Wally’s a born gagman. If somebody else was to get the job, I’m glad he did. He’s a damned clever kid. He hasn’t the brains of an ant-eater so far as any thinking about abstractions or serious problems goes. But what the hell point is there to abstractions if you’re not Whitehead or Einstein? My curse, the burden I carry on my back like Bunyan’s pilgrim, is my abstracting tendency. And now we are coming at last to the point.
Marjorie, at the present moment in my life I’m not a composer, I’m not a lyric writer, I’m not a musical-comedy writer, I’m not an advertising writer, I’m not a gagwriter, I’m not any kind of a writer. I repeat, at present. Maybe I’ll have a late flowering, like Hawthorne. At thirty-two, having tried my hand at everything, I’m back where I was at twenty-two. Ferdie Platt and I talked about this for six hours last night and I don’t care how much we drank, it was the soberest conversation that two men ever conducted. If I am anything at all, I’m a philosopher. Now that statement looks incredibly vainglorious and ridiculous, just typed out cold, but you can go to hell if you don’t like it.
I’m going back to the Sorbonne. After a while I may go to Oxford for a couple of years. There are some scholarships at both places I know I can get without half trying. Until I’m thirty-five I’m going to do nothing but study. Then I’ll take a long breath and see where I am. The greatest likelihood is that I’ll come back to the States and get a job teaching philosophy. Right now I can’t tell you what a glorious prospect that is to me. I pant for it. But I’m willing to be patient and work like hell to be worthy of it. I’m not looking beyond the immediate moment. First thing in the morning I’m going to book out on the next boat to Paris. And to prove I’m serious I’m going back on the lean regime: third-class ticket, ten-cent cigarettes, and all the rest. The money I have from the advertising drudgery has got to last. And kiddo, I am the man to make it last, especially in Paris. I do that better than practically anything.
I’m not giving up the hope of doing something creative. There are precedents for men like myself, who seem to have a facility for everything and a grasp of nothing, eventually coming through with the real stuff. Samuel Butler was all over the place with cantatas, paintings, evolutionary theories, poetry, novels, philology, and Lord knows what else. All garbage. But at last he came out with The Way of All Flesh. Actually it was published after he died. I’m not saying I’m a suppressed novelist. I don’t know what I am. Maybe I’m a defeated mediocrity salving his bruised ego, as you no doubt are about to decide in your little bourgeois wisdom. My slip is showing, hey? Well, my love, I hope we both meet, you aged forty-one and me fifty, to compare notes. I wish you the best, but I can’t wish you’re right about me, naturally.
Ye gods, a ray of weak sunlight just fell across my desk. How long have I been typing?
Well, I’m finished. I hope I’ve proved to your satisfaction that I’m a revolting heel, thoroughly incorrigible, and unreliable, and that I will never make a good citizen of New Rochelle. Actions speak louder than words. Certainly all my acts of the past three years added together should open your eyes to the cruel truth at last. But this letter should serve to document that truth, in case you begin to doubt it in weak moments. I’ve had my weak moments, too. Those, unquestionably, are what have given you hope. A man who makes loud anti-social noises like me, and then meekly drudges month after month at a desk in the J. Walter Thompson agency, writing extremely competent advertising copy, probably seems worth working on. So let’s clear that up, once for all, and then we’ll be through with this endless epistle, I believe. I just want to make it utterly clear that you have nothing to hope for.
Passion makes people do queer things. Now I’ve had a burning passion for you, and that explains all my bourgeois lapses like the Thompson job and the Rothmore job. But I want to insist, by the way, that what I told you when I took this last job was true. I am not one of these pure spirits who sees advertising as the lowest state to which the soul of man can fall. To me it’s a way of selling words for money, like any other. I don’t see any difference between writing girdle ads for money, screenplays for money, or stage plays for money. If you’re a great artist creating enduring works, that’s another matter. Frankly, I hate all kinds of writing, it’s loathsome drudgery, but I will not admit that a screenwriter or even the writer of a hit on Broadway is any better than an advertising copywriter. He’s better only in so far as he makes more money. It’s all horse manure. Nobody’s going to convince me that the dark brown manure is spiritually nobler somehow than the pale yellow manure. I stand on that.
I took the job because my money from Moon Face had run out, winter was coming on, you and I were still having fun with each other (despite your moral lapses into gloom) and I wanted to finance our pleasures in style. It was the Rothmore experience all over again for me. The first week or two it seemed a simple lark, and I rather enjoyed it. And gradually it became the most ghastly and unendurable slavery. I have been at the end of my rope for some weeks now. Ferdie Platt’s arrival in town was a godsend. A night of talking about the old days in Paris, and a frank cry on an old pal’s shoulder, was really all I needed. Coincidentally, I daresay, losing out on the gagwriting job that same afternoon had put a sort of period to this era of my life, by reducing what I was doing to the ultimate absurdity—defeat by Wally Wronken.
Marjorie, the fever has broken at last. And for good, I believe. For the first time in three years I can truly report to you that my passion for you has waned. I wouldn’t lie about this. You understand that this is the end, really the end. With the passion waned, there is no power left on earth that can ever make me into a docile commuter. Moreover, I see no chance of the passion reviving. I’ve been through it. I’m coming out on the other side. Nor will the like ever happen to me again. Probably it had to happen once. It’s been a sort of emotional smallpox. I’m scarred, but I’m cured. And I’m immune. The reason is that I now fully understand what has happened to me. The compulsions have been dragged out into daylight, and their power is gone.
You know enough about my family background by now to realize that I’m King Oedipus himself, a walking textbook on that particular complex. It also happens that my father is a louse, a windbag, and a bore, Oedipus or no Oedipus. ANYWAY—there is a slight complication, or maybe just an extension, in the fact that I’ve always been extremely fond of Monica. There isn’t the slightest doubt in my mind—I’ve never been psychoanalyzed, but I don’t have to spend forty hours on a couch and two thousand dollars to figure this out—that I’ve been “killing my father,” as the technicians would put it, by rejecting the respectable pattern of living, and being a disgraceful bum, and all that. There is also no doubt that the Shirley image I’m always talking about is my mother and my sister coalesced. Attraction-repulsion follows because of the incest theme, the association with my father, and so forth. I’m sure that my wretched behavior to a whole string of West End Avenue girls—and to some extent, the sadistic element in my treatment of you—has been a vengeance thing, the inflicting of pain substituting for normal sex relations, a childish regression. Gad, I should get a job in a clinic, I’m so brilliant at this. Well, darling, what I’m getting at is, I have possessed my nemesis. I have thereby ceased to be plagued by her. This affair of ours was probably necessary for me, or I’d always have run the risk of suddenly proposing to some dreadful Jewish dollface. You have released me.
Am I still in love with you? Love is a word. I can do without you very well. I mean to. I’ve gotten over love affairs before. I’m not seventeen. This isn’t the end of the world. The heart is a muscle. It loosens and stretches with exercise. Mine has had a lot of exercise, and will soon snap back to normal. Yours, I’m sorry to say, will give you more pain and take a little longer. But you’ll get over it too. Everybody does. Only people in nineteenth-century novels die for love—or advanced neurotics scheduled to kill themselves anyway. If there’s anything you’re not, it’s neurotic. You’re complicated, but you’re made of vanadium steel. That ol
d Jewish steel that’s outlasting the pyramids. Bless your little heart, you’re your mama all over again. I’m not jeering at you, my darling. You’re unspeakably pretty and sweet and bright and nice, and I could eat you up. But the price is too high, and I will not pay it. I said from the start I wouldn’t, and I won’t. Maybe all these words have been in vain, and you think I still will, some day. Well, I won’t. Don’t try to stop me from sailing to Europe. I know a trick worth two of that. I’ll give this letter to Ferdie to mail two days after I’m gone. I’ll be on the high seas while your warm tears are staining this page. The Masked Marvel has outwitted you to the last, Marjorie Morgenstern.
And now, my valedictory to you. Once more, I will be cruel to be kind. You are not, and you never will be, Marjorie Morningstar. In time you will be Marjorie Cohen, Marjorie Levy, or Marjorie Shapiro. It is written in the stars. I knew this back at South Wind, after watching you act once or twice. I equivocated about it for two reasons. First, there seemed no point in hurting you, especially as I knew you’d never believe me. Not at nineteen. Second, you had enough sparkle and intelligence, and also my judgment was clouded enough by the fact that I was falling in love with you, to create a shred of doubt in my mind. But that doubt went, long ago. Now let me tell you the harsh truth about yourself in words of two syllables or less, so you’ll never forget it.
All girls, including you, are too goddamn emancipated nowadays. You get the idea from all the silly magazines and movies you’re bathed in from infancy, and then from all the talk in high school and college, that you’ve got to be somebody and do something. Bloody nonsense. A woman should be some man’s woman and do what women are born and built to do—sleep with some man, rear his kids, and keep him reasonably happy while he does his fragment of the world’s work. They’re not really happy doing anything else. I’m sorry if I sound like Harry Emerson Fosdick, but the truth is the truth, no matter how stupid it happens to sound. Anyway, nowadays even preachers don’t dare talk this way, it’s considered so corny. The Nazis are the only ones who’ve come right out with it. And THEIR saying it doesn’t make it wrong, either. Two and two make four, even if Hitler says so.
Well, now, Nature gives most of you girls a burst of charm around seventeen, lasting a few years, so you can attract some man and keep this process going. It’s the flower and the bee; it’s that simple and obvious. But do you ever ascribe your new charm to Nature? Of course not. What’s happened is that you’ve suddenly become a brilliant, gifted, sage individual. You’ve assumed a role, complete with makeup, costumes, and dialogue. And you’ve dressed and painted yourself with amazing cleverness, and you keep inventing fantastically witty dialogue, and there’s no end to your graceful ways and arts. THAT’S how it happens that boys are starting to fall all over you. It’s got nothing to do with your fresh pointy breasts and new round thighs and perky behind. It follows that you have some extraordinary talent for this kind of thing. In fact, you’re an actress.
I’m not talking about you, you understand. Being an actress (or a model, same damn nonsense) has become to the average American girl what being a knight in armor was to Don Quixote. It’s a process that’s going on all over the country, this addling of girls’ brains. That’s why I call it a tropism. Nothing can stop it, until our civilization changes. Year after year troops of Marjorie Morningstars will converge on Hollywood and Broadway to be seduced, raped, perverted, prostituted, or—if they’re lucky like you—to merely tangle up in fornication for a couple of years and then go home to marry the druggist’s son or the doctor or the real estate man.
I say you’re lucky because I’ve been a little more interesting and amusing, I’m sure, than the usual show-business deflowerer. It’s generally some asinine chorus boy or actor, or lecherous third assistant stage manager, who does the job. Or a producer, if a girl’s really worth bothering with. Or maybe a musician, or a phony Village writer needing a bath and a haircut. Some idle joker, anyway, who stays up late and has a lot of time on his hands for fooling around with the Morningstars.
Margie, this job of yours doesn’t mean a thing. I am NOT being malicious. The play stinks. You know it does. You have a ridiculous walk-on part, and Guy Flamm only hired you because you’re pretty and inexperienced and he probably figures he can scrounge you on salary. I don’t think the show will ever get to New York, and if it does it’ll close in three days. No talent scout will see you. If one does, he’ll ignore you. He knows all about the Morningstars. He can spot them a mile off. Anyway, who pays any attention to a Guy Flamm production? Good Lord, you remember your first brush with him! It’s a study in self-deception to see how steamed up you’ve become over this lousy bit part, just because you had to sign an Equity form. Well, you’ll get over it. I just hope the bump isn’t too hard. Actually, it’s just as well you’re in the clouds at this particular moment in both our lives. It’ll cushion the shock of this letter. The rehearsals and all will take your mind off it. I feel a little less squeamish, consequently, about wielding the knife.
Darling, don’t ever regret the theatre, once you’re defeated and out. It’s a quicksand, a pigsty. It’s one big whorehouse extending from Forty-second Street to Columbus Circle, except for a nook here and there reserved for homosexuals. I am not abusing it because I have failed. The theatre’s never had an ounce of glamor for me. The attraction always has been the money. Maybe that’s an indication that I was never meant to write for it. Be that as it may, you were never meant to act in it, that’s for sure. Talent is as unmistakable in the long run as red hair. You haven’t got it.
I have never had such a crick in my back in all my life. I’ve been typing for three and a half hours. I’m faint for sleep. Go to hell, Marjorie Morgenstern. I really don’t love you any more.
Noel
There was a handwritten postscript:
3:30 in the afternoon, same day. P.S.—Well, I’ve just read it over once. I’m sealing it up fast. It’s probably the most nasty, abominable, drivelling screed anybody ever wrote. I was drunk, all right. If nothing has ever disgusted you with me before, I’m sure this will. So I’ll send it as is. There is only one untruth in all these pages, all the same, and that is in the very last line. I hope with all my heart it will be true in a few days, a few weeks, a few months. Because it is the only way out for both of us. There is no hope. Goodbye, my love.
N
Chapter 39. THE BAD YEAR
When Marjorie arrived at rehearsal that day she took another blow, ill prepared as she was for more evil news.
The play she was in was called The Bad Year. She was cast as a whore. The play was a farce about a small-town spinster of thirty-five who inherited a fortune and came to New York to live wildly for a year, before settling back into small-town life. There were complications involving city gangsters, and a doctor from the small town who was in love with the spinster. The chief comic idea of the play was that the spinster rented a room in a brownstone bordello in Manhattan, under the misapprehension that the place was a boardinghouse. It took her most of the play to be undeceived. All Marjorie had to do in the play was to sit around in her underwear with five other girls for a few minutes during each act, smoking, drinking, and in general conveying depravity as well as she could with pantomime.
In the original script each of the whores had had a few lines to speak. But Guy Flamm had pointed out to the author that as soon as an actress uttered a syllable on stage, she had to be paid the Equity minimum salary for all rehearsals and tryout performances; whereas if she said nothing, she could be signed on as an extra for a fraction of the cost. The author, a sad little bald man with limp-hanging long hands, was putting up all the money to produce the show himself. It was his Broadway debut, though he had written (so the report went among the cast) seventeen unproduced plays. He made his living as a partner in a firm manufacturing lawn sprinklers. His approach to the production was consistently frugal; and he had willingly revised the script so that there were now five silent whores, and one loquacious slut who
spoke all the lines the others had had. Marjorie was a silent whore.
It wasn’t much of a part, and it wasn’t much of a play, as Marjorie had frankly admitted to Noel. But she had come a long way since the day after her graduation from college, when she had hesitated over taking the part of Clarice in Guy Flamm’s production of Down Two Doubled. Her only reservation in going to the first tryout of The Bad Year had been that Flamm might be embarrassed at the sight of her, so that she would have no chance at all. But he had picked her out of a line of girls on the stage, along with several others, and thereafter at rehearsals had made no sign of recognition. Evidently he had forgotten his short encounter with her.
Marjorie had been haunting all the producers’ offices and all the tryouts, for two years: and this was her first break. She had undergone enormous and almost unrelieved frustration. Perhaps half a dozen times she had been given the lines of some minor part to read at a tryout, but she had never gotten the part.
She was such an habitué of the drugstore, and of another haunt of the hopefuls, the bar in Sardi’s restaurant, that nobody looked around any more when she came in. They could see out of the corners of their eyes that it was only Margie Morgenstern (or Morningstar—she was known by both names), the pretty girl whose boy friend had written the fearful flop Princess Jones. Even Renée, the hat-check girl at Sardi’s, called her Margie. Renée was far from a nobody; the Broadway columnists often printed anecdotes about her. It seemed to Marjorie that all was not lost—that she did have a desperate little toehold in the theatre, after all—because this celebrated hat-check girl called her by her first name.
In such a frame of mind, Marjorie could hardly have helped regarding a chance to appear on the Broadway stage, even in a Guy Flamm production, as a turn in her luck. It was too bad that she was merely playing a silent whore; but one obviously had to start at the bottom of the ladder. She had tried very hard to get the part of the talking whore. It would have meant an Equity card, more money, a true leap into the theatrical profession. For a day or two she had actually seemed to be favored for the role by Guy Flamm; then suddenly another girl had been chosen. It was believed among the cast that the talking whore was sleeping with Flamm; certainly they were always taking their meals together, and leaving rehearsals arm in arm.