One of the most famous images of the actress Marilyn Monroe captures her in a candid moment. She is sitting in a playground, wearing a striped tank top, her knees tucked up to support the copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses that she is almost finished reading. Judging by her place in the novel, she is deep in the book’s famous final chapter, usually referred to as Molly Bloom’s soliloquy, where the wife of the novel’s main protagonist speaks an unbroken, unpunctuated 22,000 word monologue. Whenever this image is posted online, the reaction can usually be synthesised into one statement: There’s no way that Marilyn Monroe read Ulysses.
But she did. In fact, Monroe was an insatiable reader. When she died in August 1962, she had over 400 books in her house. Eve Arnold’s photograph of Monroe reading Ulysses isn’t an outlier either, there are dozens of pictures of Monroe reading everything from the poetry of Walt Whitman to self-help books aimed at developing your thinking ability. In a new book, Marilyn and Her Books: The Literary Life of Marilyn Monroe, the academic Gail Crowther recontextualises Monroe’s life through the books that she read. Heading each chapter with a question – “What sort of books did Marilyn read?”; “Where did Marilyn get her books?” – Crowther offers a genuinely new line of inquiry into Monroe’s much-examined life.
Why is it important now that we portray Marilyn as a reader?
Gail Crowther: I think that in order to fully understand Marilyn, we have to understand her reading life, because the Marilyn that we know and love is a product of her literary life. In the past, we’ve had this very positive revisionist view of Marilyn as somebody who was a very competent business person, as someone who was a serious actor. But, as I argue in the book, I think we have all of these things because of her reading. Her reading informed all of those things and led her to understand the art of acting, to understand how to run a business, to understand how to produce a film. I think her literary life needs to be centred into her legacy, because I think it’s absolutely crucial to who she was and how we understand her.
Many of your insights into Monroe’s literary life come from the trove of over 400 books that were in her house when she died. What initial impressions did you glean from Monroe’s personal library?
The scope of her personal library was astonishing. That was the first thing that struck me. This was a woman who was reading all over the place. There was contemporary literature, classic literature, psychology, religion, science, gardening, pets, poetry, plays, philosophy. I thought, “somebody who reads like this has got a very vivid and alive intellectual life.” And we have not seen enough of that when it comes to Marilyn Monroe.
How did you go about proving that Monroe actually had read these books?
There were a number of ways of proving they’d been read. True, barely anyone asked her about her reading life. Nobody said, “What are you reading at the moment, Marilyn?” Nobody assumed that she was even reading. So it was a case of trying to find evidence from lots of different places. So for example, most of her books are now in private hands. We don’t really know where they are, but a couple of people who do own the books have posted things like annotations and underlinings in the books. So obviously, we can take that as evidence that she was not only reading, but she was an active and engaged reader. There was physical evidence that she’d read the book.
There were also interviews that people had given where they recounted talking to her about books that she’d read, or books that they both read. There were stories from somebody like Eve Arnold, who often saw Marilyn reading. She wasn’t posing with Ulysses in that photograph, it was the book she was genuinely reading at the time. Arnold, who had already completed the photo shoot and was packing things away, saw Marilyn had taken out the book and was just reading it after the shoot had ended. There were lots of little things that you could glean from all over the place that demonstrated that far from just being props, these books were really important to Marilyn.
It’s interesting that so many people who had casual conversations with Marilyn bring up that they discussed books… I don’t understand how all these people who interviewed her just ignored, or suppressed, the fact that she’d often make references to Dickens or her love of Freud. Why did this happen?
I think there were probably a number of things at play there. One of them would have been the control of the studio. I’m not sure the studio were particularly bothered about Monroe being presented as some kind of intellectual. I think they were quite happy to go with the reputation that they’d established for her quite early on in her career. There was an interview that Marilyn had given just after she’d married Arthur Miller, and that interview was withheld by her publicist because it presented her as this sort of happily married woman having a normal life: getting up in the morning, making breakfast for her husband. They said, we can’t let this interview go out because this goes against the kind of representation that we want of Marilyn.
I also think there was a lot of misogyny and a lot of snobbery. You still see that with the Eve Arnold image today. I was quite keen to stress that this sort of snobbery and misogyny towards the idea that Marilyn was a serious reader is not confined to the 1950s and ’60s. It’s still happening today.
Marilyn and Her Books: The Literary Life of Marilyn Monroe by Gail Crowther, published by Corsair, is out now.
