Janet Malcolm as soon as emailed to inform me she discovered an introduction I had written for my e-book on writers’ deaths, which included my very own ideas on a childhood sickness, to be “surprising” however “powerful.” I understood this to be her diplomatic method of referring to the presumably showy or undignified resolution to place myself right into a e-book that was in any other case a piece of biography and journalism. I feel she was telling me she was stunned that she favored it. I used to be additionally stunned, on condition that she had communicated to me, in a thousand direct and oblique methods, her deep suspicion of autobiographical writing.
Any whiff of self-importance, of self-satisfaction, of unchecked exhibitionism, was distasteful to her. She as soon as wrote that the memoirist “must sustain, in spite of all evidence of the contrary, the illusion of his preternatural extraordinariness.” And Malcolm, who actually was extraordinary, was not snug with even the faintest trace of that presumption. Having made a profession brilliantly puncturing the private mythologies and blooming self-delusions of others, she felt compelled to be fiercely important of her personal. She had a horror of writing what she referred to as a “puff piece” about herself.
This is why her selection to show to autobiography in her final e-book, Still Pictures, is so intriguing. From the second you open it, the e-book doesn’t current itself as a standard memoir.
Instead, it’s structured round a collection of images, every igniting a brief memory—in different phrases, it could be the world’s most elegant annotated picture album. One can nearly really feel the reluctant autobiographer taking solace within the seemingly haphazard nature of the scrapbooking mode: the casual, offhand, nearly unintended method of working. It feels as if she is nearly tricking herself into it, as if writing a memoir is one thing that type of occurred to her whereas cleansing out a shelf or an attic, although after all every sentence, in true Malcolm type, seems masterful. The sly self-deprecation of a field in her house labeled Old Not Good Photos characterizes the ambiance of the complete mission.
This associative, unfastened method belies the self-seriousness and self-dramatization of most autobiography. Somehow, with no reader even fairly realizing it, Malcolm’s memoir slips into being a commentary on memoir. Most autobiography assumes a proximity, a straightforward intimacy with the previous, an unbroken circulate. This one argues as a substitute that recollections should be fought for, interrogated, uncovered. As Malcolm places it, “Memory glimmers and hints, but shows nothing sharply or clearly.”
Though she was well-known for her journalism, Malcolm moonlighted as a collage artist, exhibiting her collages in varied Manhattan artwork galleries, and this e-book deploys the peculiar energy of that artwork type. The collage artist places fragments subsequent to one another to make that means, or spark vitality, and that is what Malcolm does in Still Pictures.
We encounter Malcolm’s mom making profiteroles and roast squab for her daughters after they had been sick; a photograph of her father in drag at a Dadaist ball within the modern, mental Prague he inhabited earlier than emigrating; the flower-patterned Italian plates that had been stolen from a Midtown condo rented for her adulterous affair with Gardner Botsford, the New Yorker editor she finally married. For Malcolm obsessives, of whom there are a lot of, these are intriguing glimpses of her life, however they’re solely glimpses. In the brevity and vignette-ish nature of every part, she evades delving too deeply into anybody relationship or state of affairs. She each reveals and doesn’t reveal, displays and withholds, tells and hides. The fast riffs allow fast turns and flights. The imperatives of the shape enable her privateness, a classy holding again, a reserve.
In the course of her reminiscences, Malcolm continuously calls our consideration to what she doesn’t keep in mind, to the holes and lacunae and pockets of vagueness. She makes use of images, letters, snippets of diary entries, to attempt to pin down the previous, to anchor her defective and tentative sense of what occurred. “I don’t know if my uncle was a domineering husband. I don’t know what the chronic exaggerated joking in the Edwards family meant about their deep relations.” “I don’t know where we slept or what we ate or did together.” She rigorously types via the proof she has however comes up towards doubts, patches of murkiness, limitations of notion. It begins to look like her actual topic is the haziness of reminiscence, its little methods and failures, its “perversity,” to make use of her phrase.
The temper of the journalist pushing for accuracy permeates the complete e-book: Who was I? Why did I act like that? What was happening within the room that I didn’t fairly perceive? We meet in its pages each younger Janet the topic and Janet the rigorous reporter: “Was being given the petals from the ‘wrong’ flower so afflicting because it set me off from the other children, making me seem different?” “Did I become a journalist because of knowing how to imitate my mother?” “Didn’t I know something about why we had come and what we had escaped?”
Malcolm’s uncommon type affords up the concept all we actually have of the previous is a field of Old Not Good Photos that we should work very onerous to know. She is writing in regards to the problem now we have evoking our former selves, the numerous methods wherein they’re strangers to us. She asks, “Do we ever write about our parents without perpetrating a fraud? Doesn’t the lock on the bedroom door permanently protect them from our curiosity, keep us forever in the corridor of doubt?”
In some sense Malcolm’s e-book is the final argument in her career-long mission to query the manufacturing of official tales, to disclose and illuminate the million vanities, exaggerations, character flaws that feed into their creation: the human error.
Sadly Malcolm grew to become too sick to jot down the final chapter she had deliberate, so the e-book ends with {a photograph} that her husband saved on his desk. It reveals two individuals enjoying tennis from the again. They will not be individuals he knew. He felt it was an ideal instance of a horrible {photograph}. He saved it as a type of memento of the absurdity of life. Malcolm included the picture in her first e-book, Diana & Nikon, as a joke, which she says nobody observed. She refers to this prank as “horsing around,” and in some sense she carries this high-level “horsing around” into Still Pictures as nicely. She is enjoying with the previous slightly than recording it uncritically. She is attuned all through to the Dadaist sense of absurdity that she pinpoints in her dad and mom’ Czech-emigre milieu, a darkish humor. Ending with {a photograph} which means nothing to her, or means one thing as a result of it means nothing, is the ultimate subversion of her profound and mischievous scrapbook.
One continues to be left with a thriller, although. Why did Malcolm write an autobiography when the shape vexed and repelled her? It could also be that she entered a reflective temper on the finish of her life, which made her need to conjure the previous. It could also be that she was tempted by the possibility at creative mastery in a brand new realm. She was not one to withstand a problem. She favored inventing or remaking kinds. She thrived on the meticulous fixing of aesthetic issues. About her battle with autobiography she as soon as wrote, “It may be too late to change my spots,” however she was clearly underestimating this specific leopard.