Her new novel is "Blonde."
Joyce Carol Oates has always been interested in memorializing people and "bearing witness" for those who can't speak for themselves. Maybe it was only a matter of time before she set her sights on the tragic life of the enigmatic sex goddess Marilyn Monroe.
At the age of 62, Oates has accumulated an impressive legacy of books, including several volumes of short stories, novels, poetry and plays. Her most widely acclaimed novels are "Wonderland," "A Garden of Earthly Delights," "Expensive People" and "Them."
Married to Raymond Smith, she lives in New Jersey, where she teaches creative writing at Princeton University. Yet, she has managed for most of her professional life to produce two or three novels a year. Almost offhandedly, she said, "I have always lived a very conventional life of moderation, absolutely regular hours, nothing exotic, no need, even, to organize my time."
In a Deseret News interview from her New Jersey home, Oates said she visualized her book on Marilyn, whom she prefers to call by her given name, Norma Jeane (spelled with an extra "e" by Oates), as one of her series of short novels about young Americans. This one was to be "a story of an American girl of the 1940s who falls into the inexorable fate of becoming Marilyn Monroe." (See review on Page E8.)
But as Oates wrote, she became so taken with the subject that she saw herself "writing an American epic, so I started putting more detail into it. I saw all her movies. I did a lot of reading in the politics of the era of the 1950s, including anti-communist hysteria and nuclear experimentation. It became the most difficult and sustained writing project of my life, and I had a great feeling of accomplishment when it was finished."
Today, she feels outside the book.
"Time forces us to move on, but I still feel close to Norma Jeane. On my wall, I have a photo of her as a baby and one of her as a teenager of about 17. I was focusing on the inner girl. My feeling is that we form our personalities when we're quite young, 14 or 15 years old. I feel about 14, so I see the world from that point of view. At Princeton, I feel very much the age of my students. We feel more inclined toward those who are younger."
Oates believes that because she identified with Norma Jeane, including her working-class background, that she was able to be more objective. "There were important differences between us — I had a loving mother and father and a unified family. I wasn't a beautiful young girl who matured at the age of 11, something that made her life so difficult. But I share the feeling of loneliness, the desire to create characters, as a novelist does. The reading that she did was reading I have done. Her estate was auctioned off recently, and she had several hundred books, including those by William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway and William Styron. People at the auction house were amazed at her books."
Although Oates admires biography as art, she denies being a biographer. "I'm much more interested in language. I focus on the personality as she expresses herself in language."
Norman Mailer, another famous novelist, wrote a biography called "Marilyn" in 1973. Although it was very popular, Mailer was criticized in some quarters for being obsessed with a movie star. Oates said, "Mailer's book is more like an essay of the phenomenon of Marilyn Monroe as it relates to him, whereas I'm more interested in the girl. Rather than the actress, I'm writing about the girl who is acting. Marilyn was simply a character she created."
Oates uses as examples some of Monroe's best received films — "How to Marry a Millionaire," "Some Like it Hot, "The Seven-Year Itch," all based on a similar theme. "It was a blonde role, the 'sex actress.' But she was so good in 'The Misfits,' with Clark Gable. If she had lived longer and done more roles, she would have been recognized as a very fine actress. She read a lot, she wrote poetry — she was more substantial than people thought. People who met her found her to be a different person."
In Oates' opinion, "Norma Jeane discovered that she was a good actress. But she would have been pretty happy being a housewife who had babies. People who knew her said she never grew up. She spent her life looking for love and protection from older men. Norma Jeane, as I see her, was her innermost self. Her hair was not blond. It was brown. She was always in a kind of disguise. That's really why I wrote the novel."
In her novel, Oates portrays Marilyn as "a rather malevolent person," a condition often characteristic of the famous. "Famous people like Julia Roberts have hideouts where they retreat from the world and get normal again. But in the '50s, Norma Jeane didn't have those resources. She had to work all the time. The house she bought was a bungalow, not a mansion. She liked it — but she didn't have much money. She made $50,000 a year while her movies were making millions. It was kinda sad."
Oates knows there were very few outlets for women in Norma Jeane's time. "There were only a couple of things a woman could do — she could become a housewife and mother or a teacher. Even girls who went to Vassar were expected to be housewives. It was not common to go to medical school, law school or study to be a university professor."
Oates admits to having tried to "redeem Norma Jeane. She had been maligned, and she started with a terrible disadvantage — feeling not wanted, wounded, that she had to prove herself."
Although Oates considers herself a feminist, she is not "a radical feminist who does not like men." She said radical feminists have been very critical of her work because she portrays men sympathetically. "Mainstream feminists, like me, believe in equal pay for equal work. They have men in their lives."
By the time Oates finished the book, she felt "spiritually diminished. It's probably like having had a really passionate love affair or being married, and then it comes to an end. You break up or someone dies. This book is the most draining I've ever written."
Oates intended the language toward the end "to be poetic in a hallucinatory way. It reflects her predilection to drugs."
As for Norma Jeane's death, Oates mentions suicide, accident or murder. "I try to suggest that any one of these might have been true. I don't really know how she died. You can make your own interpretation as you read the book. That's the beauty of reading a novel."
You can reach Dennis Lythgoe by e-mail at dennis@desnews.com