Postscript: Janet Malcolm 1934 - 2021

Janet Malcolm (Portrait by Jillian Tamaki)

Janet Malcolm, in her wonderful Reading Chekhov (2001), said,

The letters and journals we leave behind and the impressions we have made on our contemporaries are the mere husk of the kernel of our essential life. When we die, the kernel is buried with us. This is the horror and pity of death and the reason for the inescapable triviality of biography.

Malcolm died last week, age eighty-six. Are the books and essay collections she left behind “mere husk”? Not in this eye, among beholders. They’re among the glories of New Yorker writing. Malcolm is one of this blog’s touchstones. Click on her name in the “Labels” column, and you’ll open sixty-one posts on her work. 

Over the last few days, I’ve been reading tributes to her. One of the most perceptive is Jennifer Szalai’s “Janet Malcolm, a Writer Who Emphasized the Messiness of Life With Slyness and Precision” (The New York Times Book Review, June 19, 2021). Szalai says, 

As the daughter of a psychiatrist herself, Malcolm was ever alert to inconsistencies and reversals, to text and to subtext, to the ways that we try to make ourselves intelligible to ourselves and to others. 

This gets at an aspect of Malcolm’s writing that speaks to me: her psychoanalytical approach to journalism. She took nothing at face value. “Was the incident like a screen memory that hides a more painful recollection?” she asks in her superb “The Window Washer” (The New Yorker, November 19, 1990). “My arrival in Yalta was marked by an incident that rather dramatically brought into view something that had lain just below my consciousness”: “Travels with Chekhov” (The New Yorker, February 21, 2000). 

Some of her best pieces are on psychoanalysis: “The Impossible Profession,” The New Yorker, November 24 & December 1, 1980 (“For embedded in the transcript, like a message written in invisible ink, are innumerable, unmistakable traces of the patient’s unconscious motives”); “Six Roses au Cirrhose?,” The New Yorker, January 24, 1983 (“Mistrust is the analyst’s stock-in-trade, an attitude from which he must never relent”); “J’appelle un Chat un Chat,” The New Yorker, April 12, 1987 (“Today everyone knows – except possibly a few literary theorists – that the chief subject of the psychoanalytic dialogue is not the patient’s repressed memories but the analyst’s vacation”).

She had a psychoanalyst's distrust of narrative:  

We go through life mishearing and mis-seeing and misunderstanding so that the stories we tell ourselves will add up. Trial lawyers push this tendency to a higher level. They are playing for higher stakes than we are playing for when we tinker with actuality in order to transform the tale told by an idiot into an orderly, self-serving narrative. [“Iphigenia in Forest Hills,” The New Yorker, May 3, 2010]

Even her photography writing has a psychoanalytical dimension. In her brilliant “Slouching Towards Bethlehem, PA.” (The New Yorker, August 6, 1979), she wrote,

Hare takes the camera’s capacity for aimless vision as his starting point and works with it somewhat the way a psychoanalyst works with free association. He enters the universe of the undesired detail and adopts an expectant attitude, waiting for the cluttered surface to crack and yield an interpretation.

That last sentence is inspired. It could serve as a description of Malcolm’s own special brand of psychoanalytical magic. She took the secret of that magic with her. She left behind a splendid oeuvre.