Harper\'s Magazine - 03.2020

74 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2020

works can have a swift, ca sual sharp-

ness. Here’s Norma Jeane soliloquiz-

ing on “what most people mean by

faking it”:

They just mean acting. Well, in the first

place, acting is not fake. And, number

two, acting has nothing to do with de-

sire. Desire is about vanishing. You

dream of a bowl of cherries and next

day receive a letter written in red juice.

Or, a better example: you know I’m not

a totally bona fide blonde ... so I get a

bit of colour every 2 weeks from a cer-

tain Orlando in Brentwood and I used

to wonder shouldn’t I dye the hair down

there too, you know, make it match, but

the thing is—talk about a bowl of

cherries—most men like it dark. Most

men like what slips away.

Naturally this isn’t the real Mari-

lyn, whoever that may have been,

and it doesn’t aim to be. Yet Carson’s

slapdash Norma Jeane captures some

qualities underestimated in too many

conjurings of the original— the intel-

lectual energy, Bolshie rebellion, and

crude humor that underpinned her

blonde-clown antics and helped

make them indelible onscreen.

M

ore proof that minor works by

great writers can offer par-

ticular delights is found in

GARDEN BY THE SEA (O pen Letter,

$15.95), a novel by the celebrated Cata-

lan author Mercè Rodoreda (1908–83),

who is best known for The Time of the

Doves, her account of the inner life of a

working- class woman during the Span-

ish Civil War and its aftermath. Like

that novel and the one that followed it,

Camellia Street, which inhabits the mind

of a Barcelona streetwalker, Garden

It’s clear from the transcript that by

this stage Old Thiess has got the au-

thorities on the back foot, as

the court further urged him to change

his mind, alternating kindness and

threats, urging him to recognize the

many misdeeds he had committed

and his grievous crimes, or at least

their bad results.

They’re too confused to convict him,

and by the time another judge does so,

a year later, anxiety about his status as

a folk hero among the peasants is still

palpable. He’s given only a few lashes

in punishment, and the court’s hope

that he might be changed “into an

object of noteworthy aversion by pub-

lic flogging” is so evidently vain, it has

a pathos all its own.

S

capegoats must be as old as hu-

man history. In the fifth century

bc, Herodotus, who himself re-

corded rumors of a people who could

now and then transform into wolves,

cast doubt on Homer’s cherchez la

femme account of the Trojan War,

claiming that Helen never actually

made it to Troy and instead waited out

those years stranded in Egypt with a

bunch of similarly stolen Spartan prop-

erty, till Menelaus came to fetch her on

the way home. “I am myself inclined to

regard [this version of the story] as

true,” ungallant Herodotus wrote, “for

surely neither Priam, nor his family,

could have been so infatuated as to

endanger their own persons, their chil-

dren, and their city, merely that Paris

might possess Helen.” It’s also the

version Euripides drew from for

his 412 bc tragedy, Helen, which

has been reinvented by today’s

most insouciant classicist, Anne

Carson, as a quite different

play— NOR M A JEANE BAK ER

OF TROY (New Directions,

$12.95). The work was first per-

formed, under Katie Mitchell’s

direction, for the opening of the

Shed at Hudson Yards last year,

and many found it too slight and

strange. Admittedly, Carson’s

version— in which the heroine,

held captive in L.A.’s Chateau

Marmont to learn lines for Fritz

Lang’s Clash by Night, must escape to

New York with Arthur Miller— is

both. But it’s all the truer to its source

for that: the Euripides play reads more

like proto- Shakespearean romance than

tragedy. To enlist Helen, rather than the

more popular The Trojan Women, for

an antiwar theme makes sense espe-

cially in the wake of the conflict in

Iraq: Helen posits that a decade-long

war was fought and a civilization de-

stroyed over a mirage, an eidolon.

It also makes for a more ambigu-

ous Helen—in The Trojan Women,

though she defends her life with all

the subversive energy of an Old

Thiess, she’s very much presented as

“a nasty bitch evil-intriguing” (to

quote her self-description in Rich-

mond Lattimore’s translation of

Homer). Here, Carson does repeat a

joke from her translation of Orestes

in which Helen is called “that weapon

of mass destruction,” but the charac-

ter is of interest expressly for the

conflicting ways she has been inter-

preted. Hence the link with Marilyn

Monroe (aka Norma Jeane Baker).

Like witches in the ages between

them, both women are symptomatic

figures, endlessly accreting the sto-

ries a culture wants to tell about it-

self. (And again like witches, they’re

both emblems of misogyny’s ever-

green appeal; one of the only jokes

in Greek tragedy is supposed to have

been Menelaus’ question in The Tro-

jan Women, when warned not to let

Helen on his ship, about whether

she’d gained weight since last he

saw her.)

It’s always a pleasure to watch Car-

son’s mind at play, and her minor

Left: Helen of Troy, by Frederick Sandys. Courtesy Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, England

Right: “Bowl of Cherries, Rockport, Maine,” by Cig Harvey. Courtesy the artist and Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta