Fragments_ Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters - Marilyn Monroe [1]
As far as has been possible to determine, the texts are placed in chronological order. Words printed in red are the editors’ and correct spelling mistakes, add missing words, or suggest possible readings of indecipherable words. The ordering of fragments of very disparate documents has been an attempt at reconstruction and hence at interpretation. The flow of Marilyn’s thoughts on individual pages, and from one successive page to another, is indicated by red arrows (black arrows are Marilyn’s own).
It is possible that other texts written by Marilyn will surface in the years or decades to come. For the moment, this book contains every available text, excepting her technical notes on acting. In any case, these writings reveal a young woman who was dissatisfied with issues of surface appearance and who was seeking the truth at the heart of both things and people.
Only lovers of clichés will be surprised that the Hollywood actress was passionately fond of literature, although this fact cannot be illustrated merely by the pictures collected in this book. (Still: how many actresses from that period do we know who sometimes took pains to be photographed reading or holding a book?) In a 1960 interview with the French journalist Georges Belmont, Marilyn recalled the beginning of her career: “Nobody could imagine what I did when I wasn’t shooting, because they didn’t see me at previews or premieres or parties. It’s simple: I was going to school! I’d never finished high school, so I started going to UCLA at night, because during the day I had small parts in pictures. I took courses in the history of literature and the history of this country, and I started to read a lot, stories by wonderful writers.” Her library contained four hundred books, ranging from such classics as Milton, Dostoyevsky, and Whitman to contemporary writers, including Hemingway, Beckett, and Kerouac.
Arthur Miller played a part in her development as a reader, too, recommending Carl Sandburg’s six-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln, which she devoured. But some years before they were involved, Marilyn had already tackled James Joyce’s Ulysses.
As we know, Marilyn inspired numerous painters: Dalí, De Kooning, and Warhol, among others. She also felt a real interest in painting—in the painters of the Italian Renaissance, such as Botticelli; Goya, especially his demons (“I know this man very well, we have the same dreams, I have had the same dreams since I was a child”); Degas, whose ballet dancer she gazed at in wonder when taken to see a private collection; and also Rodin, whose Hand of God she admired at length in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
From all these examples emerges a cultured and curious Marilyn who had a strong desire to understand others, the outside world, destiny, and, of course, herself. She took notes, swiftly setting down her feelings and thoughts and expressing her wonder. Some may be surprised at her spelling mistakes, in which, most probably, a form of dyslexia is detectable. But readers of Marcel Proust’s correspondence (Marilyn read Swann’s Way on the set of Love Nest in 1951) will have seen worse. The very Proust who, answering the question “to which failings are you most lenient?” replied unhesitatingly, “spelling mistakes,” and who, in one of his letters, wrote this strange and beautiful phrase: “Each spelling mistake is the expression of a desire.”
The collection of documents revealed here is nothing less than a treasure trove. We owe its appearance to Anna Strasberg and her sons, Adam and David, who, during the preparation of this book, have embraced the opportunity to uncover a hitherto undervalued, even unknown dimension of Marilyn’s personality. From beginning to end we have shared their desire to create a book that, we would like to think, would have pleased its author. Marilyn once confessed to a journalist: “I think Lee probably changed my life more than any other human being. That’s why I love to go to the Actors Studio whenever I’m in New