Writing, as Janet Malcolm once declared, ought to be an “invisible, odourless calling”. Now, however, publicists and marketers push artists to be visible, voluble and, if possible, sweet-smelling. Hence the anthologies of chat in the Last Interview series, which extend from the self-elucidation of sages such as Jacques Derrida and Hannah Arendt to the bizarre dicta of Prince and the befogged ramblings of Billie Holiday, one of whose interviews is conducted by the cops after a drug bust.
To qualify for inclusion in the series you need to be dead, and while alive you must have had celebrity status: artistic achievement alone doesn’t make the grade. Janet Malcolm earned her place because of the fights she famously picked. In a case that kept the courts busy for an entire decade, she was twice sued for libel by a psychoanalyst whom she called, in her book on the Freud archives, “an intellectual gigolo”. Finally exonerated, Malcolm had no regrets: “the freedom to be cruel”, she believed, “is one of journalism’s uncontested privileges”, and in describing her apartment to an interviewer she pointed approvingly to the patches on a sofa that her cat had “viciously clawed”.
