Marjorie Morningstar (76 page)

Wally’s a born gagman. If somebody else was to get the job, I’m glad he did. He’s
a damned clever kid. He hasn’t the brains of an ant-eater so far as any thinking about
abstractions or serious problems goes. But what the hell point is there to abstractions
if you’re not Whitehead or Einstein? My curse, the burden I carry on my back like
Bunyan’s pilgrim, is my abstracting tendency. And now we are coming at last to the
point.

Marjorie, at the present moment in my life I’m not a composer, I’m not a lyric writer,
I’m not a musical-comedy writer, I’m not an advertising writer, I’m not a gagwriter,
I’m not any kind of a writer. I repeat,
at present
. Maybe I’ll have a late flowering, like Hawthorne. At thirty-two, having tried my
hand at everything, I’m back where I was at twenty-two. Ferdie Platt and I talked
about this for six hours last night and I don’t care how much we drank, it was the
soberest conversation that two men ever conducted. If I am anything at all, I’m a
philosopher. Now that statement looks incredibly vainglorious and ridiculous, just
typed out cold, but you can go to hell if you don’t like it.

I’m going back to the Sorbonne. After a while I may go to Oxford for a couple of years.
There are some scholarships at both places I know I can get without half trying. Until
I’m thirty-five I’m going to do nothing but study. Then I’ll take a long breath and
see where I am. The greatest likelihood is that I’ll come back to the States and get
a job teaching philosophy. Right now I can’t tell you what a glorious prospect that
is to me. I pant for it. But I’m willing to be patient and work like hell to be worthy
of it. I’m not looking beyond the immediate moment. First thing in the morning I’m
going to book out on the next boat to Paris. And to prove I’m serious I’m going back
on the lean regime: third-class ticket, ten-cent cigarettes, and all the rest. The
money I have from the advertising drudgery has got to
last
. And kiddo, I am the man to make it last, especially in Paris. I do that better than
practically anything.

I’m not giving up the hope of doing something creative. There are precedents for men
like myself, who seem to have a facility for everything and a grasp of nothing, eventually
coming through with the real stuff. Samuel Butler was all over the place with cantatas,
paintings, evolutionary theories, poetry, novels, philology, and Lord knows what else.
All garbage. But at last he came out with
The Way of All Flesh
. Actually it was published after he died. I’m not saying I’m a suppressed novelist.
I don’t know what I am. Maybe I’m a defeated mediocrity salving his bruised ego, as
you no doubt are about to decide in your little bourgeois wisdom. My slip is showing,
hey? Well, my love, I hope we both meet, you aged forty-one and me fifty, to compare
notes. I wish you the best, but I can’t wish you’re right about me, naturally.

Ye gods, a ray of weak sunlight just fell across my desk. How long have I been typing?

Well, I’m finished. I hope I’ve proved to your satisfaction that I’m a revolting heel,
thoroughly incorrigible, and unreliable, and that I will never make a good citizen
of New Rochelle. Actions speak louder than words. Certainly all my acts of the past
three years added together should open your eyes to the cruel truth at last. But this
letter should serve to document that truth, in case you begin to doubt it in weak
moments. I’ve had my weak moments, too. Those, unquestionably, are what have given
you hope. A man who makes loud anti-social noises like me, and then meekly drudges
month after month at a desk in the J. Walter Thompson agency, writing extremely competent
advertising copy, probably seems worth working on. So let’s clear
that
up, once for all, and then we’ll be through with this endless epistle, I believe.
I just want to make it utterly clear that you have nothing to hope for.

Passion makes people do queer things. Now I’ve had a burning passion for you, and
that explains all my bourgeois lapses like the Thompson job and the Rothmore job.
But I want to insist, by the way, that what I told you when I took this last job was
true. I am not one of these pure spirits who sees advertising as the lowest state
to which the soul of man can fall. To me it’s a way of selling words for money, like
any other. I don’t see any difference between writing girdle ads for money, screenplays
for money, or stage plays for money. If you’re a great artist creating enduring works,
that’s another matter. Frankly, I hate all kinds of writing, it’s loathsome drudgery,
but I will not admit that a screenwriter or even the writer of a hit on Broadway is
any better than an advertising copywriter. He’s better only in so far as he makes
more money. It’s all horse manure. Nobody’s going to convince me that the dark brown
manure is spiritually nobler somehow than the pale yellow manure. I stand on that.

I took the job because my money from
Moon Face
had run out, winter was coming on, you and I were still having fun with each other
(despite your moral lapses into gloom) and I wanted to finance our pleasures in style.
It was the Rothmore experience all over again for me. The first week or two it seemed
a simple lark, and I rather enjoyed it. And gradually it became the most ghastly and
unendurable slavery. I have been at the end of my rope for some weeks now. Ferdie
Platt’s arrival in town was a godsend. A night of talking about the old days in Paris,
and a frank cry on an old pal’s shoulder, was really all I needed. Coincidentally,
I daresay, losing out on the gagwriting job that same afternoon had put a sort of
period to this era of my life, by reducing what I was doing to the ultimate absurdity—defeat
by Wally Wronken.

Marjorie, the fever has broken at last. And for good, I believe. For the first time
in three years I can truly report to you that my passion for you has waned. I wouldn’t
lie about this. You understand that this is the end, really the end. With the passion
waned, there is no power left on earth that can ever make me into a docile commuter.
Moreover, I see no chance of the passion reviving. I’ve been through it. I’m coming
out on the other side. Nor will the like ever happen to me again. Probably it had
to happen once. It’s been a sort of emotional smallpox. I’m scarred, but I’m cured.
And I’m immune. The reason is that I now fully understand what has happened to me.
The compulsions have been dragged out into daylight, and their power is gone.

You know enough about my family background by now to realize that I’m King Oedipus
himself, a walking textbook on that particular complex. It also happens that my father
is a louse, a windbag, and a bore, Oedipus or no Oedipus. ANYWAY—there is a slight
complication, or maybe just an extension, in the fact that I’ve always been extremely
fond of Monica. There isn’t the slightest doubt in my mind—I’ve never been psychoanalyzed,
but I don’t have to spend forty hours on a couch and two thousand dollars to figure
this out—that I’ve been “killing my father,” as the technicians would put it, by rejecting
the respectable pattern of living, and being a disgraceful bum, and all that. There
is also no doubt that the Shirley image I’m always talking about is my mother and
my sister coalesced. Attraction-repulsion follows because of the incest theme, the
association with my father, and so forth. I’m sure that my wretched behavior to a
whole string of West End Avenue girls—and to some extent, the sadistic element in
my treatment of you—has been a vengeance thing, the inflicting of pain substituting
for normal sex relations, a childish regression. Gad, I should get a job in a clinic,
I’m so brilliant at this. Well, darling, what I’m getting at is, I have possessed
my nemesis. I have thereby ceased to be plagued by her. This affair of ours was probably
necessary for me, or I’d always have run the risk of suddenly proposing to some dreadful
Jewish dollface. You have released me.

Am I still in love with you? Love is a word. I can do without you very well. I mean
to. I’ve gotten over love affairs before. I’m not seventeen. This isn’t the end of
the world. The heart is a muscle. It loosens and stretches with exercise. Mine has
had a lot of exercise, and will soon snap back to normal. Yours, I’m sorry to say,
will give you more pain and take a little longer. But you’ll get over it too. Everybody
does. Only people in nineteenth-century novels die for love—or advanced neurotics
scheduled to kill themselves anyway. If there’s anything you’re not, it’s neurotic.
You’re complicated, but you’re made of vanadium steel. That old Jewish steel that’s
outlasting the pyramids. Bless your little heart, you’re your mama all over again.
I’m not jeering at you, my darling. You’re unspeakably pretty and sweet and bright
and nice, and I could eat you up. But the price is too high, and I will not pay it.
I said from the start I wouldn’t, and I won’t. Maybe all these words have been in
vain, and you think I still will, some day. Well, I won’t. Don’t try to stop me from
sailing to Europe. I know a trick worth two of that. I’ll give this letter to Ferdie
to mail two days after I’m gone. I’ll be on the high seas while your warm tears are
staining this page. The Masked Marvel has outwitted you to the last, Marjorie Morgenstern.

And now, my valedictory to you. Once more, I will be cruel to be kind. You are not,
and you never will be, Marjorie Morningstar. In time you will be Marjorie Cohen, Marjorie
Levy, or Marjorie Shapiro. It is written in the stars. I knew this back at South Wind,
after watching you act once or twice. I equivocated about it for two reasons. First,
there seemed no point in hurting you, especially as I knew you’d never believe me.
Not at nineteen. Second, you had enough sparkle and intelligence, and also my judgment
was clouded enough by the fact that I was falling in love with you, to create a shred
of doubt in my mind. But that doubt went, long ago. Now let me tell you the harsh
truth about yourself in words of two syllables or less, so you’ll never forget it.

All girls, including you, are too goddamn emancipated nowadays. You get the idea from
all the silly magazines and movies you’re bathed in from infancy, and then from all
the talk in high school and college, that you’ve got to
be
somebody and
do
something. Bloody nonsense. A woman should
be
some man’s woman and
do
what women are born and built to do—sleep with some man, rear his kids, and keep
him reasonably happy while he does his fragment of the world’s work. They’re not really
happy doing anything else. I’m sorry if I sound like Harry Emerson Fosdick, but the
truth is the truth, no matter how stupid it happens to sound. Anyway, nowadays even
preachers don’t dare talk this way, it’s considered so corny. The Nazis are the only
ones who’ve come right out with it. And THEIR saying it doesn’t make it wrong, either.
Two and two make four, even if Hitler says so.

Well, now, Nature gives most of you girls a burst of charm around seventeen, lasting
a few years, so you can attract some man and keep this process going. It’s the flower
and the bee; it’s that simple and obvious. But do you ever ascribe your new charm
to Nature? Of course not. What’s happened is that you’ve suddenly become a brilliant,
gifted, sage individual. You’ve assumed a role, complete with makeup, costumes, and
dialogue. And you’ve dressed and painted yourself with amazing cleverness, and you
keep inventing fantastically witty dialogue, and there’s no end to your graceful ways
and arts. THAT’S how it happens that boys are starting to fall all over you. It’s
got nothing to do with your fresh pointy breasts and new round thighs and perky behind.
It follows that you have some extraordinary talent for this kind of thing. In fact,
you’re an actress.

I’m not talking about you, you understand. Being an actress (or a model, same damn
nonsense) has become to the average American girl what being a knight in armor was
to Don Quixote. It’s a process that’s going on all over the country, this addling
of girls’ brains. That’s why I call it a tropism. Nothing can stop it, until our civilization
changes. Year after year troops of Marjorie Morningstars will converge on Hollywood
and Broadway to be seduced, raped, perverted, prostituted, or—if they’re lucky like
you—to merely tangle up in fornication for a couple of years and then go home to marry
the druggist’s son or the doctor or the real estate man.

I say you’re lucky because I’ve been a little more interesting and amusing, I’m sure,
than the usual show-business deflowerer. It’s generally some asinine chorus boy or
actor, or lecherous third assistant stage manager, who does the job. Or a producer,
if a girl’s really worth bothering with. Or maybe a musician, or a phony Village writer
needing a bath and a haircut. Some idle joker, anyway, who stays up late and has a
lot of time on his hands for fooling around with the Morningstars.

Margie, this job of yours doesn’t mean a thing. I am NOT being malicious. The play
stinks. You know it does. You have a ridiculous walk-on part, and Guy Flamm only hired
you because you’re pretty and inexperienced and he probably figures he can scrounge
you on salary. I don’t think the show will ever get to New York, and if it does it’ll
close in three days. No talent scout will see you. If one does, he’ll ignore you.
He knows all about the Morningstars. He can spot them a mile off. Anyway, who pays
any attention to a Guy Flamm production? Good Lord, you remember your first brush
with him! It’s a study in self-deception to see how steamed up you’ve become over
this lousy bit part, just because you had to sign an Equity form. Well, you’ll get
over it. I just hope the bump isn’t too hard. Actually, it’s just as well you’re in
the clouds at this particular moment in both our lives. It’ll cushion the shock of
this letter. The rehearsals and all will take your mind off it. I feel a little less
squeamish, consequently, about wielding the knife.

Darling, don’t ever regret the theatre, once you’re defeated and out. It’s a quicksand,
a pigsty. It’s one big whorehouse extending from Forty-second Street to Columbus Circle,
except for a nook here and there reserved for homosexuals. I am not abusing it because
I have failed. The theatre’s never had an ounce of glamor for me. The attraction always
has been the money. Maybe that’s an indication that I was never meant to write for
it. Be that as it may, you were never meant to act in it, that’s for sure. Talent
is as unmistakable in the long run as red hair. You haven’t got it.