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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
This is a key insight: that people rehash their stories with an Ancient Mariner obsessiveness no matter who is listening. There's a wonderful episode in "The Journalist and the Murderer" in which Malcolm plays the boob to underline this point. She has visited a newspaper reporter named Bob Keeler, who covered the Jeffrey MacDonald murder case in which both she and their fellow journalist Joe McGinniss have taken an interest. As she leaves, Keeler offers her his blue interview notebook, which she accepts unenthusiastically, because (she confesses to us) she regards it as an
affront to my pride. An interview, after all, is only as good as the journalist who conducts it, and I felt -- to put it bluntly -- that Keeler, with his prepared questions and his newspaper-reporter's directness, would not get from his subjects the kind of authentic responses that I try to elicit from mine with a more Japanese technique. When I finally read Keeler's transcripts, however, I was in for a surprise and an illumination. MacDonald and McGinniss had said exactly the same things to the unsubtle Keeler that they had said to me. It hadn't made the slightest difference that Keeler had read from a list of prepared questions and I had acted as if I were passing the time of day. From Keeler's blue book I learned the same truth about subjects that the analyst learns about patients: they will tell their story to anyone who will listen to it, and the story will not be affected by the behavior or personality of the listener; just as ("good enough") analysts are interchangeable, so are journalists. My McGinniss and Keeler's McGinniss were the same person, and so were my MacDonald and Keeler's MacDonald and McGinniss's MacDonald. The subject, like the patient, dominates the relationship and calls the shots. The journalist cannot create his subjects any more than the analyst can create his patients.
This rich and characteristic observation also has to be read as a defensive one, because by the time Malcolm wrote these words she had been accused of exactly that -- creating her subject -- by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, the unfortunate former psychoanalyst she eviscerated in a pair of 1983 New Yorker articles that were published between hard covers the following year under the unassuming title (titles are not her strong point) "In the Freud Archives."
Psychoanalysts rival early Christians in their mania for rifts, and while Malcolm may be a fundamentalist herself, she's too adventurous a thinker not to admire a talented apostate and too inveterate a satirist not to savor the stuffiness of the mother church. Masson was a youngish analyst who had penetrated the sanctum sanctorum: With the blessings of Kurt Eissler, who was something like the pontiff of the Freudians, he had been placed in charge of the archives in the Freud house in London, where the great analyst's daughter, Anna Freud, still lived. Access to Freud's unpublished letters and papers, which Eissler and Anna Freud guarded with flaming swords, was a researcher's notion of paradise.
Masson immediately started alienating Eissler and his colleagues by attacking their deity. A paper he delivered in New Haven in 1981 was the final straw. Early on Freud had attributed the sexual hysteria of a number of his patients to childhood sexual abuse; he later came to believe that this abuse had been imagined, and in abandoning the so-called seduction theory he opened the door to the theory of the Oedipus complex and to the whole new field of psychoanalysis. Masson accused the master of ignoring cases of actual abuse. Shortly after the New Haven talk, he was ousted from his post at the archives, and when Malcolm met him the following year, he was busily engaged in suing his former benefactors.
Masson spent hours and hours talking to Malcolm. She encouraged his trust, gossiping with him, cooking for him, even putting him and his girlfriend up with her in New York. And then, in writing about him, she unearthed a frightening talent. "In the Freud Archives" is a masterwork of character assassination, all the more devastating because Malcolm, in quoting her talkative subject at length, has him twist the knife himself. It's all but impossible to read Masson's long monologues (many of them, it came out in testimony, cobbled together from more than one interview) without thinking, "What an asshole!" When the articles appeared, their flabbergasted victim howled in shock at the betrayal, and his howl took the form of a libel suit.
The case hinged on five quotations that Masson claimed were fabrications and that Malcolm, embarrassingly, couldn't produce on tape -- although, as David Gates pointed out in Newsweek, "what Malcolm does have on tape -- only a few lines are in dispute -- is more than enough to make Masson look silly." The suit threaded byzantinely up and down through the courts for years before a jury finally found against Masson in 1994. But for Malcolm the victory was a Pyrrhic one. The public spectacle had been huge and humiliating, her reporting widely criticized and mocked. The lawsuit gained her more notoriety than any of her books ever had; thenceforward everything she wrote would be a target.
But Masson had liberated her, too, by letting her discover the vein of gold in her natural malice. Her next major piece for the New Yorker, a 1986 profile of Ingrid Sischy -- then the editor of Artforum, now the editor of Interview -- is a textbook demonstration of the way a malicious reporter can pulp her subjects simply by describing their apartments. (Sischy is practically the only art-world figure who walks out of it unflattened.) In "The Window Washer," a 1990 memoir of a return trip to her native Prague, Malcolm is brutal in her depiction of a professor and his wife who invite her into their home for not one but two meals. The transgression of hospitality -- the slap in the face of her hosts -- is so disturbing that it threatens to wreck what is overall a touching celebration of the newly liberated city.
Why is she so hard on these people? I think it has something to do with a blurring of the line between reportage and criticism. She nods approvingly, in a review of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being," at Milan Kundera's observation that "none among us is superhuman enough to escape kitsch completely. No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition." Yet she has remorseless radar for the kitsch in her subjects' lives, and she uses it against them. I shudder sometimes at the awful fantasy of Malcolm visiting my house, which I love and have put a lot of thought into making my own, and telling the world, in a few dismissive phrases, what a shabby and affected place it is.
