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“ What is it about Marilyn Monroe that obsesses you so? ” — Mimi Reisel Gladstein

IN A LENGTHY, SINGLE-SPACED, TWO-AND-A-HALF-PAGE TYPEWRITTEN CRITIQUE

THE MAILER REVIEW VOL. 5, NO. 1, FALL 2011. Copyright 2011. The Norman Mailer Society. Published by The Norman Mailer Society.

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page 269 MIMI REISEL GLADSTEIN

ject and the self-revelatory hesitations he expresses creates a correspondence between him and Monroe as they both projected a blatant forward sexuality that overlays an undercurrent of vulnerability.

Another service Marilyn/Marilyn performs for Mailer is facilitating his joys of linguistic excess. Given the spectacular and extravagant nature of his subject and her reputation, he allows himself a surfeit of verbal highwire acts. On occasion the result is fun as when he catalogs the list of Monroe's early Hollywood relationships: "Snively, Schenck, Karger, and Hyde! If she had been a bargirl lookng to sue an ex-lover in a raunchy case, she would have picked her law firm out of the yellow pages with a name like that". But at other times his unmonitored metaphors and imagery are definitely in need of a discerning editor. In one jarring instance he writes of Monroe's final moments when "the wings of death lay wet feathers across her face." "Wet feathers" is a clumsy image whereby to communicate the dark eminence of death. Rather than a sense of awe, what is evoked is annoyance; wet feathers would tickle or make one want to sneeze. Mailer's choice of metaphor to describe Monroe's inability to escape her past is to describe her behavior "as sluggish as a dinosaur's tail". This metaphor is equally inept. The image conveyed is awkward rather than apt. Experience that repeats itself "with the breath of a turnip" is another of his odd images. Wet feathers, dinosaur tails, and the breath of a turnip--surely a wordsmith like Mailer could do better. In his explanation of why the "detritus of the insignificant" films she played in early in her career so damaged any good will she may hav accumulated as young women and led to "retaliations" he descibes as "nihilistic," Mailer pulls out more over-the-top verbal imagery. He calls Monroe "a sly leviathan of survival, and, Faust among the Faustians". In addition to the lingustic abandon, he also allows himself such salaciously voyeuristic flights of the imagination as an nvented dialogue after the discovery by studie executives that their newest sensation had posed in the nude. Mailer excuses himself by pointing out that "a novelist has a right to invent the following dialogue". He then devises such questions as cannot help but inflame the imagination: "Did you spread your legs?""Is your asshole showing?""Any animals in it with you?" Lest he miss the opportunity to use every profanity he knows, Mailer includes the statement, when trying to describe the divided character of Monroe's personality, that while she could be an angel, she was also "on hard and calculating

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computer of a cold and ambitious cunt" and then underlines his linguistic choice by stating parenthetically "(no other English word is near)".

The publication of Marilyn was a boon to Mailer both personally and professionally--and then as a bonus benefit unexpectedly, it was to serve him as a tool for seduction. In A Ticket to the Circus, Norris Church Mailer writes of its role in their first encounter and subsequent courtship. In 1975, in anticipation of meeting the famous author, Barbara Norris--her name when they met--brought her copy of the book for him to sign. He did not sign it until February of 1976 when a relationship had already begun. Addressing it to Barbara Mailer he writes, "Because I knew when I wrote this book that someone I had not yet met would read it and be with me". The Mailer chutzpah is in full force here.

Of Women and Their Elegance, Mailer's second appropriation of Marilyn Monroe, came some seven years after the first. Like the first, it is heavily reliant on the visual. Here, however, rather than pictures only of Marilyn, there are pictures of other women and their elegance. The photographs by Milton H. Greene run the gamut from Marlene Dietrich to Grandma Moses. In Marilyn Mailer claimed to be writing a "novel biography" and he routinely referenced the biographical works of Maurice Zolotow, Fred Lawrence Guiles, and Norman Rosten, also often citing what he called "factoids." Here he baldly states in a note before the text that he "does not pretend to offer factual representations."

Works Cited

• Bailey, Jennifer (1979). Norman Mailer: Quick-Change Artist (Print). London: Macmillan.
• Dearborn, Marilyn V. (1999). Mailer: A Biography (Print). New York: Houghton Mifflin.
• Leeds, Barry H. (2002). The Enduring Vision of Norman Mailer (Print). Bainbridge Island, WA: Pleasure Boat Studio: A Literary Press.
• Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher (16 July 1973). "Aquarius ON Gemini - I". New York Times (Print). 27.
• Mailer, Norman (1980). Of Women and Their Elegance (Print). New York: Simon and Schuster.
• Mailer, Norman (1973). Marilyn (Print). New York: Galahad Books.
• Mailer, Norris Church (2010). A Ticket To The Circus (Print). New York: Random House.
• Manso, Peter (1985). Mailer (Print). New York: Simon & Schuster.
• Merrill, Robert (1992). Norman Mailer Revisited (Print). New York: Twayne Publishers.
• Rollyson, Carl (1991). The Lives of Norman Mailer: A Biography (Print). New York: Paragon House.