Marilyn Monroe was no literary misfit

Arthur Miller once wrote of Marilyn Monroe, his wife from 1956 to 1961, "she was a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes."

But what did the actress recite, record, remember in private?

Editors Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment, sorting through documents unearthed by Anna Strasberg, the widow of acting teacher Lee (to whom Monroe's personal possessions were bequeathed after her death in 1962), have assembled a tantalizing glimpse into the icon's interior life.

"Its not to much fun to know yourself to well or think you do - everyone needs a little conciet to carry them through & past the falls," Monroe concluded in a note, with typical spelling and punctuation errors, circa 1943, one year into her unhappy marriage with James Dougherty, whom she wed at age 16. Whatever her self-preserving conceits were, "Fragments" shows that Monroe remained bleakly self-aware, as in this entry written around the time her marriage to Miller started to sour: "I guess I have always been deeply terrified to really be someone's wife since I know from life one cannot love another, ever, really."

Though wracked with crippling insecurities and chronically late to the set, Monroe found the greatest solace in her attempts to become a better actress, particularly when she came under the tutelage of Lee Strasberg and then wife Paula at the Actors Studio, beginning in 1955. "Something has happened I think to make me lose my confidence," Monroe wrote to Paula in an undated letter. "I don't know what it is. All I know is I want to work." Her wish to improve extended beyond her professional life; under the heading "Must make effort to do," Monroe includes this self-exhortation to become a better analysand: "making much much much more more more more more effort in my analysis. And be there always on time - no excuses for being ever late."

Work, at times, may have saved Monroe's life - or at least her sanity. Committed against her will to the psychiatric unit of Payne Whitney in New York in February 1961, the actress recalls, in a letter typewritten to her psychoanalyst just a few weeks after her release, her strategy to escape: "I sat on the bed trying to figure if I was given this situation in an acting improvisation what would I do." Her solution involves re-creating a scene from her 1952 movie "Don't Bother to Knock."

Throughout "Fragments," Buchthal and Comment - perhaps nervous that Monroe's writings wouldn't deflate the perception of her as the quintessential "dumb blonde" - include photographs of the actress reading ("Ulysses," "Leaves of Grass") and hobnobbing with Truman Capote, Carson McCullers and other literary figures. The editors needn't have so strenuously overcompensated when Monroe's genius is evident to anyone who's ever seen "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," "Some Like It Hot" or "The Misfits."

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FRAGMENTS: Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters, by Marilyn Monroe, edited by Stanley Buchthal and Bernard Comment. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 239 pages, $30.