The Journalist and the Manipulator

A t one point or another, The New Yorker ’s Janet Malcolm construed each profession or art form she wrote about as a mug’s game.

She asserted that the “crowning paradox of psychoanalysis is the near-uselessness of its insights,” though she filled her work with Freudian tropes and paradigms. (She herself spent eight years in analysis.) The presumption of innocence underlying criminal trials had a “hollowness” that called the whole judicial system into question.

Biography was a genre that Malcolm practiced and investigated, and she has now become a subject of it with the publication of Eve Sneider’s The Absent Woman .

But all biography struck Malcolm as “transgressive,” an “impertinence”; its readers would be better off accepting that “if anything is our own business, it is our pathetic native self.” Which isn’t to say that readers should favor autobiography.

The “original sin” of that undertaking is to wallow in “memories of conflict, resentment, blame, self-justification—and it is wrong, unfair, inexcusable to publish them.” The quotations above come from five books produced over five decades, and this catalog of futility and ethical compromise does not even include Malcolm’s most famous animadversion, which she lobbed against her own craft and calling: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” These words open The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), Malcolm’s account of the lawsuit brought by Jeffrey MacDonald (the murderer, an Army captain convicted of killing his wife and children ) against Joe McGinniss (the journalist working on a book about him), who’d maintained MacDonald’s cooperation by writing him letters that conveyed the clear impression that McGinniss believed in his innocence.

The book McGinniss finally published, Fatal Vision , squarely affirmed MacDonald’s guilt.

This literary treachery seemed to agitate Malcolm more than the slaughter of MacDonald’s family.

It was all of a piece with her certainty that nonfiction writers made reality and fact as pliable as they are for attorneys facing off in a courtroom.

Journalistic accounts of trials all impose falsely coherent plotlines on actuality.

According to Malcolm, nonfiction is always aspiring to the authoritative “completeness” and seeming inevitability of fiction.