“Hypocrisy is the grease that keeps society functioning in an agreeable way, by allowing for human fallibility and reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable human needs for order and pleasure.”
Those are the words, unmistakable for their wit and moral clarity, of Janet Malcolm, from her most famous book, The Journalist and the Murderer. They’re not words she lived by personally, however. She was uncompromising in her own response to fallibilities large and small, cheerfully sending back wine at restaurants, rejecting all offers to bring contributions to dinner parties, and chiding anyone who read a certain dire translation of Anna Karenina. I remember on more than one occasion giving her a holiday present, and then watching her unwrap it, look it over, and hand it back to me, explaining that she thought I would enjoy it more than she would.
That may not have been the reaction I was hoping for as an eager-to-please nephew. But over time I understood that it was the way she expressed love and generosity, and a telling example of how her art and her domestic life were often animated by the same ambitious impulses. Her theme as a writer, as it emerged over the course of decades of now-canonical works of literary reportage, was the impossibility of objective truth – in psychoanalysis, journalism, biography, and criminal justice. But she was a moralist, not a nihilist – the fact that it was an impossible ideal made it all the more important to pursue. So she pursued it on the page, in her home, and in her relationships. She was direct and candid about everything, including her own life, and that gave her small circle of lucky relatives and friends a bond, even if it sometimes meant returning home with a piece of deficient crockery.
She inherited a fundamentally ironic sensibility from her emigre parents (my grandparents), whose Prague social scene drew from the same wellspring of European post-first world war avant-garde transgression that bred the dada and surrealist movements. One Christmas, her present for her sister’s musician husband (my father) was an impenetrable piece of sound art on an old cassette tape recorder. It sounded like (and possibly was) workmen banging on metal for 20 minutes. She was a prolific creator of collages, hundreds of them, featuring scraps of images and words that she saw artistic potential in recontextualising. She kept these scraps in beautiful trays on her desk at home and in an office in Union Square, everything from takeout chopstick wrappers to tables of world temperatures to her psychiatrist father’s old patient notes. At different times her magpie eye also yielded collections of soup cans, lemon juicers, Mona Lisa paraphernalia, laboratory beakers and decaying burdock leaves, the last of which she immortalised in an eccentric and poignant 2008 book of photographs. She collected interesting people as well – professors, psychoanalysts, young aspiring writers whose work caught her attention – inviting them to tea and bringing them together at elegant dinner parties.
About that crockery: what exactly was wrong with it? It was never entirely clear, but a visitor to Janet’s homes, in Gramercy Park in New York City, and on top of a hill in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, could see that she curated them as carefully as she crafted her prose, and with the same luminous effect. She captured some of her aesthetic in her first published work in the New Yorker, a 1963 poem entitled Thoughts on Living in a Shaker House:
This Shaker house is neat and low
And everything is made just so,
Its lineaments are straight and clean,
The household gods are epicene.
In Janet’s airy kitchens, giving way to book-lined living rooms, “just so” meant a sumptuous elaboration of Shaker austerity: clawfoot tables, bentwood chairs, off-white slipcovered sofas, and open shelves lined with yellowware bowls. The art on the walls often had that trademark ironic air of something lifted from a slightly lesser domain: a kitschy hooked rug depicting a pensive deer, a yearbook-style photograph of 1950s businessmen. It all fulfilled an exacting personal vision that, like her writing, had the additional benefit of showing that the human needs for order and pleasure were reconcilable after all. Many of us who enjoyed roast chicken and mint tea at those tables spent the rest of our lives trying to replicate the effect in our own homes. We had as much success as the generations of writers who tried to replicate her prose, inevitably falling short of the paragon but elevated by the effort.
Michael W Miller is senior editor for features and weekend at the Wall Street Journal
