Living Character and Writing Character

Forty-One False Starts: Essays by Artists and Writers
By Janet Malcolm
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2013, 320 pages, $12.22 paperback

“In what I have written… I have, like every other biographer, conveniently forgotten that I am not writing a novel, and that it really isn’t for me to say who is good and who is bad, who is noble and who is faintly ridiculous.”[ref]Malcolm, p.93[/ref] In an essay about the literary titans of the Bloomsbury House (Virginia Woolf and friends), Janet Malcolm waxes analytic about the almost impossible journalistic task of capturing anyone’s inner life. And who better to expound on the subject than Malcolm, a renowned journalist who has made art of interviews and their corresponding essays, which give holistic, empathic, personal understandings of her interviewees? She influenced journalism by writing stylized essays with a strong presence as a narrator with her own subjective opinions. Malcolm also challenged the journalistic establishment by criticizing the tactic of earning the interviewee’s trust and then lambasting her in the write-up, betraying the relationship the two had garnered during the interview process. Understanding, even caring for her subjects became Malcolm’s signature touch and she has become more famous than many of the artists and writers she has interviewed.

In Forty-One False Starts, a collection of Malcolm’s best biographical essays, the themes of personality and biography interplay in a number of complicated ways. The thesis of the collection is stated during a comparison between another biographer’s account of diary entries to the entries themselves. Malcolm writes of the disparity:

The biography genre ( like its progenitor, history) functions as a kind of processing plant where experience is converted into information the way fresh produce is converted into canned vegetables. But, like canned vegetables, biographical narratives are so far removed from their source — so altered from the plant with soil clinging to its roots that is a letter or a diary entry — that they carry little conviction.[ref]Malcolm, p.88–89[/ref]

Malcolm contends that biography loses something in its conversion by another person, and the best remedy is to quote extensively.[ref]Malcolm, p.89[/ref] In a recent luncheon at Princeton, organized by the Council of the Humanities, Malcolm responded to a question about writing her autobiography (there’s a fascinating piece at the end of the book about it) by saying it was difficult to create a character of herself for the autobiography. I asked how this squared with her dislike of biography. She replied that biography couldn’t capture inner life the way autobiography could. So that is what is found in diary entries and letters: inner life, personal feelings, and perspectives. She recommends ample quoting from diary entries and letters, but is that a viable way to discover inner life?

Here, a distinction has to be made between figuring out a subject’s character from interacting with her and figuring out her character based on reading about her. A biographer can get a firsthand account from a letter the subject has written, but even that is filtered through the subject’s own biases. Can even the subject accurately report on her own character? And the further you get from that, the more bias is introduced: a contemporary has her own opinion about the subject, and then the biographer introduces bias whenever she isn’t quoting and can even mislead with a quote if it’s out of context. Anyone who has written about people can attest that it is difficult to capture someone’s personality through words. Just think about how similar descriptions of different people can sound. And how much better you feel like you know someone you’ve met as opposed to someone you’ve read about. Personal interaction is clearly superior, but to continue this train of thought, I’ll stick with biography for a moment.

Thus, unless we reserve judgment until we’ve met famous artists in person, it seems our best option is reading Janet Malcolm-esque descriptions, which are procured by interviewing people in a more casual way over a period of time, before the essay is written. This form of biography is the closest to personal interaction. The idea is to transcend the typical interview format, where the questions are formal and expected so the answers are almost prepared and usually what the subject wants to be heard saying. In Malcolm’s approach, the questions are general and she becomes friends with the subject, hoping to get a sense of him or her as a real person. At the Princeton luncheon, she gave advice on this topic to a student who was on a scandalous journalistic mission. Malcolm told her to keep her recording device (tape or brain) on after the regular questioning was over in order to catch a possible slip of the tongue that might be more revealing than anything said on purpose. It’s like waiting until after the bow to see how an actor truly smiles. Malcolm is after the hidden person, not the appearance filtered through the subject’s veil of pretension.

This is certainly an interesting struggle. The first and title essay in Forty-One False Starts is about David Salle, a controversial postmodern painter with a curious version of the interview persona. Malcolm describes his strategy for being interviewed like this: “…Salle himself behaves like the curator of a sort of museum of himself, helpfully guiding visitors through the exhibition rooms and steering them toward the relevant literature.”[ref]Malcolm, p.9[/ref] This is a striking example of self-imposed bias. But Salle’s case is more interesting; he isn’t just trying to seem smarter or more artistic. He’s protecting the inner self. “He never forgets, and never lets the interviewer forget, that his real self and his real life are simply not on offer.”[ref]Malcolm, p.12[/ref] Malcolm still tries to get a sense of the real self by earnestly attempting to befriend Salle. It is her unique calling, after all, to uncover his personality as well as his work. So she meets with him over and over, jokes with him, shows him her amateur art, and even goes to the Met with him. After this rigorous process, she allows herself descriptions of Salle’s character, but without saying what he is about. She allows herself the descriptions “acutely intelligent,” “depressed” and “reserved,”[ref]Malcolm, p.18[/ref] but not Salle’s inner life, or why exactly he’s like that. We learn some about his character, but we can only speculate about his inner life.

This story raises a question. Did Malcolm penetrate Salle’s defenses, or simply apprehend elements of his persona? In the capacity that he let his guard down and showed how he normally interacts with other people, it’s pretty safe to conclude that Malcolm got a decent picture. It should be noted that he may comport himself differently with other people, especially people who aren’t interviewing him. But it is difficult to feign such traits as “acutely intelligent,” “depressed” and “reserved” for such a long time. His inner life remains enigmatic. We have hints of it: Malcolm reveals a strained relationship with his mother, a longing for an old flame, criticism from parts of the art world, etc. But I certainly have no idea how the man works. What keeps him up at night. What his aspirations are. But those things are always secrets. There’s an inherent desire to keep the innermost parts of one’s self a secret. People hate when their diaries are read.

With this in mind, it’s almost as if journalists are never after inner life. They’re always after the glittering character celebrities create for this purpose. At the Princeton luncheon, another student asked whether Malcolm thought she “figured out” her subjects and if that was even her goal. Malcolm modestly answered that she doesn’t “figure out” her subjects and doesn’t claim to do so. Furthermore, she explained, her practice is to get a subjective impression of her subject and she never professes that it’s anything more. So even Malcolm, who attempts a very personal interviewing strategy for her biography, doesn’t capture inner life.

In search of a more honest description of people’s inner lives, we return to diaries. Letters are not in the same category, and neither are diaries written with the intention of being read. Both of those can manifest as the same desire to obscure inner life or put on airs. Real diary entries provide the content we’re after. Who cares if Caesar was funny or easy to chat with? What’s meaningful is whether he was seizing control for power’s sake or because he believed he was helping Rome. There are some historical figures who wrote diaries or diary-type things. But not everybody writes a diary. Even fewer write a diary with the intent that it never be read. Then why does honest introspection revealing of the most inner thoughts seem so normal, as if it is a common feature of our experience?

Honest introspection feels so familiar because characters regularly engage in it. Novels and movies are rife with this kind of disclosure, in a variety of forms: novels have passages of narration and introspection; movies have scenes where characters look at water or the sky and we get to peer into their heads; both movies and novels depict deep, intimate conversations that reveal characters’ inner lives. These are different forms, with differing degrees of depth and complexity, but they are all honest. There is no lying to a consumer of fiction (even unreliable narrators somehow let us figure out that they are unreliable). Most stories give us all the important (i.e. defining) episodes in their respective protagonist’s life, and possibly similar knowledge of other characters. Less subtle works simply explain exactly how their characters work. This familiarity has noticeable effects.

First of all, there’s the classic protagonist who succeeds at the end. We like these characters. We trust them. We forgive their flaws. We accept their flaws because we know that they’re fundamentally good. The drama is how they show that goodness. Let’s consider a common example: the trope of selfish warrior becoming a true hero. It’s all over modern culture. Think of recent action/superhero movies, such as Thor or Elysium. They each have a hero who isn’t perfect, even obnoxious/selfish at first, but who manages to prove his moral worth by the end of the film. The heroes even prove themselves in the same way: demonstrating a willingness to die in order to protect others. These are the defining moments in the movies and the defining moments for the characters. But the audience already likes the heroes; we know their inner lives. Why is it necessary to show a moment when they sacrifice for the greater good? Did we only like them before because we knew they were going to make the right choice later? Or did they just need to prove it to everyone else?

It’s true that the ‘hero’ storyline is not the only fundamental structure of a story. Many characters are allegorical, or many characters specifically fail to grow personally (common to modernism). But these types of stories don’t have the same kind of effect as the personal-growth stories. We don’t think of allegorical characters as representing people at all; we like an allegorical character if we like what they represent and don’t if we don’t. These non-characters, who aren’t meant to be like real people, are not part of this discussion. On the other hand, there are those characters who simply don’t grow or learn a lesson by the end of the novel. They are almost always characters we are meant to pity. An example is Madame Bovary. She continually makes objectionable decisions throughout the book, and fails to change by the end (in any significant way). The reader is supposed to learn from her mad obsession with a twisted form of romanticism. Note that her mistakes are copious, egregious, and selfish, and yet, her position as the protagonist ensures at least some empathy.

The ‘hero’ and ‘failed hero’ archetypes just exemplify the underlying message most stories have: you have to prove who you are (characters who fail at the end simply prove they’re failures). It’s the basic structure of many stories. Writers honestly tell the reader how the protagonist is basically good, but has tendencies that get in the way. At the end of the novel, the protagonist either rises to the challenge and grows or doesn’t overcome the weakness and fails. But just by dint of knowing the protagonist’s inner life, the reader sides with the protagonist, even if the protagonist fails in the end. Until the end of a novel, the reader usually assumes that the protagonist will overcome the challenge. Is that generous? Not really. It’s a story: it’d be silly to judge a character by the first half of the book. There are two lessons to take away here: we as readers almost automatically empathize with characters whose inner lives we have access to, but those characters still have to prove themselves to people who don’t have that access.

So why do protagonists get the benefit of the doubt so much more than people do? We judge others all the time, rarely, if ever, knowing their inner lives. It takes a full novel and a failure to even dislike a protagonist, but it can take only one interaction to start disliking a real person. I’m guilty of forming opinions of people after hearing a negative episode relayed by someone else. I try not to do it anymore, but I still have trouble ignoring first impressions. But if I’ve learned anything from following this train of thought, then second, third, tenth impressions don’t even matter. Impressions are useless; you don’t know someone until you’ve had a heart-to-heart with them. You don’t know that person until you understand the causes of the behavior that you noticed at first.

Take a look at these sentences in different contexts. Personal: Jimmy brushed by me. Biographical: When his mother was in the hospital, Jimmy tended to brush by people. Literary: Thinking of his mother’s health, Jimmy brushed by Samantha. It may seem like I’ve cheated a little, but isn’t this exactly how we’d process the same information from those different sources? From a personal standpoint, if we didn’t really know Jimmy, we’d be annoyed that he brushed by us. In the biography, we get access to knowledge that the biographer has decided is relevant. And in novels, we have a ‘true’ connection between behavior and inner life. But the reasons we empathize with people in novels are in the real world too. The guy who brushed by you probably was thinking about something pressing.

You have to wait for those heart-to-hearts where you really get a sense of someone. Why isn’t that good enough for characters, though? Do people have to prove themselves to each other? People do misrepresent their inner lives. Many boys are self-described as ‘nice guys,’ but end up romantically mistreating girls they’re involved with. And sometimes the girls only became romantically involved because they thought the boys were ‘nice guys.’ This example may be polemic and I’m making it simpler than it is, but the main point stands: people misrepresent their inner lives for personal gain. The only way to know is to wait until there’s some obstacle, like in the end of those movies, that proves the quality of someone’s character. It seems like just talking to people doesn’t cut it. Forget hearing a rumor about someone’s character, maybe we shouldn’t be sure we know our friends all that well. Sure, some friends are ‘over-sharers,’ but first of all, that isn’t really a bad thing. ‘Over-sharers’ tend to value friendships and to be interesting, sweet people. And secondly, even people who seem to spill their guts could easily be hiding deeper secrets. Since it’s well known sharing can net friends, some people share surface-level secrets expressly for that purpose. Even your ‘over-sharer’ friend is a mystery.

But that’s crazy, right? We can tell who our real friends are without putting them through some personality-testing tribulation, and we have a pretty good sense of what they’re like on the inside. On the other hand, we do like to point to times when our friends come through for us. We dismiss times when our friends screw up and disappoint us. It’s almost like our friends’ inner lives don’t actually matter. We spend enough time with someone and if we like our impression of that person, then we befriend her. No one decides whether to be friends with someone only after an end-of-movie ordeal. Friendship isn’t mindless; it’d just be unfair to say we know all our friends’ inner lives or that we decided to be friends with them because of how they really are deep down.

Continuing from the quote at the beginning of this essay, Malcolm writes:

Life is infinitely less orderly and more bafflingly ambiguous than any novel, and if we pause to remember that Madge and Bunny, and even George and Gerald Duckworth, were actual, multidimensional individuals, whose parents loved them and whose lives were of inestimable preciousness to themselves… Every character in a biography contains within himself or herself the potential for a reverse image. [ref]Malcolm, p.93[/ref]

She describes a problem inherent to judging; people aren’t always their best selves. But she’s wrong that it makes life so “bafflingly ambiguous.” Everyone is the heroine of her life’s novel. If she messes up, it’s just not the final challenge yet.