At one point, she gave the unfinished manuscript of “The Silent Woman” to Philip Roth. He gave it a slashing edit, with often nasty comments in the margins. He violently disapproved of her putting herself in as a character. He hated her metaphors and accused her of intellectual shallowness.
Another writer might have been crushed or paralyzed, but Malcolm simply addressed what she thought were the few useful parts of his criticism and put aside the rest. She scribbled playful and defiant responses to his edits in the margins: “What’s bugging you, Philip? she said, with a sad shake of her head.” Later, in an unpublished interview, she said, “I didn’t accept his dislike of the book.” Some of his crankiness, she thought, arose from being a man of the 1950s reading about the female experience. But this preternatural toughness, this ability to assimilate and cast off disapproval, even from a writer she admired as much as Roth, was part of her extraordinary strength. To take this incident with equanimity, to not let it undermine either her friendship or her manuscript, requires a very expansive and shockingly healthy sense of self.
I know from my own experience how hard it is to preserve your equilibrium and sense of purpose when you are under attack. I found myself coveting Malcolm’s aura of untouchability, wishing I could bottle it. But I also wondered if there are times when a radical independence from other people’s opinions is a liability, when this way of being in the world didn’t work for her.
I have always been fascinated by Malcolm’s libel trial, because it was in the courtroom that the stakes of her perceived coldness or aloofness became higher. In front of a jury, being likable suddenly matters. In the first trial, in 1993, she projected a sense of being somehow above having to explain herself. In The New York Review of Books, she later described her own posture of “glacial distance,” drawing on The New Yorker ethos of “unrelenting hauteur.” It seems it had not occurred to her to smile a little at the jury or to project a little endearing vulnerability. She felt the facts would speak for themselves. A newspaper article at the time called her “an austere, driven woman.” Another reporter referred to her manner as “aloof, arrogant.” The jury came out against her but couldn’t agree on damages, so there was a mistrial.
In the second trial, her lawyer, Gary Bostwick, struggled with how to make her seem like a more likable witness to what he called “a regular juror.” Bostwick grew up in Wyoming and cultivated a down-to-earth mien. “She couldn’t say to the jury, ‘I am shy, so this is hard for me’ ” he told me. “I considered that. I never suggested it to her. I didn’t think she would feel comfortable. That was not Janet. That was too unnatural.” He then arranged for her to see a famous voice coach, Sam Chwat, to give her pointers on how to be appealing to the jury. They talked, among other things, about trading in her black-and-gray clothes for the more conventionally pleasing pastel palette. Like a man in the street, calling out to a passing woman, the world seemed to be saying to Janet Malcolm, “Smile, baby.” Bostwick and Malcolm debriefed by phone after each of her coaching sessions.
