Marjorie defies her parents by taking a job as an actress in a summer stock company in the Catskills. And then she defies them even more when she falls in love with and begins a sexual relationship with the director, Noel Airman. What is evident to everyone—her fellow drama club friends at Hunter College, the other summer stock actors, and Marjorie herself—is that she is special, talented, destined for great things. Before she meets Noel, Marjorie dates many boys, all of them worthy suitors. She enjoys teasing them, flirting, kissing. But her traditional Jewish parents warn her about the dangers of sex, warnings that she holds dear until the summer she’s nineteen.
Marjorie falls for Noel the summer before, but he is involved with another actress. That winter, she goes downtown to Bank Street to stand “across the street from the shabby red brick house where he lived, staring at the windows, while snow caked her beaver coat and caught in her eyelashes.” I read this as if I’d made a great discovery. I sighed. I read the passage again, out loud. I remember where I was—on my bed with its yellow-and-white checked bedspread— and what I wore—my faded Levi’s and red peasant blouse. In my doorway hung long strands of colorful beads that I’d spent months stringing; taped to one wall was a Jules Feiffer dancer cartoon; on the stereo Simon and Garfunkel sang “The Dangling Conversation.” That song spoke to my yearning too, to my desire for a love in which “you read your Emily Dickinson, and I my Robert Frost . . .”
Why did Marjorie standing on a snowy street staring at the apartment where the man she loved lived so affect me? Perhaps because sometimes at night I sat in my parents’ Chevy in front of Peter Hayhurst’s house—he who had broken my tender heart—hoping for a glimpse of him? Perhaps because as she longed for Noel, Marjorie let Wally Wronken court her, just as I let boys take me to the movies and kiss me in their convertibles while I longed for Peter Hayhurst? Perhaps because Marjorie’s romanticism, bravery, idealism, and foolishness were just like mine? Marjorie Morningstar knew me. She was me, and I was her.
The light outside had dimmed as I sat reading, and I leaned over to turn on the light by my bed. In the very next chapter, Marjorie goes on dates with dull boys and walks alone on Riverside Drive, mooning for Noel. “The soft April air blowing across the blue river, the smell of the blossoming cherry and crab-apple trees, the swaying of their bunched pink branches, filled her with bittersweet melancholy. Often she would slip a book of poetry in her pocket, and would drop on a bench, after walking far, to read Byron or Shelley or Keats.” I remember having to put the book down. I remember crying, filled with my own teenage bittersweet melancholy. Like Marjorie, I dated dull boys who tried hard to impress me, buying me steaks at Valle’s Steak House or taking me dancing at the Ocean View by the beach. I too took long solo walks—not on a city street, but on the beach—and sat in the salty air to read Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg and Rod McKuen.
When I composed myself, I picked up the book again. Wally Wronken appears at the Morgensterns’ apartment to invite Marjorie to accompany him to the Cloisters in a rainstorm. After the rain stops, he leads her “around a corner of thick bushes into a curving shadowy path filled with a curious lavender light.” He has led her onto an avenue “solidly arched and walled with blooming lilacs.” With water dripping on her upturned face, Marjorie takes Wally’s hand. “She was not sure what was rain and what was tears on her face. She wanted to look up at lilacs and rolling white clouds and patchy blue sky forever . . .” Yes! my brain, my heart shouted. That’s what I want too! So moved by this is Marjorie that she looks at ugly, young, pathetic Wally and kisses him on the mouth. “They were holding each other’s hands, and raindrops were dripping on them from the lilacs.” “I’m going to plant lilac lanes all over town,” Wally tells her in a hoarse voice. But Marjorie is already done with him. “It’s fading,” she tells Wally. “It’s becoming just a lane of lilacs.” Still, she promises him there will be another kiss only when they find such lilacs again.
Somehow, that yearning I felt was taking shape as I read Marjorie Morningstar. I wanted a man like Noel Airman. I wanted to move away from home and defy my prudish Catholic parents and have sex with a man I loved. But I wanted the kiss under the lilacs too. That kiss and those lilacs seemed enormously important to me, even though less than a hundred pages later, when Wally and Marjorie see each other at South Wind the next summer, she doesn’t remember them.
What I understood when I read Marjorie Morningstar as an adult is that of course Noel Airman will break Marjorie’s heart and destroy her dreams. “I eat little girls like you,” he tells her. Then he does just that. But as a young girl, I held my breath as I followed every twist and turn of their affair. I felt the sharp pangs of heartbreak along with her, recalling how Peter Hayhurst broke my own fragile heart.
But it is the final nine pages of the novel, written in the form of Wally Wronken’s diary, that truly break my heart every time. Marjorie gave up on her acting career, married a lawyer, and moved to Westchester. Marjorie Morningstar became Marjorie Schwartz, suburban wife and mother. Critics argue that Wouk is suggesting that Marjorie is lucky: she has had sex with another man, yet still marries a nice Jewish doctor. Perhaps, some critics contend, Wouk is telling readers that sex and rebellion and striving aren’t as great as young women hope they will be.
As a young woman back then and today as a middle-aged woman, those last nine pages slay me because Marjorie has let me down. “And if she wasn’t the bright angel I thought, she was a lovely girl,” Wally tells us. “And where is that girl now? She doesn’t even remember herself as she was.” Wally acknowledges his own loss in Marjorie Morningstar becoming Marjorie Schwartz: he will never have that second kiss under the lilacs. “Yet how beautiful she was! She rises up before me as I write . . . her face wet with rain, nineteen years old, in my arms and yet maddeningly beyond my reach . . .”
What I know now looking back at that girl on the bed with the yellow-and-white checked bedspread in the sad mill town, is that Marjorie Morningstar moved her so much not just because she saw herself in Marjorie and her family in the Morgensterns. No, Marjorie Morningstar gave her—me—the passion to never forget the bright angel who wanted everything, all of it, to go out there, wherever that might be. What I decided, what I knew in the deepest parts of me as I read those final pages through tears that wouldn’t stop, was that I would, in the final analysis, not be anything like Marjorie at all.
Maybe that’s why I reread it every year. Maybe, as time beats me up and grief or loneliness or a new kind of bittersweet melancholy take hold, I need to remind myself to keep going, keep reaching, to not forget the girl who believed she could have everything and anything at all. Maybe even now I am still waiting for that metaphorical kiss under the lilacs. Maybe I always will.
Lesson 2: How to Become a Writer
? The Bell Jar BY SYLVIA PLATH ?