Salon.com > Janet Malcolm

“A Wilderness of Error”: The murder in question

Sun, 02 Sep 2012 21:00:00 +0000

"The case has been disastrous for almost everyone who touched it. It's like a third rail." So says Harvey Silverglate, an appellate attorney for Jeffrey MacDonald, who has been imprisoned for 33 years for the murders of his wife and two young daughters in 1970. The person Silvergate says this to is Errol Morris, the maker of several seminal documentary films, most notably "The Thin Blue Line," which helped exonerate a man who had been wrongly convicted of killing a police officer in Texas. By the time Silvergate explains his own decision to back away from the case emotionally, it's too late for Morris. He's like a dog with a bone.

The MacDonald case is an object of obsession for many, with fervent advocates for both sides. Some believe with all their hearts that MacDonald is guilty. Others believe with equal vehemence that he's not. By the end of his new book, "A Wilderness of Errors: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald," Morris is careful to state that he does not know whether MacDonald is the killer. He is convinced, however, that MacDonald was "railroaded," that authorities decided early on that he was guilty and that they ignored and concealed physical evidence supporting his account of what happened in the early morning hours of Feb. 17, 1970, in Fort Bragg, N.C. By the end of this highly detailed but consistently engaging book, I was, too.

“Iphigenia in Forest Hills”: The mother and the hit man

Sun, 27 Mar 2011 21:01:00 +0000

Janet Malcolm's "Iphigenia in Forest Hills" is everything you think you don't want in a courtroom drama. Expanded from a New Yorker article about the 2009 joint murder trial of a woman in Queens and the man she was convicted of hiring to kill her ex-husband, this slender book embraces ambiguity and uncertainty. The point of a trial is to establish what "really" happened and who is truly responsible, which is one reason why courtrooms have been the setting of so many satisfying fictions. But the shooting of Daniel Malakov as he stood with his 4-year-old daughter in a playground was no fiction, and there are times when insisting that a handful of facts be made to add up to a clear chain of events and an unqualified apportioning of blame leaves us not with justice but something that looks like its opposite.

Here’s looking at you, “Kid”

Sat, 06 Oct 2007 12:00:00 +0000

If journalists were forced to observe the commandment that doctors swear to follow -- first, do no harm -- it's not clear whether our profession would exist at all. Doctors do harm all the time, of course, because they are human beings who make mistakes and whose judgment and knowledge are imperfect. They may just be bad doctors. But even good journalists are likely to cause harm (albeit non-lethal harm, most of the time) to the people they cover, without a whisper of conscience and generally in service to high-minded abstractions like "the truth" or "the reader" or "the public's right to know."

As New Yorker reporter Janet Malcolm, the patron saint of journalistic self-flagellation, has put it, what those noble phrases really boil down to -- and the impulse that journalism really serves -- is "society's fundamental and incorrigible nosiness." In the most famous sentences of her career, and perhaps the most famous ever written about the craft, she declares: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to know what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse."

Uncovering Gertrude and Alice

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 11:23:00 +0000

Gertrude Stein has a much deserved reputation as a great American writer whom no one reads. This is considerably different from being an obscure experimental filmmaker because, in the end, a difficult filmmaker will always have more fans than a difficult writer -- not because one is a greater or lesser art form, but simply because it takes less time to watch a difficult movie than it does to read a hard book. I have absolutely no evidence to this effect, but my gut tells me -- and it's a strong gut -- that there are probably more people who have sat through six hours of slow tracking shots across a desolate Hungarian farming collective in Bela Tarr's "Satantango" than have slogged through the 900 pages of Gertrude Stein's "Making of the Americans." Six hours? Six hours won't get you through Stein's first chapter.

Even if you love the hard, repetitive machinations of Stein's sentences, which draw on the same small pool of words turning over phrases until they are more or less meaningless concrete things -- "This one was not really owning the one this one needed for his loving. This one could only own one this one needed for loving by getting rid of the one this one needed for loving" -- even if you really love this, you will have to read each line over and over again. (John Ashbery read each sentence four times.) It will require more than devotion; it will require commitment.

Letters

Fri, 30 Nov 2001 20:00:00 +0000

Read "The Unsavory Martyr."

Oh yes, with all of the crowing of the upcoming death of dissent, Salon pipes in with another defense of the Clinton empire.

As per the norm, if you are a leftist and complain you become an activist.

If you are anywhere else on the political spectrum you are simply a whiner.

-- Joe Morgante

It seems like Mr. Lauerman's main complaint of Barbara Olson's book on Hillary Clinton is that it's mean to the president. Sure, he cites one, maybe two instances where her premises are faulty, but not enough to discredit the book's overall impression of the former First Lady.

Instead of criticizing a dead woman, maybe Lauerman should focus on a living breathing one -- the newest senator from the state of New York. Even in more benevolent hands, her story is as unsavory and censurable as they come.

-- Dan Avery

Nineteen terrorists died on Sept. 11. With Barbara Olson the devil got an even twenty.

-- Steve Gordon

The journalist and the provocateur

Wed, 28 Nov 2001 18:10:00 +0000

Janet Malcolm has reason to be gun-shy. A brilliant essayist whose best work has parsed the unstated contradictions inherent in psychoanalysis, journalism and the law, Malcolm endured a decade-long libel lawsuit (1984 to 1994) by psychoanalyst Jeffrey Masson, who accused her of fabricating quotes in her 1983 book about him, "In the Freud Archives" (A judge dismissed the suit, but Masson appealed and the case eventually went to a jury, which found for Malcolm.).

During the years of the lawsuit and even afterward, Malcolm was routinely represented by the press as an example of bad, unethical journalism. Masson's accusations had found a receptive audience among some of Malcolm's fellow journalists, perhaps because of her propensity for bluntly stating awkward truths that others prefer to leave unsaid and perhaps even unacknowledged. Pondering her own profession, for example, she famously began "The Journalist and the Murderer" (1990): "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. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people's vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse."

Letters to the editor

Thu, 09 Mar 2000 17:00:00 +0000

Janet Malcolm
BY CRAIG
SELIGMAN
(02/29/00)

In your mesmerizing
analysis of the career of Janet Malcolm,
you unfortunately
perpetuate a significant factual error
published in "The Journalist and the
Murderer."
Indeed, her "masterpiece," as you call
it, is riddled with errors of fact.
In the 1989 epilogue to "Fatal Vision"
-- still in print and readily
available -- I enumerate a number of
them, but here I shall focus only on the
one that you have chosen to promulgate.

Malcolm did not attend the 1987 trial
of the civil lawsuit in which the
murderer, MacDonald, charged me with
various offenses (though not with having
published anything he deemed untrue).
Her absence placed her at a severe
disadvantage in terms of accurate
reporting, but perhaps, as a "genius,"
she
considered such mundane tasks unworthy
of her. Nonetheless, it led to
grievous errors in her writings which
you continue to disseminate (albeit in
all probability unknowingly) to this
day.

Janet Malcolm

Tue, 29 Feb 2000 17:00:00 +0000

The public pillorying of Janet Malcolm is one of the scandals of American letters. The world of journalism teems with hacks who will go to their graves never having written one sparkling or honest or incisive sentence; why is it Malcolm, a virtuoso stylist and a subtle, exciting thinker, who drives critics into a rage? What journalist of her caliber is as widely disliked or as often accused of bad faith? And why did so few of her colleagues stand up for her during the circus of a libel trial that scarred her career? In the animus toward her there is something almost personal.

Yet I can't deny that she brings some of it on herself, with the harshness -- the mellifluous harshness -- of her work. Malcolm is hard on her subjects. As she sees it, being hard on them is her job; "putting a person's feelings above a text's necessities" is, in her arid and damning formulation, a "journalistic solecism." Like Sylvia Plath, whose not-niceness she has laid open with surgical skill, she discovered her vocation in not-niceness. Dryden famously noted the "vast difference betwixt the slovenly butchering of a man, and the fineness of a stroke that separates the head from the body, and leaves it standing in its place." Malcolm's blade gleams with a razor edge. Her critics tend to go after her with broken bottles.

The Crime Of Sheila Mcgough

Fri, 05 Feb 1999 20:00:00 +0000

The question of how journalists can stand to live with themselves -- when it's their job to burrow into their subjects' deepest thoughts and motives and then, possibly, betray them in the service of spinning out a "truthful" narrative -- is one that has taken up squatter's rights at the fore of Janet Malcolm's mind. And as vital as it is, there are times in Malcolm's very short, very interesting "The Crime of Sheila McGough" when you really want to say, Enough already.

Malcolm lays out a confusing, convoluted story with clarity and precision. McGough was a lawyer who so vigorously defended one of her clients -- a con artist named Bob Bailes, who'd masterminded a scam involving the selling of "unregulated" insurance companies -- that federal prosecutors in her hometown of Alexandria, Va., began investigating her as a possible accomplice. They claimed (and were ultimately able to convince a jury) that she had become so closely allied with Bailes that she had collaborated in his fraud. In 1990, a federal jury found McGough guilty of 14 out of 15 counts of felony, and she was sentenced to three years in prison. (She served two and a half.) Shortly after her release in 1996, McGough contacted Malcolm, claiming she'd been framed, and Malcolm, curious about her story, agreed to speak with her.

Bitter fame

Fri, 06 Feb 1998 18:52:00 +0000

It all began with a picture of incoming Fulbright Scholars. It was 1956. England was still recovering from the war, and good food was rare, houses were cold and money was hard to get. Ted Hughes, a brilliant and talented undergraduate at Cambridge University, saw a photograph of the latest crop of scholars from America in the newspaper: "Were you among them?" he asks. He is referring, of course, to Sylvia Plath, the poet who became his wife and later committed suicide, thus passing into legend. Hughes writes:

I was waking

Sore-footed, under hot sun, hot pavements.

Was it then I bought a peach? That's as I remember.

From a stall near Charing Cross Station.

It was the first fresh peach I had ever tasted.

I could hardly believe how delicious.

At twenty-five I was dumbfounded afresh

By my ignorance of the simplest things.