The case hinged on five quotations that Masson claimed were fabrications and that Malcolm, embarrassingly, couldn’t produce on tape—although, as David Gates pointed out in Newsweek, “what Malcolm does have on tape—only a few lines are in dispute—is more than enough to make Masson look silly.” The case dragged up and down and a jury finally found against Masson in 1994; but by then the victory for Malcolm was nothing more than symbolic as her reporting had been roundly denounced and the public drama had been huge and humiliating for her. [1]
“To your list of things to worry about, if there’s any room, add the Jeffrey Masson-Janet Malcolm libel suit, which the Supreme Court heard in January and is expected to rule on some time before the middle of the year. Malcolm, journalism’s grand inquisitor, is in the odd position of protecting the interests of journalists in a way not all of us are sure we want to be protected. And the Court, in an effort to keep us from doing our worst, could set standards that inhibit us from doing our best.” [3]
John Taylor passed along a hypothesis, too neat by half but still hard to shrug off, that an acquaintance of McGinniss’ had put forward: “She could expiate guilt toward her Jeffrey M. by coming to the aid of another Jeffrey M., who was betrayed by a writer. Freud said nothing is coincidence.”
The Salon piece covers the entire spectrum: “Judging from the outcome of the libel trial and from their later careers, it seems safe to say (but ‘safe’ is dicey—you have to take account of my own bias, which should be clear by now) that the plaintiff in Masson v. Malcolm came out looking worse than the defendant.
Having earlier offended journalists and biographers Malcolm now faced the wrath of the judiciary in The Crime of Sheila McGough (1999).” [1] “At the very outset she observes that the struggle in a trial ‘is between two competing narratives,’ and later she elaborates: ‘Trials are won by attorneys whose stories fit, and lost by those whose stories are like the shapeless housecoat that truth, in her disdain for appearances, has chosen as her uniform.’ Truth is not only a harsh mistress but also a ‘messy, incoherent, aimless, boring, absurd’ one. ‘The truth does not make a good story; that’s why we have art.’”
In her piece on Salinger, Malcolm wrote: “Today Zooey does not seem too long, and is arguably Salinger’s masterpiece. Rereading it and its companion piece Franny is no less rewarding than rereading The Great Gatsby. It remains brilliant and is in no essential sense dated. It is the contemporary criticism that has dated.” The same could be said about Malcolm’s work as the criticism and the tirade of the press against her seems dated while her work remains intense and probing.
“Of Sheila’s trial she writes, ‘It was like one of those nightmares of guilt, where everyone you have ever known has gathered to accuse you of wrongdoing.’ Notice the universalizing second person; she might as well have used the first, having suffered this nightmare herself, not just in her humiliating trial but, more bewilderingly, in the press crusade against her that left her in the minds of many, as she wryly phrased it, ‘a kind of fallen woman of journalism.’”
“The Crime of Sheila McGough falters, as her other books don’t, because all the ins and outs of the case against Sheila (and of the countless balled-up cases against her fatal client, Bailes) are so hard to follow and ultimately so boring that the narrative bogs down; by the end, I was as confused as most of the jurors. She relates too much, not too little.”
“But it’s an admirable failure. Anyone after a prize as slippery as truth is swimming against a challenging current. Towards the beginning of In the Freud Archives, Malcolm offers an arresting metaphor for psychoanalytic therapy: ‘To make the unconscious conscious … is to pour water through a sieve. The moisture that remains on the surface of the mesh is the benefit of analysis.’ That moisture is also about all of value that we can confidently retrieve from the current of factoids, rumors, misunderstandings and flat-out lies through which the truth (whatever that is) tumbles along like specks of silver. Or—to shift to her later, homelier and, I think, lovelier metaphor—Malcolm is ‘exquisite,’ even ‘rather magnificent’ in her efforts to tailor the shapeless housecoat of the truth into an honest and serviceable garment without dolling it up beyond recognition. And if it draws some outraged stares and more than a few catcalls, that’s probably the price you have to pay for going around garbed in anything so out of fashion.”
Notes:Source: Janet Malcolm “In her relentless pursuit of the truth she’s left a few bodies in her wake, but isn’t that part of a journalist’s job?” Craig Seligman; Salon, Tuesday Feb 29, 2000 [1]
Source: Himmelfarb, Gertrude. “The Right to Misquote.” Commentary 91, no. 4 (April 1991): 31-4. [2]
Source: Hoyt, Michael. “Malcolm, Masson, and You.” Columbia Journalism Review 29, no. 6 (March-April 1991): 38-44. [3]
Source: Taylor, John. “Holier Than Thou.” New York magazine, March 27, 1989.
Source: Malcolm, Janet. “Justice to J.D. Salinger.” The New York Book of Reviews, VOLUME 48, NUMBER 10 • JUNE 21, 2001
Photo is from the author’s biography page in The New Yorker.
Spellings from American English usage have been kept as such.
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