It was this siege from his former comrades that seems to have led Masson to decide Malcolm counted as a kind of friend. He knew throughout their encounters that she planned to write about what he told her. But still he was prepared to detail, for hours, his sexual activities, his grudges within the profession, and the various elements of his robust sense of self-worth for Malcolm. Much of the resulting piece she published consisted of long block quotations from him, which read as disquisitions alternating between Masson’s reading of Freud and the number of women he slept with. A typical passage:
Do you know what Anna Freud once said to me? She said, “If my father were alive today, he would not want to become an analyst.” I swear, those were her words. No wait. This is important. I said that to her. I said, “Miss Freud, I have the feeling that if your father were alive today he would not become an analyst,” and she said, “You are right.”
Though these long quotations appeared as uninterrupted soliloquies, Malcolm had actually often cobbled them together from different portions of her interviews—a practice Masson later took issue with in the court cases.
Almost all readers of the resultant articles, “Trouble in the Archives,” presumed that Malcolm was deliberately turning Masson into a buffoon, destroying his credibility. Even a fan as intelligent and discerning as the critic Craig Seligman has called Malcolm’s work on Masson “a masterwork of character assassination.” It is undoubtedly true that no one walks away from reading In the Freud Archives—the title of the book Knopf later published of these articles—thinking Jeffrey Mousaieff Masson is an upstanding citizen. Even Malcolm, at the end, speaking to one of the analysts involved in the affair, had a bad read on Masson: “I wonder if he ever cared about anything.”
But this seems to me to be a slight misreading of Malcolm’s intent. Subsequent controversy over the book—we’ll get to that in a moment—revealed that, with some exceptions, almost all of what she quoted from Masson was reflected in her tapes and notes. She had, from that perspective, simply delivered the goods that Masson had given her. He insisted, over the course of subsequent litigation, that some of these quotes were fabricated and others lifted from context, but not all of them were. A simple diagnosis of “character assassination” would imply that there was no such cooperation between reporter and subject here.
Whether Malcolm had an obligation to get in the way of Masson’s own self-destruction turned out to be a question that would occupy the next decade of her life.
After the book appeared, Masson was furious. He wrote a letter to the New York Times Book Review complaining he’d been slandered. Malcolm replied sharply:
The portrait, in fact, is based on more than 40 hours of tape-recorded conversations with Mr. Masson, which began in Berkeley, Calif., in November 1982, during a week of interviews, and continued on the telephone over the following eight months … Everything I do quote Mr. Masson as saying was said by him, almost word for word. (The “almost” refers to changes made for the sake of correct syntax.)
Masson eventually filed a libel suit for 10.2 million dollars. Of that, 10 million dollars was for punitive damages. It was an absurd sum. As numerous commentators pointed out over the course of the litigation—which, sadly for Malcolm, stretched over a decade—Masson kept having to change the details of his charge. In his initial complaint, he listed statements that he had indeed said on tape. Malcolm was able to play them back.
But there were a few sticking points. One was the “intellectual gigolo” phrase, which could not be found on the tapes. Another was the fact that Malcolm had altered some of the quotes, though Malcolm defended this in a letter to the New York Times Book Review by explaining that she thought to delete certain of Masson’s more extravagant claims. This made the matter a thorny one for the courts. As in the case of Hellman v. McCarthy, the problem became not so much about whether Malcolm might ultimately prevail in the litigation, as she did, but what it might cost her while the dispute was ongoing.
In 1987, Masson’s initial suit was dismissed. “I should have known, having written his portrait, that Masson wouldn’t give up so easily,” Malcolm said later. But she decided to put her energies into a new project.
The opening line of The Journalist and the Murderer, which originally appeared in three parts in the New Yorker in 1989, is famous. “Any journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself knows that what he does is morally indefensible,” Malcolm wrote. This sentence lit a fuse. Many people never seem to have read the book that follows. The first time I saw Malcolm in person, it was twenty years after she’d published that sentence and she was on a high platform at the New Yorker Festival talking about her work. A young man in the crowd got up and questioned her angrily about it. She was silent a moment before she answered: “Well, it was a bit of rhetoric, you see.” The young man clearly did not really see.
This was only a small preview of what happened when Malcolm published her extensive study of a dispute that had arisen between the journalist Joe McGinniss and the murderer Jeffrey MacDonald. McGinniss had contracted with MacDonald for exclusive access to him and his defense lawyers during his 1979 trial for murdering his family. MacDonald agreed, clearly thinking he’d scored a coup. McGinniss was famous for having written a book called The Selling of the President 1968, which had unflatteringly portrayed the Nixon campaign’s attempts to make the candidate more, well, personable. McGinniss had garnered quite a bit of respect as a result.
Unfortunately for MacDonald, by the end of the trial McGinniss had decided he was guilty of the crimes he committed. The book that resulted from their arrangement, a nonfiction potboiler called Fatal Vision, was a giant bestseller, but it claimed MacDonald was a psychopath who had killed his entire family in cold blood. A murderer scorned, MacDonald subsequently sued McGinniss, saying he had deliberately misled MacDonald about the nature of the project. And by most journalistic standards, McGinniss had indeed crossed a line. MacDonald could point to letters, for example, in which McGinniss appeared to be reassuring his source that he thought his conviction a grave injustice.
Malcolm’s introduction to her account of all this continued:
He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction learns—when the article or book appears—his hard lesson.
Because this paragraph was told from the perspective of the betrayed subject, many who read the piece immediately assumed Malcolm was mounting an indictment of journalism. Journalists love nothing more than to talk about journalism. And by 1989, when Malcolm’s articles appeared, the ranks of journalism were mostly stuffed with would-be Woodwards and Bernsteins, convinced that theirs was the craft that could truly take on power. As a result, many felt Malcolm had injured their honor. An exceptionally long hailstorm of criticism ensued.
“Miss Malcolm appears to have created a snake swallowing its own tail: she attacks the ethics of all journalists, including herself, and then fails to disclose just how far she has gone in the past in acting the role of the journalistic confidence man,” yelled one New York Times columnist, who also falsely charged Malcolm with admitting to “fabrications.” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, one of the leading book critics, accused her of exonerating MacDonald by excoriating McGinniss. An injured Chicago Tribune columnist looked around his newsroom and saw “fellow workers recording politicians’ doings, reporting breakthroughs in medicine … Can anyone tell me what is so wrong with any of those standard-fare journalistic chores?”
Malcolm did have her defenders. David Rieff stuck up for her in the Los Angeles Times. He pointed out that there was very little in Malcolm’s position that departed from Joan Didion’s widely celebrated phrase: “Writers are always selling somebody out.” Nora Ephron, who’d befriended Malcolm sometime before, gave an interview to the Columbia Journalism
Review: “What Janet Malcolm was saying was so reasonable I was astonished anyone took issue with it,” she said. “I believe that to be a good journalist you have to be willing to complete the transaction Janet describes as betrayal.” This is not an attitude so far from Phoebe Ephron’s “Everything is copy,” after all. The flip side is that sometimes people don’t want to be copy.
(Jessica Mitford, the noted muckraker who had also exposed the death industry back in 1963, and was a from a family of sisters one might have called “sharp” women too, chimed in alongside Nora Ephron: “I thought Malcolm’s articles were marvelous.”)
The other theme of the coverage was the identification of the similarities between what had just happened between Masson and Malcolm and the situation she had analyzed in The Journalist and the Murderer. Masson, sensing an opportunity to reopen the story, told a New York magazine reporter that he read the first part of the piece to be an open letter to himself, a kind of confession of Malcolm’s sins. He had continued to appeal the dismissal of his suit, going all the way to the Supreme Court. There, Justice Anthony Kennedy ordered that Masson be granted a new trial on his claims. Masson would ultimately lose that trial, in 1994, after the jury found that Malcolm was careless, but did not act with “reckless disregard.” A juror told the New York Times that “Masson was too honest. He opened himself up, and he just showed his true colors. She painted him. And he didn’t like it.”
Later, Malcolm said she kind of understood why people threw so many stones at her:
Who hasn’t felt pleasure in the fall of the self-styled mighty? That it was a New Yorker writer who was being dragged through the mud only added to the wicked joy. At that time, the magazine was still wrapped in a fluffy cocoon of moral superiority that really got up the noses of people who worked at other publications. I didn’t help myself by behaving the way writers at the New Yorker thought they ought to behave when approached by the press: like little replicas of the publicity-phobic William Shawn. So instead of defending myself against the false accusations Masson made in interview after interview, I maintained my ridiculous silence.
That silence wasn’t total. While Masson’s appeals were ongoing, The Journalist and the Murderer appeared as a book, and Malcolm wrote a new afterword for it. In that afterword she denied that her troubles with Masson were being refracted through the McGinnis-MacDonald dispute. She said that in fact she had begun to pity Masson because he was once again being used by journalists, who were calling him for quotes they could use to attack her, and then dropping him again.
Another thing she did in this afterword was to defend the notion of editing quotes. This was an accusation at issue in the lawsuit: Masson claimed that by moving sentences around, and changing their order, Malcolm had exceeded the bounds of her rights as a journalist. She defended the practice with an argument she would make several more times in her life as a writer: that writing from the “I” was always unreliable:
Unlike the “I” of autobiography, who is meant to be seen as a representation of the writer, the “I” of journalism is connected to the writer only in a tenuous way—the way, say, that Superman is connected to Clark Kent. The journalistic “I” is an overreliable narrator, a functionary to whom crucial tasks of narration and argument and tone have been entrusted, an ad hoc creation, like the chorus of Greek tragedy. He is an emblematic figure, an embodiment of the idea of the dispassionate observer of life.
This invitation to distrust even the writer herself is a small skeleton key not just to Malcolm’s own work, but to that of nearly every person in this book. It added something to the robust first person that had been built down through the century from Rebecca West to Didion and Ephron: a certain degree of uncertainty. The experience of reading a Malcolm text is always to linger in that sense of uncertainty, both about the nominal subject—was McGinniss really that bad; was Masson an idiot?—and about exactly what new kind of sly trick the narrator might be pulling on us.
In Malcolm, there’s always an added level of meaning like that, some sleight of hand. Much as a psychoanalyst induces patients to examine and analyze their habitual reactions and feelings, Malcolm provoked an emotional response that made many journalists rethink some of what they knew about their profession.
After all, the furor over The Journalist and the Murderer did very little except prove the thesis Malcolm was trying to advance. The topic of the book is journalism, writ large. The argument is that subjects will always feel betrayed by what some other person writes about them. “Journalism” did indeed feel betrayed by Malcolm’s assessment of it. By a stroke of luck things did come around; The Journalist and the Murderer is now taught in most journalism schools. As Malcolm herself will tell you if you ask her, in the end she was proved right.
All of Malcolm’s subsequent work has been marked by The Journalist and the Murderer’s preoccupations. Everywhere she looked, she found stories that didn’t match up. She wrote about trials for murder (in Iphigenia in Forest Hills) and for corporate malfeasance (in The Crimes of Sheila McGough) with an eye to the dueling stories each side of the room tells in those settings, and their seemingly irreconcilable inconsistences. She wrote about the artist David Salle in a piece that consists, as its title claims, of “Forty-One False Starts,” and thereby seemed to be questioning the usefulness of writing journalism at all. Regarding narratives she expresses a skepticism very like Didion’s—a doubter’s view of the stories we tell ourselves—in her examinations of the people we charge to tell us the stories in the first place: writers, artists, thinkers.
But probably the best example of that is The Silent Woman, a book-length New Yorker article on the life of Sylvia Plath, her husband Ted Hughes, and the biographers who tried to understand the truth of their history together. Plath had been a precocious poet and prose writer, publishing widely in her twenties, though never becoming particularly famous. She eventually moved to England, married the poet Ted Hughes, and had two children. She published one book of poetry, but continued to feel professionally frustrated. Then, in 1963, after Hughes had left her for another woman, Plath committed suicide. A couple of years after her death, her searing book of so-called confessional poetry, Ariel, was published to great acclaim. Her novel, The Bell Jar, also posthumously published, became a classic too. And that was when the trouble began.
Plath’s posthumous admirers came to believe that they had a unique insight into the suffering that led to her suicide. And they blamed Ted Hughes for it. There was some justification for his bad reputation. In the last months of Plath’s life, when he left her for the other woman, Plath had to survive in a strange country with no family other than two very young children. Her subsequent spectral-feminist stardom, as the author of Ariel, had meant that a great deal of ire was directed his way. Subsequently, he and his sister, Olwyn, became very guarded and careful about who they would allow to write Plath’s biographies, which they could control by way of controlling the permission to quote from her unpublished work.
Malcolm’s interest in the whole case was piqued by a biographer they had let in, Anne Stevenson. Malcolm said she had known Stevenson at the University of Michigan.
She had once been pointed out to me on the street: thin and pretty, with an atmosphere of awkward intensity and passion about her, gesticulating, surrounded by interesting-looking boys. In those days, I greatly admired artiness, and Anne Stevenson was one of the figures who glowed with a special incandescence in my imagination.
Stevenson’s Plath biography, Bitter Fame, had however come under serious attack. Olwyn Hughes was thanked profusely in a conspicuous author’s note, and it indicated that Hughes had been able to see, comment on, and request changes to the manuscript before it was published. This was seen as an assault on Stevenson’s integrity as a biographer, as it’s thought a biography will be more objective if the estate does not see the manuscript before publication. Malcolm, too, decided she had qualms about the book, but hers were of a different order altogether. She found herself resen
ting the pose of judiciousness that as a biographer Stevenson was ordered to take. Compared with the people who got to speak from their own experiences of Plath in the book—one of these witnesses truly hated Plath—Stevenson, constrained by this necessity to carefully weigh the evidence, was boring.
Such a preference for the stronger voices of personal experience led Malcolm down a path of sympathy with both Hughes and his sister. She found letters Hughes had written to some of the chief players in the saga, angrily complaining of the way they’d transformed his experience into “official history—as if I were a picture on a wall or some prisoner in Siberia.” Malcolm found that argument compelling, and says so, even as she also finds so many of the characters of this story—the other people with claims to personal witness of Plath’s personality—questionable in their motives. The book ends on the total destruction of the claims of what could be called one of the key witnesses in the Plath case. I won’t tell you who; you should read the book for yourself. Malcolm’s point, again, is that you don’t quite need to trust anyone, don’t need to answer to anyone’s assertions of fact with what she has called, in two different contexts, “bovine equanimity.”
But along the way, Malcolm makes a small disclosure about herself. She goes to visit the critic Al Alvarez, who had been one of Plath’s last friends. He first chats amiably to her about parties at Hannah Arendt’s in the fifties, then goes on to explain that Plath had been far too “big” a woman for him to be attracted to:
I saw what he was getting at, and it made me uncomfortable. As Alvarez had flatteringly mistaken me for someone who might have been invited to Hannah Arendt’s parties in the fifties (I doubt whether I even knew who Hannah Arendt was then), so he now distressingly mistook me for someone who could listen without a pang to his discussion of women he didn’t find attractive. I felt like a Jew who is tacitly included in an anti-Semitic conversation because nobody knows he’s Jewish.
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