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387
fails because he lacks the courage to disregard "all the power of good
manners, good morals, the fear of germs, and the sense of sin," and
to turn himself into a complete and ruthless egoist.
Sergius and Marion are thus the natural heroes of the world
of
The Deer Park,
as Cummings and Croft were the natural heroes
of
The Naked and the Dead,
and since Mailer is aware of this, there
is no need for him to wrench our sympathies in a direction that the
novel itself refuses to support. He does, however, make several posi–
tive assertions about Sergius and Marion that are as unwarranted
aesthetically as the negative assertions made in
The Naked and the
Dead
about Cummings and Croft. It is impossible, for example, to
believe that the Sergius we see moving around in
The Deer Park
could ever have developed into the author of this novel.* Not only
is he simple-minded, unimaginative, affected, and basically sentimen–
tal, but (what is perhaps more to the point) utterly dismissing in his
view of other people. When Eitel, who has been his good friend,
finally capitulates to Teppis and Munshin and the Committee, Sergius
cuts him off brutally-he has failed and is therefore entitled to no
further consideration. There is no question that this is the final judg–
ment Mailer himself passes on Eitel, but it is only a final judgment
and it is qualified and complicated by the rich, full picture we get
of the process that brought Eitel to the painfully sorry pass in which
we see him in the last chapter of the novel. Now it is hard to credit
that the man who could respond so insensitively to his friend's failure
would ever have been able to summon up the subtlety and the in–
sight to understand how a failure of this sort comes about. Nor
could such a man conceivably have produced the account of Eitel's
affair with Elena, where every nuance in the progress of a vastly
complicated relationship is registered with a delicacy and a precision
that recall Proust himself. He would also have been incapable of the
brilliant comic portraits of Munshin and Teppis, which are so good
precisely because they are
not
dismissing-Mailer devastates the two
producers while allowing them their full due. Nothing we see of Ser–
gius in the novel could explain how he might have come to compose
the marvellous letter of self-justification that the drunken Elena sends
*
To forestall the obvious objection, I ought to explain that Sergius's role as
narrator is comparable not to Nick Carraway's in
The Great Gatsby
but to
Marcel's in Proust. Moreover, he is an active character in the story, one of
whose purposes is to explain why he rather than Eitel must be considered the
true artist.
