on Janet Malcolm: an appreciation and an argument, etc.
Dear friends,
I first encountered Janet Malcolm a dozen or so years ago, in an elevator on the way up to a party. I didn’t know what she looked like and so I had no idea that the petite, unprepossessing older woman standing silently beside me was my literary idol. Introduced by an acquaintance a few minutes later, I was so star-struck that I was unable to utter a word. Janet turned her beatific smile on me and said, “I’m a fan of your work”—a statement so unexpected that it rendered me even more tongue-tied. “Oh, no, no, no, that’s not possible,” I stammered. “I’m a fan of your work.”
As many who knew her better have said in the last few weeks, Janet was a kind and generous friend, graciously inquiring after your writing even when all you wanted to talk about was hers. The Silent Woman, her great investigation of the ethics of biography via a consideration of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, was a touchstone for me when I started my work on Shirley Jackson, and I asked her to coffee, hoping she would somehow initiate me into the secrets of biography writing. Though Janet, as usual, was opaque on anything concerning her own work, she did recount a wonderful story about Jackson that she had heard from her late husband, Gardner Botsford:
Janet took a particular interest in the less salubrious elements of her subjects' characters, and so it feels appropriate to admit—grotesque though it may be—that when I learned about her death (via Twitter, of course), my initial reaction was not grief at the thought of never seeing her again or sympathy for her friends and family, but regret, so crushing that it briefly took my breath away, that her writing had come to an end. It’s a feeling I’ve had only once before, upon hearing of the death of W.G. Sebald. There’s something heartless in mourning the words that will go unwritten rather than the human presence forever lost. And yet a world without any more of Janet Malcolm’s extraordinary journalism feels tragic indeed. She was one of those writers for whom I would drop everything to read a new piece, from her meditations on Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas (which happily occupied me for much of a transcontinental flight) to her utterly absorbing chronicle of the Bukharan Jewish mother accused of hiring a hit man to murder her estranged husband, the father of her child. Malcolm approached these figures, as she did everyone about whom she wrote, with sympathetic and yet unsparing attention, teasing out the inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies that somehow led directly into the most secret regions of their psyches. Her motto might have been: The closer you look, the more you will see.
So I was delighted to discover, via my friend Gretchen Rubin’s newsletter, a Janet Malcolm piece I hadn’t already read: this gorgeous essay on the Bloomsbury group and the difficulties of biography. How could I have missed it? Anyone who has read The Silent Woman knows that Malcolm is skeptical of the entire biographical enterprise, but especially of the motivations of the biographer, whom she regards as on par with the journalist in her famous formulation in The Journalist and the Murderer:
Every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.
Malcolm sees the biographer, too, as a criminal, a burglar who ransacks both the possessions and the memories of sources, showing no empathy for the sensitivities of the living or the dead. But of course Malcolm was a kind of biographer, just as she was a journalist; she knew intimately the process of transmuting another person’s life into a story both honest and compelling, and in this essay she examines some of the troubles therein.
Malcolm is particularly acute on the subject of letters. She writes of a moment in the biography of Virginia Woolf by Quentin Bell, Woolf's nephew, in which Bell mentions Henry James’s dislike of his father, Clive Bell, and then quotes from a letter by James that fails to provide evidence of said dislike. Malcolm looks up the actual letter, which contains—just before the passage Quentin Bell cites—a vicious description of Clive as “quite dreadful looking[,] little[,] stoop-shouldered, long-haired, [and] third-rate,” a man who relates to Virginia’s brother Thoby “as a little sore-eyed poodle might be an intimate friend of a big mild mastiff.” Malcolm is most interested in the psychological oddity here—that Quentin Bell thanks Leon Edel, the editor of James’s letters, for bringing this document to his attention but can't manage to repeat the most relevant bit: “Like Hamlet pulling back from killing Claudius, Quentin cannot commit the parricide of publishing James’s terrible words.” The act of leaving something unsaid becomes, in Malcolm's hands, the crux of the matter. “In leaving the trace, the clue to the uncommitted murder, [Quentin Bell] has afforded us a rare glimpse into the workshop where biographical narratives are manufactured.”
Malcolm was so psychologically sensitive as to occasionally seem clairvoyant, which makes her insistence on the fundamental slipperiness of the biographical enterprise all the more puzzling. We all know that no person can ever truly know the heart and mind of another; but the biographer, Malcolm writes, more than most, is “standing in quicksand,” because new information may arise at any point that will upend her interpretation of her subject. (A side note: this must be why "definitive" is the biographer's favorite compliment, even as we know it is a lie.) “Every character in a biography contains within himself or herself the potential for a reverse image,” Malcolm writes with characteristic boldness. “The finding of a new cache of letters, the stepping forward of a new witness, the coming into fashion of a new ideology--all these events, and particularly the last one, can destabilize any biographical configuration, overturn any biographical consensus, transform any good character into a bad one, and vice versa.” Well, yes and no, one would like to respond. Of course it’s theoretically possible that a new document might suggest that George Washington was a secret royalist, or Lincoln had only a passing interest in abolition, or Woolf (for that matter) dashed off her novels to pay the rent. Still, especially for those historical figures for whom a large paper trail already exists, it's extremely unlikely that a “reverse image” could supplant the well-known portrait. Complicate it, yes—which is part of the reason I argue, in this op-ed written amid the controversy over Blake Bailey’s book about Philip Roth, that diversity of perspectives is crucially important to biography. But destabilize it entirely? That seems to me an overstatement.
Writing these notes makes me realize that I have come full circle; I now wish desperately that I could discuss these questions with Janet. I picture her turning her owlish, impenetrable gaze on me and suggesting, gently as always, that some things must remain opaque.
*
Elsewhere in the piece, Malcolm wonders why “books of letters move us as biographies do not,” and speculates: “When we are reading a book of letters, we understand the impulse to write biographies, we feel the intoxication the biographer feels in working with primary sources, the rapture of firsthand encounters with another’s lived experience. But this intoxication, this rapture, does not carry over into the text of the biography; it dies on the way." With a metaphor that does not flatter the biographer, she continues: "The genre (like its progenitor, history) functions as a kind of processing plant where experience is converted into information the way fresh produce is converted into canned vegetables. But, like canned vegetables, biographical narratives are so far removed from their source--so altered from the plant with soil clinging to its roots that is a letter or a diary entry--that they carry little conviction.”
The solution, Malcolm suggests, is to quote as heavily as possible from primary sources, although (again) she doesn’t acknowledge that it’s not that simple: too much quotation can ruin a biography, as my own editor made clear to me. But those who wish to go back to the sources for my book are now in luck: The Letters of Shirley Jackson, edited by Jackson’s son Laurence Hyman and literature professor Berenice Murphy, has just been published. This review by Laura Miller gives an excellent sense of what’s to be found within—and what isn't.
A couple of upcoming events: on Tuesday, July 13, I’ll be on Zoom with my friend Amy Sohn to discuss The Man Who Hated Women, her fantastic new book about the anti-pornography activist Anthony Comstock and the “sex radicals” whose work he targeted. Join us if you have any interest in early-twentieth-century marital aids, intercourse with ghosts, or women’s right to social and sexual self-determination. And at the other end of the spectrum: on Thursday, July 29, I’m appearing at this event sponsored by Moment magazine to discuss the importance of the Holocaust in contemporary Jewish fiction. Between these two, there’s something for everyone!
As always,
Ruth
“No live organism can continue for long to exist under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.”—Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House