A Hollow Culture

For readers familiar with Malcolm’s work — nine monographs whose subjects range from the lives of Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, the goings-on of the New York psychoanalytic scene, the ethics of journalism and the Sylvia Plath–Ted Hughes biographical-industrial complex — her latest is uncharacteristically unguarded.

For context, look at the disappointment with which Malcom observes in her best book, The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1994), that Jacqueline Rose, the author of a rival biography of Plath, “understood the nature of the transaction — and had carefully worked out for herself exactly how much she had to give in order to receive the benefit of the interview.” Most interviewees, Malcolm tells us, are easily “seduced and distracted by the encounter’s outward resemblance of an ordinary friendly meeting.” Malcolm continues:

The meal that is often thrown around it like a cloth, to soften the edges; the habits of chat and banter; the conversation reflexes, whereby questions are obediently answered and silences too quickly filled — all these inexorably pull the interlocutors away from their respective desires and goals. However, Rose never — or almost never — forgot, let me forget, that we were not two women having a friendly conversation over a cup of tea and a box of biscuits but participants in a special artificial exercise of subtle influence and counterinfluence with an implicit antagonistic tendency.

As is often the case in Malcolm’s writing, it is on these moments, flagged by parenthesis, like a fact deemed “curious” by a detective in a crime novel, that her narrative pivots. Here it is the “almost never,” buried within a long paragraph, that is retrieved pages later and held up before the reader. Playing with Rose’s pridefulness, Malcolm gets the literary theorist to share a quote from an exchange with Hughes’ sister, corroborating Rose’s line of argument. “I wouldn’t have shown you that if I wasn’t wanting to check the passage Olwyn quoted to you,” she tells Malcolm. Rose ensnared, Malcolm observes triumphantly, “in her discomposure [she] had slipped into a more colloquial syntax.”

Key to this writerly posture was the influence of Freudianism, which instilled in Malcolm a suspicion of innocence and combinative view of communication. She took this view to its most extreme in her second book on psychoanalysis, In the Freud Archives (1984). There she argued against Sigmund Freud’s early seduction theory via a profile of one of its proponents, Jeffrey Masson, who later unsuccessfully attempted to sue Malcom for fabricating quotes. Her attack on the theory, which postulated that actual, rather than imagined, cases of child sexual abuse might be the cause of what in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century came to be known as hysteria, is hard to defend in our current political context.

But this hostility toward innocence also had the effect of dispelling illusions. In both Still Pictures and in The Silent Woman she rejects idealizations of the wholesomeness of childhood in the 1950s and complains of the sexlessness of her own adolescence — the lameness of “petting” as a date’s final act. Accompanying this was a form of middle-class self-hatred — a keen sense that much of what occurs in fashionable society is a fraud.

In a characteristic profile, the photographer Thomas Struth claims to be inspired by Marcel Proust only to be forced into admitting that he has never read Á la Recherche du Temps Perdu. His profession commitment, meanwhile, is revealed to be motivated not merely by aesthetic ideals but the need to maintain a second home and support his partner’s lavish lifestyle. Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1977) provides equivalent insight into the New York psychoanalytic community. Beneath all their erudition and sophistication: simple, domestic pride in the Mitteleuropa charm of their consulting rooms.

Was She Cruel?

Malcolm delights in these grubby matters, in making her subjects betray and incriminate themselves. She was not above employing sleight of hand — or even outright manipulation — to achieve this. In The Silent Woman, she manages to engineer a rendezvous with Ted’s sister, Olwyn, on the anniversary of Plath’s death in which they visit the former home of the deceased. Malcolm is aware that the appeal of her writing is based on borderline deception. This is a guiding thread of Still Pictures, the artifice that Malcolm, who was born in 1934 in Prague, which she fled for New York City along with her family after the Nazi occupation, constructed on her way to launching her career as a journalist.

Malcolm looks back on her childhood with feelings of self-hatred and regret. Was her family provincial? Was she cruel to her mother? Such moments of vulnerability are unexpected, given Malcolm’s previous work. More than a decade ago, she conceded that the severity of her approach to her subjects had inhibited her capacity for self-examination. In “Thoughts on an Autobiography from an Abandoned Autobiography,” the ideal memoirist is described as a person capable of looking back at their younger self “with tenderness and pity.” By contrast, “I see that my journalist’s habits have inhibited my self-love.” A harsh observation, but one that Still Pictures goes some way to confirming.

One of Malcolm’s earliest childhood fantasies centers on the private lives of her parents, Hanna and Josef. When Malcolm examines a photo of them sitting on a train entitled “Leaving Prague 1939,” she wonders about the relationship between her mother and the photographer, a man “not Jewish enough to be on the list of the doomed.”

A circuitous thought process, started by Malcolm’s retrospective description of herself as having been a self-hating Jew, leads her to speculate that he may have been her lover. Realizing that one’s parents have desires separate from, and ungratified by, their children is a formative moment; the adult’s independence provides a model for the child’s future autonomy. But Malcolm’s mother never had an affair. What we have here is an act of Freudian displacement par excellence: a desire that is mine is projected onto someone else.

The real object of Hanna’s affection was altogether more horrifying: her children. Malcolm recalls the stream of letters her mother sent her while she was an undergraduate in the early 1950s. Time and again, Hanna implores her to write back, to simply say — without the distance of irony — how she is doing, whether she is happy. In response, Malcolm says nothing or sends cryptic puns and convoluted phrases, which her mother takes to calling “gargoyles” (the name of the campus literary magazine that Malcolm edits). Looking back on this behavior now elicits shame: “My mother wanted love and affection, and I gave her stupid jokes.”

In the writer’s telling, Hanna suffered from overcommitment. D. W. Winnicott famously argued that adequacy rather than perfection was the matriarchal ideal. To allow one’s child to cry — to expose them, even inadvertently, to the fact that there is something outside the mother-child dyad — helps to dislodge their narcissistic illusions. Hanna’s problem, Malcolm writes, lay in being a “good mother” rather than a “good enough” one.

Josef, meanwhile, loved her and her sister dearly, but “he loved his own life more”: a far healthier psychic state. This dynamic — a father admired for his autonomy and a mother resented for her maintenance of the structures that make this autonomy possible — is the classic emotional backdrop to the nuclear family. Out of it emerges an imperative — “Don’t become your parents!” — that drives a certain kind of identity formation.

Malcolm accordingly recalls her parents’ middlebrow tastes with embarrassment and looks back on her state school curriculum with contempt. She has nothing critical to say about elite education — barely stopping to consider the fact that she became a brilliant essayist without it. Instead, she embraces a conventional model of personal development as an ascent from the idiocy of domestic life to the high-minded world of letters.

At one point, she wonders how her “witty, kind, unselfish, gentle father” managed to “squeeze the serf out of himself.” It is inconceivable that it may be the bourgeois perspective, with its frigid sexual mores and transformation of culture into a mark of social distinction, that is rotten to the core and needs to be trampled underfoot. Malcolm may have been a preeminent unmasker of fraudulence in bourgeois society, but this tended to be in service of the rules of distinction, rather than some liberated conception of culture.

The background to Malcolm’s childhood was a revolving cast of refugees who either fled Europe before the Nazi terror or survived the camps themselves. How this proximate brutality affected her is hard to say. But in Still Pictures, the melancholy of the postwar years cuts through any attempt to ironize about human misery. The weight of history proves too much for Malcom’s literary defense mechanisms. When describing one Holocaust émigré in her mother’s milieu, she quotes from the opening of Anton Chekov’s The Seagull:

Medvendenko: Why do you always wear black?

Masha: I am mourning for my life. I am unhappy.

Chekhov, Malcolm writes, “is being funny. He is mocking Masha’s pretentiousness.” Were she to have stopped here we would perhaps have grounds for agreeing with this judgment, but Malcolm continues:

Malva always wore black, and it was not necessary to ask her why. She was mourning for her husband, her two children, their spouses, and her granddaughter, who had been murdered at Auschwitz. She had survived . . . she never smiled. She was gentle and kindly and indifferent.

Here is an experience that cannot be integrated into the framework of “performativity.” Faced with it, Malcolm admits defeat: “I cannot say anymore.”

Facing Reality

Malcolm came up against the limits of her authorial persona after she published In The Freud Archives. She was taken to court by Masson, who accused her of fabricating quotations. Later, she admitted that her aim in the trial “wasn’t to persuade anyone of my innocence. It was to show off what a good writer I was.” Yet there are only certain settings where the clever schoolchild can gratify their desire for intellectual affirmation. Among her devoted readers, Malcolm’s aloofness was admired.

In the trial, however, she came across badly and was forced to consult a speech coach, who told her she should make more effort to appear genuine and likable to the jury. The courtroom, of course, is no less of a stage than the pages of the New Yorker. But Malcom’s mistake, corrected by her coach, was to misunderstand the kind of acting it required. She failed to realize that in this context the most effective method was to affect authenticity.

Even so, a glimmer of optimism about human interactions that suggests they are more than just games of ironic self-presentation is discernible in this posthumous work — not least in Malcolm’s sensitive portraits of her parent’s generation of Holocaust survivors. Reading these passages, one feels that a naivety alien to Malcolm’s other work has crept in. In her essay on the art historian Michael Fried, Malcolm observed that:

Ideals of sincerity, authenticity, spontaneity — all derive from the bias against the theatrical. The paradigmatic image of the theatrical is the crying child peeping through the fingers he holds in front of his presumably tear-filled eyes, to see if he is being observed and what effect he is producing in the beholder.

But this is only partly true. To think that artifice is more real than sincerity is simply to invert the error that Malcolm identifies in Fried. The alternative is to reject both the unreflective idea of pure experience and the postmodern fantasy that there is nothing more to human interaction than the construction of different masks. It is in the tearstained image of another human being, seen through the gaps between one’s own hands, that anything like a sense of what is real emerges. At her best, Malcolm managed to fix her gaze for long enough to reveal both her own guardedness and the terror within the subject before her.