Introduction
BY IAN FRAZIER
The first photo of herself that Janet Malcolm includes in this book shows her at the age of two or three wearing a hat and a sunsuit and sitting on a stone step. She writes that she doesn’t identify with the child in the photo or think of the child as herself. The viewer who is also the reader has a different reaction. The little girl is obviously a person for whom the world will be grateful in her grown-up life—a future personage whose extraordinary nature the camera has caught in early childhood. Even without that aspect of prophecy, the photo arrests us because the little girl is adorable.
Janet Malcolm wrote nonfiction like no one else, won a wide and devoted readership, knew the stark difference between delight and whatever isn’t delight, and made some people angry with the straightforwardness and occasional asperity of her work. After she and I became friends, and I’d noticed that picture among others on the wall in her apartment, I saw that small personage as a still-surviving part of her. I adored her and told her so not long before she died. Coming home on the train, I kept wincing at having blurted such a risky and uncool thing, and I even wince a little describing it now. But I’m also glad I said it because it’s true, and I imagine her accepting it for that reason, and not seeing it as too over the top.
As I’m writing this, her death is about ten weeks in the past, so I probably don’t have the distance one would hope for in surveying anybody’s work. On a Friday, I was talking to her on the phone, as we’d done many times over the twelve years of our friendship (if we didn’t talk, we exchanged emails almost every day), and a few days later, on a Wednesday, she was gone. My sense of carrying on an interrupted conversation with my suddenly absent friend remains so strong, it makes me believe even more that something must exist beyond death. E. B. White once said that a writer writes until he dies. In my now one-sided conversation with Janet, I’m wondering if the writer (in this case, she) stops even then. She had good ideas for pieces whose energy may still be carrying her along, wherever she is in time-space or space-time, thinking about them. For thirty or forty years she listened to the same classical music program on a New York City radio station, with the same host, a woman. She liked the host, had learned some details of her personality over the years, and came up with the idea of writing a profile of this person without saying (or even trying to find out) what the person looked like. The point would be to fit the profile within the pandemic’s imposed conditions of apartness; she would concentrate entirely on the voice, maybe filled in with some reportorial phone calls. As Janet got sicker and could not do much except lie on the couch, she told me she had thoughts about helplessness, solitude, and the end of life that could make another good piece. I could see that the piece already existed in roughed-out form in her mind, full of possibility. She never wrote it, or even made notes for it, as far as I know. But I believe the piece still exists somewhere and is somehow ongoing.
In this book are the last pieces Janet gave us. They exist outside of any simple category. She distrusted biography as a form and had a lot of skepticism about autobiography. In The New York Review of Books in 2010 she published a short piece in which she listed a few of the hazards involved in writing about oneself, such as the desire to seem like an interesting person, or the conflict between self-love and journalistic objectivity.
She also happened to be a good visual artist and knew about photography from her own experience of taking photos. She and I used to send each other pictures of so-called weeds. She did not believe in the concept of weeds, and supported me in my maintaining a bad—that is, weed-filled—lawn in the suburb where I live. Her photos of weeds looked wild and raucous and fabulous. Mine looked like weeds. Recently I read about a gardener who said how horrible burdock is. Burdock is the large-leafed, disturbed-earth plant whose burr-covered seedpods often end up in your dog’s hair and seem to have provided the structural model for the coronavirus. Janet took hundreds of photos of burdock leaves—they get eaten by insects, and decay interestingly, and suggest other beleaguered leaves: ancient or recent manuscript pages, for instance—and she made a book of twenty-nine of the photos, called Burdock. In a short introduction she said she was trying to portray individual burdock leaves as clearly and as cruelly as Richard Avedon photographed individual human beings. Her effort succeeded; each burdock leaf is a life, seen straight on, epic and battered and dignified.
The main visual form she worked in was the collage. Among the hundreds of collages she made, some appeared in gallery shows in New York, and now hang on collectors’ walls. She also loved assembling bookmarks, her favorite kind of collage. I have fifty or seventy bookmarks she made and sent me. I use her bookmarks in most books I read, which means that now I can’t find them all. In some future century, one or two of Janet’s bookmarks will fall out from between a book’s pages in the shop of an antique-book dealer and amaze their re-discoverer. The bookmark collages bring together papers from her father’s psychiatric practice, Chinese Communist propaganda leaflets, Soviet hotel DO NOT DISTURB signs, strange newspaper clippings, World War II ration stamps, Muybridge motion-capture photo sequences, reproductions of classic paintings, her grade-school report cards.… She color-xeroxed the components and reduced them to bookmark size and fit them together. As readers of this collection will observe, she had a knack for choosing which ephemera to save.
She didn’t describe the pieces in this collection as memoirs or autobiographical sketches; I recall her referring to them only by topic. Whatever they’re called, she came to them through photographs, by way of her visual-artist side. That approach freed her. I had read all the pieces before seeing them assembled here, and on rereading, I’m surprised and sometimes saddened by what I’d missed. Her description of her family escaping the Nazis like insects who happened to avoid the insect spray rattled me, but now I see how deeply she meant and felt the horror of the image. Their wartime experience never gave her family psychological peace. Her second husband, Gardner Botsford, who went ashore on D-Day, also was in a unit that liberated a concentration camp. He never talked about that experience, nor did he include it in the book in which he tells other parts of his war service. When he became Janet’s editor at The New Yorker, her work opened out dramatically. I knew Gardner as an elegant and gallant man and a careful, intuitive editor. She may have seen him, at an emotional level, as her heroic American rescuer.
I admired the brilliant humor that ran through her life and work, but I hadn’t understood it for the bedrock it was. Her sense of what was funny and her love of being a smart aleck exist in early form even in the photo of her sitting on the step. In one of these pieces, she describes telling her aunt and uncle and cousin every dirty joke she knew while on a car trip when she was a teenager. I was a smart-aleck teen myself, but telling dirty jokes to my uncle and aunt would have been a stretch, and I’m in awe of her dedication. At the University of Michigan, she and her first husband, Donald Malcolm, wrote for a humor magazine called Gargoyle. I have three issues of it, from 1952 and 1953, that Janet gave me. She contributed pieces with titles like “The Bobsey Twins Meet Ezra Pound” that hilariously mash-up high culture and low—in this case, the girl-detective mystery genre and early Modernist poetry. When she sends ironical letters from Ann Arbor to her lonely mother, her father pleads with her to have mercy and write her something that’s “non-Gargoylian.” Janet later thinks she was a jerk for ignoring him. I don’t; mercy is too much to expect from a college kid who’s into being funny. In these pieces, her disquisition on the Czech humor of her family’s immigrant community separates that humor into horribly clunky and overbearing and unfunny, on one side, and playful and dangerous, on the other. The second is thrilling to her, the first almost beneath contempt. Her lifelong humor derived from and Americanized the Dadaist, absurd, playful-dangerous humor of the Czech avant-garde. In short, as she says several times, she liked to horse around. To understand her work, you have to know that deep down or on the surface, it usually contains some horsing around.
She wrote these pieces at a level of wisdom that took a lifetime to attain, and that almost nobody reaches at any age. Maybe the most famous opening statement in literature, “All happy families are alike,” from Anna Karenina, has always puzzled me because, first, are all happy families alike? (All Gaul wasn’t necessarily divided into just three parts, either.) Second, how are all happy families alike? Here Janet comes to Tolstoy’s aid. In a piece about her grandmother, Janet says that although she (Janet) and her sister disdained most of their elders’ jokes, they believed their own family’s humor “was of the highest quality.” Then she adds, “All happy families are alike in the illusion of superiority their children touchingly harbor.” The wisdom of this floored me. I grew up in that exact illusion and would not begin to question it until after I became eligible for Medicare. Janet’s aperçu ended it forever.
Another great sentence, from her piece about her Czech teacher, Slečna:
Sites of idleness and wasted time like the Czech school are fertile breeding grounds for the habit many of us form in childhood of always being in love with somebody.
Those sites are out there, all over the country: high-school study halls, empty theaters before play rehearsals, gym bleachers before practice, rec centers, small-town libraries. Kids spend hours in them, dreamily, hopelessly in love. A page or two later she follows the observation with another, even more profound, about herself and her fellow classmates
who secretly loved and, unbeknownst to ourselves, were grateful for the safety of not being loved in return. The pleasure and terror of that would come later.
I can remember the moment in my life when I became aware of that romantic safety, on the one hand, and the pleasure and terror of reality, on the other; lots of people, especially artists, get such mileage out of the first that they never venture the second. But life brings everybody around, whether you’re willing or not, and the pleasure and terror do eventually come.
Describing the rituals at the Christian (Congregational) summer camp she and her sister attended as kids, she says she remembers the faux Native American camp motto, and the grace the whole assembly prayed before meals, better than she remembers most relics of her childhood. She liked the camp’s religious intonations, and adds,
Children are mystical-minded creatures; they sense the strangeness of it all. As we settle into earthly life, this sense fades.
It did not fade for her. Earthly life, as she experienced it, contained numinous effects, otherworldly manifestations, and sanctified figures like her neurologist-psychiatrist father, whom she calls “the gentlest of men.” The fact that I’m a Christian and go to church interested her. The doings of the Episcopal church I attend provided a recurring topic in our conversations. A few years ago, our minister’s husband needed a lung transplant, and the theological-ethical question arose: Do we pray that a healthy pair of lungs becomes available? That is, do we pray for an organ donor to get in a fatal accident that leaves the lungs intact? And, if possible, soon? The question engaged Janet’s philosophical and spiritual sides. Everybody was relieved when some lungs were found (I’m not sure how), the patient returned to health, and we left the conundrum behind.
Janet’s parents sent her and her sister to a Lutheran Sunday school, part of the protective coloration the family assumed in their new country. She knew about regular churchgoing. I attended the eight o’clock Sunday morning service at my church, and being able to tell her about it afterward was one reason I went. (The eight o’clock is its own kind of contemplative service, and we who get up for it tend to be an off-brand subset of Episcopalians.) Sometimes I told her what the week’s scriptural readings had been, and she looked them up and we discussed them. She enjoyed the scriptures as writing, and as texts to ponder. Sometimes she said she wished she could believe, but just couldn’t. On the occasional Sunday morning when I found it hard to get out of bed, I roused myself anyway. When I did miss a Sunday, I sensed her disappointment; she made me a more faithful attendee than I might have been. It was difficult during Covid, because the church building closed and the congregation gathered by Zoom. The remote services, full of tech glitches, weren’t the same. Now we’re back to services at ten o’clock in the church, and last week the minister told me that the eight o’clock service would start up again soon. The news gave me a pang when I reflected that Janet and I would have discussed this development.
After it became clear that her illness would end her life before much longer, she asked me if I had any advice. The question stopped me. To say anything about heaven—that seemed presumptuous, ridiculous, even if in some way I believed in it myself. She endured horrible physical pain. If I could’ve taken the pain for two or three hours a day to give her a break, I would have. But I could no more do that than give end-of- life advice. I did say something mealy-mouthed about how the possibility of heaven could not be ruled out. After she died, I had a dream in which heaven was not high up in the sky but only about 250 feet above ground and it encircled the globe, coexisting with skyscrapers and mountains and weather and passing airplanes. In this heaven, eternity was real, and ordinary, like when you wake in the morning and realize it’s once again Thursday.
She was an amazing and wonderful writer (she might cringe at this introduction). The sense of delight she found in literature, including in her own work, sharpened to an exquisite point. She never wrote a bogus sentence, and I encourage readers of these pieces to look at the sentences one by one. How they achieve their effect remains a mystery. The entire momentum of her life is behind them. I still don’t know what advice I could have given her, but I like to think of Janet as quite nearby, maybe just 250 feet up, dwelling forever in a realm of keen and generous delight.