DIANA TRILLING
33
was far from turning out as he must have hoped. She seemed not to
understand Mailer's concern with the theater. He had for some time
wanted to make his Hollywood novel,
The Deer Park,
into a play and
expectably he inquired of Murdoch about her recent achievement in
bringing her fiction to the stage. What part, he asked, had she herself
had in transforming
A Severed Head
into a play? Was it she who had
done most of the dramatization or had this been the work of
J.
B.
Priestley, her collaborator? The tone of his inquiry was entirely
respectful. It was clear, if only to me, that he was merely looking for
information which might be useful to him in his own attempt to write
for the theater. But Murdoch apparently found his questions intrusive
and even impertinent. She answered him so cuttingly that at last he
turned to me, grinning but red-faced, and drew a finger across his throat.
His was the severed head.
But rescue was not yet to be his. Returning to his conversational
duty, he quit the subject of playwriting, only to plunge into the yet
darker pit of philosophy. When Mailer had spoken to Murdoch of the
theater, her rebuff had been unwarrantedly harsh. Now, with consider–
ably more justification, the annihilation was total. Mailer's quixotic fic–
tional representation of the human .condition might merit critical disap–
proval but in the wide range of his work he had regularly demonstrated
his capacity to master various fields of technical learning.
It
required no
special training in philosophy, however, to be aware of his
miscomprehension of Existentialism, a philosophical doctrine to which
he made frequent reference in his writing. Repeatedly in his work he
used the word "existential" when he had it in mind to indicate that
something was actual or pertained to his experience. Iris Murdoch
taught philosophy and had written a definitive book on Existentialism.
As I overheard Mailer at my table moving ever more inescapably to his
philosophical doom, I wished that I could warn him: Stay off that
subject! He at last realized his mistake. He was manly in defeat. "I give
up," he announced to Murdoch. "You're the champ!"
Dinner over, I was finally able to bring Mailer and Goronwy to–
gether in the sitting room. They seemed to like each other at once: each
must instinctively have perceived in the other the hard core of ven–
turousness which lay beneath the surface of his social amiability. I suspect
that each of them sensed of the other that he had lived, and perhaps still
lived, at what Mailer so admiringly calls the cutting edge of experience.
For the remainder of the evening, the two men sat apart from the rest
of us, talking prodigiously and drinking prodigiously. Except for a slight
thickening of their laughter and a glistening on the brow, neither of
