Ekphrasis (2)

The novel Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates (2000) is a fictionalized biography of Marilyn Monroe. I’m still in the middle of reading it and haven’t reached an opinion, but it does seem to be worth more attention than it appears to have received.

There is a challenge in writing a book about any celebrity (and Marilyn Monroe is the celebrity apotheosis, or at least she was in her era ), which is that the themes are already established before you begin. If someone’s life is documented so extensively in film and television, then why does there need to be a book about it? And why a fiction book? I and many others in my generation know very little about Marilyn Monroe, but we still have a rough idea of the arc of her career – the tragedy, the irony. The glamor. The money. The sex. All of this knowing almost nothing about the facts of her life. There would be a similar problem in writing about any superstar performance artist who is invested with symbolism; somebody could write a novel about Michael Jackson and what he means to America, except we have all pretty much read the novel about Michael Jackson already, even though it doesn’t exist.

One way to describe this book, or at least the 200 pages I’ve read so far, is by comparing it to the Hollywood biopic formula, which is as follows: 1) Childhood, 2) Awakening of talent, 3) First love, 4) The first Big Idea, 5) A setback, 6) The breakthrough, 7) Rise to fame, 8) Second love (optional), 9) Fall from favor, 10) Decadence, 11) Catharsis. It would appear to be pointless to narrate the life of Marilyn Monroe in this fashion, as the suspense would be minimal; we all know her life ends in tragedy. But an advantage books have that movies do not (allowing exceptions for some very good movies) is that we can experience this trajectory from the inside: Instead of watching what happens to Marilyn, we can read about what she is feeling. The novel uses fictional journal entries, and first-person accounts of her thoughts, to set up a running comparison between the persona she created and her private outlook on the world.

A further complication is that much of the book (how much, I don’t know) is fictional; dates, places and people are changed, so that the novelistic Marilyn becomes intentionally different from the biographical Marilyn. For me, the difficulty of reading this book is that I may not know enough about the Hollywood Marilyn. But I’ll get to that point in a moment. I’ve read the novel up to stage four on the biopic chart, so let’s see how the author handles each of them in turn:

1) Childhood. Oh, wait, I forgot that biopics often have a prelude.

0) Prelude. There are two preludes. First, the scene of her death. Second, Marilyn, now a famous actress, walks incognito into a movie theater. She thinks, “This movie I’ve been seeing all my life, yet never to its completion.” Moving along:

1) Childhood. The first part of her life, as described in the book, is not so much different from how a movie might tell the story. Her mother, who is later committed to a mental hospital, tries to drive both of them into a brush fire near L.A. I don’t know if this story is true or not, but it makes for riveting fiction and it would make an equally good movie. The possible departure here from a typical biopic is that her early drive to succeed is presented as stemming from feelings of inadequacy; to simplify, if her mother doesn’t love her, then maybe the entire world can instead, etc. A movie does not seem as likely, I think, to argue that creative talent is caused directly by misery.

2) Awakening of Talent. What were Marilyn Monroe’s talents? This is a simple, naive question on my part; I don’t even know. I don’t even think I’ve ever seen a movie that she appears in. The novel’s approach from the beginning is to suggest that her career as an actress; and her larger identity as Marilyn Monroe, were not so much aspirations on her part as they were roles forced upon her. It does not for a moment imply that she was stupid or did not work hard; just that she happened to be an actress instead of preparing to become one. And yet, there is an element of control on her part that is hard to pin down. This is from the passage when Marilyn (her birth name was Norma Jeane) is living at an orphanage. Celebrities come on a charity visit for the holidays, and she gets her picture taken in front of the Christmas tree:

Nine-year-old Norma Jeane must have gaped in utter panic, for the photographers, who were all men, laughed at her in delight; one cried, ‘Hold that look, sweetheart!’ and it was flash! flash! flash! and Norma Jeane was blinded and would not have  a second chance, unable to smile for the cameras ... as she might have smiled as watching her Magic Friend in the mirror she smiled in a dozen special ways, secret ways, but her Friend-in-the-Mirror had abandoned her now, so taken by surprise and I would never be surprised again I swore.

3) First love. She drops out of high school to get married (according to the novel, her foster family kicked her out) and finds someone who needs a sweetheart before he goes off to fight in World War II. This part of the book is both hilarious in its profile of a man with no clue about what his wife really wants, and perceptive in showing how people in love can be content and miserable at the same time.

4) The first Big Idea. In the book, the beginnings of her independence come when the husband goes overseas and she gets a job at an aircraft factory. One day (this seems to have really happened) a magazine photographer was scouting the premises for a feature on women at work, and caught her spraying chemicals onto an airplane. The novel imagines her husband on a Navy ship flipping through the magazine where she appeared:

Then this croaking noise from him, “Jesus. My wife. This is my w-wife!” The magazine was snatched from him. Everybody was gawking at GIRL DEFENSE WORKERS ON THE HOME FRONT and this full-page photo of the sweetest-faced girl you’d ever seen, darkish curls springing out around her head, beautiful, wistful eyes and most lips in a shy-hopeful smile, she’s wearing a denim coverall snug on her young sizeable breasts and her amazing hips, with little-girl awkwardness she’s holding a canister in both hands as if to spray the camera.

This passage, I think, is central to understanding the different sort of experiences possible in reading a book about Marilyn Monroe, compared to watching a Marilyn Monroe movie, or a movie about Marilyn Monroe’s movies. For someone who is largely ignorant of popular culture during the era when the book takes place, it is a way to get a good understanding of the protagonists’ subjective point of view; but it is hard to acquire an accurate picture of the external events.

That was a clumsy sentence, but here’s what I mean. Read the passage above one more time, and try to imagine what that picture might look like. Then look at the picture. It is here. And as the novel progresses, it is piled with references to the time period that would require either visual aids provided by the author, or the initiative of research on the part of the reader to achieve their full impact. There is a description, for example, of “a girl with auburn-red hair falling across her eyes Veronica Lake style,” which made no sense to me until I found this.

What I’m trying to figure out, I guess, is whether the images of Marilyn Monroe have already told us everything that a book could possibly say.