When Marilyn Monroe died, she left her personal possessions to her acting teacher, Lee Strasberg. After Strasberg’s death, the collection passed to his widow, Anna, who some years later discovered among the dresses, pictures, and other miscellany a cache of personal writings. This week, Farrar, Straus & Giroux publishes these in “Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters.†The writings are intimate, unfiltered, and often unsettling:
On the stage—I will
not be punished for it
or be whipped
or be threatened
or not be loved
or sent to hell to burn with bad people
feeling that I am also bad.
or be afraid of my genitals being
or ashamed
exposed known and seen—
They come to us in facsimiles of the originals, in Monroe’s messy handwriting (with typed transcripts on the facing pages), complete with spelling and grammatical errors, giving them a vulnerability characteristic of Monroe on film:
For someone like me its wrong to go through thorough self analisis—I do it enough in thought generalities enough. Its not to much fun to know yourself to well or think you do—everyone needs a little conciet to carry them through & past the falls.
This is heartbreaking, not least for feeding the myth of the dumb, blond, “sweet angel of sex†(as Norman Mailer once put it). But Monroe also emerges in these pages as a surprisingly strong writer, capable of conveying very clearly and beautifully, in vivid images, her own pain. In a letter to a psychiatrist during a hospital stay in 1961, she writes, “Just now when I looked out the hospital window where the snow had covered everything is a kind of muted green. The grass, shabby evergreen bushes—though the trees give me a little hope—the desolate bare branches promising maybe there will be spring and maybe they promise hope. Did you see ‘The Misfits’ yet? In one sequence you can perhaps see how bare and strange a tree can be for me.†She also comes across as a lover of the written word. In this month’s Vanity Fair, Sam Kashner writes:
Several photographs taken of Marilyn earlier in her life—the ones she especially liked—show her reading. Eve Arnold photographed her for Esquire magazine in a playground in Amagansett reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. Alfred Eisenstaedt photographed her, for Life, at home, dressed in white slacks and a black top, curled up on her sofa, reading, in front of a shelf of books—her personal library, which would grow to 400 volumes. In another photograph, she’s on a pulled-out sofa bed reading the poetry of Heinrich Heine. If some photographers thought it was funny to pose the world’s most famously voluptuous “dumb blonde†with a book—James Joyce! Heinrich Heine!—it wasn’t a joke to her. In these newly discovered diary entries and poems, Marilyn reveals a young woman for whom writing and poetry were lifelines, the ways and means to discover who she was and to sort through her often tumultuous emotional life.
One of the more remarkable things “Fragments†does is give us Marilyn Monroe the way we’ve always wanted her: as someone, finally, have-able. This is both satisfying and, ultimately, disturbing. In one entry, Monroe recounts a dream in which she is being operated on by Strasberg and her analyst. When they cut her open, Monroe writes, “there is absolutely nothing there … devoid of every human living feeling thing.†This book feels a little like this sort of cutting open, only in addition to this fear of emptiness there are many other “living feeling things†inside. This is a far cry from “Boo-boo-be-dooâ€:
Scream—
You began and ended in air
but where was the middle?