Flaws and ApplauseFor all its flaws (and they are both numerous and substantial), "The Deer Park" is still one of my favourite novels of the 1950's.It deals with two personal interests and obsessions: radical Left-wing politics in the United States from the 1930’s to the 1950’s (including the House Un-American Activities Committee) and Hollywood (the two of which coincided in the Hollywood Blacklist of 1947).I should also mention that it deals with the relationship between the sexes in as explicit a way as literature was permitted in 1955, when the novel was first published, even though it was rejected by just about every publisher in town because of obscenity and defamation concerns (some of which were dressed up as concerns about literary merit).One Fake-Irish, the Other EitelThe narrator is Sergius O’Shaugnessy, an orphan who despite his name comes from mongrel sailor blood: Welsh, English, Russian and Slovene, with perhaps a touch of Irish as an afterthought. To add to the sense of fake-Irish, he’s six foot one inch, blonde and good-looking: not much of Norman Mailer in that description, perhaps a little more in the vanity that follows: “I was good looking and I knew it; I had studied the mirror long enough.”Sergius has returned from the war in Asia, feeling guilty about both the burning flesh caused by his bombing flights and the sexual orgy that occurred on the ground.He decides to ease himself back into society with a $14,000 gambling win, by spending a year in Desert D’Or (a resort town modeled on Palm Springs), which is the playground of the Hollywood film industry based in “the capital”. Hence its resemblance to the French Deer Park of the title:“…that gorge of innocence and virtue in which were engulfed so many victims who when they returned to society brought with them depravity, debauchery and all the vices they naturally acquired from the infamous officials of such a place.”Soon, Sergius meets Charles Eitel, a well-known film director who has, for the moment, declined to name names in front of the Committee and has therefore been blacklisted in Hollywood.Eitel is trying to revive his career by writing a screenplay. Sergius is trying his first hand at writing fiction. Both have a similar taste in women, though strangely, they never seem to conflict, partly because in every case, Eitel has “been there before”.Both men work or play within the orbit of Herman Teppis (the head of Supreme Studios) and his son-in-law, the producer, Collie Munshin. It’s their duty to enforce the blacklist, but they also represent a career opportunity for both protagonists if either of them will accept their terms.Sergius has to decide that he wants to be an actor. Eitel, like the real life Elia Kazan, has to name names (and be ostracised by his former friends on the Left).A third man and rival is Marion Faye, a rebellious hipster who pimps call girls for visitors from the capital.From Pillow to Post-ModernistThis ensemble of sexually active males is the beginning of the novel’s problems. You can almost sense that Mailer, the author, the person, the egotist, identified with all of these characters, that he couldn’t work out which one he preferred, probably because he wanted to join in all of the love action of his characters.Ultimately, he chooses Sergius to write in the first person. He admires and writes about Eitel in the same, almost fawning and obsequious manner that Nick Carraway documents the life of Jay Gatsby. Yet, in irregularly alternating chapters, Sergius has a psychic insight into the minds of not just Eitel, but Munshin and Faye as well. Occasionally, Sergius tells us that these characters have confided their stories to him, but there is just too much omniscience and verisimilitude for this to be credible. Elsewhere, he discloses that he has sat down to write a novel, and that it is the novel that we are reading. The reader is left to question whether the events and internal dialogue are real or imagined, which is disconcerting. It's an anomaly that lingers awkwardly.I can’t make a convincing case for this narrative aspect of the novel being Post-Modernist. OK, Mailer includes a poem that seems to be a pastiche of something out of “Finnegan’s Wake” and towards the end there is a letter from Eitel’s wife that some argue resembles Molly’s soliloquy from the end of “Ulysses”. But the novel is otherwise too realistic. Besides, it takes itself too seriously. You can tell that Mailer really cared about the people (well, at least the males), their predicaments and their ideas.Ultimately, I think Mailer was just too ambitious in the subject matter of his third novel. For all of the problems he had with rejection, requests for re-writes and censorship, he hoped that the ambition of his project would get it across the line.The quality of writing is consistently high, and it's a relatively easy to read. However, if Mailer had managed the narration more realistically and perhaps harnessed some of his subject matter better, the work could have rivalled Saul Bellow's "The Adventures of Augie March" (my favourite novel from this period of American literature) in greatness.Mailer received an excessive amount of advice on how to write his novel in the course of trying to get it published in a hostile environment. Ultimately, we can only judge it as it appears on the printed page.Lulu and ElenaThe critical reception in 1955 wasn’t particularly positive. Now, sixty years later (is it really that long?), two criticisms are warranted.Firstly, if the novel had been written now, it probably would have been much less sexually restrained, and more explicit. As it stands, it’s almost modest and quaint. There's a sex scene in a car, where the only way I know there was sex is that Sergius says it was a "success".Secondly, the role of the women, in particular, Lulu and Elena, could or would have been substantially revised and strengthened.Neither woman is presented as a strong, competent woman in the sense that 1960’s feminism would suggest. There is an inordinate amount of crying in the novel (not just by the women).Lulu has the greater public profile. She’s a successful actress with bargaining power. Yet, she is vulnerable and is constantly compromised in her sexual and personal relationships by the expectations, demands and machinations of her studio. Earlier in her career, she was married to Eitel, but they have since divorced, even though the mutual attraction hasn’t dissipated. Needless to say, she encounters Sergius, which means that both guises of Mailer’s authorial presence get to bed her. Equally needless to say, there are some suggestions that Lulu was based on Marilyn Monroe, even though it seems that Mailer had hoped that Monroe would play Elena in the stage play he wrote based on the novel.It's almost as if Lulu was a vehicle to meet and have sex with Monroe in real life. So, to Elena Esposito. She is a relative innocent, and is tossed around from male to male (if not Sergius), yet she seems to be the most likely candidate to be dropped into contemporary society and successfully survive. She is sexually attractive, experienced, assertive, caring and generous, yet the males constantly relate to her as if she is stupid. They put her down, much to her detriment. It’s clear that in an age of education and opportunity, she might even have been able to perform a role in the film industry in her own right.The males have an aversion for marriage. Yet Elena seems to be the person most capable of making and keeping a commitment, if only a male would reciprocate.Sexual appetite and desire, at least in the eyes of the males, is an end in itself. It’s not something that is expected to survive a marriage or parenthood. For all the power and influence that appears on the printed page, hardly anybody seems to have a child (Bobby, the single mother of two children, is relegated to a role as the purveyor of a blow-job for Herman Teppis). MachismoMailer has been criticized for a long time for his apparent chauvinism, and the criticism might be warranted, particularly in retrospect.However, I think it’s worthwhile examining the issues that he was trying to deal with, because they are still important issues.Sergius is a relatively passive character, who admires Eitel, so it is often in Eitel’s dialogue that we can appreciate Mailer’s concerns.What Sergius admires is Eitel’s “ability to talk about himself with considerable masculinity of mind”.There’s no mention of the gender of the audience. Just a suggestion that thinking and talking, at least in a male, are more effective or impressive, the more masculine the speaker and the content.Later, Munshin remembers Eitel saying that, “when you were a kid you always wondered how to get a woman, and now you wonder how to get rid of one.”Commitment to a woman, to a relationship, is transitory, if not totally illusory. There is little warmth or tenderness with the opposite sex, except so much as is necessary to have sex. Man values availability above chastity or friendship:"She had a naïve chastity which coaxed a man to find its opposite."Even Sergius says:"Women who have come to know me well have always accused me sooner or later of being very cold at heart, and while that is a woman's view of it, and a woman can rarely know the things that go on inside a man, I suppose there is a sort of truth to what they say."Eitel, again:"To be a good lover, one should be incapable of falling in love…I don’t love anybody at all."It’s almost as if the physical performance, as in a boxing ring or a bull fight, is the real determinant of conjugal or passionate success.A man must not reveal vulnerability. Sergius asks:"How can there be love without some weakness?"The choice is between love and strength.Still, Eitel comes across as the most sympathetic of the men:"Eitel always felt that the way a woman made love was as good a guide to understanding her character as any other way, and from the distance of an inch, Elena was a woman of exceptional beauty…When she was timid with people, she was bold with him; where crude in her manners, subtle with intuition. So it went, her energy almost ruthless in its call on him. When at last they were done and Eitel could glow from a show of skill more valuable to him than the pleasure itself, they lay side by side smiling at each other."Try A Little TendernessIs this truly sympathetic? Is it necessary to sleep with a woman to know her character? Is a woman more than an object upon which to demonstrate one’s sexual prowess? Another man envies his lover’s “touch of bawd and lots of energy”.Does a man seek in a woman only a [D.H.] Laurentian “blossoming of the flesh” during intercourse? Is he inevitably jealous if he suspects another man might achieve (or might have achieved) the same blossom?What is missing is a little tenderness, a little genuine sensitivity to a woman’s character and needs.Mailer's men, at least supposedly creative men, are driven by vanity, a self-regard, a sense of achievement, and therefore hamstrung by “the sense of shame, of sickness, and of loathing for any work which was not his best.”This self-loathing imposes a burden, not just on the Self, but on the Other:"Under such a burden, he was growing critical of Elena’s faults. He would wince as he watched her eat, for she waved her fork, her mouth often full as she spoke."The men can't be happy in their relationships, because they aren't happy in themselves. The greatest unhappiness derives from a misguided sense of personal freedom.Eitel observes of the progress of all love affairs:"One began with the notion that life had found its flavour, and ended with the familiar distaste of no adventure and no novelty. It was one of the paradoxes he had cherished. The unspoken purpose of freedom was to find love, yet when love was found one could only desire freedom again."Man seeks liberation, but love, apparently, puts him in chains. It's just too easy and convenient to infer that women are witches who cast a spell on America's vulnerable men (who Mailer would later argue had become "feminised", as if this implies weakness, rather than tenderness).Noble Humans for More Than One NightMailer implies that sex is a momentary experience of a performance, of magic, of “mummery”.It’s difficult to translate this energy into other aspects of life, for example, in the artistic or political sphere. However, it’s in these spheres that mankind becomes truly noble (a word also used a lot by Bellow in "The Adventures of Augie March").As Eitel loses energy and nobility over the course of the novel, we are supposed to infer that it will transfer to Sergius. As one man falls, the other rises.Mailer, the author, doesn’t have to choose between the protagonists. He can identify with both.The Small Trumpet of Your DefianceUltimately, Eitel loses his self-respect artistically and politically, even if he ends up married to Elena. He confesses to Sergius:"I have lost the final desire of the artist, the desire which tells us that when all else is lost, when love is lost and adventure, pride of self, and pity, there still remains that world we may create, more real to us, more real to others, than the mummery of what happens, passes, and is gone. "So, do try, Sergius, try for that other world, the real world, where orphans burn orphans and nothing is more difficult to discover than a simple fact. "And with the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists, the small trumpet of your defiance."And with this counsel, Sergius finishes his novel, a tribute to Eitel, if not also to the women in their lives.SOUNDTRACK:Otis Redding - "Try A Little Tenderness"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXmLj...
It's quite rare that I don't finish a book. Usually, once I start reading something, I have a kind of compulsive urge to finish it, no matter how bad or how dull. Occasionally, however, there comes along a book that overpowers me with its banality and mediocrity, a tome that forces me to set it aside and move on. The Deer Park, for me, is one such book. At the urging of a professor who is helping me with something I'm writing, I sought out a copy and started to read it. After all, I thought, it's only about 300 pages. I'll finish it in no time. Right? Wrong. The Deer Park is a sort of 1950s retelling of The Great Gatsby. Our Nick-Carraway-type figure is replaced by Sergius O'Shaughnessy, a former air force pilot who wins big at a casino and proceeds to blow his money by spending some time in a hotel in a thinly-disguised Palm Springs. Our Gatsby is Charles Eitel, a wealthy screenwriter hoping to make a comeback after his career is destroyed by his unwillingness to cooperate with the Unamerican Activities Committee.The characters that populate this novel indulge in all sorts of hedonism. Mainly, though, that hedonism manifests in the form of sex. As I understand it, there was some sort of bruh-ha-ha concerning the book's risqué content when it first came out, but by modern standards, everything in here is pretty tame. There are no actual sex scenes in Mailer's novel (at least in the first of it), instead there are only vague, after-the-fact details, which I'm pretty sure Mailer wrote mostly by looking in a thesaurus for synonyms for "passion." Boring, chauvinistic, and plainly written, there didn't seem to be anything to see here. Maybe I'll go back to it one day, but probably not.
What do You think about The Deer Park (1997)?
I reread Norman Mailer’s, The Deer Park, his third novel and originally published in 1955. It is not a great book and I will not take much time on it. It is remarkable for two reasons. First, it is the last of Mailer’s “traditional” novels for a while. In his next book, Advertisements for Myself, he begins to mix journalism with fiction, creating his own very personal style. Secondly, Mailer fought hard to keep portions of the book in publication despite the resistance of several publishers who found it pornographic. He left Rinehart rather than make requested changes and finally ended up with Putnam. Today, the book would be considered tame, with very little lewd language. Not one “f” bomb, one c-word or one n-word. He does use “shit” twice. And any reference to sex is described obliquely and topics such as homosexuality are raised but not developed at all. In fact, the dialogue comes off as naïve today. “Don’t panic, love-bucket” (Lulu Meyers, the actress). Despite this, Mailer manages to convey the loss of soul of several characters as they live the Hollywood life. This is not the definitive Hollywood book: rather read Nathanael West's Day of the Locust. But do read this for the amazing character development, especially of Howard Teppis, the movie mogul, Marion Faye, a young pimp and the narrator, Sergius O'Shaugnessy, 23, orphan,just out of the military, movie star handsome, adrift in the world. Mailer uses an epigraph by Andre Gide: Please do not understand me too quickly. You will not understand these characters too quickly, but by the end of this book, you will know them as if they were real.
—Mark Noble
In The Deer Park, Mailer satirizes post-WWII hollywood which by his account was an immoral, selfish, venal, and generally corrupt society. The story in mostly set in a desert town east of LA (Palm Springs?), where the studio owners, producers, directors, writers, and actors go to lounge around and drink, party, and sleep around. The characters are fickle and unfaithful, cheating on one another and trying to build themselves up by cutting others down, usually in a dramatic fashion befitting Hollywood. Artists are sucked into the commercial Hollywood production system and actors and actresses real lives are manipulated by powerful studio executives. The problem with the book is that the first half is very slow, lots of dialogue that I found boring. Mailer warns about this at the start, but I could not help but wonder if it was all necessary. The book did pick up a bit in the second half with some solid scenes, including a great one in which a studio executive tries to manipulate two of his actors into marrying one another although neither has any interest. Still, the book seems to cover and recover the same ground as characters continually cheat on each other. Then, the story ends bizarrely with the main character running of to mexico to learn bull-fighting (what?). The edition I have also included some post-script notes about how he had to re-write the book and how much effort, marijuana, speed, sleeping pills, and agonizing went into its production. It was interesting to hear an author talk about his process, but it would have been more so if I actually liked the finished work.
—mark
The Deer Park was probably a better read when it was first published in 1955. Its exploration of sex and violence - and the way in which these two forces are at the heart of the "American Dream" - is fearless. It must have been very shocking back in 1955, before the world had been exposed to Burroughs and Selby, and Lady Chatterley and Tropic of Cancer were still banned.The book is plotless because it has to be. Mailer creates a social milieu - Desert D'Or - which reminds one of Palm Springs, and he deals with Hollywood types: actors, directors, etc. The characters sleep with each other, commit acts of violence, etc. In Dante mode, Mailer reveals the "underside" or Hell of the American Dream - the Hollywood types that, he assumes, Americans aspire to be. But, the thing is, Mailer creates an Inferno in which the characters are trapped and no movement can occur. In other words, once characters reach Hollywood, they can't escape the primal desires and drives that exist despite their imprisonment in a Hell of endless parties, meaningless sex, meaningless art... So what do they do? They philosophize. Or - better said - the narrator Sergius philosophizes for them (Mailer runs into a narrative perspective problem early on, so he includes a clunky section that makes the book into something that Sergius has written, which allows him to be omniscient. But let's be honest - this isn't a metafictional book).The result is a book in which Mailer sacrifices character (always his greatest strength: see The Naked and the Dead, The Executioner's Song, and An American Dream) for philosophical didacticism. Sergius, an aspiring writer, is Mailer's mouthpiece - a self-proclaimed antagonist to the herd, much like Mailer himself.When coupled with the plotlessness and the lame, Hemingway-influenced ending (bullfighting in Mexico?), the lack of true characters makes for one slog of a read.As far as Mailer's career is concerned, The Deer Park led him to a realization that for the time being at least, he should give up fiction (the structural and perspectival problems in the novel are all too apparent) and focus on writing non-fiction. Essays like "The White Negro" and books like Advertisements for Myself allowed him to develop and articulate his philosophy so that he could write strong novels like An American Dream and Why Are We in Vietnam?, as well perfect the new form of fiction that Capote called the nonfiction novel.Yes, the masterpieces The Armies of the Night, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, The Fight, and Of a Fire on the Moon soon followed - all of which blurred the lines of fiction and nonfiction. The culmination was - obviously - The Executioner's Song, which is one of the strongest novels of the 20th century and the apex of Mailer's career.The Deer Park is only for Mailer completists or those interested in what was considered obscene and radical in 1955. Mailer completists (like me) will find a failure of a book that years later paid off because it led to some of the greatest writing of the 20th century.
—Paul Gleason
