As a writer, I have always sought inspiration from others who have gone before. Like most writers do, I suppose, as all writers tend to borrow certain features and styles from writers they admire.
Since I have started writing this blog over a year ago, as those who follow my musings regularly know, I sometimes take time to write a post honoring those writers - whether authors, poets, or journalists - who have impacted my life over the years and I try to take time to pen words of tribute to them from time to time.
One journalist - and author - who's work I have admired in the past was Janet Malcolm, who died of cancer in New York in June at the age of 87. She was a staff writer for The New Yorker, where I became familiar with her talents.
The writer whom she admired most was Chekhov and one of her great legacies was to bring his spirit to her reporting - the small, telling gesture that burned a character into the mind of the reader.
One thinks, for example, of her description of a revered New York psychoanalyst, who stood out from others in the fishbowl of a psychoanalytical convention "the way a lady's slipper leaps out at you in the woods." These observations, embedded in an unfurling scroll of impeccable facts, explication, analysis and original ideas, set her journalism apart from every other practitioner of her generation.
Malcolm often deployed this kind of fairy-tale imagery to great effect. In The Silent Woman, her masterful book about the competing versions of the defensively dead Sylvia Plath and her defensively alive widower, Ted Hughes, she wrote: "The narratives of journalism (significantly called 'stories'), like those of mythology and folklore, derive their power from their firm, undeviating sympathies and antipathies. Cinderella must remain good and her stepsisters bad. "'Second stepsister not so bad after all' is not a good story."
What appears to be a story about Sylvia Plath is really a reflection of how falsehoods become "Facts" because people enjoy them more than reality. The generic story of a helpless victim or a doomed genius or a Bluebeard-like villain is preferable to the human actuality of contradictory motives, confused allegiances and hidden drives that is Malcolm's true subject.
Malcolm, in her own view, was no better than the rest of the journalistic vultures. In The Silent Woman, when she pays an uninvited visit to Hughes' house, she excoriates herself for being a grubby snoop, like all the others who hovered around seeking to snatch fallen crumbs from the Plath/Hughes tragedy. As she studies the house, with a recently filled bird feeder on the lawn, she "felt his reality, his aliveness, his stuckness, and...felt shame at my complicity in the chase that has made his life a torment; I had now joined the pack of his pursuers." Reading this, we understand that the famous first line of The Journalist and The Murderer - "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" - which caused a stir of indignation, was less a criticism of her colleagues than a confrontation with herself.
As a journalist, there were times when I, too, felt that same way at times while in pursuit of the story. Or, even worse, when I became the subject of the story.
People sometimes mistook her perceptiveness for cruelty. Her reputation for cold dissection (do not cut tomatoes in front of her, do not let her into your apartment, etc.), as if she were some kind of avenging angel, was ridiculous. But I think she rather enjoyed it, to some degree. It gave her a certain potent aura. People grew anxious in her presence, wondering what she thought of them, a useful power for an inveterate observer like Malcolm. In their nervousness they were apt to expose themselves more thoroughly, which in the end is what the portraitist desires. She possessed the ability to see the excruciating difference between who we are and how we believe we are seen. At the same time, she understood that the delusion at the heart of this difference was necessary to get through life.
Malcolm was skeptical of her achievements. Decades of writing journalism, she believed, had limited her vision. In 2010, she explained why she abandoned a "pitiful" attempt to write what would have been her autobiography: "I cannot write about myself as I write about the people I have written about as a journalist. To those people, I have been a kind of amanuensis: they have dictated their stories to me and I have retold them. They have posed for me and I have drawn their portraits. No one is dictating to me or posing for me now."
She went on to say that the "I" of journalism resembles that "of a judge pronouncing sentence on a guilty defendant. This 'I' is unsuited to autobiography. Autobiography is an exercise in self forgiveness. The observing 'I' of autobiography tells the story of the observed 'I' not as a journalist tells the story of his subject, but as a mother might...I see that my journalist's habits have inhabited my self-love."
What is striking about this is her uncharacteristically emotional realization that her career of scrutinizing others had hardened her to herself. In a way, I understand all that, because I often feel the same way as a journalist.
In the last year and a half of her life she found a way to overcome the autobiographer's block. In a series of pieces provoked by old personal photographs, she devised a way to write about her Czech parents, the Manhattan world she grew up in and her ever-forming aesthetic as a girl and young woman. (They will be published in 2022). The stories within are deliciously intimate. There are some wicked scenes from the trial for libel brought against her by an aggrieved subject, Jeffrey Masson, the major figure of In the Freud Archives. Some blood is spilled in these pieces, but almost all of it is Malcolm's, spilled by her own hand.
She changed the way we read - and for many of us (myself included), the way we write - nonfiction. She made us aware of our disreputable motives. She taught us that when we wrote, as often as not, we were wearing a mask.
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