Cutting and incisive: Memories from Janet Malcolm, one of the great émigré writers

SHE was born Jana Wienerová in Prague, 1934. Her parents are not rich and not poor; she calls them ordinary middlebrows, Czech nationalists – a doctor and a lawyer – who got on a train to Hamburg in July 1939 before shipping over to America and safety.

Here’s a picture of her beside mum and dad as she looks out the carriage window. She’s in a huff but she doesn’t yet know how lucky she is.

Elsewhere in Europe her peers hide, begin writing diaries In Manhattan she becomes Janet Malcolm. She will write for The New Yorker. She freaks readers out when she talks about interviews and says: “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.”

Such dangerous truth telling becomes her trademark. It’s hard not to imagine her unlucky soul sister, Anne Frank, nodding somewhere in sad agreement.

This is Janet Malcolm’s last book – she died in 2021 – and it consists of 26 short essays inspired by some monochrome photographs that illustrate her life.

The word “memory” in the subtitle intrigues as each image acts as a spur to her subsequent recollections – she doesn’t remember much of the actual events captured in the photographs. Time and again she says the pictures summon no memories, that some are “uninformative and flat”.

She sighs: “Most of what happens to us goes unremembered. The events of our lives are like photographic negatives. The few that make it into the developing solution and become photographs are what we call our memories.”

This said, on a page that name drops Vladimir Nabokov, famed for his eidetic powers. Still Pictures might be seen as the antipode to the master’s Speak, Memory.

Janet’s Manhattan world is also Nabokovian: clumsy, fumbling, Pnin-like émigrés surround her. As an adolescent she delights in maliciously slagging them off behind their backs; she can be cruel. Janet distrusted charm: “By being charming, you are lowering yourself. You are asking for something. I admire the deadpan young women of today who want nothing from you. I like their toughness and self-containment. Of course, beneath the surface, they are as pathetic as everyone else.” Ouch!

There was always that qualifying barb with Janet. She could sting but she would go on to write brilliantly on Chekhov, on Plath, on Gertrude Stein.

In these last writings she talks too about her parents but admits that she might be “perpetrating a fraud” because, as she asks: “Doesn’t the lock on the bedroom door permanently protect them from our curiosity, keep us forever in the corridor of doubt?”

She clearly loved her father feeling “flooded with things I want to say about him”. She inherits his “shell of detachment”, one that’s positively testudinal.

As for her demanding mother, she admits to ignoring her entreaties and admits she behaved like a jerk: “What would it have cost me to tell her that I loved her?”

Channeling Tolstoy she says “all happy families are alike in the pain their members helplessly inflict upon one another”.

One memory in particular rings out. Janet hides a comic strip from her parents that showed a tree and two paths: “The caption spoke in ominous lettering about someone who was lost and in danger.” She admits she wanted to hang out with rebels, bad girls. But Janet herself was never “genuinely bad”; wistfully she seems disappointed by her “native goody-goodyness”.

What does she make of the photographs seen here? There’s no forensic interrogation of their meaning a la Geoff Dyer or Roland Barthes. Janet admits the images are naff, poorly composed, poorly lit, almost throwaway. Her guard remains up even if she is as honest as she can be about them: “The prerogative of cowardly withholding is precious to the most apparently self-revealing of writers.” As David Bowie sang, she “can’t give it all away”.

Those ghosts from Theresienstadt haunt Malcolm’s shards of memory. A letter from a physician is quoted about another émigré: “She is how I imagine Anne Frank might have looked had she been allowed to live.”

By extension, Still Pictures is the volume I imagine Anne Frank could have written had she been allowed to live. That tree, those two paths.