Did you ever begin Ulysses? Did you ever finish it? Marilyn Monroe (June 1, 1926–August 5, 1962) did both. She took great pains to be photographed reading or holding a book — insistence born not out of vain affectation but of a genuine love of literature. Her personal library contained four hundred books, including classics like Dostoyevsky and Milton, and modern staples like Hemingway and Kerouac. While she wasn’t shooting, she was taking literature and history night classes at UCLA. And yet, the public image of a breezy, bubbly blonde endures as a caricature of Monroe’s character, standing in stark contrast with whatever deep-seated demons led her to take her own life.

But her private poetry — fragmentary, poem-like texts scribbled in notebooks and on loose-leaf paper, published for the first time in Fragments: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters (public library) — reveals a complex, sensitive being who peered deeply into her own psyche and thought intensely about the world and other people. What these texts bespeak, above all, is the tragic disconnect between a highly visible public persona and a highly vulnerable private person, misunderstood by the world, longing to be truly seen.

Only parts of us will ever

touch only parts of others —

one’s own truth is just that really — one’s own truth.

We can only share the part that is understood by within another’s knowing acceptable to

the other — therefore so one

is for most part alone .

As it is meant to be in

evidently in nature — at best though perhaps it could make

our understanding seek

another’s loneliness out.

Life —

I am of both of your directions

Life

Somehow remaining hanging downward

the most

but strong as a cobweb in the

wind — I exist more with the cold glistening frost.

But my beaded rays have the colors I’ve

seen in a painting s — ah life they

have cheated you

Oh damn I wish that I were

dead — absolutely nonexistent —

gone away from here — from

everywhere but how would I do it

There is always bridges — the Brooklyn

bridge — no not the Brooklyn Bridge

because But I love that bridge (everything is beautiful from there and the air is so clean) walking it seems

peaceful there even with all those

cars going crazy underneath. So

it would have to be some other bridge

an ugly one and with no view — except

I particularly like in particular all bridges — there’s some-

thing about them and besides these I’ve

never seen an ugly bridge

Stones on the walk

every color there is

I stare down at you

like these the a horizon —

the space / the air is between us beckoning

and I am many stories besides up

my feet are frightened

from my as I grasp for towards you

Beyond her poems, the rest of Monroe’s intimate thoughts collected in Fragments are equally soul-stirring. Writing in her famous Record notebook in 1955, she echoes Kerouac’s famous line, “No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge”:

feel what I feel

within myself — that is trying to

become aware of it

also what I feel in others

not being ashamed of my feeling, thoughts — or ideas realize the thing that

they are —

In her 1955-1956 Italian diary engraved in green, she writes:

I’m finding that sincerity

and trying to be as simple or direct as (possible) I’d like

is often taken for sheer stupidity

but since it is not a sincere world —

it’s very probable that being sincere is stupid.

One probably is stupid to

be sincere since it’s in this world

and no other world that we know

for sure we exist — meaning that —

(since reality exists it should be must be dealt should be met and dealt with)

since there is reality to deal with

In 1956, Monroe traveled to London to shoot The Prince and the Showgirl. She stayed at the Parkside House, a luxurious manor outside the city, and used the hotel stationery for her thoughts:

To have your heart is

the only completely happy proud possession thing (that ever belonged

to me) I’ve ever possessed so

I guess I have always been

deeply terrified at to really be someone’s

wife

since I know from life

one cannot love another,

ever, really

Some of her undated notes live between the discipline of the to-do list and the expansive contemplation of philosophy:

for life

It is rather a determination not to be overwhelmed for work

The truth can only be recalled, never invented

Tender, tortured, thoughtful, the texts in Fragments hint at what playwright Arthur Miller, whom Monroe eventually married, must have meant when he said that she “had the instinct and reflexes of the poet, but she lacked the control.”

Images courtesy of FSG // thanks, Sean