The Paris Review Interview with New Yorker writer Janet Malcom:
INTERVIEWER
I’ve often noticed how much work your physical descriptions do in your writing, how they make us feel we know and understand the subjects before they begin to speak, and how you impose your very singular interpretation in such an authoritative way that it feels organic, like anyone walking into a room couldn’t help but see it exactly as you do. So how would you describe your apartment if you were the journalist walking into your living room?
JANET MALCOLM
My living room has an oak-wood floor, Persian carpets, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, a large ficus and large fern, a fireplace with a group of photographs and drawings over it, a glass-top coffee table with a bowl of dried pomegranates on it, and sofas and chairs covered in off-white linen. If I were a journalist walking into the room, I would immediately start composing a satiric portrait of the New York writer’s apartment with its standard tasteful objects (cat included) and general air of unrelenting Culture.
INTERVIEWER
Interesting, given my own blind spots with visual detail. I would have mentioned the cat, and maybe the decorative French dishes, and the view of the park, but I wouldn’t have gone to satire. I guess if I were doing a close reading of the room I would have gotten “orderly and precise, carefully unpretentious, somehow perfect and comfortable.” I got the impression of a room where no uncivilized scenes occur (revealing, I guess, more about myself than the room).
MALCOLM
You underestimate your powers of description. I admire “carefully unpretentious.” That “carefully” has a nice sting. I’m not sure it’s fully merited. The cat deserves some of the credit for the look of shabby chic—the stuffing that is coming out of the sofas and armchairs is entirely his doing. Did you notice the place where I pinned a patch over one of the most viciously clawed places? But, seriously, your generous and appreciative words only confirm my sense of the difficulty of autobiographical writing. If I had said these things about my living room (“somehow perfect and comfortable”) I would have sounded conceited and complacent. The autobiographer works in a treacherous terrain. The journalist has a much safer job.
INTERVIEWER
It seems to me that for a journalist you use yourself, or the persona of “Janet Malcolm” anyway, more than most journalists. You use and analyze your own reaction to and relationship with many of your subjects, and often insert yourself into the drama. How is this “safer” than a more straightforward or autobiographical portrayal of self?
MALCOLM
This is a subject I’ve thought about a lot, and actually once wrote about—in the afterword to The Journalist and the Murderer. Here’s what I said:
The “I” character in journalism is almost pure invention. Unlike the “I” of autobiography, who is meant to be seen as a representation of the writer, the “I” of journalism is connected to the writer only in a tenuous way—the way, say, that Superman is connected to Clark Kent. The journalistic “I” is an overreliable narrator, a functionary to whom crucial tasks of narration and argument and tone have been entrusted, an ad hoc creation, like the chorus of Greek tragedy. He is an emblematic figure, an embodiment of the idea of the dispassionate observer of life.
It occurs to me now that the presence of this idealized figure in the narrative only compounds the inequality between writer and subject that is the moral problem of journalism as I see it. Compared to this wise and good person the other characters in the story—even the “good” ones—pale. The radiant persona of Joseph Mitchell, the great master of the journalistic “I,” shines out of his works as perhaps no other journalist’s does. In the old days at The New Yorker, every nonfiction writer tried to write like him, and, of course, none of us came anywhere near to doing so. This whole subject may be a good deal more complicated than I made it seem in the afterword. For one thing, Superman is connected to Clark Kent in a rather fundamental, if curious, way.
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