Though Janet Malcolm’s career was as tied to the New Yorker as Renata Adler’s, she was quiet where Adler was brash, a late bloomer where Adler was a prodigy. Like Hannah Arendt, Malcolm would reach her forties before she began publishing any serious work. And her name would not really be made until she published, in 1983, a profile of a man barely anyone had heard of: a Sanskrit scholar turned psychoanalyst named Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. He had recently been fired as the head of the Sigmund Freud Archives.
Masson was just past forty with a thick head of hair and a healthy dose of self-confidence when Malcolm interviewed him. The first time they met, as she told the story, he’d boasted of his power:
Almost everyone else in the analytic world would have done anything to get rid of me. They were envious of me, but I think they also genuinely felt that I was a mistake and a nuisance and a potential danger to psychoanalysis—a really critical danger. They sensed that I could single-handedly bring down the whole business—and let’s face it, there’s a lot of money in that business. And they were right to be frightened, because what I was discovering was dynamite.
Malcolm was interested in the fight Masson had ignited with this dynamite, an argument over the “seduction thesis,” an idea about the nature of the parent-child relationship—that it was, in a primal sense, defined by sexual attraction—that Freud later rejected and revised. But in pursuing the intellectual debate, she found herself in the company of a man who could, in her depiction of him, find no end of things to praise about himself.
Malcolm tends to convey things by implication rather than outright statement. Whenever she cast aspersions on Masson, she never did so by outright insult. She’d simply let his quotes go on and on, as above, which made Masson sound like a fool. She’d let him explain, for example, that he had gone into psychoanalysis to cure himself of “total promiscuity.” He told her he’d slept with a thousand women by the time he was a graduate student, and she quoted him on it. Or she’d quote a nineteenth-century letter from Freud, talking about someone else, to inflect her account of Masson’s activities: “Everything he said and thought possessed a plasticity, a warmth, a quality of importance, which was meant to conceal the lack of deeper substance.”
This was relevant because Malcolm was investigating the circumstances surrounding Masson’s firing. If he was grandiose and egotistical, those were relevant facts. But he was also something else: litigious. Masson would eventually sue Malcolm too, a suit that dragged on for years and ended up in the Supreme Court, on the claim Malcolm misquoted him. After two bruising trials in lower courts, in which the very nature of literary journalism was debated, Masson lost his libel claims against her.
The subtle but devastating indirectness of Janet Malcolm was a function of history and personality. She had been raised to be somewhat genteel and obedient. She was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1934, and originally named Jana Wienovera. Her family fled the country as the war came on, settling in Brooklyn, where Janet and her sister, Marie, learned English. It was not an easy process. She had a memory of “the kindergarten teacher saying, ‘Good-bye, children,’ at the end of the day, and my envy of the girl whose name I assumed to be Children. It was my secret hope that someday the teacher would say, ‘Good-bye, Janet.’”
Her father was a psychiatrist (which no doubt influenced Malcolm’s eventual interest in the discipline), and her mother was a lawyer. They managed to find work in America. He changed the family name to Winn, one much easier for Americans to pronounce. English got easier, and Janet was a good student. She ended up at the University of Michigan. She was not radically minded. She was raised, as many were in the fifties, to curry favor with men, get married, and have a family. “During my four years of college, I didn’t study with a single woman professor,” she told the Paris Review. “There weren’t any, as far as I know.” In this she seems sometimes to liken herself to an Alice Munro character: smart, bookish, but not particularly ambitious, and wandering into marriage because it was what was expected.
She came to a career slowly, not someone who burst out of the gates with a fully formed voice like Adler or Parker. At college, she met a young man named Donald Malcolm. Donald had ambitions of being a writer, and so did she, but her attempts were being repeatedly shot down by her creative writing teacher. When Donald Malcolm graduated and went to work for the New Republic, Janet Winn followed him and began to write for that magazine too. The first piece she published in 1956 was a kind of parody of a film review, written in the register of an excited teenager:
I went to see Love Me Tender last night, and I liked it enormous. Elvis Presley isn’t a bit obscene or lewd; he’s just different. He certainly stood out from everybody else in the picture—it takes place back in Civil War times when they didn’t hardly have no rock ‘n roll yet—and not only because of his singing and virileness; but also because of his acting.
There is no way this piece was meant seriously; it ends on a wish that Marilyn Monroe should film The Brothers Karamazov with Elvis as a star because it would be just “great.” The humor might be a little lost on a modern reader, because parody tends not to age well. But something about the young Janet Winn’s wide-eyed sarcasm must have impressed someone, because within six months of publishing it, she began to write more serious film reviews for the New Republic on an intermittent basis. And she was not generally disposed to liking what Hollywood had on offer. She trashed Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan for having diluted the moral complexity George Bernard Shaw had originally given to Joan of Arc’s story. She disliked, too, Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success, because she found it too obvious. But she made some waves with readers when she wrote her reaction to a newly rescreened The Birth of a Nation, which she found not only racist but also far too devoted to a hard division between good and evil:
Outside the theatre, a few blocks away, a civil rights bill, if not a very good one, was being passed; and a few blocks in the other direction, a movie, called I Was a Teenage Werewolf was being played; but I couldn’t help feeling cheerful and comfortably certain that film-wise and otherwise, we have come rather a long way.
Readers reacted quite strongly to these strong opinions. One wrote in. He suspected Miss Winn of knowing a lot and of having great judgment, but added that “it is hard to tell about this, because Miss Winn is quite determinedly On the Side of the Angels, and her prose judgements come to us wearing The Whole Armor of God. Her standards seem so high.” Another letter writer, Hal Kaufman, a self-professed “student of motion pictures,” wrote in to correct Miss Winn too. His qualms about her were rather more wide-ranging, and delivered with a thickness of reference that pompous individuals often mistake for intelligence. The letter writer wished to inform Miss Winn that “the leading authorities everywhere have accorded the work of Griffith the highest praise.” He noted that Lenin had loved the movie too. He also urged her to show more “charity” in her judgments of older films. Her reply to this was very simple:
Mr. Kaufman is a “student of motion pictures” and I am not. How can we agree?
She was by then also turning her critical talents to books and theater. She reviewed a collection of D. H. Lawrence’s letters, but nothing met with her judgment so strongly as the introduction, written by none other than McCarthy’s and Arendt’s old foe Diana Trilling, who was then the lead critic of the Nation. She ridiculed Mrs. Trilling’s acidity in calling Frieda Lawrence an “awful nuisance,” observing that she “aged badly” and “had no real intellect”—by pointing out that it shouldn’t matter in a book of literary criticism whether a writer’s wife was a terrible person.
These reviews, while not particularly memorable in themselves, track the development of a young writer’s self-confidence. She started to get praise alongside the snide letters—including praise from one Norman Mailer, whose appearance on television with Dorothy Parker and Truman Capote Malcolm had chronicled for the magazine. Mailer thought she had gotten the quotes wrong in his discussion with Capote. But he also seemed to be writing in for a bit of flirting:
One is forced to add that the Lady Winn’s account was marvelously well-written and suffered only from the trifling flaw that most of the words she put in my mouth were never said by me.
Winn was by then engaged to Donald Malcolm. Donald took a job at the New Yorker in 1957, and she moved back to Brooklyn. For seven years after that, too busy bringing up their only daughter, Anne Olivia, she did not publish a single word.
If you ask her to tell it herself, Janet Malcolm will usually start the story of her becoming a writer at the New Yorker. While her daughter was small, she had to read an inordinate number of children’s books, and eventually Mr. Shawn, whom she knew through her husband, suggested she write about children’s literature for a December 1966 issue of the New Yorker. Malcolm complied perhaps more eagerly than he anticipated. She provided him with a ten-thousand-word omnibus essay summarizing and analyzing her favorites. She begins in a stodgier tone than the playful younger self of the New Republic:
Our children are a mirror of belief and a proving ground for philosophy. If we bring up a child to be happy and don’t care very much how he behaves, we evidently believe in man’s essential goodness and in life’s infinite possibilities for happiness.
On the strength of that article, Shawn asked her to do it again in 1967 and 1968. The review for 1967 was as stiff as the one for 1966, but in 1968, something moved Malcolm into the realm of reasoned argument. Midway through the piece Malcolm becomes embroiled in an argument with a physician who insists that reality should be made “less ugly” for the young.
I don’t know how Dr. Lasagna proposes to make reality less ugly, and I am not even sure that reality is uglier today than it ever was. There is more knowledge and concern about social problems today, but this does not mean that more or worse social problems exist today. Reality would have been harder to face in the days when they hanged a child for stealing a loaf of bread, one would think. (Today they ought to hang the people who make our bread.)
She then begins to suggest it might be better to have children read “factual books” about drugs in order to prevent their use. She also recommended books about sex that were “a good deal more forthright than any published before, and they will not suit every family’s notions of how the information ought to be presented.” She also reviewed books about black history suitable for children, finding that many of them taught her things she did not know.
Mr. Shawn, apparently noticing a burgeoning talent, gave her a column called “About the House” to write, on art and design. Malcolm found these articles good training for learning to write. They were also her first forays into a field other than criticism. She began to report these pieces slowly, talking about the individual merchants of furniture and interior design. She also felt moved in 1970 to write something about the burgeoning women’s liberation movement everyone else was talking about.
The piece was published in the New Republic. Her name was misspelled in the byline (as Janet Malcom). But her playful attitude had returned. She poked fun at the notion prevalent in the women’s movement that the only place to find fulfillment was outside the home.
In any case, a woman who chooses to put her baby in someone else’s care so she can pursue a career shouldn’t be hypocritical about her decision and tell herself that she is doing it for the sake of the child. She is doing it for herself. She may be doing the right thing—selfish decisions are often the best decisions—but she ought to see what she is doing and be willing to pay the price in affection that parental neglect often exacts.
There is more than a small whiff of anger about that. Its claim that the “new feminism may be an even more invidious cause of unhappiness and discontent” was a common argument at the time—Didion, in her concern about the “triviality” of the women’s movement, often approached it too—but there is something uneasy about the argument. It doesn’t quite track with someone who was building gradual independence as a writer, but it does fit someone who had found motherhood an enjoyable experience and didn’t want to discard whatever good came of it, or whatever degree of choice she could claim for it. But she sounds nothing like the playful presence in the essays she was publishing at the New Yorker, which had become much more elegant, thorough streams of consciousness. When the New Republic’s editors asked her to reply to the angry mail that came in, she wrote a typically sarcastic response:
As for those that raise questions of substance, they require lengthier consideration than my baking and canning obligations permit me to give them at this time. When my Lot improves, I hope to send you another essay on some of the points at issue.
Perhaps the unease was situational. By the time Malcolm wrote this, her husband, Donald, was seriously ill. The doctors could not figure out what was wrong with him; later Malcolm came to believe he had misdiagnosed Crohn’s disease. Soon he was unable to work, and although the New Yorker in those days was financially generous to writers, his illness put the family under considerable strain. It soon became clear that Donald Malcolm was dying.
Malcolm continued to turn out her furniture columns faithfully once a month. Most of these were simple catalogs and descriptions of items she liked. But in March 1972, for the first time, she wandered off the pattern. For a column on modern furniture, she went to meet the artist Fumio Yoshimura, “who, as yet, is better known for his wife, Kate Millett, than for his work.” Millett, of course, was famous in 1972 because she had written a bestselling book called Sexual Politics, a kind of scorched-earth approach to bringing feminism into literary criticism. As Malcolm continues to describe the encounter with Yoshimura, she keeps getting distracted by Millett. The conversation eventually turns to women’s liberation.
I remarked that parents here are afraid that boys who don’t like sports will grow up to be homosexuals. “A fate worse than death,” Kate Millett murmured without looking up from her mail. Kate Millett’s removal of herself from the conversation, I later realized, was an expression of tact rather than of incivility.
At this point Malcolm couldn’t seem to help herself; the piece instead turned into an interview of Millett, whom she kept referring to by her full name.
The allusive, ironic, academic tone of Sexual Politics is entirely absent from Kate Millett’s conversation … Kate Millett’s sculptures all look alike and like Kate Millett. They have a square-cut, blocky, strong, optimistic character.
This is the first appearance of the kind of Janet Malcolm reportage that would make her both revered and controversial. She made herself a character in this short story of an interview, began to build the “I” she would later tell everyone was untrustworthy, a kind of necessary trick. For example: readers probably didn’t know, at the time, that they were reading an interview of a great feminist by a great skeptic regarding feminism, but one who had obviously already read Millett’s book.
In the last year of her husband’s life—Donald Malcolm would die in September 1975—perhaps suspecting she needed to build an even firmer career for herself, Janet Malcolm began to branch out into a newish art that interested her: photography. She did not then read the work of Susan Sontag, which was being slowly published in the New York Review of Books. She would not do that until the 1980s.
But before any of that, she reviewed first a book about Alfred Stieglitz for the New Yorker, and then a retrospective of the work of Edward Weston for the Times. She was careful and a bit prone to jargon in the Weston review. It was in the end an audition to be the New York Times’ photography critic. The Times offered her the job, but William Shawn told her she could be the New Yorker’s photography critic instead.
When she published her photography essays as a collection, Diana and Nikon, in 1980, Malcolm wrote it had taken her some time to find her groove. “Rereading these essays,” she wrote, “makes me think of someone trying to cut down a tree who has never done it before, isn’t strong, has a dull axe, but is very stubborn.” She eventually began to get the hang of it in 1978, she thought, with an essay, “Two Roads,” that explored the snapshot properties of photography. She began to talk of photographs in moral terms, the same ones that had served Sontag so well. In this way of looking at things, she could more easily convey what she found so disturbing about so many of the photographs:
The [Walker] Evans book is not the anthology of grace and order it should have been. It is a book full of chaos and disorder, of ugly clutter and mess, of people with dead eyes, victims and losers crushed by the indifferent machinery of capitalism, inhabitants of a land as spiritually depleted as its soil was physically eroded.
You could also see Malcolm relaxing into the subject matter, her sentences becoming more of a pleasure to read:
Innocently opening the book Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait, published by the Metropolitan Museum on the occasion of its exhibition of the photographs, is like taking a little drive in the country and suddenly coming upon Stonehenge.
By the time Malcolm got a handle on photography she was also becoming more and more interested in writing what were known at the New Yorker as “fact pieces.” This was the in-house term for the long, reported pieces that were the magazine’s signature product. At that point she was married again, this time to her editor at the New Yorker, Gardner Botsford. And she was trying to quit smoking, an activity she closely associated with the act of writing. Meanwhile, reporting would get her out into the world, where she could not interview subjects with a cigarette in hand. So she told Mr. Shawn that she thought she’d do a “fact piece.” She chose as her subject family therapy. Perhaps there is Freudian insight to be had here, since her father was a psychiatrist. But this marriage of Malcolm as a writer and psychoanalysis as a subject was a perfect, unforgettable match.
Psychoanalysis had been around, of course, for almost a century by the time Malcolm began writing about it. But in the 1970s, when she began writing about psychiatry, it was not a popular approach. Psychopharmacology was on the rise; magazines made repeated reference to “Mother’s Little Helper,” Valium. The feminist movement mostly abhorred psychoanalysis, seeing in Freud’s ideas (like “penis envy”) the basis for the fundamental repression of women. But therapy itself was growing in popularity, though its heyday wouldn’t come until the late 1980s and 1990s in America. The books of the existential psychotherapist Rollo May, which connected the ideas of existential philosophers to clinical practice, were enormously popular, especially among the cultural elite that might subscribe to the New Yorker. And all that was enough to spark curiosity about the subject.
Malcolm opened her explorations of modern psychiatric practice with a piece on family therapy, called “The One-Way Mirror,” which pointed out that in fact the practice upset most previous psychoanalytical thinking. By adding more people to the equation, therapists became more confrontational, more strategic, and it was impossible to maintain confidentiality. Malcolm treated all of this with a skeptical eye, but she also let the family therapist speak for himself and, as a result, make himself sound somewhat like a salesman in a cheap suit:
Family therapy will take over psychiatry in one or two decades, because it is about man in context. It is a therapy that belongs to our century, while individual therapy belongs to the nineteenth century. This is not a pejorative. It is simply that things evolve and change, and during any historical period certain ways of looking at and responding to life begin to crop up everywhere. Family therapy is to psychiatry what Pinter is to theater and ecology is to natural science.
The piece is not quite written as criticism of psychoanalysis as a whole. That was the fate that would await Malcolm’s next reporting subject, a typical therapist she called Aaron Green (not his real name). Malcolm used her extensive interviews with Green as a pretext for mounting a critique of psychoanalysts and psychoanalysis generally. In short, she analyzed him. Even his therapist’s couch came up for comment:
The empty couch looked out on the room with a meaningful air. “I’m not any old shabby foam-rubber sofa,” it seemed to say, “I am the couch.”
This delicate touch (and characteristic interest in the comedic possibilities of a subject’s interior décor) reveals something important about Malcolm’s technique. While it is a critical perspective, it isn’t a cruel one. Malcolm is illustrating a problem and making certain judgments about the solution to it, but she is more, as one reviewer explained, “mischievous.” While Aaron Green is at turns silly and anxious, he is also quite sympathetic. Under Malcolm’s questioning he gradually comes around to admitting that even his attraction to the profession at all has the quality of a flaw in his psychology:
I was attracted to psychoanalytic work precisely because of the distance it would create between me and the people I treated. It’s a situation of very comfortable abstinence.
Malcolm continues to catalog the vaguenesses and hypocrisies of this “impossible profession”: the way the duration of therapy seems to get longer and longer; the fact that what a patient will likely get from psychoanalysis is not a cure, but rather “transference,” the phenomenon in which patients redirect to their relationships with their therapists the very feelings and desires retained from childhood that they came to therapy in the first place to solve. Malcolm saw most of these problems as institutionalized by psychoanalytic training institutes, which therapists themselves came to see as a kind of surrogate parent. The training, she gently points out, insists that good psychoanalysts themselves should be extensively analyzed.
But she doesn’t quite turn Green into a caricature of himself. He seems hapless, confused, and quite possibly in need of a different job. But not malevolent.
Put together in a book called Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, Malcolm’s profile of Aaron Green drew raves from every corner. Nearly every American, it seemed, had tried out psychoanalysis at one point in the 1970s, then given it up in disgust, confused at what it was supposed to do for the patient. Malcolm’s piece spoke so beautifully of its paradoxes that every reviewer, even the psychoanalysts, seemed enthralled.
Emboldened, she set out on a second project related to psychoanalysis. This was to be another long profile of a psychoanalyst. But this time, instead of mining Manhattan’s opulent selection of therapists, Malcolm found Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. Masson’s “dynamite” was in the unpublished letters between Freud and Wilhelm Fliess, one of Freud’s disciples. Masson promptly told newspapers that in these letters he’d discovered that Freud had not really abandoned what was known as the “seduction thesis.” The seduction thesis in its original form had held that childhood sexual experiences, often seduction by a parent, were the source of most patient neuroses. When Freud dropped it in 1925, he explained that he had come to understand that when patients described such experiences, they were often describing not a literal truth, but a psychic one. If Masson was correct, it meant Freud originally had been correct to suspect that child sexual abuse—as contemporary mores would recognize it—had been at the heart of most psychological disorders.
Malcolm became interested in Masson because of this claim, and she decided to call him up. Masson was a good talker, and he had a flair for revealing sentences. Over the course of several days of interviews, some of which Malcolm taped and others she recorded in handwritten notes, he told her about his marriages. He told her about his affairs. He told her that Anna Freud and his other mentors had their doubts about him. “I was like an intellectual gigolo,” she quoted him as saying, from her notes. “You get your pleasure from him, but you don’t take him out in public.” Evidently Masson was ready to meet his public, because he was preparing to write a book about the truth he claimed he had found in the Freud-Fliess correspondence. Both Anna Freud and the man who had gotten him the Sigmund Freud Archives job in the first place, Kurt Eissler, told Malcolm they believed Masson was misreading the letters.
It was this siege from his former comrades that seems to have led Masson to decide Malcolm counted as a kind of friend. He knew throughout their encounters that she planned to write about what he told her. But still he was prepared to detail, for hours, his sexual activities, his grudges within the profession, and the various elements of his robust sense of self-worth for Malcolm. Much of the resulting piece she published consisted of long block quotations from him, which read as disquisitions alternating between Masson’s reading of Freud and the number of women he slept with. A typical passage:
Do you know what Anna Freud once said to me? She said, “If my father were alive today, he would not want to become an analyst.” I swear, those were her words. No wait. This is important. I said that to her. I said, “Miss Freud, I have the feeling that if your father were alive today he would not become an analyst,” and she said, “You are right.”
Though these long quotations appeared as uninterrupted soliloquies, Malcolm had actually often cobbled them together from different portions of her interviews—a practice Masson later took issue with in the court cases.
Almost all readers of the resultant articles, “Trouble in the Archives,” presumed that Malcolm was deliberately turning Masson into a buffoon, destroying his credibility. Even a fan as intelligent and discerning as the critic Craig Seligman has called Malcolm’s work on Masson “a masterwork of character assassination.” It is undoubtedly true that no one walks away from reading In the Freud Archives—the title of the book Knopf later published of these articles—thinking Jeffrey Mousaieff Masson is an upstanding citizen. Even Malcolm, at the end, speaking to one of the analysts involved in the affair, had a bad read on Masson: “I wonder if he ever cared about anything.”
But this seems to me to be a slight misreading of Malcolm’s intent. Subsequent controversy over the book—we’ll get to that in a moment—revealed that, with some exceptions, almost all of what she quoted from Masson was reflected in her tapes and notes. She had, from that perspective, simply delivered the goods that Masson had given her. He insisted, over the course of subsequent litigation, that some of these quotes were fabricated and others lifted from context, but not all of them were. A simple diagnosis of “character assassination” would imply that there was no such cooperation between reporter and subject here.
Whether Malcolm had an obligation to get in the way of Masson’s own self-destruction turned out to be a question that would occupy the next decade of her life.
After the book appeared, Masson was furious. He wrote a letter to the New York Times Book Review complaining he’d been slandered. Malcolm replied sharply:
The portrait, in fact, is based on more than 40 hours of tape-recorded conversations with Mr. Masson, which began in Berkeley, Calif., in November 1982, during a week of interviews, and continued on the telephone over the following eight months … Everything I do quote Mr. Masson as saying was said by him, almost word for word. (The “almost” refers to changes made for the sake of correct syntax.)
Masson eventually filed a libel suit for 10.2 million dollars. Of that, 10 million dollars was for punitive damages. It was an absurd sum. As numerous commentators pointed out over the course of the litigation—which, sadly for Malcolm, stretched over a decade—Masson kept having to change the details of his charge. In his initial complaint, he listed statements that he had indeed said on tape. Malcolm was able to play them back.
But there were a few sticking points. One was the “intellectual gigolo” phrase, which could not be found on the tapes. Another was the fact that Malcolm had altered some of the quotes, though Malcolm defended this in a letter to the New York Times Book Review by explaining that she thought to delete certain of Masson’s more extravagant claims. This made the matter a thorny one for the courts. As in the case of Hellman v. McCarthy, the problem became not so much about whether Malcolm might ultimately prevail in the litigation, as she did, but what it might cost her while the dispute was ongoing.
In 1987, Masson’s initial suit was dismissed. “I should have known, having written his portrait, that Masson wouldn’t give up so easily,” Malcolm said later. But she decided to put her energies into a new project.
The opening line of The Journalist and the Murderer, which originally appeared in three parts in the New Yorker in 1989, is famous. “Any journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself knows that what he does is morally indefensible,” Malcolm wrote. This sentence lit a fuse. Many people never seem to have read the book that follows. The first time I saw Malcolm in person, it was twenty years after she’d published that sentence and she was on a high platform at the New Yorker Festival talking about her work. A young man in the crowd got up and questioned her angrily about it. She was silent a moment before she answered: “Well, it was a bit of rhetoric, you see.” The young man clearly did not really see.
This was only a small preview of what happened when Malcolm published her extensive study of a dispute that had arisen between the journalist Joe McGinniss and the murderer Jeffrey MacDonald. McGinniss had contracted with MacDonald for exclusive access to him and his defense lawyers during his 1979 trial for murdering his family. MacDonald agreed, clearly thinking he’d scored a coup. McGinniss was famous for having written a book called The Selling of the President 1968, which had unflatteringly portrayed the Nixon campaign’s attempts to make the candidate more, well, personable. McGinniss had garnered quite a bit of respect as a result.
Unfortunately for MacDonald, by the end of the trial McGinniss had decided he was guilty of the crimes he committed. The book that resulted from their arrangement, a nonfiction potboiler called Fatal Vision, was a giant bestseller, but it claimed MacDonald was a psychopath who had killed his entire family in cold blood. A murderer scorned, MacDonald subsequently sued McGinniss, saying he had deliberately misled MacDonald about the nature of the project. And by most journalistic standards, McGinniss had indeed crossed a line. MacDonald could point to letters, for example, in which McGinniss appeared to be reassuring his source that he thought his conviction a grave injustice.
Malcolm’s introduction to her account of all this continued:
He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction learns—when the article or book appears—his hard lesson.
Because this paragraph was told from the perspective of the betrayed subject, many who read the piece immediately assumed Malcolm was mounting an indictment of journalism. Journalists love nothing more than to talk about journalism. And by 1989, when Malcolm’s articles appeared, the ranks of journalism were mostly stuffed with would-be Woodwards and Bernsteins, convinced that theirs was the craft that could truly take on power. As a result, many felt Malcolm had injured their honor. An exceptionally long hailstorm of criticism ensued.
“Miss Malcolm appears to have created a snake swallowing its own tail: she attacks the ethics of all journalists, including herself, and then fails to disclose just how far she has gone in the past in acting the role of the journalistic confidence man,” yelled one New York Times columnist, who also falsely charged Malcolm with admitting to “fabrications.” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, one of the leading book critics, accused her of exonerating MacDonald by excoriating McGinniss. An injured Chicago Tribune columnist looked around his newsroom and saw “fellow workers recording politicians’ doings, reporting breakthroughs in medicine … Can anyone tell me what is so wrong with any of those standard-fare journalistic chores?”
Malcolm did have her defenders. David Rieff stuck up for her in the Los Angeles Times. He pointed out that there was very little in Malcolm’s position that departed from Joan Didion’s widely celebrated phrase: “Writers are always selling somebody out.” Nora Ephron, who’d befriended Malcolm sometime before, gave an interview to the Columbia Journalism Review: “What Janet Malcolm was saying was so reasonable I was astonished anyone took issue with it,” she said. “I believe that to be a good journalist you have to be willing to complete the transaction Janet describes as betrayal.” This is not an attitude so far from Phoebe Ephron’s “Everything is copy,” after all. The flip side is that sometimes people don’t want to be copy.
(Jessica Mitford, the noted muckraker who had also exposed the death industry back in 1963, and was a from a family of sisters one might have called “sharp” women too, chimed in alongside Nora Ephron: “I thought Malcolm’s articles were marvelous.”)
The other theme of the coverage was the identification of the similarities between what had just happened between Masson and Malcolm and the situation she had analyzed in The Journalist and the Murderer. Masson, sensing an opportunity to reopen the story, told a New York magazine reporter that he read the first part of the piece to be an open letter to himself, a kind of confession of Malcolm’s sins. He had continued to appeal the dismissal of his suit, going all the way to the Supreme Court. There, Justice Anthony Kennedy ordered that Masson be granted a new trial on his claims. Masson would ultimately lose that trial, in 1994, after the jury found that Malcolm was careless, but did not act with “reckless disregard.” A juror told the New York Times that “Masson was too honest. He opened himself up, and he just showed his true colors. She painted him. And he didn’t like it.”
Later, Malcolm said she kind of understood why people threw so many stones at her:
Who hasn’t felt pleasure in the fall of the self-styled mighty? That it was a New Yorker writer who was being dragged through the mud only added to the wicked joy. At that time, the magazine was still wrapped in a fluffy cocoon of moral superiority that really got up the noses of people who worked at other publications. I didn’t help myself by behaving the way writers at the New Yorker thought they ought to behave when approached by the press: like little replicas of the publicity-phobic William Shawn. So instead of defending myself against the false accusations Masson made in interview after interview, I maintained my ridiculous silence.
That silence wasn’t total. While Masson’s appeals were ongoing, The Journalist and the Murderer appeared as a book, and Malcolm wrote a new afterword for it. In that afterword she denied that her troubles with Masson were being refracted through the McGinnis-MacDonald dispute. She said that in fact she had begun to pity Masson because he was once again being used by journalists, who were calling him for quotes they could use to attack her, and then dropping him again.
Another thing she did in this afterword was to defend the notion of editing quotes. This was an accusation at issue in the lawsuit: Masson claimed that by moving sentences around, and changing their order, Malcolm had exceeded the bounds of her rights as a journalist. She defended the practice with an argument she would make several more times in her life as a writer: that writing from the “I” was always unreliable:
Unlike the “I” of autobiography, who is meant to be seen as a representation of the writer, the “I” of journalism is connected to the writer only in a tenuous way—the way, say, that Superman is connected to Clark Kent. The journalistic “I” is an overreliable narrator, a functionary to whom crucial tasks of narration and argument and tone have been entrusted, an ad hoc creation, like the chorus of Greek tragedy. He is an emblematic figure, an embodiment of the idea of the dispassionate observer of life.
This invitation to distrust even the writer herself is a small skeleton key not just to Malcolm’s own work, but to that of nearly every person in this book. It added something to the robust first person that had been built down through the century from Rebecca West to Didion and Ephron: a certain degree of uncertainty. The experience of reading a Malcolm text is always to linger in that sense of uncertainty, both about the nominal subject—was McGinniss really that bad; was Masson an idiot?—and about exactly what new kind of sly trick the narrator might be pulling on us.
In Malcolm, there’s always an added level of meaning like that, some sleight of hand. Much as a psychoanalyst induces patients to examine and analyze their habitual reactions and feelings, Malcolm provoked an emotional response that made many journalists rethink some of what they knew about their profession.
After all, the furor over The Journalist and the Murderer did very little except prove the thesis Malcolm was trying to advance. The topic of the book is journalism, writ large. The argument is that subjects will always feel betrayed by what some other person writes about them. “Journalism” did indeed feel betrayed by Malcolm’s assessment of it. By a stroke of luck things did come around; The Journalist and the Murderer is now taught in most journalism schools. As Malcolm herself will tell you if you ask her, in the end she was proved right.
All of Malcolm’s subsequent work has been marked by The Journalist and the Murderer’s preoccupations. Everywhere she looked, she found stories that didn’t match up. She wrote about trials for murder (in Iphigenia in Forest Hills) and for corporate malfeasance (in The Crimes of Sheila McGough) with an eye to the dueling stories each side of the room tells in those settings, and their seemingly irreconcilable inconsistences. She wrote about the artist David Salle in a piece that consists, as its title claims, of “Forty-One False Starts,” and thereby seemed to be questioning the usefulness of writing journalism at all. Regarding narratives she expresses a skepticism very like Didion’s—a doubter’s view of the stories we tell ourselves—in her examinations of the people we charge to tell us the stories in the first place: writers, artists, thinkers.
But probably the best example of that is The Silent Woman, a book-length New Yorker article on the life of Sylvia Plath, her husband Ted Hughes, and the biographers who tried to understand the truth of their history together. Plath had been a precocious poet and prose writer, publishing widely in her twenties, though never becoming particularly famous. She eventually moved to England, married the poet Ted Hughes, and had two children. She published one book of poetry, but continued to feel professionally frustrated. Then, in 1963, after Hughes had left her for another woman, Plath committed suicide. A couple of years after her death, her searing book of so-called confessional poetry, Ariel, was published to great acclaim. Her novel, The Bell Jar, also posthumously published, became a classic too. And that was when the trouble began.
Plath’s posthumous admirers came to believe that they had a unique insight into the suffering that led to her suicide. And they blamed Ted Hughes for it. There was some justification for his bad reputation. In the last months of Plath’s life, when he left her for the other woman, Plath had to survive in a strange country with no family other than two very young children. Her subsequent spectral-feminist stardom, as the author of Ariel, had meant that a great deal of ire was directed his way. Subsequently, he and his sister, Olwyn, became very guarded and careful about who they would allow to write Plath’s biographies, which they could control by way of controlling the permission to quote from her unpublished work.
Malcolm’s interest in the whole case was piqued by a biographer they had let in, Anne Stevenson. Malcolm said she had known Stevenson at the University of Michigan.
She had once been pointed out to me on the street: thin and pretty, with an atmosphere of awkward intensity and passion about her, gesticulating, surrounded by interesting-looking boys. In those days, I greatly admired artiness, and Anne Stevenson was one of the figures who glowed with a special incandescence in my imagination.
Stevenson’s Plath biography, Bitter Fame, had however come under serious attack. Olwyn Hughes was thanked profusely in a conspicuous author’s note, and it indicated that Hughes had been able to see, comment on, and request changes to the manuscript before it was published. This was seen as an assault on Stevenson’s integrity as a biographer, as it’s thought a biography will be more objective if the estate does not see the manuscript before publication. Malcolm, too, decided she had qualms about the book, but hers were of a different order altogether. She found herself resenting the pose of judiciousness that as a biographer Stevenson was ordered to take. Compared with the people who got to speak from their own experiences of Plath in the book—one of these witnesses truly hated Plath—Stevenson, constrained by this necessity to carefully weigh the evidence, was boring.
Such a preference for the stronger voices of personal experience led Malcolm down a path of sympathy with both Hughes and his sister. She found letters Hughes had written to some of the chief players in the saga, angrily complaining of the way they’d transformed his experience into “official history—as if I were a picture on a wall or some prisoner in Siberia.” Malcolm found that argument compelling, and says so, even as she also finds so many of the characters of this story—the other people with claims to personal witness of Plath’s personality—questionable in their motives. The book ends on the total destruction of the claims of what could be called one of the key witnesses in the Plath case. I won’t tell you who; you should read the book for yourself. Malcolm’s point, again, is that you don’t quite need to trust anyone, don’t need to answer to anyone’s assertions of fact with what she has called, in two different contexts, “bovine equanimity.”
But along the way, Malcolm makes a small disclosure about herself. She goes to visit the critic Al Alvarez, who had been one of Plath’s last friends. He first chats amiably to her about parties at Hannah Arendt’s in the fifties, then goes on to explain that Plath had been far too “big” a woman for him to be attracted to:
I saw what he was getting at, and it made me uncomfortable. As Alvarez had flatteringly mistaken me for someone who might have been invited to Hannah Arendt’s parties in the fifties (I doubt whether I even knew who Hannah Arendt was then), so he now distressingly mistook me for someone who could listen without a pang to his discussion of women he didn’t find attractive. I felt like a Jew who is tacitly included in an anti-Semitic conversation because nobody knows he’s Jewish.
There is a hint of explicit feminism here, of explicit dissatisfaction with the way men talk about women, even to other women. It was a theme that took quite some time to emerge in Malcolm’s work. She had come around gradually to feminism after writing that long critique in the 1970s. She also made a number of women writer friends. Malcolm even knew Sontag a little, though not well. In a short note to Sontag in 1998, when Sontag had become ill again, she wrote: “At lunch I made a mess of saying what I will have a stab at saying here, which is how distressed I am about what you have to endure, how deeply I admire you, and how grateful I am to you for writing ‘Illness As Metaphor.’”
But like Didion, Malcolm would become friends with Nora Ephron and come to feel a deep connection with her work, particularly her essays. Feminism was one of their perennial subjects. Late in Ephron’s life, the two of them had been part of a book club, one that reread The Golden Notebook just to see what it was all about.
And in her travels as a journalist and critic, she seemed to have noticed something about the way the world responded to smart, capable, and insightful women. In 1986, Malcolm published “A Girl of the Zeitgeist,” her profile of Ingrid Sischy, completed amid the initial Masson lawsuit. One of its motifs is the way a serious-minded woman keeps trying to make her way among the naysaying of a bunch of serious-minded men. At one point, Sischy tells Malcolm about a man she once met at a lunch, a man who was not very interested in Sischy because of what she looked like. Malcolm immediately imagines herself to be just like that man:
I had formed the idea of writing about her after seeing Artforum change from a journal of lifeless opacity into a magazine of such wild and assertive contemporaneity that one could only imagine its editor to be some sort of strikingly modern type, some astonishing new female sensibility loosed in the world. And into my house had walked a pleasant, intelligent, unassuming, responsible, ethical young woman who had not a trace of the theatrical qualities I had confidently expected and from whom, like the politician at the lunch, I had evidently turned away in disappointment.
The expectations women have for each other, the way we all size each other up, have so many hopes for each other and so many moments, too, of disappointment: that is the nature, apparently, of being a woman who thinks, and talks about thinking, in public.