Janet Malcolm, Hypocrite

A review of the late, great New Yorker writer's posthumous memoir.

Often while reading Janet Malcolm — the long-time New Yorker writer who died in June 2021 at 86 — I’ll think I’ve made some clever connection in her work, only to find, several pages or chapters later, that the insight is hers, that she has graciously permitted me the pleasure of discovery by design; in these moments, I feel a rueful gratitude, as when a parent reveals, years on, that a cherished memory of childhood triumph was engineered for the child’s benefit. (That is, I feel she has let me win.)

I experienced this sheepish delight many times while trying to write about Malcolm’s posthumous memoir, Still Pictures, for a review essay in the New Republic (just published). Her books, which I reread, are so densely packed with intelligence and piquant insight, the reviewer often finds himself at a loss to say anything of interest or import that Malcolm hasn’t already, at the very least, implied. This is, I suppose, partly a way of saying she is an exquisitely guarded writer; her intellectual fortifications are at once glorious to behold and near-impossible to penetrate. And yet, somehow, the overall effect is not stinginess but generosity. One feels flattered by her formidable intelligence, elevated by it, not intimidated or put off — ravenously grateful that she has chosen to share it with us.

That is to say, also, that she reserves her candor for the reader alone. As I write in my review, she plays host to the reader with extraordinary graciousness; we feel we are her favorite, with whom she shares her most thrilling gossip about the other guests:

Her books whisk us through rooms of chattering guests, all of whom reveal more than they intend. As we approach an elderly couple, she points to the man, a moth-eaten psychoanalyst inhaling canapés, and, in a conspiratorial whisper, renders a concise and bracing judgment of his character. As she writes of one of the Freudians she interviews in The Impossible Profession, “He was a man without charm, without ease, without conceit or vanity, and with a kind of excruciating, prodding, twitching honesty that was like an intractable skin condition.” Her description reaches its denouement at the exact moment we arrive at the couple’s side, so that her withering verdict is just dancing on the threshold of our consciousness when her voice rises, reacquiring its benevolence, to introduce the good doctor so-and-so and his wife. When the man speaks—for several paragraphs—the accuracy of her assessment is clear.

This method, however, is ill-suited to the task she sets herself in Still Pictures, a spare and limpid memoir inspired by a set of old photographs from her life. The book, which Malcolm almost didn’t write, is nothing like her others — in which her subjects are constantly betraying themselves. It is, instead, as Malcolm once wrote of Edith Wharton’s autobiography, “a sort of tour de force of self-control” in which the “little betrayals (of complacency, pomposity, self-congratulation) that leak out of so many autobiographies” do not appear.

What my review goes on to wonder about — and please do read it and share it with others — is the apparent contradiction between her terror at being subject, herself, to the sort of intense scrutiny she regularly deploys against the real-life characters in her books. She constantly avers her own disgust at self-exposure; her subjects are always losing her respect by succumbing to her own method, by giving in to the human impulse to spill the beans, to self-narrate, to “play” themselves (in more ways than one). “The act of snooping,” she writes, “carries with it a certain discomfort and unease; one would not like to have this happen to oneself.”

One word for this sort of posture — of professionally doing unto others what one would not want done to oneself — is hypocrisy. I puzzled for a long while at Malcolm’s split-morality. She has made a career of violating the Kantian imperative. And it is my surmise that her famously withering criticism of the journalistic (and biographical) enterprise — “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.” — are, in every case, accusations against herself. Indeed, they are accusations she has no desire to dispute. Nor does she suggest that she should be forgiven her transgressions for admitting them. “Being aware of your rascality,” she says, “doesn’t excuse it.”

So what’s the deal? One hypothesis — which I didn’t have space to entertain in the review — comes from psychanalysis. As Adam Phillips paraphrases Jacques Lacan, “there was surely something ironic about Christ’s injunction to love thy neighbour as thyself – because actually, of course, people hate themselves.” Or, as Phillips elaborates, “Given the way people treat one another, perhaps they had always loved their neighbours in the way they loved themselves: that is, with a good deal of cruelty and disregard.” In this way, perhaps, by the Freudian law of ambivalence, it was inevitable that journalists and biographers would come to hate and be cruel to their subjects — because, of course, they also love and need them, rely on them, in a fundamental way, for sustenance. And we never hate anything so much as that which can satisfy (and, thus, also frustrate) our needs.

But ultimately, in the piece, I settle on a different interpretation — derived from her own reading of Sylvia Plath’s diaries. I won’t give away the ending (read the piece!), but it ultimately has to do with the irresolvable incongruity between the demands of art and the demands of journalistic ethics, or even just the demands of good human behavior (of obeying your mother and being a good girl). I don’t think Malcolm ever truly resolve this tension for herself, but her comfort with living with its ambivalence — of “constantly claiming exemptions, forbearance, and reprieves for ourselves (and those whom we love) that we would never permit to others” — is something of what makes her body of work so satisfying and formidable.

I’ll leave you with one more quote from Malcolm, which also didn’t make it into the piece, but which sheds some more light on the question of Malcolm’s hypocrisy:

Society mediates between the extremes of, on the one hand, intolerably strict morality and, on the other, dangerously anarchic permissiveness through an unspoken agreement whereby we are given leave to bend the rules of the strictest morality, provided we do so quietly and discreetly. Hypocrisy is the grease that keeps society functioning in an agreeable way, by allowing for human fallibility and reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable human needs for order and pleasure. [It relies on] a contract whereby you never come right out and admit you have stretched the rules for your own benefit. You do it and shut up about it, and hope you don’t get caught, because if you are caught no one — or no one who has any sense — will come forward and say he has done the same thing himself.

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Oh and one more thing. I neglected to send one of these newsletters a month ago, when my last piece came out: a review of several 2022 movies in the “eat the rich” genre, for New York Magazine. Here’s the opening:

The existence of hell is a problem for theologians: Why would a just and merciful god create a playground for the perpetual torture of his children? But for the rest of us it’s a comfort. Never in human history have we possessed so capacious a knowledge of the various and specific iniquities of the world — and so little hope of them ever being rectified. Evil abounds; justice is scarce. Every day brings more nuanced data about the criminally wealthy, the lives they live at our expense, and the elaborate means at their disposal to escape judgment. In this context, the promise of otherworldly damnation is a solace. “We need to believe that the powerful can suffer, that they can be humiliated, that they can be made to feel there is no way out,” theologian Adam Kotsko writes of this dilemma. “If there can’t be any hope for us, we can at least hope that one day there will be hopelessness for the destroyers of our hope.”

Hell, in other words, is our consolation prize for the futile dream of justice — a damnation deferred. My enemies are in power, but I can picture them in flames. And so it goes, of late, at the movies.

It goes on from there. Hope you enjoy.

I’ll try to keep sending these posts when a new piece of mine comes out, though I’m not sure my original purpose — preserving a non-Twitter space to share my work — will be so urgent. The embers of the “hell-site” continue to burn and burp out flames.

Happy Springtime. Thanks for reading.

Sam

P.S. My Janet Malcolm piece appears in the magazine alongside this wonderful, apposite art by Zoë Van Dijk. Follow Zoë’s instagram here.