Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters (11 page)

where his eyes rest with pleasure—

I want to still be—but time has changed

the hold of that glance.

Alas how will I cope when I am

even less youthful—

I seek joy but
you are
it is clothed

with pain—

have courage - to be brave
take heart as in my youth

sleep and rest my heavy head

on
your
his breast—
because
for still my love

sleeps beside me.

Marilyn reading Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass
, 1951
Marilyn reading Arthur Miller’s
Death of a Salesman
, 1952

ROXBURY NOTES

1958

In the summer of 1957, Marilyn and Arthur Miller bought a house in Roxbury, Connecticut, where Arthur had already lived with his first wife. They initially considered having the house demolished in order to have a new one built by Frank Lloyd Wright, with a swimming pool, a home cinema, a theater, and a big office for Arthur, but the project turned out to be too expensive and they contented themselves with renovating the property.

Marilyn probably wrote these few pages in the spring of 1958, and their tone is particularly disenchanted. The couple stayed a long time in the country, but, loveless now, their home seemed empty. Arthur worked with little success on the screen adaptation of his own short story
The Misfits
, and Marilyn quickly got bored with her role of housewife. Even the arrival of spring and leaves on the trees were no longer any solace, since they reminded her of failed attempts at motherhood, the lack of a child she had hoped for. At this time she would look closely at her own face in a magnifying glass and observe the effects of passing time.

Since the “other” (the beloved) was unattainable, she resigned herself “to love bravely” and accept what she could not alter. Here we can sense a tortured soul who still wanted to believe in the possibility of profound connection, even as the relationship grew more strained and distant.

starting tomorrow I will take care of myself for that’s all I really have and as I see it now have ever had. Roxbury—I’ve tried to imagine spring all winter—it’s here and I still feel hopeless. I think I hate it here because there is no love here anymore. I regret the effort I desperately made here. I tried to fight what with my being I knew was true—
that
due to pressure (it’s going to sound like a telegram) that have come in my work (it’s funny I’ve always accepted even the worst—tried to oppose it if it meant jeopardizing my work) he could not endure (he is from another land) though I felt (innocently, which I am not) that what I could endure helped both of us and in a material way
also
which means so much more to him than me even. I have seen what he intends me to see and I am strangely calm while I catch my breath. It’s a good saying the not so funny—what it stands for though—pain “If I had my life to live over I’d live over a saloon”

Those tender green leaves on these one hundred & seventy five year old maples that I see (
I wondered several what my senses felt
what was I looking at). It’s like having a child when one is ninety.
I don’t want any children because I only could trust every delicate and indelicate feeling of my child with myself in case of accident
(
sounds like an identification card
) there is no one I trust. I mean if anything would happen Blessed thought at this moment. In every spring the green is too sharp—though the delicacy in their form is

Note: The quote is from W. C. Fields.