102
PARTISAN REVIEW
or perhaps, in another sense of the word, because of it-nearly
alway~
turns out in her work to be synthetic. The playreading scene is a good
illustration. The play is
Berenice,
and there are fine opportunities for
irony in an occasion where an evening of comment on the heroic renun–
ciation of
Berenice
leads up to Martha's and Miles' sexual encounter.
Miss McCarthy saw these opportunities: the scheme for the action is
hers. But though the necessary ideas are there, they never take on the
dramatic life of characters moving from felt attitude to felt attitude;
instead, they are elaborated through the mouths of the characters as they
might be in an essay. "In the Greeks you get bitterness and you get
it again in Shakespeare. There's acceptance without resignation-a kind
of defiance in the end, like Othello's last speech: 'I have done the
state, etc.''' This goes on for pages. Much the same thing is true of
the meditations, the meandering lifelessness of which is emphasized by
the frequent flashes of Miss McCarthy's penetrating wit when she allows
herself to slip into comment: " ... pity was very unreliable, as a guide
to conduct. It signified a conquered repugnance." In moments like this,
as in much of its plan,
A Charmed Life
has all the deadly charm of
Miss McCarthy's glittering intelligence, but it hardly ever comes to that
life which is essential to a novel of this kind.
Mr. Mailer's
Th e Deer Park
is also clearly the work of a talented
writer.
It
brings a young pilot back from Korea to do a stretch at
Desert D'Or, a place not unlike Palm Springs. It starts out like a fine
novel of manners with a sharp-eyed, sardonic account of Desert D'Or
and its Hollywood characters. Perhaps Mr. Mailer's studio head, Herman
Teppis, seems too obviously caricatured (but what can you do to make
plausible in fiction characters who are so fantastic in fact), but people
like Collie Munshin, Mr. Teppis' son-in-law and second in command,
are completely realized people. Mr. Mailer adds to this comed y of man–
ners a good deal of less serious journalism such as a McCarthyite attack
on his director, Eitel, in which Eitel answers the Senator with a courage
and brilliance which, if implausible, is a thoroughly satisfying realization
of the day dream all of us have had.
Gradually, however, it becomes clear that Mr. Mailer is writing,
side by side with his comedy of manners, another book completely incon–
gruous with it in tone and third-rate in conception. This book aims at
profound tragedy and achieves a gruesome sentimentality of the kind
usually associated with the Gothic novel. The narrator turns out to be
an orphan, psychologically lost, who found community with his fellow
pilots in Korea until it came over him that they were burning orphans;
as the night the day, it followed that he became temporarily impotent.
