Janet Malcolm
Encyclopedia
Janet Malcolm is an American writer and journalist on staff at The New Yorker
magazine. She is the author of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981), In the Freud Archives (1984) and The Journalist and the Murderer
(1990).
Craig Seligman wrote of her: "Like Sylvia Plath
, whose not-niceness she has laid open with surgical skill, she discovered her vocation in not-niceness ... Malcolm's blade gleams with a razor edge. Her critics tend to go after her with broken bottles." The influential critic Harold Bloom
has praised her "wonderful exuberance," writing that Malcolm's books, "transcend what they appear to be: superb reportage."
in 1934, one of two daughters—the other is author Marie Winn
—of a psychiatrist
father. She has resided in the United States
since her family emigrated from Czechoslovakia
in 1939. Malcolm was educated at the University of Michigan
and lives in New York City
. Her first husband, Donald Malcolm, reviewed books for The New Yorker
in the 1950s and 1960s. Her second husband, whom she wed in 1975, was long-time New Yorker editor Gardner Botsford; Botsford died at age 87 in September, 2004.
Early Malcolm book jackets report her "living in New York with her husband and daughter." Her daughter is also mentioned in the text of The Crime of Sheila McGough.
, and of the subsequent book In The Freud Archives, triggered a $10 million legal challenge by psychoanalyst
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
, former project director for the Freud Archives
. In his 1984 lawsuit, Masson claimed that Malcolm had libelled him by fabricating quotations attributed to him; these quotes, Masson contended, had brought him into disrepute.
Malcolm claimed that Masson had called himself an "intellectual gigolo
", and that he had slept with over 1000 women. She also claimed that he said he wanted to turn the Freud estate into a haven of "sex, women and fun"; and claimed that he was, "after Freud
, the greatest analyst that ever lived." Malcolm was unable to produce all the disputed material on tape. The case was partially adjudicated before the Supreme Court
, which held, against Malcolm, that the case could go forward for trial by jury. After a decade of proceedings, a jury finally found against Masson in 1994 on the grounds that, whether or not the quotations were genuine, more evidence was needed to rule against Malcolm. (For the opinion of the Supreme Court that allowed the case to proceed to trial, see the opinion at Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc. (89-1799), 501 U.S. 496 (1991))
In August, 1995, Malcolm claimed to have discovered a misplaced notebook containing three of the disputed quotes. As reported in The New York Times
the author "declared in an affidavit under penalty of perjury that the notes were genuine."
Malcolm's example was popular non-fiction writer Joe McGinniss
, author of The Selling of the President, among others; while researching his non-fiction, true crime
book Fatal Vision
, McGinniss lived with the defense team of former Green Beret
doctor Jeffrey MacDonald, then on trial for the 1970 murders of his two daughters and pregnant wife. In the published Fatal Vision, McGinniss concluded that MacDonald was a sociopath
and had been unbalanced by amphetamines when he slew his family. McGinniss drew upon the work of social critic Christopher Lasch
to construct a portrait of MacDonald as a "pathological narcissist".
Malcolm contended that McGinniss was pressed into this strategy for professional and structural reasons — by MacDonald's "lack of vividness" as a real-life character who would be carrying the book. "As every journalist will confirm," Malcolm writes,
Per Malcolm, it was to conceal this deficit that McGinniss quoted liberally from Lasch's 1979 study The Culture of Narcissism
. This, to her, was a professional sin. McGinniss' moral sin, his "indefensible" act in her view, was to pretend to a belief in MacDonald's innocence, long after he'd become convinced of the man's guilt.
The book created a sensation when in March 1989 it appeared in two parts in The New Yorker
magazine. Roundly criticized upon first publication, the book is still controversial, although it has come to be regarded as a classic, and ranks ninety-seventh in The Modern Library's list of the twentieth century's "100 Best Works of Nonfiction". As Douglas McCollum wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review
, "In the decade after Malcolm's essay appeared, her once controversial theory became received wisdom."
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
magazine. She is the author of Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981), In the Freud Archives (1984) and The Journalist and the Murderer
The Journalist and the Murderer
The Journalist and the Murderer is a 1990 study by Janet Malcolm about the ethics of journalism published by Alfred A. Knopf/Random House. Attracting heavy criticism upon first publication, it is now regarded as a "seminal" work, and ranks ninety-seventh on Random House's The Modern Library's list...
(1990).
Craig Seligman wrote of her: "Like Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. Born in Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College, Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a professional poet and writer...
, whose not-niceness she has laid open with surgical skill, she discovered her vocation in not-niceness ... Malcolm's blade gleams with a razor edge. Her critics tend to go after her with broken bottles." The influential critic Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom
Harold Bloom is an American writer and literary critic, and is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University. He is known for his defense of 19th-century Romantic poets, his unique and controversial theories of poetic influence, and his prodigious literary output, particularly for a literary...
has praised her "wonderful exuberance," writing that Malcolm's books, "transcend what they appear to be: superb reportage."
Background and personal
Malcolm was born in PraguePrague
Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...
in 1934, one of two daughters—the other is author Marie Winn
Marie Winn
Marie Winn, a journalist, author and birdwatcher, is known for her books and articles on the birds of Central Park, her Wall Street Journal ornithology column and her role in the quiz show scandals of the 1950s...
—of a psychiatrist
Psychiatry
Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the study and treatment of mental disorders. These mental disorders include various affective, behavioural, cognitive and perceptual abnormalities...
father. She has resided in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
since her family emigrated from Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...
in 1939. Malcolm was educated at the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
and lives in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. Her first husband, Donald Malcolm, reviewed books for The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
in the 1950s and 1960s. Her second husband, whom she wed in 1975, was long-time New Yorker editor Gardner Botsford; Botsford died at age 87 in September, 2004.
Early Malcolm book jackets report her "living in New York with her husband and daughter." Her daughter is also mentioned in the text of The Crime of Sheila McGough.
Masson case
Publication of articles in The New YorkerThe New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
, and of the subsequent book In The Freud Archives, triggered a $10 million legal challenge by psychoanalyst
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
Dr. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson is an American author, residing in New Zealand. Masson is best known for his conclusions about Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis...
, former project director for the Freud Archives
Sigmund Freud Archives
The Sigmund Freud Archives mainly consist of a trove of documents housed at the US Library of Congress and in the former residence of Sigmund Freud during the last year of his life at 20 Maresfield Gardens in northwest London...
. In his 1984 lawsuit, Masson claimed that Malcolm had libelled him by fabricating quotations attributed to him; these quotes, Masson contended, had brought him into disrepute.
Malcolm claimed that Masson had called himself an "intellectual gigolo
Gigolo
Gigolo may refer to:* A male prostitute, escort, or dancer, who offers services to women* Gigolo , a 2006 single by Helena Paparizou* Gigolo , a 2003 single by Nick Cannon...
", and that he had slept with over 1000 women. She also claimed that he said he wanted to turn the Freud estate into a haven of "sex, women and fun"; and claimed that he was, "after Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
, the greatest analyst that ever lived." Malcolm was unable to produce all the disputed material on tape. The case was partially adjudicated before the Supreme Court
Supreme Court of the United States
The Supreme Court of the United States is the highest court in the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all state and federal courts, and original jurisdiction over a small range of cases...
, which held, against Malcolm, that the case could go forward for trial by jury. After a decade of proceedings, a jury finally found against Masson in 1994 on the grounds that, whether or not the quotations were genuine, more evidence was needed to rule against Malcolm. (For the opinion of the Supreme Court that allowed the case to proceed to trial, see the opinion at Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc. (89-1799), 501 U.S. 496 (1991))
In August, 1995, Malcolm claimed to have discovered a misplaced notebook containing three of the disputed quotes. As reported in The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
the author "declared in an affidavit under penalty of perjury that the notes were genuine."
The Journalist and the Murderer
The thesis of The Journalist and the Murderer is contained in its first sentence: "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."Malcolm's example was popular non-fiction writer Joe McGinniss
Joe McGinniss
Joe McGinniss is an American author of nonfiction and novels. He first came to prominence with the best-selling The Selling of the President, 1968 which described the marketing of then-presidential candidate Richard Nixon, and has authored 11 works since that time...
, author of The Selling of the President, among others; while researching his non-fiction, true crime
True crime
True crime is a non-fiction literary and film genre in which the author examines an actual crime and details the actions of real people.The crimes most commonly include murder, but true crime works have also touched on other legal cases. Depending on the writer, true crime can adhere strictly to...
book Fatal Vision
Fatal Vision
Fatal Vision is a best-selling true crime book published in 1983 by journalist and author Joe McGinniss. The following year it was made into an NBC television miniseries under the same name. Fatal Vision is the real-life story of Captain Jeffrey MacDonald, M.D., who in 1979 was convicted of the...
, McGinniss lived with the defense team of former Green Beret
United States Army Special Forces
The United States Army Special Forces, also known as the Green Berets because of their distinctive service headgear, are a special operations force tasked with six primary missions: unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense, special reconnaissance, direct action, hostage rescue, and...
doctor Jeffrey MacDonald, then on trial for the 1970 murders of his two daughters and pregnant wife. In the published Fatal Vision, McGinniss concluded that MacDonald was a sociopath
Psychopathy
Psychopathy is a mental disorder characterized primarily by a lack of empathy and remorse, shallow emotions, egocentricity, and deceptiveness. Psychopaths are highly prone to antisocial behavior and abusive treatment of others, and are very disproportionately responsible for violent crime...
and had been unbalanced by amphetamines when he slew his family. McGinniss drew upon the work of social critic Christopher Lasch
Christopher Lasch
Christopher Lasch was a well-known American historian, moralist, and social critic....
to construct a portrait of MacDonald as a "pathological narcissist".
Malcolm contended that McGinniss was pressed into this strategy for professional and structural reasons — by MacDonald's "lack of vividness" as a real-life character who would be carrying the book. "As every journalist will confirm," Malcolm writes,
- "MacDonald's uninterestingness is not unusual at all...When a journalist fetches up against someone like [him], all he can do is flee and hope that a more suitable subject will turn up soon. In the MacDonald-McGinniss case we have an instance of a journalist who apparently found out too late that the subject of his book was not up to scratch — not a member of the wonderful race of auto-fictionalizers, like Joseph Mitchell's, Joe Gould's SecretJoe Gould's Secret__FORCETOC__Joe Gould's Secret is a 1965 book by Joseph Mitchell, based upon his two New Yorker profiles, "Professor Seagull", and "Joe Gould's Secret", . Mitchell's work details the true story of the eponymous Joe Gould, a writer who lived on the streets of Greenwich Village in the first half of...
, and Truman CapoteTruman CapoteTruman Streckfus Persons , known as Truman Capote , was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's and the true crime novel In Cold Blood , which he labeled a "nonfiction novel." At...
's Perry SmithPerry Smith (murderer)Perry Edward Smith was one of two ex-convicts who murdered four members of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, United States on November 15, 1959, a crime made famous by Truman Capote in his 1966 non-fiction novel In Cold Blood.-Family and early life:Perry Edward Smith was born in Huntington,...
, on whom the "non-fiction novel" depends for its life...The solution that McGinniss arrived at for dealing with MacDonald's characterlessness was not a satisfactory one, but it had to do."
Per Malcolm, it was to conceal this deficit that McGinniss quoted liberally from Lasch's 1979 study The Culture of Narcissism
The Culture of Narcissism
The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations is a 1979 book by the cultural historian Christopher Lasch exploring the roots and ramifications of the normalizing of pathological narcissism in 20th century American culture using psychological, cultural, artistic and...
. This, to her, was a professional sin. McGinniss' moral sin, his "indefensible" act in her view, was to pretend to a belief in MacDonald's innocence, long after he'd become convinced of the man's guilt.
The book created a sensation when in March 1989 it appeared in two parts in The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
magazine. Roundly criticized upon first publication, the book is still controversial, although it has come to be regarded as a classic, and ranks ninety-seventh in The Modern Library's list of the twentieth century's "100 Best Works of Nonfiction". As Douglas McCollum wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review
Columbia Journalism Review
The Columbia Journalism Review is an American magazine for professional journalists published bimonthly by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism since 1961....
, "In the decade after Malcolm's essay appeared, her once controversial theory became received wisdom."
Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession
"Janet Malcolm's witty and wicked Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession has been praised by psychoanalysts (with justice) as a dependable introduction to analytic theory and technique. It has the rare advantage over more solemn texts of being funny as well as informative".Works
- Diana & Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography (1980)
- Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981)
- In The Freud Archives (1984)
- The Journalist and the MurdererThe Journalist and the MurdererThe Journalist and the Murderer is a 1990 study by Janet Malcolm about the ethics of journalism published by Alfred A. Knopf/Random House. Attracting heavy criticism upon first publication, it is now regarded as a "seminal" work, and ranks ninety-seventh on Random House's The Modern Library's list...
(1990) - The Purloined Clinic: Selected Writings (1992), which contains the essays "A Girl of the Zeitgeist" and "The Window Washer"
- The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes (1994)
- The Crime of Sheila McGough (1999)
- Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey (2001)
- Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (2007)
- Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial (2011)
Sources
- Janet Malcolm by Craig Seligman, Salon.com, February 29, 2000
External links
- NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH?
- The Lives They Lived: Kurt Eissler, b. 1908; Keeper of Freud's Secrets, By JANET MALCOLM, Published: January 2, 2000
- Malcolm archive from The New York Review of BooksThe New York Review of BooksThe New York Review of Books is a fortnightly magazine with articles on literature, culture and current affairs. Published in New York City, it takes as its point of departure that the discussion of important books is itself an indispensable literary activity...