Sharp

by Michelle Dean

  Readers reacted quite strongly to these strong opinions. One wrote in. He suspected Miss Winn of knowing a lot and of having great judgment, but added that “it is hard to tell about this, because Miss Winn is quite determinedly On the Side of the Angels, and her prose judgements come to us wearing The Whole Armor of God. Her standards seem so high.” Another letter writer, Hal Kaufman, a self-professed “student of motion pictures,” wrote in to correct Miss Winn too. His qualms about her were rather more wide-ranging, and delivered with a thickness of reference that pompous individuals often mistake for intelligence. The letter writer wished to inform Miss Winn that “the leading authorities everywhere have accorded the work of Griffith the highest praise.” He noted that Lenin had loved the movie too. He also urged her to show more “charity” in her judgments of older films. Her reply to this was very simple:

  Mr. Kaufman is a “student of motion pictures” and I am not. How can we agree?

  She was by then also turning her critical talents to books and theater. She reviewed a collection of D. H. Lawrence’s letters, but nothing met with her judgment so strongly as the introduction, written by none other than McCarthy’s and Arendt’s old foe Diana Trilling, who was then the lead critic of the Nation. She ridiculed Mrs. Trilling’s acidity in calling Frieda Lawrence an “awful nuisance,” observing that she “aged badly” and “had no real intellect”—by pointing out that it shouldn’t matter in a book of literary criticism whether a writer’s wife was a terrible person.

  These reviews, while not particularly memorable in themselves, track the development of a young writer’s self-confidence. She started to get praise alongside the snide letters—including praise from one Norman Mailer, whose appearance on television with Dorothy Parker and Truman Capote Malcolm had chronicled for the magazine. Mailer thought she had gotten the quotes wrong in his discussion with Capote. But he also seemed to be writing in for a bit of flirting:

  One is forced to add that the Lady Winn’s account was marvelously well-written and suffered only from the trifling flaw that most of the words she put in my mouth were never said by me.

  Winn was by then engaged to Donald Malcolm. Donald took a job at the New Yorker in 1957, and she moved back to Brooklyn. For seven years after that, too busy bringing up their only daughter, Anne Olivia, she did not publish a single word.

  If you ask her to tell it herself, Janet Malcolm will usually start the story of her becoming a writer at the New Yorker. While her daughter was small, she had to read an inordinate number of children’s books, and eventually Mr. Shawn, whom she knew through her husband, suggested she write about children’s literature for a December 1966 issue of the New Yorker. Malcolm complied perhaps more eagerly than he anticipated. She provided him with a ten-thousand-word omnibus essay summarizing and analyzing her favorites. She begins in a stodgier tone than the playful younger self of the New Republic:

  Our children are a mirror of belief and a proving ground for philosophy. If we bring up a child to be happy and don’t care very much how he behaves, we evidently believe in man’s essential goodness and in life’s infinite possibilities for happiness.

  On the strength of that article, Shawn asked her to do it again in 1967 and 1968. The review for 1967 was as stiff as the one for 1966, but in 1968, something moved Malcolm into the realm of reasoned argument. Midway through the piece Malcolm becomes embroiled in an argument with a physician who insists that reality should be made “less ugly” for the young.

  I don’t know how Dr. Lasagna proposes to make reality less ugly, and I am not even sure that reality is uglier today than it ever was. There is more knowledge and concern about social problems today, but this does not mean that more or worse social problems exist today. Reality would have been harder to face in the days when they hanged a child for stealing a loaf of bread, one would think. (Today they ought to hang the people who make our bread.)

  She then begins to suggest it might be better to have children read “factual books” about drugs in order to prevent their use. She also recommended books about sex that were “a good deal more forthright than any published before, and they will not suit every family’s notions of how the information ought to be presented.” She also reviewed books about black history suitable for children, finding that many of them taught her things she did not know.

  Mr. Shawn, apparently noticing a burgeoning talent, gave her a column called “About the House” to write, on art and design. Malcolm found these articles good training for learning to write. They were also her first forays into a field other than criticism. She began to report these pieces slowly, talking about the individual merchants of furniture and interior design. She also felt moved in 1970 to write something about the burgeoning women’s liberation movement everyone else was talking about.

  The piece was published in the New Republic. Her name was misspelled in the byline (as Janet Malcom). But her playful attitude had returned. She poked fun at the notion prevalent in the women’s movement that the only place to find fulfillment was outside the home.

  In any case, a woman who chooses to put her baby in someone else’s care so she can pursue a career shouldn’t be hypocritical about her decision and tell herself that she is doing it for the sake of the child. She is doing it for herself. She may be doing the right thing—selfish decisions are often the best decisions—but she ought to see what she is doing and be willing to pay the price in affection that parental neglect often exacts.

  There is more than a small whiff of anger about that. Its claim that the “new feminism may be an even more invidious cause of unhappiness and discontent” was a common argument at the time—Didion, in her concern about the “triviality” of the women’s movement, often approached it too—but there is something uneasy about the argument. It doesn’t quite track with someone who was building gradual independence as a writer, but it does fit someone who had found motherhood an enjoyable experience and didn’t want to discard whatever good came of it, or whatever degree of choice she could claim for it. But she sounds nothing like the playful presence in the essays she was publishing at the New Yorker, which had become much more elegant, thorough streams of consciousness. When the New Republic’s editors asked her to reply to the angry mail that came in, she wrote a typically sarcastic response:

  As for those that raise questions of substance, they require lengthier consideration than my baking and canning obligations permit me to give them at this time. When my Lot improves, I hope to send you another essay on some of the points at issue.

  Perhaps the unease was situational. By the time Malcolm wrote this, her husband, Donald, was seriously ill. The doctors could not figure out what was wrong with him; later Malcolm came to believe he had misdiagnosed Crohn’s disease. Soon he was unable to work, and although the New Yorker in those days was financially generous to writers, his illness put the family under considerable strain. It soon became clear that Donald Malcolm was dying.

  Malcolm continued to turn out her furniture columns faithfully once a month. Most of these were simple catalogs and descriptions of items she liked. But in March 1972, for the first time, she wandered off the pattern. For a column on modern furniture, she went to meet the artist Fumio Yoshimura, “who, as yet, is better known for his wife, Kate Millett, than for his work.” Millett, of course, was famous in 1972 because she had written a bestselling book called Sexual Politics, a kind of scorched-earth approach to bringing feminism into literary criticism. As Malcolm continues to describe the encounter with Yoshimura, she keeps getting distracted by Millett. The conversation eventually turns to women’s liberation.

  I remarked that parents here are afraid that boys who don’t like sports will grow up to be homosexuals. “A fate worse than death,” Kate Millett murmured without looking up from her mail. Kate Millett’s removal of herself from the conversation, I later realized, was an expression of tact rather than of incivility.

  At this point Malcolm couldn’t seem to help herself; the piece instead turned
into an interview of Millett, whom she kept referring to by her full name.

  The allusive, ironic, academic tone of Sexual Politics is entirely absent from Kate Millett’s conversation … Kate Millett’s sculptures all look alike and like Kate Millett. They have a square-cut, blocky, strong, optimistic character.

  This is the first appearance of the kind of Janet Malcolm reportage that would make her both revered and controversial. She made herself a character in this short story of an interview, began to build the “I” she would later tell everyone was untrustworthy, a kind of necessary trick. For example: readers probably didn’t know, at the time, that they were reading an interview of a great feminist by a great skeptic regarding feminism, but one who had obviously already read Millett’s book.

  In the last year of her husband’s life—Donald Malcolm would die in September 1975—perhaps suspecting she needed to build an even firmer career for herself, Janet Malcolm began to branch out into a newish art that interested her: photography. She did not then read the work of Susan Sontag, which was being slowly published in the New York Review of Books. She would not do that until the 1980s.

  But before any of that, she reviewed first a book about Alfred Stieglitz for the New Yorker, and then a retrospective of the work of Edward Weston for the Times. She was careful and a bit prone to jargon in the Weston review. It was in the end an audition to be the New York Times’ photography critic. The Times offered her the job, but William Shawn told her she could be the New Yorker’s photography critic instead.

  When she published her photography essays as a collection, Diana and Nikon, in 1980, Malcolm wrote it had taken her some time to find her groove. “Rereading these essays,” she wrote, “makes me think of someone trying to cut down a tree who has never done it before, isn’t strong, has a dull axe, but is very stubborn.” She eventually began to get the hang of it in 1978, she thought, with an essay, “Two Roads,” that explored the snapshot properties of photography. She began to talk of photographs in moral terms, the same ones that had served Sontag so well. In this way of looking at things, she could more easily convey what she found so disturbing about so many of the photographs:

  The [Walker] Evans book is not the anthology of grace and order it should have been. It is a book full of chaos and disorder, of ugly clutter and mess, of people with dead eyes, victims and losers crushed by the indifferent machinery of capitalism, inhabitants of a land as spiritually depleted as its soil was physically eroded.

  You could also see Malcolm relaxing into the subject matter, her sentences becoming more of a pleasure to read:

  Innocently opening the book Georgia O’Keeffe: A Portrait, published by the Metropolitan Museum on the occasion of its exhibition of the photographs, is like taking a little drive in the country and suddenly coming upon Stonehenge.

  By the time Malcolm got a handle on photography she was also becoming more and more interested in writing what were known at the New Yorker as “fact pieces.” This was the in-house term for the long, reported pieces that were the magazine’s signature product. At that point she was married again, this time to her editor at the New Yorker, Gardner Botsford. And she was trying to quit smoking, an activity she closely associated with the act of writing. Meanwhile, reporting would get her out into the world, where she could not interview subjects with a cigarette in hand. So she told Mr. Shawn that she thought she’d do a “fact piece.” She chose as her subject family therapy. Perhaps there is Freudian insight to be had here, since her father was a psychiatrist. But this marriage of Malcolm as a writer and psychoanalysis as a subject was a perfect, unforgettable match.

  Psychoanalysis had been around, of course, for almost a century by the time Malcolm began writing about it. But in the 1970s, when she began writing about psychiatry, it was not a popular approach. Psychopharmacology was on the rise; magazines made repeated reference to “Mother’s Little Helper,” Valium. The feminist movement mostly abhorred psychoanalysis, seeing in Freud’s ideas (like “penis envy”) the basis for the fundamental repression of women. But therapy itself was growing in popularity, though its heyday wouldn’t come until the late 1980s and 1990s in America. The books of the existential psychotherapist Rollo May, which connected the ideas of existential philosophers to clinical practice, were enormously popular, especially among the cultural elite that might subscribe to the New Yorker. And all that was enough to spark curiosity about the subject.

  Malcolm opened her explorations of modern psychiatric practice with a piece on family therapy, called “The One-Way Mirror,” which pointed out that in fact the practice upset most previous psychoanalytical thinking. By adding more people to the equation, therapists became more confrontational, more strategic, and it was impossible to maintain confidentiality. Malcolm treated all of this with a skeptical eye, but she also let the family therapist speak for himself and, as a result, make himself sound somewhat like a salesman in a cheap suit:

  Family therapy will take over psychiatry in one or two decades, because it is about man in context. It is a therapy that belongs to our century, while individual therapy belongs to the nineteenth century. This is not a pejorative. It is simply that things evolve and change, and during any historical period certain ways of looking at and responding to life begin to crop up everywhere. Family therapy is to psychiatry what Pinter is to theater and ecology is to natural science.

  The piece is not quite written as criticism of psychoanalysis as a whole. That was the fate that would await Malcolm’s next reporting subject, a typical therapist she called Aaron Green (not his real name). Malcolm used her extensive interviews with Green as a pretext for mounting a critique of psychoanalysts and psychoanalysis generally. In short, she analyzed him. Even his therapist’s couch came up for comment:

  The empty couch looked out on the room with a meaningful air. “I’m not any old shabby foam-rubber sofa,” it seemed to say, “I am the couch.”

  This delicate touch (and characteristic interest in the comedic possibilities of a subject’s interior décor) reveals something important about Malcolm’s technique. While it is a critical perspective, it isn’t a cruel one. Malcolm is illustrating a problem and making certain judgments about the solution to it, but she is more, as one reviewer explained, “mischievous.” While Aaron Green is at turns silly and anxious, he is also quite sympathetic. Under Malcolm’s questioning he gradually comes around to admitting that even his attraction to the profession at all has the quality of a flaw in his psychology:

  I was attracted to psychoanalytic work precisely because of the distance it would create between me and the people I treated. It’s a situation of very comfortable abstinence.

  Malcolm continues to catalog the vaguenesses and hypocrisies of this “impossible profession”: the way the duration of therapy seems to get longer and longer; the fact that what a patient will likely get from psychoanalysis is not a cure, but rather “transference,” the phenomenon in which patients redirect to their relationships with their therapists the very feelings and desires retained from childhood that they came to therapy in the first place to solve. Malcolm saw most of these problems as institutionalized by psychoanalytic training institutes, which therapists themselves came to see as a kind of surrogate parent. The training, she gently points out, insists that good psychoanalysts themselves should be extensively analyzed.

  But she doesn’t quite turn Green into a caricature of himself. He seems hapless, confused, and quite possibly in need of a different job. But not malevolent.

  Put together in a book called Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, Malcolm’s profile of Aaron Green drew raves from every corner. Nearly every American, it seemed, had tried out psychoanalysis at one point in the 1970s, then given it up in disgust, confused at what it was supposed to do for the patient. Malcolm’s piece spoke so beautifully of its paradoxes that every reviewer, even the psychoanalysts, seemed enthralled.

  Emboldened, she set out on a second project related to psychoanalysis. This was to be anot
her long profile of a psychoanalyst. But this time, instead of mining Manhattan’s opulent selection of therapists, Malcolm found Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson. Masson’s “dynamite” was in the unpublished letters between Freud and Wilhelm Fliess, one of Freud’s disciples. Masson promptly told newspapers that in these letters he’d discovered that Freud had not really abandoned what was known as the “seduction thesis.” The seduction thesis in its original form had held that childhood sexual experiences, often seduction by a parent, were the source of most patient neuroses. When Freud dropped it in 1925, he explained that he had come to understand that when patients described such experiences, they were often describing not a literal truth, but a psychic one. If Masson was correct, it meant Freud originally had been correct to suspect that child sexual abuse—as contemporary mores would recognize it—had been at the heart of most psychological disorders.

  Malcolm became interested in Masson because of this claim, and she decided to call him up. Masson was a good talker, and he had a flair for revealing sentences. Over the course of several days of interviews, some of which Malcolm taped and others she recorded in handwritten notes, he told her about his marriages. He told her about his affairs. He told her that Anna Freud and his other mentors had their doubts about him. “I was like an intellectual gigolo,” she quoted him as saying, from her notes. “You get your pleasure from him, but you don’t take him out in public.” Evidently Masson was ready to meet his public, because he was preparing to write a book about the truth he claimed he had found in the Freud-Fliess correspondence. Both Anna Freud and the man who had gotten him the Sigmund Freud Archives job in the first place, Kurt Eissler, told Malcolm they believed Masson was misreading the letters.