Reading Janet Malcolm in Yorkville
by Hallel Yadin

Growing up means getting better at keeping your promises to yourself. This belief dawned on me — or, more accurately, I was able to articulate it — around week three of a self-imposed project to read as much Janet Malcolm as possible. Malcolm was a longtime New Yorker staffer who took a “piercingly analytical” approach to her writing, and her body of work is rich with profiles on subjects oblivious to their own motivations.

Perhaps that was to be expected, as psychoanalysis was an enduring professional interest of hers. The field was a major focus of inquiry throughout Malcolm’s writing career; her first piece of reportage in the New Yorker, in 1978, was an investigation of family therapy. One of her earliest books was Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession (1981). In the Freud Archives followed in 1984, The Purloined Clinic in 1994. Malcolm once noted that she “might have liked” to become a psychoanalyst herself, but she was no good at math. (She came of age in an era where psychoanalysts were almost exclusively physicians.) Instead, she studied English and became a journalist. 

Malcolm was born in Prague in 1934. In 1939, her family escaped the city on more or less the last train out before Prague fell to the Nazis. She grew up in the Manhattan neighborhood of Yorkville, living among other Czech expats and refugees, speaking Czech, and attending Czech schools alongside New York City public schools. This fostered a distinct sense of being Czech, and no sense of being Jewish.

Malcolm is forthright about the way this upbringing affected her and her sister. Her parents, once they landed in the States, changed the family’s surname, Winn, already a blunting of Wienerová, to Wiener.  Janet shed her birth name, Jana. In her posthumously published memoir, Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory, Janet wrote, “The fearfulness that fuelled the change of name from Wiener to Winn was not entirely unwarranted: my parents could not know for sure that they had found a refuge here. By the time they understood that they had, their children’s imaginative life had been deeply affected by their dread.” 

Parents always constrain their children’s “imaginative lives,” if by no other instrument than providing the particular material conditions of their childhoods, and the New York City to which the Winns fled would both bolster and limit Janet’s imagination. She and her sister did not realize they were Jewish until their parents were forced to correct some antisemitic slurs they picked up at elementary school, and the tensions that this must have wrought in her adult life are largely only alluded to in her oeuvre. She had a strong sense of the land of childhood as distinct and separate from adult consciousness. She once wrote, “In the best children’s books, parents never share the limelight with their children; if they are not killed off on page 1, they are cast in the pitifully minor roles that actual parents play in their children’s imaginative lives.”

How do our parents’ desires shape our own? It’s one of the questions posed by psychoanalysis, the “Jewish science,” and perhaps the answer for Malcolm was borne out in her very profession. Her career was in some sense an inversion of her analyst father’s. Joseph had been a neurologist in Prague and took up family medicine in the United States out of necessity. He eventually wrested his way back to neurology and psychiatry, at which point he took up psychoanalysis. Joseph had only gone into medicine at all because at his university in Prague, the department of literature — his preferred field — did not accept Jews. 

In a Paris Review interview, the interviewer poses the question of whether coming to the United States as a young child affected Malcolm’s identity as a writer. Malcolm responds, “I came here at the age of five and knew no English  …  I have never connected these ­pathetic struggles with a language I didn’t know to later struggles with the language I tried and try not to disgrace myself in as a professional writer, but there may be a connection after all.” She continues, “Your question gives me much to think about.”

I became more enamored of Malcolm the more I read of her work. This is undoubtedly a function of the way she inserted herself into her pieces. (Not for nothing, I admire her writing and seek to emulate certain elements of her style.) I wanted to better understand her, and Still Pictures is sort of catalog of Malcolm’s childhood addresses, so my writing partner and I, both hobbyist photographers, decided to go on a photo walk to capture them. Her Yorkville childhood seemed important, not just because of her own journalistic focus on psychoanalysis and childhood, but because there is a certain ethnic New York undercurrent to her work that I wanted to unravel.

Consider what she wrote about George Jellinek, a Hungarian fellow who hosted a show on the classical radio station WQXR from 1969 to 2004. She fabricated childhood memories of listening to him, to the point that she was startled to learn as an adult that his show did not begin until the year she turned 35. She associated Jellinek with “the New York émigré community” of her parents, and identified with him to the point that she had to confess to a “twinge of disappointment” when she learned that Jellinek wasn’t Czech. Understanding the Czech-ness her Yorkville childhood instilled in her felt critical to understanding her as a writer. Fortunately, Yorkville is one of those Manhattan neighborhoods which maintains an air of anachronism no matter how many incongruous high-rises go up, so I felt confident I would get something out of a visit. 

I also had an ulterior motive. In Still Pictures, Malcolm writes that she attended junior high school at Public School (P.S.) 96, at 82nd Street and York Avenue in Manhattan. P.S. 96 is now an elementary school in the Bronx, and my initial investigation turned up no quick answers about the location of Janet’s P.S. 96. I was hoping that there would be some physical evidence of the school so I could figure out where it had been to photograph it. We gamely trekked to 82nd and York, hoping to find a building with some indication that it had once been a middle school. But there was nothing.

Insofar as there is Janet Malcolm lore, a foundational story is that she began taking collaging seriously after profiling the artist David Salle in the 1994 New Yorker article “Forty-One False Starts.” Malcolm plainly gives away Salle’s game. She writes, “He gives good value—journalists come away satisfied—but he does not give himself away … What is on offer is a construct, a character who has evolved and is still evolving from Salle’s ongoing encounters with writers.” Here Salle and Malcolm, who became friends, had complementary objectives. He offered a character and she so unassailably constructed one that Salle himself, reflecting on the piece after Malcolm’s death, refers to Malcolm’s David Salle as “that guy.” 

There’s a scene in “Forty-One False Starts” where Malcolm, unsubtly, takes Salle to a Lucian Freud show at the Met (Lucian was the painter grandson of Sigmund). She had assumed that Salle would denigrate Freud’s work, but he bypasses the bait, stating that he is not only a fan of Freud’s but “quotes” him in his own work. Malcolm would ultimately do the same in her own artistic practice. She was at that time a nascent collagist. Collage was probably a natural format, given how she approached journalism as a kind of literary pastiche. While Malcolm had long been a commentator on visual art — she had New Yorker columns on both photography and interior design, two of her hobbies — it seems that collaging is what allowed her to consider herself some flavor of visual artist.

Still, one wonders if it was an adjustment for her to work in a wordless medium. For all of her writing about art, Malcolm didn’t write about collaging much. For one of her exhibitions, she cannily agreed to let the owner of the gallery reproduce her letters. The collages are sourced from Marta Werner’s book Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios, and the letters are between Malcolm and Werner. Essayists now cite these letters widely when dissecting Malcolm’s collage practice. The letters are a welcome glimpse into Malcolm’s creative process, but that process remains opaque. She writes things like, “When I first opened Marta Werner’s Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios I felt a shiver of interest and desire such as one feels in an expensive shop at the sight of an object of particular beauty and rarity.” This, of course, says nothing about the desire to cut it up.

I find writing about Janet Malcolm to be an unusually stilted process, given that she wrote so broadly and incisively on the art of biography. One of her takes on the genre is oft-quoted: “After we are dead, the pretense that we may somehow be protected against the world’s careless malice is abandoned. The branch of the law that putatively protects our good name against libel and slander withdraws from us indifferently. The dead cannot be libelled or slandered. They are without legal recourse.” 

I don’t know that Malcolm found this troublesome. My impression is that she did not derive any comfort from the fallacy that things last. She acknowledged her “preoccupation” with the “most inessential and ephemeral forms,” in this case referring to interior design. This was an affinity she shared with her grandmother Klara; she once wrote, “My handsome apartment will go the way of hers. There are photographs of it, but in their way they are as poker-faced as the photographs of Klara.” She abandoned at least one attempt to write an autobiography, surely a natural stab at immortality for a writer of her stature. There was too much distance from her younger self. “I see that my journalist’s habits have inhibited my self-love,” she wrote. “Not only have I failed to make my young self as interesting as the strangers I have written about, but I have withheld my affection.”

Perhaps the only biographical subject as complicated as oneself is one’s parents; as Malcolm posited, “Do we ever write about our parents without perpetrating a fraud? Doesn’t the lock on the bedroom door permanently protect them from our curiosity, keep us forever in the corridor of doubt?” Malcolm never did write any biographies of her parents, although they feature heavily in her body of work. However, her sister organized their family archives. Digitized now, they are deposited as two separate collections at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York City, which specializes in German Jewish history. Malcolm’s papers are at Yale.

One of the archival tasks Malcolm’s sister undertook was translating and annotating Joseph’s diary. The diary is a scramble of personal recaps, cultural references, and medical literature. (Malcolm’s daughter makes many appearances in her grandfather’s diary. One vignette: Memorial Day weekend at Lost Lake – Anne said she will be a writer like mommy and daddy and have her own typewriter.) The diary illuminates moments of Malcolm’s life that were never going to be published in The New Yorker: Dinner parties. Nights at the opera. A second baby who never materialized.

The labor of archiving has nothing to do with capturing the life of the deceased — not possible — and everything to do with signposting the life of the deceased. Archival storage is temperature-, humidity-, and light-controlled, and archives inevitably absorb some of this airlessness. In return, you get the freedom to compose the narrative. Reading the biographical notes on Joseph, you might barely register that he was a physician. You would certainly think he was a writer.

After that first visit to Yorkville, I returned alone. I had been unable to shake P.S. 96. I trusted Janet’s undoubtedly fact-checked recollection of the school’s historic cross-streets, and though I knew as well as anyone that urban landscapes change, I was dissatisfied that there was no trace whatsoever of this P.S. 96 still legible. I didn’t actually think that my physical presence would excavate anything, but I can’t resist a low-stakes mystery.

The intersection of York Avenue and 82nd Street is charming in a movie-set Manhattan way. Yorkville is a sub-neighborhood of Manhattan’s Upper East Side, which itself is a neighborhood so dense it has to be further subdivided to make any sense. It’s home to a number of seminal New York avatars, including the first Gray’s Papaya; Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s residence; Lyle the Crocodile in the original children’s books; and Barney Stinson’s apartment in How I Met Your Mother. During Janet’s childhood in the 1940s and 1950s, it was a middle-class ethnic neighborhood further broken up, street by street, into distinct ethnic enclaves, including the Czech blocks on which Janet was raised. 

The neighborhood has a complicated Jewish history which in some way reflects Janet’s own tenuous childhood relationship to her Jewish-ness. It had historically been a densely German neighborhood, although the German demographic domination was beginning to taper off by the 1930s, when Yorkville became the home base of notorious American Nazi group the German American Bund. In the 1940s, the neighborhood became a refuge for World War II refugees, including Jews like the Winns. Its Jewish refugees assiduously maintained Yorkville’s tradition of self-segregation by nationality, in contrast to more conspicuously Jewish neighborhoods in New York, like the Lower East Side. I couldn’t help but reflect on all this as I again surveyed the buildings for signs that one had once housed a junior high.

Eventually, I figured out the address of Janet’s P.S. 96 sitting in my office, using only the Internet. It is now an Indian restaurant, and I found myself disappointed upon learning that, not because I had any particular investment in 1532 York Avenue being anything other than an Indian restaurant, but because that possibility hadn’t occurred to me, and then I understood what I had really gotten from Still Pictures: an opportunity to exercise my imagination.