Sharp

by Michelle Dean

The new Vanity Fair regime did not last long; Richard Locke was fired in April 1983, and Adler left soon after. But an article in an obscure trade journal called the Washington Journalism Review printed instead that she had been fired. It also said she had been dishonest with the magazine about her contributions—she published a piece of Pitch Dark under a pseudonym—and that she had been fired for her incompetence. Adler decided to sue the journal. She won.

  Thus began the legal phase of Adler’s career, in which her writings about the law began to bleed into actual events in the law. Adler became obsessed with two legal cases against the media. The first, Westmoreland v. CBS, was a suit over a television documentary about the war in Vietnam. The documentary essentially accused former army general William C. Westmoreland of manipulating intelligence to take the United States deeper into the war. The second, Sharon v. Time, saw Time magazine sued by the Israeli military man and politician Ariel Sharon for implying in one of its articles that Sharon had been responsible for massacres in Lebanon in September 1982.

  In both cases, there was little question the reporters had gotten things wrong. The facts, as reported, were shown to be incorrect. But in each of the cases the question was whether the reporters had made their errors with “actual malice,” the standard required to prove libel under American law. It is an extremely difficult standard to meet. Adler argued that it ended up becoming a kind of blanket protection for the media to report falsehoods. She often seemed to sympathize with the plaintiffs in that respect:

  Whatever their other motives may have been (pride, anger, honor, politics at home), the plaintiffs were clearly suing on principle, and that principle, in each general’s mind, at least, was truth: not justice, but plain, factual truth … As it happens, American courts are not designed, or even, under the Constitution, permitted, abstractly to resolve issues of this sort, to decide for history what is true and false.

  Through the course of philosophical musing on this conundrum, Adler was heavily critical of the journalists in question as well, so much so that she inspired their anger. She initially published her findings on the trial in the New Yorker in the summer of 1986. (Under William Shawn, writers were frequently allowed to work on single articles for years, an arrangement that could not be had anywhere else.) The pieces were to be collected in a book called Reckless Disregard. Before its scheduled publication in September, however, both Time and CBS put the New Yorker and Renata Adler’s publisher on notice of libel suits themselves. The book was held for a few months before it was released.

  In the meantime, all hell broke loose in reviews of Reckless Disregard. Adler had raised the possibility that some journalists were slippery with their facts. So other journalists in turn focused their attention on seeing if she had made any mistakes. According to them, she had. Even a critic as predisposed to be sympathetic as the legal scholar Ronald Dworkin, writing in the New York Review of Books, praised Adler’s general perspicacity, but also wrote that

  she too often surrenders to the very journalistic vices she excoriates. Reckless Disregard is marred by the same one-sided reporting, particularly in its account of Westmoreland, and its coda displays the same intransigence in the face of contrary evidence, that we would rightly condemn in the institutional press.

  Ultimately Adler’s reputation came out of the affair rather marred. The fact-checkers at the New Yorker claimed she had snowed them.

  Yet the furor Reckless Disregard inspired did not apparently lessen Adler’s appetite for a fight. Things had suddenly gotten worse for her, because William Shawn—the man who stood by her through many of her controversies, up to and including the hullabaloo about her Reckless Disregard pieces—had been fired. The New Yorker had been purchased by the Condé Nast company in 1985, and its owner, S. I. Newhouse, had decided it was time for a change. No longer would the New Yorker be home to so many long and potentially boring articles, he thought, if only it had a different editor.

  What Newhouse did not anticipate was the staff revolt that followed Shawn’s firing. Newhouse did not abide by Shawn’s condition that he be allowed to name his successor. He instead hired an outside person, Robert Gottlieb, a longtime editor at the Alfred A. Knopf publishing house, to helm the revitalized magazine. Petitions were exchanged, staff meetings held, and for a time it looked as though the New Yorker might implode under the strain of the transition. But ultimately it did not lose many of its writers. Many of them could not have found a home for their works elsewhere.

  Adler had a particularly negative reaction to this shake-up. She was outraged at the presumption of Newhouse, and especially upset that Shawn had been given such shoddy treatment. And she did not think Gottlieb an adequate replacement. She found him “comically incurious.” He wanted to change the art. He brought in Adam Gopnik, whose “meaching” personality Adler could not abide:

  I had learned over the course of conversations with Mr. Gopnik that his questions were not questions, or even quite soundings. Their purpose was to maneuver you into advising him to do what he would, in any case, walk over corpses to do.

  In 1999, a decade after all these events occurred, Adler wrote a book about them she called Gone: The Last Days of the “New Yorker.” Something of an intellectual memoir, it paired unsavory portraits of certain New Yorker staffers with excessive praise for others. It began with a long critique of two other New Yorker memoirs, by Lillian Ross and Ved Mehta, that Adler had read and found insufficiently representative of the atmosphere of serious regard for writing she felt Mr. Shawn had cultivated.

  Ask just about any New Yorker staff people of the era, and they will bring up various objections to the book. Again, Adler made a few mistakes, mostly on the order of misspelling names. One staffer told me she also thought Adler had not been around the New Yorker offices enough at the time described to know what was really going on. But probably the best way to look at Gone is not as a strict history of the dissolution of William Shawn’s New Yorker, but rather as a personal intellectual biography of someone who could never have been the writer she was, or become the force that she was, at a different sort of magazine. Gone is an angry book, motivated by betrayal. And at times, it seems even the book’s critics, including Robert Gottlieb himself, didn’t have the heart to completely dismiss Adler’s feelings of betrayal:

  To a large extent this book is an explosion of pain and anger from someone caught up in the dynamic of a highly dysfunctional family—what must have hurt most is that there was no place in it for a daughter.

  Gone was a turning point in Adler’s career. All her writing life, she had been on the offensive, and fairly confident that even if she failed she had somewhere to land softly. Suddenly she had attacked the most prestigious magazine in America. Even those who still liked her disagreed with her. And some, who were plainly looking to curry favor with the new New Yorker editors, decided it was finally time to well and truly attack Adler herself.

  As Adler later pointed out, her book was covered by the Times in no fewer than eight separate articles over the course of January 2000. The first four were just about the New Yorker. The second four concerned one tossed-off line in the book about Judge John Sirica, who had presided over the Watergate trials. Adler had written that “contrary to his reputation as a hero, Sirica was in fact a corrupt, incompetent, and dishonest figure, with a close connection to Senator Joseph McCarthy and clear ties to organized crime.”

  Sirica wrote to Adler’s publisher objecting to this. Then it seems he called reporters, who began calling Adler. One of them was Felicity Barringer, then the Times media correspondent, who began to badger Adler to reveal her sources on the Sirica allegations. Adler declined, but Barringer pressed on.

  If I did not wish to “disclose” my “sources” to her in an interview, Barringer said, “Why don’t you post it on the Internet?” “You post a lot of your own pieces on the Internet, do you, Felicity?”

  The journalist went ahead and published a piece accusing Adler of hiding her sources anyway. The newspa
per commissioned John Dean, one of Nixon’s most trusted advisers, to write his own editorial about this mysterious sentence, and suggest that Adler’s source for it had been the embittered G. Gordon Liddy. Adler was amused:

  What was remarkable, however, was less the content of the piece than the words with which the Times identified its author. The caption, in its entirety, read as follows:

  John W. Dean, an investment banker, is former counsel to President Richard M. Nixon and the author of Blind Ambition.

  If this is the way Dean will enter history, then all the Times pieces in this peculiar episode have value.

  It turned out that when Adler finally did write her own article about the “peculiar episode,” her source for Sirica’s connection to McCarthy was his own autobiography. She also reported the connection with organized crime by tracking down the son of one of Sirica’s father’s business partners. When she published her findings in the August 2000 issue of Harper’s, the Times did not issue a response. Possibly the editors declined to correct it because of how Adler ended her excoriation of their tactics:

  The Times, financially successful as it may be, is a powerful but, at this moment, not very healthy institution. The issue is not one book or even eight pieces. It is the state of the entire cultural mine shaft, with the archcensor, still in some ways the world’s greatest newspaper, advocating the most explosive gases and the cutting off of air.

  This entire affair cost Adler most of her professional status. At the New Yorker, she was no longer a vital writer to the magazine’s editor. When she called to ask if the New Yorker might take a piece from her about the Starr Report on Bill Clinton’s affairs, then editor David Remnick said he’d had enough Monica Lewinsky pieces. She managed to get it placed in Vanity Fair instead.

  It’s a brilliant piece of work, biting into the thousand pages with appetite, the kind of lawyerly dissection of a document’s own logic that had been her great strength since she gave up on fiction.

  The six-volume Starr Report by Kenneth W. Starr to the U.S. House of Representatives—which consists, so far, of the single-volume Referral and five volumes of Appendices and Supplemental Materials— is, in many ways, an utterly preposterous document: inaccurate, mindless, biased, disorganized, unprofessional, and corrupt. What it is textually is a voluminous work of demented pornography, with many fascinating characters and several largely hidden story lines. What it is politically is an attempt, through its own limitless preoccupation with sexual material, to set aside, even obliterate, the relatively dull requirements of real evidence and constitutional procedure.

  It won a magazine award for commentary. But later the same year, the New Yorker severed its long contractual ties with Adler, ending her health insurance. She wrote two more pieces—one for the New Republic shortly before September 11, which took the Supreme Court to task, and one arguing with another Times mistake. But she was very much feeling ostracized, and for years felt at sea without an institution behind her like the one she’d had in the Shawn era.

  “I’ve said it all along, in my even way: if you’re at Condé Nast, and they’re cutting your pieces to shreds, just hang on. Do your art in your own time, but don’t quit because then you’ll be out there, vulnerable. When I left the New Yorker, I was fair game,” she told an interviewer in 2013, when her novels had been reissued and she was enjoying something of a revival. The critical consensus on the excellence of her novels had given her a newfound prominence. But the analytical viewpoint, the fierce ability to critique someone else’s argument, hasn’t found a similar home. Adler hasn’t published a new essay since 1999.

  14

  Malcolm

  Though Janet Malcolm’s career was as tied to the New Yorker as Renata Adler’s, she was quiet where Adler was brash, a late bloomer where Adler was a prodigy. Like Hannah Arendt, Malcolm would reach her forties before she began publishing any serious work. And her name would not really be made until she published, in 1983, a profile of a man barely anyone had heard of: a Sanskrit scholar turned psychoanalyst named Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. He had recently been fired as the head of the Sigmund Freud Archives.

  Masson was just past forty with a thick head of hair and a healthy dose of self-confidence when Malcolm interviewed him. The first time they met, as she told the story, he’d boasted of his power:

  Almost everyone else in the analytic world would have done anything to get rid of me. They were envious of me, but I think they also genuinely felt that I was a mistake and a nuisance and a potential danger to psychoanalysis—a really critical danger. They sensed that I could single-handedly bring down the whole business—and let’s face it, there’s a lot of money in that business. And they were right to be frightened, because what I was discovering was dynamite.

  Malcolm was interested in the fight Masson had ignited with this dynamite, an argument over the “seduction thesis,” an idea about the nature of the parent-child relationship—that it was, in a primal sense, defined by sexual attraction—that Freud later rejected and revised. But in pursuing the intellectual debate, she found herself in the company of a man who could, in her depiction of him, find no end of things to praise about himself.

  Malcolm tends to convey things by implication rather than outright statement. Whenever she cast aspersions on Masson, she never did so by outright insult. She’d simply let his quotes go on and on, as above, which made Masson sound like a fool. She’d let him explain, for example, that he had gone into psychoanalysis to cure himself of “total promiscuity.” He told her he’d slept with a thousand women by the time he was a graduate student, and she quoted him on it. Or she’d quote a nineteenth-century letter from Freud, talking about someone else, to inflect her account of Masson’s activities: “Everything he said and thought possessed a plasticity, a warmth, a quality of importance, which was meant to conceal the lack of deeper substance.”

  This was relevant because Malcolm was investigating the circumstances surrounding Masson’s firing. If he was grandiose and egotistical, those were relevant facts. But he was also something else: litigious. Masson would eventually sue Malcolm too, a suit that dragged on for years and ended up in the Supreme Court, on the claim Malcolm misquoted him. After two bruising trials in lower courts, in which the very nature of literary journalism was debated, Masson lost his libel claims against her.

  The subtle but devastating indirectness of Janet Malcolm was a function of history and personality. She had been raised to be somewhat genteel and obedient. She was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1934, and originally named Jana Wienovera. Her family fled the country as the war came on, settling in Brooklyn, where Janet and her sister, Marie, learned English. It was not an easy process. She had a memory of “the kindergarten teacher saying, ‘Good-bye, children,’ at the end of the day, and my envy of the girl whose name I assumed to be Children. It was my secret hope that someday the teacher would say, ‘Good-bye, Janet.’”

  Her father was a psychiatrist (which no doubt influenced Malcolm’s eventual interest in the discipline), and her mother was a lawyer. They managed to find work in America. He changed the family name to Winn, one much easier for Americans to pronounce. English got easier, and Janet was a good student. She ended up at the University of Michigan. She was not radically minded. She was raised, as many were in the fifties, to curry favor with men, get married, and have a family. “During my four years of college, I didn’t study with a single woman professor,” she told the Paris Review. “There weren’t any, as far as I know.” In this she seems sometimes to liken herself to an Alice Munro character: smart, bookish, but not particularly ambitious, and wandering into marriage because it was what was expected.

  She came to a career slowly, not someone who burst out of the gates with a fully formed voice like Adler or Parker. At college, she met a young man named Donald Malcolm. Donald had ambitions of being a writer, and so did she, but her attempts were being repeatedly shot down by her creative writing teacher. When Donald Malcolm graduated and went to wor
k for the New Republic, Janet Winn followed him and began to write for that magazine too. The first piece she published in 1956 was a kind of parody of a film review, written in the register of an excited teenager:

  I went to see Love Me Tender last night, and I liked it enormous. Elvis Presley isn’t a bit obscene or lewd; he’s just different. He certainly stood out from everybody else in the picture—it takes place back in Civil War times when they didn’t hardly have no rock ‘n roll yet—and not only because of his singing and virileness; but also because of his acting.

  There is no way this piece was meant seriously; it ends on a wish that Marilyn Monroe should film The Brothers Karamazov with Elvis as a star because it would be just “great.” The humor might be a little lost on a modern reader, because parody tends not to age well. But something about the young Janet Winn’s wide-eyed sarcasm must have impressed someone, because within six months of publishing it, she began to write more serious film reviews for the New Republic on an intermittent basis. And she was not generally disposed to liking what Hollywood had on offer. She trashed Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan for having diluted the moral complexity George Bernard Shaw had originally given to Joan of Arc’s story. She disliked, too, Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success, because she found it too obvious. But she made some waves with readers when she wrote her reaction to a newly rescreened The Birth of a Nation, which she found not only racist but also far too devoted to a hard division between good and evil:

  Outside the theatre, a few blocks away, a civil rights bill, if not a very good one, was being passed; and a few blocks in the other direction, a movie, called I Was a Teenage Werewolf was being played; but I couldn’t help feeling cheerful and comfortably certain that film-wise and otherwise, we have come rather a long way.