October 29, 2018 Issue

A few years ago, Janet Malcolm wrote a short essay titled “Thoughts on Autobiography from an Abandoned Autobiography” (included in her 2013 collection Forty-one False Starts), in which she expresses frustration with her inability to write interestingly about herself. She says,

I have been aware, as I write this autobiography, of a feeling of boredom with the project. My efforts to make what I write interesting seem pitiful. My hands are tied, I feel. I cannot write about myself as I write about the people I have written about as a journalist. To these people I have been a kind of amanuensis: they have posed for me and I have drawn their portraits. No one is dictating to me or posing now.

Well, since writing the above, she appears to have found a way that satisfies her. That way is through old family photos. She uses them as aides-memoire. Her personal history piece, “Six Glimpses of the Past,” in this week’s issue, is pure delight. And what is delightful are the many Malcolmian touches: the analysis of photos (“I suspect that the exciting, Arbus-like picture of the grotesque Slečna was one that she would have preferred not to have taken”), the literary references (“I imagined my father’s life in the village as something out of late Tolstoy: a peasant culture of want, harshness, and discomfort; sledges chased by wolves through the snow, not enough to eat, everything scratchy and uncouth, nothing easy, nothing pretty”), her interest in interior design (“As a child, I played with doll houses that were orange crates furnished with chairs and tables and beds contrived out of this and that piece of wood or metal or cloth scavenged from around the house”), her epigrammatic observations (“Autobiography is a misnamed genre; memory speaks only some of its lines”), her distrust of narrative (“My mind is filled with lovely plotless memories of him. The memories with a plot are, of course, the ones that commit the original sin of autobiography and give it its vitality if not its raison d’être. They are the memories of conflict, resentment, blame, self-justification—and it is wrong, unfair, inexcusable to publish them”). There’s even mention of a pomegranate: “One day, a pair of twins named Janice and Rose brought in a pomegranate split in half and dispensed seeds to a favored few. I was not among them.” I’ve written about the subtle pomegranate pattern running through Malcolm’s work (see here). “Six Glimpses of the Past” continues the motif.

Malcolm doesn’t animate her photos; she uses them to kindle her memories. Sometimes her method works, sometimes it doesn’t. For me, the most interesting passages in her piece describe her method when it fails. For example, writing about her grandfather, she says, 

I see some resemblance to myself in pictures of him. That’s all I can say about Oskar. If I had known I was going to write about him, I would have asked my mother questions. But now I am like a reporter with an empty notebook. Oskar is out of reach.

Oskar is out of reach. It’s a chilling, memorable line. Oskar can’t be rescued from oblivion.