Forty-one False Starts
Artists, writers, and skeptical eyes
Description
The book takes its name from its opening piece, a 1994 profile of the painter David Salle that Janet Malcolm chose to publish in a form no editor would normally allow: as forty-one separate attempts to begin. Each fragment starts the essay over. One opens on Salle's studio in a former factory on White Street; another on a remark he made about his own ambivalence; another on the critics who dismissed him. None of them is discarded in favor of a final version. Malcolm simply lays them side by side and lets the reader watch a writer fail, repeatedly and on purpose, to settle on where the story starts.
That gesture is the key to the whole collection, published in 2013 under the same title. The pieces gathered here — on painters, photographers, writers, the Bloomsbury circle, the trade of art itself — span decades of Malcolm's work for the New Yorker and elsewhere. They share a subject and a suspicion. The subject is the creative life and the people who try to render it. The suspicion is that rendering anyone at all, in prose, is a far more compromised act than the smooth conventions of the profile and the biography pretend.
Malcolm had spent a career pulling at that thread. She was famous, and to some infamous, for beginning one of her books with the flat assertion that every journalist knows what he does is morally indefensible. Here the same eye turns on the arts, where the stakes feel gentler and the deceptions are subtler. What she finds is that a portrait is never innocent, and that the most honest thing a writer can do is admit it.
The question we’re asking : What happens to the portrait when the person drawing it stops pretending to be invisible?What we’ll see : How Malcolm turns her skeptical eye on artists, their biographers, and the quiet dishonesty of the well-made profile.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — The title that never chose one beginning
The Salle profile is the collection's centerpiece and its manifesto, even though Malcolm never calls it one. She had gone to write about David Salle, the painter who had risen fast in the 1980s art market and then found himself out of fashion almost as quickly. The obvious profile would have traced that arc — the ascent, the money, the backlash — and delivered a verdict. Malcolm instead gives us the wreckage of forty-one attempts to write it, each numbered, each starting fresh, each abandoning the one before.
The device is not a stunt. It is an argument made visible. A conventional profile hides all the false starts a writer actually produces, presenting the one surviving version as if it were the natural, inevitable account. Malcolm suspects that inevitability is a lie. There was nothing inevitable about it; the writer chose, and the choosing shaped the man on the page. By showing forty-one doors into the same room, she reminds us that the door taken was only one option among many, and that Salle himself would look different through each.
02Chapter 2 — The painter who wouldn't be fixed
Salle is not the only figure in the book who slips the frame. Malcolm returns again and again to artists whose lives and work sit uneasily with the tidy stories people want to tell about them. She writes about the photographer, the collector, the dealer, the studio — the whole apparatus by which raw creative activity gets turned into reputation, price, and legend. In each case she is drawn to the gap between the polished public version and the messier thing underneath.
Her method is patient and a little merciless. She notices what a subject wants her to notice and then notices the wanting. A gesture meant to seem spontaneous reveals its rehearsal. A confession offered as candor turns out to be strategy. Malcolm does not gloat over these discoveries; she registers them with a cool precision that is itself a kind of respect, since she assumes her reader is smart enough to see what she sees. The prose is elegant, unhurried, and quietly devastating.
03Chapter 3 — The lives that resist their biographers
Some of the collection's sharpest essays are not about artists at all but about the people who write about artists after they are dead. Malcolm had long been obsessed with biography as a form — with its pretensions, its intrusions, and its quiet violence. Here she turns that obsession on the Bloomsbury group and its endless afterlife of memoirs, letters, diaries, and rival accounts, a world that has been picked over by biographers for generations.
Her point, developed with characteristic care, is that biography flatters itself. It presents its version of a life as recovery, as if the facts were simply lying there to be gathered and arranged. Malcolm sees instead an author with an agenda, a limited stock of documents, and an appetite for shape. The biographer, she suggests, is closer to the burglar than the historian — entering a house that is not his, taking what he can use, and leaving behind a narrative that serves his purposes more than the dead person's truth.
04Chapter 4 — The confession that undoes the reporter
Step back from the individual essays and the collection makes a larger claim, one Malcolm spent her whole career pressing. Nonfiction about creative lives is itself a creative act — a made thing, shaped by choices, subject to the same distortions it observes in others. The writer who profiles a painter is doing what the painter does: selecting, arranging, discarding, imposing a form on unruly material. The forty-one false starts are the seam Malcolm chooses to leave showing.
This is where the book earns its unity. Salle refusing to resolve, the biographers imposing shape, the art world manufacturing legend — these are not separate topics but the same problem seen from different angles. In each, someone turns a life into a representation, and the representation is never neutral. Malcolm's innovation is to place herself inside the problem rather than above it. She does not exempt her own writing from the suspicion she directs at everyone else's.
05Conclusion
The book closes the way it opens: with a writer refusing to hide her hand. The forty-one false starts on David Salle were never a failure to begin. They were Malcolm's clearest statement of what she believed writing about other people actually is — a series of choices, none of them innocent, none of them the only one available. The painter who wouldn't be fixed, the biographers caught reshaping the dead, the art world spinning legend out of ambition, all belong to the same inquiry into how a life becomes a portrait.
