Janet Malcolm: Interview with a vampire

Janet Malcolm thinks journalists are immoral and biographers are burglars. She talks to Matthew J Reisz about the joys of Chekhov, collage and chewing-gum wrappers.

By the second page of Reading Chekhov: a critical journey (Granta, £13.99), Janet Malcolm already feels like "a character in a new drama". She is in Yalta, looking down at a famous Chekhovian view, and starts to see herself in "the absurdist farce of the literary pilgrim who leaves the magical pages of a work of genius and travels to an 'original scene' that can only fall short of expectations".

She realizes she has never really liked travel writing, for the interesting (and very Chekhovian) reason that travel itself is "a pallid affair in comparison to ordinary life". Our real dramas take place at home. Her most savage words, however, are reserved for biographers: "The letters and journals we leave behind and the impressions we have made on our contemporaries are the mere husk of the kernel of our essential life. When we die, the kernel is buried with us. This is the horror and pity of death and the reason for the inescapable triviality of biography." She illustrates this with a brilliant exposé of how Chekhov's biographers have both tidied up and embroidered the eyewitness accounts of his death; one even lifted details from a fictional account by Raymond Carver.

Malcolm claims to be someone who "just likes to stay at home and has to drag [herself] out for other people", but for more than 20 years the US-based writer's vivid and incisive works of reportage have taken her to some fascinating places – behind the scenes of courtroom dramas, into the solitary-confinement cell of a convicted murderer, among the biographers picking over the marriage of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Her detached refinement always makes her a witty and illuminating voyager into some very macho worlds. It has also got her into trouble. In the Freud Archives (1984) tells the story of Jeffrey Masson, the Young Turk who was appointed Secretary of the Sigmund Freud Archives and then got into a fierce dispute with the psychoanalytic establishment about the life stories of Freud's early patients, and whether they had been made neurotic by real abuse or by their forbidden unconscious fantasies. Malcolm claims that her attitude to Masson was that of "an unillusioned but fond aunt of a gifted but impossible boy", but he sued her for libelling him through invented quotations. It took over a decade for the matter finally to be settled in her favour. I ask her about the question of "fairness". Like most of her books, In the Freud Archives is a gripping human drama built around clashing narratives.

Malcolm certainly discredits Masson as a brash self-publicist, but didn't that tend to shut down consideration of whether his concrete claims were true? Her reply sounds pretty evasive: "You could say that any book that takes a position is not fair, unless you keep saying, 'On the one hand, on the other ...' and take a great deal of trouble to present both sides. That kind of journalism tends not to be very interesting. We do more of that kind of thing in our country than you do in yours: On the one hand, there was a Holocaust; on the other hand, there are people who say there wasn't."

Even allowing for comic exaggeration, there is something disconcerting about interviewing a writer who once described the journalist as a kind of vampire, "mak[ing] away with the fragile essence of a person's being and turn[ing it] into some horrid mess of his own while the subject sleeps". In the flesh, as in her books, Malcolm is cool, precise, solicitous, detached but genuinely eager to convert me to her passion for Chekhov ("Read The Duel – and see if you can resist it!"). I ask in what sense she identifies with Chekhov. She modestly demurs and then says: "I am reticent and not an exhibitionistic person – he too was reticent. More quiet than noisy. He hated to get out on stages and perform – I share that." She has the shy writer's gift for coming up with highly provocative statements in the quiet of her study – that the biographer is like "the professional burglar", that the work of the journalist is "morally indefensible" – and then claiming to be surprised when people are provoked. She is not about to get caught out in careless self-revelation.

I mention a moving piece she wrote in 1990, which describes her impressions of Prague, the city where she was born and which she left as a very young child in 1939. The real focus, however, is a former dissident called Daniel Kumermann, a lovably morose, unsuccessful journalist who had worked as a window cleaner and whose passions included comics and chewing-gum wrappers.

Malcolm very unexpectedly calls him "a sort of double". In what sense, I ask her. His experience echoed hers, she says, "mostly in being both Jewish and Czech. Some of the joy of the Velvet Revolution and of coming back to Czechoslovakia was haunted by my knowledge of all the Jews that had perished. That is where the doubleness mostly came in, in that feeling of being Czech, but still identifying with the Jews because of that tragic history. Personally I don't think we could have been more unlike."

I find it hard, I admit, to imagine her collecting chewing-gum wrappers. "I think you're right, although I was fascinated by his collection. Now that you mention it, there may be a tenuous connection, because in recent years I've begun to do work on paper with collage. I was in a group show last year and have a one-person show coming up this year. The works are created out of material from the past – a photograph of a painting, an old book or ledger, things from family archives – like the scraps that psychoanalysts are looking for. Part of my impulse was to preserve the 20th century in some way – which was my century." There is something of the psychoanalytic collage about Reading Chekhov.

Malcolm shot to fame with Psychoanalysis: the impossible profession (1980), an extended portrait of a 46-year-old Manhattan analyst which was sufficiently complex and three-dimensional to win glowing reviews from both critics and admirers of psychoanalysis. Analytic technique (and Chekhov's fascination with tiny details) still inspires her journalistic technique: "One of the lessons I've learnt and applied to my writing from psychoanalysis is that the action is on the surface – depth psychology is the wrong metaphor. It's the small things one notices about people, and what's going on between people, that's where the pay-off is. Keeping one's eyes open, listening, watching, being quiet, adopting some of the techniques of the psychoanalyst in talking to people, will bring you that surface from which something more comes."

The new book is built around a trip to Russia, where she read Proust, deliberately avoided Chekhov experts, visited drab Chekhov museums and only interacted with waiters, tour guides and people on the street. She then returned to America, intensively re-read Chekhov's stories and plays – writings she finds so moving she kept exclaiming: "Here they come again! Here come the tears!" – and created a collage interweaving her travels, the views of critics and her own powerful reflections on the life and works.

Her journey also took her, of course, back to the part of the world she originally came from, and (not knowing Russian) she seems to have accessed some of the deeper emotion in Chekhov by mentally translating him into her first language, Czech: "Slavic languages have affectionate diminutives, which English doesn't. They are kind of untranslatable. The Constance Garnett translation uses phrases like 'little mother', but there's a familiar tenderness in the Slavic terms which that doesn't have."

Finally, I ask Malcolm about the savaged biographers she relies upon for fascinating information about Chekhov's illnesses, romances, gardens and relationships with his feckless brothers and literary acquaintances. "Biographies never feel as real as the best fiction. There is such a discontinuity between the narrative and the material it comes from, which is always such a mixed bag of letters, recollections and other data. I don't deny that biographers work very hard. People sometimes complain about biographies being so long, with so much detail, but I like those better. They seem closer to the texture of life."

Compared to a traditional full-scale biography (and even to some of Malcolm's earlier books), Reading Chekhov seems a rather amateurish effort. Yet, just as in Chekhov, its very obliqueness can lead to sudden piercing insights.

Matthew J Reisz is the editor of 'Jewish Quarterly'

Biography

Janet Malcolm was born in Prague, educated in New York and Michigan, and is now one of America's best-known investigative journalists. She is a regular contributor to The New Yorker and New York Review of Books. She has written a book of essays on photography, Diana and Nikon (1980); two books on psychoanalysis; two books on contentious court cases, The Journalist and the Murderer (1990) and The Crime of Sheila McGough (1999); and The Silent Woman (1995), a study of the afterlife of Sylvia Plath in the hands of her critics and biographers. The Journalist and the Murderer opens with the much quoted (and much criticised) sentence: "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." A collection of Malcolm's shorter writings, on topics ranging from family therapy to the Bloomsbury Group, was published as The Purloined Clinic (1992).