Janet Malcolm

Malcolm burst my bubble herself when "The Journalist and the Murderer" came out in book form the following year. In a newly appended afterword, she declared:

The notion that my account of this case is a thinly veiled account of my own experience of being sued by a subject not only is wrong but betrays a curious naoveti about the psychology of journalists. The dominant and most deep-dyed trait of the journalist is his timorousness. Where the novelist fearlessly plunges into the water of self-exposure, the journalist stands trembling on the shore in his beach robe. Not for him the strenuous athleticism -- which is the novelist's daily task -- of laying out his deepest griefs and shames before the world. The journalist confines himself to the clean, gentlemanly work of exposing the griefs and shames of others. Precisely because MacDonald's lawsuit had no elements in common with Masson's did I feel emboldened to write about it (and, incidentally, was I, as a defendant, able to position myself so as to view a plaintiff's case with sympathy).

A more stupefying specimen of bullshit would be hard to find -- though there's also something reassuring, even endearing, in this demonstration that Malcolm can be just as neurotic and self-deceiving as the rest of us. Her reasoning is bogus on every level. To write anything more than just the facts, ma'am, is to write about oneself. Criticism is widely understood to be a form of autobiography (your tastes define you), but so is Malcolm's brand of reflective journalism (your perceptions define you). As much as Malcolm may think she hates the spotlight -- she almost never gives interviews -- on the page she is helplessly forthcoming, a peculiarity that goes some way toward explaining why the issue of privacy ("life's most precious possession," she calls it in her recent New Yorker essay on Chekhov) runs through her work like a nerve. And while I suppose it's possible (weird, but possible) that Malcolm didn't think about Masson's lawsuit as she was writing about MacDonald's, she of all people -- a writer who enjoys roughly the same relationship with Freud that Jerry Lewis has with the Muscular Dystrophy Association -- could be expected to know that what you think you're thinking about is never the whole story. In the New York article, Taylor passed along a hypothesis, too neat by half but still hard to shrug off, that an acquaintance of McGinniss' had put forward: "She could expiate guilt toward her Jeffrey M. by coming to the aid of another Jeffrey M., who was betrayed by a writer. Freud said nothing is coincidence."

How could she be so clueless about her own method? In "The Journalist and the Murderer" she points to "the writer's identification with and affection for the subject," citing Joseph Mitchell's Joe Gould and Truman Capote's Perry Smith as examples of "the transformation from life to literature that the masters of the nonfiction genre achieve." In the afterword she goes so far as to paraphrase Flaubert: "Masson, c'est moi." Malcolm's later books are works of profound identification with the luckless wretches, not the least of them Joe McGinniss, who are her subjects. Fear of self-exposure? With each of her books she stands more naked before the world.

I also mentioned another reaction of the press: defensive fury. It was a dumb fury based on a misunderstanding of Malcolm's argument. Shortly after the articles appeared in the New Yorker, an editorial writer at the New York Times took umbrage at Malcolm's "sweeping indictment of all journalists." Fred Friendly, the renowned broadcaster, took up this theme the next year in his review of the book. Convinced that Malcolm was trying to put her finger on "what ails journalism," he complained that her conclusion that "all journalists are guilty" was "distorted by a crabbed vision of the profession and her own place in it." To counter what he perceived as the affront to his calling, he even listed several big-name reporters who he happened to know had excellent ethics. This defensiveness was part of a widespread misperception; a few years later, a Times reporter covering the libel trial noted that many writers and editors were reluctant to speak up for Malcolm because of the "sweeping indictment" (that formula again) she had leveled against them.

No, no, no, no, no. "The Journalist and the Murderer" is not an attack on the ethics of journalists. True, the worst-case scenario that Malcolm chose to illustrate her argument teetered on the dubious end of the ethical spectrum; its stark colors were what made her choose it. But her point is "the canker that lies at the heart of the rose," the ethical paradox at the core of all journalism; it doesn't matter whether the ("good enough") reporter in question is McGinniss or Malcolm or one of Fred Friendly's paragons of virtue. The journalist-subject relationship, like the analyst-patient relationship, is fraught with "abnormality, contradictoriness, and strain," but -- in a further paradox -- these disquieting qualities are what give it its value. Just as therapeutic progress is predicated on the mutual miseries of the transference, "the tension between the subject's blind self-absorption and the journalist's skepticism" is what, in Malcolm's view, "gives journalism its authenticity and vitality." And she capped her argument with a zinger: "Journalists who swallow the subject's account whole and publish it are not journalists but publicists."

Next Page: Are biographers after revenge?

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