It took me a while to get to this one. It’s been a really busy month. But I had to take a second to pay tribute to a writer whose work has meant so much to me, whose style, outlook, perspective, has been so influential, so aspirational. She’s one of those writers where I read her work and want to do better in my own.
No matter the subject, I would read her. If it had her byline? I’m reading it. Her books? I’ve read them all.
All writers should read The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Malcolm’s now-classic book about the challenges of writing about Sylvia Plath, due to the accretion of myth/rumor/speculation, not to mention the draconian estate (run by Ted Hughes and his dragon-lady sister Olwyn Hughes). Malcolm interviews them all, writers who ran into trouble with the estate, etc. Malcolm has a brutal eye. She “takes in” people. She tells the truth about what she sees. She sees humanity, but she is also unsparing. The book is not just about Plath. It’s about the act of writing.
So is The Journalist and the Murderer, maybe her most brutal book. Malcolm was incensed about Joe McGinniss’ best-selling smash-hit “true” crime book Fatal Vision, about family annihilator Jeffrey MacDonald. What angered Malcolm was the trickery McGinniss used in his interviews with MacDonald, pretending to be his friend, pretending that the book he was going to write would be a defense of MacDonald, when in actuality it was going to be an indictment. Malcolm didn’t care about MacDonald, but she went after Joe McGinniss’ tactics, and she went after them hard. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that Malcolm destroyed McGinniss’ reputation. He’s still “out there” but his reputation never recovered. But even beyond that, Malcolm’s real interest is journalism itself – in the way that in The Silent Woman her main topic is literary biography. Malcolm was not afraid to go after the entire profession of journalists, calling them ALL out. Malcolm was not “here to make friends.” Malcolm’s book is about ethical behavior and journalistic responsibility. The Journalist and the Murderer was so influential it’s on the curriculum in Journalism programs across the US.
What is striking to me about all this is how unafraid she was to go against the overwhelming grain. Every person on earth sang McGuinness’ praises. Fatal Vision was celebrated far and wide. She strolled into that landscape of universal acclaim, saying, “Yeah. I’m not impressed. At all.”
Malcolm was a tough unsentimental writer and constitutionally resistant to getting swept away by emotion or consensus-driven pressure. It’s a great lesson, one I try to take to heart. The pressure to conform is intense, especially on Twitter. I haven’t experienced such peer pressure since high school. I never was susceptible to peer pressure, for some reason, but I sure FELT it. Malcolm’s example says: Resist the crowd. Stand back. Doing this is essential for clarity, and crucial for writers. Don’t concern yourself with the general agreement of The Crowd. The Crowd is so often wrong.
I always trusted Malcolm because of her standing-back-ness. I loved to know how she thought, and what was great was how transparent she was about how she thought, not just WHAT she thought. Her book about Plath is really an investigation into the situation, and her own grappling with what she discovered. She thinks out loud in her writing. But she was also a rigorous researcher. And while her writing is crystal-clear, often what she’s doing is leading you down a maze of possibilities, where clarity then vanishes (see the Plath book: there are no clear-cut answers there, and everyone has a different story, a different truth).
Janet Malcolm was – and still is – a real role model for me as a writer. Even her controversies – look them up – are interesting.
I will miss her. I will miss coming across a Janet Malcolm byline, in The New Yorker, or in the New York Review of Books, and setting everything aside to dive on in.
There are many great obituaries out there. I really like this one in The Atlantic.
I really liked the interview Katie Roiphe did with her in 2011. You may have read it.
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6073/the-art-of-nonfiction-no-4-janet-malcolm
Just before the interview section, Roiphe writes:
Later, she will write to me, “Before I try to answer your question, I want to talk about that moment in our meeting at my apartment last week, when I left the room to find a book and suggested that while I was away you might want to take notes about the living room for the descriptive opening of this interview. Earlier you had made the distinction between writers for whom the physical world is significant and writers for whom it scarcely exists, who live in the world of ideas. You are clearly one of the latter. You obediently took out a notebook, and gave me a rather stricken look, as if I had asked you to do something faintly embarrassing.”
She succeeded at Hemingway’s observation that “The hardest thing to do is write straight honest prose on human beings.”
Oooh!! I haven’t read that interview – thanks for the heads up. Love Roiphe too – that email from Malcolm is so classic Malcolm. She was … weird. Idiosyncratic. Relentless, really.
Thanks for the link – will read.