Arthur Miller once described Marilyn as “a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes.”
“Fragments,” a new book of her poems, letters and musings, written in her own hand in leather books and others on stationery from the Waldorf-Astoria and the Beverly Hills Hotel, is affecting. The world’s most coveted woman, a picture of luminescence, was lonely and dark. Thinking herself happily married, she was crushed to discover an open journal in which Miller had written that she disappointed him and embarrassed him in front of his intellectual peers. “I guess I have always been deeply terrified to really be someone’s wife since I know from life one cannot love another, ever, really.”
Some may feel that the book is quite intrusive because of the personal content but at the same time it does give us a deeper understanding of the woman behind the image, her hopes and fears. Her fans have always been aware of this side of her personality and hopefully with this book the secret is out; Marilyn was no dumb blonde and indeed we see a real depth to her character, creative, intelligent, a bookworm with a flair for poetry herself! Not really how the public pictures Marilyn Monroe.
Her poems are, by far, the heart of the book. She describes the human spirit as a “cobweb in the wind”; a sleeping lover’s vulnerability is tenderly captured; a suicide fantasy turns on itself to celebrate the beauty of a world that Monroe is not ready to leave. Her depression, her romantic spirit, her impenetrable loneliness is all there, and these poems could have been published on their own.
This has to be one of the most amazing books on Marilyn ever. It’s a real insight into the person she was away from the blinding flashbulbs and movie cameras. She was so much more than she appeared to be. And that makes the tragedy of her short life all the more heartbreaking.
The book was published simultaneously around the world in October 2010 and a deluxe version was made available for a limited time in France. It was one of the most heavily publicised Marilyn books in recent years, gaining coverage on major magazines throughout the world including Vanity Fair.
By Fraser Penney
