Janet Malcolm's "The Master Writer of the City"

One of my favorite essays of the past ten years is Janet Malcolm’s “The Master Writer of the City,” a spirited defense of Joseph Mitchell’s “radical departures from factuality.” I first read it when it appeared in The New York Review of Books (April 23, 2015). At that time, I was struck by Malcolm’s audacity; she mocked journalism’s ironclad injunction don’t mess with the facts! She says,

The obvious answer to Kunkel’s question – the one that most journalists, editors, and professors of journalism would give – is yes, of course, the reputation of “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” should suffer now that we know that Mitchell cheated. He has betrayed the reader’s trust that what he was reading is what actually happened. He has mixed up nonfiction with fiction. He has made an unwholesome, almost toxic brew out of the two genres. It is too bad he is dead and can’t be pilloried. Or perhaps it is all right that he is dead, because he is suffering the torments of hell for his sins against the spirit of fact. And so on.

But today, rereading Malcolm’s piece in her new essay collection, Nobody’s Looking at You, I find myself admiring the stylish way she shapes her argument. She doesn’t start out wildly swinging at Mitchell’s critics. She begins with a close reading of one of Mitchell’s greatest pieces, “Up in the Old Hotel.” She gives it the same concentrated attention she gives to Chekhov’s stories in her Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey (2001). She shows the art in Mitchell’s many seemingly irrelevant digressions. She says,

As in all of Mitchell’s pieces everything is always going somewhere, though not necessarily so you’d notice. Mitchell is one of the great masters of the device of the plot twist disguised as a digression that seems pointless but that heightens the effect of unforced realism.

Malcolm’s defense of Mitchell is based on artistic license. She makes a two-step argument: (1) Mitchell is an artist; (2) therefore, he’s free to bend actuality to his artistic will. She writes,

Mitchell’s travels across the line that separates fiction and nonfiction are his singular feat. His impatience with the annoying, boring bits of actuality, his slashings through the underbrush of unreadable facticity, give his pieces their electric force, are why they’re so much more exciting to read than the work of other nonfiction writers of ambition.

I disagree with the second stage of Malcolm’s argument. In my opinion, a journalist, no matter how artistic he or she may be, isn’t free to tamper with the facts. But the first part of her brief – the claim that Mitchell is an artist – seems to me incontrovertible. No one argues it better than she does in her superb “The Master Writer of the City.”