Janet Malcolm

There are names in journalism that everyone knows – Janet Malcolm, who died on June 16 in New York City at 86 years of age, is one such. During her almost sixty years at The New Yorker, she wrote a multitude of pieces over an extraordinary range; some I have read but most I of course I have not – being (funnily enough!) once too young, and later, before the digital revolution, while the said esteemed publication came my way only sporadically.

Interesting, are the controversies commented on in The New York Times obituary – serving to remind of just how radically the print media and journalism has changed in the last decades – how trite Malcolm’s transgressions now appear and how prescient her ideas about what good journalism is and what it could and could not do.

Also, in the NYT obit, and as one forever on the watch for lurking wolves – hunting in pack for easy prey, with family in tow or home in the den – I note with delight the link to her great 1995 essay in The New Yorker; entitled “A House of One’s Own” and inspired by the Stephen/Woolf/Bell family house-hopping, correspondence and biographical works, including Quentin Bell’s famous Woolf biography, and culminating with conversations with Quentin and Anne Olivier Bell during a visit of her own to Vanessa’s Charleston home. Malcolm brilliantly explores the Stephen sisters’ coming of age and complicated relationship; with others and with each other and brings Vanessa out of the shadow of her more famous sister. She surprises with details of the familial animosities and inconsistencies that the protagonists left in their wake for the next generation to grapple with. But, in considering Angelica Bell’s bitter recriminations, what Malcolm also does in this essay is articulate her own personal theory of biography; one in which choices have to be made, circumstances rarely prevail and moral certitude anything but.

In what I have written, […]I have, like every other biographer, conveniently forgotten that I am not writing a novel, and that it really isn’t for me to say who is good and who is bad, who is noble and who is faintly ridiculous. Life is infinitely less orderly and more bafflingly ambiguous than any novel, […]and if we pause to remember that [they] were actual, multidimensional individuals, whose parents loved them and whose lives were of inestimable preciousness to themselves, we have to face the problem that every biographer faces and none can solve; namely, that he is standing in quicksand as he writes. There is no floor under his enterprise, no basis for moral certainty. Every character in a biography contains within himself or herself the potential for a reverse image. The finding of a new cache of letters, the stepping forward of a new witness, the coming into fashion of a new ideology—all these events, and particularly the last one, can destabilize any biographical configuration, overturn any biographical consensus, transform any good character into a bad one, and vice versa. […] Another biographer might have made—as a subsequent biographer may well make—a different choice. The distinguished dead are clay in the hands of writers, and chance determines the shapes that their actions and characters assume in the books written about them.

Janet Malcolm in The New Yorker A Critic at Large – June 5, 1995 Issue

Finally, The New York Review of Books, to whom Janet Malcolm also often contributed over very many years, kindly provide a peep into their archives (probably for a limited time) to celebrate a great journalist’s life. From their mail of June 17, 2021:

Free from the Archives:

Janet Malcolm, a longtime contributor to The New York Review, died yesterday at the age of eighty-six. Between 1981 and 2020, Malcolm published thirty-eight pieces in our pages, including the essay below, part of her career-long meditation on the hazards of writing about other people. “Almost from the start,” she writes, “I was struck by the unhealthiness of the journalist-subject relationship, and every piece I wrote only deepened my consciousness of the canker that lies at the heart of the rose of journalism.”

The Morality of Journalism
There is no such thing as a work of pure factuality, any more than there is one of pure fictitiousness. As every work of fiction draws on life, so every work of nonfiction draws on art.

25 June 2021: There have been numerous tributes to Janet Malcolm in the last days, but I would just like to mention one last one; an antipodean perspective that unites her with another that I have long, long, admired. Should one have read any of Helen Garner’s non-fiction works, it would surely not surprise that she would have been influenced by Malcolm, in style, in sensibility and in methodology. (It also should be said, both writers shared a talent for attracting controversy, and not shying from it, and that Malcolm was not uncritical of Garner on a book and its repercussions that received intense scrutiny in the Australian literary scene and beyond, and that this appears not to have affected Garner’s admiration.) Here in a Guardian tribute adapted from her introduction to the Australian publication of an essay collection entitled “Forty-One False Starts“, Garner says:

To open any one of her books at random is to find myself drawn back into that unmistakable sensibility, that unique tissue of mind, and to grasp how deeply I am indebted to her. […]

[…]I saw manifest [in her Plath biography,The Silent Woman] what I was at the time painfully trying to learn: the fact that beneath the thick layers of a writer’s self-censorship, of her fear of being boring or wrong, lies a whole humming, seething world waiting to be released. I learned from watching Malcolm in full flight that I could go much further than timidly nibbling at the edges of people’s peculiar behaviour. I saw that I could get a grip on it and dare to interpret it, to coax meaning from it. The tools were already in my possession. […] that in journalism, as well as in fiction, I could call upon the imagery, the spontaneous associations and the emblematic objects that I had learned to trust when I myself was groaning on the therapist’s couch.

Helen Garner on Janet Malcolm: ‘Her writing turns us into better readers’, The Guardian, June 24th 2021.

Doing the Bloomsbury Walk

This warm mid-June Wednesday (June 16th 2021), decreed this year to be “Dalloway Day”, is just the most perfect opportunity for a city stroll. Not the famous London walk from Westminster to Bond Street that Clarissa Dalloway made all those years ago to buy flowers for her party, but a virtual guided tour with Bonnie Greer through some of the haunts of Clarissa’s creator and her friends – and, what a radical bunch they were; more than queer, however one chooses to define the word, some were, like Duncan Grant, unabashedly taking the private into the public space – and making art out of it.

Each Dalloway Day, then, can be none other than an opportunity for a sometimes loud, but often reflective, celebration of Virginia Woolf and those in her orbit; artists all, who were inspired by their favorite haunts in a city coming to terms with the monumental intellectual and material changes of modernity – its tempo and its promises.

The many lives of St. Ives

As the G7 gathers for the first time since the wretched Covid-19 pandemic took grip, and dignitaries and media descend upon Cornwall to do whatever it is they do, it seems an appropriate time to pay a visit too, albeit only in one’s head – and that of Virginia Woolf.

St. Ives, Cornwall, 2021.

In 2018, NYT had a very nice travelogue feature (the usual “subscriber access” proviso applies) entitled “In Search of Virginia Woolf’s Lost Eden in Cornwall”. I know, of course, from my own reading, how very much Woolf cherished the childhood Summers spent at “Talland House”; how those memories found their way into so much of her later writing – Jacobs Room, To the Lighthouse, The Waves. Mentioned in the above article; this letter written by Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, in the summer of 1884, describing the “pocket paradise” that the two year old “‘Ginia” was getting to know and explore.

St. Ives, Porthminster Bay, Cornwall, 1895

The above postcard image from 1895 is particularly poignant; although from the year after Virginia Woolf’s mother’s death, and the first Summer in Virginia’s young life that the Stephen family did not spend at “Talland House” (instead at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight), it still must be very illustrative of the St. Ives town and coastal landscape that so enriched her own memories of the time and later literary work.

Mary Beard on empires, emperors & when the old is new again

I’m surprised that it wasn’t until very recently, and in respect to her pending retirement, that I first mentioned Mary Beard here; for she really does rank up there amongst my most favorite people. In my Twitter life – now forsaken – I followed her avidly (and even went into bat for her when necessary!).

For those unacquainted, this annotated “talk” piece in The New York Times Magazine (subscription) is as good an introduction as any to the person and particularly to the very special art of delving into the ancient world and learning the lessons it can teach, even be they about how not to be. Also, I take this opportunity to make mention of her new book, entitled Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern, due out later this year.

[…]In this book—against a background of today’s “sculpture wars”—Mary Beard tells the story of how for more than two millennia portraits of the rich, powerful, and famous in the western world have been shaped by the image of Roman emperors, especially the “Twelve Caesars,” from the ruthless Julius Caesar to the fly-torturing Domitian. Twelve Caesars asks why these murderous autocrats have loomed so large in art from antiquity and the Renaissance to today, when hapless leaders are still caricatured as Neros fiddling while Rome burns. […]

Princeton University Press (2021)

Published in the UK on September 28th, 2021, and in the US on October 12th.

Videos of The Sixtieth A. W. Mellon Lectures in Fine Arts at the National Gallery of Fine Arts, Washington D.C. held in 2011, and on which Mary’s book is based may be found here (scroll down to the 60th lecture series). A decade old, but resonating in a new light considering the ongoing – and global – controversies surrounding statues and memorials of historical figures with – mildly put – tainted images. And, not to mention, a growing gallery of populist autocratic figures running amok from one end of the world to the next – until recently even in the US capital. To think, as Mary speaks, a much finer figure of a man was in power, and one could almost believe the promises of an ever-evolving democracy. These videos, a great find on my behalf, I must say! And just a taster before the (belated) publication in extended book form.

Berthe Morisot: much more than a muse

The Impressionist Art of Seeing and Being Seen; so the impressive title of Jason Farago’s equally impressive interactive piece at The New York Times – an exploration of Impressionism and its scandalous beginnings in France in the latter half of the 19th century, as exemplified through one particular work of the one woman associated with the movement – Berthe Morisot’s “In England (Eugène Manet à l’Île de Wight)”. [To be seen at the Musée Marmottan in Paris, which houses the largest collection of her works. Unlike her male colleagues she sold very few works during her lifetime. Well, who would have thunk it!]

Eugène Manet on the Isle of Wight, 1875, Musée Marmottan Monet

Farago deconstructs the painting as more than Morisot’s impression of the scene but rendered as an invitation by the artist to explore the multiple gazes – sometimes twice removed, sometimes hidden, always distorted by relative time. No longer discrete, time blurs the edges, and it is no longer clear who is doing the seeing and who or what is being seen.

In 2019, at the time of a major exhibition of her works at the Musée d’Orsay, I read (in German media) for the first time about Morisot. If it is still accessible, I hightly recommend this essay by Julian Barnes in the London Review of Books, from about that time.

Caste: a defining problem

“Caste – the Lies that Divide Us” by Isabel Wilkerson
Las castas. Anonymous, 18th century, Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Tepotzotlán, Mexico.

That is the thing with definitions, be they of word, phrase or more complex description; beyond the essential vocabulary and grammatical rectitude, precision is rarely absolute and very often determined by context; imbedded in society, geography and time.

One such word that provides an interesting example is ‘caste’. As an Anne with an ‘e’ like she from Green Gables, and having always been uncompromisingly for its quiet but firm closing presence both in word and speech, I have blithely accepted caste so spelt to have just one definition, and that firmly rooted on the Indian sub-continent and descriptive of the system of social stratification that has existed there since ancient times. Now, of course, it turns out to be infinitely more complex than that, even when specific to Indian society, but the etymological route from the Latin castus ‘to be cut-off, separated’ through to the Portuguese casta meaning ‘breed or race’ and adopted by – and complicated by – the British Raj is clear. That the very ordinary and malleable word cast is strongly associated is equally so (though a matter to which I have not previously given thought!) – always somehow to do with throwing together, throwing away – a troupe of players (cast of characters); iron (cast-iron); a fishing line; a dice (literally, and metaphorically as in iacta alea est; the die is cast) And then there are all those who are cast out, away; who are downcast, typecast.

My copy of “Caste – The Lies that Divide Us”, Allen Lane, UK, 2020

Not wishing to cast aspersions (to stay with my train of thought!) on Oprah Winfrey, but when a tome comes my way emblazoned with “Magnificent. Profound. Eye-opening. Sobering. Hopeful” my antennae begin to twitch nervously. Be that as it may, I said here that I would read Isabel Wilkerson’s 2020 book Caste: The Lies That Divide Us (as my copy is titled), and I have, and so give here a few of my thoughts.

Only now after reading Caste and upon reflection, has it occurred to me that Wilkerson also used that terminology in her 2010 bestseller The Warmth of Other Suns; though, I think, sparsely and without particular emphasis, nor can I remember that she specifically explained her choice of vocabulary. Of course, I may be wrong on this, but on any account it is obviously a means of framing race that she has mulled over for a relatively long period, and one that she thought needed refining and deserving of its very own book. This I am not so sure of; I would even contend it even muddies the waters.

And, this is not to say that I didn’t find Caste an interesting enough read; for despite the objections I have – and there are a few (or maybe many!) – and however dissatisfied I was in the conclusions drawn by the author, Wilkerson is a very good writer and journalist, who can weave the factual with anecdotal to present the narrative that she very well wants to tell, and in the interests of a firmly held point of view and, furthermore, in an accessible style well suited for popular consumption. Perhaps here lies the crux of my criticism – the author, it seems to me, was so intent on telling her one version, that she has not even attempted to identify faults in her argument or to consider whether her reasoning may be inadequate or does not lend itself to generalization (across vast expanses of time and place). And as colorful as they sometimes may be, her more personal micro-narratives with typical micro-aggressions at their core have a tendency to aggravate. Now I can’t be sure, but who hasn’t been pushed, shoved, insulted, etc., by some dude on a plane (though I’ve never had the luxury of first class!), or felt out of place or ignored in a crowd, and my irritation hasn’t been lessened by reflecting upon interviews that Wilkerson has given in the last year or so in which the same anecdotes are rattled off. That’s okay, but one has to wonder what she thinks they add to her argument, other than presumably offering up herself as an example of the subordinate caste. As a highly successful, Black American woman of renown, fair or not, that premise rests on shaky ground. When I say this, I don’t wish to diminish the sensitivities of those who are subjected to or slighted by everyday racism, or sexism, or both, it is just that I think when putting forward an argument, or espousing a theory, sometimes it is better to stand back – a little less subjectivity is more.

On a fundamental level, I have to say I struggled with Wilkerson’s ‘update’ of an ancient caste model to expound her own “eight pillar” theoretical framework, one in which racial discrimination is inherent, and racial purity and allocation of labor constrained within each hierarchy is aspired to. And, to then whittle this down to the existence of a rigid three tier caste system in the United States; one in which the white majority in all their, presumably homogeneous, glory reigns on high, a Hispanic and Asian middle struggles to ascend – whereby the very possibility of doing so is antithetical to a caste construction, and a Black minority, relegated (and by virtue of their skin color alone) to the lower caste. The result is, in my opinion, a much too simple reading of the dynamics at play in a modern society driven by capitalism; Wilkerson’s absolute decoupling of race from capital fatally ignores the latter as the ultimate “pillar” (to use her language) in supporting – perpetuating – racial inequities in the United States.

Continue reading …

Tulsa, Oklahoma.

While writing last year about Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, and the fictional childhood town of her protagonists, with its “coloured” populace peculiarly intent on becoming about as fair-skinned as they could; I diverged to mention the town of Eatonville near Orlando in Florida – one of the first all-black municipalities to be founded after Reconstruction – which was lived in and then “fictionalised” by Zora Neale Hurston. I didn’t investigate any further into where other such communities may have evolved and what their fate may have been. This week, though, I have learnt about one such other. Ended well did it not.

From May 31st into this June 1st day in 1921, a white mob descended on the prosperous Black community of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, murdering hundreds of residents and destroying more than a thousand homes. One hundred years late(r), a US President will visit a place, revisit an abominable event that has found no place in history books or civics classes, and pay respects, homage … and probably not much else. The careful dance around reparations, in this case as in others, and generally, will continue.

What can be said, though, is that remembrance of this event has come at a time when ignorance can no longer be an excuse – not for governments, nor institutions and not for the public. The tragedy of Greenwood is out there for all to come to terms with. It is telling, I think, that it is another glaring omission both in the national historical narrative and, it follows, from many – or most – of the school history curricula in the United States. (If you don’t believe me or the mainstream media on this, Tom Hanks has his say. A rare high spot in the new genre of “celebrity woke essay”!) And it is a tribute to the tenacity and courage of those who have kept the memory alive, who have fought for recognition and justice.

In The New York Times; an excellent photographic and multi-media essay that juxtaposes the flourishing community that was, pulsing with human endeavour and industry, against the decimated remains after the rampage. And this NYT Magazine piece by Caleb Gayle (Black and from Tulsa) about the contemporary legacy of a trauma and a history too long wrapped in silence and rarely admitted to is a good read.

A classical update in a digital world

Unlike in the digital world, where an update comes from out of nowhere, or perhaps from the clouds above – overnight and undercover, or intruding unannounced in the light of day, there remain great collections of human thought and knowledge, remnants from times passed, that demand meticulous review; and under the auspices of the human brain that understands memory as more than a machine, that pays little regard to bits and bytes, and timeouts, rather dedicates its own finely wired synapses to the higher arts of scholarship – perseverance, selection, reflection, accuracy.

Such may be said of the just published Cambridge Greek Lexicon (Cambridge University Press). [On the website is a trove of information, including the history and methodology of the project, an extended video introduction and reference material and links.] Over twenty years in compilation; what was originally conceived as a revision of HG Liddell and Robert Scott’s legendary 1889 Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon, after due consideration and because of its antiquated form, had morphed into a completely new project.

Classics at Cambridge: Introducing the “The Cambridge Greek Lexicon”

This Guardian piece informs of what is in and what is not, and delights in giving us the down and dirty – or “earthy” as they call it. Some may say, well … and with a blush! To rejoin: Shame on those who go digging in ancient ground and shun at getting hands dirty! And though blushing, I quote:

…The verb χέζω (chezo), translated by Liddell and Scott as “ease oneself, do one’s need”, is defined in the new dictionary as “to defecate” and translated as “to shit”; βινέω (bineo) is no longer “inire, coire, of illicit intercourse”, but “fuck”; λαικάζω (laikazo), in the 19th-century dictionary translated as “to wench”, is now defined as “perform fellatio” and translated as “suck cocks”.

The Guardian, 27th May 2021

Whatever would the Messrs. Liddell and Scott think! Whether these new volumes will endure as long as their predecessor only time will tell but it is interesting to contemplate how language and custom may develop in the next hundred years or so (hopefully, it will still be determined by the living, breathing not an artificial intelligence!) – and in which direction! As the Guardian editorial ends:

…Easy as it is to gently mock the sensibilities of a former age, perhaps future generations will decry early-21st-century comfort with sexually aggressive terms; when, perhaps, it will be time for another dictionary of a “dead” language.

The Guardian, 28th May 2021