Forty-One False Starts

Forty-one false starts

ALSO BY JANET MALCOLM

Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial Burdock

Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice

Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey

The Crime of Sheila McGough

The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

The Purloined Clinic: Selected Writings

The Journalist and the Murderer

In the Freud Archives

Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession

Diana and Nikon: Essays on Photography

Janet Malcolm has garnered worldwide acclaim for her many books, and received the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography for
Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice
. Malcolm writes frequently for the
New Yorker
and the
New York Review of Books
.

Forty-one
false starts
Essays on artists
and writers

Janet Malcolm

textpublishing.com.au

The Text Publishing Company
Swann House
22 William Street
Melbourne Victoria 3000
Australia

Copyright © 2013 by Janet Malcolm
Introduction copyright © 2013 by Helen Garner

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

The essays in this volume originally appeared in the following publications:
New York Review of Books
: “Salinger's Cigarettes,” “Capitalist Pastorale,” “The Genius of the Glass House,” “Good Pictures,” “Edward Weston's Women,” “Nudes Without Desire,” “The Not Returning Part of It,” “Thoughts on Autobiography from an Abandoned Autobiography”;
New York Times Book Review
: “The Woman Who Hated Women”;
New Yorker
: “Forty-one False Starts,” “Depth of Field,” “A House of One's Own,” “A Girl of the Zeitgeist,” “Advanced Placement,” “William Shawn,” “Joseph Mitchell”.

First published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2013
First published in Australia by The Text Publishing Company, 2013

Cover design by W. H. Chong
Page design by Jonathan D. Lippincott

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Author: Malcolm, Janet, author.
Title: Forty-one false starts / by Janet Malcolm; introduction by Helen Garner.
ISBN: 9781922147165 (paperback)
ISBN: 9781922148230 (eBook)
Subjects: Authors. Artists. Authorship.
Dewey Number: 808.02

To the memory of Gardner

CONTENTS

Introduction
by Helen Garner

Forty-one False Starts

Depth of Field

A House of One's Own

The Woman Who Hated Women

Salinger's Cigarettes

Capitalist Pastorale

The Genius of the Glass House

Good Pictures

Edward Weston's Women

Nudes Without Desire

A Girl of the Zeitgeist

Advanced Placement

The Not Returning Part of It

William Shawn

Joseph Mitchell

Thoughts on Autobiography from an Abandoned Autobiography

INTRODUCTION

by Helen Garner

The great American journalist Janet Malcolm will turn eighty next year. This fact has hit me amidships. She is the writer who has influenced and taught me more than any other. I have never met her, or heard her speak, but I would know her written voice anywhere. It is a literary voice, composed and dry, articulate and free-striding, drawing on deep learning yet plain in its address, and above all fearless, though she cannot possibly be without fear, since she understands it so well in others.

The whole drive of her work is expressed, I think, in a phrase she uses in one of the essays collected here: “the rapture of a first-hand encounter with another's lived experience.”

Rapture
is not too strong a word for the experience of reading Malcolm. You can feast on these essays in
Forty-One False Starts
, as on all her work. Nothing in them is slick or shallow. Her work is always challenging, intellectually and morally complex, but it never hangs heavy. It is airy, racy, and mercilessly cut back, so that it surges along with what one critic has called “breath-taking rhetorical velocity”. It sparkles with deft character sketches. It bounds back and forth between straight-ahead reportage and subtle readings of documents and diaries, of photographs and paintings.

Malcolm's whole way of perceiving the world is deeply dyed by the psychoanalytical view of reality. She never theorises or uses jargon. She simply proceeds on the assumption that (as she puts it in another book,
The Purloined Clinic
) “life is lived on two levels of thought and act: one in our awareness and the other only inferable, from dreams, slips of the tongue, and inexplicable behaviour”. This approach, coupled with her natural flair for metaphor and imagery, allows her almost poetic access to meaning in the way people dress and move, speak or decline to speak—and in her most famous and disputed concern, trust and betrayal in the relations between journalists and their subjects.

You feel the intense pleasure she gets from thinking. She keeps coming at things from the most unexpected angles, undercutting the certainty she has just reasoned you into accepting, and dropping you through the floor into a realm of fruitful astonishment, and sometimes laughter.

She skates past the traditional teachings on split infinitives or the undesirability of adjectives: like Christina Stead she will string adjectives and adverbs together in sinewy strands—half a dozen of them, each one working hard. An art magazine, she says, has “an impudent, aggressively unbuttoned, improvised, yet oddly poised air”.

Her description of clothes and their meaning is deadly: “a tall, thin, bearded man wearing tight jeans and high-heeled clogs”. Her brisk shorthand often has a sting its tail: “Wilson, who had an unhappy childhood in a mansion”; “the look of a place inhabited by a man who no longer lives with a woman”. A young art critic speaks, she says, “with the accent of that non-existent aristocratic European country from which so many bookish New York boys have emigrated.”

The longest piece in this collection, “A Girl of the Zeitgeist”, is a study of the New York art scene of the 1980s. Nothing could interest me less, I thought; but within a few sentences I found myself drawn into a scintillating anthropological investigation that I read greedily, realising that like any other microcosm this one could be studied with both entertainment and profit, and with a thrilling degree of enlightenment about the whole human project.

For Malcolm, life is unruly. She is gripped by artists' struggles to get command of it, not to be abject before it. But she pulls no punches. She will observe a person and the décor of his apartment, his shoes, his clothes, his way of cooking; she will switch on her reel-to-reel, start him talking, then stand back. Her ear is so finely tuned to speech, her nerves to the unspoken, that later, at her desk, she will recreate her subject's utterances with a lethal accuracy, unfolding his character and world-view like a fan.

She maintains a perfectly judged distance between her eye and its target. She does not seem to suck up to the people she interviews, or try to make them like her by revealing her own personal life in exchange for their confidences. Her boredom threshold is high. She gives her subjects rope. She allows herself to be charmed, at least until her interlocutor reveals his vacuity or his phoniness, and then she snaps shut in a burst of impatience, and veers away. Although at times she draws back in distaste, or contempt, or even pity, she is not someone who deplores the way of the world or desires to change it. She merely observes it with a matchless eye. In her work there is a complete absence of hot air.

She will not be read lazily. She assumes intelligence and expects you to work, to pace along with her. Her writing turns you into a better reader. There is no temptation to skim: its texture is too rich, too worldly, too surprising. She is brilliant at revealing things in stages, so you gasp, and gasp, and gasp again. She yokes the familiar with the strange in the way that dreams do—suddenly a wall cracks open and a flood of light pours in, or perhaps a perfectly aimed, needle-like beam. Reading her is an austerely enchanting kind of
fun
.

In the closing piece of this collection, fragments from “an abandoned autobiography”, Malcolm describes herself as “someone who probably became a journalist precisely because she didn't want to find herself alone in the room”. What are those words
probably
and
precisely
doing there, bouncing off each other, striking a little chord of uncertainty? I dare to feel a rush of comradeliness. Ms Malcolm, Janet, we cannot do without you. Live in good health and keep writing, for another ten years at least. Dear boss, shine on.

FORTY-ONE FALSE STARTS

FORTY-ONE FALSE STARTS

1994

1

There are places in New York where the city's anarchic, unaccommodating spirit, its fundamental, irrepressible aimlessness and heedlessness have found especially firm footholds. Certain transfers between subway lines, passageways of almost transcendent sordidness; certain sites of torn-down buildings where parking lots have silently sprung up like fungi; certain intersections created by illogical confluences of streets—these express with particular force the city's penchant for the provisional and its resistance to permanence, order, closure. To get to the painter David Salle's studio, walking west on White Street, you have to traverse one of these disquieting intersections—that of White and Church Streets and an interloping Sixth Avenue—which has created an unpleasantly wide expanse of street to cross, interrupted by a wedge-shaped island on which a commercial plant nursery has taken up forlorn and edgy residence, surrounding itself with a high wire fence and keeping truculently irregular hours. Other businesses that have arisen around the intersection—the seamy Baby Doll Lounge, with its sign offering
GO-GO GIRLS
; the elegant Ristorante Arquà; the nameless grocery and Lotto center; the dour Kinney parking lot—have a similar atmosphere of insularity and transience. Nothing connects with anything else, and everything looks as if it might disappear overnight. The corner feels like a no man's land and—if one happens to be thinking about David Salle—looks like one of his paintings.

Salle's studio, on the second floor of a five-story loft building, is a long room lit with bright, cold overhead light. It is not a beautiful studio. Like the streets outside, it gives no quarter to the visitor in search of the picturesque. It doesn't even have a chair for the visitor to sit in, unless you count a backless, half-broken metal swivel chair Salle will offer with a murmur of inattentive apology. Upstairs, in his living quarters, it is another story. But down here everything has to do with work and with being alone.

A disorderly profusion of printed pictorial matter covers the surfaces of tables in the middle of the room: art books, art journals, catalogs, brochures mingle with loose illustrations, photographs, odd pictures ripped from magazines. Scanning these complicated surfaces, the visitor feels something of the sense of rebuff he feels when looking at Salle's paintings, a sense that this is all somehow none of one's business. Here lie the sources of Salle's postmodern art of “borrowed” or “quoted” images—the reproductions of famous old and modern paintings, the advertisements, the comics, the photographs of nude or half-undressed women, the fabric and furniture designs that he copies and puts into his paintings—but one's impulse, as when coming into a room of Salle's paintings, is to politely look away. Salle's hermeticism, the private, almost secretive nature of his interests and tastes and intentions, is a signature of his work. Glancing at the papers he has made no effort to conceal gives one the odd feeling of having broken into a locked desk drawer.