Janet Malcolm. The Journalist and the Murderer

"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.  He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.  Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns -- when the article or book appears -- his hard lesson.  Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments.  The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and 'the public's right to know'; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living" (Journalist, p. 3)

"The fatal attraction of a lawsuit -- as Dickens showed us in Bleak House, with the case of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce -- is the infinite scope it offers for escape from the real world of ambiguity, obscurity, doubt, disappointment, compromise, and accommodation.  The world of the lawsuit is the world of the Platonic ideal, where all is clear, etched, one thing or the other.  It is a world -- as Dickens showed with his allegory of obsession -- that we enter at our peril, since it is also the world of madness" (Journalist, pp. 148-49).

"The phenomenon of transference -- how we all invent each other according to early blueprints -- was Freud's most original and radical discovery.  The idea of infant sexuality and of the Oedipus complex can be accepted with a good deal more equanamity than the idea that the most precious and inviolate of entities -- personal relations -- is actually a messy jangle of misapprehensions, at best an uneasy truce between powerful solitary fantasy systems.  Even (or especially) romantic love is fundamentally solitary, and has at its core a profound impersonality.  The concept of transference at once destroys faith in personal relations and explains why they are tragic:  we cannot know each other.  We must grope around for each other through a dense thicket of absent others.  We cannot see each other plain" (Psychoanalysis:  The Impossible Profession, p. 6).

"(Freud himself preferred to align the psychoanalytic revolution with the revolution of Copernicus and then the revolution of Darwin, saying that the first showed that the earth was not the center of the universe, the second that man was not a unique creation, and the third that man was not even master of his own house.)  It was as if a lonely terrorist working in his cellar on a modest explosive device to blow up the local brewery had unaccountably found his way to the hydrogen bomb and blown up half the world.  The fallout from this bomb has yet to settle" (Psychoanalysis, pp. 22-23).

"The most dedicated of Freudians do daily battle with the disinclination of the mind to accept the chastening evidence of the fossils of the unconscious (dreams, slips of the tongue, forgettings, accidents) in favor of the more acceptable testimony of the ordinary senses.  The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the examined life is impossible to live for more than a few moments at a time.  To fully accept the idea of unconscious motivation is to cease to be human.  The greatest analyst in the world can live his own life only like an ordinary blind and driven human being" (In the Freud Archives, p. 25).

"Far from presenting the patient with a well-made story, analysis seeks to destroy the story that the patient has for a long time believed to be the story of his life.  Like a police investigator bent on breaking down the alibi of a stubborn suspect, the analyst doggedly whittles away at the patient's story through evidence that the patient unwittingly provides.  Nor does analysis replace the old story with a new one.  It emboldens the patient to live without a story.  It permits him to see that his life is at once more disorderly and risky and interesting and free than he had dared to imagine.  Our lives are not like novels"  (The Purloined Clinic, pp. 45-46)

"Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world.  The biography at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away.  The voyeurism and busybodyism that impel writers and readers of biography alike are obscured by an apparatus of scholarship designed to give the enterprise an appearance of banklike blandness and solidity.  The biographer is portrayed almost as a kind of benefactor.  He is seen as sacrificing years of his life to his task, tirelessly sitting in archives and libraries and patiently conducting interviews with witnesses.  There is no length he will not go to, and the more his book reflects his industry the more the reader believes that he is having an elevating literary experience rather than simply listening to backstairs gossip and reading other people's mail....  The reader's amazing tolerance ... makes sense only when seen as a kind of collusion between him and the biographer in an excitingly forbidden undertaking: tiptoeing down the corridor together, to stand in front of the bedroom door and try to peep through the keyhole"  (The Silent Woman:  Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, pp. 8-9).

In a recent issue of The New Yorker, in the middle of an article on fashion designer Eileen Fisher, Janet Malcolm unexpectedly finds herself "babbling about the ethical dilemmas of journalism, about the risk subjects take when they let journalists into their houses and the pangs journalists feel when they write their betraying narratives"  (Sept. 23, 2013, p. 58).  None of this makes a whole lot of sense, particularly -- it just seems to come flying in from out of the blue sky, like an engine falling from an unseen airplane, but it's quite clear, since the publication of Malcolm's fascinating account of The Journalist and the Murderer, that the impossible relationship of journalists to their subjects and to the truth has been her life-long preoccupation.  One of Modern Library's top 100 non-fiction works of the 20th century, The Journalist is Joe McGinness, author of Fatal Vision, who and which betrayed The Murderer Jeffrey McDonald, resulting in a libel lawsuit against the author.  Its opening lines and its premise -- the instability of truth; its larger argument that journalists, lawyers, and biographers alike are obliged to wrest from out of the contradictory bits and pieces of human experience a narrative line, a convincing story; the inevitable impossiblity and thus duplicity of the journalistic enterprise  itself-- stung journalists across the country.  All of which resonates all the more, when one learns that Malcolm, herself, was sued for libel for her portrait of Jeffrey Masson In the Freud Archives -- a decade-long string of hearings and appeals from out of Dickens that ended in a stalemate.  (For a fascinating account of the conflict between the so-called New Journalists or Literary Journalism and "real" journalists, see Kathy Forde's fascinating account of Masson v. Malcolm in Literary Journalism on Trial.)  At any rate, whether exploring photography, psychoanalysis, or literary biography -- Two Lives on Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas; The Silent Woman, on Sylvia Plath; her richly rewarding Reading Chekhov -- the Prague-born Janet Malcolm has continued to explore, in a kind of post-modern vein, our longing for stories that either fail to find the truth or persist in distorting it.  Written in The New Yorker tradition of Joseph Mitchell and A.J. Liebling, her investigations are endlessly fascinating, richly detailed, moving accounts of the impossibility of truly knowing one another.  Or even ourselves.  In the Journalist and the Murderer, there is a fragment of court transcript, in which Bostwick, the prosecuting attorney, grills McGinness, which may seem as pointless a quibble as Malcolm's apology to Eileen Fisher for invading her house.  But taking the long view, it's about as effective and memorable a summary of Malcolm's baffled, bemused, intricate, and eloquent pieces of journalism as I know of, so here goes:

Bostwick Q:  You don't really know he killed his wife and children, do you?
McGinness A:  Well, I know that he's been convicted, and the conviction has been confirmed by every appeals court that's considered it.
Q: That's not what it says in here, though, Mr. McGinniss.  That's why I asked you the question in your own words.  You don't really know, do you?
A: I know to my own satisfaction, yes, after the four years of intensive investigation I did.
Q: Did you ever talk to anyone who you believe knows that Dr. MacDonald committed the crimes?
A:  Well, the victims are dead.  Can't talk to them.  And I came to believe that MacDonald simply didn't tell the truth.
Q:  Have you ever talked to anyone who knows that Dr. MacDonald committed the crimes?
A: Well, I think you're getting into an area of epistemology here, Mr. Bostwick.
Q:  That's right.  I agree with you.
A: Yes.
Q:  Did you ever talk to anyone who knows?
A:  I couldn't talk to Colette.  Couldn't talk to Kimberly.
Q:  Did you talk to anyone who knows, Mr. McGinness?
A:  Yes, I did.
Q:  Who did you talk to?
A:  I talked to MacDonald.
Q:  You know that he knows?
A:  I know in my heart that he knows.
Q:  Did he ever tell you that he did?
A:  He certainly didn't.

James Salter. A Sport and a Pastime

"Over France a great summer rain, battering the trees, making the foliage ring like tin.  The walls grow dark with water.  The gutters are running, the streets all abandoned.  It started at dusk.  By nine it is still pouring down" (Sport, p. 143).

"Now, at the age of twenty-four, he has come to the time of choice.  I know quite well how all that is.  And then I read his letters.  His father writes to him in the most beautiful, educated hand, the born hand of a copyist.  Admonitions to confront life, to think a little more seriously about this or that.  I could have laughed.  Words that meant nothing to him.  He has already set out on a dazzling voyage which is more like an illness, becoming ever more distant, more legendary.  His life will be filled with those daring impulses which cause him to disappear and next be heard of in Dublin, in Veracruz" (Sport, pp. 78-79).

"But of course, in one sense, Dean never died -- his existence is superior to such accidents.  One must have heroes, which is to say, one must create them.  And they become real through our envy, our devotion.  It is we who give them their majesty, their power, which we ourselves could never possess.  And in turn, they give some back.  But they are mortal, these heroes, just as we are.  They do not last forever.  They fade.  They vanish.  They are surpassed, forgotten -- one hears of them no more" (Sport, p. 185).

"There comes a time when you realize that everything is a dream, and only those things preserved in writing have any possibility of being real" (Preface to All That Is).

"Through the green water of the harbor, late in the day, long, dark, and powerful, moving slowly and gravely at first, a bow wave forming, gathering speed, almost silent, the large dock cranes pasing in silhouette, the shore hidden in evening mist, leaving white swirls of foam trailing behind it, the Yamato headed for sea.  The sounds that could be heard were muted; there was a feeling of good-bye.  The captain addressed the entire crew massed on the deck.  They had plentiful ammunition, lockers filled with great shells the size of coffins, but not the fuel, he told them, to return.  Three thousand men and a vice admiral were aboard.  They had written farewell letters home to their parents and wives and were sailing to their deaths.  Find happiness with another, they wrote.  Be proud of your son.  Life was precious to them.  They were somber and fearful.  Many prayed.  It was known that the ship was to perish as an emblem of the undying will of the nation not to surrender"  (All That Is, pp. 10-11).

"What if there should be no river but only the endless lines of unknown people, people absoutely without hope, as there had been in the war?  He would be made to join them, to wait forever.  He wondered then, as he often did, how much of life remained for him.  He was certain of only one thing, whatever was to come was the same for everyone who had ever lived.  He would be going where they all had gone and -- it was difficult to believe -- all he had known would go with him, the war, Mr. Kindrigen and the butler pouring coffee, London those first days, the lunch with Christine, her gorgeous body like a separate entity, names, houses, the sea, all he had known and things he had never known but were there nevertheless, things of his time, all the years, the great liners with their invicible glamour readying to sail, the band playing as they were backed away, the green water widening, the Matsonia leaving Honolulu, the Bremen departing, the Aquitania, Ile de France, and the small boats streaming, following behind.  The first voice he ever knew, his mother's, was beyond memory, but he could recall the bliss of being close to her as a child.  He could remember his first schoolmates, the names of everyone, the classrooms, the teachers, the details of his own room at home -- the life beyond reckoning, the life that had been opened to him and that he had owned" (All That Is, p. 289).

"There is no complete life.  There are only fragments.  We are born to have nothing, to have it pour through our hands."  (Light Years, p. 35).

"'Greatness is something which can be regarded in a numbers of ways,' he said.  'It is, of course, the apotheosis, man raised to his highest powers, but it also can be, in a way, like insanity, a certain kind of imbalance, a flaw, in most cases a beneficial flaw, an anomaly, an accident'" (Light Years, p. 123).

"You are not obscure, they told him.  You have friends.  People admire your work.  He was, after all, a good father -- that is to say, an ineffective man.  Real goodness was different, it was irresistible, murderous, it had victims like any other aggression; in short, it conquered" (Light Years, p. 136).

"'Do we really only have one season?  One summer,' she said, 'and it's over?'" (Light Years, p. 140)

Over the past several months, I've fallen for James Salter, widely acknowledged as the writer of the most luminescent, elegant sentences in American prose today.  "There were a dozen or more," he writes of fuel tanks dropped by jet aircraft, "going down like thin cries fading in silence."  A graduate of West Point, Salter flew 25 missions during the Korean War -- the subject of The Hunters, about a jet fighter pilot who longs for the kill, who longs to be immortal -- and then he quit the military in order to write, so that he might be immortal, like Achilles in Homer's Iliad.  The tick tock of time -- the passing light that the sun casts on the grey waters of the ocean, the passing of a day, a season, a life -- time slips through the fingers of Salter's characters as water, and his heroes, whether Philip Dean in Sport and a Pastime, drowning in love in Southern France in the 60s; Rand climbing Solo Faces in the French Alps; the architect Viri in Light Years, dying to be remembered in the face of a crumbling marriage; the editor Philip Bowman in Salter's most recent novel, All That Is, savouring each glass of wine, each kiss, each embrace, that never will be again -- in all of Salter's novels there is, against the current of time that sweeps all out to sea, this desperate and terrific hope that reminds us to live this life intensely, for it is all that is.  Against Salter, it is true that there is much to be said:  women who are not so much companions as prizes, like Achilles' Breisis; an adoration of the way in which light flickers over the patina of things; and above all, an anachronistic longing for the heroic, the legendary, the immortal that seems more suitable to the world of Homer or Beowulf, than to our self-absorbed age of ambivalence and despair.  But Homer spoke truly, no less so than the Psalmist, when he wrote of "the lives of mortal men," "like the generations of leaves ... -- now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth'" (Iliad 6.171-72; Fagles translation).  This James Salter knows as well:  the terrible brevity of life, the terrifying urgency to make it matter, the irrevocable turn of the seasons.  "Remember that the life of this world is but a sport and a pastime," cautions the Koran.  This James Salter remembers as well, and it is because he remembers, that each sentence, each moment in his novels is treasured with equal measures of melancholy and love.