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Janet Malcolm

Janet Malcolm is the author of Reading Chekhov: A Critical ­Journey, among other books. (June 2016)

IN THE REVIEW

Socks

Vivien Leigh in Julien Duvivier’s adaptation of Anna Karenina, 1948

A sort of asteroid has hit the safe world of Russian literature in English translation. A couple named Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have established an industry of taking everything they can get their hands on written in Russian and putting it into flat, awkward English.

‘A Very Sadistic Man’

Ted Hughes, 1978; photograph by Bill Brandt

Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life

by Jonathan Bate
In his introduction to Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life, Jonathan Bate offers a “cardinal rule” of literary biography: “The work and how it came into being is what is worth writing about, what is to be respected. The life is invoked in order to illuminate the work; the biographical impulse must be at one with the literary-critical.” But these fine words—are just fine words.

The Master Writer of the City

Joseph Mitchell in Lower Manhattan, near the old Fulton Fish Market; photograph by his wife, Therese Mitchell

Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker

by Thomas Kunkel
The idea that reporters are constantly resisting the temptation to invent is a laughable one. Reporters don’t invent because they don’t know how to. This is why they are journalists rather than novelists or short-story writers. They depend on the kindness of the strangers they actually meet for the characters in their stories. There are no fictional characters lurking in their imaginations.

NYR DAILY

Free Associations: Collages

Janet Malcolm: Temperature of World Cities, 2011 (detail).

Last winter, I came into possession of the papers of an émigré psychiatrist who practiced in New York in the late 1940s and 1950s. The archive included a collection of manila envelopes, around six by ten inches, stuffed with folded sheets of thin paper covered with single-spaced typing: the notes the psychiatrist made after seeing patients (many of them fellow émigrés) in his office. As I studied the sheets with their inky typewriting and 60-year-old paper clips holding them together and leaving rust marks on the surface, my collagist’s imagination began to stir. I began to “see” some version of the collages on view here.

Comedy Central on the Mall

On October 31, Peter Clothier, a seventy-four-year-old author and retired professor, posted an entry on his blog, called The Buddha Diaries, about the wonderful day he and his wife Ellie had spent at the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear on October 30 at the Mall in Washington, D.C., between noon and 3 PM. “We stood there trapped for a good two hours, surrounded by people who, like us, had showed up. We saw nothing, heard nothing of what was happening on the stage. It was great!” Clothier writes.

Thoughts on Autobiography from an Abandoned Autobiography

Republica Portuguesa, a collage by Janet Malcolm, 6¼ x 17 in., 2003
(Courtesy of Lori Bookstein Fine Art)
I have been aware, as I write this autobiography, of a feeling of boredom with the project. My efforts to make what I write interesting seem pitiful. My hands are tied, I feel. I cannot write about myself as I write about the people I have written about as a journalist. To these people I have been a kind of amanuensis: they have dictated their stories to me and I have retold them. They have posed for me and I have drawn their portraits. No one is dictating to me or posing for me now.