October 9, 2017 Issue

Janet Malcolm’s “The Storyteller,” a profile of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, in this week’s issue, contains a delightful surprise. In the penultimate section, a vivid character from one of her earliest New Yorker pieces suddenly reappears. Here are the words that usher him in:

“Does the name Ben Maddow mean anything to you?” Maddow asked during one of our early interviews. “Yes, it does,” I said. In the early eighties, I had read a brilliant book—an illustrated biography of the photographer Edward Weston—by a man of that name.

The book is Edward Weston: Fifty Years. Malcolm not only read it; she favorably reviewed it in a piece titled “Two Photographers” (The New Yorker, November 18, 1974; re-titled “East and West” in her superb 1980 collection, Diana & Nikon), praising it for, among other things, its “enormous, almost novelistic, interest,” and concluding that it will “outlast many of Weston’s photographs.”

This is high praise, indeed, from a critic known for her disdain for biography: see, for example, her great The Silent Woman (1994) (“Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world”). Maddow’s Edward Weston: Fifty Years is one of the few biographies she’s admired. (Another is Quentin Bell’s Virginia Woolf: see “A House of One’s Own,” The New Yorker, June 5, 1995.)

Malcolm’s “East and West” imprinted Ben Maddow’s name in my memory. The passage in “The Storyteller,” beginning with the words “Does the name Ben Maddow mean anything to you?,” made me smile. Here is Malcolm, forty-three years after “East and West,” writing about Maddow again. Nothing in those intervening decades has changed her opinion of his book. She calls it “brilliant.”