A very private woman
With an introduction by Katie Roiphe Melville House, £12.99
The author and journalist Janet Malcolm, who died last year aged 86, was a divisive figure in American media. This largely stemmed from her critical attitude towards contemporary journalism, pithily summarised in the first sentence of her 1990 book The Journalist and the Murderer: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” Not surprisingly this caused uproar among her fellow practitioners.
The journalism Malcolm refers to is the sort she practised herself: very lengthy articles for magazines like The New Yorker, sometimes written in the first person. She was regarded as one of the finest magazine writers of her time, meticulous and demanding, and also courageous. The psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson sued her unsuccessfully for libel for what she wrote about him in a two-part New Yorker series and then sued again over the resulting book. Malcolm won again in the end but the case lasted a decade and divided journalistic opinion.
This slim volume consists of five question-and-answer interviews with Malcolm conducted between 2001 and 2019. Four are by women; the fifth, from the New York Times Book Review, is anonymous. Some are object lessons in how not to conduct an interview. The interviewers frequently appear more interested in themselves than their subject, the abiding curse of so much modern journalism.
The honourable exception is the Canadian journalist Eleanor Wachtel, who interviewed Malcolm about her books on Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Plath. But even the excellent Wachtel failed, like the others, to ask Malcolm a key question: what, if anything, did being Jewish mean to her? After all, she was born Jana Wienerová in Prague to Jewish parents who fled to New York in 1939, anglicising their name to Winn (Janet later took her first husband’s surname).
She only discovered she was Jewish at the age of about 10, which came as a double shock as until then she had bought into the antisemitism of the era.
But of this and anything else about her Jewish background you will discover nothing in these interviews.
This may have been attributable to her natural reticence: like many journalists who enjoy probing other people’s lives Malcolm disliked receiving the same treatment. Malcolm is apparently an icon to young women, understandably.
It was quite an achievement for a very private woman (her description) to achieve what she did in what was then — and largely still is — a tough, male-dominated trade.