Mailer's Mystic Marriage

...Alas, great hagio-raphy-even of this secular and profane sort-Seldom makes for good writing...

...The capital offense of this book is the rant, the bombast, the fustian, the sheer ludicrous and ugly overwriting of it...

...It is they who spread the canard of her as a great stage actress, which, for them, paid off handsomely...

...If the content is worthy of Preminger's Laura, the style is rather like Popeye the Sailor's arm after the ingestion of spinach: Mailer flexing his verbal muscles to the point where his prose is not a good read but a grisly roller-coaster ride along a biceps gone berserk...

...You can read stuff no worse than that in any studio's publicity handouts...

...she "possessed the talent to play Cordelia," and became "so superb an actress" that "her taste by the end of her career was close to superb...

...he can do it with mere hyperbole...

...Vulgar errors abound...

...Norman becomes obsessed with the lovely dead woman, and his proposed preface mushrooms into a 90,000-word mushy and maniacal "novel biography...

...nor is it the absurd overestimation of that person's talents and scope...

...Mailer expatiates: "Never again will she seem so close to a detumescent body ready to roll right over the edge of the world and drop your body down a chute of pillows and honey...

...I would say that her flagrant sexiness, as in Niagara, was indisputable...

...Food once more, but that must be some sticky, clogged-up chute...

...If Marilyn exasperates her fellow actors on the set, this becomes in Mailer: "She is an extermination camp to millions of cells in each of the brains of her co-workers as she gasses their patience"-Six million dead Jews in search of an author who can convert them into a metaphor for Monroe's neurosis...

...Or consider this Sargasso Sea of verbiage through which we must fight toward the simple notion that young Marilyn, although a narcissist, need not have been a virgin: "While an actor's face can be the human equivalent of Potemkin's village, and glamour no more than a measure of the distance from the glow of the flesh to sentiments of sewer gas in the womb, not every woman who is transcendently sexual on the screen must therefore be transcendently frigid in bed...

...Already at the end of An American Dream Rojack got a phone call from his dead girl who told him that Marilyn sends her love...

...And if the actress doesn't wash to the point of stinking, this is an existential act: "Marilyn, like many another artist, may not wish to wash if in the scent of the previous day some clue to experience can linger...

...Why limit oneself to criticism when one can create hagjography...

...Even further back, in The Deer Park, Mailer had created Lulu, modeled, one gathers, on Marilyn...

...But then there is always the Charybdis of the adman's or press agent's sweet banalities lying in wait for him...

...This is no longer mere bad writing or bad thinking...

...Yet Mailer needs neither sex nor food to be nauseating...

...that her attempts at comedy, as in Bus Stop, were risible...

...We begin to wonder what oral-infantile fixation obliges Mailer to keep mixing up sex and eating, the erotic and the esculent...

...But] one unconscious could almost serve for Nana and Bovary both...

...That time her name will be Anna May Wong...

...But, lest that be too unmodishly happy an ending, he adds: "It is the devil of her humor and the curse of our land that she will come back speaking Chinese...

...It is her transcendence of the oppo-sites into a movie star that is her triumph...

...If Monroe on the set keeps flubbing the simple line, "It's me, Sugar," by twisting it into "It's Sugar, me," Mailer glosses this as "searching into nuances of identity . . . working out a problem in psychic knots worthy of R. D. Laing...

...At last, even if only posthumously, the affair can be consummated...

...And it won't do to say that Mailer has only lately gone over the bend: There is less than a Chappaquiddick wheel's deviation between these onanistic lucubrations on the late sex star, the nude and deceased, and that supposedly brilliant first novel on the naked and the dead...

...Mailer's Marilyn is clearly a labor of lust...

...No glory to his own sausage...

...The clever editor hires a brilliant young (well, young in everything but years) literary detective, Norman Mailer, to piece together the woman's story and unriddle its dark ending...

...Note also the ungrammaticalness...

...Mailer explicates this as not necessarily trying to be funny, but rather an awareness that one is much less nude "with the protection of sound...

...So Mailer writes: "This woman, then, is better seen as Madame Bovary and Nana all in one, both in one, each with her separate unconscious...

...Most biographies are labors of love...

...It is when Nana and Joan of Arc exist in the same flesh, or Boris Karloff and Bing Crosby, that the abysses of insanity are under the fog at every turn...

...nor even the arrogance and foolishness with which he figures out by spurious near-anagrams of their names that Marilyn and Mailer were destined for each other (or really the same person, I'm not quite sure which...

...The tastelessness is less in the prurience than in the ineptitude...

...of course, Mailer can write simply, too...

...so Darryl Zanuck, a hundred pages later, finds Marilyn's surpassing his low estimate of her "ulcerous to the eye of his stomach," and Marilyn's vacuous countenance becomes "in part the face DiMaggio has been leaving in her womb...

...The real Monroe was a noteworthy sexpot and quite inconsiderable actress, though today the very handbooks will tell you otherwise...

...nor yet the metaphysical balderdash about karma and double souls and Chinese reincarnation...

...It is simpler to assume that sexual attraction is finally based on something in sex itself, or that for some years, at any rate, there is the power to find some sexual return in a phallus or vagina as well as in a mirror or lens...

...Anyone else, man or woman, who contained such opposite personalities within his body would be ferociously mad...

...So Marilyn gets written, not exactly as a "novel biography," though Mailer, to rival Capote's equally preposterous "nonfiction novel," would have it so, and certainly not as biography or criticism...

...Marilyn's longing for power to compensate for an orphan's dreary childhood becomes catchily "Yeats' beast slinking to the marketplace," although that particular beast slouched toward Bethlehem...

...The pity was that she had real talent," says The Film-goer's Companion...

...Already in the very first paragraph of the book we read: "Across five continents the men who knew the most about love would covet her, and the classical pimples of the adolescent working his first gas pump would also pump for her, since Marilyn was deliverance, a very Stradivarius of sex, so gorgeous, forgiving, humorous, compliant and tender that even the most mediocre musician could relax his lack of art in the dissolving magic of her violin...

...If not that, at least Mailer believes in karma: "She will soon return to us from retirement," he concludes hopefully...

...For Marilyn Monroe, whom their adulation confused, made megalomaniaca], and turned against the Hollywood where she belonged, the result was merely that she was speeded along on the pill-paved road to perdition...

...Thus Mailer's Marilyn is at various times compared or contrasted to Napoleon, Nixon, John F. Kennedy, the Kennedy clan as a whole, George Wallace, Saint Joan, and even, most curiously, likened in her ways of cleaning her first conjugal apartment to Joseph Conrad learning English...

...Who was Marilyn Monroe...

...Beyond that, she is the creature of his fantasy, of his yearning for, as well as hostility toward, women...

...We are told that "one might literally have to invent the idea of a soul in order to approach her...

...In his eyes [Marilyn] had to be Schenck's meat and Hyde's potatoes...

...Today [when] one has to look into the highest ranks of the Republican party before finding an American who is not polymorphous perverse," as Mailer, for whom no boudoir holds a secret, observes, what is a little platonic necrophilia...

...Moreover, it is probably Marilyn, "the First Lady of American ghosts," who gives "a witch's turn to the wheel in Chap-paquiddick...

...For such a master Jesuit, it is simple legerdemain to speculate that Monroe's suicide may have been a cleverly disguised murder, either by the FBI-CIA or by the Mafia-an Either/Or at which Kierkegaard himself would have boggled -and that this death set off the series of cataclysmic political assassinations that were soon to start rending the country...

...Most typical is the mixed metaphor, as when Marilyn is "a sweet peach bursting before one's eyes" while looking "like she'd stepped fully clothed out of a chocolate box for Valentine's Day"-a chocolate-covered peach, presumably, to whom, in the next sentence, "sex was, yes, ice cream...

...And there is Monroe with the pictures of Eleonora Duse and Abraham Lincoln on her wall, double Monroe, one hard and calculating computer of a cold and ambitious cunt . . . and that other tender animal, an angel, a doe at large in blonde and lovely human form...

...We read, for example, that "a male photographer [wants] to photograph his woman nude, ideally her vagina, open and nude"-as if a vagina were not ipso facto open and nude...

...Again: "Darryl Zanuck liked to put his own meat into a star's meat, so that the product was truly stamped Twentieth Century-Fox...

...in The International Encyclopedia of Film one reads: "Her considerable talent for comedy and pathos was largely either unrecognized or belittled in her lifetime...

...What is truly shocking about Marilyn is not so much that Mailer is writing a biography of someone he didn't know and doesn't bother to research properly...

...Such an indigestible diet of metaphors leads inevitably to the scrambling of digestive and other organs...

...Despite a few flashes of common sense, some insights and an occasional bit of lucid exposition, Marilyn is a very poorly written, very demented book, by someone whom our deluded critics persist in treating as a major, perhaps our best, writer...

...at least let me instance the carelessness that exudes from repetitions like "receive a good reception" and "Dougherty's version is by way of Guiles: 'Are you happy?' he decides to ask by way of a greeting...

...back in the days when Mailer's Connecticut farm was only five miles from the Millers', Norman, as he tells us, hoped in vain that Arthur would invite him over to meet Marilyn...

...From verbal aggrandizement we go, quite naturally, to ideological magnification...

...it is perfect madness...

...Taking on a quick project for easy money, he becomes engrossed in the grossest way...

...When he lusts for his heroine most, in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes ("never . . . will she appear so fucky again...

...If Marilyn is looking at some mushrooms, to Mailer she is probably "comparing them to differences she has now discovered in the penis of the husband and the lover...

...It can be described more precisely as a new genre called transcendental masturbation or metaphysical wet dreaming...

...Eureka...

...To Mailer, she is two books about her (by Fred Guiles and Maurice Zolo-tow, plus some other publications he could briefly dip into), which he quotes, paraphrases, embroiders upon and, finally, disputes or disparages...

...All that is left of her is a set of photographs by various hands about to be published in book form...

...To buttress such gilt (yes, gilt) by association, Mailer will outstrip any casuistic Biblical exegete...

...The legend of her comedic skills seems to have been largely the fabrication of Lee and Paula Strasberg, who saw in her acquisition for the Actors Studio and their personal coaching a boost to their failing fame and fortune...

...We read that "more than one Hollywood star would yet brag of early morning blow jobs fresh as milk while having his studio lunch in the commissary"-where it is rather hard to determine what is blown and what is eaten, and just where "breakfast" stops and lunch begins...

...He awaits the Preminger twist, when the girl in the pictures will prove alive after all and fall into his arms...

...So we read of Marilyn that "to kiss her is to drift in a canoe" or that "she is Lady Girl of the working class, and our own Rubens of the 4x5 Speed Graphic...

...and that her pathos, as in The Misfits, was a pathetic fallacy...

...I haven't the space here for examples of mere errors of grammar and syntax, misuse of words, illiterate inversions, and the like...

...But Mailer, despite the ocular evidence of 24 of her 30 films, which he seems to have sat through in rapid succession, thinks Monroe a great actress and great woman...

...She is "a proud, inviolate artist" who "inhabits every frame of the film" she is in...

...Asked if she had anything on for her calendar poses, Monroe (or her press agent) replied, "The radio...

...Again, in The Misfits, Marilyn "is not so much a woman as a mood, a cloud of drifting senses in the form of Marilyn Monroe-no, never has she been more luminous...

...If a goddess didn't exist, we'd have to invent her...