“Sometimes things fall apart, so that better things can fall together,” she remarked.
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.There are countless books on Marilyn Monroe, and it comes with good reason, she was an actress, model, and singer who became one of the most popular sex symbols of the 1950s and early 1960s. In one entry, Monroe recounts a dream in which she is being operated on by Strasberg and her analyst. This is both satisfying and, ultimately, disturbing.
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.
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. 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 another photograph, she’s on a pulled-out sofa bed reading the poetry of Heinrich Heine. 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. Eve Arnold photographed her for Esquire magazine in a playground in Amagansett reading James Joyce’s Ulysses. Several photographs taken of Marilyn earlier in her life-the ones she especially liked-show her reading. In this month’s Vanity Fair, Sam Kashner writes: 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. 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. 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. 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. This is heartbreaking, not least for feeding the myth of the dumb, blond, “sweet angel of sex” (as Norman Mailer once put it). 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. For someone like me its wrong to go through thorough self analisis-I do it enough in thought generalities enough.
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