The writer Janet Malcolm once joked to her editor Ileene Smith, “People are disappointed when they meet me because I don’t look like a dominatrix.” An image of Malcolm as brutal had been looming over her for decades. A news reporter labeled her “a master of pitiless prose.” A review called her “the Queen of Not-Nice.” An admiring critic said she “was given to mutilating her subjects.” In an interview, she was once asked, “To what extent do you see yourself as an eviscerating machine?” And when Malcolm died, in 2021, words like “deadliest,” “pitiless,” “cold,” “merciless” and “chilling” echoed through the obituaries and reminiscences.
The idea of her as terrifying emerged from her writing, which irritated, flustered, enraptured and dazzled the literary world for half a century. She turned outrageously arcane subjects, like a feud about the Sigmund Freud Archives, or infighting among Sylvia Plath biographers, into books as gripping as mystery novels. On subjects ranging from photography to murder trials, there is a thrilling psychological penetration in her descriptions, a brisk rigor to her thinking, a superb confidence in her own opinions.
Malcolm sliced through delusions and vanities, and cut to the heart of people and situations. One of my New York University students said of her, “She’s like a psychiatrist freed from the need to heal people.” She was a master at reading the accidental gesture or casual comment for what it exposed. This quality combined with the drop-dead elegance of her sentences was distilled as “cold” or “mean.”
What is odd is that this idea of Malcolm as ruthless seemed to be constructed as much by people who love her work as by those who were troubled by it. There seemed to be something in her supreme confidence and intellectual brio that provokes people even as they revere her.
Malcolm and I became friendly in the last decade of her life, after I interviewed her for The Paris Review, and we often met for lunches at a Japanese restaurant near her house in Gramercy. In person, Malcolm was slight, sparrowlike, with large glasses. Her ambience was watchful, controlled, reserved. One felt she was keeping herself a bit apart. But she was also nice, if that is not too vacuous a word. She was quietly generous, sympathetic, funny, good company. Throughout her life, she sent encouraging notes to younger writers, especially women. She once tried to buy her housekeeper a house. Long after finishing a piece about a woman who was convicted of murder, Malcolm worried about her being in prison on very hot days without air-conditioning. This Janet Malcolm clashed so conspicuously with the ruthless, forbidding Janet Malcolm in the public imagination that I began to wonder about the gap.
Of course, writers are often different on the page than in life. What drew me to Malcolm’s overblown reputation is its cartoonishness, its note of insistent moralism, its whiff of sexism. I can’t think of a male writer who preoccupies the public with their “not niceness” or “coldness.” The characterization evokes a whole set of standards men are not generally judged by. Something in Malcolm’s personality made her a lightning rod for the kind of subtly gendered judgment that we often participate in without realizing it.
When you were talking to her, it was almost impossible to read her reaction to what you were saying on her face. This could be interpreted as an inviting blankness or a stoniness. She gave whomever she was talking to more space to express and expand themselves than they were used to. This was striking or unnerving in a social situation and remarkably effective as an interviewing tactic. She managed to turn her extreme reserve into a source of power.
The more I thought about the tangle of her personality, her work and its reception, the more uneasy I became. Was she really colder or meaner than the rest of us? Or was this a fantasy that both her admirers and detractors were oddly attached to? If there was something in Malcolm’s emotional makeup that liberated her from the pressure to be “nice,” I wanted to know what it was. I wondered if, on some level, she liked or enjoyed or even created this reputation. I also wanted to know if it hurt her in some way, if there was a cost to this way of being in the world.
Over half a year, I tracked down people in Malcolm’s orbit and dug through boxes in archives at Yale and the New York Public Library to understand not just Malcolm but also the charged force field of projection that existed around her. I noticed a strange intensity in my conversations with her friends, family members, editors, colleagues, admirers and ambivalent readers. People seemed unusually invested, disconcerted, fascinated, challenged; their accounts of her had the feeling of a pressing puzzle whose solution was just out of reach.
I sensed that if I could understand Malcolm’s relation to this outsize reputation, I could get at something larger: How do we balance the pressure to be nice or likable or make other people comfortable against the imperatives to do our best work and be our true selves?
Even before Malcolm wrote her most famous, inflammatory pieces, she was a daunting figure at The New Yorker. I learned that there was a nickname for her in the 1970s: Lady Macbeth. Apparently the name was based on an outlandish theory that the quiet writer was plotting some kind of coup at the magazine involving her husband, Gardner Botsford, who was an editor. This was totally fabricated, though the name clearly drew on early fantasies of Malcolm as brutal or ruthless.
The critic Chip McGrath, who was then a young New Yorker editor, said: “I think a lot of people were afraid of her. You thought she was judgmental, and she was judgmental. I found her very intimidating, and I was never sure whether she liked me.” Her shyness may have enhanced the idea of her as a distant, judging presence.
I began to notice that a majority of the men I talked to — mostly admirers, friends and colleagues — assimilated Malcolm’s exotic independence in a very specific way: They referred to her as “feline” or “catlike.” This felt to me like a coded reference to her extreme apartness or reserve. It made me wonder if there was something challenging or provocative in that aloofness. A younger colleague, Alec Wilkinson, said, “She seemed completely self-contained and very alluring.” Tad Friend, a New Yorker writer who admires Malcolm’s work (in a “complicated way”), emailed me an extended association of her as a cat, which included the line “Cats are hunters.”
It is true that Malcolm did not go in for the smiling, bubbly, feminine putting-people-at-ease that many of us engage in. As Kennedy Fraser, a writer at the magazine in the ’70s and ’80s, said, “If you met her in the ladies room, she never said a friendly word or had a little chat.” Malcolm wrote in her last book “Still Pictures” that she saw her own mother’s charm as springing from an outdated need to please or flatter men. She once wrote: “By being charming, you are lowering yourself. You are asking for something.”
Ultimately, it is her rare confidence that fascinates and provokes. In my conversations with other admirers of Malcolm, it began to feel as if they were in some curious way attached to this idea of her ruthlessness themselves, even as it seemed to them facile or overstated. Her admirers are passionate about her intellectual ferocity. They admire the cerebral coolness, the “not niceness” in her work, which reads to them as unfettered honesty. She holds out a thrillingly high standard that the rest of us struggle to meet. One writer told me that she was so anxious about how her subject would react when her piece came out in The New Yorker that she had to take Klonopin; she was drawn to the contrasting image of Malcolm, who she imagined doing this work without being bogged down by these kinds of anxieties.
When I spoke to the New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead, she mentioned a moment in Malcolm’s book “The Silent Woman” about Sylvia Plath when the critic Jacqueline Rose asked Malcolm not to include a line from a letter she showed her. Not only did Malcolm include it, but she turned the request into an extended meditation on Rose’s sleek competitiveness. “I would like to think I would have the inner fortitude to do what she does with Jacqueline Rose,” Mead told me. “You can only hope you would be true to your inner self and the imperative of the story.” Most writers would have given in, and sacrificed the startling moment that exposed the human situation in a vivid, revelatory way.
In my conversations, I began to see that even the Malcolm admirers I think of as uncommonly tough and independent-minded seem to view themselves as constantly capitulating to “niceness” in their own lives. For them, Malcolm symbolizes an ideal of a woman who does not cater to or pander to or worry about making other people happy. She seemed somehow above compromising herself or her work with concern for other people’s feelings. She was comfortable saying no to an invitation, a photograph, a profile, an interview, a lecture if she didn’t feel like doing it, which she mostly didn’t. As the writer Zoë Heller put it, “That I think is a fantastic lesson for all women, you know, a polite, firm no thank you.” As the writer Alice Gregory told me, “She is unwilling to temper the truth with all the kind of frilly girlie things we do in conversation to soften things or get people used to certain ideas.”
In all my lunches and teas and calls with people in Malcolm’s world, I began to see that she did in fact possess a greater-than-normal ability to block out the outside world. This may have been perceived, in a woman, as a kind of “not niceness,” a coolness. Even at the most turbulent points in her career, she had an untouchable confidence, a rare and fruitful independence from other people’s opinions. There was a period when people would come up to her at parties to say they disagreed with her famous line from her 1990 book “The Journalist and the Murderer,” about a journalist exploiting the trust of a murderer he was writing about: “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”
In 1984, Jeffrey Masson, the disgruntled, anti-Freudian psychoanalyst at the heart of her juicy, much-talked-about book “In the Freud Archives,” sued Malcolm for libel, and the case hung over her for a decade as it moved through the courts, attracting enormous amounts of publicity. His accusation that she made up quotes, like his reference to himself as “an intellectual gigolo,” seemed to substantiate the shadowy suspicion of Malcolm floating around the literary world. People denounced her journalistic integrity behind her back and sometimes to her face. This paper ran a vitriolic piece by Michiko Kakutani condemning her “sloppy journalistic ethics.” She was so embattled that Philip Roth joked about signing all his letters “A proud friend of Janet Malcolm.” While some of the viciousness circulating in the literary world upset her, and she did cut off some friendships during this time, she did not let it shake her sense of purpose, or threaten or muffle her writing.
Malcolm never lost her sense of humor, joking in a note to Barbara Epstein, her editor at The New York Review of Books, “Dearest Barbara, I will be thinking of you all drinking champagne and eating caviar as I iron my prison gowns.” As the unpleasant attention swirled around her, Malcolm was hard at work on what many view as her masterpiece, “The Silent Woman,” which she pursued without softening her sharpness; if anything, it took more risks than her earlier work.
In “The Silent Woman,” Malcolm dismantled the lush mythology surrounding Sylvia Plath and her doomed marriage to the poet Ted Hughes. As Malcolm moves through drafty kitchens, Indian restaurants and train rides through the damp English countryside, she turns each biographer and figure in Plath’s life into a character. She exposes the motives and agendas and prejudices at the heart of the Plath industry. She brilliantly indicts the whole enterprise of biography itself, comparing biographers to burglars rifling through people’s drawers. It is a bravura performance — a strange, glittering, singular work. At the heart of the book, she describes herself as one of these figures stalking Ted Hughes’s house, misreading handwriting in libraries. She emphasizes the total impossibility of ever knowing the truth of another person’s life, while at the same time signaling to the reader that she has gotten closer to something true about the dead poet than anyone else.
At one point, she gave the unfinished manuscript of “The Silent Woman” to Philip Roth. He gave it a slashing edit, with often nasty comments in the margins. He violently disapproved of her putting herself in as a character. He hated her metaphors and accused her of intellectual shallowness.
Another writer might have been crushed or paralyzed, but Malcolm simply addressed what she thought were the few useful parts of his criticism and put aside the rest. She scribbled playful and defiant responses to his edits in the margins: “What’s bugging you, Philip? she said, with a sad shake of her head.” Later, in an unpublished interview, she said, “I didn’t accept his dislike of the book.” Some of his crankiness, she thought, arose from being a man of the 1950s reading about the female experience. But this preternatural toughness, this ability to assimilate and cast off disapproval, even from a writer she admired as much as Roth, was part of her extraordinary strength. To take this incident with equanimity, to not let it undermine either her friendship or her manuscript, requires a very expansive and shockingly healthy sense of self.
I know from my own experience how hard it is to preserve your equilibrium and sense of purpose when you are under attack. I found myself coveting Malcolm’s aura of untouchability, wishing I could bottle it. But I also wondered if there are times when a radical independence from other people’s opinions is a liability, when this way of being in the world didn’t work for her.
I have always been fascinated by Malcolm’s libel trial, because it was in the courtroom that the stakes of her perceived coldness or aloofness became higher. In front of a jury, being likable suddenly matters. In the first trial, in 1993, she projected a sense of being somehow above having to explain herself. In The New York Review of Books, she later described her own posture of “glacial distance,” drawing on The New Yorker ethos of “unrelenting hauteur.” It seems it had not occurred to her to smile a little at the jury or to project a little endearing vulnerability. She felt the facts would speak for themselves. A newspaper article at the time called her “an austere, driven woman.” Another reporter referred to her manner as “aloof, arrogant.” The jury came out against her but couldn’t agree on damages, so there was a mistrial.
In the second trial, her lawyer, Gary Bostwick, struggled with how to make her seem like a more likable witness to what he called “a regular juror.” Bostwick grew up in Wyoming and cultivated a down-to-earth mien. “She couldn’t say to the jury, ‘I am shy, so this is hard for me’ ” he told me. “I considered that. I never suggested it to her. I didn’t think she would feel comfortable. That was not Janet. That was too unnatural.” He then arranged for her to see a famous voice coach, Sam Chwat, to give her pointers on how to be appealing to the jury. They talked, among other things, about trading in her black-and-gray clothes for the more conventionally pleasing pastel palette. Like a man in the street, calling out to a passing woman, the world seemed to be saying to Janet Malcolm, “Smile, baby.” Bostwick and Malcolm debriefed by phone after each of her coaching sessions.
Malcolm wrote an intriguing passage about this interlude in that same N.Y.R.B. article, which came out toward the end of her life: “His gentle correction of my self-presentation at trial, from unprepossessing sullenness to appealing persuasiveness, took me to unexpected places of self-knowledge and knowledge of life.” She seemed exhilarated and fascinated to have discovered a new mode. But Bostwick told me that she felt differently at the time: “My impression is that she felt as if it was a little unseemly. I never got the feeling that she was comfortable with it.”
Uncomfortable and intriguing as it may have been, the metamorphosis worked. Malcolm prevailed in court. In the coverage, The New York Times noted the disappearance of the “dour defendant with the downcast eyes” and reported that she “startled photographers by smiling directly at them.” The news reports lingered over her pastel clothing, her pretty patterned scarves and brown suede pumps. She spoke to the jury in a new, warmer, more approachable style. In some sense, this is what she refused to do in her writing, a feminine performance she disdained. This was the “niceness” she omitted from her work.
The more people I talked to, the more I struggled with the question of how much of this persona, this aura of steeliness, was intentional. As a master craftsman, Malcolm was in such consummate control of her presence on the page that it is hard to imagine this harshness was not deliberate — that she did not in some way create the “Janet Malcolm” the newspapers were referring to, “the austere, driven woman” people perceived. As her book editor Ileene Smith put it, “I don’t think she accidentally did anything on the page.” In “The Silent Woman” manuscript, she crossed out a line that might seem soft or sentimental about having so much sympathy for Ted Hughes that “my eyes actually filled with tears.”
But there are also plenty of signs that this forbidding persona wasn’t calculated and entirely within her control. She often expressed surprise or bemusement about it to her friends. She talked about it as something funny, absurd, completely outside of herself. She said in one rare interview: “I really don’t know whether the people who don’t like my writing, don’t like it because of their perception of me as a tough, not-nice woman. It seems kind of ridiculous — I think of myself as a completely ordinary, harmless person — but what people think of your writing persona is out of your hands.”
I started to feel that I could only cut through the thick atmosphere of mythmaking and get closer to Malcolm if I could see notes she casually scribbled to friends. Was she colder and more dedicated to getting the story than other writers? Did she struggle to achieve the coolness she manifested on the page? Was it a burden to be renowned for not-niceness? There had to be some clues in the archives.
When I got to the sleek, glassed-in archive at Yale University, some of my assumptions about Malcolm began to come undone. I always thought that she didn’t lose much sleep over what her subjects felt about what she wrote. With its atmosphere of high-minded purpose, her writing gave an impression that she would not compromise the purity or integrity of the story for people’s feelings. But as I sat at a long wooden table, with one of many giant cardboard boxes in front of me, I stumbled across a slim folder of extraordinary letters she wrote to Kurt Eissler, the brilliant psychoanalyst who is betrayed by Masson in “In the Freud Archives.” In the liberally crossed-out typewritten prose, I glimpsed a side of her that startled me. When Eissler decided to cut off their warm, lively correspondence, she wrote: “Your letter makes me very sad. In fact, I am in tears as I write this.”
Eissler, like Malcolm’s psychiatrist father, had a worldly European aura, and she admired his fervent defenses of Freud. While she was working on the piece, she wrote to him: “Because of my growing regard for you, I feel in a precarious moral position. I like to think that what I write will not cause you any distress, but I know that this may be a vain hope. I would rather give up the whole project than cause you distress. It is only because I believe that there is the chance that what I write will not upset you, that I go on with it.” I had to read this passage several times. Janet Malcolm thinking of giving up a piece because someone would be upset by it?
In the end, she published the piece, which got a huge amount of attention, and even though Eissler came across as a dignified, moral figure, he was even angrier than she feared. She wrote, “I have long felt in a terrible bind about this.” She went on, “Since I could not write it differently than I did, the only way to ensure your continuing good will toward me would have been not to publish it. A small, saintly (or if you like masochistic) part of me has always been attracted to that alternative, but the larger, ambitious, practical, more ordinarily human part has prevailed. There are times when no alternative is the right one, and this is one of those times.”
Seeing this kind of messiness in Malcolm’s writing process is somehow startling, even though it is precisely this messiness that is her central subject. The emotional entanglement, the struggle to get free of emotional obligations to others, belies the colder, steelier Malcolm of her reputation. The Malcolm we imagine — decisive, uncaring, dedicated only to craft — was something she worked hard for, wrestled with.
Sitting in the archives, it suddenly occurred to me that the reason she wrote so eloquently about the moral conflicts of journalism is that she struggled so deeply with them herself; it is precisely because they were not easily or neatly resolved for her that she was drawn to illuminating them. She was obsessed with these betrayals — not because she was cold, but because she wasn’t.
Malcolm had also revealed a surprising concern about her subjects’ feelings in the unpublished interview, which was conducted by email. In an earlier piece, the interviewer attacked a scene she wrote in an article on newly democratic Prague about having dinner at the house of a couple who had compromised their politics to get by. He felt the description was so brutal that it undermined her whole article. She noted that she signaled clearly in the piece that she had given the family a fake name. She also disguised the dinner so that the couple wouldn’t recognize themselves. She wrote, “I enjoyed your portrait of me as a journalistic serial killer and hope this confession of compunction doesn’t shock you too much.” Malcolm was clearly having fun with the caricature of her. Was I imagining it, or was there a hint of the cat playing with a mouse?
On my last day at the archive, an hour before I had to catch the train, I stumbled across an email from the photographer Thomas Struth. This caught my eye because one of the Malcolm admirers had mentioned her profile of him as a particularly harsh one. We had been wondering what the subjects of her “pitiless” or “mutilating” profiles thought of them. Did he hate the piece? “I highly regard your meticulous eye,” Struth wrote. “I feel seen, and appreciate it as constructive commentary.” It must have been exciting to be seen and considered by someone who observed the world on such a high plane. Her writing was also shot through with a bright strain of generosity and compassion, with what Heller has called “a romantic warmth.”
Later, Struth told me, “I found her very uncompromising, in a good way.” He also told me a story about inviting her to see a series of photographs he did of dead animals the day before a gallery opening, and she told him she hated them. “I didn’t mind,” he said. “I liked it. I found it very refreshing.”
I was also curious about how the artist David Salle felt about her stylish profile of him, “Forty-One False Starts.” In each of 41 short sections, she views him from a different angle, pasting together different impressions, modes, moods into a kind of Cubist portrait of the poised, discontented artist. About his paintings, Malcolm wrote, “The paintings were like an ugly mood.” Of him, she wrote, “During my conversations with Salle, he kept returning to the subject of his reception, like an unhappy moth singeing itself on a lightbulb.” When the piece came out, many readers noted its critical edge, but Salle admired it as an “elegant formal experiment.” He both did and did not recognize himself in it. He appreciated the seriousness and rigorous accomplishment of the piece, and the two remained close friends until her death.
At one point, Salle told Malcolm that another piece she wrote was “cold.” She did not let this offhand comment slide. She wanted to understand and take apart this feeling about her work. She made him go through the piece with her line by line to show her where the “coldness” was, but when they went through it, he couldn’t pin it down. The impression dissolved. The coldness wasn’t there.
As I was finishing my deep dive into Malcolm’s reputation, I came across a glamorous photo of her with dark lipstick, in her high school yearbook. There was also a “Popularity Poll.” To my surprise, she did not win the “best writer” award, which went to two other students, but instead won “Toast of the Town (most popular).” Shy Janet Winn, the most popular girl in her high school class? This rogue detail reminds me of something I had taken from Malcolm’s work: the fundamental surprise and unruliness of human character. “Biographies pale and shrink,” she wrote, “in the face of the disorderly actuality that is a life.”
It was beginning to seem like critics and admirers want Janet Malcolm to be more ruthless than she is — that we are turning her into a symbol of something other than the brilliant, hard-working, playful, slightly introverted writer she was.
This potent admixture of adulation and judgment, the fascination and irritation and envy she provoked, speaks to the discomfort many of us have with aggression, especially female aggression. Malcolm wrote and spoke openly about her own “aggression” as a journalist. We all harbor aggressions, of course, but we don’t all talk or write about them in public. She wrote, in “The Journalist and the Murderer,” “We have all dreamed about the violent deaths of our families.” In my Paris Review interview, she said: “I think you are asking me, in the most tactful way possible, about my own aggression and malice. What can I do but plead guilty?” She had a kind of psychoanalytic calm in speaking about motives, even bad or suspect motives. They did not shock or rattle her. She could talk about them in a refreshing, straightforward way.
But a woman who does not hide or apologize for or conceal her own aggression unsettles us. What can we do with her? She can be Lady Macbeth, or a dominatrix, or a “journalistic serial killer,” or an “austere, driven woman” in a courtroom. When she dressed in pastels and smiled at the jury she scrambled the archetypes.
We have trouble seeing that the warm, generous, affectionate Janet Malcolm coexists with the brutally honest, unsparing one. As she put it in one of her transcendently great lines, there is a rigidity to public narratives: “Cinderella must remain good and the stepsisters bad. ‘Second stepsister not so bad after all’ is not a good story.” But perhaps this is the story: ruthless Janet Malcolm not so ruthless after all. It is hard for us to tolerate the kind of baroque contradictions Malcolm embodied, her aggression and her generosity, her niceness and her “not niceness.” She was the woman who cried when one of her subjects cut off their friendship, and the woman who wrote razor-sharp descriptions. She often refused to play conventionally feminine roles, and she could play them very well when she tried. It is confusing, destabilizing even, to our own provisional efforts to navigate the bewildering imperatives of femaleness and power. It is hard to let an extraordinary woman be extraordinary without imposing these puncturing critiques and crude categories.
As always, Malcolm herself may have had the most elegant formulation of her own reputation. Talking about a murderous, enigmatic mythological creature, she once said to her daughter, Anne: “I think the sphinx may have gotten a bad rap. It was just an animal being quiet.”
Source photographs for illustration above: Nancy Crampton; Jim Wilson/The New York Times.
Katie Roiphe is the author, most recently, of “The Power Notebooks” and “The Violet Hour.” She is the director of the cultural reporting and criticism program at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, where she teaches Janet Malcolm’s work every year.
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