Marjorie Morningstar (75 page)

Marjorie, my love:

I am full of Dutch courage, having just come back from an all-night drunk with my
old boon companion, Ferdie Platt. But there is nothing alcoholic about what I’m going
to say to you. In fact to make sure there isn’t, I won’t mail this letter until the
morning. I’ve got so much to say that I may fall asleep before I finish it. But I
doubt that. I’ve never felt more wide awake, nor more completely in possession of
my faculties, nor more clear-seeing. There’s a reason why drunks in bars always get
to talking sooner or later about elemental truths—love, family, death, politics, war,
and so forth. Alcohol cuts down to size the trivialities that loom so large to the
sober mind. The sober mind is a man groping through a forest tree by tree. The drunk
mind is that same man lifted in an airplane, seeing the forest whole. The term “high”
is a wise folk symbol. I hope you get the general idea. I assert that everything I’ll
say in this letter is not only true, but a hell of a lot truer and more perceptive—about
both of us—than anything I’ve ever said before, verbose as I am.

It’s hard to know where to begin, but one place is as good as another. So let’s begin
with that moment last Saturday night when you said to me, “Why don’t we get married?”

I’m not objecting to the fact that you said it. The good humor, the lightness, the
way you said it and forgot about it and went on having fun, were all perfect. In fact
I was a little scared, you were so clever about it. I suppose it was inevitable that
you grow up in time. But I guess parents and lovers are always startled when it really
happens. You picked such a perfect time to say it. You were up, and I was down. You
had just gotten a job. I had just lost one. You were on the rise; I was on the fall.
It was almost gracious of you at that point to ask me to marry you. What was especially
gracious, you didn’t press your advantage in the least. It was one of those wonderful
evenings when we were both feeling in tune. You, of course, were in seventh heaven,
having achieved your dream of Marjorie Morningstar, after a fashion. And I was more
relieved than otherwise to have lost out on the radio script-writing job. You must
have decided that the gap was at last closing between us; that the age difference
was really ceasing to matter; that we were obviously and very sweetly still in love;
that even our careers were falling into parallel lines. You must have thought—no,
not
thought
, women don’t think when they make their best thrusts—but anyway, you must have figured,
somewhere deep down in your endocrine system, that NOW was the time, NOW or never.
So you said it.

Your instincts didn’t deceive you. The timing
was
perfect. If I just laughed and went on dancing without saying anything, it wasn’t
because I couldn’t think of an answer. The trouble was I thought of something immediately.
I had to bite my lower lip to keep from saying it. I wanted to say, “All right, set
a date,” and for the life of me I couldn’t think of any other words. I’m not telling
you this to tease you or upset you. If your encounter with that monster Noel Airman
is to have any enduring value, it’s as education. I want you to know how very close
you came. If it was in the cards, in fact, it would have happened then and there.
The fact that it didn’t simply proves that the moving finger has never written this
marriage and never will write it.

I just went and got another drink to keep up my energy. It’s about six o’clock in
the morning. There’s a blue dawn outside my window and I’m so tired I can’t hold up
my head. But this can’t wait, mustn’t wait. I’ll never see it all so clearly again,
and I’ll never have the impulse to write it again. I don’t want to vanish like any
decamping seducer. I believe I’m right to do what I’m doing and I want you to understand
me.

Do you remember what I said to you after the first time I kissed you, back in South
Wind—centuries ago, when you were such an infant I could still taste the milk on your
lips? I tasted milk, all right, but I also tasted honey. The whole threat of what
has happened since then presented itself to me. I said to you then, “I’ll never marry
you, and nothing you can do will ever make me.” You must have thought I was crazy,
the Grand Panjandrum of South Wind talking about marriage after kissing a kid of nineteen
once, but maybe now you will grant me extraordinary perspicacity, if not clairvoyance.
That same perspicacity is at work now as I bang away at this typewriter, three—or
is it four?—endless years later.

As you know, I’ve wavered back and forth twenty times about it since then. When I
went to work for Sam Rothmore, I had just about decided to marry you. When I quit
and fled to Mexico I was trying to get away; I used poor Imogene as a club to beat
you off with, to get you out of my system—unsuccessfully, I need hardly add. When
we ran into each other and went to the Waldorf, the night you had that date with Dr.
Shapiro, you’ll never know what a job I had throttling off the proposals in my throat
all evening. You looked to me like an angel then, that’s all, a pure bright angel.
Damn your respectable heart and Watteau body, you have never looked like anything
else to me. When we met again at Marsha’s wedding I thought I was done for. You won’t
believe it, maybe, but all during the rehearsals of
Princess Jones
the thought uppermost in my mind was, “Has Marjorie read about it in the papers?
Will she call? Will she write?” The first thing I did unfailingly when I came to the
theatre was to look in the letter box for a note from you. Well, I seem to be maundering,
here…. Let’s get down to facts.

I blame the
Princess Jones
catastrophe on you, Marjorie. That, and everything that’s happened to me since. I’ve
spent a horrible and utterly futile year at a time when I can ill afford to waste
any more of my hours on earth. Now let me make myself clear. I’m not blaming you for
my bad writing or for the brutal notices. I know you didn’t dictate that deathless
first line to Brooks Atkinson,
Noel Airman’s resemblance to Noel Coward unhappily begins and ends with their Christian
names
. (It’s burned into my memory, you see.) I’m responsible, true enough, for the fact
that
Princess Jones
was an old-fashioned piece of tripe that closed in five days. You’re responsible,
however, for my exposing myself and my limitations in such a wretched and crucifying
way. You’ll remember that while the show was still in rehearsal—that famous night
of nights for us—I freely gave you credit for inspiring me to keep at
Princess Jones
. You had the credit, you must take the blame.

I’m not a librettist
. It’s a special, exceedingly narrow, exceedingly difficult theatrical form. Nobody’s
ever really mastered it except Gilbert. All current musicals are hashed up by word-carpenters.
The musical show is such a charming and entertaining diversion in itself that the
public forgives the stupidity of the libretto, so long as it passes muster with enough
vaudeville jokes and standard love scenes. I tried to do something better. If I failed
abysmally, at least I tried. The point is, I should never have tried. I wrote
Princess Jones
originally as a sort of jeu d’esprit, an imitation of Gilbert. Maybe I was dreaming
of being another Gilbert some day. A young fool is entitled to dream of being anything
he pleases. But by the time I met you I had pretty well reconciled myself to the fact
that, if the script had any merit, it was of a slight and recondite kind, and that
I’d better charge it off to youthful dreams. I didn’t take the staff’s drunken enthusiasm
over it, that night I played it at South Wind, very seriously. But you did. You wouldn’t
let me forget it. Every time I read a new scene or played a new song for you, you
would burst into a new blaze of excitement. Naturally, no writer alive isn’t a prey
to his own vanity. I wanted to believe you were right, and so I kept on reviving the
damned thing and going back to work on it.

You didn’t have an atom of taste about the whole thing. It was all pure femininity.
That’s obvious to me now, and should have been then, perhaps. But if you were in love,
so was I, and I took this as proof that you weren’t just another Shirley. You had
the marvelous wisdom to see cleverness and charm where all the grubby professional
producers were blind. That was how my mind worked.

All this is extremely unchivalrous and low of me, I’m sure. I’m a snake to state such
ugly facts.

Marjorie, the long and short of the matter is, I’m tired of playing the horse to your
rider, and I’m throwing you. People who didn’t know the situation as well as I do
would be appalled at this statement of it. You’re the innocent victim, of course,
and I’m the bored old seducer casting you aside. But the fact is, you seduced me as
much as I seduced you. If I seduced you to go to bed with me you seduced me to go
to work for you. In the long run, you came closer to making me respectable than I
did to making you bohemian. You have ridden me mercilessly. Your left spur has been
the American idea of success, and your right spur the Jewish idea of respectability.
I have disbelieved in both ideas with all my heart since I was seventeen. But you
have used the miserable fascination you had over me to make me conform to those ideas,
or to break my heart trying.
Princess Jones
was at bottom
your
big bid for a house in New Rochelle, and for that reason I’m glad it flopped.

Let me make it perfectly plain that I’m not accusing you of evil intent, or deliberate
plot. It all goes much beyond your conscious intent. You can’t help being what you
are, acting as you do, and exerting the pressures that well up in you. If you’ve been
a most unfortunate influence on me, it isn’t your “doing” in the sense that you could
be arrested for it. That has made matters worse, in a way. I could always reach your
mind and convince it and change it, but I could never work the slightest alteration
in YOU. From the first moment I encountered you, you have never changed an iota, never
deviated from your line by a hair. You were, you are, you always will be, SHIRLEY—and
if I had a red strip in this typewriter ribbon, or some gold ink, I’d write that word
in red or gold. There should also be a blast of trumpets, before and after pronouncing
the Name.

I say you have
never
departed from your line, and I mean it. Not even when you decided to have an affair
with me. That, my sweet love, was a mere gesture to my eccentric views—was it not,
dear?—and to the loose ways of the day. In the old days Shirley baked cakes and showed
off her sewing to get her man. Nowadays the poor girl finds she may also have to sleep
with the big slob a few times beforehand; it seems to be the fashion among the smart
crowd, alas. So, she holds her nose and plunges in. I’m being very brutal, I know.
It’s not my intention to wound or insult you by intimating that you’re not a good
bed partner. You know all too well what a devouring passion I’ve had for you. If it’s
any satisfaction to you, I have never known anything like it. But I have brains enough
to know that a bed takes up a very small space in a house, and that you don’t spend
a marriage sleeping with a person but waking with her. It’s the waking part with you
that I will no longer endure, come hell or high water. I will not be driven on and
on to that looming goal, a love nest in the suburbs. I WANT NO PART OF IT OR OF YOU,
do you understand?

If I had had half a brain, the collapse of
Jones
would have taught me to flee you to Australia, or to the North Pole, if necessary.
Unfortunately, you had complicated the matter by consenting to sleep with me. Nothing
could have dragged me away from that enchantment, at the moment. And yet, Marjorie,
what an unsatisfactory half-baked business it has been, and how like you and your
ways! You wouldn’t move in with me, and frankly proclaim to the world what you were
doing, would you? Not you. People don’t do such things. The forty thousand couples
in the Village doing just that don’t count, they’re trash. As a result, to this day
you don’t know what it’s like to sleep with the man you love all night, and wake up
in the morning and have breakfast together. No, if it was 5
A.M.,
and hailing, you’d drag yourself out of bed and stagger home to sleep a formal hour
or two in your parents’ apartment, thus preserving the amenities. Some day I’d like
to know what stories you told your vigilant mama.

When I think that one week after
Jones
fell around my ears I was working on a new musical I wonder at my sanity. But you
had me completely persuaded. The pilot walks away from the crash and takes another
plane into the air immediately, and all that. All the great ones started with terrible
flops, et cetera, et cetera. Fortunately the beating I took had knocked some critical
faculty back into me, and I soon realized that what I was writing was hopeless garbage.
That was why I went to Hollywood again last summer. I couldn’t face your devastating
encouragement any more. It was all a lie about having an offer, dear. I had no offer.
I didn’t do an ounce of work out there. I just bummed around all through the summer.
I did
try
to get a job, heaven knows. When I think of the crawling I did, and the scum before
whom I crawled, Hollywood agents, third-rate producers, phony actors, even script
girls—and all for nothing, just to prove to my precious Marjorie back home that I
could still be a big wage earner—I get furious at you all over again. But enough of
that….

Well, by now you must have the idea. I want you to know that there is not an ounce
of pique or malice in all this. Being beaten out of a contest for a radio gagwriting
job—and by Wally Wronken, of all people—was not exactly pleasant, and I won’t pretend
it was. But again, the basic mistake was in ever trying for the job.
I am not a gagwriter
. That was you again, persuading me that with my fingertips I could write better jokes
than all of Eddie Cantor’s and Jack Benny’s writers. The job seemed more interesting
than writing advertising copy, the money of course was far better, so I was lulled
into trying. But the point is, I
can
write simply peachy advertising copy. I’ve been proving that during these last five
wretched months. If I were going to be a bourgeois provider, that’s obviously the
line I should stick to. And if I hate the work, and hate myself when I’m doing it—well,
how many of the hordes of husbands who shuttle back and forth on the Long Island Railroad,
or the New York, New Haven, and Hartford, don’t really wish they were dead? This world
is a vale of tears. You might as well drown yourself in martinis in Mamaroneck on
a green lawn under a spreading tree, as in a cramped cell on Manhattan. The grass
is better for the children.