Marilyn: A Biography Read Online Free PDF

than
once a confirmed source of inaccuracy, but still it is her first
recollected image, accurate or no — “I remember waking up from my
nap fighting for my life. Something was pressed against my face. It
could have been a pillow. I fought with all my strength.” So it is
recorded by Guiles as told to Arthur Miller by Marilyn, and she was
to tell it to others. It is one of the stories she always told.
While other such dramatic items are usually false — she was, for
example, probably not raped at the age of seven or eight although
she told the tale to reporters for years — still Della was
committed about this time to the Norwalk asylum after a series of
accelerating attacks. Ida Bolender would claim no knowledge of an
assault on the baby, but it is agreed Della stopped seeing Norma
Jean almost completely a few weeks before she was committed.
Besides, there is something in the prodigious tortures of Monroe’s
later insomnia that all but insists on traumatic origin. “Sleep was
her demon,” Miller was to say, “the fundamental preoccupation of
her life,” and no one was in a better position to know.
    For what it helps to explain, let us assume
some sort of partial suffocation probably occurred. Obviously a
thirteen-month-old baby does not push away a pillow pressed down
upon her by a grown woman, not unless we assume the baby has as
much sudden strength and agility — in such a crisis — as a kitten
fighting for its life. But then there is no need to envisage a
struggle. The grandmother may have played too vigorously until the
baby was caught beneath blankets and in a panic for fresh air, or
as easily laid a pillow for an instant upon the child’s face, and
held it there an instant more, then held it longer, as though
hearing the first note of a far-off spell — and time began to pass
— was there time enough for both to travel that long aisle which
leads from the pounding heart of consciousness down into death,
long enough for the grandmother to know that the spell she had
entered spoke of murder; and for the baby to have been forced into
suffocation long enough to take a fix on the onset of death, and be
in part attracted to its dimensions, attracted enough so that the
fall into sleep in later years would ring every alarm, for death
was not unseductive. If this is Marilyn’s first memory, oncoming
sleep may suggest death is near — so, adrenaline may electrify her
limbs.
    We have now transgressed every border of
history. But then it is hardly possible to conceive of grandmothers
attacking grandchildren unless we also accept the first logic of
insanity: “I am a soul of the most mighty dimensions engaged in a
dialogue with eternity.” Should someone like Della decide that her
relation to eternity is evil, then so are her offspring: the duty
is to kill offspring. It is a logic considered insane only when
grandmothers set out to suffocate one-year-olds; it is not nearly
so insane when one-year-olds are ignited from one mile or more up
in the sky by young men who are not related – no, it must be that
all acts of violence, love, and war presuppose some unconscious
dialogue with eternity. A clean-cut twenty-two-year-old American
pilot does not drop firebombs on hamlets, nor do the citizens of a
great nation support the act by re-electing his Godfather, unless
our unconscious dialogue with eternity assumes that America is
closer to God’s will than other lands. It is the pride of the weed
that knows it is the true flower of the garden. By this logic,
Della Monroe Grainger was an American as most.
    Of course, short of Marilyn’s dubious
witness, we do not know that Della ever touched the child. Perhaps
the memory was no more than a recollected sense of terror the baby
used to experience when alone with Della; and the grandmother, poor
woman, could have been innocent, and Norma Jean merely tangled in
her own blanket and then rescued by Della. It is even conceivable
Marilyn made it all up as still one more