The Deer Park: A Play

by Norman Mailer

  “You see, she was so funny to me,” Elena would tell him, “she would take me when I was a kid and say, ‘If you don’t do nothing else, get off this goddamn street.’ But then, five minutes later, she’d slap me so hard I’d almost fall down. And sometimes when I wouldn’t do what they said, they would tell me that I wasn’t really their daughter, but that they had bought me from somebody, and they were going to send me back. Oh, it was bad, Charley.” As a child, Elena would cry silently while the mother and father yelled insults at one another. Her childhood had been spent listening to their jealous quarrels.

  Elena had had the courage to leave home before she was twenty, and she had moved into a furnished room, and from there, through the friends she had, girls who worked at Supreme, young unemployed actors, aging college boys who went to night school, Elena had learned to go bohemian, that was the word she used. So she had taken night courses, and studied dancing, and worked as a model in art schools and as a hat-check girl in restaurants with colored plastic tables and imitation wood-paneled walls. Then had come Collie, and a furnished apartment near the studio.

  Eitel would grow tender when he would think of her life. She had opened his sympathy in a way nobody had for years. She had come out of nothing, and with such pain, such waste, such backward looks. Even now, though she had not seen her family ten times in the last six years, she was always thinking about them. She had an aunt who sent her all the news. That was the only tie, and Elena always answered with long letters, eager to hear that this relative was married, that cousin was sick, her brother was trying to get on the police force, her sister was studying to be a nurse; Elena told him these items about people he would never see. She could not go back to her family—that was the short of it. They would take her, but she did not want to pay the price. The last time she had visited her parents, they had found nothing to say to one another and had sat down to dinner. In the middle of the meal her parents had started to yell at her for the way she lived, and Elena fled the house.

  Now, she was Eitel’s responsibility, without family and without friends. Collie had taken care to wean her from everybody she knew, and for that matter Elena made friends poorly. If she could chat easily with Eitel, often going on like a child from one subject to the next, she was stiff in company the few times they went out. But Eitel hardly cared these days what people were saying about him, and they were not invited out that much. Three days after Elena moved in, the gossip column of the weekly sheet in the resort had an item:

  What’s this we hear about Red-tainted Charley Eitel doing a boudoir Pygmalion with the former protégée of a certain extra-but-big producer???

  Whether it was coincidence or not, he was asked about this time not to come to the Yacht Club any more, and I could measure the meaning of that by the way Lulu would go into a fury every time I visited them. Eitel only laughed when I told him. “Deep-down, Lulu’s admiring you,” he said with a grin. “Tell her she’s welcome to come over.”

  That was the night he told me his theory, and although I do not want to go into theory, maybe it is a part of character. I could write it today as he said it, and I think in all modesty I could even add a complexity or two, but this is partly a novel of how I felt at the time, and so I paraphrase as I heard it then, for it would take too long the other way. Eitel made references to famous people and famous books I never heard about until that evening although I have gotten around to reading them since, but the core of Eitel’s theory was that people had a buried nature—“the noble savage” he called it—which was changed and whipped and trained by everything in life until it was almost dead. Yet if people were lucky and if they were brave, sometimes they would find a mate with the same buried nature and that could make them happy and strong. At least relatively so. There were so many things in the way, and if everybody had a buried nature, well everybody also had a snob, and the snob was usually stronger. The snob could be a tyrant to buried nature.

  Meanwhile, the days passed quietly, and the nights followed one another with the lamp on the bed table throwing a golden light. Eitel was making the trip he had begun so many times and quit as often and was now making again. For he thought that Elena was soft, she was tender, she was proud when they made love, and she was more real to him as a woman who had come from a fantasy than as a girl with a history. The act was now quiet to them, it was tender—that was the emotion he felt over and over—their first nights together which he had thought so extraordinary seemed like no more than a good hour in a gymnasium compared to what they had now. And Eitel felt changes in his body race beyond the changes in his mind, as though all those nerves and organs which he had tired almost to death were coming back to life, carrying his mind in their path, as if Elena were not only his woman but his balm. He had the hope that he would keep this knowledge of her, that the old snob would not come back to torture him with her little faults, her ignorance, her inability to be anything but his mate. He would stay with her in his house, he would refresh himself, he would do the work which had to be done, and then he could go out to fight.

  Eitel loved these weeks. He felt as if he were in the good days of convalescence when appetite comes back and each day one is stronger. He would spend hours at a time on the patio of their bungalow, thinking, daydreaming, storing strength. And at night, full of the warmth of the sun, they would lie in bed, delighted with each other, caught each time with surprise at how they had forgotten how nice it was, every moment seeming more perfect than the one before. “Poor memory is so indispensable to passionate lovers,” Eitel would think with a smile.

  He felt at times that he lived in an opium dream, for nothing was very real to him except to wait for night, when easily, led by each new wish, waiting for the pleasure itself, they would come together, they would explore a little further, he would come back with more. Over and over he would remind himself that nothing lasted forever, and the tenderness he enjoyed so much might not be equally attractive to her—their first few nights together had been, after all, quite a different kind of thing—but Elena had a spectrum of fancies as complex as his own, and so he had the faith these days that they would continue to change together.

  They had their quarrels, of course, they had their troubles, but they enjoyed them. Elena had insisted that he let his cleaning woman go because she could do the housework. Pleased by her offer, knowing he should save money, Eitel had agreed. Only Elena was a poor housekeeper, and the messiness of the house irritated him. Their fights followed a predictable routine—making breakfast could end in a crisis—but for Eitel these fights were new, they were fun; in the past, arguments with his women had ended in chilly silence, and so he could enjoy these quarrels. He would criticize Elena for something, and she would lose her temper. She hated to be criticized.

  “You’re tired of me,” she would say, “you don’t love me.”

  “You don’t love me,” he would tell her. “The moment I hint you’re not perfect, you could take a butcher knife to me.”

  “I know. You think I’m not good enough for you. Remember that thing in the papers? You tell me I don’t love you because you don’t love me. It’s all right. I’ll leave.” And she would make a move to the door.

  “For God’s sake, come back,” he would command her, and five minutes later the scene would be forgotten. He understood. He knew that in back of all this, she did not believe in her happiness, she waited for it to end at a sudden blow, and judged the danger not by the quarrel but by the way he made up the quarrel. It was exhausting to him at times, it was annoying, he sometimes felt as if he had asked a subtle animal to share his house. Her concern for what he thought was so intense that he knew nothing to measure it by.

  They had only one jealous quarrel, and it was Eitel who started it. In a bar, they ran into Faye, and he sat at their table, he was pleasant to Elena, and as they were leaving she invited him to come over to their house. Eitel was fairly certain she was indifferent to Faye, but when they were home he accused her of wanting Marion, feelin
g all the while he talked that it was not true, that with her odd capacity to love, infidelities did not remain with her, not even the picture of them. Such pictures were left for Eitel, and he guarded them like a curator. If he had only one real treasure of his own, there were all the ones he had borrowed from Munshin. So Eitel forced himself to be hurt with the sense that to lose his jealousy was to lose his knowledge of how she could hurt him, blessed woman who could cause him pain after so many dozen who caused him nothing.

  It was not for this alone he loved the situation. He saw it now that he had one true love—those films which had flowered in his mind and never been made. In betraying that love, he had betrayed himself. Which led into another theory. The artist was always divided between his desire for power in the world and his desire for power over his work. With this girl it was impossible to thrive in the world except by his art, and for these weeks, these domestic weeks when all went well and the act of sitting beside her in the sun could give him a sense of strength and the confidence of liking himself, he would feel indifference to that world he had found so hard to leave. To quit it by the bottom—that was nice, it gave a feeling there was fruit to life. And he was warmed by the knowledge that he was good for Elena, that for the first time in was-it-forever? somebody improved by knowing him, someone grew, he did not spoil all he touched. So, he could see their affair hopefully. He would teach her all the small things, that was nothing. What was more important, she understood the rest. Eitel could see her becoming one day the wise mistress of his home, confident in herself and what she could give to him. So, at the end of fantasy, was his return to the world after all.

  He was always making references to the future, he would talk of what they would be doing together a year from now, two years from now. As if a slave to his tongue, he would listen helplessly while he wrapped the net around them. “Let’s go to Europe sometime, Elena,” he would say. “You’d love Europe.” She would nod. “You know when the picture is finished,” he would go on, “then maybe …”

  “Maybe what?”

  “I don’t offer you anything now, do I?”

  She would be upset. “I don’t think about it. Why do you?”

  “Because you’re a woman. You have to think of it.” He would be furious suddenly. “I know all these people, sitting around, waiting for us to break up.”

  “They’re squares. I don’t think about them.” Somewhere she had picked up the word, and it served for her shield. When he was jealous he was being square; when she was nothing she was at least not square. “If I left you because you wouldn’t marry me,” she said quietly, “it would mean I didn’t really love you.”

  He adored her for that. She did possess dignity. If he could make his film, he would do well by her. No matter what, he would treat her well. He promised that to himself.

  All this while, ideas formed for that movie with which he had teased himself so many years, and for the script which he had begun several times in the last months. There were nights when he would lie awake in the excitement of creating whole passages of dialogue, whole scenes, and he would hear Elena murmur in her sleep as he turned on the lamp and scribbled still another item into the notebook he kept on the bed table. The notebook was filling quickly now, and he had the hope that finally he was ready, he could succeed. With the pride that other people might feel for their children, Eitel was in love with his creation, impatient for all the months he had to work before he had a script, and then money, and then his production.

  One night his feeling for the picture came to such a point that he sat down and wrote an outline, pressing into it by the choice of his language all the enthusiasm he could no longer contain. And some of his doubts. He showed it to me the next time I came over to visit.

  I will try to sketch the tale of a modern saint. A man who has risen in the world by profiting on the troubles of others. He will have a famous television program where people are selected to tell their problems and he will give them the advice an audience wishes to hear. Through the seasons my hero will market sentiment and climb the heights of his own career while the anonymous ones, the faces which visit his program, stammer their laments and disasters about the parents who are incurably ill and the children who run away, the cripples who are dying for love and the lovers who spurn the cripples, and always there, and never named, will be the sensual envy of jealousy, the jealousy of the desperate. Jealousy for the missing husband, the lecherous wife, the fast sister, the weak brother. All of them, and my hero gives them advice on his enormous program and converts their suffering to theatrical material.

  I will have to make it clear that this is a fairy tale. For we will come to the moment when my hero cannot bear to listen to these stories any more. Rich through the suffering of others, that suffering swallows him. There is no more than a little door opened to his heart, but through that door floods the gulf of the world’s pain. My hero tries to give genuine advice to his supplicants, and thereby destroys the interest of his program. So, brouhaha, pressure from the front office, storms and alarums and excursions until the explosion and the program is gone. Only the smoke.

  Then my hero goes down to the bottom of the world and he wanders through the slums and the soup kitchens and the dreary cheap saloons, all the black shadow and gray light of the city where he has been king, trying to bring comfort to the people he sees and so saying the wrong comfort for he has taught dishonesty and they must turn on the honest man, until in the anger of his chain of defeats he turns on them, he destroys himself with some pathetic violence, his sainthood remembered only by the despairing round of his sins.

  If I work it well enough there’s a beauty beyond the picture, the beauty of a man who opens himself to an ocean of pity and there is drowned. Scathe the world with this mirror of itself, the hypocritical world, the brutal world. Gone is the idea that the evils of life exist so that man may destroy them.

  My favorable comment: If I do it well enough, the hero can be truly beautiful, and the picture a masterpiece.

  My adverse comment: One doesn’t usually make a masterpiece by beginning with that idea. Am I just playing with the enthusiastic emotions of the night?

  C.F.E.

  I gave it back to him and told him I thought I saw what he meant, and he nodded and said, “Of course in two pages it’s all a little ridiculous, but I do have a vision of it.” He laughed at the word. “Elena thinks it’s beautiful, but she’s prejudiced.”

  “Don’t joke about it,” Elena said from across the room.

  The devil in Eitel pushed him a little further. “Do you know, Sergius,” he said with one of his ambiguous smiles, “Elena thinks I have you in mind as the model for this improbable hero of mine.”

  “Now, keep quiet,” Elena said, not looking in my direction.

  “Listen, Charles Francis,” I said, pretending to be indignant, “I’d pose for a weight-lifter’s magazine before I’d model for your hero. What a future for me!”

  We all laughed, and I kept my eye on Elena, beginning to think for the first time that Eitel might have more of a woman on his hands than he would always be ready to realize. Though we had never made much about it, Elena and I liked each other, we had things in common—my first girl friend had been a Greek and her father had owned a fly-specked hash-house. So before two minutes went by, I was not surprised that Elena’s eyes met mine. We laughed in private, just the two of us, while Eitel looked puzzled. I think that was the moment Elena and I made an instinctive agreement that we would be friendly about the little thing we felt and never go near one another, at least not so long as her life was running parallel to Eitel.

  “Let’s go over to that nice little bar,” Elena said to him.

  They had taken the habit of going to a little French bar a few doors from their house, and I would often find them there. It was a new place, and the only entertainment was accordion music. The musician was not very good, and yet I used to think that the melody of the accordion wound itself into their affair, its breathy
notes leaving the whisper of the bal musette: “Life is sad, life is gay, life is gay because life is sad,” soft as the music of an old song, and I believe it turned Eitel back on those movies he made when he was young. He was getting ready to begin work again. For a change, he was busy, he wrote letters to his business manager, calculated the money he still had left, and with a kind of pleasure at the modesty in which they lived, announced to Elena that possibly they would have enough for three more months. Afterward, he could sell his car and sell the mortgage on the bungalow. That much was left from fifteen years. Yet it did not leave him depressed.

  One night in his house with the accordion washing through the desert air, he showed for Elena and himself, on his own projector, a print in sixteen millimeter of one of his early films. It was very powerful, he felt; a picture about jobless people with the ideas of a young man and the enthusiasm of twenty years ago, but still it was so good that he knew why he had not looked at it in a long time, and while the camera and the actors went their short course, he watched with an aching heart, excited with the artist’s self-love for what he had done, suffering from the dull fear that he could never do it again, and yet caught by the sudden enthusiasm that he could do more, that he could do everything. And all the while he wondered at the young man who had made such a film. “I didn’t know a thing when I made those pictures,” he said to Elena, “and yet somehow I knew more. I wonder where it’s hiding in me.” Elena kissed him when the movie was done. “I love you,” she said. “You’ll do a wonderful strong movie like this again.” And Eitel, frightened beyond fright, knew his vacation was over, and he must begin again that script, that skeleton of an art work he had until now been unable to create.