Janet Malcolm

Janet Malcolm (born 1934) is an American writer and journalist on staff at "The New Yorker" magazine. She is the author of "The Journalist and the Murderer", "Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession", and "In the Freud Archives".

Malcolm is best known for the 1991 lawsuit triggered by "In the Freud Archives", when psychoanalyst Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson sued Malcolm and "The New Yorker" for $10 million, after claiming that Malcolm had fabricated explosive quotations attributed to him. After several years of proceedings, the court found against Masson.

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." [ [http://www.salon.com/people/bc/2000/02/29/malcolm/ Seligman, Craig. "Salon", "Brilliant Careers: Janet Malcolm". February 2, 2000.] ] The influential critic Harold Bloom has praised her "wonderful exuberance," writing that Malcolm's books, "transcend what they appear to be: superb reportage." [Bloom, Harold, "The New York Times Book Review", "War Within The Walls", May 27, 1984.]

Background and personal

Malcolm was born in Prague 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 1960's. 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 the book "In The Freud Archives" triggered a $10 million legal challenge by Jeffrey Masson, former project director for the Freud Archives, who claimed that Malcolm had libelled him by fabricating quotations attributed to him; these quotes, Masson contended, had brought him into disrepute.

In the disputed quotations, Masson called himself an "intellectual gigolo", who had slept with over 1000 women; 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 [ [http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/89-1799.ZO.html / Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc., 501 U.S. 496 (1991)] ] , and after years of proceedings, a jury finally found against Masson in 1994. (See the opinion at [http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/89-1799.ZO.html Masson v. New Yorker Magazine, Inc. (89-1799), 501 U.S. 496 (1991)] )

In August, 1995, Malcolm discovered a misplaced notebook containing three of the disputed quotes. As reported in "The New York Times" [ [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CEEDF153AF933A0575BC0A963958260/ Stout, David, "The New York Times", "Malcolm's Notes and a Child at Play", August 30, 1995] 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, Janet, "The Journalist and the Murderer", New York: Knopf, 1990.]

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 pregnant wife and two daughters. 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, "The Journalist and the Murderer", pps. 28, 72-3.]

Malcolm contended that McGinniss was pressed into this strategy for professional and structural reasons — by MacDonald's "lack of vividness" [Malcolm, p.68] as a real-life character who would be carrying the book. "As every journalist will confirm," Malcolm writes [Malcolm, pps. 71-3.] ,:"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 and Truman Capote's Perry Smith, 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". 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 of 1989 it appeared in two parts in "The New Yorker" magazine. [Scardino, Albert, "The New York Times". "Ethic, Reporters and The New Yorker", March 21. 1989. "Janet Malcolm, a staff writer for "The New Yorker", returned her magazine to the center of the long-running debate over ethics in journalism this month...Her declarations provoked outrage among authors, reporters and editors, who rushed last week to distinguish themselves from the journalists Miss Malcolm was describing."] Although roundly criticized upon first publication [See Friendly, Fred W., "The New York Times Book Review", "Was Trust Betrayed?", February 25, 1990, and Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher, "The New York Times", "Deception and Journalism: How Far to Go for the Story", February 22, 1990.] , the book has since become regarded as a classic [McCollum, Douglas, "Columbia Journalism Review", "You Have The Right to Remain Silent", January, February, 2003.] , and ranks ninety-seventh in The Modern Library's list of the twentieth century's "100 Best Works of Nonfiction". [ [http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100bestnonfiction.html/ The Modern Library 100 Best] ] As Douglas McCollum wrote in the "Columbia Journalism Review", "In the decade after Malcolm's essay appeared, her once controversial theory became received wisdom."

Works

*"Diana & Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography" (1980)
*"Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession" (1981)
*"In The Freud Archives" (1984)
*"The Journalist and The Murderer" (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)

References

ources

* [http://www.salon.com/people/bc/2000/02/29/malcolm/ "Janet Malcolm"] by Craig Seligman, "Salon.com", February 29, 2000

External links

* [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/3551 "NOTHING BUT THE TRUTH?"]
* [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9C04E1D91F39F931A35752C0A9669C8B63&n=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fPeople%2fF%2fFreud%2c%20Sigmund "The Lives They Lived: Kurt Eissler, b. 1908; Keeper of Freud's Secrets", By JANET MALCOLM, Published: January 2, 2000]
* [http://www.nybooks.com/authors/395 Malcolm archive] from "The New York Review of Books"