38b
PARTISAN REVIEW
true interest in anything but self. For them sex has become a testing–
ground of the self: they rate one another on their abilities
in
bed,
and the reward of making love is not so much erotic satisfaction or
spiritual intimacy as a sense of triumph at being considered "good."
Mailer's attitude toward all this-I mean the attitude built into his
tone and his emphases-is very tricky. There is an unmistakable note
of shocked disapproval at many of the things he is describing, yet
he insists on treating them with the respect due a major fact of ex–
perience. What follows from that respect is a highly disciplined re–
fusal to dismiss the "decadent" narcissistic sexuality of his charac–
ters either as immoral or (what comes to the same thing) immature,
either .as sinful or unhealthy. It would be difficult to exaggerate the
originality of this approach, for it is almost impossible to think of
another serious American novelist who has even so much as at–
tempted to study contemporary sexual life on its own terms, let alone
one who has brought to the subject anything resembling Mailer's
readiness to find the organizing principle, the principle of meaning,
that may be implicit in these terms.
The Deer Park
takes place largely in Desert d'Or, the favorite
resort of the Hollywood movie colony, and it centers mainly on
Charles Francis Eitel, a famous and very talented director who has
been blacklisted for refusing to cooperate with a Congressional in–
vestigating committee and who, after holding out for a whole year
against all the pressure to capitulate, finally collapses and gives in.
This, of course, is the standard Mailer situation-the rebellious indi–
vidual crushed by the powers that be-but we do not have to read
very far into the novel before we realize that Mailer's view of the
nature of the conflict has changed considerably since
The Naked
and the Dead.
Hearn and Valsen were defeated in a contest against
a hopelessly strong adversary; it is not, however, the strength of his
adversaries that defeats Eitel. The two producers Teppis and Munshin
are formidable enough in their own way but they are also-what Cum–
mings and Croft could never be-figures of comedy and objects of
ridicule. For the first time in Mailer, then, victory over the system
has become possible to those who can see through it and who are suf–
ficiently brave to act on what they see. Eitel, a sensitive and intelli–
gent man, understands the secret of the system quite as well as the
two characters in the novel who succeed
in
overcoming it-the nar–
rator Sergius and the diabolical young pimp Marion Faye-but he
