The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe (10 page)

* A not entirely un-obnoxious publication, first published in 1936. It was invented by an enterprising New York travel agent named Victor Green, who saw what we were learning, in the early 60s, to call ‘a gap in the market’. It listed the restaurants, barber shops, nightclubs, and so on, that catered to black customers. It was said to be very helpful, in the years before better help came along.

1 . Central Park, New York
2. Regent’s Park, London
3. Botanic Gardens, Glasgow
4. The Royal Pavilion Gardens, Brighton
5. Luxembourg Gardens, Paris

I admit to a certain degree of sentimentality in my choices. These are the places where I have been happiest. Not Paris: I have never been to Paris, but Duncan Grant was never away from it, and his love rubbed off on me despite my ignorance. In any case, is it not a fact among creatures, each and every one of us, that we are often happiest where we have never been?
^*
I might have chosen Prospect Park in Brooklyn, but I was kicked there once while walking with Marilyn and her friends the Rostens. I would have said the Plaza Hidalgo in Mexico City but thinking about it makes me feel too sad, on account of the Old Man. I might have chosen Hyde Park in London, but Vanessa Bell got into a state of nervous exhaustion the one time we went there together, leaving me panting with thirst. I think it was something to do with the drama of forgetting, the resurgence of the past, the remaining reminders, or some such thing. At least that’s what Cyril Connolly said with a mandarin grin. Vanessa spent the evening warbling about the last issue of
Hyde Park Gate News
and the park as viewed in her childhood, past a windowpane and a ledge of chimneypots.

* And perhaps that is the most sentimental position of all. Proust, for example, conjured a whole life and an excellent novel out of such nonsense. Those of us who tell stories are committed slaves to the past’s dominion, to the fresh echo of the little bell which announced M. Swann’s arrival. We hear it now, though its peal rings out in the far distant past. It is never quite a place we have been and is always a place we imagined.

Marilyn was reading her Russian novel, then suddenly she shifted on the bench and looked at me. ‘What’s the story, Snowball?’

‘The novel is our daily bread,’ I said. ‘That’s Trotsky’s opinion, not mine. He loved the old
spiritus papyri
. I have it on good authority, too, that his favourite novel was from the German, the book they call
The Adventures of a Simpleton
. The thing was written by a certain Hans Jacob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen. Very lively. Very tart. My breeder was reading it the day I was born.’

‘I could swear you hear me half the time. Okay, little guy. I guess it’s time to face the music.’
We walked round the path and she laughed when I began dancing with a nearby shadow, this dark event on the ground, a real character with a life of its own and absolutely determined not to leave my side so long as we walked. It changed sides and I wondered if it had a story, the four-legged friend that liked to keep in step and never speak. Plato has a lot to answer for in this world of dogs, men, and other ruins. Your average person ignores his shadow, but it might be the best thing about him. It might be his ideal self: there but not quite there, and dense with reality. The asphalt path at the top of West Drive held a very recent memory of snow. I could feel the lingering cold and the grit under my paws. A grey squirrel appeared at the bottom of a tree with half a sandwich in its little claws. ‘Peanut butter,’ it shouted over with a toothy grin. ‘Life is sweet.’
We made our way to 135 Central Park West. From the analyst’s apartment, the world below seemed uncomplicatedly yellow, a busy jungle where plants spluttered carbon dioxide and billions of creatures had their say. The people were outnumbered and I guess they came to apartments like this one, high above the insects and the traffic, to find a place where they might be heard. Dr Marianne Kris was already standing by her desk. She was wearing those small-heeled satin shoes once popular with senior ballet mistresses, and, as we came in, she was in the act of dropping something into the wastepaper basket. Her eyes had that benign, intelligent note of suffering one associates with old Europe, the gleam of enquiry one connects to the well-ordered streets of Vienna. She kept her grey hair in a bun and enjoyed gathering up the loose strands and storing them behind her ears. She stood to attention with her hands clasped: Schubert’s Piano Sonata for Four Hands was coming from a record player that sat on top of a bookcase.
We walked over the rug and stood for a moment at the window. Man was something to be proud of, no? Each of the buildings was significant in itself, but together they were a projection of power and social brilliance that shone in the day and made illuminated pathways at night. Tall buildings cannot be built by ants or squirrels or dogs: they mark the high point of human aspiration, the pinnacle of man’s ability to master the world’s materials. Once they are up they are up and only man can take them down. Marilyn liked to order herself at the window before sitting down; she merely nodded at Dr Kris and turned again to the window, the vast, changing world.
The doctor had her routines and playing music between sessions was one of them. After a minute or so of the patient’s being in the room she would walk, rather delicately, rather interestingly, to the bookcase and shut the phonograph off. Dr Kris was the kind of small-boned person who did everything just so. Were she not as efficient, as alive in her small and particular ways, it might have appeared the world was about to crush her hoard of sensitivity, but in fact she was good at living amid the world’s bigness and very good at choosing her roles and finding her place. In the minds of her patients, the music was part of that. Marilyn found it aggressive. Coming into the room she often felt she might be swallowed up by the music’s rather too potent indication of someone else’s well-being. Dr Kris must have been aware of this possibility, but she played the music anyway. In fact, she was quite competitive when it came to the battle of selves that took place in the comfort of her rooms. I jumped up and sat on a cushioned windowseat; it was beautifully done, the windowseat I mean, upholstered in a bold grey-and-whitestriped wool dhurri, with a vase of white tulips standing on the ledge. ‘Take a chair if you prefer it, Marilyn,’ said Dr Kris.
‘I can’t think of anything. It’s useless. I’ve been trying to learn some lines for Lee. I can’t think.’
‘Sit down.’
Marilyn took off her sunglasses, removed her wig and sat down in a wonderful armchair, the sort of chair one used to find at Charleston, an expanse of cream-coloured cotton, rubbed and worn, covered in tiny, almost invisible grey roses. ‘Do you find, Marilyn, that you must rehearse for these sessions?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not rehearse. But I have to be able to think, right? It’s often that way before the housekeeper arrives, for some people: they have to tidy up. Well, I guess I feel like that coming here. I’ve got to get my head straight.’ ‘Am I your audience?’
‘No, you’re my shrink. I don’t have to wear make-up for you to recognise me.’
In decorative terms, the room spoke of a relationship between fadedness and vibrancy: the rugs were extremely good rugs, displaying colours that might have been common only to two villages in the north of Afghanistan a hundred or more years ago, but the fadedness of the material brought a nice philosophical edge to the room. All the parts worked together in this way, to dignify, to calm, to amuse, to deepen the tone, making a conversation of the most quiet kind. The glass bookcases, the rosewood side-tables, had come from Germany between the wars, and to Marianne Kris’s mind they gave a dimension of wisdom and learning to the weathered prettiness of the room. Virginia Woolf would have been at home in such a place: the painted wooden birds and the tin toys, the ships-in-a-bottle, the damaged mirrors. They all spoke of the journey a person might make to become themselves. In many ways it was not a suitable room in which to conduct psychoanalysis, seeming so redolent of one woman’s achievements. Even the lampshades were tokens of Marianne’s awakening. The flowers underlined her goodnatured sentiment and the paperweights fed her appetite for pleasure and hard work. Her eye could wander among these things, lighting on what was solid, what had survived. In the corner stood an eighteenth-century desk with a small blue painting by Paul Klee hanging above it.
Kris and her famous husband had escaped something I couldn’t understand. And here she was in broad daylight, her hands covered in graphite smears and pencil dust, sitting at the centre of an environment she had made. She lifted and laid down her objects with a patience that seemed to give every thing its due – a glass of water, a silver letter-opener, a spider plant with a tangerine beside it on a plate. Everything in the room, and in the dangerous world beyond the room, inclined towards Dr Kris’s sensibility, her steady conception of reality, which made even her own psychological confusions appear as a kind of blessing to her patients. She knew who she was, she knew where she came from, she knew what she liked, and she lived pretty much as she had hoped. She would not have experienced these certainties as certainties, but to the people who visited her consulting room, Dr Kris had a definite talent for tethering herself to the world of herself. Other people, most of her patients, were much better at being more people, but none was so good at being herself as she was. That was how it seemed. This room was the domain, shall we say, of her subjectivity. The sort of place where one might easily feel absent among all this evidence of someone else’s presence. Yes, the room was comfortable, but by years, and by degrees, it could become the kind of room that made you question the comforts in your own life.
Dr Kris lifted a pencil from an old stone jug and slowly sharpened it, using a sharpener from a foreign museum. The delicacy of the action, though typical, annoyed Marilyn: it seemed to indicate an over-sufficiency of personal contentment. In fact, Dr Kris was still grieving for her husband who had passed away a few years before, but Marilyn was fixated on how the analyst seemed to cope. It had never occurred to her that they were both in the persuading game. The doctor held the pencil between her fingers like someone who had spent a lifetime with pencils, and who could master them, direct them, keep them sharp, make them do what she wanted. ‘I guess it’s not really possible to be Anna Christie,’ said Marilyn, ‘without
him
coming up and when
he
comes up then I have to talk about
him
as well, which is hard, you know? Lee says I should use all that and, of course, I try my best but half the time when I’m acting I just want to scream.’
‘I must ask you, Marilyn. Do you experience your father as a source of prohibition, perhaps?’
‘Uh, I didn’t know him. In the play her father is standing over her. He wants to tell her who she can marry and who’s a bad guy.’
‘So, in the play
Anna Christie
the father is a source of prohibition. Maybe even of jealousy.’
‘I guess so. It’s by Eugene O’Neill.’
‘Yes. I know the play. I saw it once with my husband in London.’
Marilyn took a deep breath. ‘Her father can’t tell her what to do.’
‘And your own father . . .’
‘He’s dead, see? He can’t stop me from doing anything. He couldn’t stop me from marrying Arthur.’
‘No, but it’s interesting you mention one playwright in order to understand another, no?’
‘I’m not trying to understand Eugene O’Neill. And I’m not trying to understand Arthur Miller. I’m trying to understand Anna – or I’m trying to understand why playing Anna is so terrible for me.’
‘Okay, Marilyn. This is good. Just because your father is not alive, it doesn’t mean he is no longer a source of prohibition. He may be that. And equally he may be a source of something else, something unlikely, say, perpetual approval?’ ‘I always thought he would like me.’
‘Who?’
‘My father. If he had known me. I think he’d have liked me.’
‘You do? Tell me about that.’
‘Well. I thought he would like me more than other people. Not for sex. Not for sex reasons. That he’d know I was smart and everything, I guess.’
‘You idealise your father, no? You idealise him as someone who idealises you.’
‘That’s right. Isn’t that what fathers are for?’
‘If you say so. But I’m interested in what the play is saying to you at this time.’
‘It’s a great play.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it allows me to be a serious actress.’
‘This is your definition of a great play? Is
Hamlet
a great play for this reason, Marilyn?’
‘Yes. Well, partly I guess. I would love to play Ophelia.’
‘But let us return to the father. In the play your character is struggling to transfer the inhibited sexual feelings for the father onto the legitimate sexual feelings for a husband, okay?’
‘I guess.’
‘This is normal, Marilyn. This is what we do. Our husbands replace our fathers.’
‘Not if we don’t want them to.’
‘No?’
‘Not if we can’t bear it, huh? In that movie last year, you know, the Cukor picture. We sang a song called “My Heart Belongs to Daddy”.’
‘Why do you say “we” – “we sang a song”. Wasn’t it you who sang the song?’
‘Yup. I sang the song.’
‘Right.’
‘Well, it took twenty-three takes. I kept crying. Isn’t that something? I didn’t even know my father.’
‘But you want to know him.’
‘I guess.’
‘And that is a form of knowledge, Marilyn. A very pressing kind of knowledge. Desire. Yes. Desire may be the most pressing kind of knowledge there is.’
‘My father’s dead, doctor.’
My fated companion was irked by her analyst. More irked than she had ever been before: she sometimes had fantasies during these sessions that she, Marilyn, was the analyst, asking Dr Kris the questions her cleverness protected her from asking of herself. ‘I know your sister Margarethe was an actress,’ Marilyn wanted to say to her. ‘Did you ever imagine your father preferred your sister to you?’
‘No, Marilyn. I never considered that.’
‘Is that because you wanted to sleep with your father or kill your sister?’ Marilyn believed her shrink’s world was made of tinder; it comforted her to imagine Dr Kris had the same kinds of problem she had. It would only take a little flame and all the comforts of Marianne’s life would be consumed.
‘I never considered that, Marilyn. Not at all.’
There were several old clocks in Dr Kris’s room but none of them made a sound. As the voices bent and doubled and pro voked and choked back – the customary motions of the talking cure – the room’s objects maintained a state of perfect detachment, though, curiously, the patients often felt they were being watched. At one point that day Marilyn turned and clicked her fingers at me and it was obvious she needed comfort. I leapt on her lap and Dr Kris gave me one of her experienced looks, which always had a hint of narcissism. She went into a little aria of remembrance about Dr Freud and her place among the psychoanalytic royalty of Vienna. The lady’s father, Oskar Rie, was a paediatrician and a friend of Freud’s, sending the great man a case of dark wine every Christmas. She was busy telling Marilyn this, not for the first time, when a tiny spider crept across the front of the desk and gave me that charming E. B. White look, a very New York spider with its slick legs and its neighbourhood smarts. It had lazy, pot-smoking eyes, too, the little beatnik spider walking in front of me.
‘Ahh, put a smile on it,’ said the spider. ‘This is where she does her counter-transference bit. Listen to her: her father, her father, Freud, Freud. They wrote a book together about children, haven’t you heard? Aaaaah, shurrup already. Her father studied children, geddit? She writes about child psychology. You do the math.’
‘But what about the music? The pictures? The goddamn Latin translation of Winnie the Pooh?’
‘The one lying next to the desk there, on the floor. Yeah. I was over there this morning. All her clients see that book and feel intimidated.’
‘Right.’
‘I mean, Jesus Christ –
Winnie Ille Pu
? What’s a person supposed to do with that information?’