Malcolm

When I was two essays into this collection, published in 2013 but collecting pieces from across several decades before, I was certain it would be one of my best books of 2021. The first two essays are among the best non-fiction I’ve ever read.

After that, sadly, it became a bit more run-of-the-mill – but let me take you on that journey.

The title of the collection is also the title of the first essay, and it opens like this:

There are places in New York where the city’s anarchic, unaccommodating spirit, its fundamental, irrepressible aimlessness and heedlessness have found especially firm footholds. Certain transfers between subway lines, passageways of almost transcendent sordidness; certain sites of torn-down buildings where parking lots have silently sprung up like fungi; certain intersections created by illogical confluences of streets—these express with particular force the city’s penchant for the provisional and its resistance to permanence, order, closure.

Malcolm doesn’t go for sparse descriptions, so this might be off-putting to some. I think it is absolutely wonderful, and I was excited to dive in – to a piece about the artist David Salle. I’m afraid I hadn’t even heard of him. He was presumably a bigger name in 1994, when this essay was first published and before I’d reached double digits – something of an enfant terrible, disrupting art with collages and ‘quotes’ from other artwork and (or was it?) misogyny. He is a fascinating character, though I also imagine anybody that Malcolm meets and writes about is a fascinating character. She has a way of giving the details of a person that make them simultaneously extraordinary and ordinary. She will introduce someone with an unexpected comment on their handshake, or a piece of pottery they have, or how they exemplify a broader type – and they are instantly illuminated in a Malcolm-portrait that isn’t uncharitable but also is completely unsparing. She is never nasty or malicious, she is simply completely unhindered.

In ‘Forty-One False Starts’, though, we don’t just get this introduction once. As the title suggests, we get it 41 times. After a few paragraphs, Malcolm tries a different entrance to the essay. And over and over. Some are short, none are more than a page or two. Each looks at Salle and his work from a different angle – and while none paint a full picture, the composite is like the collages that they discuss. It’s such a brilliant idea for an essay and, more importantly, is brilliantly executed. (You don’t have to get a copy of the book to read it, either: it’s still on the New Yorker website.)

The second essay is almost as excellent. In it, Malcolm meets the photographer Thomas Struth and, in her conversation with him about photographing Queen Elizabeth II, gives us a vivid picture of the man. As usual, the way she conveys the conversations is odd, unexpected, and sublime. (My paperback doesn’t include any pictures, so I spent a lot of time on Google for the essays about artists, looking up the examples discussed.)

Sadly, the reason that Forty-One False Starts didn’t make my Top Books of 2021 is that it also includes a lot of essays where Malcolm doesn’t speak with her subjects. In most cases, admittedly, that is because they’re dead. There are essays on Edith Wharton, Vanessa Bell, Diane Arbus etc. She covers a range of artists and writers – the provenance of the essays isn’t always clear, but I think some must be introductions to books or intended to accompany exhibitions. And they are fine. There’s nothing wrong with her writing. But the spark is gone when Malcolm isn’t conveying conversations she has had.

There are still moments of Malcolm individuality. I loved ‘The Reef has been called Wharton’s most Jamesian novel, but it is merely her least cleverly plotted one’ and, from the Diane Arbus essay, ‘It is a measure of the power Doon wields in the Arbus world that no one dared protect her against saying something so breathtakingly silly in print.’ But they are few and far between.

I should add, there are still a couple of other essays where she is present, and those are wonderful. She is at her gossipy best while finding out the scandals and tantrums behind the magazine Artforum, and there is a great essay about meeting Rosalind Krauss that starts with a fantastic description of her apartment, including this:

But perhaps even stronger than the room’s aura of commanding originality is its sense of absences, its evocation of all the things that have been excluded, have been found wanting, have failed to capture the interest of Rosalind Krauss – which are most of the things in the world, the things of ‘good taste’ and fashion and consumerism, the things we see in stores and in one another’s houses. No one can leave this loft without feeling a little rebuked: one’s own house suddenly seems cluttered, inchoate, banal.

But the collection feels so diluted by those other pieces. The person Malcolm writes best about is herself – or, rather, she is brilliant at revealing two people in a conversation, where one of them is her. I would love a collection where she is front and centre alongside her subjects. It flies in the face of received wisdom about how to write an essay about an artist or writer, and it would be terrible in the hands of most essayists – but Malcolm was a genius, and she should be allowed to write her own rules.

As a collection, Forty-One False Starts is uneven. But I think it’s worth getting for the third or so of the essays that are truly extraordinary. Skim the rest.

My love for Janet Malcolm continues apace. I’ve been buying up her books but initially hadn’t bothered with The Silent Woman (1993) because I’m not especially interested in Sylvia Plath. Then somebody told me, probably on here, that it’s much more about the ethics and process of writing a biography than it is about Plath – and that sounded completely up my street.

Malcolm sets out the key moral quandary at the heart of writing and reading biographies, and she puts it so well that I’m going to quote a long passage:

The voyeurism and busybodyism that impel writers and readers of biography alike are obscured by an apparatus of scholarship designed to give the enterprise an appearance of banklike blandness and solidity. The biographer is portrayed almost as a kind of benefactor. He is seen as sacrificing years of his life to his task, tirelessly sitting in archives and libraries and patiently conducting interviews with witnesses. There is no length he will not go to, and the more his book reflects his industry the more the reader believes that he is having an elevating literary experience, rather than simply listening to backstairs gossip and reading other people’s mail. The transgressive nature of biography is rarely acknowledged, but it is the only explanation for biography’s status as a popular genre. The reader’s amazing tolerance (which he would extend to no novel written half as badly as most biographies) makes sense only when seen as a kind of collusion between him and the biographer in an excitingly forbidden undertaking: tiptoeing down the corridor together, to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the keyhole.

One of the catalysts for this exploration was Anne Stevenson’s 1989 biography of Plath, Bitter Fame, which Malcolm describes as ‘by far the most intelligent and the only aesthetically satisfying of the five biographies of Plath written to date’. This was 1993, and I’m sure plenty have been written since – but Malcolm tracks down all the biographers and memoirists who had written about Plath, critically and sympathetically, from personal experience and none. Because, though Malcolm admires Stevenson’s book, it was apparently received very critically – because it is sympathetic to Ted Hughes.

This is all before Hughes published Birthday Letters and the tide started to turn a little on seeing him as the villain of the piece. At the time, any criticism towards Plath or sympathy towards Hughes was seen as giving into the dominant force of the Plath estate: Olwyn Hughes. She is the most vivid character in Malcolm’s book. As Ted Hughes’ sister, she is the gatekeeper to Plath’s works and archives, and tries fiercely and hopelessly to determine the narrative. Well, again, Malcolm puts it best:

After three and a half years of acquaintance with Olwyn – of meetings, telephone conversations, and correspondence – I cannot say I know her much better than I did when she first appeared to me in her letter. But I have never seen anything in her of the egotism, narcissism, and ambition that usually characterise the person who welcomes journalistic notice in the belief that he can beat the odds and gain control of the narrative. Olwyn seems motivated purely by an instinct to protect her younger brother’s interests and uphold the honour of the family, and she pursues this aim with reckless selflessness. Her frantic activity makes one think of a mother quail courageously flying in the face of a predator to divert him from the chicks scurrying to safety.

And there is some truth to the reputation Stevenson’s book apparently had. She is so beset upon by Olwyn, every word of the biographer examined and questioned, that (in interviews with Malcolm) she describes the experience of writing the book as a kind of trauma. In many cases, she gave up. But when Malcolm meets and interviews the others who have written about Plath, she also pierces through all of their veneers, finding the real moral and personal choices behind their books (as well as the academic or supposedly objectives ones).

Malcolm is always arrestingly honest in a way that makes it seem like candour was the only option that occurred to her. She relays conversations with all her interviewees without even seeming to notice when they have exposed themselves and their flaws. There is an astonishing immediacy to it all and, given the discussions in the book about the difficulties of getting permission to quote from letters, I’m amazed that everybody involved signed up. Malcolm must be very persuasive. Some of the letters between Stevenson and Olwyn Hughes, for instance, are quite shocking. At one point, it’s almost like watching an abusive relationship from the inside.

As I say every time I write about a Malcolm book, she is the main draw. Don’t pick this up if you chiefly want to know the facts of Plath’s life. But if you’re at all interested in the ethics and practicalities of biography, or even just in how people interact when there is a lot at stake, then The Silent Woman is a brilliant and fascinating book.

As part of my DPhil, I did quite a lot of research into Freud and his disciples. I sat and read the Journal of Psychoanalysis from the 1920s, and wrote about how the language of Freudianism helped inspire the language of the fantastic (and vice versa). It was fascinating, and I was able to use some of this research in the forthcoming afterword to the British Library’s reprint of Rose Macaulay’s Dangerous Ages. But I signed out of psychoanalysis in about 1935, and know very little about what followed.

That’s where Janet Malcolm comes in. I became besotted with her after reading Two Lives, the book she wrote about Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, and have been steadily reading her others since. I’ve previously read In the Freud Archives, which did include a lot of modern Freudians and their in-fighting, but Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession looks more closely and what psychoanalysis means today – or at least the ‘today’ of 1981, when the book was published. The title comes from a quote by Freud: ”It almost looks as if analysis were the third of those ‘impossible’ professions in which one can be sure beforehand of achieving unsatisfying results. The other two, which have been known much longer, are education and government.’

When Freud was about, psychoanalysis was usually seen as a short-term treatment to cure extreme symptoms – people went for a few weeks or months. By the time Malcolm explored the profession, it was anticipated that treatment would last many years – of going every day to spend an ‘analysis hour’ (50 minutes) with the analyst. Indeed, as Malcolm explains:

Cases that formally terminate – i.e. end by mutual agreement of analyst and patient – are relatively rare. The majority of analytic cases end because the patient moves to another city, or runs out of money, or impulsively quits the analysis, or agrees with the analyst that stalemate has been reached. Even the most experienced and successful analysts acknowledge at least as many cases that run afoul or end prematurely or inconclusively as those that properly terminate.

Much of the book is based upon interviews Malcolm does with ‘Aaron Green’ (a pseudonym), a 46-year-old analyst whom Malcolm describes on the first page as ‘a slight man, with a vivid, impatient, unsmiling face’. That description is quintessentially Malcolm and shows her unabashed style as a journalist/writer – she writes as though her subjects will never read what is written; as though she can be as blunt on the page as she is in her head. But never with a sense of righting a wrong, or finding personal enjoyment in describing the people she interviews. It’s just a summing up.

I loved all the sections where she relays her interviews with Green – whether establishing his dissatisfaction with his career or looking at the wider scope of psychoanalysis and the arguments and factions that exist within it. Malcolm is brilliant at interviews that reveal the whole of the person often, you imagine, slightly against their better judgement. She is something of an analyst herself in these sections and is brilliant at getting under the skin of a close-knit, often warring fraternity.

The things that analysts warred over in this period are relatively niche. Should an analyst offer sympathy to a grieving patient? Is it ever acceptable for a patient and an analyst to date after their professional relationship has ended? It’s intriguing that all the big Freudian ideas – the Oedipus complex, sublimation, the death drive etc. – are not disputed internally. They are no longer the big headline-grabbing discoveries. Analysts are left to dispute the lesser corners of their profession – even while it remains a collection of absurdities to a large percentage of the world.

Where I found Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession less successful was, ironically, where it did what it purported to do. The book sort of claims to be an introduction to psychoanalysis, and I suppose that’s the way it would be marketed – but I found it quite dry when Malcolm was tracing the history of the profession and its various key areas. Whenever she removed herself from the narrative, basically. She is one of those rare writers that you want to intrude into her topic more, rather than less.

And it seems that, much like when I read Two Lives to find out about Gertrude Stein and ended up more interested in Janet Malcolm, I am always going to read her books wanting to spend more time when her intriguing personality – her way of reporting and interviewing, and her unique take on writing and the world.

After reading Two Lives by Janet Malcolm, you may recall that I went on a Malcolm buying binge. Four of her books arrived more or less at once, none of them matching remaining A Century of Books years, but I allowed myself to cheat on ACOB with In the Freud Archives from 1984. Sadly my edition is not the lovely NYRB Classics edition pictured, but it’s much nicer than mine.

I researched quite a lot about Freud for my DPhil – or, more specifically, how his ideas permeated to the middlebrow public of the 1920s and ’30s, and how they often ridiculed his ideas. Malcolm is looking at rather a different world connected to Freud – fast forwarding a few decades, and exploring the in-fighting between the various custodians of his ideas and legacy.

I think Malcolm might be a Freudian herself, and takes his legacy seriously – but it would difficult to take it as seriously as the people in this work of reportage. (But it is more than reportage.) Kurt Eissler is a respected psychoanalyst and head of the Freud archives. He brings in a young scholar, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, who has a background in Sanskrit but the sort of personality that can make people believe he should be in control – and he is lined up as the next Curator of the Freud Museum (waiting only for Anna Freud’s death). And then there is Peter Swales, the self-styled ‘punk historian of psychoanalysis’, whose modus operandi is writing people enormously long letters detailing their failings (and then circulating these letters widely).

As a cast, they feel like they belong in a Muriel Spark novel or something by Beryl Bainbridge. They are forthright, obsessed, and deeply distrustful of one another. And much of their rivalry and animosity stems from whether or not they believe that Freud went back on the concept of the ‘seduction theory’. Of such matters are careers and lives made, it seems. Dramatic papers are published; people are fired and sued and verbally attacked. While 99% of us don’t care either way, this is the lynch pin of the fraught relationships between Swales, Masson, and Eissler. The former pair are particularly astonishing creations – because, while real people, one feels they must have been put through Malcolm’s eye for the absurd.

And yet this is an earlier work than Two Lives, and Malcolm feels a little less adventurous in her writing. She is still very much a presence, but (perhaps because her subjects are alive) she is more of an observer than a shaper of her topic. Long sections are devoted to the words of her subjects, and I felt that I missed her unique view of the world in those moments – I wanted her to intervene and twist things slightly, bringing the shock of the new in her muted way. That talent of hers is definitely there, but a little too muted; too restrained.

If her style and interventions are more cautious, she has still done an exemplary job of showing us who these people are – letting them be hoist by their own petard, perhaps. It’s all a bit dizzying, and her genius shows itself best in that she discovered the issue and focalised it in the way she did. Whether or not you have the remotest interest in the legacy of Freud, I recommend you discover how it has obsessed these lives – and it confirms my belief that I will read absolutely anything Malcolm turns her eye to.