46 The New York Review
not meet the standard of proof. Thus,
under our nervously accommodating
legal system, Masson had the right to a
trial by jury. As it turned out, two years
after the second trial, the lost notes
were found at my country house, in a
notebook that my two- year- old grand-
daughter pulled out of a bookcase,
attracted by its bright color. It had all
been for nothing.
Meanwhile, however, as Masson’s day
in court approached, he and Morgan
had a problem to solve: how to fill the
time of the trial. The five quotations—
fatuous as they may have made Masson
appear—were surely not compelling
enough to justify making eight men and
women sit on hard chairs for four weeks
and decide whether or not to award
him millions of dollars. A portrait of
me as a malevolent woman out to de-
stroy the reputation of a naively trust-
ing man needed to be fleshed out by
other crimes than the one of five lines
of misquotation. They hit on the crime
of “compression” as a leading one.
Their opportunity arose from an inci-
dent in 1984, when an article appeared
on the front page of The Wall Street
Journal written by a young woman
named Joanne Lipman, who had grad-
uated from Yale the year before and
was hired by the Journal a few months
later. The article was about the liber-
ties that the writer Alastair Reid took
in reportage from abroad he had been
publishing in The New Yorker since- Reid, born in Scotland, was pri-
marily a poet and translator, notably of
Jorge Luis Borges, and also known for
having seriously irked Robert Graves
by stealing one of his White Goddess
girlfriends. Lipman first encountered
Reid in her student days at Yale, where
she heard him speak at an extracurric-
ular seminar and was struck by the un-
conventional way he said he practiced
journalism. After starting at the Jour-
nal, she called Reid and conducted a
series of interviews with him in which
he unrepentantly elaborated on these
practices, which the newspaper consid-
ered horrible enough to put on its front
page as evidence of the fraud The New
Yorker had been perpetrating on read-
ers of its “prestigious pages.”
Reid happily babbled to Lipman
about the things he had made up in
his reports from Spain. He had pieced
together several people he knew into
a composite character. He had set a
scene in a bar that had closed years
earlier. He had invented conversations.
As an unacknowledged legislator, he
felt bound to go beyond what the non-
poet journalists among us do. Lipman
wrote, “‘The implication that fact is
precious isn’t important,’ Mr. Reid
says. ‘Some people (at the New Yorker)
write very factually. I don’t write that
way.... Facts are only a part of real-
ity.’” Lipman also interviewed Shawn,
who tried to say that of course The New
Yorker is as factual as it is possible to
be while not saying that Reid ought to
be drawn and quartered.
Lipman’s story created a scandal in
the journalistic world, one that was
deeply enjoyable for those who did
not work at The New Yorker and mor-
tifying for those who did. I remember
feeling mad at Reid for opening his big
mouth and talking about what we do
in our workshops. I assumed that he
strayed further from factuality than the
rest of us ever imagined or were even
capable of doing, but I also knew that
some New Yorker writers—the great
Joseph Mitchell, for example—quietly
used techniques that resembled some
of those that Reid preened himself on
using. Mitchell had suffered some em-
barrassment when a character he called
Mr. Flood was outed as a composite.The Alastair Reid affair fell neatly
into Morgan’s hands as a solution to
the problem of how to fill the time at
his disposal to make me look bad. Al-
thoug h I ha rd ly sha red Reid’s contempt
for factuality, I had unapologetically,
almost unthinkingly, used a literary de-
vice in In the Freud Archives that was
commonplace at The New Yorker but
that outside journalists—in the accu-
satory atmosphere following the Lip-
man article—saw as another violation
of the reader’s good faith. The devicewas the uninterrupted monologue in
which characters made preposterously
long speeches in impossibly good En-
glish. Anyone could see that the speech
had never taken place as such but was a
compilation of what the character had
said to the reporter over a period of
time. Not everyone liked the conven-
tion, but no one thought it was decep-
tive, since its artificiality was so blatant.
I set my long monologue with Mas-
son at the restaurant Chez Panisse in
Berkeley, where he and I ate lunch on
the first day of my interviews with him.
During the lunch he excitedly spoke of
the events that had catapulted him from
an impressive and well- paid position as
director of the Freud Archives to his
present condition of jobless humiliation
and indignation. He spoke wildly and
not always coherently. Over the next
six months I spoke with him dozens of
times on the phone and a few times in
person, and was able to fill in the gaps
of his account and, further, to inspire
formulations that ever more imagina-
tively expressed his sense of having
been wronged. I then wrote my mono-
logue. It was like making a collage. It
never occurred to me that I was doing
anything wrong by using scraps that
had been acquired at different times.
But Morgan’s “He didn’t say that at
Chez Panisse, did he?” question, with
its implication that the reader was
being deceived, was hard to answer.
During our period of preparation for
the second trial, Bostwick, Chwat,
and I spent a great deal of time on it.
Finally, an answer evolved from our
efforts that I still recall the pleasure
of delivering on the stand. It took the
form of a long speech about the mono-
logue technique that Morgan keptinterrupting but was unable to stop. I
went relentlessly on and on. I talked
about the difference between the full
and compelling account of his rise and
fall in the Freud Archives that Masson
gives in the article and his wandering
incomplete speech in the restaurant. I
spoke of the months of interviews out
of which, bit by bit, the monologue
was formed. I concluded by saying, “I
have taken this round- about way of
answering your question, Mr. Morgan,
because I wanted the jury to know how
I work, and what we’re talking about
here in talking about this monologue.”
“Mrs. Malcolm, you will be given all
the chances in the world to tell this jury
how you work, so don’t worry about
it” was Morgan’s lame riposte. I didn’t
worry. I had already gleefully seized
my opportunity. When Bostwick andI interviewed the jury after its verdict
and asked them what they thought of
the monologue technique, they said
they saw nothing wrong with it. They
said they understood that writers had
artistic obligations.
At the second trial Bostwick im-
proved his own performance as Mas-
son’s antagonist. In his best moments,
he played him like a matador playing
a bull. Under Bostwick’s punishing in-
terrogation, Masson seemed pathetic,
as he never was in my article. I almost
felt sorry for him.Sam Chwat died of lymphoma in 2011
at the age of fifty- seven. I was shocked
and saddened by the news. I remember
my sessions with him with undimin-
ished gratitude and pleasure. He was
a straightforward, modest, kind per-
son, with a fine, interesting mind. His
unspoken but evident distaste for the
New Yorker posture of indifference to
what others think and his gentle cor-
rection of my self- presentation at trial
from unprepossessing sullenness to ap-
pealing persuasiveness took me to un-
expected places of self- knowledge and
knowledge of life. After the trial, I had
no further occasion to appear in public
and did not seek any. I relapsed into my
usual habits of solitary work and pri-
vate intimacy. Looking back on my life
as a writer I don’t regret the trade- off
of the openly performative for the less
obvious way writers draw attention to
themselves. My memories of the time
in my life when I went on stage and per-
formed like a trouper seem somewhat
unreal now. But my rehearsals with the
man who had briefly made me into one
remain wonderfully vivid. QINTERNATIONAL
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