BOO KS
103
The counterpart to Eitel, whose career gives us the word on politics,
is a Gothic satanist named Marion Faye. This Faye is a great reader of
books, earns his living as a pimp, and exercises what we are to believe
is his unsleeping, tragic religious sense by devising a sadistic sex life for
himself and trying to persuade a girl to commit suicide. He is also, of
course, given to a good deal of praying, in the vein of "Oh, God, have
mercy on Father Marion for he is a saint in Hell," which ends by making
a writer like Grahame Greene sound positively responsible.
All this Gothic extravagance appears to be meant quite seriously,
as does its central proposition, that happiness and the capacity for
emotion-love, affection, charity-are roughly proportional to the talent
for sexual gymnastics. Well-being for Mr. Mailer's characters is a life
of balls; tragedy the monkey mopes which fall between. The Deer Park
was the place where thc victims of Louis XV's lust were prepared for
his delectation. Perhaps Mr. Mailer means us to think of his Deer Park
as we think of Louis', but it is hard to believe for he treats several
of his characters as if he thought them fully human.
Perhaps the most disturbing tendency in these novels is the way
any amount of cleverness and intelligence combine in them to frustrate
life. All these writers are talen ted, yet they repeatedly fail to realize
their talent as fiction . With the exceptions of Mr. Powell and Mr.
Hartley, and in his strange way Mr. O'Brian, they are deeply infected,
the English with a blighting cleverness and the American with some
one or another abstract theory, so that they are botanizing, if not on
their mothers' graves, then on their imagined children's.
Arthur Mizener
ORWELL AS A MODERATE HERO
GEORGE ORWELl. By
J oh n Atkins. Unga r.
$4.50.
I t is only a few years since Orwell's death, but the amount
of criticism directed toward his work is already enormous. Each month
new articles appear; in England three critical biographies have been
published, and more are on the way. All of which is as it should be,
5ince Orwell is one of the few contemporary writers who really matter,
one of the few who have brought about a significant change in our in–
tellectual climate. Yet even as his reputation keeps growing and the
appreciations keep pouring out, one notices a curious shift of critical
