I am not exactly disillusioned with Janet Malcolm, but I’m not not disillusioned with her. Her writing remains as beautifully clear and elegant as I ever thought it was. She is still the person I turn to when David Foster Wallace has worn me down with his ceaseless locutions. Lo:

Human nature is such that when we are suddenly taken up by someone whom we consider superior and admirable, we accept his attentions calmly, whereas when we are dropped we cannot rest until we feel we have got to the bottom of the person’s profound irrationality. Nor can we easily accept the verdict sent down to us through the mortifying silence of someone who has found us wanting and has packed up and moved on. We protest it, each in our way — our futile ways, since the more effective is our protest the more surely do we drive away the person whose love we have lost not because of anything we did, but because of who we are.

Good, right?

On the down side, I am finding that Malcolm’s acknowledgement of the ethical problems posed by journalism does not inoculate her against those problems. Whereas the controversies she covers in her literary biographies remain interesting and relevant — we won’t stop caring about what sort of person Sylvia Plath was, or about the inherent problems of someone like Bronwyn Hughes controlling Plath’s letters and estate — something like In the Freud Archives feels pointlessly petty and gossipy. Viz.:

[Jeffrey Masson said,] “Wendy [O’Flaherty] was even worse, in her way, though I thought, Well, at least she’s a woman. I remember once trying to touch her, and she looked at me and said, ‘Frankly, I don’t think you’re man enough to have an affair with me.’ I ran into this sort of thing everywhere I went at Harvard.

and much later in the book:

[Wendy O’Flaherty said,] “I gather from other people that [Masson’s] not nice to anybody, but he certainly has always been beastly to me. I wouldn’t sleep with Jeff, and he might have regarded that as a kind of gauntlet.”

This sort of thing feels like a waste of Janet Malcolm’s — or anyone’s — time. So much of In the Freud Archives — and this was true of The Crime of Sheila McGough and The Journalist and the Murderer as well — is spent in quoting long, complicatedly self-justifying speeches from people who feel they have been dreadfully wronged. Malcolm cycles through various interviewees and their feelings of having been wronged — Jeffrey Masson, denied curatorship of the Freud Archives following an ill-advised Times article; Kurt Eissler, who comes off rather sweet actually in his Freud apologetics; Peter Swales, also taken under Eissler’s wing and later abandoned when he proved to be insufficiently fond of Freud.

And, just, why bother? Most of the people you meet in the world could probably be drawn on to talk about Wrongs Done to Me by People I Did Not Realize Were Terrible Until Much Too Late, but that gets wearisome pretty quickly — as do, to my infinite regret, a number of Janet Malcolm’s books, including In the Freud Archives. (But not The Silent Woman, which I still really love, and maybe it’s just because I’m more interested in troublesome literary executors than I am in scholars who went around scandalizing Freud’s name in the 1980s when Freud was still (sorry Freud!) relevant to mental health practice.) Wearisome and not worthwhile.

Cover report: I like the faux-wrinkly business the British cover has going on, but I think the American cover is more visually interesting. I am also fond of collage where pieces of the collage have writing on them. So that is my bias. I will accept counterarguments.

The post Review: In the Freud Archives, Janet Malcolm appeared first on Reading the End.

Which is, at least to me, much more interesting. In the days of my youth when I thought I was going to be an academic (oh Past Jenny), I had a scheme to write a book about Oscar Wilde that was basically this exact plan: the history of his mythology (not the story of his life). The interest is in the variances and intersections.

One example of this is the mythology of Alice Toklas having been unlikeable. Malcolm quotes various contemporaries of Stein and Toklas as saying that Alice was like a witch, a crone, taciturn and unsocial in comparison with Stein’s gregarious, lovable nature. Then she talks about Stein’s biographers, who have a similar reaction to Toklas — like Oscar Wilde biographers hating Bosie, but without the clear reasons for doing it — and considers what might be the reason for it. Is it, she asks, only by comparison with Stein that Toklas seems dreadful? And what, anyway, did Stein love so much in Toklas (and vice versa)? Malcolm lets you feel that you are discovering this yourself, by keeping her own opinions on the back burner. She offers different perspectives in the form of well-curated quotations, and the reader gets to form an opinion for herself.

Fodder for a post I am going to write sometime about sympathetic characters (you may be waiting a long time but it’s coming, y’all), and testament to Malcolm thoughtfulness and balance as a writer, is the fact that I started the book thinking “blech” about Stein and “meh” about Toklas, and ended by feeling vaguely positive toward them and pleased to know a bit more about them. Gertrude Stein’s rambles about her genius made me want to slap her (though when Oscar Wilde says the same thing I don’t want to slap him; but I think it’s because I like his writing and don’t like hers), but Malcolm’s portrayal of the affection other people felt for her upon meeting her was an antidote to that. The knowledge that people liked her when they met her made me pay attention to the fact that she wasn’t limited to her own self-portrayal; that she had facets outside of the arrogance and selfishness that come through in some of her writing.

Malcolm also includes a long section about a Stein scholar who conducted extensive, illuminating interviews with Alice Toklas late in her life, and never published his notes. He wrote a dissertation, which apparently set the world of Stein scholarship abuzz, but he has never produced a Stein book since then. Now he is very old, and he has all these notes, and nobody is allowed to see them, and he won’t be interviewed about them because he doesn’t want anyone to steal his ideas for the Stein book he still claims he’s going to write.

This? Is catnip to me. I am unfailingly fascinated by cases where knowledge exists in the world, and it’s right there, but for whatever reason, you can’t have it. It’s interesting when the knowledge is on a time delay (like the Eliot/Hale letters, which you know you can have, but not until 2019); interestinger when it’s withheld by circumstances (like Linear A, which is surely going to be deciphered one day, but right now we don’t have the knowledge to do it); and interestingest when it’s withheld by human agency (like this Stein scholar, Leon Katz). Malcolm explores something like this in The Silent Woman, where Ted Hughes’s sister retracts alliances with scholars who displease her and denies them access to necessary documents. What’s interesting about Leon Katz is the notion that maybe he could blow Stein scholarship wide open. MAYBE! We don’t know because we haven’t seen his notes. I think I just like the idea that world-shaking discoveries (if Gertrude Stein scholarship is your world, that is) are within reach but not quite attainable.

The post Review: Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, Janet Malcolm appeared first on Reading the End.

The Crime of Sheila McGough is about a lawyer who was indicted for, I don’t know, some sort of dishonest practices. She was lawyering for a small-time con man, the con man stole from the wrong guy, the guy got pissed and prosecuted the hell out of him, and Sheila McGough got caught up in it and sent to jail. Janet Malcolm doesn’t think she did it.

Oh my God so boring. Janet Malcolm’s writing is good, but this is the story of a petty possible crime possibly conducted by the lawyer of a petty criminal, and it’s all a bunch of petty boring stuff about, like, putting money in this account and that account and was there a phone call and were there papers–

Tell you what. There may have been a phone call and there may have been papers but you know what there were not? Stakes is what. Jesus. I kept thinking Janet Malcolm was fixing to get to the juicy stuff but she never ever did and the reason she never ever did is that there is no m.f. juicy stuff. I do not care if Sheila McGough did it or not. I don’t care! I don’t care! I don’t care!

(See, I wasn’t lying. If you know about Janet Malcolm, now is probably the very best time to tell me.)

No other reviews. Not surprised.

The post Review: The Crime of Sheila McGough, Janet Malcolm appeared first on Reading the End.

I say all this because if you are a definite Ted Hughes hater, this book maybe would irritate you. From my position of liking Sylvia Plath better than Ted Hughes but ardently wishing never ever to have any personal contact with her, the book’s stance on Ted Hughes was fine. Janet Malcolm is too thoughtful a writer to take unqualified sides, but if sides were to be taken, she wouldn’t be standing hand-in-hand with the ladies of Jezebel on this one, ya know what I’m saying?

The Silent Woman is about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes and their marriage and her suicide. Sort of. I have now tried three different times to describe what this book is about, and failed spectacularly. It’s a short book, and a fast read — because it’s enthralling — but it packs a lot in. Janet Malcolm is interested in the ethical quandaries inherent in biography: by choosing what to include, you are choosing as well what to exclude, and your choices have an impact on the living. Whence the famous stories of Sylvia Plath’s life, Malcolm asks, and what has been the effect on the living of returning to them over and over?

Argh, I’m not doing this book justice! I loved it so much, and I cannot articulate the reasons. Janet Malcolm is an elegant, insightful writer who describes people well and vividly, but also knows when to step aside and let her subjects speak for themselves. As a fan of block quotes by judicious writers, I was enchanted at how much (really good, interesting, germane) material was quoted directly from letters by all the involved parties: biographers and Hugheses and all. Perhaps I can do no better than to quote two bits from the first chapter that give a better indication of what the book is about:

But a person who dies at thirty in the middle of a messy separation remains forever fixed in the mess. To the readers of her poetry and her biography, Sylvia Plath will always be young and in a rage over Hughes’s unfaithfulness. She will never reach the age when the tumults of young adulthood can be looked back upon with rueful sympathy and without anger and vengefulness….

After we are dead, the pretense that we may sometimes by protected against the world’s careless malice is abandoned. The branch of the law that putatively protects our good name against libel and slander withdraws from us indifferently. The dead cannot be libelled or slandered. They are without legal recourse. 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.

See what nice clear writing? I am reading Consider the Lobster right now, and liking it, but Janet Malcolm is a breath of fresh air after the orgies of convolution perpetrated by David Foster Wallace (more on him later). You may also note that Janet Malcolm is not comfortable with the project she herself is undertaking, to write about dead people. This is a tension that runs throughout the book, and one that is not resolved to her satisfaction by the end. For instance, when she writes about Olwyn Hughes, Ted’s sister and gatekeeper of the Plath estate, you can see that she sympathizes with Olwyn while also pitying the Plath biographers who are subject to the draconian restraints placed on their writing in exchange for the use of material from the Plath papers. I, too, worry about the families of people whose biographies and memoirs I read, and I nevertheless continue to devour memoirs about dysfunctional families like they aren’t making them anymore (which, let me assure you, they definitely are). So I can sympathize.

Apart from that, I don’t know what to say to convey to you how much I loved The Silent Woman. It was one of those reading experiences where the book is so good that you have to keep pausing and marveling at your luck at having happened to pick up a book that is just so damn good. It was page-turnier than I would expect a book about books to be. I started reading it on the High Line and then came home on the subway because it got too windy, and finished reading it on my couch, with short breaks to shriek to Miniature Roommate about how relentlessly good it was.

The moral of this post is: Janet Malcolm is the best! I am now going to read the rest of her books in reverse order of how awesome Amazon says they are. When I’m done with that, I expect I will lament the fewness of her books and the fact that a whole one of them was devoted to (blech) Chekhov.

Thank you to the wonderful Litlove for recommending this book to me much earlier this year. Part of me wishes I’d read it sooner, and part of me feels like there could have been no more pleasant experience than reading it on the High Line at the turn of autumn.

A weird little PS: This is probably silly, but do y’all know anything to Janet Malcolm’s discredit? I don’t want to fall madly in love with her just to find out a few days/months/years down the line that she, like, supports the repeal of the 19th Amendment. If you do know something bad about her, please tell me now. I’ll still read all her books, I just won’t fall in love with her. I’m only worried because she’s a little bit on Ted Hughes’s side here, and Katie Roiphe frantically loves her, and neither of those two things is a red flag on its own, but together they’re like a tiny half red flag. I can feel myself wanting to fall properly in love with her like I am in love with Patrick Ness or Diana Wynne Jones, people who are fantastic writers and also seem to be genuinely good people, and I don’t want to have my heart broken, y’all! Do you have any idea how much I used to love Orson Scott Card? And how long it took me to accept the fact that he is a big jerk? Tell me now if you know. It will spare me heartache down the line.

A second weird little PS: Also extremely fascinating to me are contentious heirs to literary greats. Like Stephen James Joyce? What do we think, guys? Will his head explode when Joyce falls into the public domain? Will he do what he threatens and burn up letters written by James Joyce? The man’s a loose cannon! He talks about himself in the third person! Because I have no stake in Joyce scholarship, this does not cause me anguish but only fascinates me. If Merlin Holland were this crazy, I would cry. Fortunately he seems to be a sweet dear and incredibly kind and helpful to Wilde scholars.

The post Review: The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm appeared first on Reading the End.