The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe

by Andrew O'Hagan

  ‘Oh, Carson. Aren’t you just a tiny bit jealous? I mean, he’s a joke, right? But he’s a good joke and good jokes are hard to find.’

  ‘Why would I be jealous, dear? He stole all that writin’ from me and Bill Faulkner.’*

  ‘I hear tell he’s mighty good on a yacht,’ said Marilyn.

  ‘Quit impersonatin’ me,’ said Miss McCullers. ‘I’d sooner walk the plank as sit on a yacht. Telling ya’. Truman nearabout killed everybody who was ever nice to him and that’s the damn truth.’

  ‘He stole your work?’

  ‘Yes, dear. He stole that little fag novel from me and Bill Faulkner and Eudora Welty. The rest he got from Tennessee Williams.’

  ‘And what about Breakfast at Tiffany’s?’

  ‘He stole that from you, dear.’

  ‘So they say.’

  ‘Yes. From you he up and stole it. And from Carol Marcus and Slim Keith. That was the story he stole, and the attitude he done stole the same way. The style, well, honey, the style he stole from me and Christopher Isherwood, right’n front of our eyes.’

  ‘Heavens.’

  ‘When you reck’n on Truman, he’s really jest a redneck pansy impressed by the smart folks. He’s a rag-doll, jest waitin’ to be picked up by any spoiled girl who happ’ns to be passin’ by lookin’ for a darn plaything.’

  ‘Well, nobody’s saying he’s Proust.’

  ‘Next time he comes your way, you skedaddle now dear, you hear me? He’ll cuss you behind yo’ back like tomorrow’s never comin’.’

  ‘Carson, Carson. Come, come.’

  ‘You’ll see if I’m wrong, dear. That little bitch hung his momma out to dry. He hung Katherine Ann Porter and Newton Arvin out to dry. You know what he said about Greta Garbo? He said he happened to go up there to her apartment and she has a Picasso in there, but Truman says she so stupid she hung the Picasso upside down.’

  Marilyn shrieked. I jumped onto my feet at the size of her laughter and she covered her mouth. ‘Oh, my,’ she said. ‘He must be the most wicked man who ever did live.’

  ‘Quit impersonatin’ me. And he ain’t no man. Don’t kid yourself on that score. Yo’ just naive about men.’

  Carson had a cane hooked over the back of her chair and her face was white. She was only forty-four years old, ten years older than Marilyn, but from her face and her manner one might have imagined she was much older. Lillian Hellman said that Carson wallowed in her illness – and that was the kind of thing Lillian Hellman would say – but nobody, not even Carson, could deny she was conscious at all times of being ‘efflicted’. She even understood how sometimes she used it to gain control over others, that being a ‘burden’ or a ‘handful’ was often a nice way of making sure you weren’t forgotten. For much of the time in the Oak Room, Carson spoke about the surgery she had had on her wrist, about a second operation due to happen in July and then there was her novel. ‘My. I guess that’s something to get excited about,’ said Marilyn. ‘Do you know what it’s going to be called?’

  ‘Clock Without Hands.’

  * 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.’