The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe (17 page)

* This was a little self-regarding of Carson. Mr Capote had in fact stolen much more from Colette and Jane Bowles.

‘That’s beautiful, huh? Did you steal that from Truman?’ ‘No, dear. From Faulkner.’
The thing that the girls really had in common, though,

was their doctors: they had both spent time with analysts who were child psychologists. Marilyn smiled sexily at the waiter and he poured the last of the champagne into their glasses. ‘Dr Kris put me into the Payne Whitney,’ said Marilyn. ‘It was horrible, Carson. Really awful. You know the Dangerous Floor? They put me up there with locks on the doors. Like I was crazy. My mother’s been in a ton of those places. I can’t help her and she can’t help me.’

‘Then you’re even, dear.’ Marilyn drank the whole glass of champagne down in one go. ‘But Payne Whitney,’ said Carson. ‘That’s shocking, dear. They did the same to me in 1948. That’s how long they’ve been that way with poor efflicted people.’ Carson shuddered so her bangs shook on her forehead; she lifted another cigarette, her hands trembling around a chipped gold lighter.

‘Carson, do you live alone?’
‘I live with the people I create,’ she said. She didn’t say it in a regal way, but very simply, as if she was just giving her friend an important fact.
‘My analyst’s father was a big wheel in Vienna,’ said Marilyn. ‘A friend of Freud’s. And her husband was a big wheel in the psychology of art. She thought I was crazy for leaving Arthur.’
‘Is that why she put you in the bin, honey?’
‘I think maybe. I mean, I know I needed help. Maybe a lot of help. There’s no point denying I’ve been . . . well . . . I’ve been sad, Carson. I didn’t think I could be so sad . . . so . . . you know, lost.’
‘Take your time, child.’
‘Yes. I’ve been so very blue. Too blue to cope, I guess. I would wake up and think everything . . . was just, well . . . dust.’
‘That’s the end of the road, honey. Or the beginning.’ Marilyn shivered and went on speaking.
‘Anyhow. I guess the shrink was angry at me, putting me in that place.’
They discussed it further, Carson wincing now and then and holding her cigarette over the ashtray, her fingers stained yellow, shaking. Marilyn loved talking to Carson because sometimes, just in the middle of their time together, after the gossip and the teasing, a moment would arrive when everything came together, when all the stuff that mattered to each of them came spilling into a chat about books. As you know, Marilyn had been reading the same novel for months,
The Brothers Karamazov
, and she felt Carson was the only person who would understand how to talk to her about it, and how to allow her to talk about it as well. Marilyn lifted me onto her lap, a sign of her nervousness. ‘Do you know that article of Freud’s, the one about Dostoevsky and parricide?’
People often lose their accent when they talk about books. I’d noticed it in others, but in Carson it was dead obvious. ‘Naturally,’ she said. ‘ “Four things may be distinguished in the rich personality of Dostoevsky: the artist, the neurotic, the moralist, and the sinner.” ’
‘You know it?’
‘I’m afraid I do,’ said Carson. ‘And some of my friends’d say that’s no surprise at all.’
Marilyn coughed quietly. ‘Well, Lee says he thinks I would make a wonderful Grushenka.’
‘He’s right, honey.’
‘Thank you, Carson. Thank you for saying that.’ ‘Go on, dear.’
‘Well, I’ve been reading the novel. It takes a lot of reading. For me, anyhow, it does.’
‘Oh, for anybody.’
‘And I’m trying to figure out how a girl would want to be with a man who wanted to kill his father. I mean: killing your father . . .’
‘We all kill our fathers, dear. That’s what we do. Then if we’re fortunate we find someone to put in his place.’
‘Some people love their fathers,’ said Marilyn. ‘Some people love their fathers all their lives.’
‘Loving, murdering. It’s all the same.’
‘Oh, Carson. I can’t talk to you today. Even for me, that’s just too perverse. I won’t say another word.’
‘Perverse, honey? They give me awards for that.’
The waiter put another dish of olives on the table and Carson just ate them up, one by one, until the dish was a grave of sticks and stones. I could smell some lovely things coming from the kitchen, but I just sat there, I’m afraid, growling at some of the passers-by, who were staring. Some of the women wore ballgowns, great balloonings of tulle, and others came in yellow or purple trouser suits from Jax. Marilyn felt about Carson the way she often felt about the Strasbergs, the way she used to feel about Arthur. She liked their thoughts. She liked their thoughts the way people liked her face. Carson began to speak as if Freud’s essay on Dostoevsky and the falling sickness was really a treatise on her own problems. Marilyn put her hand under her chin and listened. Egotism is sometimes a very entertaining disease.
‘Grushenka’s a darn case,’ Carson said. ‘You know the novelist had the mentality of a criminal? All the good ones do, my dear. We are racked with guilt about the things we do in our dreams. Not just in dreams. They say poor Dostoevsky may have assaulted a young girl years before. He was king of the neurotics, sweet man. Wrote a great book, though, my God, and beastly too, just beastly. That man could imagine anything.’
Marilyn lowered her voice. ‘Grushenka’s another way for the men to deal with their neurosis, right?’
‘By fucking her? Oh yes, my dear.’ Marilyn took out a book and showed a page, an underlining.
‘He writes that the earliest doctors called copulation the little epilepsy.’
‘
Le petit mal.
Darn right. Grushenka has real passions. She has authenticity, by God. She has innocence. And these men’ll seek to quench their neurosis any which way they can. Not that she helps herself any. She thinks she’s a drink of water when really she’s a drought.’
‘Gee,’ said Marilyn. ‘Lee would love that.’
‘But remember we had fathers, too, dear. And so did Grushenka and little Ophelia. The girls have fathers too and they have mothers, God help us. God help everybody.’
‘I never knew my father,’ said Marilyn.
‘Well, child,’ said Carson, putting the last olive stone into the dish. ‘Never knowing your daddy has its problems, but at least it means you’ll never lose him.’ Marilyn asked for the check and the girls began to collect their things. For each of them, the hour they spent at the Oak Room would be the best part of the evening. But now they were due uptown: they were already late for a cocktail party, though Carson said those book parties only got going when people had stayed past their welcome.

The party was at Alfred Kazin’s place on Riverside Drive, an apartment with books piled on the stove, ice heaped in the bath, tapenade smeared on the crackers, the English huddled in the hallway, and the beatniks on the fire escape. I have to tell you it wasn’t a natural haven of cocktailparty talk. Carson was sitting in a large armchair next to a record player, which she soon asked to be turned down, and Marilyn, radiant with champagne, was spirited through the rooms by invisible hands. Mr Kazin wasn’t in love with dogs, you could tell, but Carson is from the South where dogs are understood to be among the beacons of high culture, and I was soon tolerated. (Not long after we arrived, I noticed that almost everyone appeared to be discussing the current number of
Partisan Review
.) Mr Kazin had a connection with Carson that was sentimentally intense: he was humbled by her manners and her talent, her small boy’s face that made him nervous. Whenever he was around her, he found himself quietly hatching plans to compliment her. She didn’t say much back, simply spitting a little tobacco, watching him with her suspicious eyes. ‘Mary McCarthy mentions you in April’s issue,’ he said. ‘She says you and Jean Stafford carry the torch for the writing of sensibility today.’ Mr Kazin’s eyes narrowed every time he was about to launch an idea. ‘You know how it is with Mary. She wants everything cut and diced. She imagines the new crowd, her, young Updike, are like mimics, actors, where an abundance of care is used in the mechanics of the imitation. She likes it that way.’
‘Well,’ said Carson. ‘I’m damn sure Mary knows well

enough what she’s talking about.’
‘She has the tendency to be overawed by her own
discriminations,’ he said.
‘I don’t know,’ said Carson, ‘but I’d say that was the critic’s
prerogative.’
I thought of Mr Connolly and was excited for a moment
to imagine he might be there. (He wasn’t.) At the same time
a man called Marius Bewley tripped up quite homosexually.
He was with a man who smoked a pipe as if he were playing
a cello, Bewley’s large moon face appearing through the fug.
Bewley glanced at his friend. ‘I’ve never seen a briar do such
sterling work,’ he said. Carson sniggered and gladly accepted
a martini proffered by sensitive fingers.
‘Marius, we were just discussing Mary’s piece about
character in fiction.’
‘Oh, yes. All that hissing jargon. Mary assumes that comic
characters are by definition real, while serious people like
myself are figments. My dears, I am no less real than Leopold
Bloom. I may be averse to cheap soap and the tang of urine,
but I am real. Touch me if you like.’
‘Damn right,’ said Carson. ‘You’re as real as Edith Sitwell.’
She laughed, she coughed, until two grey spots appeared on
her cheeks. She thought Bewley the very spice of literature. ‘I’m as real as Jay Gatsby, dear. And much more serious
than Dame Edith. Do you want to know what Randall said
about Mary McCarthy? He said, “torn animals are removed
at sunset from that smile”.’
‘Ha! That’s the funniest thing I heard in munts,’ said
Carson. ‘Munts.’
‘She means “months”,’ said Mr Kazin.
‘Am I not objectively existent?’ said Mr Bewley. ‘You’re on far, sister.’
‘She means “fire”,’ said Mr Kazin.
‘I met her brother,’ I said. ‘His name is Kevin. I sat on his
lap at the Actors Studio.’
‘Now look at that little white dog.’ Mr Bewley sighed
and shook his head. ‘Oh, to be young and innocent again.’
Mr Kazin lifted me up and walked me through the crowd to
get to the kitchen, where a dish of water was kindly made
available. I was up on the draining board. Next to me, leaning
against the stove, a Dr Annan of King’s College, Cambridge,
was speaking to a poet about the doctor’s recent evidence in
the
Lady Chatterley
trial. ‘Dwight MacDonald wrote about it
in
Partisan Review
,’ he said. A hand reached between us and
lifted a bottle of vermouth.
‘I did indeed,’ said Mr MacDonald, his cuff all wet from
being dipped in my dish. ‘Hello, Noel. That was a very
sprightly performance in Court Number One.’
‘Oh, one has to do one’s bit,’ said Dr Annan. ‘Now, have
you met my friend . . .’
‘Frank O’Hara,’ said the poet, putting out his hand in a
cramped way.
‘Oh, yes,’ said MacDonald. ‘I read Kenneth Koch’s piece
about you in the last issue.’
‘It was a sweet article,’ said O’Hara shyly. A poet from the
fire escape made O’Hara smile by calling him a square and
a beauty. I looked round at the sound of the cracked voice.
The man had whiskers and was more like a lion than a cat,
a big poet of the jungle with his chunky spectacles and holy
whispers. It was Allen Ginsberg. He was drinking wine from
a jug and offering ‘revelations’ to people asking about his long poem, a thing I was bound to like called ‘Howl’. He was excited about life and he had his own boisterous crowd, other poets, a drunk from Times Square with a bashed face. Last thing I saw on the fire escape was Ginsberg attacking Columbia University and taking a young man’s face in his hands, kissing him and saying, with no small degree of relish, ‘Trust is an intimate conspiracy.
Shantih. Shantih.
Trust is
Mae West’s asshole.’
‘Is that in your poem?’ said the young man.
‘Nope,’ said the poet. ‘It’s just for you.’
‘Sweet?’ said MacDonald to O’Hara. ‘He said you were the
best writer about New York alive.’
‘That’s very sweet,’ said O’Hara.
I rested my head and surveyed the room. ‘Why do critics
always look like unhappy rabbits?’ I thought.
Kazin tickled me under the chin and put me down on the
floor. It was great just to walk among the shoes: there were
lace-ups and heels, sandals and boutique boots, some of them
like beautiful drawings I had recently seen in the magazines.
I followed the trail of Chanel No. 5 in the hope of finding
Marilyn. I passed a great many people, some of them touching
hands and all of them gripping drinks, the youngest ones’ eyes
now and then flashing with terror. I passed one pair and looked
up to see a man called Jacob trying to be kind to a girl of eager
solemnity. ‘A good magazine, Susan – it was Susan, right? – is
not only about what it puts in but about what it keeps out.’ ‘Ah,’ she said, this Susan, ‘the natural despotism of literary selection. I like it very much.’ Her eyes appeared to
darken with excitement. ‘I am writing something about the
comedy of high seriousness, not an essay so much as a series
of jottings. A cascade of
pensées
.’
‘And what do they indicate, these jottings?’
‘That the world is an aesthetic phenomenon. It’s about a
sensibility, the idea that there is a good taste of bad taste.’ ‘So it’s about Oscar Wilde?’
‘Oscar, yes. But also Tiffany lamps. The novels of Ronald
Firbank. Schoedsack’s
King Kong
.’
‘So it’s about innocence?’
‘Perhaps,’ she said, making a mental note. ‘But also
about seriousness, a seriousness that fails. It is also about
extravagance, empathy, and the glorification of character.
Life as theatre.’
‘So it’s about homosexuals?’
‘Not all Jews are liberals and not all queers are artistic.’ ‘Most are, if they are good at what they do. Good at who
they are.’
‘That’s very funny.’
‘Thank you, young lady. Pass the ashtray. Can you give me
another example of the thing you’re talking about?’ ‘Garbo’s face
. The Wings of the Dove
. The rhetoric of de
Gaulle. The Brown Derby restaurant on Sunset Boulevard.’ ‘That’s four examples.’
‘I think I’ve had too many martinis,’ she said. ‘You’ll find the Brown Derby is on Wilshire,’ I said. ‘Shoo that dog away,’ said Susan. ‘I don’t trust dogs, the
way they sniff.’
Half a room later I stopped at the ankles of a woman
with several holes in her stockings. She was very loud and
wearing a pair of reptile-skin shoes by François Pinet. I
absorbed without hesitation that she was Lillian Hellman.
She was smoking a long cigarette and dangling a glass of
vodka down by her side, splashing my nose. I licked up the puddle of booze at her feet, then sat under a nest of tables to eavesdrop. She was tougher on the editors of the magazine than she was on Josef Stalin, and I soon found I wanted to bite her. The woman was totally in love with herself, which was bad enough, but she also disliked Marilyn because of Arthur – she was waiting for her chance to say something nasty – and it was clear she considered herself to have been the greater hero before the Committee.
^*
In the time I spent under the tables, she found something vile to say about everybody she mentioned. First it was Marilyn: ‘So vulgar you wouldn’t believe it. They say she killed Clark Gable stone dead with her lateness on
The Misfits
.’ Then it was the magazine: ‘Don’t make me laugh.
Partisan Review
is the
house journal of the nation’s liberal cowardice.’
‘Why are you here, then?’ asked a nice-looking painter
called Robert Motherwell.
‘I like to feast with my enemies, darling.’
Then it was Norman Mailer. ‘He’s been looking for someone to stab for years. And Adele was looking for years for
someone to stab her. They were perfect together. Existential
hero, my ass. Norman couldn’t fight his way out of a pillowcase. His career is over.’
‘That’s harsh,’ said Mr Podhoretz, gliding up. ‘Norman’s
honest.’
‘Honest, my ass,’ she said.
‘You know something, Lillian. You ought to try just for
once being generous. Norman’s in trouble and he’s been
good to you.’
‘Good to me, my ass.’
‘No. He was good to you and he was good to Dash when
he was ill. You should be ashamed to go talking like that.’ ‘I haven’t been out since Dash died.’
‘Well,’ he said. ‘I’ll put it down to that. You know what
Degas said of Whistler? He said he behaved as if he had no
talent.’
‘That’s just the worst thing you can say about an artist.’ ‘Well, Lillian. Think about it.’
‘Aren’t you the moral arbiter,’ she said. ‘I might believe
you, Norman, if
Commentary
magazine ever gets up and says
a single brave thing before it dies. Why don’t you just go
back to troubling those pot-smokers?’
‘People change, Lillian.’
‘You won’t, Norman. You’ll be licking people’s self-inflicted
wounds for them until Doomsday.’
She then engaged a nice little man called F. W. Dupee in
a discussion of the Cold War. Miss Hellman believed it was
all invented by the CIA to keep Russian people poor and
American people stupid. ‘We have no national style,’ she
said. ‘The government in this country wouldn’t give you a
nickel for what you people call high culture.’
‘That’s not true,’ said Dupee. ‘The government takes a
great interest in high culture. Even the bad bits of government care about it. Everybody in this city can take it for
granted that politics and high culture have everything to do
with one another.’
‘Rubbish,’ she said. ‘Wishful thinking.’ Stephen Spender, a cat sloping among cats, grazed past her and she sent a dirty look like a harpoon into his back. ‘We are living through a period when the American government has no real con
sciousness of intellectual life at all.’
‘I’m afraid that’s wrong,’ said Dupee. ‘The war between
capitalism and socialism happening now is basically an
ontological debate. It’s an argument about how people can
live in society. We locate that debate in culture, and that is
America’s instinct.’
‘You’re dreaming, honey.’
‘This is a new era for America,’ said one of the editorial
assistants, called Jane.
‘Get me another vodka stinger, honey,’ said Miss Hellman
with a boiling face. She turned. ‘You are all addled Trotskyists,
as dictated by lunacy. I’m sorry to say Comrade Trotsky is a
traitor. I was glad I opposed his application for American
asylum.’
Everything went blank and I just launched myself from
under the tables and sank my teeth into her nylon-clad
ankle. She screamed loudly and people stepped back from
her. ‘Help! I’m being attacked!
Ohhhh
. They’re attacking
me!’ she said. I didn’t hang on for long and Mr Kazin was
there in an instant, lifting me up. ‘Is that
Mrs Miller’s
dog?’
she shouted.
‘No fuss, Lillian.’
‘Is it? Goddammit. The dog bit me for telling the truth.
I’ll sue.’
‘No fuss, I said.’ He examined her ankle. ‘There are no
cuts and it’s all over. Don’t fuss, Lillian. Not even a scratch.
This is a swell party and he’s just a little dog. Hot in here for
a dog. Ann! Could someone open a window?’
When Mr Kazin placed me back on the floor, a number of his friends patted me. Many of the
Partisan Review
wives were in fact widows: their husbands were totally preoccupied with each other, and the wives for the most part remained un-introduced, abandoned by the door, where they tried not to seem tetchy. There were exceptions of course among these women, but not many. The area around Columbia and Riverside Drive formed a society – a world of social ease that Kazin resented – and it was the wives who did the crockeryborrowing, the pattern-swapping, the passing back and forth of kids’ clothes. Most of these wives didn’t have anything to do with the ‘smart women’: they were frightened of their tongues and their independence and happy not to be like that. I wandered out from that hall of pretty shoes, and was soon among the brogues. A young man had a girl up against the bathroom door: they were sharing a cigarette and a love of Samuel Beckett. ‘Hellman’s play is about consumerist madness,’ he said. ‘It just closed at the Hudson. Well, it’s about the brutality of shopping, but, hell, she’s the biggest shopper in the business. She’s the only Stalinist in the history of the world to have done a . . . you know, starred in