Self-Suspicion

I recently read the journalist Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice. The much bruited hook is how did two American Jewish lesbians survive in Vichy France during WWII. The answer is that they were protected by the collaborator Bernard Fay, about whom they may not have known much in terms of his responsibility for the suffering and deaths of a number of people—but people choose not to know what they don’t want to know. There's also a bit on Stein's and Toklas' possibly S&M-ish sexual relationship which doesn't turn out to be very interesting (as sex lives of other people generally, and disappointingly, do not.) I think Malcolm tries to dislike Stein and to like Toklas, and fails on both counts.
A few years ago I read Malcolm’s The Silent Woman, a book about books on Sylvia Plath. In both books, the Plath and the Stein, there is more interest in Malcolm’s journey in trying to understand her subject than there is in what she finds out. Both are popularized metabiography, both are good smart easy reads. Those concerned about “I” in poems might be interested in Malcolm.

One of the silliest ways journalists go about pretending to objectivity is to avoid using the pronoun, as if doing so makes them able to renounce subjectivity. This is similar to how poets who avoid “I” often fill their poems with so much self that one feels one is (I feel I am) simply reading the same old confessional lyric in new clothes; these poets' avoidance of “I” seems a dutifully automatic retreading of ground their teachers first cleared because they felt some urgency about what they were doing.
In the books on Stein/Toklas and Plath, Malcolm wants to get at the truth of the matter and knows she can’t. She doesn’t want her quest to intrude on her subject, and she also doesn’t want to pretend she is a squeaky-clean window through which one can see the truth about Gertrude Stein. She’s self-suspicious, though not terminally so, and she allows for irony and contradiction to coexist with a quite sincere desire for discovery. She strikes a nice balance.
On the other hand, excessive balance itself can seem a bit slick. I’m kind of hoping Malcolm’s next book, whatever it may be, will enact its ironies of discovery in a new way. Self-suspicion eventually comes to seem like an act.