Book: Reading Chekhov
Author: Janet Malcolm
Price: (Granta, ?13.99)
When journalist Martin Bashir and singer Michael Jackson recently produced two painfully conflicting video versions of their encounter, they inadvertently demonstrated the essence of Janet Malcolm's argument, first elaborated in her 1990 book 'The Journalist and the Murderer'. Its opening statement has become famous: "Every journalist who is not too stupid ... 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."
She wrote about the unequal power relationship between an interviewer and his or her "na?ve subject," and about the resulting narrative, which, as the latter will find out, reveals that the journalist "never had the slightest intention of collaborating with him on his story, but always intended to write a story of his own."
In her book, Malcolm explored the situation of an author who had been sued for breach of contract by the disappointed subject of his book. (She herself had been the victim of a similar lawsuit, having been sued by Jeffrey Masson, a young psychoanalyst she had portrayed critically in her book 'In The Freud Archives'). In this case, the author was Joe McGinniss, who had written about a doctor convicted of murdering his wife and two children; in the process of interviewing the doctor, false expectations had been raised as to the sympathetic portrayal of him in the final story. After the trial, which resulted in a hung jury, Malcolm began a series of interviews with McGinniss. "I had never interviewed a journalist before, and was curious about what would develop between me and a journalistically knowledgeable, rather than na?ve subject... Nobody would 'do' anything to anyone. The conversation would be serious, on a high level, maybe even lively and witty." To her surprise, "it did not work out that way. McGinnis refused the role of co-experimenter, preferring to play the role of subject... I gave in to the old game of Confession, by which journalists earn their bread and subjects indulge their masochism."
What would it be like to interview Janet Malcolm herself? We were to talk mainly about her new book, 'Reading Chekhov', and masochism of any sort didn't seem to be on the agenda. Except that I had an ulterior motive, which I did not hide. Malcolm reveals very little about herself in her writing; she observes and analyses with the eye of a detached private investigator. So I had no idea who she really was, and wanted to find out. Would she let me?
We meet in an expensive, chintz-heavy hotel in Knightsbridge, where her simple, all-black elegance seemed a little out of place. Malcolm is a petite woman with a gentle handshake and a strong, New York voice. She studies me quietly for a few moments after we greet each other, in a politely inquisitive sort of way. But once we start talking, she is very accommodating and tries to answer every question, even helping me through the occasional shy moment.
Her unusual book about Chekhov-part biography, part literary criticism, part travelogue-turned out to be a gateway to a closer understanding of Malcolm herself. When asked by James Atlas to contribute a short biography to a series he edits, she had originally refused, but finally agreed to write one on this author she has always loved. Of course, she did it her way-by travelling to Russia, visiting not only the places where Chekhov himself had lived and worked and showing their post-Soviet transformation but also the places where his characters walked, sat, talked, loved. In 'Reading Chekhov', the author himself, speaking through his published writing and his letters, is often made as real as the people she encounters on her travels in Russia (mostly her guides, chauffeurs and hotel employees). Although there is a slight artifice in linking every experience she has in Russia to her reading and recreating of Chekhov, Malcolm does this convincingly, while also managing to introduce a more abstract level of literary criticism to her narrative. But when I point out to her that she is assuming that she actually knows how Chekhov would have felt or what he would have said about certain things-presenting as fact what is, after all, merely her own, imagined version of Chekhov-she agrees: "Maybe that's a little shaky, I'm not sure I did the right thing there. I presumed too much. If I ever rewrite this book I might do that differently."
Malcolm is suspicious of what she calls the "triviality of biography"-the tendency of biographers to construct subjective narratives out of a selection of data and present them as the truth about a person's life. 'Reading Chekhov' has become known for Malcolm's discovery of a number of "factual" accounts of Chekhov's death in a hotel room in Germany, one of which she discovered was based on a fictional version of the scene in a story by Raymond Carver. But for me, the most interesting revelation of her book is the tension between Chekhov's absolute privacy and his need to scatter hints and clues about his secret life throughout his writing, often under the guise of his characters' double lives which are revealed only to the reader, not to other characters. Most of these secrets are about love, of course. I wondered whether, like her Chekhov, Malcolm also left interesting hints in her writing about herself? Does she want them to be picked up?
She asks the question for me: "So you're saying Chekhov had a double life and this was his way of talking about it in the 'The Lady and the Dog', and I have a double life so I talk about it in the way I write about Chekhov...?" I nod. "Hmm... How do I answer that? I mean I can just tell you that right at this moment I don't have a double life."
In 1990, I read a piece by Malcolm in the 'New Yorker' (where most of her writing has originally appeared), about her visit to Prague, her native town. She left in 1939, at the age of four, and it turns out that she had lived just around the corner from where I grew up in Prague. We speak a few words in Czech and her face lights up; her Czech is slightly accented and she says, "I speak like a small child." Her father was a distinguished neurologist and psychiatrist, and continued his practice in New York. "He fell in love with America instantly, became a Dodgers fan right away." Does she remember the time in Prague as a period of danger? "Not really," she says. "I felt very secure and protected." Although the family was Jewish and left to escape Nazi persecution, "we didn't really advertise our Jewishness. In New York, I went to Czech school in the afternoons. There were no Jews in that environment." Her original name had been Jana; her family name Wienerova, later changed to Winn.
Malcolm's first contributions to the 'New Yorker' were about design and photography. And in her later writing she has the visual artist's approach to her material, looking for and finding patterns, hidden or overt. She likes this idea, and tells me she is now working on collages, and is preparing a show of them for next fall. I ask her to describe them. "They're just... pieces of paper, put together in pleasing shapes." Then adds: "It's also a way of preserving relics of my family, and of the 20th century that I have lived in. Some of my collages have old letters and, in fact, a few of them touch on that period when we were leaving, envelopes with Nazi seals on them."
"So your artwork is the only place where you are saying something autobiographical?" She nods: "It would be difficult for me to write about. The journalistic 'I' is pretty easy. The so-called real 'I' is a little harder for me to figure out."
It occurs to me, as we say goodbye, that a book called 'Reading Janet Malcolm'-part investigative biography, part criticism, part collage perhaps?-would be very difficult to write.
