“Adultery takes one out of one’s usual life, sometimes in unusual ways,” she says of their weekly-sometimes twice weekly-guilty midday trysts, which moved from a seedy midtown hotel (the Belvedere) to a seedy one-room apartment rented for these assignations. Malcolmishness, to an adulterous relationship with “G” in the early 1970s. And then along comes “The Apartment,” toward the end of the volume, where we find Malcolm confessing, in a rather starting departure from her longstanding. I’m not sure I’d call the quality of forensic scrutiny she brought to the enterprise a form of deep optimism about the human plight, the underlying premise being that people are engineered for deception, and that self-deception is just the frosting on the cake.Įven so, I was charmed and lulled by Malcolm’s late-in-life memoirish turn: mostly half-remembered reminiscences of her family, childhood, and adolescence, from Nazi-occupied Prague to émigré New York. A big chunk of what I know about the art of creative inference I learned from Malcolm, who practiced it deftly (sometimes ruthlessly). She was good at revealing people to themselves not all her subjects loved that about her. Indeed, other people’s compulsions to confess things they probably shouldn’t was the meat and bones of her reported pieces and profiles, including such inadvertent “confessions” as an inapt word choice, a chaotic love life, or an overly self-conscious item of living room decor, all of which became, in Malcolm’s hands, a window onto some hapless striver’s soul. She was a writer singularly and supremely herself in every sentence you didn’t require the grubby personal specifics to feel you knew her well. Malcolm, who died in 2021, enjoyed a pretty tight-lipped career when it came to dispensing biographical data points. Which brings me to Janet Malcolm’s posthumously published collection of autobiographical fragments, Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory. Needless to say, the more forthcoming you appear, the more calculated the agenda, not always consciously. Even I, who once fled the first-person singular like a bad smell, now talk about myself endlessly in print, opening every essay or review with some “revealing” anecdote or slightly abashed confession, striving for the perfect degree of manicured self-deprecation and helpless charm. We age and turn inward, we become garrulous and spill. WE LIVE IN CONFESSIONAL TIMES and the self-exposure bug eventually comes for us all, the steeliest of non-disclosers, no less.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |