Hollywood Without Madness

...The Deer Park seems always on the verge of dissolving back into the anonymous legends, the gossip- and fan-magazine stories out of which it is compounded...

...There is scarcely a single word or image that leads its own life--no redeeming eccentricity, no passion and no rebellion in the prose with which Mailer presumably celebrates eccentricity and passion and rebellion...

...From cover to cover of The Deer Park, what is inevitable never happens: In a world of indignities, no one dies...

...This means, finally, that the book is in no way superior to the material which it incorporates...

...These things are annoying precisely because they are so easily avoided...

...And to what program can such an allegiance lead...

...and the only remaining Heroic vision is the dream of being told by the woman all slobs (i.e., men who marry and have children) vainly desire on the screen: "No one ever dived so deep or sent me so far before...

...One knows why Mailer thinks he has chosen such a style...

...That avowed subject is, of course, Hollywood, though the name itself is never mentioned...

...Indeed, beside the accepted insanity of marriage ("Did you ever think of how crazy that is, I mean a man and a woman for instance making legal arrangements to live together all their lives...

...But The Deer Park is not really about sex, even in all its philosophical ramifications, any more than it is really about Hollywood...

...What he has written is one of those troublingly circular and cannibalistic books about books: The story of a boy who wants to write a book which is really the book one is reading, in which there is a boy who wants to write a book, etc., etc...

...Mailer has, at one level or another, the sense that he is dealing with a Utopia of Pure Sex, a world of pastoral make-believe in which passion is assumed to have nothing to do with reproduction or responsibility...

...At any rate, such a view of writing as the last barricades puts an almost intolerable burden on the novelist...

...For do we not gamble our way to the heart of the mystery against all the power of good manners, good morals, the fear of germs, and the sense of sin...

...Only the greatest of artists, however, can achieve the insight and intensity necessary to such an aim...

...But he does not quite have enough nerve to plump for the radical or even the criminal as hero (though, indeed, a pimp is the most sympathetic character in the book besides Sergius...

...his acute sense of the misery of a workman's lot does not let him take the worker's unwilled victimization for a virtue...

...It is not merely a matter of certain technical insufficiencies: of not always knowing exactly what words mean, of constructing badly...

...Professor of English, Montana State University "Perhaps the spokesman for a new generation," is what the book-jacket calls Norman Mailer, and certainly Sergius O'Shaugnessy, the protagonist of this book, is intended to be a representative contemporary figure: a Korean War veteran...

...Insofar as The Deer Park deals with sex, it is an honest novel, which touches a level of experience we can all recognize and to which we can respond...

...He espouses instead the not-quite underworld of Bohemia, the quasi-criminal protest of the artist...

...it is difficult to conceive of any human speaking most of his speeches...

...One finds it less easy to believe in him as an individual than as a somewhat sentimentally faked type of the alienated young man--an orphan with a fake Irish name, a not quite convincing tough guy--prizefighter, bullfighter and big lover who can't really make it...

...He is the compassionate father-sweetheart not only of the orphan O'Shaugnessy but of the illegitimate rebel-pimp whom we are asked dimly to admire, and of the producer Munshin, the Judas-lover who seduces him spiritually...

...The only character who comes to life, with an unreality living enough to seem real and a way of speaking incredible enough to compel belief, is Teppis, a producer...

...Charles Francis Eitel (hailed as "lover" by one of his male admirers when we first meet him) stands for all that is best in the other relationship...

...Perhaps we do not deserve any better, but I should hate to think so...

...The book's title (and the quotation from "The Private Life of Louis XV" which explains it) suggests that such an outrageous Utopia is the epitome of the universal corruption and decadence of our world...

...In the face of such "swagger sex," Mailer is buffaloed...

...The book as a whole has a strange sort of squeamishness whose principle escapes me...

...In ancient times and in ours, unlimited sex is the province of "the Immortals," an outward symbol of the inner mysteries of ichor or money...

...It is perhaps the ultimate sign of our times of conformity that our realist rebels will settle for so little...

...By its final pages, Sergius has declared his independence from all the false lures of accommodation and compromise, and is ready -- for what...

...Would You agree that sex is where philosophy begins," Sergius asks his God (who is not very easy to distinguish from Eitel...

...One must head his final bill of particulars against The Deer Park with the charge that (contrary to the opinion of Life and Time) there is not nearly enough sex in the book...

...He has, then, chosen the egalitarian style for good democratic reasons, without being aware of how much his strategy is like that: of the populist politician, who makes mistakes in grammar so that he won't seem to condescend to anyone...

...a boy to whom the Spanish Civil War, the Depression, even World War II are remote historical events...

...His people are too much like us and not enough like our nightmares...

...He is left in a world of inherited disillusion with something which he calls occasionally "anarchism," but which is not really much like the political philosophy of the same name...

...His last-ditch allegiance is made to what is left of all radical politics at the moment before it becomes an utter cipher: class consciousness diluted to the conviction that the orphans of the world must not burn each other, the theory of the state as necessarily oppressive turned into a GI distrust of authority--in short, the politics of non-politics...

...is not the promiscuity of pain and pleasure a step toward freedom and truth...

...Quite willing to call tail tail, Mailer prefers to discuss the movie colony without ever saying either Jew or Hollywood--and to treat Congressional investigations without ever using the word "Communist...

...No, for him psychoanalysts are head-shrinkers pandering to the rich--and Communists fools and self-deceivers...

...What actually emerges is a prose style like that of the better hard-boiled detective stories--that is, the language of Raymond Chandler with all its lovely extravagance, its poor man's baroque touches removed: literature aping sub-literature aping literature...

...It is difficult to think of a book of similar pretensions in which so many phrases and sentences are merely along for the ride...

...his testimony before a Congressional investigating committee is rendered with an almost appalling falsity...

...It is characteristic of the latest generation that they have not been able to write their own war books or invent their own mythology...

...a pilot who has lost faith in flying and killing, without being able to define the character of the particular war from which he has withdrawn...

...Judged by the standards upon which he himself insists, his work is a signal failure...

...It is much easier to say what one should not do: get rich, be a soldier, testify before investigating committees, marry, have children...

...It is a novel not meretricious in any sense--merely inept, an honorable failure, sufficient unto its day...

...and I therefore do not begrudge Mailer even those passages in which he deliberately tickles our concupiscence by hinting darkly at indulgences too recondite and confusing to describe...

...But he is transformed bodily from the Goldwyn legend--and left unreconstructed with a tact Mailer seldom shows...

...For it is a real pleasure, after all, to come on respectable pornography...

...With a last shock, we realize that precisely such dubious and hard-won platitudes are what the book has been after the whole time, that even the sex was only a byroad to philosophy...

...Quite aside from this odd scruple...

...His good sense and sheer pedestrian plod, relatively effective in dealing with the conditions of war, are hindrances in exposing a world of myth and miracle, to whose inhabitants we stand in the relationship of the Homeric Greeks to their Gods...

...I do not mean that he does not try...

...An editor might have straightened out his narrative so that the two major characters would not have to exchange the key ideas of the book in an imaginary conversation spanning three thousand miles...

...What does one do...

...He confuses the facts of lust with the dream of lust, and so he cannot give his relatively literate audience even as much "truth" as the movie magazines give their readers...

...Mailer the difference between "uninterested" and "disinterested" and give him enough of the rudiments of fictional technique to avoid the aimless trifling with point of view, the clumsy intrusion of letters and quotations from documents, which mar his book...

...The real pity is that O'Shaugnessy has as little character and definition as the palest previous version of the rebel-author as a young jerk...

...and there is no viable morality which does not involve a politics profounder than the non-politics of The Deer Park...

...It is hard to make the most dismal sex as obscene as poor philosophy--or as false...

...Insofar as its characters are intended to be more than the lay figures of such sub-literature, they become blurred and incoherent, less interesting than they were as raw material...

...or maybe, after all, it is a token of our having outgrown certain Romantic extravagances...

...and Mailer, alas, is far from being a great artist...

...For all his personal failure and betrayal of his talent, Eitel is finally the only Love in the book which does not fail or betray...

...The author has warned us on the title page, "Please do not understand me too quickly," and we must take him at his word...

...Mailer is not mad enough for his subject...

...At least Mailer does not, like certain corresponding writers in the Twenties, dream of Freud as a deliverer, any more than he can accept the vision of Marx as savior which overwhelmed many of his opposite numbers in the Thirties...

...and that God rather astonishingly answers, "Rather think of Sex as Time, and Time as the connection of new circuits...

...Mailer refuses to become a fake proletarian...

...From the very first sentence, "In the cactus wild of Southern California, a distance of two hundred miles for the capital of Cinema as I choose to call it, is the town of Desert D'Or," one has the sense of swimming through a sea of breakfast-food soaked overnight in tepid milk...

...for it is only the language of the writer which can convince us that he is in control of what he has evoked...

...Perhaps this resolution on a question-mark rather than an exclamation-point is a clue to its peculiar contemporaneity (though Huck Finn came to the same end...

...in a world of false starts and bad beginnings, no one is born...

...but he has chosen an unfortunate protagonist, too ploddingly naive, too sanely rebellious, too cool to do justice to so fabulous a world...

...It does not really make much difference that O'Shaugnessy is rather like all the rest of those by-now old-fashioned makers of a one-man peace who descend from Hemingway's Henry...

...It is, as a matter of fact, our madness, vicariously enjoyed (as Nathaniel West saw so well in Day of the Locust) -- and it must not be reduced to merely human size by sanity and feeble rhetoric...

...But there is another flaw more profoundly discouraging because infinitely harder to remedy--a flaw of language and style...

...Mailer brings to his subject certain incapacitating virtues...

...But he does not know how to judge it...

...A positive program is another matter...

...The protagonist and the style are one, able to enter but not to conquer (by understanding or imagination or sheer rhetoric) a realm in which there is not, in the ordinary sense, marriage or family, birth or death...

...Insofar as The Deer Park is O'Shaugnessy's book, it is an account of his step-by-step education in dissent, his learning to separate himself from the operators and the slobs...

...A $20 correspondence course could teach Mr...

...It is to his mouth that Mailer entrusts the final wisdom of his novel--"with the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls"--just as it is to him that Sergius expounds his own counter-wisdom that "we must invariably look for a good time since a good time is what gives us strength to try again...

...In talking of his own reading, Sergius informs us that "part of a man's style is what he thinks of other people and whether he wants them to be in awe of him or think of him as an equal...

...It is finally, like a good American book, a study of freedom as an absolute good...

...Eitel, for instance, the writer-director who is the kingpin of the book, has moved so far from the figures of legend that he has no existence at all...

...For us humans the unreal, unaging beauty of the Gods or the Stars, the splendor and disorder of their passions is as necessary as his madness to a madman...

...It is not against any concept of the family or social order that Mailer measures the anguish and pettiness of his lovers, but in the best Hammett-Chandler tradition against the passionless love of males...

...But as an "anarchist," Mailer has no longer any standards--Christian, bourgeois or Marxist--by which he can judge such behavior...

...For here, the artistic problem becomes a moral one...

...but he must impose upon indifference a vision of that world so vivid and atrocious that it can no more be shrugged off than a nightmare...

...He must not only establish in the teeth of convention the real world most men refuse to see...

...And with the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists, the small trumpet of your defiance...

...In such a limited world, failure is defined as impotence, success as the perfect performance in bed...

...For the rest, the book manages to be at the mercy of its avowed subject without really profiting by it...