Bluebeard - Kurt Vonnegut [46]
And if only I could get back there in a time machine, what incredible fortune I could tell for her:
“You will be as beautiful as you are now, but much, much wiser, when you and I are reunited in Florence, Italy, after World War Two. What a war you will have had!
“You and Fred and Gregory will have moved to Italy, and Fred and Gregory will have been killed in the Battle of Sidi Barrani—in Egypt. You will have then won the heart of Mussolini’s minister of culture, Bruno, the Oxford-educated Count Portomaggiore, one of Italy’s largest landowners. He will also have been head of the British spy apparatus in Italy all through the war.”
When I visited her in her palace after the war, incidentally, she showed me a painting given to her by the mayor of Florence. It depicted the death of her late husband before a Fascist firing squad near the end of the war.
The painting was the sort of commercial kitsch Dan Gregory used to do, and of which I myself was and remain capable.
Her sense of her place in the world back in 1933, with the Great Depression going on, revealed itself, I think, in a conversation we had about A Doll’s House, the play by Henrik Ibsen. A new reader’s edition of that play had just come out, with illustrations by Dan Gregory, so we both read it and then discussed it afterwards.
Gregory’s most compelling illustration showed the very end of the play, with the leading character, Nora, going out the front door of her comfortable house, leaving her middle-class husband and children and servants behind, declaring that she had to discover her own identity out in the real world before she could be a strong mother and wife.
That is how the play ends. Nora isn’t going to allow herself to be patronized for being as uninformed and helpless as a child anymore.
And Marilee said to me, “That’s where the play begins as far as I’m concerned. We never find out how she survived. What kind of job could a woman get back then? Nora didn’t have any skills or education. She didn’t even have money for food and a place to stay.”
That was precisely Marilee’s situation, too, of course. There was nothing waiting for her outside the door of Gregory’s very comfortable dwelling except hunger and humiliation, no matter how meanly he might treat her.
A few days later, she told me that she had solved the problem. “That ending is a fake!” she said, delighted with herself. “Ibsen just tacked it on so the audience could go home happy. He didn’t have the nerve to tell what really happened, what the whole rest of the play says has to happen.”
“What has to happen?” I said.
“She has to commit suicide” said Marilee. “And I mean right away—in front of a streetcar or something before the curtain comes down. That’s the play. Nobody’s ever seen it, but that’s the play!”
I have had quite a few friends commit suicide, but was never able to see the dramatic necessity for it that Marilee saw in Ibsen’s play. That I can’t see that necessity is probably yet another mark of my shallowness as a participant in a life of serious art.
These are just my painter friends who killed themselves, all with considerable artistic successes behind them or soon to come:
Arshile Gorky hanged himself in 1948. Jackson Pollock, while drunk, drove his car into a tree along a deserted road in 1956. That was right before my first wife and kids walked out on me. Three weeks later, Terry Kitchen shot himself through the roof of his mouth with a pistol.
Back when we all lived in New York City, Pollock and Kitchen and I, heavy drinkers all, were known in the Cedar Tavern as the “Three Musketeers.”
Trivia question: How many of the Three Musketeers are alive today? Answer: me.
Yes, and Mark Rothko, with enough sleeping pills in his medicine cabinet to kill an elephant, slashed himself to death with a knife in 1970.
What conclusion can I draw from such grisly demonstrations of terminal discontent? Only this: some people are a