Recently, the editor of Bookforum magazine interviewed Janet Malcolm at her summer home in Massachusetts and, shortly into their conversation, she broke off one of her stuttering answers to paraphrase the dancer Isadora Duncan: 'If I could describe it, I wouldn't have to dance it.'
Malcolm asked why the editor didn't forego the Herculean struggle to exact interesting answers from her, and review her new book, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice, instead. He closed his notebook, they had lunch, and he returned to New York to write a review.
Malcolm recounts this anecdote during our conversation in her Manhattan flat as a cautionary tale against expecting too much from her. Celebrated for her long, ferociously opinionated New Yorker profiles, she is understandably wary of the interview process. In The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), Malcolm describes the inevitable betrayal involved in the journalist-subject encounter; the subject will regress like a patient in psychoanalysis, childishly trusting the questioner, only to discover that the journalist is not a compassionate listener but a professional with their own agenda. Thus, according to the book's oft-quoted opening: '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, 73, is a small, fragile-looking woman, whose solicitous manner betrays nothing of her work's caustic tone. She is precise and discreet, in person and print. You can imagine her as an inconspicuous observer, fading into the background while her unsuspecting interview subjects, mistaking reticence for sympathy, fill the silence and fall into her trap. The key to being a shrewd interviewer, Malcolm says, is 'to keep your mouth shut'.
Her subjects generally regret being so voluble - most famously Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, the iconoclastic psychoanalyst who was anointed, then fired, as director of the sacred Freud archives. When Masson saw himself portrayed as a brash narcissist in the brace of New Yorker articles that became In The Freud Archives (1984), he sued for libel. Masson alleged that Malcolm fabricated quotations in which he reportedly described himself as 'an intellectual gigolo' who had bedded more than 1,000 women and who planned to turn Freud's house into a place of 'sex, women and fun'.
The decade-long, US$10 million lawsuit came to a close when the court ruled in Malcolm's favour, but not before Malcolm was ridiculed by colleagues for her claims that journalists should compress, rearrange and smooth over quotations to remain faithful to the meaning, rather than the actuality, of speech. Malcolm now insists that I set aside my voice-recorder and take written notes instead, chafing at 'overly literal' journalists who have quoted her 'tape-recordese'.
'People talk in ungrammatical, unwriterly ways,' she says. 'I don't do good sound bites.'
