This is the second column in a four-part series by B.D. McClay on speculative fiction. Read the first here.
People don’t really understand each other: that’s at least half of what makes stories run at all. Fritz Leiber, who grew up with a traveling Shakespeare troupe, might have absorbed this fact before most people. By the age of four (the family legend had it), he knew most of Hamlet’s lines by heart. Embedded as he was in these plays, watching Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies of crossed communications, mistaken twins, misplaced mistrust and disguised selves, he learned that lesson early. As a professional writer of speculative fiction, Leiber would go back to Shakespeare often, setting stories backstage at Shakespeare productions or lifting a line to title a book. The greatest tribute he would pay to Shakespeare, though, was his interest in human doubleness: double agents, double crossings, double hearts.
If people do not, in general, understand each other, though, can we simply leave it there? Bob doesn’t understand Dick and Bob doesn’t understand Jane. Does he fail to understand them in precisely the same way? Leiber’s fiction is constantly running at this question and coming up with the answer: no, that the way men and women don’t understand each other is different from the way people, in general, fail to do so, an inter-gender not understanding that possessed a quality all its own. Something had interposed itself between him and women. He hadn’t put it there and they hadn’t put it there, but it was still there. That was why he didn’t understand them. His male characters have a sense that this veil is driving their emotional responses to women; his female characters have a sense of being imprisoned.
One diagnosis: the thing that lies between men and women is “sex.” That is, men want women and resent them for that, and women are wanted and resent men for that; men respond to their situation with violence, women with cunning. Such a perspective is sometimes played straight in Leiber’s stories, though it’s also just as likely to be viciously sent up: In a parody of Mickey Spillane, titled “The Night He Cried” (1953), Leiber narrates the story from the perspective of an alien that has assumed the shape of a noir bombshell sent to “reform” a hard-boiled misogynist pulp hero. Her hot bod works (“I’d been certain that my magnificently formed milk glands would turn the trick”), but every time he gets uncomfortable, he shoots her and runs. Eventually she corners him and demands: “Now do to me … the thing you’re always going to do to those girls, except you have to shoot them.” The violent man doesn’t merely conflate his penis and a gun, sex with killing—he really only knows how to use one of them (and it’s the gun).
Whatever explanatory power “sex,” meant in this way, has, it does not quite suffice. Really, it’s a redescription of the problem. In Leiber’s Hugo-winning Conjure Wife (1943), when Norman Saylor goes snooping in his wife Tansy’s dressing table and discovers she practices magic, he sees her as an image of herself, not herself at all: “If he were to reach out and touch her, Norman felt, the paint would peel down in strips from the empty air, as from some walking sister-picture of Dorian Gray.” As the novel goes on, Norman will be faced with multiple images of Tansy, and much will depend on his ability to recognize and know his wife even though he’s also come to accept that he doesn’t know her at all. Tansy proves to him that all women are witches and explains: “There are two sides to every woman. … One is rational, like a man. The other knows.”
Leiber viewed Conjure Wife as a feminist text, one that “humanized women.” Whether or not it can properly be called feminist, it is, ultimately, on women’s side. The message of Conjure Wife is not that women are constantly plotting to dominate and destroy, but that there is an aspect of their lives that men don’t see and—because they don’t see it—are inclined to dismiss if it’s brought to their attention. It’s also a book about what it means, and does not mean, to be in a happy marriage. Norman and Tansy love each other, and, just as importantly, they like each other. They are sexually in sync with each other. But it’s a big mistake to assume that just because you love and like and lust for each other, you understand each other. A happy marriage, in Conjure Wife, requires trust in the absence of understanding. Norman violates that trust when he snoops and makes Tansy destroy her magical tools; the rest of the book takes up the process of recovering it when he discovers those tools really did serve a purpose. Norman didn’t take his wife’s life seriously, and because of that mistake, she almost dies.
Like a Shakespearean comedy, Conjure Wife ends happily in marriage, albeit of a pair that was married already. (Shakespeare did that himself from time to time, as in Cymbeline.) In other stories, Leiber would refuse such a harmonious resolution of the troubles endemic in the way men look at women. One of these darker stories, published in 1958, was called “A Deskful of Girls.” In it, Carr Mackay, a private detective of no great competence, witnesses the existence, and subsequent revenge, of ghostly girls—“sexy ones,” he adds. “Personally I never in my life saw any ghosts except the sexy kind.” He goes on:
But ghosts are supposed to be frightening? Well, who ever said that sex isn’t? It is to the neophyte, female or male, and don’t let any of the latter try to kid you. … After all, what is a ghost, according to all traditional views, but the shell of a human being—an animated skin? And the skin is all sex—it’s touch, the boundary, the mask of flesh.
With this theatrical opening, Mackay establishes the story’s mood. He also, as events will go on to demonstrate, shows himself as somebody who never really gets the whole picture. For instance: the skin is all sex, it’s true. Sex, though, is not all skin. There’s a person in there one cannot simply dispense with—though of course, one always can try.
●
“A Deskful of Girls” is technically a spin-off of The Big Time, a novel Leiber also published in 1958, in which “ghost girls” are formed by clipping out women’s personas at specific moments, then kept hanging in closets until they’re needed to entertain the troops in a vicious and completely pointless time-traveling war. (“Entertain” here should be read as euphemistically as possible.) Leiber would return to The Big Time more explicitly in other stories, but the focus of “A Deskful of Girls” is the ghost girl technology, with its mix of creepiness and sexual allure.
Mackay has wormed his way into an exclusive joint called the Countersign Club, having fished out an introduction by sending a psychologist, Emil Slyker, an annotated edition of Marquis de Sade’s Justine. In fact, Mackay has been sent there by Jeff Crain, the ex-husband of a movie star named Evelyn Cordew, to try to buy back some compromising materials that Slyker is using to blackmail her. Crain warns Mackay that Slyker is highly paranoid, so in order even to get close enough to strike a deal he has to get Slyker to trust him—hence the song and dance with Justine. Slyker invites Mackay back to his office, saying that he’s got a deskful of girls back there “needing attention.” Mackay indulges for a brief moment in what he knows must be an impossible fantasy: a mass of “girls about five or six inches high,” trying to break out from the desk, “tearing down and defacing small signs, big to them, which read YOU BELONG TO DR. EMIL SLYKER.”
But that, he knows, would be silly. There are no girls who are just six inches tall. He’s correct. There aren’t. The desk is full of girls, all right, but in an entirely different way.
This momentary flight of fancy is our story’s first point of friction, one of several unexpected moves in a story that is full of technology that does not exist and events that could not possibly happen. Why is it that we’re also given to understand that this fantasy is an unqualified impossibility? The Lilliputian female rebels are the first women we meet in this story. They are not real and they are not even scary; they are just comic. As visions of women, they will be succeeded later in the story by Slyker’s run down of actresses as ciphers who contain our “most hidden fears and secretest dreams”: Greta Garbo “the Free Soul,” Ingrid Bergman “the Brave Liberal,” and, of course, Cordew, on whose behalf Mackay has been sent. Slyker dubs Cordew “the Good-Hearted Bait, the gal who accepts her troublesome sexiness with a resigned shrug and a foolish little laugh.”
Slyker has, it turns out, clipped five “ghosts”—facets of her psyche—from Cordew in the course of treating her. Cordew wants them back. He has no intention of returning them and claims, further, that reuniting them with Cordew would kill her. He then traps Mackay, who is abruptly bound and at his mercy. Slyker has known all along that Mackay was sent to get the ghosts back, and he plans to kill him, but only after gloating a little. After all, what’s the point of having Evelyn Cordew on demand and on display if you never get to show her off? Slyker switches off the lights and prepares to set his ghosts free.
But he’s one step behind Evelyn Cordew herself, who secretly used both Crain and Mackay to infiltrate Slyker’s office. Now that she’s here, she, in turn, renders the good doctor helpless and takes her ghosts back. She sets his files on fire and unleashes all the other ghost girls imprisoned in his desk, letting them decide whether Slyker lives or dies. “I’ll trust their judgment,” she tells him. “Do your ghosts love you, Emmy?” They descend on Slyker en masse, enveloping him “as if he was being strangled by his own cigarette smoke in a film run backward.” Almost as an afterthought, she frees Mackay on her way out. Then she’s gone. It’s implied, though not outright stated, that no one will ever see her again.
Slyker’s description of Cordew as plagued with “troublesome sexiness” is a characteristically misogynist refusal to accept that what troubles Cordew is not herself, but the men around her, her inability to be perceived by them as anything other than a beautiful image, a cash cow, a bragging opportunity, a damsel in distress or even an insane person. In short, she can be everything to men except what she wants to be—a person. Even Mackay, dire as his situation is, takes a moment to notice Cordew’s naked figure as she merges with her first ghost and compare it with his imagination: “breasts almost as you’d guess them from the bikini shots, but with larger aureoles.”
As Cordew regains her ghosts, she explains the memories they each bring back with them: the first ghost is her “happiness” over her burgeoning career, the second her fear of aging, the third ennui, the fourth the realization that “nobody, even the bottom boobs in the audience, really respected you because you were their sex queen.” The fifth is pure despair:
You cut it after the party in Sammy’s plane to celebrate me becoming the top money star in the industry. I bothered the pilot because I wanted him to smash us in a dive. That was when I realized I was just property—something for men to make money out of (and me to make money, too, out of me) from the star who married me to prop his box-office rating to the sticks theater owner who hoped I’d sell a few extra tickets. I found that my deepest love … was just something for a man to capitalize on.
Easy to understand why you’d want to be rid of most these things, harder to imagine why you’d want them back. Slyker attributes Cordew’s search for her ghosts to vanity and irrationality: “She claims that the ghosts I’ve taken from her have made her lose weight permanently—‘look like a skeleton’ are her words—and given her fits of mental blackout, a sort of psychic fading—whereas actually the ghosts have bled off from her a lot of malignant thoughts and destructive emotions.” What Cordew seeks to regain, however, is her sense of herself as a whole person, not a peeled-off series of images that live ghostly afterlives on the film screen, as mental masturbation material in the memories of men, or as literal clipped-off selves in the desk drawer of her old psychiatrist. Even if these aspects of herself are, as Slyker puts it, malignant, they are not his to keep from her. Without them, Evelyn has become diluted as a person. Though none of the men in her life understand her or what it is she wants, we can, and we can also see that she has passed the point where she needs their understanding. That is, in addition to despair, the meaning of the fifth ghost: men won’t save you. Don’t even ask them to try.
●
The animating question of this column is what genre stories gain from being genre—what it is that they achieve that more realistic stories cannot. “A Deskful of Girls” is unique among the four stories I’ve selected in that there are realistic treatments of the same subject to which we can compare it. Because the story is so clearly situated in a real Hollywood, with real Hollywood “it” girls past presented to our memories, the contemporary reader knows just as clearly as the reader in 1958 who “Evelyn Cordew” must stand for: Marilyn Monroe. Leiber makes this allusion as explicit as he can without just naming his actress “Varilyn Vonroe,” including comparing her to Jean Harlow (the real Monroe’s idol). If read out loud, all of Cordew’s lines in the story follow a clear, cooing Monroe-esque “whispering baby” cadence.
If Monroe was not yet the woman whose image and look were endlessly duplicated and made iconic in ways that floated wide from any actual person, she was as far as she could possibly get without dying. (She would accomplish that necessary step in 1962, four years later, the same year that Andy Warhol would produce his “Marilyn Diptych.”) By 1958, she’d made most of her iconic movies (though not Some Like It Hot, a movie I suspect Leiber might have appreciated and even found resonant with his story). The legend of “Marilyn” is of a girl who oozed so much sex it killed her; the truth is something else. Most of the successful, or at least memorable, art about Marilyn Monroe deals explicitly with her image, as in Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde (and its film adaptation), approaching her as a kaleidoscope of selves whose “true” core is unknowable and perhaps does not exist.
“A Deskful of Girls” goes the other way. Evelyn Cordew is barely seen—only briefly illuminated. She is first described by Slyker in tones of vicious contempt (“dumb as they come, no rational mind at all”) and then she speaks for herself. Cordew is a voice in the dark, one that speaks with authority about who she is, who she has been, and what it is that she wants. Leiber does not represent Cordew’s image to us, because he understands that the moment we can see her physically, we will cease to see her in reality. Instead of fragmenting the image of his bombshell over and over, he integrates it. The process of re-assembling a whole woman, wresting her back from others’ fantasies, is a terrifying process that can only be interpreted by a man like Slyker as violence—whereas the original act of separating them from Cordew was not violent, he thinks, but therapeutic.
It makes sense that so much art about Marilyn Monroe tries to split her up. The clearest way to communicate the unreality of the image that people see is to multiply it. But realistic art about Marilyn Monroe is also limited, not only by what actually happened to Monroe, but to dealing with the icon. There is no way to avoid it: its extratextual existence is too powerful. Leiber, writing in 1958, was not as limited by what would actually happen in Monroe’s life, since at the time she was still alive and things could still happen otherwise.
But the other suggestion in “A Deskful of Girls” is that if a woman like Monroe reclaims herself, that will break reality as we know it. It would not be a slapstick break with reality, either, like tiny women running around a doctor’s office. It would be something that would bring to the surface all the sublimated violence that has gone into generating her image. And when she’d succeeded, she might become someone we’d be unable to see at all, stepping out of our fantasies and wet dreams into a real and solid life nobody else could touch. Like the Shakespeare that Leiber grew up absorbing, it is a story that suggests the possibility of righting primal wrongs through supernatural means. In Shakespeare, that might mean being lost in a fairy forest, or living on an enchanted island, or resurrecting someone’s lost wife first as a statue and then as a woman. These are stories in which wrongs are righted through healing; order is upended so that it can be restored. Leiber, more pessimistic, goes another way. Wrongs are righted through violence. The order should be upended and it should not be restored.
Genre fiction—of any kind—doesn’t have a reputation as a sophisticated context in which to write women. That’s because it often is not. As a treatment of Marilyn Monroe, though, “A Deskful of Girls” stands with David Lynch’s later masterpiece, Twin Peaks, as a story that tries to take seriously the struggles of her life without becoming entangled in her ghostly shell. Twin Peaks also chooses to tell the story of Monroe by taking the path of unreality, seeking its doomed blonde in dreamworlds that uncover cosmic battles between good and evil, and in particular psychic beings that live off of the food of human anguish. Both Leiber and Lynch seem to have asked themselves how they could tell this story in a way that would not generate more such food for more such vultures. (“Pitying Marilyn Monroe” is, after all, as much an industry as desiring her.)
Put most bluntly: many women live in worlds in which they are regarded as alien beings with unknowable psyches and strange motivations. They encounter other people who treat them in ways that they can’t really understand—as projections and fantasies, not really as people at all. If that’s the case, what kind of art can truly rise to occasion, and do justice not only to women, but to this experience? What kind of art can imagine its way even into some sort of justice? It might be art that’s unconcerned with the real. We might find, at its very best, that speculative fiction is able to go past what limits our perceived world into another world, a world that is truer because it is unconcerned with being factually true. In neither Twin Peaks nor “A Deskful of Girls” do we get to imagine Marilyn Monroe happy. Leiber lets us imagine a Monroe who has taken back her darknesses, her hopes and her despairs. Evelyn Cordew isn’t happy at the end of the story. She is free, and that is something much better.
This is the second column in a four-part series by B.D. McClay on speculative fiction. Read the first here.
People don’t really understand each other: that’s at least half of what makes stories run at all. Fritz Leiber, who grew up with a traveling Shakespeare troupe, might have absorbed this fact before most people. By the age of four (the family legend had it), he knew most of Hamlet’s lines by heart. Embedded as he was in these plays, watching Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies of crossed communications, mistaken twins, misplaced mistrust and disguised selves, he learned that lesson early. As a professional writer of speculative fiction, Leiber would go back to Shakespeare often, setting stories backstage at Shakespeare productions or lifting a line to title a book. The greatest tribute he would pay to Shakespeare, though, was his interest in human doubleness: double agents, double crossings, double hearts.
If people do not, in general, understand each other, though, can we simply leave it there? Bob doesn’t understand Dick and Bob doesn’t understand Jane. Does he fail to understand them in precisely the same way? Leiber’s fiction is constantly running at this question and coming up with the answer: no, that the way men and women don’t understand each other is different from the way people, in general, fail to do so, an inter-gender not understanding that possessed a quality all its own. Something had interposed itself between him and women. He hadn’t put it there and they hadn’t put it there, but it was still there. That was why he didn’t understand them. His male characters have a sense that this veil is driving their emotional responses to women; his female characters have a sense of being imprisoned.
One diagnosis: the thing that lies between men and women is “sex.” That is, men want women and resent them for that, and women are wanted and resent men for that; men respond to their situation with violence, women with cunning. Such a perspective is sometimes played straight in Leiber’s stories, though it’s also just as likely to be viciously sent up: In a parody of Mickey Spillane, titled “The Night He Cried” (1953), Leiber narrates the story from the perspective of an alien that has assumed the shape of a noir bombshell sent to “reform” a hard-boiled misogynist pulp hero. Her hot bod works (“I’d been certain that my magnificently formed milk glands would turn the trick”), but every time he gets uncomfortable, he shoots her and runs. Eventually she corners him and demands: “Now do to me … the thing you’re always going to do to those girls, except you have to shoot them.” The violent man doesn’t merely conflate his penis and a gun, sex with killing—he really only knows how to use one of them (and it’s the gun).
Whatever explanatory power “sex,” meant in this way, has, it does not quite suffice. Really, it’s a redescription of the problem. In Leiber’s Hugo-winning Conjure Wife (1943), when Norman Saylor goes snooping in his wife Tansy’s dressing table and discovers she practices magic, he sees her as an image of herself, not herself at all: “If he were to reach out and touch her, Norman felt, the paint would peel down in strips from the empty air, as from some walking sister-picture of Dorian Gray.” As the novel goes on, Norman will be faced with multiple images of Tansy, and much will depend on his ability to recognize and know his wife even though he’s also come to accept that he doesn’t know her at all. Tansy proves to him that all women are witches and explains: “There are two sides to every woman. … One is rational, like a man. The other knows.”
Leiber viewed Conjure Wife as a feminist text, one that “humanized women.” Whether or not it can properly be called feminist, it is, ultimately, on women’s side. The message of Conjure Wife is not that women are constantly plotting to dominate and destroy, but that there is an aspect of their lives that men don’t see and—because they don’t see it—are inclined to dismiss if it’s brought to their attention. It’s also a book about what it means, and does not mean, to be in a happy marriage. Norman and Tansy love each other, and, just as importantly, they like each other. They are sexually in sync with each other. But it’s a big mistake to assume that just because you love and like and lust for each other, you understand each other. A happy marriage, in Conjure Wife, requires trust in the absence of understanding. Norman violates that trust when he snoops and makes Tansy destroy her magical tools; the rest of the book takes up the process of recovering it when he discovers those tools really did serve a purpose. Norman didn’t take his wife’s life seriously, and because of that mistake, she almost dies.
Like a Shakespearean comedy, Conjure Wife ends happily in marriage, albeit of a pair that was married already. (Shakespeare did that himself from time to time, as in Cymbeline.) In other stories, Leiber would refuse such a harmonious resolution of the troubles endemic in the way men look at women. One of these darker stories, published in 1958, was called “A Deskful of Girls.” In it, Carr Mackay, a private detective of no great competence, witnesses the existence, and subsequent revenge, of ghostly girls—“sexy ones,” he adds. “Personally I never in my life saw any ghosts except the sexy kind.” He goes on:
With this theatrical opening, Mackay establishes the story’s mood. He also, as events will go on to demonstrate, shows himself as somebody who never really gets the whole picture. For instance: the skin is all sex, it’s true. Sex, though, is not all skin. There’s a person in there one cannot simply dispense with—though of course, one always can try.
●
“A Deskful of Girls” is technically a spin-off of The Big Time, a novel Leiber also published in 1958, in which “ghost girls” are formed by clipping out women’s personas at specific moments, then kept hanging in closets until they’re needed to entertain the troops in a vicious and completely pointless time-traveling war. (“Entertain” here should be read as euphemistically as possible.) Leiber would return to The Big Time more explicitly in other stories, but the focus of “A Deskful of Girls” is the ghost girl technology, with its mix of creepiness and sexual allure.
Mackay has wormed his way into an exclusive joint called the Countersign Club, having fished out an introduction by sending a psychologist, Emil Slyker, an annotated edition of Marquis de Sade’s Justine. In fact, Mackay has been sent there by Jeff Crain, the ex-husband of a movie star named Evelyn Cordew, to try to buy back some compromising materials that Slyker is using to blackmail her. Crain warns Mackay that Slyker is highly paranoid, so in order even to get close enough to strike a deal he has to get Slyker to trust him—hence the song and dance with Justine. Slyker invites Mackay back to his office, saying that he’s got a deskful of girls back there “needing attention.” Mackay indulges for a brief moment in what he knows must be an impossible fantasy: a mass of “girls about five or six inches high,” trying to break out from the desk, “tearing down and defacing small signs, big to them, which read YOU BELONG TO DR. EMIL SLYKER.”
But that, he knows, would be silly. There are no girls who are just six inches tall. He’s correct. There aren’t. The desk is full of girls, all right, but in an entirely different way.
This momentary flight of fancy is our story’s first point of friction, one of several unexpected moves in a story that is full of technology that does not exist and events that could not possibly happen. Why is it that we’re also given to understand that this fantasy is an unqualified impossibility? The Lilliputian female rebels are the first women we meet in this story. They are not real and they are not even scary; they are just comic. As visions of women, they will be succeeded later in the story by Slyker’s run down of actresses as ciphers who contain our “most hidden fears and secretest dreams”: Greta Garbo “the Free Soul,” Ingrid Bergman “the Brave Liberal,” and, of course, Cordew, on whose behalf Mackay has been sent. Slyker dubs Cordew “the Good-Hearted Bait, the gal who accepts her troublesome sexiness with a resigned shrug and a foolish little laugh.”
Slyker has, it turns out, clipped five “ghosts”—facets of her psyche—from Cordew in the course of treating her. Cordew wants them back. He has no intention of returning them and claims, further, that reuniting them with Cordew would kill her. He then traps Mackay, who is abruptly bound and at his mercy. Slyker has known all along that Mackay was sent to get the ghosts back, and he plans to kill him, but only after gloating a little. After all, what’s the point of having Evelyn Cordew on demand and on display if you never get to show her off? Slyker switches off the lights and prepares to set his ghosts free.
But he’s one step behind Evelyn Cordew herself, who secretly used both Crain and Mackay to infiltrate Slyker’s office. Now that she’s here, she, in turn, renders the good doctor helpless and takes her ghosts back. She sets his files on fire and unleashes all the other ghost girls imprisoned in his desk, letting them decide whether Slyker lives or dies. “I’ll trust their judgment,” she tells him. “Do your ghosts love you, Emmy?” They descend on Slyker en masse, enveloping him “as if he was being strangled by his own cigarette smoke in a film run backward.” Almost as an afterthought, she frees Mackay on her way out. Then she’s gone. It’s implied, though not outright stated, that no one will ever see her again.
Slyker’s description of Cordew as plagued with “troublesome sexiness” is a characteristically misogynist refusal to accept that what troubles Cordew is not herself, but the men around her, her inability to be perceived by them as anything other than a beautiful image, a cash cow, a bragging opportunity, a damsel in distress or even an insane person. In short, she can be everything to men except what she wants to be—a person. Even Mackay, dire as his situation is, takes a moment to notice Cordew’s naked figure as she merges with her first ghost and compare it with his imagination: “breasts almost as you’d guess them from the bikini shots, but with larger aureoles.”
As Cordew regains her ghosts, she explains the memories they each bring back with them: the first ghost is her “happiness” over her burgeoning career, the second her fear of aging, the third ennui, the fourth the realization that “nobody, even the bottom boobs in the audience, really respected you because you were their sex queen.” The fifth is pure despair:
Easy to understand why you’d want to be rid of most these things, harder to imagine why you’d want them back. Slyker attributes Cordew’s search for her ghosts to vanity and irrationality: “She claims that the ghosts I’ve taken from her have made her lose weight permanently—‘look like a skeleton’ are her words—and given her fits of mental blackout, a sort of psychic fading—whereas actually the ghosts have bled off from her a lot of malignant thoughts and destructive emotions.” What Cordew seeks to regain, however, is her sense of herself as a whole person, not a peeled-off series of images that live ghostly afterlives on the film screen, as mental masturbation material in the memories of men, or as literal clipped-off selves in the desk drawer of her old psychiatrist. Even if these aspects of herself are, as Slyker puts it, malignant, they are not his to keep from her. Without them, Evelyn has become diluted as a person. Though none of the men in her life understand her or what it is she wants, we can, and we can also see that she has passed the point where she needs their understanding. That is, in addition to despair, the meaning of the fifth ghost: men won’t save you. Don’t even ask them to try.
●
The animating question of this column is what genre stories gain from being genre—what it is that they achieve that more realistic stories cannot. “A Deskful of Girls” is unique among the four stories I’ve selected in that there are realistic treatments of the same subject to which we can compare it. Because the story is so clearly situated in a real Hollywood, with real Hollywood “it” girls past presented to our memories, the contemporary reader knows just as clearly as the reader in 1958 who “Evelyn Cordew” must stand for: Marilyn Monroe. Leiber makes this allusion as explicit as he can without just naming his actress “Varilyn Vonroe,” including comparing her to Jean Harlow (the real Monroe’s idol). If read out loud, all of Cordew’s lines in the story follow a clear, cooing Monroe-esque “whispering baby” cadence.
If Monroe was not yet the woman whose image and look were endlessly duplicated and made iconic in ways that floated wide from any actual person, she was as far as she could possibly get without dying. (She would accomplish that necessary step in 1962, four years later, the same year that Andy Warhol would produce his “Marilyn Diptych.”) By 1958, she’d made most of her iconic movies (though not Some Like It Hot, a movie I suspect Leiber might have appreciated and even found resonant with his story). The legend of “Marilyn” is of a girl who oozed so much sex it killed her; the truth is something else. Most of the successful, or at least memorable, art about Marilyn Monroe deals explicitly with her image, as in Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde (and its film adaptation), approaching her as a kaleidoscope of selves whose “true” core is unknowable and perhaps does not exist.
“A Deskful of Girls” goes the other way. Evelyn Cordew is barely seen—only briefly illuminated. She is first described by Slyker in tones of vicious contempt (“dumb as they come, no rational mind at all”) and then she speaks for herself. Cordew is a voice in the dark, one that speaks with authority about who she is, who she has been, and what it is that she wants. Leiber does not represent Cordew’s image to us, because he understands that the moment we can see her physically, we will cease to see her in reality. Instead of fragmenting the image of his bombshell over and over, he integrates it. The process of re-assembling a whole woman, wresting her back from others’ fantasies, is a terrifying process that can only be interpreted by a man like Slyker as violence—whereas the original act of separating them from Cordew was not violent, he thinks, but therapeutic.
It makes sense that so much art about Marilyn Monroe tries to split her up. The clearest way to communicate the unreality of the image that people see is to multiply it. But realistic art about Marilyn Monroe is also limited, not only by what actually happened to Monroe, but to dealing with the icon. There is no way to avoid it: its extratextual existence is too powerful. Leiber, writing in 1958, was not as limited by what would actually happen in Monroe’s life, since at the time she was still alive and things could still happen otherwise.
But the other suggestion in “A Deskful of Girls” is that if a woman like Monroe reclaims herself, that will break reality as we know it. It would not be a slapstick break with reality, either, like tiny women running around a doctor’s office. It would be something that would bring to the surface all the sublimated violence that has gone into generating her image. And when she’d succeeded, she might become someone we’d be unable to see at all, stepping out of our fantasies and wet dreams into a real and solid life nobody else could touch. Like the Shakespeare that Leiber grew up absorbing, it is a story that suggests the possibility of righting primal wrongs through supernatural means. In Shakespeare, that might mean being lost in a fairy forest, or living on an enchanted island, or resurrecting someone’s lost wife first as a statue and then as a woman. These are stories in which wrongs are righted through healing; order is upended so that it can be restored. Leiber, more pessimistic, goes another way. Wrongs are righted through violence. The order should be upended and it should not be restored.
Genre fiction—of any kind—doesn’t have a reputation as a sophisticated context in which to write women. That’s because it often is not. As a treatment of Marilyn Monroe, though, “A Deskful of Girls” stands with David Lynch’s later masterpiece, Twin Peaks, as a story that tries to take seriously the struggles of her life without becoming entangled in her ghostly shell. Twin Peaks also chooses to tell the story of Monroe by taking the path of unreality, seeking its doomed blonde in dreamworlds that uncover cosmic battles between good and evil, and in particular psychic beings that live off of the food of human anguish. Both Leiber and Lynch seem to have asked themselves how they could tell this story in a way that would not generate more such food for more such vultures. (“Pitying Marilyn Monroe” is, after all, as much an industry as desiring her.)
Put most bluntly: many women live in worlds in which they are regarded as alien beings with unknowable psyches and strange motivations. They encounter other people who treat them in ways that they can’t really understand—as projections and fantasies, not really as people at all. If that’s the case, what kind of art can truly rise to occasion, and do justice not only to women, but to this experience? What kind of art can imagine its way even into some sort of justice? It might be art that’s unconcerned with the real. We might find, at its very best, that speculative fiction is able to go past what limits our perceived world into another world, a world that is truer because it is unconcerned with being factually true. In neither Twin Peaks nor “A Deskful of Girls” do we get to imagine Marilyn Monroe happy. Leiber lets us imagine a Monroe who has taken back her darknesses, her hopes and her despairs. Evelyn Cordew isn’t happy at the end of the story. She is free, and that is something much better.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.