyers in The Journalist and the Murderer, who Malcolm later hired to defend her in her libel case, is named Gary Bostwick. Surely all just coincidence, but, like the passage about the card players in The Silent Woman, it gives her purportedly clear and factual work an uncanny feeling, that of a world populated with Dostoevskian doubles.
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This is great! Worthy appreciation of the great goddess.
I was introduced to her, somewhat unexpectedly, by a professor of mine. It was after a talk she gave at my grad school program. All I could think of to say at that moment was: "I think you're amazing." I'm really happy that that's what came out of my mouth.
Great piece Henry. I’ve never read Malcolm but I love anything that blurs the line between truth and fiction so will have to read something.