388
PARTISAN REVIEW
to Eitel after she has gone to live with Marion-that letter in which
a girl who has been universally snubbed and patronized because of
her social crudity suddenly bursts forth with astonishing power as
a woman of feeling and perception.
But if Sergius could not conceivably be the author of
The Deer
Park,
Eitel very easily could; what Mailer has done here is to endow
Sergius with Eitel's sensibility, just as he tries to endow Marion's
nihilism with grandiose theological significance. The reason, I think,
can be found in "The White Negro, " where Mailer tells us that the
nihilism of the Hipster is really a creative force. In Hip "incompa–
tibles have come to bed, the inner life and the violent life, the orgy
and the dream of love, the desire to murder and the desire to cre–
ate." Yet the curious thing is that the Hipster who "lives out, acts
out, follows the close call of his instinct as far as he dares," who
is
the herald of a revolution moving "backward toward being and the
secrets of human energy," and whose subversiveness takes the form
of a constant pursuit of immediate gratification-the curious thing
is
that this "adventurer" of the night is deeply suspicious of feeling
and mortally afraid of passion. The nihilism of Marion Faye, for
example, amounts to a rebellion
against
feeling, a kind of Nietzschean
repudiation of his "civilized" or Christian self. Everything he does
is done precisely because
it
is repugnant to him, and he believes that
"there is no pleasure greater than that obtained from a conquered
repugnance." He
is
not naturally cruel and therefore he forces him–
self to be hideously cruel; he is not naturally vicious and therefore
he cultivates the vices with the grimness of a hermit scourging him–
self in the desert. Similarly with Sergius, who bends all his efforts
toward the perfection of a style based on the suppression of spontane–
ous feeling: above all he wants to be
cool.
The irony is that with Sergius and Marion we are back again
to Hearn- and he is still trying to get by on style and an ideal of
personal integrity. It is much the same style and derives from much
the same source (the unavailability of radical political solutions),
but in the rank atmosphere of cold-war stalemate it has grown and
matured and begun to mistake itself for a portentously weighty phi–
losophy. At the time of the Korean war, when the apocalypse seemed
about to descend at any moment, Hearn (who had been killed off
in
T he Naked and the Dead
before
his
newly formed resolve to throw
off his surly nihilism could be tested) reappeared in
Barbary Shore
