Q&A with Janet Malcolm
MIDWAY THROUGH HER new book, "Two Lives," about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Janet Malcolm admits to an act of literary vandalism. She'd been intending to read Stein's unwieldy, 925-page "The Making of Americans," but the book was too heavy to haul around. With the aid of a kitchen knife, she was soon in possession of six portable segments - and an insight: by carving up the famously impenetrable book, she realizes, she'd "unwittingly made a physical fact" of its chaotic structure.
She'd also provided her readers with a dramatic rendering of her own writing style. Malcolm doesn't just engage with her subject matter, she vivisects it, vigorously slicing up tangled topics such as psychoanalysis and biography and refashioning them into intellectual whodunits in which the investigation itself is part of the story. Reading her more than 30 years' worth of cultural reporting for The New Yorker is to watch a writer take full possession of a form and make it her own.
One aspect of Malcolm's brilliance is her ability to breathe new life into seemingly "settled" issues. Whether writing about the well-documented relationship between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes in "The Silent Woman," or other literary/intellectual episodes, Malcolm spots a door nobody has tried to open before - some overlooked oddity or insight - and walks right through. In the case of "Two Lives," the question she ponders is how it was that this tiny nation of two Jewish American lesbians managed to outlast World War II while living in France. As usual, she plays the roles of literary scholar, biographer, reporter, and sleuth.
Malcolm moved with her family to New York from Prague in 1939, when she was 5 years old, and joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1965, a few years after her daughter was born. Fans might be surprised to learn that she began by covering shopping. ("People don't exactly think of Janet Malcolm as the Lucille Ball of The New Yorker," David Remnick, the magazine's editor, told me when I called to ask for background, "but those early columns are very sharp, very funny.") In the 1970s she married her editor there, Gardner Botsford (he died in 2004 at the age of 87), and also started writing for The New York Review of Books; she's been contributing to both publications ever since. Fittingly, for a woman who has written trenchantly about the ambiguous contract agreed upon by a journalist and her subject, she requested that we conduct this interview over e-mail. "I'm far more comfortable on the other side of the tape recorder," she explained.
IDEAS: I'm curious to know about your early years as a writer. What did you do before The New Yorker, and how did you join the magazine?
MALCOLM: I had done some film and book reviews for The New Republic, but my true apprenticeship began at The New Yorker, where I wrote shopping columns and pieces on design. It was an invaluable apprenticeship - learning to describe objects was an excellent preparation for the long fact pieces (as they were called at The New Yorker) I did later on. Also, going to shops and trying not to be noticed while taking notes anticipated later journalistic practice. Invisibility is a good quality for journalists to cultivate. I also wrote about photography and children's books for The New Yorker.
IDEAS: When I asked David Remnick where he would place you in the pantheon of New Yorker writers, he cited Joseph Mitchell and A.J. Liebling. When you started writing "the long fact pieces," who were your models?
MALCOLM: When I started writing long fact pieces, I had a general sense of the genre as it was practiced by New Yorker writers. But one writer - Joseph Mitchell, as it happens - was a special influence and inspiration. He was and continues to be considered the greatest of The New Yorker's nonfiction writers. Long before the term "the new journalism" was coined, Mitchell was writing factual pieces that had the attributes of works of fiction. "Mr. Hunter's Grave" and "Joe Gould's Secret" are two examples of Mitchell at his most brilliant and poetic, but there are many others.
IDEAS: You possess so many of the novelist's tools - the ability to imagine yourself into the experiences of others; descriptive flair; a talent for narrative; all those incredible metaphors - yet you've said that you're "incapable of writing fiction." What is it that you lack?
MALCOLM: Yes, I can imagine myself into the experiences of others, but I cannot imagine anyone who does not exist. At least not when I am writing. At night, when I am asleep, I can imagine all kinds of characters and events. In our dreams we are all novelists and short-story writers. But in our conscious thoughts, only a few of us can make the leap from actuality to fiction.
IDEAS: You've done a great deal of biographical writing, but you've never written a traditional biography. Has this spared you from over-identifying with your subjects in the way that biographers are sometimes said to do?
MALCOLM: I just started a book called "Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire" by Amanda Foreman, who wonderfully writes in her introduction: "Biographers are notorious for falling in love with their subjects. It is the literary equivalent of the Stockholm Syndrome, the phenomenon which leads hostages to feel sympathetic toward their captors." When I wrote about Chekhov, I certainly was in love with him - and when I wrote about Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, I certainly was not in love with them. But over time, I began to feel more sympathetic toward both women. I did not identify with them personally, but when I put myself in their place during World War II, I felt I could not criticize their conduct.
IDEAS: Was there a particular moment that first aroused your sympathy, and altered the course of your own response to their conduct?
MALCOLM: My first article in The New Yorker about Stein and Toklas - which raised the question of how a pair of Jewish lesbians had survived the Second World War in occupied France - prompted some readers to blame the women for their acceptance of protection from a man named Bernard Fay, who was a Nazi collaborator. My response to this response was to think about what Stein and Toklas had done - and to conclude that they had done nothing bad. They hadn't harmed or betrayed anyone and they had not known of Fay's activities as a collaborator. They did not behave heroically; they behaved the way most people in their situation would have behaved: they lay low and they were lucky. Readers also felt critical of Stein and Toklas for being as closeted about their Jewishness as they were about their lesbianism. Here, too, I could feel sympathetic toward them. In the anti-Semitic culture they grew up in, it was not uncommon for Jews to sidestep, if not deny, their Jewishness.
IDEAS: "Two Lives" is as much about the bond between Stein and Toklas as it is about the women themselves. What draws you to studying relationships, not just individuals?
MALCOLM: The stories that nonfiction writers tell - like the stories that novelists tell - have to do with the conflicts that arise between individuals. In studying troubled relationships I am following a tradition of storytelling; the extraordinary things people do in relation to others give writers their plots. Aristotle wrote, "Character determines men's qualities, but it is by their actions that they are happy or the reverse." This line appears as an epigraph to my book "In the Freud Archives," but it could appear in any of my other books.
IDEAS: I can't help wondering about your own relationship with Gardner Botsford. Was he a big part of your writing and/or editing process? What has your writing life been like without him?
MALCOLM: Gardner was indeed a big part of my life as a writer. He was one of The New Yorker's great editors and I always felt extremely fortunate in having him as my editor. We loved working together. We were almost always in agreement about what to do to improve a piece of writing. He often suggested cuts, which almost invariably were in order. But not every writer he edited understood that he was tightening the piece rather than cruelly robbing the world of his or her precious words. One New Yorker writer called him "The Ripper." Yes, of course, my writing life without him is greatly diminished.
IDEAS: In a recent book review, you likened e-mail to a "dangerous power tool." Yet you chose to have this interview conducted over e-mail. How come?
MALCOLM: I chose an e-mail interview over a face-to-face one because it gave me more time to think about the questions you asked. If we had spoken together rather than written back and forth, I probably would have just looked at you helplessly when you asked your very good, complex questions. My book review was of David Shipley and Will Schwalbe's "Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home." If I haven't electrocuted myself during this interview, I owe it to Shipley and Schwalbe.
Kate Bolick is features editor of Domino magazine. Her interviews appear monthly in Ideas. E-mail kbolick@globe.com.
