Janet Malcolm

Based on Wikipedia: Janet Malcolm

"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."

That sentence, published in 1990, detonated like a bomb in the world of American journalism. It opened Janet Malcolm's book The Journalist and the Murderer, and it made her one of the most controversial—and eventually celebrated—writers of her generation. The sentence is a provocation, an accusation, and perhaps a confession all at once. It also happens to be the kind of thing that gets assigned to journalism students today as required reading, which tells you something about how completely Malcolm won the argument she started.

From Prague to New York

Janet Malcolm was born Jana Klara Wienerová in Prague in 1934. Her father, Josef Wiener, was a psychiatrist. Her mother was Hanna Taussig. The family was Jewish, and when Malcolm was five years old, they fled Czechoslovakia just as the Nazis were tightening their grip on Europe. It was 1939. They escaped to America, resettled in New York City, and like so many refugee families of that era, they reinvented themselves. Josef became Joseph A. Winn. Jana became Janet.

Malcolm's sister, Marie Winn, would also become an author. Something in that household—the displacement, perhaps, or the psychiatrist father, or simply the intellectual atmosphere of mid-century New York—produced two writers preoccupied with observation and understanding.

Malcolm attended the High School of Music and Art in New York, then went to the University of Michigan, where she wrote for the campus newspaper, The Michigan Daily, and edited the humor magazine, The Gargoyle. At Michigan she met her first husband, Donald Malcolm, and after graduation they moved to Washington, D.C. She reviewed books occasionally for The New Republic before returning to New York.

The Long Apprenticeship

Malcolm joined The New Yorker in 1963. She was not immediately assigned to the kind of searching, psychological journalism that would make her famous. Instead, she wrote what the magazine then called "women's interest" pieces—holiday shopping guides, children's book reviews, a column on home decor. This was 1963. Women at major magazines often started this way.

She moved on to writing about photography, becoming the magazine's photography critic. Her essays on the medium were collected in a book called Diana & Nikon, published in 1980. But the real transformation in her work came from an unlikely source: she quit smoking.

In a 2011 profile, Malcolm explained to writer Katie Roiphe that she simply couldn't write without cigarettes. The words wouldn't come. So when she gave up smoking in 1978, she found a workaround. Instead of sitting alone trying to produce prose, she went out and reported. She interviewed people. She gathered facts. The first result was a long piece for The New Yorker on family therapy called "The One-Way Mirror."

This is how one of the most distinctive voices in American nonfiction emerged—as a kind of accident, a coping mechanism for nicotine withdrawal.

The "I" That Is Not Me

Malcolm developed a peculiar and powerful theory of what it meant to write in the first person. She had learned from her New Yorker colleague Joseph Mitchell, a legendary reporter, that first-person journalism wasn't autobiography. The "I" on the page was a character, a construction, just like everyone else in the story.

"This 'I' was a character, just like the other characters," Malcolm explained. "It's a construct. And it's not the person who you are. There's a bit of you in it. But it's a creation. Somewhere I wrote, 'the distinction between the I of the writing and the I of your life is like Superman and Clark Kent.'"

This insight—that the narrator is as crafted and artificial as any fictional character—became central to Malcolm's work. She was interested in how stories are made, how journalism constructs reality, and how the relationship between a writer and subject is always, unavoidably, a kind of performance on both sides.

The Impossible Profession

Malcolm's first major book, Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, appeared in 1981. She followed a psychoanalyst she called "Aaron Green" (a pseudonym) and used his practice as a lens through which to examine the entire Freudian enterprise.

The Freud scholar Peter Gay praised the book as "a dependable introduction to analytic theory and technique" that had "the rare advantage over more solemn texts of being funny as well as informative." Joseph Edelson, reviewing it for The New York Times, called it "an artful book" and praised Malcolm's "keen eye for the surfaces—clothing, speech and furniture—that express character and social role."

The book was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1982. But it was also just the beginning of Malcolm's engagement with psychoanalysis and its institutions—an engagement that would soon land her in court.

The Archives and the Lawsuit

In 1984, Malcolm published In the Freud Archives, which began as articles in The New Yorker. The book told the story of three men: Kurt Eissler, the elderly guardian of Sigmund Freud's reputation; Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, a charismatic psychoanalyst who had briefly been named project director of the Sigmund Freud Archives; and Peter Swales, an independent scholar who had made a career of digging up scandalous facts about Freud's life.

The book was witty, devastating, and closely observed. It was also, according to Jeffrey Masson, full of fabricated quotations.

Masson sued Malcolm, The New Yorker, and her publisher Alfred A. Knopf for libel in 1984. He claimed that Malcolm had invented quotes attributed to him—including a claim that he had called himself an "intellectual gigolo" and said he wanted to turn the Freud estate into a haven of "sex, women, and fun." He also disputed her claim that he had said he was "after Freud, the greatest analyst that ever lived."

Malcolm could not produce tape recordings of all the disputed quotations. The case dragged on for a decade. In 1989, a federal appeals court dismissed the suit, but Masson appealed to the Supreme Court. The Court ruled in 1991 that the case could proceed to trial. The justices did not decide whether Malcolm had fabricated quotes, but they held that if she had, and if the fabrications were damaging, a jury could find malice.

Finally, in November 1994, a jury decided in Malcolm's favor. She had won. Then, in August 1995, she announced that she had discovered a misplaced notebook containing three of the disputed quotations. She swore an affidavit under penalty of perjury that the notes were genuine.

The lawsuit shadowed Malcolm's career for years. It made her both notorious and, in certain circles, a kind of martyr for literary journalism. It also gave her an intimate, firsthand education in exactly the kind of legal and ethical tangles she liked to write about.

The Journalist and the Murderer

Even as the Masson lawsuit was grinding through the courts, Malcolm published the book that would become her most famous and most controversial work.

The Journalist and the Murderer appeared in two parts in The New Yorker in March 1989, then as a book in 1990. It examined the relationship between the true-crime writer Joe McGinniss and his subject, Jeffrey MacDonald, a doctor convicted of murdering his pregnant wife and two young daughters.

McGinniss had embedded himself with MacDonald's defense team during the trial. He lived with them, ate with them, befriended MacDonald. But according to Malcolm's reporting, McGinniss quickly came to believe that MacDonald was guilty. Rather than admit this, McGinniss continued to feign sympathy and friendship to maintain his access to the story. When his book Fatal Vision was published, MacDonald discovered the betrayal. He sued McGinniss, and the case eventually settled.

Malcolm used this story to make a larger argument about journalism itself. Journalists, she argued, necessarily cultivate sources under false pretenses. They encourage intimacy and trust, knowing that they will eventually transform their subjects into characters in a story—characters the subjects may not recognize and would not endorse. This is not a corruption of journalism. It is the essence of the practice.

The opening sentence—about every journalist knowing that what he does is "morally indefensible"—was roundly attacked when it first appeared. Journalists accused Malcolm of projecting her own ethical failures onto the profession. They called her cynical, hostile, self-hating.

But something strange happened over the following decade. The book became a classic. It was assigned in journalism schools. It ranked ninety-seventh on the Modern Library's list of the twentieth century's one hundred best works of nonfiction. Douglas McCollum wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review that "in the decade after Malcolm's essay appeared, her once controversial theory became received wisdom."

Polarized Reactions

Malcolm attracted both passionate admirers and fierce critics throughout her career. In 2013, Cara Parks wrote in The New Republic that Malcolm pursued "literary analysis like a crime drama and courtroom battles like novels." She praised Malcolm's "intensely intellectual style" and her "sharpness and creativity."

Tom Junod, writing in Esquire, was considerably less kind. He called Malcolm "a self-hater whose work has managed to speak for the self-hatred (not to mention the class issues) of a profession that has designs on being 'one of the professions' but never will be." He found her devoid of "journalistic sympathy" and accused her of being "animated by malice."

Katie Roiphe summarized the contradiction in 2011: "Malcolm's work, then, occupies that strange glittering territory between controversy and the establishment: she is both a grande dame of journalism, and still, somehow, its enfant terrible."

The term "enfant terrible" usually applies to young provocateurs. Malcolm was well into her seventies when Roiphe wrote those words. But Malcolm had managed to remain unsettling, to resist the comfortable authority that usually softens older writers into respectability.

The Range of Her Work

Although Malcolm is best known for her writing on journalism and psychoanalysis, her bibliography is remarkably varied. She wrote The Silent Woman about the fraught legacy of the poet Sylvia Plath and her husband Ted Hughes. She wrote Two Lives about Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. She wrote Reading Chekhov, a travel book about visiting the Russian playwright's haunts while reading his work.

She returned repeatedly to true crime—not the lurid kind, but cases that interested her for what they revealed about the construction of narrative and the limits of knowledge. The Crime of Sheila McGough examined the case of a lawyer convicted of helping a con man. Iphigenia in Forest Hills covered a murder trial in Queens, New York.

Her essay collections—The Purloined Clinic, Forty-one False Starts, Nobody's Looking at You—gathered her shorter work on artists, writers, and culture. And in 2023, two years after her death, Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory appeared posthumously. In it, Malcolm wrote autobiographical sketches structured around family photographs—returning, at the end of her life, to the medium she had written about at the beginning of her career.

A Collagist, Too

Malcolm was also a visual artist. She made collages, and in 2008 she published Burdock, a book of her collage work, through Yale University Press. This was not a hobby tacked onto her literary career; it was an extension of the same preoccupations. Collage is about selection, arrangement, the juxtaposition of found materials. It is about making something new from pieces of existing reality. This is also, of course, a fair description of what a journalist does.

Two Marriages

Malcolm married Donald Malcolm, her college sweetheart, and they had a daughter, Anne, in 1963. Donald wrote book reviews for The New Yorker in the 1950s and 1960s and served as a theater critic. He died in 1975.

That same year, Malcolm married Gardner Botsford, a longtime editor at The New Yorker. Botsford came from the family that had originally funded the magazine—he was, in a sense, New Yorker aristocracy. He wrote a memoir called A Life of Privilege, Mostly and died in 2004 at the age of eighty-seven.

The End

Janet Malcolm died of lung cancer on June 16, 2021, at a Manhattan hospital. She was eighty-six years old. She had fled the Nazis as a child, reinvented herself in New York, spent years writing about holiday shopping and home decor, quit smoking and accidentally discovered her true calling, been sued for libel and vindicated, and produced a body of work that permanently changed how journalists think about what they do.

In 2023, the essayist Charles Finch offered a bold assessment: "It seems safe to say that the two most important long-form journalists this country produced in the second half of the last century were Joan Didion and Janet Malcolm."

Malcolm was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001. Her papers are held at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. In 2017, the Academy awarded her its Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism—one of its highest honors.

But perhaps the most telling measure of her influence is simpler than any award. That incendiary opening sentence from The Journalist and the Murderer—the one that seemed outrageous in 1989—now reads like conventional wisdom. Every journalism student encounters it. Most working journalists have absorbed its lesson, even if they've never read Malcolm's book. She told the profession an uncomfortable truth about itself, and the profession, eventually, agreed.