Janet Malcolm famously despised biography. While she found journalism, with its mandate “to notice small things”, deliciously congenial, she thought biographical research led only to an “insufferable familiarity”, the fat volumes resulting from it being little more than processing plants in which “experience is converted into information the way fresh produce is converted into canned vegetables”. As for autobiography, that great literary craze of the late 20th century, it is misnamed. As she notes in Still Pictures, the slim book that is her last, it is a novelistic enterprise, and not to be trusted. Memory is patchy and partial. What does this or that story prove? The answer is: almost nothing, in the end. The gold is “dross”.
But memoir’s call is siren, and ultimately, not even Malcolm was entirely immune. Still Pictures, published posthumously (she died in 2021, at the age of 86), is a collection of short autobiographical essays: selective postcards of asperity and wisdom that she delivers with, if not embarrassment, exactly, then a certain amount of equivocation and avoidance. Not wanting to bloody herself too much on the rocks of disclosure, Malcolm cleverly deploys an old ally in the form of photography, about which she once wrote for the New Yorker. Most of these pieces, if not all, are sparked by the contemplation of fuzzy black and white images pulled from boxes in her attic – and doesn’t the camera always lie? The most brazen fabulist of them all, its near constant presence undercuts just about every line Malcolm writes.
In theory, this should make us doubt her. But while Still Pictures is slight in the hand – including an introduction by her friend, the writer Ian Frazier, and an afterword by her daughter, Anne Malcolm, it runs to only 155 pages – it has the weight of veracity, even if not always precisely candid. Its jumbled cast, a list that comprises Malcolm’s parents and many of their friends among New York’s community of Czech refugees in the years during and after the second world war, are so wonderfully and lucidly sketched – a lost world to be found in their manners, their clothes, their furniture (a covered pewter bowl is a novel in itself). Even as Malcolm insists that the past issues no visas, she slips smoothly over the border, lost papers only spurring her on.
She and her parents left Prague by train in July 1939, boarding in Hamburg the liner that would take them to America. “We were among the small number of Jews who escaped the fate of the rest by sheer dumb luck, as a few random insects escape a poison spray,” she writes, pushing ambiguity, for once, to the side. Her father, who was a psychiatrist, and her mother, a lawyer in Czechoslovakia, loved America, but they continued to fear antisemitism and their closest bonds were always with other Czech refugees, a situation that may in part account – though she would have found the idea glib – for the uncommon combination of watchfulness and inattention in Malcolm’s work as a journalist (in Still Pictures, she writes fascinatingly of the way she doesn’t really listen to people’s answers to her questions, her tape recorder doing the job for her while her mind wanderingly attends to other, possibly id-related, matters).
In the book, she scoots around. Here are the girls she met at summer camp, and here is her paternal grandmother, Babicka; in this picture is her naughty friend, Francine, and in this one, her parents’ boring friends, the Traubs. Each image leads her to ponder not the facts of these people’s lives, but the compact mythologies that surrounded them: the stories that were smoothed by time and tellers into, not just an easy narrative, but a kind of spell. She is expert in matters of social class and snobbery, and proud of it. “We know so much that we don’t know we know about each other,” she writes, remembering her distinct lack of surprise when she first saw a girl on whom she’d had a crush at camp dressed like someone whose aunt was “staying at the Plaza”.
Her mother had “European charm”, and Malcolm believes she inherited a measure of it. But how to describe it? After all, such a thing is quite awful, isn’t it? “By being charming, you are lowering yourself,” she writes. “You are asking for something.” Charm is not feminist: “I admire the deadpan young women of today who want nothing from you.” But she also knows they’re only posing: “Beneath the surface they are as pathetic as everyone else.”
Malcolm’s charm in Still Pictures comprises, for me, a particular charmlessness – an absolute refusal to pose – and it’s this that makes the book worth reading, even if it doesn’t rank among her masterpieces (they would be In the Freud Archives and The Journalist and the Murderer). She has nothing bad to say about her parents, who loved her deeply. But doesn’t every silver lining have a cloud? “All happy families are alike in the illusion of superiority their children touchingly harbour,” she writes, playing on Tolstoy. It’s a line that sounds perfectly breezy until you begin really to unpick it.
Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory by Janet Malcolm is published by Granta (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
