Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters (10 page)

1956

Soon after their wedding on June 29, 1956, Marilyn and Arthur Miller went to London, where the film
The Prince and the Showgirl
, produced by Marilyn Monroe Productions, was to be shot. Laurence Olivier directed the film and played the male lead. The relationship between the two actors was difficult: Olivier was disdainful and haughty toward Marilyn. The couple arrived in London on July 14 and stayed at Parkside House, a luxurious manor house in Egham, Surrey, near London. Everything should have been idyllic. However, one day Marilyn found her husband’s open diary and discovered that the playwright was disappointed in her, that he was sometimes ashamed of her in front of his intellectual peers, and that he had doubts about their marriage. Marilyn was extremely upset and felt betrayed.

Did she write these few poems and odd texts on Parkside House stationery before or after her discovery? In either case, their tone is mournful. They are pessimistic about love and love’s possibilities as well as the inevitable passage of time. The filming was difficult. Marilyn’s acting coach Paula Strasberg was called in to help, as was Dr. Margaret Hohenberg, her New York analyst. On October 29, Marilyn Monroe was introduced to Queen Elizabeth II during a ceremony, and she went back to the United States on November 20. The portrait shown
here
is possibly of Laurence Olivier.

my love sleeps besides me—

in the faint light—I see his manly jaw

give away—and the mouth of his

boyhood returns

with a softness softer

its sensitiveness that trembling

in stillness

his eyes must have look out

wonderously from the cave of the little

boy—when the things he did not understand—

he forgot but will he look like this when he is dead

oh unbearable fact inevitable

yet sooner would I rather his love die

than/or him?

the pain of his longing when he looks

at another—

like an unfulfil
l
ment since the day

he was born.

And I in merciless pain

and with his pain of longing—

when he looks at and loves another

like an unfulfil
l
ment of since the day

he was born—

we must endure

I more sadly because I can feel no joy

oh silence
why don’t/aren’t you still soothe me

you
sounds drums
stillness hurt my
ears
head—and

pierce ears

jars my head with the stillness of

sounds unbearable/durable—

on the screen of pitch blackness

comes/reappears the shapes of monsters
who are

my most steadfast companions—

my blood is throbbing with unrest

turns it route in
the opposite
another direction

and the
whole
world is sleeping

ah peace I need you—even a

peaceful monster.

Note: Wissett is a village in Suffolk. It is not known what the number refers to; possibly it is a phone number.

I guess I have always been

deeply terrified at to really be someone’s

wife

since I know from life

one cannot love another,

ever, really.

it is not to be for granted

in life less that
the old woman hides—

from her
mirror
glass—the one she polishes so it won’t be dusty—

daring sometimes
that to

to see her toothless gasp and if she perhaps very gently smiles

years only
she remembers—

her
life or imagined youth
pain

her pale chif
f
on dress

that she wore on a windy

afternoon when she walked

where no one had ever been

her
blue eyed
clear eyed baby who

lived to die—the woman’s
youth
years have

not
left. The woman
stares
&
stares
in space