Posterous theme by Cory Watilo

David Dobbs's Somatic Marker

My catch-all first filter for web-worthy offerings and gleanings

Filed under: Janet Malcolm

Janet Malcolm on truthiness in fiction v nonfiction

In a work of nonfiction we almost never know the truth of what happened. The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction, where the writer faithfully reports on what is going on in his imagination. When James reports in "The Golden Bowl" that the Prince and Charlotte are sleeping together, we have no reason to doubt him or to wonder whether Maggie is "overreacting" to what she sees. James's is a true report. The facts of imaginative literatures are as hard as the stone that Dr. Johnson kicked. We must always take the novelist's and the playwright's and the poet's word, just as we are almost always free to doubt the biographer's or the autobiographer's or the historian's or the journalist's. In imaginative literature we are constrained from considering alternative scenarios -- there are none. This is the way it is. Only in nonfiction does the question of what happened and how people thought and felt remain open.

from Janet Malcolm, The SIlent Woman (Granta UK 1996), 155

The allure of Ted Hughes' letters, especially in typescript

In The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm's meta-biography of Sylvia Plath, Malcolm at one point describes reading some letters that Ted Hughes, who was married to Plath when she killed herself in 1962, wrote in the 1980s to Anne Stevenson, who was then writing a biography of Sylvia Plath. Stevenson Malcolm read the letters during a visit Malcolm paid to Stevenson in England. Earlier, Stevenson had mentioned to Malcolm, as a way of explaining what it was like to be around Hughes, that "One thing you must understand about Ted is that he was and still is an electrically attractive man." 


Here's Malcolm reading the letters. It's obviously mostly about Hughes, but it's interesting as well for its sensitivity (in this highly sensitive writer) to the experience of reading letters written in different media — a letter printed from a word processor being in a different media, though the paper be the same, than one  typed on an Olivetti.  

The letters from Hughes immediately drew me, as if they were the electrically attractive man himself. As I looked at the pages of dense, single-paced typing, punctuated by x-ings-out and penned-in corrections, I had a nostalgic feeling. The clotted, irregular, unrepentantly messy pages brought back the letters we used to write one another in the 1950s and '60s on our manual Olivettis and Smith Coronas, so different from the marmoreally cool and smooth letters young people write one another today on their Macintoshes and IBMs. Reading the letter giving Hughes's response to the chapters Anne had sent him of her short biography, I felt my identification with its typing swell into a feeling of intense sympathy and affection for the writer. Other letters of Hughes's that have come my way have had the same effect, and I gather that I am not alone in this reaction; other people have spoken to me with awe of Hughes's letters. Someday, when they are published, critics will wrestle with the question of what gives them their peculiar power, why they are so deeply, mysteriously moving. 

Chaos, Clutter, & the Writer’s Challenge | Wired Science | Wired.com

My post at Neuron Culture:

In The Silent Woman, Janet Malcolm’s meta-biography of Sylvia Plath, Malcolm structures the book around visits, mostly in and about London, with other writers who have written about Plath and encountered the hazards, both obvious and submerged, that await anyone writing about people live or recently alive. For the end of the book she saves a visit to one of the oddest Plath memoirists: Trevor Thomas, a man of many hats who happened to live in the flat below Plath’s in the last couple of months before she killed herself, and who in 1986 had been coaxed by the Independent to retail his memories of her. He was 79 then and a few years older when Malcolm visited him.

Thomas and a friend, Robbie, pick her up at the tube stop in London, pick up a pizza and some olives for dinner, and drive back to Thomas’s flat. The entire visit is searing, as Malcolm, a writer of incomparable intelligence, fierceness, and compassion, tries to give order to Thomas’s dense, cluttered existence in a house that is much the same way. Toward the end of this passage, which is just short of the end of the book — this is both a biography of biography as well as of Plath, so she’s trying to tie up one just before the other — Malcolm offers this extraordinary passage about the challenge facing any writer. It’s vintage Malcolm and an extraordinary view of the writer’s challenge:

 

Read the rest of this post »

​