See What Can Be Done

by Lorrie Moore

  (1987)

  Anaïs Nin, Marilyn Monroe

  In the love lives of the famous, romance is largely a public business: private affairs made public, public affairs made even more public. And at the bedroom doors of all those affairs lurk, inevitably, the writers—biographers, journalists, novelists, poets, diarists—intent on giving public shape to private muck, heedless of the wishes of the muckers or muckees. Occasionally this makes for daring and probing books, but more often it produces the literary equivalent of McDonald’s: private passions, some long dead, are unearthed and reworked into public French fries.

  Two recent books aid and abet, to varying degrees, this sort of literary cannibalism. Both fairly slim volumes, they describe two very different couples: Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, and Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe. In the first we are given what is indeed a probing and daring book—a passionate diary account from the interior of the affair. In the latter we get fast food: a newspaperman’s best guesses from Outer Mongolia.

  When Anaïs Nin, at age sixty-three, published the first volume of her already notorious diary, in 1966, she excised an important chunk of the journal—and of her own personal history. In its edited form, the diary was a mesmerizing collage that included opinions on interior decorating, lyrical self-attacks, and compassionate psychosexual analyses of her friendships with some of the bohemians and bourgeoisie of thirties Paris. Nin had actually begun writing a diary as a young girl, conceiving it as a means of “talking to” her absent father, a celebrated violinist who had abandoned the family when Anaïs was nine. As one might expect, there is everywhere in her diary a search and hunger for father figures—attended by conflicting desires to seduce, retrieve, vanquish, and be loved by them.

  The part of her journal that was originally deleted detailed some of the fruits of that search: Nin’s discovery, at the age of twenty-eight, of two father figures, in the persons of writer Henry Miller, then forty, and his enigmatic wife, June. What resulted was something of a ménage à trois—a crush on June and a full-blown adulterous affair with Henry (Nin was also married at the time). For Nin, her relationship with the Millers was a “laboratory of the soul,” a dangerous theater of self, and the diary served as a kind of dressing room to which she repaired. It is only now, nine years after Nin’s death, that her publisher and her executor have seen fit to publish what she wrote. They have titled it Henry and June: From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin.

  There is this to be said for expurgation and elision: it can be a writer’s most effective tool. Put back in what the writer herself took out, and the work’s edges may get lost, the essence clouded. Unexpurgated, Nin says of Henry Miller things like “He looks down and shows me his lanced desire again.” Or, “Yesterday, in the very paroxysm of sensual joy, I could not bite Henry as he wanted me to.” Whereas in the edited volume Nin is deftly attuned to the people around her, in Henry and June she is made to appear in a hormonal haze, erotically preoccupied, tortured by a question that seems to nag only women in their twenties: Is what I’m calling love really just good sex? And its heartbreaking corollary: Is what I’m calling good sex not even all that good? Nin wears black underwear. This is not the stuff of heavy philosophical inquiry. Nonetheless, Nin knew all about beauty and sexual game playing, and she wrote about it with a poetry and intelligence that can pass for profundity. Her sensitivity to the physical and emotional was such that virtually everything in her life—from meals to hand-holding—became an aesthetic moment.

  “There are two ways to reach me,” Nin wrote in December 1931, soon after meeting the Millers, “by way of kisses or by way of the imagination.” June Miller reached her via the latter, and Henry via the former. Nin’s relationship with June was, by and large, one of mutual infatuation, and it expressed itself in intense conversations, walks, gifts of perfume, stockings, jewelry. And although Nin had recurrent dreams in which June had a small, secret penis (surely somebody is rolling in a grave somewhere), their desire for each other seems to have remained delicate and unconsummated. “Our love would be death. The embrace of imaginings,” Nin wrote. When, in early 1932, June left Paris for New York and a lesbian lover she claimed to have there, it was Henry, twelve years Nin’s senior, with whom Nin became sexually involved, Henry with whom she experienced “the white-heat of living.” “I’ll teach you new things,” he said. And a few weeks later Nin wrote in her diary, “It is easy to love and there are so many ways to do it.”

  Perhaps like no two other writers of their time, Nin and Miller were interested in erotic appetites. “For once,” wrote Nin, “I stand before a nature more complicated than my own.” Indeed, the pairing of Nin and Miller seems something like the Ali–Frazier match of literary sex. When they weren’t checking in to hotels together at noon (and sometimes even when they were), they read each other’s manuscripts, discussed their interests in Lawrence and Dostoevski, wrote at enormous, amorous length to and about each other. Miller’s words were explosive, exhausting; Nin’s were searching and metaphorical, attempting to grasp with poetry what she felt his “realism” could not capture. “My work is the wife of his work,” she wrote.

  Although Nin claimed to have grown enormously in this period, her fiery passion for Miller eventually subsided. She felt an increased tenderness toward her banker-husband, Hugo, a man who is shown in Henry and June to be Nin’s real anchor, someone who provided her with a suburban home, a monthly allowance, and a famous psychoanalyst, with whom she also had an affair. True bohemianism gave her cold feet. Miller’s worn lapels and jacket cuffs pained her, as did his terrible eyesight (made weak by his job as a newspaper proofreader). She grew discomfited by Miller’s sponging of her money and by his spending it on prostitutes. Once when Nin brought Miller an elegant breakfast on a tray, “all he could say was that he longed for the bistro around the corner, the zinc counter, the dull greenish coffee and milk full of skin.” By the end Nin had discovered the perverse boy at the core of the man, had exposed Miller’s emotional and financial helplessness and his petty cruelty. She had conquered a father figure, but no longer quite believed in him. When the affair was over after less than a year, she wrote movingly, “Last night I wept. I wept because I was no longer a child with a blind girl’s faith….I wept because I could not believe anymore and I love to believe.”

  * * *

  —

  The very public and glamorous love shared by Marilyn Monroe and her second husband, retired Yankee star Joe DiMaggio, might have seemed, unlike the private adultery of Miller and Nin, fated to be happy. But it was patently not happy, and, since neither Monroe nor DiMaggio kept passionate diaries, few people have been privy to the intimate reasons for the failure of their marriage. The most recent in an endless stream of biographies, Joe and Marilyn: A Memory of Love, does little to remedy that state of affairs.

  The biggest problem with this book is that it’s simply not long on material. Monroe and DiMaggio’s marriage lasted all of nine months, and DiMaggio, who is still alive, has refused to talk about Monroe with anyone, including author Roger Kahn. So Kahn has to do some rhetorical tap dancing. When, in Joe and Marilyn, Kahn runs out of things to say about the lives of “Mr. and Mrs. America” (as Monroe and DiMaggio were dubbed by the press), he shamelessly summarizes movie plots, lectures on sexual mores, extemporizes on batting streaks. Every once in a while, under the strain of improvisation, he simply throws up his hands and attempts one-sentence paragraphs like “What a hard, sad life.”

  Unlike Nin and Miller, DiMaggio and Monroe both enjoyed and paid heavily for quick rises to stardom from deprived backgrounds: he from poor Sicilian parents, she from a series of foster homes and a Los Angeles orphanage. When they met, each was aroused by the other’s fame but also by some mistaken impression that they were kindred spirits. Each sought comfort in the homey fantasies they entertained about the other. For Monroe, DiMaggio was protective, courteous, fatherly. For DiMaggio, Monroe was the sexiest house
wife in America. What Monroe got was an average Joe who liked to sit in front of the television watching sports all day. What DiMaggio got, among other things, was a woman who rarely ironed.

  In his prime, DiMaggio was accomplished and revered, given to an old-fashioned reserve that may or may not have hidden a more turbulent nature, depending on to whom one listens. Monroe, by contrast, was an exhibitionistic and unfocused talent, denigrated by the very Hollywood that had made her a star. But Monroe wasn’t stupid. As Kahn points out, she collected sophisticated books and displayed a sexy, impudent wit. Once, when asked what she had on during a photography session, Monroe replied, “The radio.” About her husband she used to say, “Joe brings a great bat into the bedroom.”

  The latter example, writes Kahn, suggests why the couple broke up: their relationship was an overridingly physical one, with Monroe chafing under what she felt to be the marriage’s intellectual constraints, and DiMaggio growing less comfortable with Monroe’s hugely public sexuality, something that she called a “career.” Kahn insists, however, that DiMaggio’s love for Monroe continued long after their marriage, that it was “a lapping ceaseless flame,” that he attempted to protect her from Hollywood “phonies” and overweening psychiatric wards. Nonetheless, Monroe’s losing battle with mental illness has become Hollywood legend, and DiMaggio’s something of an ineffectual knight-errant within that legend. JOE DIMAGGIO STRIKES OUT read newspaper headlines when he and Monroe announced the end of their brief marriage.

  Kahn, speculating from the periphery, cannot hope to have put together a book that is much more than sympathetically rendered hearsay. And books such as his, unlike the rich personal document of Henry and June, are more evidence, if any were needed, of the cruel triviality and petty theft inherent in most celebrity biography. As a journalist, Kahn is only at the perimeter of his subject and must take up the role of voyeur. He writes, “We know that when she killed herself on August 4, 1962, Marilyn needed a pedicure.” Is that what we want to know? Ghoulishly enough—as we watch Joe DiMaggio sell coffeemakers on TV and we wonder, still, about the men who married Marilyn Monroe—maybe the answer is yes?

  (1987)

  John Cheever

  Literature, when it is occurring, is the correspondence of two agoraphobics. It is lonely and waited for, brilliant and pure and frightened, a marriage of birds, a conversation of the blind. When biography intrudes upon this act between reader and author, it may do so in the smallest of vehicles—photographs, book jacket copy, rumors—parked quietly outside. In its more researched and critical form—the biography—it may nose into the house proper.

  Probably it is difficult for biography not to intrude at all, for the impulse toward it, in its insistence and irresistibility, resembles something more physical than intellectual. The housebound correspondents wonder and invent and begin to make a being of the other behind the letters. So innocently insinuating is the biographical that even the professional biographer may begin a work entitled John Cheever with the words “This book is for Vivian,” momentarily allowing his own biography to occlude his subject’s in a pretty if irrelevant cameo. Such is the religious nature of the biographical that it believes all work must come from someplace, that one can give it, dedicate it like a prayer.

  Whatever its seductive impingements, in literature biography is never the point. In biography’s attempts to know the exact midwifery between life and art, it is always guessing. With its power to eclipse and compete, its attempts to own and undo mystery, it remains, as Twain once said, the mere clothes and buttons of the man. And it is an odd paradox that every such biographer must know this deeply and also deeply not know it. Real life—that collection of facts with an angle thrown in—has the importunate growl of stomach or wolf; it raps compellingly at all doors, including those behind which is conducted the preferential code of poetry and fiction. Literary biography has boasted some of the finest and bravest practitioners—from Boswell on Johnson to Gaskell on Brontë—yet there is always something a little guilty in it. Whatever its pleasures for the reader, for the subject biography is a kind of artistic tax, winging in during life like a complicated pamphlet, after death like a crow.

  * * *

  —

  At least Scott Donaldson’s new biography of John Cheever—the first to appear since Cheever’s death in 1982—is not a lurid act of forensic medicine or necrophilia. Though it has none of the genius of its subject, it imitates honorably Cheever’s politeness, intelligence, and reserve. Hobbled in its significance, perhaps, by the appearance in 1984 of Susan Cheever’s memoir, Home Before Dark, and the forthcoming Cheever letters, Donaldson’s biography manages, nonetheless, with sweat on its modest brow, to gather Cheever’s life into a kind of mad English garden of data through which lovers of Cheever’s fiction may not be able to resist a stroll. “Writing is very much like a kiss,” said Cheever, thinking of those readers. “It’s something you can’t do alone.” It is a remark that both denies and illustrates the solitude of a literary life, and it is a telling one. John Cheever: A Biography, though populated with the names of Cheever’s colleagues, intimates, and admirers, seems primarily the story of a man who found himself alone in a way he could never quite accept, in a way that took him completely against his will.

  Cheever grew up in Quincy, Massachusetts, the son of a failed shoe salesman and a stern Englishwoman whose entrepreneurial instincts were sounder than her spouse’s (she came to own a successful gift shop). Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose life and work Cheever’s most resemble, Cheever lived in the best neighborhood in town but with an impostor’s sensitivity and insecurities, due, in part, to the failure of his father. Both Cheever and Fitzgerald had strong, autonomous mothers, and in their adult life each felt the desire to shore up the masculine side of himself, in fear of the strength of the feminine. They both lived very socially, forging new, more secure identities out of their abilities to charm and impress the rich, toeing the ragged line between court jester and town clown, Cheever with more grace, perhaps, but both with a powerful, liquored ambivalence.

  Donaldson suggests that Cheever’s talent came from his mother’s side of the family, which was educated and artistic. But it was his father’s side that Cheever himself tended to mythologize, with its somewhat spurious links to Ezekiel Cheever, the legendary seventeenth-century schoolmaster at the Boston Latin School. It was also Cheever’s father who, while working full-time in a shoe factory, had once studied evenings to be a magician, one of his handbook tricks being “How to Cook an Omelet in Your Hat”—surely a significant bit in a writer’s parentage.

  Cheever, shy, plump, and only an average student, whose spelling, according to one teacher, was “unusual, to say the least,” learned early the power of good storytelling (which he was encouraged to do in front of his classmates) and of excellent manners. As a mere kindergartener he was remembered as having been the only child who, upon leaving a party, spoke to the hostess. “Thank you for inviting me,” he said. “I enjoyed it very much and I mean it!” At Thayer Academy, at the age of thirteen, he wrote astonishingly sophisticated poetry. He composed the winning slogan for Good Posture Week: “Make it Posture Week, not Weak Posture.” And when, in 1930, at the age of seventeen, he was expelled for poor grades, he sat down and wrote a story titled “Expelled,” sent it off to Malcolm Cowley at The New Republic, and had it accepted for publication. Out of rejection was launched his brilliant career.

  It is a story such as “Expelled,” the portrait of a prep school to which the young narrator has not been allowed to return, that no doubt causes Donaldson to use straightforward summaries of Cheever’s fiction as mortar and sometimes as the bricks themselves in reconstructing Cheever’s youth and young adulthood. Donaldson himself tells of Cheever’s allergy to the unembroidered truth, so one can hardly believe that art and life serve each other well here. The trompe l’oeil of autobiography present in any fiction is difficult enough, but the presumption of
it, foisted on Cheever’s work, makes for a semblance of biographical desperation.

  But it is not as if Donaldson hasn’t done his research. He guides the reader through a detailed chronology—Cheever’s move to New York in 1934, the trips to Yaddo, the marriage to Mary Winternitz, the military service at an Army camp that looked like “of all places, Harvard,” the Guggenheim fellowships, the National Book Award for 1957, the journeys to Italy, the house in Ossining. Donaldson is fine, if careful, in his presentation of Cheever’s long and finally turbulent relationship with The New Yorker. He is vivid, if short-winded, in his discussion of Cheever’s deep attachment to his brother Fred, a relationship Cheever felt stirred the homosexual longings in him. He goes into great, anecdotal detail about servants the Cheevers had both in Italy and on the Vanderlip estate in Scarborough, New York, where they rented for some years. And he is strangely if respectfully tight-lipped regarding Cheever’s wife, Mary, who never emerges very clearly and to whom the biography, at times, does seem beholden.

  It is not until the book’s last third that the picture of Cheever that Donaldson is after sharpens into something wrenching. By middle age, Cheever’s heavy drinking had affected his work habits and made chaos of his family life. Bisexuality seemed at first to offer the connection and emotion that he felt had eluded him, despite all his gifts. Promiscuity ripped open a room in him. He had affairs with students, with men in gay baths, and, more notoriously, with Ned Rorem and with Hope Lange. At Boston University he was hired to teach the same year that Anne Sexton, also a faculty member, committed suicide; Cheever himself sank into a depression exacerbated by drinking. In the middle of the second semester he was sent home to his wife, and John Updike was brought in to take over the class.