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

by Andrew O'Hagan

  ‘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

  an ad-spot for mink coats.’

  ‘God. She’s quite fierce, isn’t she?’ said the girl. ‘Old Scaly

  Bird.’

  My head turned and I took two paces through the forest of

  legs. Ted Solotaroff was talking to an intense young man with

  hurt eyes. At first I thought it was Charlie, the leader of the

  Monroe Six, this being the sort of party Charlie might steal

  into as a young staffer at the Viking Press. He had the same

  intensity and self-involvement as Charlie, similar interests,

  but he was much smaller and didn’t find things funny. He

  was talking about a story of Isaac Rosenfeld’s called ‘Red Wolf’. ‘In some ways I think it’s a real pity,’ the young fellow said. ‘He was never gonna be Saul Bellow. I mean, they were friends and everything. They both thought they were going

  to be Bellow, but only Bellow has a shot at it.’

  ‘Even that isn’t guaranteed,’ said Solotaroff. ‘It’s all a

  struggle. Have you read Saul’s Africa novel?’

 
; ‘Crazy stuff.’

  ‘You bet. Anyhow, that Rosenfeld story. Story’s narrated

  by a dog, right? Well, that’s him doing Kafka. He can’t get

  over Kafka.’

  ‘Oh, give us a break fellas,’ I said.

  Following the perfume trail, I found Marilyn in the bedroom up against a white bookcase. She was standing with

  Lionel Trilling and his wife Diana, while Irving Howe sat

  looking up at them from the arm of some William Morris

  upholstery. My owner had that lovely, strange, underwater

  look on her face and she was listening intently. I stood in

  the shadow-box of the doorway, when it occurred to me that

  this was a play and with a certain taste in my mouth, a taste

  of Hellman, I could see myself as the author. As Cicero said,

  ‘honour encourages the arts’.

  * Lillian Hellman appeared before the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities in 1950. She invented her life, which is reasonable, but she also invented a good line she claimed to have said under interrogation. ‘I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.’ No such line was uttered, except by Lillian at parties. Arthur Miller appeared before the Committee in 1957. Marilyn had accompanied him to the hearing in Washington.

  trilling is wearing an elegant sports jacket, a dark tie, holding a pipe at an angle to his thoughts. diana is wearing a midnightblue dress with a jacket over the top, a brooch pinned on her breast as if to guarantee her dignity. Her lips are stained grey, but I guess that’s just a dog seeing red. mr howe is wearing light trousers, a pair of soft shoes, and a cotton jacket with pencils sticking out of his top pocket. The room has a strong sense of the setting sun. The sound of Dizzy Gillespie comes from another room. trilling [careful, noble, unassailable]: Let us call it the

  romance of culture.

  diana: No, Lionel.

  trilling: No?

  diana: I simply can’t believe we have enough reason to

  begin thinking of art as a narcotic.

  trilling: One might do better to insist on the notion

  that no work of art can ever be divorced from its effect.

  The Brothers Karamazov is no kind of narcotic, but for the

  sensitive reader it may nevertheless possess a homeopathic

  character. Tragedy’s function is to prepare us, to inure

  us, as human beings, as a society even, to what we may

  experience as the pain of life.

  diana: So art is simply an escape?

  trilling [patiently]: No. An engagement.

  mr howe [cheerfully]: The very opposite of escape. The

  very opposite!

  trilling: In comedy we find reality. We find the essence

  of man as a living creature.

  mr howe: Too true!

  diana [tomarilyn]: Mr Kazin believes that Dostoevsky is

  the master critic of our civilisation.

  mr howe [very shyly]: Is that so?

  diana: Do you mean, is it the case? I would say it is arguable,

  yes. Let’s see what Lionel says.

  trilling [looking atmarilyn]: In the essay of Freud’s you

  mentioned a few minutes ago, ‘Dostoevsky and Parricide’,

  Freud says that psychoanalysis can have no real purchase

  on the artist. Yet he understands Dostoevsky to be a very

  great writer indeed, and a high-culture prophet, who

  could summon the forces at work not only in man but in civilisation itself. But you are interested in Grushenka, and I must say I believe that is where the author’s genius actually finds its bearings, in the blend of tragedy and comedy that informs his rendering of the secondary

  characters in that powerful work.

  marilyn: Do you think she’s funny?

  trilling: Anything truly alive is funny.

  marilyn: Really?

  diana: Khrushchev is funny? Leopold and Loeb? Adolf . . . trilling: Khrushchev is not unfunny.

  marilyn: He came to the studio. When was it, last year,

  the year before? They had a dinner in the commissary at

  Fox. I thought he was very funny. Kooky. I mean odd, but

  I liked him. He once told Nixon all shopkeepers were

  thieves. Nixon grew up in a shop, or something. trilling: There you have it.

  [As diana looks towards the window, mr howe fiddles with

  the pencils in his top pocket. diana sips her martini. She

  looks as if she’s biting the insides of her cheeks.]

  mr howe: Yes. Dostoevsky and Dickens are writers who

  show us the comedy of realism, the tragedy of intellectual

  life, the wonders of psychology. Each of them is a prophet

  and his religion is humanity.

  diana [smiling]: Very good, Irving. Very good indeed. mr howe: The work is full of buffoonery.

  marilyn [almost hurt]: But I’m sure The Brothers Karamazov

  is very serious.

  mr howe: It is serious.

  trilling: There’s nothing so serious as comedy. diana: Go on, Irving.

  mr howe: The novel is political to the marrow of its bones. In the world of Dostoevsky, no one is spared, but there is a supreme consolation: no one is excluded. Like Dickens, he populates his books with true people. Dickens sets in motion a line of episodes: the pícaro is defined by his energy and his voice, and he moves from adventure to adventure, each cluster of incidents bringing him into relation with a new set of characters. Via Fielding, the great influence on Dickens was the picaresque. A novel must not only reveal the world but it must be a world. Show me a good novel and I will show you a centre of vibrancy. Why, this dog could write a novel and I would read it tomorrow. It would no doubt be a piratical compilation from the works of old Spanish masters. Old British masters. So be it. Let’s have it. We need more of this. Where are today’s comic novels? It is the heartbeat of the form. That’s how society might be examined and our examinations, God save us, might

  even prove to be entertaining. That’s my argument. diana: Well, it’s not much of an argument.

  marilyn: I think it’s neat.

  diana: Neat?

  marilyn: Sure. I think it’s neat.

  diana: You have lost me, Irving. Are you suggesting that

  it might benefit our . . . our national literature, if works

  were to be conceived by workers and servants, and by . . .

  by dogs?’

  mr howe: The Brothers Karamazov is really the story of

  the domestic servants. All great stories are about the

  servants.

  trilling: That’s outrageous.

  mr howe: I mean, even King Lear – it’s the Fool’s story.

  And The Brothers K. is Smerdyakov’s story.

  [I yapped with excitement and put myself into the play.] diana: Oh, look. It’s the hero of the hour.

  At least Irving Howe was agile and open in his absurdity. (Perhaps too open: I think he was standing too close to me, picking up my propaganda, the taste of my experience, my will to power.) Mr Trilling, on the other hand, was a puzzle of a much less benign sort. There was something sinister in Trilling’s immense composure. People appeared to be awed by his carefulness, his patient discrimination, his gentle unwillingness to say too much or to think too little before speaking. His manner concealed fear and so did his faith in culture: there was dirt and uncertainty out in the world. Mr Trilling knew it, and his project was to make his defences impregnable. Not even his wife could quicken his cool blood, though God knows she made a good effort. While appearing to share in her husband’s dignity, Diana in fact exerted a powerful drain on it, subtly challenging his sense of himself while wishing to appear its curator. (Not that women are obliged to protect their husband’s gifts, but Diana wanted to, and she wasn’t aware of the hostility it generated in her.) There was something wrong with Mrs Trilling that caused her to d
eny, when it came to other people, those qualities she knew she lacked herself: it was merely a survival ritual. She needed to feel superior in order to feel alive, that was all. Lionel, meanwhile, had made a fetish of his own moral percipience, his body a vehicle of serene motion, a machine that concealed its efforts and its exhaustions. He wasn’t to blame for anything except his need to be blameless. All these things became obvious as the Trillings inched around each other with their super-alert conversation, rewarding the bystanders with their attention while making it clear that their marriage was all the social intercourse they could ever wish for. In her own mind, everything Mrs Trilling knew about her husband gave her licence both to doubt him and to defend him, and she knew that he had only recently forgiven Mr Howe for an article the latter wrote in 1954, about the intellect and power. Some essential human conflict was crystallised in her marriage to Lionel, but she found she was almost happy, which her private self told her was quite sufficient. She looked down at her shoes: blue, with a heel, a prim little bow on the front. Mr Trilling, meanwhile, was thinking how well – relatively well, almost well – his wife was coping at the party, given Kazin’s unforgotten criticism of her psychoanalytical approach to D. H. Lawrence. Marilyn remarked to herself how very smart these people were and how decisive they seemed about everything. ‘I’m afraid we’ve rather been monopolising Miss Monroe,’ said Diana as Mr Kazin came into the room, leading a bright and portly Edmund Wilson, who was sniffing into a handkerchief and holding a glass of whisky.

  ‘As we speak, Lillian is telling Carson she knows nothing about the South,’ said Alfred. ‘She is saying Carson has never been to New Orleans.’

  ‘The convergence of the twain,’ said Wilson like a grand and busy bumble bee.

  ‘I don’t know if you’ve met Miss Monroe,’ said Diana, always polishing the silverware.

  ‘Hello, madam.’

  Marilyn put out her hand. ‘Charmed, I’m sure.’ Wilson tapped his tummy and looked at Lionel. It was like the meeting in the forest between Mary and Elizabeth in Mary Stuart: each bowed almost imperceptibly and Wilson coughed. Schiller himself might have coughed at the throattickling buzz which Wilson felt passing through his body as he gulped his whisky and began to talk. As people often do around dogs, they used me as the excuse for a little small talk, and you could see instantly that neither man was built for small talk. ‘When Henry James was old and tired,’ Wilson said, ‘he could be seen moving down the High Street in Rye with his dog Maximilian trotting behind him.’