Biographies are books, not the lives themselves – a point that Janna Malamud Smith seems to acknowledge in the title of her memoir but which she can only fitfully make good on.

When her father died 20 years ago, Ms. Smith wrote a piece for the New York Times exploring her father’s “complex sense of privacy and my own.” Although Bernard Malamud enjoyed reading biographies and wrote a novel,”Dubin’s Lives,”featuring a biographer-protagonist, he did not like to divulge the “personal sources of his fiction,” Ms. Smith noted, and “delighted in Shakespeare’s relative biographical anonymity.” She seconded Joyce Carol Oates’s outcry against “pathographies,” which demeaned their subjects by focusing on private failings, and supported descendants like Stephen Joyce, who affirmed the family’s right to destroy his grandfather’s papers. She concluded that it was “most unlikely that I’d ever make the contents of my father’s early journals public.”

Thoroughly worked up, Ms. Smith published “Private Matters” (1997), including a chapter titled “Burnt Letters, Biography, and Privacy.” She approved of Henry James’s making a bonfire of his correspondence because he was defending the integrity of the self: “My whole capacity to assert a self rests on not having your definition of events continually impede or drown out mine. But also because the gratification of writing, of self-expression generally, is – psychologically – about nothing so much as control.”

Most biographers, I should think, would agree with Ms. Smith, but that would not stop them, as it did not stop Leon Edel from writing a biography of Henry James. The core of biography is private matters – what Samuel Johnson called “domestic privacies”and the “minute details of daily life.” In this defining statement on biography, published in The Rambler no. 60 (October 1750), Johnson cited ancient authorities who believed in laying “open to posterity the private and familiar” characters of their subjects.

Despite her misgivings, in “My Father Is a Book” (Houghton Mifflin, 304 pages, $24), Ms. Smith now claims to be delivering the goods. “How do I justify my change of heart? I’m not sure I can,” she writes. Well said. After finally taking a peek at her father’s journals, she laughs at herself and concludes,”Their content did not need my protection.” Even more important, she adds, “time has passed … My grief has abated. I am older. Our family past has come to feel distant enough to approach.”

The result is rather a mess. Not content to write simply about the father she knew, Ms. Smith attempts to interpret his journals and to speculate on his life.A good deal of fruitless psychologizing goes on, although the rudiments of Malamud’s searing early life – a self-defeated father and an insane mother – may eventually prove, in the hands of a biographer other than Ms. Smith, to be a moving story.

Malamud grew up in Brooklyn, the son of a struggling storekeeper and his mentally disturbed wife. Malamud moved away from Brooklyn to teach at a college in Oregon. It was there that he struggled to find his voice as a writer, eventually producing “The Natural” (1952), a mythic treatment of a baseball hero, Roy Hobbs, which catapulted Malamud into the ranks of the finest writers of contemporary fiction. “The Assistant” (1957), based in part on Malamud’s childhood in Brooklyn, solidified his reputation and led to his teaching appointment at Bennington College in Vermont.

Ms. Smith attempts to be honest about her father’s affair with one of his Bennington students, but Ms. Smith’s confession that she shut out this student, who later wanted to become a friend of the family, is just one sign of how inadequately the memoirist is able to deal with events she initially wanted to cover up.

Ms. Smith also attempts to deal directly with her father’s contempt for women, and his self-gratifying idea that adultery should be part of a writer’s adventurous life,but she seems not seem to realize how angry her father made his female colleagues,one of whom I interviewed in the course of researching a biography of Susan Sontag.

Naturally enough, other voices get smothered in a memoir, and Ms. Smith seeks to compensate by including an appendix with reminiscences provided by her father’s friends. But the range of these recollections is rather limited; in toto they read like just one more effort to keep Malamud in the family, so to speak.

Did Ms. Smith ever believe wholeheartedly that certain private matters ought not to make their way into biography? In “Private Matters” she did not chastise Edel, for example, but rather approved his idea that “a certain passing of time, respectfulness on the part of the biographer, are vital elements.” Ms. Smith evinces no knowledge of Johnson, who insisted:

If a life be delayed till interest and envy are at an end, we may hope for impartiality, but must expect little intelligence; for the incidents which give excellence to biography are of a volatile and evanescent kind, such as soon escape the memory, and are rarely transmitted by tradition.

At various points in “My Father Is a Book” Ms. Smith’s memory fails her. And at other points she is still reticent, not wishing to offend those who requested she not divulge what they told her. She does not heed Johnson’s injunction that “if we owe regard to the memory of the dead, there is yet more respect to be paid to knowledge, to virtue, and to truth.”

Still, Ms. Smith recognizes there is inevitably, and obviously, a conflict of interest between biographer and subject. As she puts it:

Real memory, real experience, and real facts give way in fiction to the psyche’s urge to redress itself by reconstructing experience. Part of what writers like James seek to protect with reticence and burnt letters is the integrity of this transformation and, with it, their power and the power of their art.

Just so, yet Ms. Smith also argues the contrary: “If the story ended here, artists, like heroes in old cartoons, would sweep away their tracks and escape. But even as good fiction satisfies, it often creates hunger to know more about the teller of the tale.”

Ah, whereas biography is often thought of as incomplete (how can the biographer know everything the way a novelist does?), while fiction is complete, fact and fiction, the biographer and subject, are actually symbiotic.

Ms. Smith is anxious – as Johnson could have predicted – because her father now is not “something overshadowing” but “something disappearing from view.” She says she has been told that after 20 years, the absence of a biography has harmed her father’s reputation, making him seem a lesser figure compared to contemporaries such as Saul Bellow and Philip Roth.

Would Bernard Malamud think much of this apologia? Now determined to have the whole hog,Ms.Smith is even cooperating with an authorized biographer in order to alleviate her “guilt for my part in discouraging such undertakings.” The biography, she believes, has left her “free to write this more personal story.” Having written “Private Matters,” she has now “broadened” her understanding of privacy and “subsequently needed less of it”! So, the argument of her entire previous book is evidently to be dismissed as therapy.

No wonder she suffers from guilt, since what she has done, by continuing to half-disclose and half-conceal, is a kind of crime worse than any trespass a biographer might commit.

crollyson@nysun.com