Janet Malcolm: Still Angry After All These Years

I can’t think when I have read a book start to finish, and more than once, and liked its main character—the protagonist, “I”— less. I surprised myself. Janet Malcolm is admired, is highly accomplished, distinguished and awarded. This is her last book and a subject, from its title, that engaged me: Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2023). I knew her work—long essays and profiles published in the New Yorker and collected in subsequent books—a vaunted career and here, this book with its wonderfully elliptical title, Still Pictures. Printed photographs, snapshots or formal sittings, are fixed, unmoving, immobile. (Wait, even those descriptive states are weighted because “to be moved” could reflect an emotional response and “immobile” suggests an absence of volition.) And “Still” meaning remaining as photographs, not having transformed into something else, or “Still” with a nice sense of quietude or “Still” as only or just, implying a deficiency. The title had me hooked.

Old photographs from her past as a prod to memory, which, as I read on, could have as easily been a goad, reflected in the sometimes unpleasant responses they provoked. But a good point of departure. Not, however, random in their selection. These can’t have been the only photos available to her. The subheading in the book’s title—On Photography and Memory—should give notice to readers who know other works by this noted journalist; those words would not go unexamined.

Janet Malcolm had published a book of her own photographs, Burdock (Yale University Press, New Haven, 2008), and had written an introduction to it. A section is quoted in the afterword to Still Pictures, written by her daughter Anne. About photography Janet Malcolm had said, “Photography is naively believed to reproduce visual actuality, but in fact the images our eyes take in and the images the camera delivers are not the same. Taking a picture is a transformative act.” So, don’t believe your eyes, or what is written about what you are seeing, or memory, or autobiography, which this book obliquely, and in fragments, is. About autobiography she says it is a “misnamed genre; memory speaks only some of its lines,” and, “Like biography it enlists letters and the testimony of contemporaries in its novelistic enterprise.” In other words, largely a fiction. “The past,” she wrote, “is a country that issues no visas. We can only enter it illegally.”

Visa or not, I am turning my attention, giving over to a book with photographs that trigger memories and stories that may be unreliable, are certainly subjective—a person can remember only their own memories, are remembering from a single point.

Janet Malcolm, journalist, chose her words with precision, as her many books attest. An early chapter in Still Pictures is titled “The Girl in the Train” and shows a photograph of the author as a child of almost five, and her parents, looking out from the window of a train. The child scowls, the parents smile, and on the photo’s reverse is inscribed, “Leaving Prague, July 1939.” The train, the author tells us, was on its way to Hamburg where an ocean liner, one of the last civilian ships to leave for America, would take them to safety. They were among the few Jews lucky enough to escape and I am jarred, an intended reaction I am certain, by her comparison with random insects escaping a poison spray, calling immediately to mind Hitler’s deadly presentation of Jews as vermin to be exterminated.

Malcolm’s daughter Anne describes the entries in her afterword to Still Pictures as the recollections of the author as a child and adolescent, but it is the accomplished and fully grown mature adult Janet Malcolm who writes and here again is the unreliable narrator, memory, telling the story. Riding through the book is a sense of detachment, distance—perhaps rightly attributable to the family’s particular Czech wryness and skeptical wit—of being outside and acutely aware of this place, and knowing yours, and class, and money, even though scorned as a concern in poor taste. Foreigners, not fitting in, but also a tenuous pride in the sophistication and elegance carried from the Old World. Choice does come up. Her assessment: the choices of her parents were deficient. But leaving Europe in 1939 was the only choice, if you had the luck and resources. Not really a choice, if offered. She’s angry with her parents for making a home, a nice middle-class home when there was no other. But how she plays it for herself and readers is, I found, some kind of awful. She’s not a ventriloquist, not even in her own younger voice (maybe in tone but not tenor). The adult Malcolm is writing. Here’s one example. But first—to be fair, we should understand the trauma the whole family experienced and that she was later able to identify. She names it “dread.” Smiling from the window of the departing train was not a photograph of people leaving on vacation; they were fleeing for their lives. America would be better, far away, but safe? Antisemitism was everywhere. Arriving, her parents anglicized their name: Wiener became Winn; and Janet and her sister were sent to a Lutheran Sunday school. Safer for them not to be Jewish, which they effectively weren’t until they came home from school one day, repeating with pride an antisemitic phrase they’d learned, and were told, then, that they were Jewish. For Janet it was too late. She said, “We had internalized the anti-Semitism in the culture and were shocked and mortified to learn that we were not on the ‘good’ side of the equation.” She wrote that, as an adult, many years later she acknowledged and valued her Jewishness, but throughout her childhood and adolescence she had hated, resented and hidden it. She recognized, she wrote, that the term “self-hating Jew” was a sign of an anxiety disorder and it did colour and was profoundly shaping, as the people, events and incidents that populate the photographs that prompt the memories that fill this book indicate in each chapter.

Here is an example. Janet must have been in elementary school. She recognized differences, had the attentive observing eye of an outsider, was embarrassed by the clothes her mother wore on visits to her school, clothes she’d worn in Prague and unlike the American floral-printed dresses her schoolmates’ mothers wore. On her own she made a trade with a girl who lived across the street: a comic book from the neighbour for an illustrated book of fairy tales from Janet who showed her transactional results to her parents who insisted she renege on the trade and recover her beautiful book. Always resenting the accommodation her parents had made to life in what she felt was middle-class America, to their enthusiasm or maybe pragmatic acceptance of where they were—their place—she wrote, “The parallel between my trade and the one they had made of Old-World culture to New World vitality was not apparent to them and only now comes into view.” Equivalent transactions…

Janet Malcolm loved her father, a neurologist and psychiatrist—a man of generosity and kindness. She described him as having no sides. Equanimity seems to have been a prevailing condition. The auto in this biography noted that he seemed to express almost a brief rapture when he came in from the cold or ate something he really enjoyed—a state she attributed to his early privations and noted this as an example of her sensing something real rather than imagined. Again, her sensing. She describes him as the least pretentious person she’d ever known, who never pulled rank on anyone and had no fear of losing face. He loved opera, birds, wildflowers, mushrooms, poetry and baseball, and she goes on to name fine qualities and accomplishments. If he had ever been an imperfect father, she doesn’t want to list or linger on grievances. “He was a wonderful father. I know he dearly loved my sister and me. But he loved his own life more and seemed to have hated leaving it more than most men and women do.” I find myself almost without a response to the tender description of this fine and loving man, undercut by her observation that even though he loved her sister and herself, he loved himself more.

The odd state, almost of suspension, I feel here as a reader without a ready response may make it apparent that she doesn’t care how the reader responds. A recollection she had—another illustration—as a young child, of a game of potsy, like hopscotch, and a “moment of acute consciousness of the special delightedness she’d experienced … a feeling that was like the recognition of the face of joy.” Reading this, it seems to me so individual, unremarkable and unique to her that it wouldn’t be possible to share or repeat, leaving no way for anyone else to engage with her in this told memory.

Memory, we are reminded throughout the book, is not to be trusted, is not a reliable narrator. Malcolm’s parents sent the two young sisters to Happyacres, a girls’ summer camp in New Hampshire, which, from the telling, was a reasonable enactment of its name. The daily grace, recited at meals, imprinted itself on her memory for no particular reason she can recall but she concludes the chapter with another recollection, unrelated except by being a young memory: “I remember the smell of phlox in Aunt Marion’s garden.” As an adult, with a garden, she planted phlox for its “evocative smell.” Then the inevitable “but,” the tag at the end of the story—the plant was susceptible to mould and not so attractive and she stopped planting it. “It was a madeleine that didn’t earn its keep.” No harm here, no hurt or pointed critique, just wit, and an implicit caution on reading Proust too closely.

There’s a charming incident that involved Malcolm’s parents and her daughter Anne, who was staying with her grandparents at a small lake retreat frequented by Czech émigrés, among them friends of Malcolm’s parents whom they’d all found a bit tedious and dull. Still, though dull, they owned a small white dog whom they’d taught to respond to a whistled tune. The dog’s consistent and learned response delighted everyone—a memory that, years later, still delighted Anne. With perfect recall she was able to whistle the tune again. Janet Malcolm noted that she recognized it immediately— one of Anton Dvorak’s Slavonic Dances played regularly on WQXR and to which she listened “with mild boredom verging on irritation.” In spite of this she found herself responding with a flood of emotion. “It seemed to act on me as it acted on the dog,” her wit here masking what might seem an excess of sentimentality at finding herself being drawn back by the “fifty-year-old ghosts of my parents, my child and myself” calling from the shores of the lake and she was helpless but to respond.

I too have a dog story prompted by a photograph. Also black and white and I am a child. I was five, nearly six. It is the backyard of the duplex in which we lived. A narrow sidewalk led the length to the garage. I stood on it wearing, I remember perfectly, a brown, heavy cotton twill jodhpur and short jacket outfit, memorable because, while nicely clothed, I had few “outfits,” nothing so matchy and intentional. I wore a sweet round hat in navy felt with a narrow, rolled brim. Tucked into the grosgrain ribbon band was a small brown feather, in the style of the time. Posing as I was for the photograph, I had one hand low on my hip. I am comfortable, showing the beginnings of a smile and a slight squint, facing my father and the camera with the sun behind him. Not visible, but I know it was there, was a doghouse painted dark green with a pitched roof covered in rough asphalt, tarry-smelling shingles. The blond cocker spaniel wasn’t in the doghouse with its dark interior. One small window was cut into the door and covered in a gridded screen. Too dark to consider an attempted entry. What the photo also doesn’t tell us is where the puppy is, who, soft and small, had become ill and just wasn’t there. Sick, my parents told me and the doctor had to “put him to sleep.” But could we still wake him up and I was assured that yes, maybe. I didn’t ask more. Not a happy sleeper even at just about six, I felt an unease, even though I knew I looked well in the jodhpurs, hat and feather.

Janet Malcolm asks, “Do we ever write about our parents without perpetrating a fraud?” ❚