Forty-One False Starts Read online

  Forty-one false starts

  ALSO BY JANET MALCOLM

  Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial Burdock

  Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice

  Reading Chekhov: A Critical Journey

  The Crime of Sheila McGough

  The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

  The Purloined Clinic: Selected Writings

  The Journalist and the Murderer

  In the Freud Archives

  Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession

  Diana and Nikon: Essays on Photography

  Janet Malcolm has garnered worldwide acclaim for her many books, and received the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography for Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice. Malcolm writes frequently for the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.

  Forty-one

  false starts

  Essays on artists

  and writers

  Janet Malcolm

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © 2013 by Janet Malcolm

  Introduction copyright © 2013 by Helen Garner

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  The essays in this volume originally appeared in the following publications: New York Review of Books: “Salinger’s Cigarettes,” “Capitalist Pastorale,” “The Genius of the Glass House,” “Good Pictures,” “Edward Weston’s Women,” “Nudes Without Desire,” “The Not Returning Part of It,” “Thoughts on Autobiography from an Abandoned Autobiography”; New York Times Book Review: “The Woman Who Hated Women”; New Yorker: “Forty-one False Starts,” “Depth of Field,” “A House of One’s Own,” “A Girl of the Zeitgeist,” “Advanced Placement,” “William Shawn,” “Joseph Mitchell”.

  First published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2013

  First published in Australia by The Text Publishing Company, 2013

  Cover design by W. H. Chong

  Page design by Jonathan D. Lippincott

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Author: Malcolm, Janet, author.

  Title: Forty-one false starts / by Janet Malcolm; introduction by Helen Garner.

  ISBN: 9781922147165 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781922148230 (eBook)

  Subjects: Authors. Artists. Authorship.

  Dewey Number: 808.02

  To the memory of Gardner

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Helen Garner

  Forty-one False Starts

  Depth of Field

  A House of One’s Own

  The Woman Who Hated Women

  Salinger’s Cigarettes

  Capitalist Pastorale

  The Genius of the Glass House

  Good Pictures

  Edward Weston’s Women

  Nudes Without Desire

  A Girl of the Zeitgeist

  Advanced Placement

  The Not Returning Part of It

  William Shawn

  Joseph Mitchell

  Thoughts on Autobiography from an Abandoned Autobiography

  INTRODUCTION

  by Helen Garner

  The great American journalist Janet Malcolm will turn eighty next year. This fact has hit me amidships. She is the writer who has influenced and taught me more than any other. I have never met her, or heard her speak, but I would know her written voice anywhere. It is a literary voice, composed and dry, articulate and free-striding, drawing on deep learning yet plain in its address, and above all fearless, though she cannot possibly be without fear, since she understands it so well in others.

  The whole drive of her work is expressed, I think, in a phrase she uses in one of the essays collected here: “the rapture of a first-hand encounter with another’s lived experience.”

  Rapture is not too strong a word for the experience of reading Malcolm. You can feast on these essays in Forty-One False Starts, as on all her work. Nothing in them is slick or shallow. Her work is always challenging, intellectually and morally complex, but it never hangs heavy. It is airy, racy, and mercilessly cut back, so that it surges along with what one critic has called “breath-taking rhetorical velocity”. It sparkles with deft character sketches. It bounds back and forth between straight-ahead reportage and subtle readings of documents and diaries, of photographs and paintings.

  Malcolm’s whole way of perceiving the world is deeply dyed by the psychoanalytical view of reality. She never theorises or uses jargon. She simply proceeds on the assumption that (as she puts it in another book, The Purloined Clinic) “life is lived on two levels of thought and act: one in our awareness and the other only inferable, from dreams, slips of the tongue, and inexplicable behaviour”. This approach, coupled with her natural flair for metaphor and imagery, allows her almost poetic access to meaning in the way people dress and move, speak or decline to speak—and in her most famous and disputed concern, trust and betrayal in the relations between journalists and their subjects.

  You feel the intense pleasure she gets from thinking. She keeps coming at things from the most unexpected angles, undercutting the certainty she has just reasoned you into accepting, and dropping you through the floor into a realm of fruitful astonishment, and sometimes laughter.

  She skates past the traditional teachings on split infinitives or the undesirability of adjectives: like Christina Stead she will string adjectives and adverbs together in sinewy strands—half a dozen of them, each one working hard. An art magazine, she says, has “an impudent, aggressively unbuttoned, improvised, yet oddly poised air”.

  Her description of clothes and their meaning is deadly: “a tall, thin, bearded man wearing tight jeans and high-heeled clogs”. Her brisk shorthand often has a sting its tail: “Wilson, who had an unhappy childhood in a mansion”; “the look of a place inhabited by a man who no longer lives with a woman”. A young art critic speaks, she says, “with the accent of that non-existent aristocratic European country from which so many bookish New York boys have emigrated.”

  The longest piece in this collection, “A Girl of the Zeitgeist”, is a study of the New York art scene of the 1980s. Nothing could interest me less, I thought; but within a few sentences I found myself drawn into a scintillating anthropological investigation that I read greedily, realising that like any other microcosm this one could be studied with both entertainment and profit, and with a thrilling degree of enlightenment about the whole human project.

  For Malcolm, life is unruly. She is gripped by artists’ struggles to get command of it, not to be abject before it. But she pulls no punches. She will observe a person and the décor of his apartment, his shoes, his clothes, his way of cooking; she will switch on her reel-to-reel, start him talking, then stand back. Her ear is so finely tuned to speech, her nerves to the unspoken, that later, at her desk, she will recreate her subject’s utterances with a lethal accuracy, unfolding his character and world-view like a fan.

  She maintains a perfectly judged distance between her eye and its target. She does not seem to suck up to the people she interviews, or try to make them like her by revealing her own personal life in exchange for their confidences. Her boredom threshold is high. She gives her subjects rope. She allows herself to be charmed, at least until her interlocutor reveals his vacuity or his phoniness, and the
n she snaps shut in a burst of impatience, and veers away. Although at times she draws back in distaste, or contempt, or even pity, she is not someone who deplores the way of the world or desires to change it. She merely observes it with a matchless eye. In her work there is a complete absence of hot air.

  She will not be read lazily. She assumes intelligence and expects you to work, to pace along with her. Her writing turns you into a better reader. There is no temptation to skim: its texture is too rich, too worldly, too surprising. She is brilliant at revealing things in stages, so you gasp, and gasp, and gasp again. She yokes the familiar with the strange in the way that dreams do—suddenly a wall cracks open and a flood of light pours in, or perhaps a perfectly aimed, needle-like beam. Reading her is an austerely enchanting kind of fun.

  In the closing piece of this collection, fragments from “an abandoned autobiography”, Malcolm describes herself as “someone who probably became a journalist precisely because she didn’t want to find herself alone in the room”. What are those words probably and precisely doing there, bouncing off each other, striking a little chord of uncertainty? I dare to feel a rush of comradeliness. Ms Malcolm, Janet, we cannot do without you. Live in good health and keep writing, for another ten years at least. Dear boss, shine on.

  FORTY-ONE FALSE STARTS

  FORTY-ONE FALSE STARTS

  1994

  1

  There are places in New York where the city’s anarchic, unaccommodating spirit, its fundamental, irrepressible aimlessness and heedlessness have found especially firm footholds. Certain transfers between subway lines, passageways of almost transcendent sordidness; certain sites of torn-down buildings where parking lots have silently sprung up like fungi; certain intersections created by illogical confluences of streets—these express with particular force the city’s penchant for the provisional and its resistance to permanence, order, closure. To get to the painter David Salle’s studio, walking west on White Street, you have to traverse one of these disquieting intersections—that of White and Church Streets and an interloping Sixth Avenue—which has created an unpleasantly wide expanse of street to cross, interrupted by a wedge-shaped island on which a commercial plant nursery has taken up forlorn and edgy residence, surrounding itself with a high wire fence and keeping truculently irregular hours. Other businesses that have arisen around the intersection—the seamy Baby Doll Lounge, with its sign offering GO-GO GIRLS ; the elegant Ristorante Arquà; the nameless grocery and Lotto center; the dour Kinney parking lot—have a similar atmosphere of insularity and transience. Nothing connects with anything else, and everything looks as if it might disappear overnight. The corner feels like a no man’s land and—if one happens to be thinking about David Salle—looks like one of his paintings.

  Salle’s studio, on the second floor of a five-story loft building, is a long room lit with bright, cold overhead light. It is not a beautiful studio. Like the streets outside, it gives no quarter to the visitor in search of the picturesque. It doesn’t even have a chair for the visitor to sit in, unless you count a backless, half-broken metal swivel chair Salle will offer with a murmur of inattentive apology. Upstairs, in his living quarters, it is another story. But down here everything has to do with work and with being alone.

  A disorderly profusion of printed pictorial matter covers the surfaces of tables in the middle of the room: art books, art journals, catalogs, brochures mingle with loose illustrations, photographs, odd pictures ripped from magazines. Scanning these complicated surfaces, the visitor feels something of the sense of rebuff he feels when looking at Salle’s paintings, a sense that this is all somehow none of one’s business. Here lie the sources of Salle’s postmodern art of “borrowed” or “quoted” images—the reproductions of famous old and modern paintings, the advertisements, the comics, the photographs of nude or half-undressed women, the fabric and furniture designs that he copies and puts into his paintings—but one’s impulse, as when coming into a room of Salle’s paintings, is to politely look away. Salle’s hermeticism, the private, almost secretive nature of his interests and tastes and intentions, is a signature of his work. Glancing at the papers he has made no effort to conceal gives one the odd feeling of having broken into a locked desk drawer.

  On the walls of the studio are five or six canvases, on which Salle works simultaneously. In the winter of 1992, when I began visiting him in his studio, he was completing a group of paintings for a show in Paris in April. The paintings had a dense, turgid character. Silk-screen excerpts from Indian architectural ornaments, chair designs, and photographic images of a woman wrapped in cloth were overlaid with drawings of some of the forms in Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, rendered in slashing, ungainly brushstrokes, together with images of coils of rope, pieces of fruit, and eyes. Salle’s earlier work had been marked by a kind of spaciousness, sometimes an emptiness, such as surrealist works are prone to. But here everything was condensed, impacted, mired. The paintings were like an ugly mood. Salle himself, a slight, handsome man with shoulder-length hair, which he wears tied back, like a matador, was feeling bloody-minded. He was going to be forty the following September. He had broken up with his girlfriend, the choreographer and dancer Karole Armitage. His moment was passing. Younger painters were receiving attention. He was being passed over. But he was also being attacked. He was not looking forward to the Paris show. He hated Paris, with its “heavily subsidized aestheticism.” He disliked his French dealer . . .

  2

  In a 1991 interview with the screenwriter Becky Johnston, during a discussion of what Johnston impatiently called “this whole Neo-Expressionist Zeitgeist Postmodernist What-ever-you-want-to-call-it Movement” and its habit of “constantly looking backward and reworking or recontextualizing art history,” the painter David Salle said, with disarming frankness, “You mustn’t underestimate the extent to which all this was a process of educating ourselves. Our generation was pathetically educated, just pathetic beyond imagination. I was better educated than many. Julian”—the painter Julian Schnabel—“was totally uneducated. But I wasn’t much better, frankly. We had to educate ourselves in a hundred different ways. Because if you had been hanging around the Conceptual artists, all you learned was the Frankfurt School. It was as if nothing existed before or after. So part of it was the pledge of self-education—you know, going to Venice, looking at great paintings, looking at great architecture, looking at great furniture—and having very early the opportunity to kind of buy stuff. That’s a form of self-education. It’s not just about acquisition. It was a tremendous explosion of information and knowledge.”

  To kind of buy stuff. What is the difference between buying stuff and kind of buying it? Is “kind of buying” buying with a bad conscience, buying with the ghost of the Frankfurt School grimly looking over your shoulder and smiting its forehead as it sees the money actually leave your hand? This ghost, or some relative of it, has hung over all the artists who, like Salle, made an enormous amount of money in the eighties, when they were still in their twenties or barely in their thirties. In the common perception, there is something unseemly about young people getting rich. Getting rich is supposed to be the reward for hard work, preferably arriving when you are too old to enjoy it. And the spectacle of young millionaires who made their bundle not from business or crime but from avant-garde art is particularly offensive. The avant-garde is supposed to be the conscience of the culture, not its id.

  3

  All during my encounter with the artist David Salle—he and I met for interviews in his studio, on White Street, over a period of two years—I was acutely conscious of his money. Even when I got to know him and like him, I couldn’t dispel the disapproving, lefty, puritanical feeling that would somehow be triggered each time we met, whether it was by the sight of the assistant at a sort of hairsalon receptionist’s station outside the studio door; or by the expensive furniture of a fifties corporate style in the upstairs loft where he lives; or by the mineral water he woul
d bring out during our talks and pour into white paper cups, which promptly lost their take-out-counter humbleness and assumed the hauteur of the objects in the design collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

  Salle was one of the fortunate art stars of the eighties—young men and women plucked from semi-poverty and transformed into millionaires by genies disguised as art dealers. The idea of a rich avant-garde has never sat well with members of my generation. Serious artists, as we know them or like to think of them, are people who get by but do not have a lot of money. They live with second or third wives or husbands and with children from the various marriages, and they go to Cape Cod in the summer. Their apartments are filled with faded Persian carpets and cat-clawed sofas and beautiful and odd objects bought before anyone else saw their beauty. Salle’s loft was designed by an architect. Everything in it is sleek, cold, expensive, unused. A slight sense of quotation marks hovers in the air, but it is very slight—it may not even be there—and it doesn’t dispel the atmosphere of dead-serious connoisseurship by which the room is dominated.

  4

  During one of my visits to the studio of the artist David Salle, he told me that he never revises. Every brushstroke is irrevocable. He doesn’t correct or repaint, ever. He works under the dire conditions of performance. Everything counts, nothing may be taken back, everything must always go relentlessly forward, and a mistake may be fatal. One day, he showed me a sort of murdered painting. He had worked on it a little too long, taken a misstep, killed it.

  5

  The artist David Salle and I are sitting at a round table in my apartment. He is a slight, handsome man of thirty-nine, with dark shoulder-length hair worn tightly sleeked back and bound with a rubber band, accentuating his appearance of quickness and lightness, of being sort of streamlined. He wears elegant, beautifully polished shoes and speaks in a low, cultivated voice. His accent has no trace of the Midwest, where he grew up, the son of second-generation Russian Jewish parents. It has no affectation, either. He is agreeable, ironic, a little detached. “I can’t remember what we talked about last time,” he says. “I have no memory. I remember making the usual artist’s complaints about critics, and then saying, ‘Well, that’s terribly boring, we don’t want to be stuck talking about that’—and then talking about that. I had a kind of bad feeling afterward. I felt inadequate.”