«Non v’è nulla che sia più drammatico di un fantasma»

«Non v’è nulla che sia più drammatico di un fantasma» is a phrase the Playwright recalls while watching Norma Jeane gather flowers near their house. Its importance lies in the change of meaning it undergoes: what once seemed an objection to ghosts in his plays becomes a way of thinking about the danger that may shadow his wife’s future. The ghost is not a supernatural presence, but the public identity she has tried to leave behind.

The phrase and the Playwright’s objection

The Playwright remembers wondering what T.S. Eliot meant by the claim that nothing was more dramatic than a ghost. He had never liked the idea, in part because his own dramas contained no ghosts. The objection is presented as more than a technical preference: the phrase does not belong, or seem to belong, in the kind of drama he writes. Yet its return in this scene suggests that its force has become personal, even though the Playwright does not resolve his earlier disagreement with it.

The text gives the phrase two closely related forms. First, it appears as the thought that nothing is more dramatic than a ghost; later, after the Playwright has seen Norma Jeane look up and has returned her greeting, the Eliot thought comes back to him. Between those recurrences, he thinks, «Niente fantasmi nelle nostre vite.» The line does not settle what counts as a ghost. Instead, its placement makes the denial feel precarious: the thought returns precisely while he is considering the future and identity of the woman beside him.

A scene of looking

The phrase arises as the Playwright watches Norma Jeane gathering flowers. He is captivated by her, and his attention divides her into two figures: the Norma who speaks with him and the Norma a few metres away, an object of aesthetic admiration. The narration treats that admiration as an emotion in its own right, as intense as the feeling directed toward the wife with whom he shares a life. His repeated inward recognition of her as his beautiful, pregnant wife joins tenderness to the act of looking at her from a distance.

The details of the garden give that looking a domestic setting. Norma Jeane wears light trousers, one of the Playwright’s shirts, and a broad-brimmed straw hat to protect her sensitive skin. She is barefoot and has not put on gardening gloves; the Playwright dislikes both choices, especially because her soft hands are developing calluses. The flower bed also recalls the Glazer garden and its hydrangeas, Norma Jeane’s favourite flowers, including Mrs. Glazer’s emphatic declaration that the hydrangea was the most beautiful flower. These recollections place the present scene beside an earlier domestic memory, while the calluses make visible the bodily work and ordinary life from which the Playwright’s aesthetic gaze sets Norma apart.

His own posture matters too. He has gone to the window to look at the ocean and the cloud-strewn sky, and he feels pleasure in the work he has just done: scattered scenes and sketches for a new drama, perhaps material for a screenplay. He has not initially gone to the window to watch Norma. Yet she becomes the focus of his attention. When she finishes gathering flowers and heads toward the house, he briefly wonders whether she will catch him watching. She looks up, greets him with a gesture, and he smiles back. The recalled phrase follows this small exchange, bringing the dramatic image into an ordinary moment of recognition.

The ghost of a former identity

The Playwright’s concern reaches beyond the garden. Since their adventure in England, he has wondered what Norma Jeane’s future will be. She has renounced acting, but he doubts how long she can remain a non-actress: a housewife, soon a mother, without a career. He believes she has too much talent to be satisfied with private life. His certainty about her talent does not offer an easy solution, because he also believes she cannot return to Marilyn Monroe. In his view, sooner or later Marilyn would kill her.

That fear gives the phrase its central dramatic implication. The Playwright has declared that there are no ghosts in their lives, but his thoughts describe an identity capable of pursuing Norma Jeane even after she has renounced the profession that made it visible. The ghost is therefore associated with neither a haunting house nor an unexplained apparition. It is the persistent possibility of a former public self reclaiming the woman who hopes to live privately. The image holds together two futures the Playwright cannot reconcile: Norma Jeane as wife and expectant mother, and Marilyn Monroe as a role to which she must not return.

Recurrence and significance

The phrase’s recurrence turns a remembered literary assertion into a measure of the Playwright’s unease. At first, it recalls his resistance to ghosts as dramatic material. Later, it returns after he watches Norma Jeane, and the attempt to dismiss ghosts from their life sits beside his explicit fear that Marilyn Monroe could destroy her. The dramatic presence is not something the story confirms as supernatural; it is the danger embedded in a divided identity and in the uncertainty of what a life without acting can become.

The scene leaves that uncertainty open. Norma Jeane has stopped acting, but the Playwright doubts that domesticity and impending motherhood will answer her needs; he sees her talent as too great to disappear into private life. At the same time, he considers the public persona she might resume fatal to her. The phrase thus gathers the conflict into one image: something absent from the present can still dominate what comes next. Its drama lies in the gap between the life the couple hopes to inhabit and the identity the Playwright fears will return.