“If work comes easily, it is suspect”
On David Salle, Janet Malcolm, and feeling like you’re doing everything wrong
Welcome to the latest issue of Subtle Maneuvers. Previously: Advice on self-marketing (ugh) with guest columnist Ron Hogan.
The other week, following the sad news of the writer Janet Malcolm’s passing, I spent an afternoon reading her New Yorker colleagues’ tributes plus several of the Malcolm articles mentioned therein. The most-mentioned piece was “Forty-One False Starts,” Malcolm’s 1994 profile of the American painter David Salle, which Adam Gopnik calls “one of the most influential profiles of the past thirty or forty years.” Somehow I had never read it.
As the title implies, the piece is structured as 41 attempts to write the lede for a profile of Salle. This sounds like a gimmick, but the result does not feel gimmicky at all. Instead, all of Malcolm’s false starts add up to a brilliant portrait of Salle and a vivid illustration of how difficult it is to say anything authoritative about, well, anything—but, in particular, about a living artist and his work.