A Rare, Free, Kind, and Scrupulous Mind
IT’s NOT CLEAR how much of what we made of them in life the dead get to hear, but if word does reach them, Janet Malcolm, a life-long skeptic of her own merit, will be well-pleased. I, for example, would like to be remembered as David Remnick of The New Yorker remembered Malcolm, who died on Wednesday in New York: “when she sat down to write, the instrument of her prose was equal to the intelligence and range of her mind… All her considerations are examples of a rare and utterly free mind at work.”
I’d like to remember Malcolm, too, for those reasons, which were clear to me, as to anyone who read her, from her essays “Forty-One False Starts,” “The Impossible Profession” [on psychoanalysis], “The Journalist and the Murderer” [on biography and memoir and journalism], “Forty-One False Starts” [on the artist David Salle, on post-modernism, on creativity, on integrity, on authorship, on self], and “The Silent Woman” [on Sylvia Plath, how the dead are remembered, how memory and reputation are fabricated].
But even as I characterise those essays, it strikes me that whatever and whomever Malcolm wrote about, she was always asking, as great literature always does (essay, poetry, fiction), taxing, scrupulous, discerning questions like: what is art and what is it for; what is true and how does one know it and plumb it and live it; what is the self and how do we find it and live it, in ourselves, and understand it in others; what is right and what is beautiful; and how, in the face of all that matters and all that is unsure, does one write and do justice to one’s subject and one’s gift and one’s life and one’s nature and one’s obligations and one’s time? What is a good life, a life of integrity, and how, especially in the face of the troubles and confusions that will inevitably beset you, do you get that lived?
It was her work, and it is, in my view, always the core business of literature, to put these eternal questions freshly, to ask them of one’s life and times. Malcolm did that, and never ceased. Like Hannah Arendt, she toed no party line. Her mind was “utterly free.”
But I think I liked her writing because, she was, as Remnick notes, not only razor-sharp and exacting, her own woman entirely and elegant of phrase; she was kind. She was not pious; she was not certain; understanding the difficulty of proof and the frailty of all humans, including herself, she refused simplistic, reductive conclusions about all but the most heinous actors and eventualities among us.
We live in shrill times, a clamour of certitudes; kindness and humour and equanimity are endangered species in the poetry and prose of my fellow-travellers. We know all the wrongs in the world; our outrage is exquisite; our offence profound; our hearts bleed rivers; our judgments are extravagant, lofty, remorseless. But where is our tenderness, our capacity for joy and delight, our appreciation of the paradox of all things, our humility; what have we done with our humanity—our understanding of our human selves, and the real-life, flawed and contradictory, beautiful humanity of other human lives? We live, it seems, a melodramatic moment, a Punch & Judy pantomime of victim and perpetrator, goody and baddy. Where have we parked our Selves? In our piety, have we lost our sense of humour, of proportion, of rhythm? Poetry, Seamus Heaney wrote, refuses the mind’s tendency to foreclose. Malcolm had that gift in prose. I wonder these judgmental, sanctimonious days, have we lost it? And when poetry loses it, we are truly lost.
Have we forgotten how not to hasten to judgment, how to stay execution, how to consider another point of view, the possibility that the opposite truth may also be true? We are all reason these days, as I think I wrote once, and no rhyme (or in some poetry, all rhyme and no music); we are all mind and no matter; we are all cause and no craft. Few, now that Janet Malcolm is gone, are left, it seems, to carry on that other core work that only art performs: to forgive us all for being human, and to ask—beginning with the writer herself or himself—a little more of ourselves, and a lot more of our language.
That was work that Malcolm never ceased to do. Making an account—and trying to free that account from the constraints and distortions of sentiment and theory and conformity to prevailing idioms of belief—an account of what it feels like and what it means to live this one human life for a short time on this terrifying and astonishing earth.
