Ouch!

In his introduction to Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and The Murderer, the late Ian Jack says it ranks with Scoop as one of the “wisest descriptions” of journalism. Whereas Evelyn Waugh relies on biting satire, Malcolm attacks journalism with pitiless observation and insight. The journalist, she says, “is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness”. She goes on to say: “The journalistic ‘I’ is an overreliable narrator, a functionary to whom crucial tasks of narration and argument and tone have been entrusted, an ad hoc creation, like the chorus of Greek tragedy.”

Given the standards she set for herself as one of the most important American long-form journalists of her time, Malcolm was never going to write a conventional autobiography. Indeed, long before her death in 2021, she gave it a shot, and spiked it. In a 2010 essay, Thoughts on Autobiography from an Abandoned Autobiography, she said that as a journalist who is constantly fixing her gaze on others, “it isn’t easy to suddenly find oneself alone in the room. It is particularly hard for someone who probably became a journalist precisely because she didn’t want to find herself alone in the room”.

Still Pictures is what she left us. A slender volume, it allows her to report on herself and her life selectively and as if from a distance. Almost every chapter begins with a black-and-white photo – snapshots, really – around which she frames a brief recollection. She handles memory, and memories, in her own way. As she wrote in her 2010 essay, “if an autobiography is to be even minimally readable, the autobiographer must step in and subdue what you could call memory’s autism, its passion for the tedious”.

The photo that introduces one of her better chapters, The Girl on a Train, is of Malcolm, nearly five, bracketed by her parents in the window of a train carriage. Someone had handwritten on the back of the photo “Leaving Prague, July 1939”. In her precise, evocative language, Malcolm writes: “We were among the small number of Jews who escaped the fate of the rest by sheer dumb luck, as a few random insects escape a poison spray.”

Malcolm built her career on luminous, exacting detail. But the portrait she paints in Still Pictures is deliberately patchy at times. Writing circumspectly about her maternal grandfather, she says she would have told us more, “but now I am like a journalist with an empty notebook”. Her preoccupation with memory is present throughout this book. The “glitter of memory” can be deceptive, she writes, just before penning one of the most celebrated lines in Still Pictures (paraphrasing LP Hartley): “The past is a country that issues no visas. We can only enter it illegally.”

Her wariness of that country is there when she writes about her father: “Since my father was not concerned with his image, he would probably not object to the recitation of my wounded-child’s grievances. But I do not wish to make it. He was a wonderful father. I know he dearly loved my sister and me. But he loved his own life more and seemed to have hated leaving it more than most men and women do.”

Still Pictures is weighted toward the early years of Malcolm’s life, before she started out at The New Yorker in 1963. Her family, like many Czech refugees, gravitated to Yorkville on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, a working-class neighbourhood prior to the demolition of the Third Avenue elevated train in the 1950s. “We were an ordinary middle-class, middlebrow family,” she says. She took Czech language classes after school. She went to summer camp with her sister, Marie. The family went to the seashore.

Readers of Malcolm’s work will not be surprised by the icy objectivity of some of her descriptions. Her Czech-language teacher “was an obese woman with short, straight hair and coarse, swarthy skin who always seemed to be sweating. She wore long dark-red print dresses, all of which appeared to be the same dress, and heavy black shoes”.

Malcolm is nothing if not self-aware. Writing about a couple – “the epitome of dullness” – who were friends of her parents, she says “a child’s cruelty is never completely outgrown”. She chides herself, but only half-heartedly: “They were modest, good, kind people who brought out an obnoxiousness in my sister and me for which I would blush today if I were a better person.”

“In literature,” Malcolm writes, “interesting things happen to interesting people; in life, more often than not, interesting things happen to uninteresting people.” Malcolm is herself an exception to this rule. But she was never going to let us in on everything. In this memoir, she’s behind the camera, showing the reader only what she wants to. In no uncertain terms, she levels with us: “I would rather flunk a writing test than expose the pathetic secrets of my heart.”