Still Pictures: On Photography & Memory by Janet Malcolm

This text – unless something has been cobbled together since, which seems unlikely given the bizarre introduction from a [presumably] agéd friend and the satisfying afterword from her daughter – is Janet Malcolm’s last work.

It is a series of sketches – some of which were published in the various high-powered American magazines Malcolm wrote for throughout her career – that look at Malcolm’s own life, linked through each (most, not all) looking at and considering an old photograph from her life, or her family’s life before her birth.

As Malcolm’s daughter writes in the gently moving final piece at the end (Malcolm lived very much long enough – and successfully enough – for her death to not be patronisingly evoked as a tragedy, thank god), she had planned to add an additional chapter to this body of work exploring her own amateur-plus (late in life she had a photography exhibition and monograph published) relationship to the form, but she didn’t get it finished.

Still Pictures, though, works as is, with a clear consistency and a sense that this project is realised perfectly. The text lacking a conclusion actually works in its favour: a document looking at lives from various generations and circumstances doesn’t need to be neatly tied up, because though lives have definitive endings (deaths), life itself doesn’t (not until the eventual total collapse of all space and time, which is a fair few years away at least)…

Malcolm was well over 80 when she started putting these texts together, so the lack of one knotting chapter speaks far less to what was lost (what, a few pages?) and emphasises instead what was created and finished (the rest of this impressive, thoughtful, witty and articulate book).

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Honestly, I was worried that this would function more as Joan Didion’s much-promoted – and non-posthumous – “final book” did and merely be a slim collection of otherwise-elsewhere uncollated pieces, which thankfully it isn’t – this is a new project from Malcolm’s final years and it coheres and builds to create an intriguing and exciting whole.

Still Pictures isn’t a cash-in final book made from notes: it’s a text that was genuinely nearly finished and neatly, appropriately, tied together with a few pages from a family member (the book is frequently about family). That closing piece politely and succinctly guesses what might have been there, and doesn’t try to write the imagined missing text, which is (of course) super appropriate for a book about the life of Janet Malcolm, someone constantly interested by the language and the imaginings used by people to describe and define their own lives…

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Malcolm was born to a middle class Jewish family in Prague a few years before the Second World War. Her immediate family – and several other people her parents knew socially in the same situation – were able to buy/bribe/beg themselves passage to the United States before Hitler’s genocidal project overran then-Czechoslovakia, and this sense of escaping death haunted – understandably! – many people from that generation.

Malcolm recalls people with fine Prague careers and social lives who never managed to integrate into North America in the way they had hoped to… she writes about people still keen to keep their heads down long after the war and the immediate threat of violence had receded…

Malcolm explores how secularism and class were defining in Prague and (later) in New York, but how the Nazis reduced everyone by emphasising race above all else. There’s a lot of blunt, emphatic, detail here about being survivors of genocide, not mere survivor’s guilt so much as European guilt that it happened at all… Souls were destroyed with every body that was… Dehumanising an other dehumanises the self.

That said, Still Pictures isn’t a book solely about genocide and the trauma of survival, but it also contains lots about being a child immigrant in New York in the ’40s, about being young in the 50s and ’60s, about culture and art and romance and relationships and careers and regrets and things one can look back on with pride, too.

It’s a great memoir that positions itself as an anti-memoir but never quite gets there… Malcolm’s early stance that it fundamentally isn’t acceptable to write about the self is a laughable assertion in a book of recollections, but it feels like an authentic feeling and a coherent one.

Is it Malcolm’s best work? No, but it’s also probably her simplest, her most direct, her clearest and most open exploration and excavation of herself and her ideas and possible sources for her attitudes and ideologies.

It’s great. Important, engaging, entertaining and good.

I recommend it. Of course I do.

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Oh, and the bizarre introduction I mentioned is from a friend of Malcolm’s and it seems far more interested in repeatedly exerting and emphasising the writer’s own devout Christianity and how it’s relevant because a) Malcolm thought it was interesting (did she?) and b) because she believes Malcolm is in heaven.

It’s frankly embarrassing, childish and naïve, but also comes across as raw writing from someone grieving their friend to the point where they’ve lost their grip on reality and context. It’s a cruel choice by the publisher to include this, imo.

There’s obviously no afterlife and though it’s a nice thought for someone who is grieving to have, it does feel like a notion inappropriate for an introduction to a serious, realist, book.

Beliefs shouldn’t be asserted as facts. I “believe” my baby is the best baby there’s ever been. Is that a verifiable statement that would pass vigorous fact checking? Again, I “believe” it would, but I “know” it couldn’t possibly.

It’s also genuinely disconcerting to read a recently published book where someone writes about adhering to a type of Christianity that I had presumed died out with the industrial revolution! America, hey!?