https://projectmailer.net/api.php?action=feedcontributions&user=Klcrawford&feedformat=atomProject Mailer - User contributions [en]2024-03-29T12:32:04ZUser contributionsMediaWiki 1.39.0https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=User:Klcrawford&diff=13027User:Klcrawford2021-03-01T17:01:02Z<p>Klcrawford: </p>
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<div>Hello, my name is Kari ('''Klcrawford''') and I'm from [[Chicago]]. I am currently a student and finishing my IDS degree at MGA. ''I love cooking, language learning (Hindi & Odia), and spending time with my fiancé and our two dachshunds: Dexter & Bella.'' I am excited to learn how to better edit here on [[Wikipedia]].</div>Klcrawfordhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/Angst,_Authorship,_Critics:_%E2%80%9CThe_Snows_of_Kilimanjaro,%E2%80%9D_%E2%80%9CThe_Crack-Up,%E2%80%9D_Advertisements_for_Myself&diff=13026The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself2021-03-01T16:58:39Z<p>Klcrawford: Fixed minor spelling, spacing, and punctuation errors.</p>
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<div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” ''Advertisements for Myself''}} __NOTOC__<br />
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{{Byline|last=Vince|first=Raymond M.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13vin|abstract=Mailer, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald face personal and cultural angst. Despite critical disapproval at the time, the works use counterfactuals and aesthetic distance to mark “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” Vladimir Nabokov suggests that we possess “only words to play with.” Using such frail and fallible words, these writers transformed their personal angst into great art, creating works that—like Mount Kilimanjaro—endure.|note=An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Seventeenth Norman Mailer Conference at Wilkes University, Pennsylvania, 10–12 October, 2019.}}<br />
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{{dc|dc=I|t is not easy being a great writer.}} Nor is it easy—as various members of Norman Mailer’s family have testified—living with a great writer. The vocation of the serious author involves, along with a multitude of passions and perspectives, a good deal of ''angst''. In using the term ''angst'', I mean a deep sense of existential dread, but more particularly a peculiar experience of alienation that may be inseparable—it has been argued—from twentieth-century authorship. Hilary Justice has described a kind of “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} experienced both by Mailer and Hemingway, and their differing responses to that alienation.{{efn|In arguing her claim, Hilary Justice compares Hemingway’s ''Death in the Afternoon'' (1932) with Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959), using the phrase “authorship and alienation.” This suggested to me the theme of writer/author alienation, but I decided to use instead Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), published four years later, and to add Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” (1936). It seemed to me that “Snows” is a more successful work than ''Death in the Afternoon'', and was also published the same year as Fitzgerald’s articles. All three works, I believe, reveal this writer/author alienation, but I decided to use as my title “Angst, Authorship, and the Critics” to highlight other factors. The article by Justice, however, was the primary catalyst for my paper.}}<br />
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{{quote|Hemingway saw this alienation as a paradox and sought to eliminate it through force of will and pedantry. Mailer, having learned from Hemingway (and writing not as a Modernist but Postmodernist), embraced the paradox and gave it center stage. . . . Their future success as novelists (which would in both cases be uneven) would depend for the remainder of their careers on how successfully each negotiated the inescapable alienation of writer from author that was intrinsic to mid-twentieth-century American authorship.{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=230}} }}<br />
<br />
Her description of Mailer as one who “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage” sounds familiar to those of us who value and teach his work. The phrase brings us face to face with the complex relationship between Mailer’s fiction and nonfiction, and between the writer and the public figure. Few contemporary writers have “embraced the paradox” as much as Mailer, but this “writer/author alienation”{{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}} would seem to be common to many twentieth-century authors. My conviction is that these three authors—Norman Mailer (1923–2007), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)—in struggling with that alienation, reveal a profound experience of angst, an angst that was both personal and cultural. Their literary responses were very different, as we shall see, but each writer was able to find a degree of aesthetic distance that transformed that angst into art.<br />
<br />
To illustrate this claim, I want to compare Mailer’s genre-bending work ''Advertisements for Myself'' (1959) with Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936) and Fitzgerald’s three essays known as “The Crack Up” (1936). There are some interesting parallels to note. In career arc, each writer had published about three major works—one of which now has classic status. In age, each man was between 36 and 39 years old. In their public role as authors, each felt challenged and embattled by the critics. In addition, these two historical moments—1936 amid the Great Depression and 1959 a decade or so into the Cold War—portray an America experiencing great uncertainty and on the cusp of enormous change. Personally and culturally, there was plenty of angst going round.<br />
<br />
===Hemingway and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936)===<br />
In his short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” Hemingway began his long search for what Rose Marie Burwell has called “a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist,”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|p=1}} a search that occupied him to the end of his life.{{efn|Hemingway’s long search for a “reflexive vision” culminated in the four works that he worked on until the end of his life but could not complete. Eventually, in various edited forms, they were published posthumously. “Together these four narratives form a serial sequence that was at times consciously modeled on Proust’s ''Remembrance of Things Past''. . . . In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.”{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1–2}} }} The story tells of Harry, dying on the African plain of gangrene, arguing bitterly with his wife, Helen. With regret, he remembers his life: what he had seen, what he remembered, and what he had not written.<br />
<br />
{{quote|He had seen the world change; not just the events; although he had seen many of them and had watched the people, but he had seen the subtler change and he could remember how people were at different times. He had been in it and he had watched it and his duty was to write of it; but now he never would.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=17}} }}<br />
<br />
“Snows” is a complex and beautifully told story, certainly one of Hemingway’s best. The structure, however, seems fragmented and the tone is dark.{{efn|Kenneth Johnston suggests that Hemingway wrote the story “to exorcise his guilt feelings for having neglected his serious writing.”{{sfn|Johnston|1984|p=223}} He reminds us that Hemingway had published no novel since ''A Farewell to Arms'' (1929) and not much short fiction. The critics were not kind.}} So, what is happening? This story is a tale not of what is but of ''what might have been''. To use Jennifer Harding’s useful term, the story is all about ''counterfactuals''.<br />
<br />
{{quote|The central theme of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” I believe, is the exploration of unrealized alternatives and the coincident judgments of these alternatives by characters, narrator, and implied author. The explorations of “what might have been”—which appear in some form in every section of “Snows”—unite the story’s fragments and provide the key to its total thematic effect, inviting the reader to participate in the process of judgment.{{sfn|Harding|2011|pp=21–22}} }}<br />
<br />
In 1933, Hemingway was living in Key West, Florida. Michael Reynolds tells us that he “was in a period of reassessment, melancholy and morose . . .”{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} He felt battered by the critics and preoccupied with death. It was the middle of the Great Depression. Fascists and Nazis were on the march, and another cataclysmic War seemed imminent. As Hemingway was working on what would become “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” the first two of Fitzgerald’s three “Crack-Up” essays appeared in ''Esquire''. Reading them, Hemingway was “depressed and appalled,” partly because—rightly or wrongly—he believed Scott was alluding not only to his own breakdown but also to Hemingway’s “suicidal gloom”.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|p=222}} True or not, Hemingway would have his revenge.{{efn|Angry because of Fitzgerald’s allusions to his own “suicidal gloom,” Hemingway mocks Fitzgerald in several places in both “Snows” and “Francis Macomber,” even after his editors asked him to tone down the attacks.}} Even so, the “Crack-Up” articles may have been the catalyst that Hemingway needed to write this masterpiece. Reynolds continues the story,<br />
<br />
{{quote|In April of 1936, shortly after reading Fitzgerald’s third instalment in ''Esquire'', Ernest finished his story of the dying writer in disrepair, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” in which Harry berates himself for the same kinds of failure that haunt Fitzgerald: squandering talent which never creates the fiction of which it was capable. . . . The result is a collection of short stories inside of a short story about a writer who failed his talent by not writing these very stories.{{sfn|Reynolds|1997|pp=222–223}} }}<br />
<br />
The larger setting is Africa the continent described as the Cradle of Mankind. The veneer of civilization is removed, human illusions stripped away. The story is told with a simplicity and universality reminiscent of the parables of Jesus in the New Testament. As was his wont, Hemingway uses several natural symbols, emerging spontaneously it seems from the setting—plain and mountain, hyena and leopard, heat and snow, symbols that Carlos Baker has well described.{{efn|“The story is technically distinguished by the operation of several natural symbols. These are non-literary images, as always in Hemingway, and they have been carefully selected so as to be in complete psychological conformity with the locale and the dramatic situation. . . . Like the death symbol, the image for immortality arises ‘naturally’ out of the geography and psychology of the situation.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|pp=193–194}} }} Hemingway uses these symbols to portray a series of contrasts. The hot, humid plain where Harry receives his death-wound is contrasted with the cold, pure summit of Kilimanjaro. The “evil-smelling emptiness” represented by the hyena{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=15}} is juxtaposed with “the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=3}} found near the summit—a contrast to which we shall return.<br />
<br />
The immediate setting is the African plain. The plain is the dwelling place of mankind, the natural landscape of human mortality, the stage upon which each of us faces life’s challenges. Inevitably, it is also a stage where each must face death. Carlos Baker reminds us that Hemingway was a master of “cultural synecdoche,”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}} so it may not be too farfetched to see in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” a retelling of the Garden of Eden parable—with a new Adam and Eve, and a new Fall from innocence.{{efn|“He was . . . also beginning to attack the problem of cultural synecdoche, the means by which the novelist, presenting and evaluating the things he has known, summarizes dramatically the moral predicament of his time.”{{Sfn|Baker|1972|p=206}}}} In “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—a story that appears ''quantum-entangled'' with “Snows,” the hunter Robert Wilson quotes Shakespeare’s ''Henry IV, Part II'', “we owe God a death and let it go which way it will, he that dies this year is quit for the next.”{{sfn|Baker|1972|p=178}}{{efn|There is some debate about whether Hemingway is being ironic or serious in using this Shakespeare quote. The young Hemingway evidently first heard it from his friend Chink Dorman Smith during the Great War.{{sfn|McKena|Peterson|1981|p=84}} }} For both Harry and Francis, this would be the year. <br />
<br />
How do we read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” meaning not only the title but the controlling image of the story? Sometimes, we may underestimate the crucial role of ''place'' in Hemingway’s work, what his character Colonel Cantwell called the “accidents of terrain.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=325}} Here is Gerald Kennedy’s helpful summary,<br />
<br />
{{quote|As a writer, Hemingway was of course intensely interested in human conflicts and challenges, but he perceived in the physical order an ultimate, irreducible truth that he strove to capture. He understood how deeply “accidents of terrain” had shaped his work and how important “dreams of places” were to the construction of his stories and novels. As suggested by “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” that most geographical of his fictions, he also recognized that place is the organizing principle of memory and so conceived the last reveries of Harry, the dying writer, as a series of topographical visions. To the end, doing country (or doing city) remained arguably the crux of Hemingway’s poetics, the generative principle of narrative itself.{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|pp=328-329}} }}<br />
<br />
Kennedy perceives that in Hemingway “place is the organizing principle of memory.”{{sfn|Kennedy|1999|p=328}} This claim rings true: we may think of the title and epigraph for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) or we could reflect on the archetypal nature of so many settings in Hemingway’s work.{{efn|To take just the ten stories in the {{harvtxt|Hemingway|2003}}, the settings are Safari, Café, Hospital, Hunt, Hospital, Café, War, Fight, and Safari. Each setting suggests by synecdoche that life is a safari, or a hospital or a café at night, etc.}} We might think<br />
about the complex relationship between inner and outer landscapes, remembering Mailer’s poignant description of Hemingway, that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}}{{efn|Mailer, in his 1963 essay, “Punching Papa,” said that the truth of Hemingway’s “long odyssey” was that his “inner landscape was a nightmare.”{{sfn|Mailer|2013|p=170}} Maybe it was, but the relationship between inner and outer landscapes—for any of us—is a complex one. We might assume that “inner landscape” is merely metaphorical, representing our psyche as some kind of physical space—a plain, a mountain, a house. However, the word landscape is itself metaphorical—whether inner or outer. The ''OED'' calls landscape “a picture representing natural inland scenery,” contrasting it with seascape. In other words, landscape is a “picture” that is always being created and shaped by the human subject.}} Maybe it was. It needs to be said, however, that whenever we encounter landscape, it is always as pictured through our senses, as ''refracted'' through our own perspective, as recreated from our own memories.<br />
<br />
So Kennedy writes of Harry’s “topographical visions” in “Snows.” These are a series of five vignettes, printed in italic type, describing places, people, events, sensory impressions, hints and allusions that represent “what might have been.” They do not yet exist as stories, as developed plots and narratives. They are merely the ''possibility'' of a story. They exist only in Harry’s fevered imagination—they are the thoughts of a dying man. Containing the raw material for a dozen stories, all remain unwritten.<br />
<br />
In other words, returning to Harding’s term, these five vignettes printed in italics are ''counterfactuals'', one of three different sets in this story. But even the non-italic sections—the bitter arguments between Harry and Helen—also, deal with “what might have been.” Harry wonders—if I had taken better care of the initial wound, this would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Helen reasons—if we had never come to Africa, this death-wound would not have happened. But it ''did'' happen. Hemingway’s story is full of such counterfactuals. Indeed, it is as if Hemingway has written the whole story in the ''subjunctive mood'', written with an excess of content, with dozens of potential stories yet to be told. As told by the normally minimalist Hemingway, this “excess of content” seems unusual—at the very least.<br />
<br />
What of the story’s end? We discover that the ''subjunctive mood'' extends to the final act—and to the two endings. In the first ending, Harry is rescued from the African plain by Compton and flown past the snow-covered mountain of Kilimanjaro, “as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=27}} This we could call the “happy” ending—beloved of Hollywood and the Hallmark Channel. Ostensibly, the flight and the mountain could represent immortality. But, we ask, immortality for whom? Not for poor Harry, for just before this scene we read that “the weight went from his chest.”{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=25}} Does the story itself, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” possess a kind of immortality, one that is shared by its implied author, Ernest Hemingway? Perhaps it does.<br />
<br />
Then, with a jolt, we realize the truth. The triumphant flight past the pure white snows of Kilimanjaro is yet another “might have been” for poor Harry. The first ending, the “happy” ending, is abruptly followed by a second—where Helen discovers her husband’s lifeless body. After Harry’s fantasy ride to Kilimanjaro, the story ends in stone-cold naturalism, with the hyena’s uncanny cry and Helen’s beating heart.{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=28}}<br />
<br />
What is the significance of another animal, the leopard, mentioned at the beginning of the epigraph? Surely that—even at the point of death—this skilled hunter was still climbing, still searching for its prey. Ben Stoltzfus draws a contrast between Harry and the leopard:“The leopard near the summit is one of the objects in the chain of animal events, death, and sensory impressions that contributes to the particular emotion of the story. The epigraph states that no one has explained the presence of the leopard at that altitude, but Hemingway’s story is the answer to the riddle and it explains the cat’s presence.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Harry, by contrast, as a writer was neither climbing nor hunting. “Leopards hunt and they do what leopards do, whereas Harry, the would-be writer, does everything except write.”{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=224}} Both man and leopard die—as eventually do all living things—but they die for different reasons.<br />
<br />
How do we reconcile the two endings, the first of which, although printed in normal font, not italics, is, in reality, counterfactual in nature? Here again Harding is helpful.<br />
<br />
{{quote|By the end of the story, readers have not only learned what Helen and Harry regret but have also been supplied with an opportunity to judge Harry’s talent through the memories and thoughts conveyed in the italicized vignettes. The story ultimately privileges the counterfactual past, endorsing the notion that Harry ''should have written his stories''. Harry, the narrator, and the implied author all seem to agree on this point, and readers are led to share this evaluation as well. The false rescue ending encourages readers not only to understand Harry and Helen’s regrets but to experience a sense of disappointment for themselves.{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=32}} }}<br />
<br />
At this point, in 1936—and for while afterwards—Hemingway’s life was different from Harry’s. As both narrator and implied author, Hemingway recognizes the temptation that Harry represented, one that he would wrestle with until the end of his life. But in this story, at least—on any reading, a true masterpiece—Hemingway has learned his lesson from Harry’s fatal<br />
mistake.<br />
<br />
Rich in regret and counterfactuals, this story “flaunts the creative presence of an implied author who has made no such mistake—an author who has flirted with multiple narrative possibilities while maintaining a tight grip on the story’s ultimate trajectory,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} right up to the alternative endings. Hemingway feared Harry’s fate, yet in this story, he brilliantly demonstrated his “own final control of the text.”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway had bared his soul, revealing his ''angst''. Unlike Fitzgerald, he employed a complex ''fictive'' form to do so.<br />
<br />
Sadly, however, his “final control of the text,”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} as illustrated in “Snows,” would not be the final act. Towards the end of his life, as serious physical illness, depression, and alcohol abuse took over, Hemingway would begin to breakdown, finally in 1961 taking his own life. Burwell has poignantly described this disintegration, linking Hemingway’s complex narrative style with the metaphor he himself used to describe his task as an author—that of ''the iceberg''. Burwell concludes with this description of the later postwar Hemingway,<br />
<br />
{{quote|Working throughout the postwar years at the four novels he could not bring to closure, Hemingway examined the life of the creative male from childhood through late middle age. He unified the narrative by invoking memory in a consciously Proustian manner, by twinning painters and writers as characters; by writing recurrently of the loss or destruction of the writer’s manuscripts by his wife, and by focusing intensely on the growth and decline of the artist. Always Hemingway was aware that the narratives were very personal; and sometime he would speculate that they could not be published while he was alive. . . . In the final months of his life Hemingway discovered that in venturing from the old narrative forms which had protected him from introspection, he had descended into the iceberg.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=4-5}} }}<br />
<br />
So it was that losing his “final control of the text”{{sfn|Harding|2011|p=33}} and realizing his inability to write as he had done in an earlier period, experiencing serious physical and psychic pain, depression, and paranoia, Hemingway<br />
would on July 2, 1961, take his own life. But whatever his personal demons and however we understand his tragic end, it is Hemingway’s commitment to his art that should have the last word, and for which he will be remembered. For, as Ben Stoltzfus has written,<br />
<br />
{{quote|The one constant in his life was fidelity to writing and the subordination of almost everything else to it. When it comes to art, he is an authentic and original genius, and we admire the discipline that enabled him to create his masterpieces. . . . That is Hemingway’s essence, a Nobel laureate who altered the direction of twentieth-century writing.{{sfn|Stoltzfus|2005|p=218}} }}<br />
<br />
=== Fitzgerald and “The Crack-Up” Essays (1936) ===<br />
Fitzgerald’s three revealing ''Esquire'' essays, “The Crack-up,” were not well received in 1936. Hemingway was “appalled,” and his reaction was typical. When, after Fitzgerald’s death, the larger 1945 book, ''The Crack-Up'', appeared, critics and contemporaries were more respectful. This very useful collection, edited by Edmund Wilson, contains—along with the three 1936 “The Crack-Up” essays—some of Fitzgerald’s other significant essays, such as “Echoes of the Jazz Age” (1930), “My Lost City” (1932), and “Early Success” (1937), his Notebooks, letters to and from friends, and much more. His essays in particular present an interesting “autobiographical sequence.” Wilson points out in a preliminary Note,<br />
<br />
{{quote|The following pieces have been selected from the articles written by F. Scott Fitzgerald between 1930 and 1937. They make an autobiographical sequence which vividly puts on record his state of mind and his point of view during the later years of his life.{{sfn|Wilson|1993|p=11}} }}<br />
<br />
This additional material shed a good deal of light on the original “The Crack-Up” articles, revealing, as Wilson claims, “his state of mind.” Apart from occasional quotations from these other essays, however, my focus here is mainly on the 1936 essays. My intention is to highlight ''a particular moment''—the year 1936—and how both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in literary terms responded to the personal and cultural stresses they were experiencing. But there is no doubt that ''The Crack-Up'' collection, as a whole, paints a more complete picture of Fitzgerald’s state of mind, as well as—more importantly—his literary task.<br />
<br />
So what was the response to the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles in ''Esquire''? Scott Donaldson, writing in 2002, says, “Above all, and despite their evasions, one is never in doubt in reading them that they come from the heart, that they convey the very real depths of the author’s depression.”{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Often in his work, Fitzgerald seems to express a sense of ''angst'', but much of that angst seems focused in the three “Crack-Up” essays appearing in 1936. Are these essays merely an expression of “the author’s depression,” as Donaldson has said?{{sfn|Donaldson|2002|p=179}} Is there little else?<br />
<br />
Patricia Hampl would go further, claiming that “The Crack-up” should be recognized as signaling “a fundamental change in American consciousness.” She sees these essays as a “sharp pivot,” a change in narrative style that was a forerunner of American autobiographical writing:<br />
<br />
{{quote|The publication of the ‘Crack-Up’ essays looks now like a sharp pivot, marking a fundamental change in American consciousness and therefore in narrative voice, an evident moment when the center of authorial gravity shifted from the ‘omniscience’ afforded by fiction’s third person to the presumption (accurate or not) of greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.’{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} }}<br />
<br />
We realize that such self-disclosure was rare in the 1930s, especially from a man. The language appeared antithetical to contemporary expectations of masculinity—expectations shaped by the hard-boiled novels of Raymond Chandler, the film persona of Humphrey Bogart, and the celebrity legends of Hemingway himself. In such a ''macho'' culture, it is not surprising that many were embarrassed by Fitzgerald’s revelations. After all, Fitzgerald had not hidden behind a fictional voice such as Harry’s; he had not used Joseph Conrad’s complex double framing device found in ''Heart of Darkness'' (1912); he had not written under a ''nom de plume'' as George Eliot had done.{{efn|“For George Eliot, the act of novelistic good faith is contained in the seventeenth chapter [of Adam Bede], where she moves ahead in “time” to tell the reader of a recent discussion she has had with Adam Bede, long after the events of the novel. Thus she brings Adam out of the story, making him less totally defined by the frame of the plot, even while she also recalls to us her own role in the creation and articulation of the novel’s elements, not as Mary Ann Evans but as ‘George Eliot,’ the novelist.”{{sfn|Braudy|1981|p=628}} }} Yet, despite the suspicion and derision of contemporaries and critics, Fitzgerald was creating something new.<br />
<br />
We can also recognize that this new confessional voice is as much evasion as revelation. In Fitzgerald’s self-disclosure, there was much literary art, and a heavy dose of self-deception. At times, as writers or readers, are we all not guilty of such self-deception? As T.S. Eliot reminds us, “our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}“Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.”{{sfn|Eliot|1933|p=155}}. It is interesting, therefore, that the opening sentences of the first essay are actually in second-person, not the supposed “greater authenticity provided by the first-person voice with all its limitations.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=108}} “Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big, sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another kind of blow that comes from within—that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Fitzgerald begins with the provocative claim, “Of course all life is a process of breaking down . . .”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} Following these introductory sentences, there comes the oft-quoted aphorism of Fitzgerald, “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=69}} There are, of course, many precedents for a first-person voice—confessional or otherwise.{{efn|As first-person precedents to Fitzgerald voice in “The Crack-Up,” Hampl mentions Whitman’s “Song of Myself ” (1855), Nick Carraway in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925), Hemingway’s Nick Adams, and “before that the narrators of ''Huckleberry Finn'' and ''Moby-Dick''.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=118}} }} It is also true that while ''something'' is being revealed, “often in a wry, self-deprecating style,”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} much more is being concealed. Fitzgerald makes no mention of his own alcoholism, his affair with a married woman, or of Zelda’s schizophrenia.{{efn|“Though he describes his psychological and spiritual breakdown, his utter collapse, often in a wry, self-deprecating style, he doesn’t spill many autobiographical beans. We don’t learn of his despair over his wife’s mental illness. He doesn’t divulge his bouts with drinking, his imprudent affair with a married woman, his money worries, his literary woes. Mother, father, those stock figures of personal narrative—never mentioned.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=104}} }} Rather telling omissions, one might say. In his 1980 article, Donaldson says, “As it stands, ‘The Crack-Up’ tells its truth only between the lines.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=182}} Indeed it does. But that is true of much of Modernist fiction and poetry, is it not?<br />
<br />
I said earlier that there was much ''literary art'' in Fitzgerald’s apparent self-disclosure in these essays. The “Crack-Up” confessions, while obviously related to a genuine experience of ''angst'' and breakdown at the time, possess a complex relationship to his literary creations to characters such as Jay Gatsby in ''The Great Gatsby'' (1925) or Dick Diver in ''Tender is the Night'' (1934). As with Mailer, the line between his fiction and nonfiction is a complex, contested border. In an interesting 2013 article in ''The Mailer Review'', comparing Fitzgerald, Mailer, and Dylan, Bob Batchelor writes,<br />
<br />
{{quote|Fitzgerald’s insight into Jay Gatsby revealed, according to critic Alfred Kazin, the author’s “tragic moodiness” and “a burst of self-understanding” that set the book apart from those of his 1920s contemporaries and writers ever since. . . . It took a special comprehension of the lives of the wealthy and the lives of ordinary people to create such a broad swath. . . . Kazin’s idea captures the strength and beauty of the novel and may actually reveal why it has such staying power. Fitzgerald, despite his claims of not really understanding Gatsby as he created him, desperately identified with the dreams the character espoused. He knew the pain of losing the girl and the joy in attaining her. {{sfn|Batchelor|2013|pp=76–77}} }}<br />
<br />
Scott Donaldson agrees with this general point. “It is true of Fitzgerald,” he writes, “not only that his characters are modeled on himself but that he sometimes becomes his characters after the fact.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}}{{efn|“Thus his retreat to Ashville, Tyron, Hendersonville in North Carolina during the two years of his personal depression virtually repeat Dick Diver’s drifting among the small towns of upstate New York. . . . He will now be ‘ a writer only,’ he announces in the last of the ‘Crack-Up’ articles, just as Dick Diver finally became only a doctor, no longer a scientist or entertainer or bon vivant.”{{sfn|Donaldson|1980|p=185}} }} Batchelor cites other critics who agree that Fitzgerald “virtually invented the confessional mode” of writing and that his own life seems to mirror his greatest artistic creations, characters such as Jay Gatsby.{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}}{{efn|Morris Dickstein discusses the author’s transformation from literary and celebrity prince to “representative man,” which led to him producing more “introspective” work. The result, Dickstein explains, was that the great novelist “virtually invented the confessional mode in American writing.”{{Sfn|Dickstein|2005|p=82}} Because of the “Crack-Up” essays in ''Esquire'', later writers felt free to explore the genre, including Norman Mailer in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Writing about Fitzgerald in late 1963, critic Malcolm Cowley assesses the author’s life as similar to one of his artistic creations, even greater than that perpetuated by Jay Gatsby. There is a certain duality, he concludes, between the study of Gatsby in high schools all over the nation and the author’s life becoming “a legend like that of Poe or even that of Davy Crockett.”{{sfn|Batchelor|2013|p=78}} }}<br />
<br />
It is also true that Fitzgerald is dealing with a profound sense of loss in “The Crack-Up” essays—whether we describe it as the loss of youth, innocence, naiveté or whatever. Moreover, that element of loss is characteristic of his best fiction: it is ''not'' restricted to the personal revelations of “The Crack-Up.” In a foreword to an anthology of Fitzgerald’s early short stories, Roxana Robinson writes:<br />
<br />
{{quote|What is more beautiful than the landscape of loss? What is more heartbreaking, more haunting, more romantic? F. Scott Fitzgerald saw the world as a place of unbearable beauty and unlimited glamour. He saw it as illuminated by the glory of the natural landscape, by the glitter of the people, and by the perilous, irresistible pull of love. He was a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}}}}<br />
<br />
Fitzgerald could write convincingly of such loss because he was such a perceptive ''chronicler'' of his age—in this respect, superior to Hemingway and certainly comparable to Mailer. His clear-sighted perspective is illuminated by his 1931 essay, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” where—looking back from the sobering vantage point of the Great Depression—he writes what could be the definitive ''post-mortem'' of the 1920s.<br />
<br />
{{quote|The Jazz Age had a wild youth and a heady middle age. . . . Finally skirts came down and everything was concealed. . . . It ended two years ago [1929], because the utter confidence which was its essential prop received an enormous jolt, and it didn’t take long for the flimsy structure to settle earthward. And after two years the Jazz Age seems as far away as the days before the War. It was borrowed time anyhow—the whole upper tenth of a nation living with the insouciance of grand ducs and the casualness of chorus girls.{{sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=21}} }}<br />
<br />
This wider perspective helps us to understand the standpoint of his 1936 “Crack-Up” essays. While Fitzgerald had appalled friends and critics alike, the essays did introduce an important confessional element into American narratives of the 1930’s. Certainly, their immediate source was Fitzgerald’s depression, his personal angst. But their larger themes—such as Robinson’s haunting “landscape of loss”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} or his own description of the Jazz Age—were grounded in his genius and passion as a writer. In other words, the line between the personal confessions of “The Crack-Up” and the fictive creations of Fitzgerald’s short stories and novels (including his essays on the Jazz Age, etc.) is not as obvious as Hemingway and others believed. His literary art, the ability to take his subjective ''angst'', his own perspective on the culture, and make it into objective art was there from early on. Bryant Mangum, for instance, sees this “artistic detachment” as beginning with his 1920 short story, “Benediction”:<br />
<br />
{{quote|With “Benediction,” Fitzgerald seems literally to have discovered the principle of artistic detachment or aesthetic distance, a distance that will lead in his most mature work to that often-cited quality that Malcolm Cowley labeled “double vision”—simply defined, the ability to participate emotionally in experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively.{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} }}<br />
<br />
In the 1936 “Crack-Up” articles, while the immediate ''angst'' is real and painful, Fitzgerald had not totally lost his “aesthetic distance” as a writer. It is true that the distance seems eclipsed, temporarily, by the deep stresses of 1936 and later. As he wrote in “Pasting it Together,” his second article, “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.”{{Sfn|Fitzgerald|1993|p=75}} However, as with Hemingway, Fitzgerald’s ''angst'' was an integral part of his humanity: it cannot be separated from his literary gift—a gift that was also his doom.<br />
<br />
In conclusion, the ''angst'' expressed in the “Crack-Up” articles was disturbing, so the shocked reaction of friends and critics was not totally unwarranted. However, most failed to recognize that there was a degree of “artistic detachment or aesthetic distance”{{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=xx}} even in his “laments.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}}{{efn|“But in the ‘Crack-Up’ essays he stopped in his personal and professional tracks, and described the dark night of his soul, against all advice and prudence. He wrote his lament.”{{sfn|Hampl|2012|p=110}} }} Today, with our contemporary understanding of memoir, confessional literature, and other creative nonfiction, we may recognize more clearly that aesthetic distance. We are able to see continuity between Fitzgerald’s self-creation in “The Crack-Up” and the creation of his fictive characters such as Jay Gatsby, Dick Diver, and others.<br />
<br />
It seems undeniable that Fitzgerald was indeed “a romantic, and the greatest of his writing is charged with feeling and haunted by a longing for something irretrievable.”{{sfn|Robinson|2005|p=xi}} But he was also a Modernist. We recognize that his peculiar genius was both to subjectively experience the ''angst'' and also—as an artist—to objectively analyze his experience, thereby creating art that was “charged with feeling.”<br />
<br />
===The Cultural Context of the 1930s===<br />
What is the cultural context for Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1930s? Do<br />
authors reflect the struggles of their age or simply their own struggles? We<br />
would answer both, surely. The economic and social angst of the 1930s—<br />
considerable on any metric—cannot easily be divorced from one person’s<br />
psychological angst. We remember that this was the middle of the Great Depression, and although the Great War was two decades previous, another<br />
greater War seemed increasingly inevitable.<br />
<br />
On a different level, the 18th Amendment had been repealed in December 1933, so alcohol was once more legal in America. Ironically, Hampl points out that, just as Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” articles were appearing, the first Alcoholics Anonymous groups were beginning to meet. There was no causal relationship, but as Hampl suggests, “no cultural change happens in a vacuum”, at the very least, there was “a shared landscape.” {{sfn|Hampl|2012|pp=108}} Through these AA groups, America was introduced to a new kind of secular confessional, a different kind of personal storytelling—one that nearly a century later is still very much with us.<sup>19</sup><br />
<br />
What of the phrase “nervous breakdown” and the metaphor “crack-up”? A useful article, “Nervous Breakdown in 20th-Century American Culture” by Megan Barke and others, shows how the term opens “an interesting window on pervasive anxieties” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=565}}. The phrase had been introduced in 1901 by Albert Adams in a “technical treatise, addressed to physicians,” but he used it with a decidedly “mechanistic emphasis.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568}} The article continues,<br />
<br />
{{quote|Adam’s specific physical arguments had little impact, but his term quickly added to the lexicon available to discuss nervous ailments. Attention to ‘shell shock’ in World War I provided an additional ingredient, and by the 1920s, along with continued use of neurasthenia and stress or strain, nervous breakdown had<br />
clearly become part of a standard American vocabulary. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=568|}} }}<br />
<br />
They suggest that earlier generations often masked their anxieties by more<br />
freely using opiates, but that particular escape from stress was increasingly<br />
blocked from the 1980s onward.<sup>20</sup> As we have said, there was plenty of angst<br />
going around. The term nervous breakdown “began to cover a wide range of definitions,” embracing “a multiplicity of symptoms." {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=569}} The very vagueness of the term no doubt increased its usefulness. While there were attempts to distinguish between mild and severe cases, such rational evaluations were not always successful: “Yet many descriptions of nervous breakdown belied this rational progression, insisting that the phenomenon always involved terrible pain: as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in ‘The<br />
Crack-Up,’ ‘Every act of life from the morning toothbrush to the friend at<br />
dinner had become an effort’.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=570}} <br />
<br />
Gradually, the usefulness of the term nervous breakdown—and the associated metaphor of a “crack-up”—diminished in American culture. In part, this was due to the impact of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, which increased understanding of the psychological effects of trauma on soldiers— and on their families. {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=577}} In part, this was also due to a new series of drugs, including tranquillizers and antidepressants, available by the 1950s. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association produced their first ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual''(DSM I). “Nervous breakdown,” the authors tell us, “was never listed.” {{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=578}} They conclude, “Nervous breakdown’s history and its continued currency suggest a fascinating undercurrent to American worries about worry in the 20th century.” {sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}<br />
<br />
It seems undeniable that both Hemingway and Fitzgerald suffered—severely at times—from what we have been calling angst. It is within that developing sense of dread—cultural “worries about worry."{{sfn|Barke|2002|pp=580}}—that we should place both “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up.” Our understanding of their pain as authors and as men, and the vocabulary we employ to describe it, has of course changed from the 1930s. But their ''angst'' remains—with dimensions that are literary, medical, psychological, and cultural.<br />
<br />
So how do we understand “Snows” and “The Crack-Up” today? Both authors were undergoing a significant and profound transformation—both in spirit and in the psyche. Donaldson suggests there had been an “alienation from self." {{sfn|Donaldson|1980|pp=184}}, which seems plausible. War and the Depression had brought vast amounts of suffering and loss into people’s lives. The actions taken by each author are clear. Fitzgerald commits to be “a writer only,” less the Jazz Age playboy.<sup>21</sup> Hemingway, for his part, decides he will not make Harry’s mistake: he will write the stories.<br />
<br />
Initially, it could appear that Hemingway’s response in “Snows” is more successful in narrative technique, less bound by the particular context of the 1930s, and more timeless as a literary work. That view seems plausible. However, by including Fitzgerald’s other essays from the 1930s to form a wider “autobiographical sequence,” {{sfn|Wilson|1993|pp=11}} his original 1936 articles reveal a mature perspective on that cultural context—the contradictions of America in the 1920s and 1930s—that goes beyond anything Hemingway could have written.<br />
<br />
So, despite differences in narrative form and intention, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Crack-Up” share a common landscape—that of authorial anxiety and cultural depression. Both works were written under personal stress, both are revealing, and both proved therapeutic for their authors.<sup>22</sup> To use a handy German phrase, the ''Sitz im Leben'' of both Hemingway and Fitzgerald in 1936 had far more similarity than either author was prepared to admit.<br />
<br />
=== MAILER AND ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF (1959) ===<br />
Two decades on, in 1959, in a genre-bending fusion of retrospective, self-creation, and future strategy, Mailer’s Advertisements appeared. Norman Mailer believed his task was “nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time” Advertisements.{{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=17}} This bold work would mark a new, controversial era in Mailer’s life and work. ''Advertisements'' has been described by David Castronovo as “an act of defiance—filled with tantrums and inflated rhetoric—but nevertheless a landmark in our literature of protest.'{{sfn|Castronovo|2003|PP=179}} From this moment onward, Mailer would never be “the modernist ''dues absconditus'' . . . vanishing into silence” {{sfn|Braudy|1981|pp=630}} as Leo Braudy has described Thomas Pynchon. Mailer must be both observer of and participant in his times, both author and actor. Mailer would embrace that dual role with enthusiasm.<br />
<br />
We have seen that Hilary Justice compared Hemingway and Mailer on the issue of “writer/author alienation.” Hemingway, she says, tried to overcome that alienation “through force of will,” whereas Mailer, writing as a Postmodernist, “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage." {{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=260}} Indeed he did. We realize, naturally, that Mailer’s postwar world of 1959 was very different from the world of the 1930s. This is evident in the brutal opening words of Mailer’s 1957 article, “The White Negro,” reprinted in ''Advertisements for Myself'' <sup>23</sup>: “Probably, we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camp and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years. . . . The Second World War presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=338}} Both Fitzgerald and Mailer sought to understand and record their times, more so perhaps than Hemingway.<sup>24</sup> Richard Foster describes the many similarities between “The Crack-Up” and Advertisements.<sup>25</sup> Mailer seems to agree, confessing toward the end of ''Advertisements for Myself'' that, “Fitzgerald was an indifferent caretaker of his talent, and I have been a cheap gambler with mine.” {{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=477}} Michael K. Glenday also sees the relationship between Fitzgerald and Mailer as close, claiming in his Mailer Review article that “Mailer saw Fitzgerald as seminal and exemplary.” {{sfn|Glenday|2012|pp=121}}<sup>26</sup><br />
<br />
There is, of course, much more in ''Advertisements for Myself''. Just as “Snows” had dozens of potential stories, so Mailer too has an excess of content. In structure and genre terms, Mailer was breaking new ground with ''Advertisements''. Its structure, Justice suggests, “. . . owes nothing to classical literary forms of Western canonical works,”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=266}} for Mailer’s purpose “was to confront alienation head-on.” {{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=266}} <sup>27</sup> Alex Hicks has suggested to me that “the big difference between ''Advertisements'' and the Hemingway and Fitzgerald stories is that the latter two are preponderantly diagnostic (if not post mortems) while ''Advertisements'' is aspirational and—as a narrative rather than compilation—constructive” (personal correspondence). <sup>28</sup> The fact that Mailer continued to write and publish for nearly six decades after ''Advertisements'' certainly supports that suggestion. While the writing process did not change that much as the twentieth century progressed, the vocation of the author did. More than many, Mailer realized that salient fact and acted upon it—first in his “The White Negro” (1957), then in ''Advertisements'' (1959), and later in ''The American Dream'' (1965) and beyond.<br />
<br />
The title of ''Advertisements for Myself'' seems to connect Mailer’s work to<br />
Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” the first poem in ''Leaves of Grass'' (1st Ed. 1855) a work that changed the direction of American poetry. Whitman “celebrated” a first-person poetic voice, creating himself as a kind of bard—or, in the Old English poetic tradition, a ''scop''. The poem opens thus,<br />
<br />
{{quote| I celebrate myself,<br><br />
And what I assume you shall assume,<br><br />
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.<br><br />
I loafe and invite my soul,<br><br />
I lean and loafe at my ease. . . . Observing a spear of summer grass<br><br />
(1st ed. 1855, lines 1– 5) }}<br />
<br />
It is important to realize that the “I” of the poem—the apparent hero—is not<br />
the same as Walt Whitman (1819–1892), even though a frontispiece in the 1855 First Edition of ''Leaves of Grass'' suggested the identification.<sup>29</sup> As Malcolm Cowley has written in his Introduction, “The hero as pictured in the frontispiece—this hero named ‘I’ or ‘Walt Whitman’ in the text—should not be confused with the Whitman of daily life. He is, as I said, a dramatized or idealized figure, and he is put forward as a representative American workingman, but one who prefers to loaf and invite his soul” (xv). Cowley argues that “Song of Myself” is “Whitman’s greatest work, perhaps his one completely realized work, and one of the great poems of modern times” (x).<br />
It is also, as many have seen, a significant forerunner to Mailer’s ''Advertisements for Myself''. Mailer would create other incarnations of such a “dramatized or idealized figure.”<br />
<br />
Mailer saw clearly the problem of writer/author alienation in the mid-twentieth-century. However, in contrast to Hemingway, he “embraced the paradox and gave it center stage.”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=206}} We can also see a contrast with the kind of heroes that Mailer creates in his writing, compared with the heroes of the earlier Modernist era. In an older article from the 1960s, Frederick J. Hoffman suggests that Mailer’s heroes, such as Sergius O’Shaugnessy, seem to be polar opposites to T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock. They act with passion, and they act without inhibitions.<br />
<br />
{{quote|Mailer’s writings explicitly state the terms of the modern revolt<br />
against conventional society. It is very different from past literary rebellions: it begins in the instinctual life, and it is free both<br />
from established conventions and ideological complications.<br />
Sergius O’Shaugnessy, Mailer’s favorite hero, as a personality,<br />
stands at the opposite pole from Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock. He<br />
acts independently of all the inhibitions which allowed Prufrock<br />
to postpone action; his major impulse is both to murder and to<br />
create, to express passion through instinctive acts. He is the<br />
“marginal ego,” the dislocated and “disaffiliated” self, who tries<br />
to make a way of life from the energy and strategy of pure rebellion.{{sfn|Hoffman|pp=12}} }}<br />
<br />
In a recent article, Alex Hicks has made a strong case that we should see Advertisements as Mailer’s Künstlerroman or artist-novel—similar in scope to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and other examples. His the- sis is “that Advertisements for Myself is better appreciated as a novelistic autobiography than as an anthology-like collection of writings,” and he finds support for this view from Bloom, Frye, Jonathan Lethem and many others (Advertisements). The quotation from Lethem is particularly powerful, “Advertisements for Myself is Mailer’s greatest book, simply because it frames the drama of the construction of this voice, the thrilling resurrection of his personality as his greatest asset after the public pratfalls accompanying his second and third novels”{{sfn|Lethem|2013|p=14}}. Lethem saw Mailer “in the late fifties to have become a radar detector for the onset of . . . the post-modern cultural condition generally”{{sfn|Lethem|2013|p=13}} I find the arguments of both Hicks and Lethem cogent and persuasive, but I do wonder if elements of this artist-novel mode are not also found in Hemingway’s “Snows” and Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up”—albeit in a rudimentary form.<br />
<br />
I am also reminded of Burwell’s poignant description, quoted earlier, of the late Hemingway wrestling with the four narratives that he could not complete:<br />
<br />
{{quote|In their totality, the four narratives record Hemingway’s fifteen-year search for a form and style that would express his reflexive vision of the artist. It is a search he had begun as early as the fall of 1936 as he wrote in ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ of a dying writer’s imaginative triumph over the distractions that have limited his art. There is a discernible movement towards what we have come to call postmodern narrative in these works.{{sfn|Burwell|1996|pp=1-2}} }}<br />
<br />
Whenever we see an author creating as a character within his or her fiction an artist—any kind of artist—we should pay attention. In this literary phenomenon, we may see aspects of the Künstlerroman or artist-novel, certainly. But we may also regard it as a skillful use of aesthetic distance—as an example of Malcolm Cowley’s “double vision”—that is “the ability to participate emotionally in the experience while, at the same time, retaining the ability to stand back and view it objectively” {{sfn|Mangum|2005|p=20}}. That ability, Mailer certainly possessed, as did, in an earlier age, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. {{efn|These two perspectives—Künstlerroman and aesthetic distance—are not incompatible, of course. They are, perhaps, two sides of the same coin, and we should learn from both.}}<br />
<br />
=== GREAT AUTHORS TRANSFORM ANGST INTO ART ===<br />
<br />
These three authors were dealing with their own angst in their writing, but<br />
they also were creating art. In a dramatically changing America, Hemingway,<br />
Fitzgerald, and Mailer each faced the “inescapable alienation of writer from<br />
author.”{{sfn|Justice|2010|pp=260}} Each was trying to work out what we could call a<br />
proper authorial distance in their narratives.<br />
<br />
In his article on Hemingway called “The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as<br />
Life,” Jackson Benson writes, “One’s life, after all, is not a drama, nor should<br />
a drama ever be confused with a life. Both at the bottom are mysterious, but<br />
each is different in kind from the other.” {{sfn|Benson|1989|pp=358}} This is an important point in interpreting the work of each author. Writing about Hemingway, but applicable, I would argue, also to Fitzgerald and Mailer, Benson says this:<br />
<br />
{{quote| Out of his emotions and needs, as well as out of a conscious s desire to create and win approval, the author projects, transforms, exaggerates, and a drama emerges which is based on his life but which has only a very tenuous relationship to the situation, in its facts, that might be observed from the outside. That is to say, he writes out of his life, not about his life. So that one can say, yes, Hemingway’s life is relevant to his fiction, but only relevant in the way that a dream might be relevant to the emotional stress that might have produced it.{{sfn|Benson|1989|pp=350}} }}<br />
<br />
Benson has warned us of the dangers of the biographical fallacy.<sup>31</sup> That<br />
the warning is timely but needs to be balanced by an awareness of a proper authorial distance. There is always a complex relationship between author and work. The three authors used different narrative strategies, but their ''Sitz Im Leben'', I would argue, were similar. The crucial part of that life situation was simply being human. As great artists, they understood what human nature involved. They knew how to show humanity in and through the art of fiction. That remains their lasting achievement.<br />
<br />
For instance, only one of their works was set on a hot plain under Kilimanjaro, but all three were set in “a landscape of human mortality.” If part of our angst arises from our individual psyche, part comes from the awareness—indeed the dread—of both our human freedom and our mortality. Surely, Kierkegaard and Sartre have taught us that existential perspective, and Ben Stoltzfus has reminded us of the links between Sartre and Hemingway.<sup>32</sup> So, whether creating fiction or nonfiction, each man wrote “out of his life, not about his life.” {{sfn|Benson|1989|pp=350}} Struggling with an alienation both personal and cultural, each took his flawed humanity and transformed it<br />
into art.<br />
<br />
How then should we interpret the tragic end of Hemingway? The angst that Hemingway fought against would eventually catch up with him. Yet the demons that Hemingway fought were both part of his humanity and an integral part of his genius. Jackson Benson, referring to the wound that Hemingway received on the Italian Front, makes this important point,<br />
{{quote|It may be that the wounding itself led to the dark thoughts that characterize Hemingway’s best fictions (a canon in which the centerpieces would be “Big Two-Hearted River” and “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”). But the shock of lost immortality seems to have been magnified by an inherited depressive, paranoid personality. The latter was part of his genius, although it was an inheritance that at last, he could not bear. {{sfn|Benson|1989|p=352}}. }}<br />
<br />
I return to my opening thought: it is not easy being a great writer. Nor is it easy, living with a great writer. There is a profound cost to be paid—by the authors themselves but also by their wives, children, lovers, and friends. That appears undeniable. In these three works, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Mailer all sought to overcome their angst and translate it into art. The source of that angst was not only an alienation between writer and author {{sfn|Justice|2010|p=260}}, but also—and more profoundly, I suggest—an alienation between us as human beings. Their art, like that of all great artists, was a long search to “bridge the gulf,” to overcome the estrangement, to communicate truthfully with other human beings. As was said of another great author, Vladimir Nabokov: “[I]t is a representative search, a heightened emblem of all our at- tempts to communicate . . . the distance between people, the distance separating love from love-making, mirage from reality—the desperate extent of all human need and desire” {{sfn|Appel|1972|P=456}}.{{efn|Nabokov’s search for the language adequate to Lolita is HH’s search for the language that will reach Lolita; and it is a representative search, a heightened emblem of all our attempts to communicate. “‘A penny for your thoughts,’ I said, and she stretched out her palm at once (p.). It is the almost insuperable distance between those thoughts and that palm which Nabokov has measured so accurately and so movingly in Lolita: the distance between people, the distance separating love from love-making, mirage from reality—the desperate extent of all human need and desire. “I have only words to play with,” says H.H., and only words can bridge the gulf suggested by Lolita’s palm” {{sfn|Appel|1972|456}} }}<br />
<br />
Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous character, Humbert Humbert, suggests that we possess “only words to play with”{{sfn|Appel|1972|p=456}}. Indeed we do—mere words. Yet, using such frail and fallible words, employing flawed humanity and literary genius, these authors transformed personal angst into great art—creating works that shall abide, like Mount Kilimanjaro. In so doing, each has revealed to us genuine truth—a truth that may speak to our flawed but mutual humanity.<br />
<br />
===Notes===<br />
{{notelist}}<br />
<br />
===Citations===<br />
{{reflist|15em}}<br />
<br />
===Works Cited===<br />
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1972 |title=Hemingway: The Writer as Artist |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite journal |last1=Barke |first1=Megan |last2=Fribush |first2=Rebecca |last3=Stearns |first3=Peter N. |date=2000|title=Nervous Breakdown in 20th Century American Culture |journal=Journal of Social History |volume=33 |issue=3 |pages=565-584 |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite journal |last=Batchelor |first=Bob |date=2013|title=Visions of the American Dream: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and Norman Mailer Probe at the Heart of the National Idea |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=7 |issue=1 |pages=74-89 |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite journal |last=Benson |first=Jackson |date=1989 |title=Ernest Hemingway: The Life as Fiction and the Fiction as Life |journal=American Literature |volume=61 |issue=3 |pages=345-358 |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite journal |last=Braudy |first=Leo |date=1981|title=Providence, Paranoia, and the Novel |journal=ELH |volume=43 |issue=3 |pages=619-637 |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Burwell |first=Rose Marie |date=1996 |title=Hemingway:The Postwar Years and the Posthumous Novels |publisher=Cambridge UP|ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite journal |last=Castronovo |first=David |date=Fall 2003 |title=Norman Mailer as Midcentury Advertisement |journal=New England Review |issue=24 |volume=4 |pages=179-186 |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Conrad |first=Joseph |editor-last=Watts |editor-first=Cedric |date=2002 |title=Heart of Darkness and Other Tales |publisher=Oxford UP |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Cowley |contributor-first=Malcolm |contribution=Introduction |last=Whitman |first=Walt |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |orig-year=1955 |date=1978 |edition=first |title=Leaves of Grass |url= |location=New York |publisher=Penguin |pages=vii–xxxvii |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Dickstein |first=Morris |date=2005 |title=A Mirror in the Roadway: Literature and the Real World |url= |location=Princeton |publisher=Princeton UP |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite journal |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1980 |title=The Crisis of Fitzgerald’s ‘Crack-Up’|journal=Twentieth Century Literature |volume=26 |issue=2 |pages=171-188 |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |author-mask=1 |chapter=Fitzgerald’s Nonfiction |date=2002 |title=The Cambridge Companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald |url= |editor-last=Prigozy |editor-first=Ruth |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge UP |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Eliot |first=T. S. |date=1933 |title=The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism |publisher=Faber & Faber |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=The Crack Up |title=New Directions |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |author-mask=1 |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew |date=1955|title=The Great Gatsby |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite journal |last=Foster |first=Richard |date=1968 |title=Mailer and the Fitzgerald Tradition |journal=NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction |issue=1 |volume=3 |pages=219-230 |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite journal |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=2012 |title=The Blade and the Gambler: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Norman Mailer |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=6 |issue=1 |pages=117-128 |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite journal |last=Hampl |first=Patricia |date=2012 |title=F. Scott Fitzgerald: Essays from the Edge |journal=American Scholar |volume=81 |issue=2 |pages=104-111 |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite journal |last=Harding |first=Jennifer Riddle |date=2011 |title=‘He Had Never Written a Word of That’: Regret and Counterfactuals in Hemingway’s ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’ |journal=The Hemingway Review |volume=30 |issue=2 |pages=21-35 |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2003 |title=The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories |publisher=New Scribner |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite journal |last=Hicks |first=Alexander |date=n.d. |title=''Advertisements for Myself'': Mailer's ''Künstlerroman'' |publisher=Unpublished Manuscript |ref=harv}} [Later published in ''[[The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018|The Mailer Review]]'', volume 12. —Ed.]<br />
* {{cite journal |last=Johnston |first=Kenneth G. |date=1984 |title=‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro’: An African Purge |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=21 |issue=3 |pages=223-227 |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite journal |last=Justice |first=Hilary K. |title=Authorship and Alienation in ''Death in the Afternoon'' and ''Advertisements for Myself'' |url= |journal=The Mailer Review |volume=4 |issue=1 |date=2010 |pages=259–272 |access-date= |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite journal |last=Kennedy |first=Gerald J. |date=1999 |title=Doing Country: Hemingway’s Geographical Imagination |journal=Southern Review |volume=35 |issue=2 |pages=325-329 |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Lethem |first=Jonathon |chapter=Introduction |date=2013 |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Random House |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Mangum |contributor-first=Bryant |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |date=2005 |contribution=Introduction |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xvii=xxvii |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite journal |last1=McKena |first1=John J. |last2=Peterson |first2=Marvin V. |date=1981 |title=More Muddy Water: Wilson's Shakespeare in ‘The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber’ |journal=Studies in Short Fiction |volume=18 |issue=1 |pages=82-85 |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=Putnam's |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |authormask=1 |date=2013 |chapter=Punching Papa |title=Mind of an Outlaw |editor-last=Sipiora |editor-first=Phillip |publisher=Scribner |pages=168-170 |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Nabokov |first=Vladimir |editor-last=Appel |editor-first=Alfred |date=1970 |title=The Annotated Lolita |publisher=Vintage |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Reynolds |first=Michael |date=1997 |title=Hemingway: The 1930s |publisher=Norton |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |contributor-last=Robinson |contributor-first=Roxana |date=2005 |contribution=Foreword |title=The Best Early Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |editor-last=Mangum |editor-first=Bryant |publisher=Modern Library |pages=xi-xvi |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Fitzgerald |first=F. Scott |contributor-last=Scriber |contributor-first=Charles |contribution=Introduction |date=2003 |title=Tender is the Night |publisher=Scribner |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite journal |last=Stoltzfus |first=Ben |date=2005|title=Satre, Nada, and Hemingway's African Stories |journal=Comparative Literature |volume=42 |issue=3 |pages=205-228 |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Whitman |first=Walt |date=1976 |title=Leaves of Grass |publisher=Penguin |editor-last=Cowley |editor-first=Malcolm |ref=harv}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Wilson |first=Edmund |date=1993 |chapter=Autobiographical Pieces |title=The Crack-Up |editor-last=Wilson |editor-first=Edmund |publisher=New Directions |ref=harv}}<br />
{{Refend}}<br />
<br />
{{Review}}<br />
{{DEFAULTSORT:Angst, Authorship, Critics: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Crack-Up,” Advertisements for Myself}}<br />
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]</div>Klcrawfordhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/On_the_State_of_Mailer_Studies:_A_Conversation_with_J._Michael_Lennon&diff=13025The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/On the State of Mailer Studies: A Conversation with J. Michael Lennon2021-03-01T16:52:29Z<p>Klcrawford: Fixed minor spacing and punctuation errors.</p>
<hr />
<div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}<br />
{{working}}<br />
{{MR13}}<br />
{{byline|last=Sipiora|first=Phillip|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13sip|note=[[J. Michael Lennon]] is the author or editor of several books, including ''A Double Life'', the authorized biography of Norman {{NM}} (Simon & Schuster, 2013). Lennon was a founder of The [[Norman Mailer Society]] and has served as President of the Society for most of its existence. His deep, long-term friendship with Mailer has inspired a number of works by Lennon and he is currently co-editing, with [[Susan Mailer]] and [[Jerry Lucas]], Norman Mailer’s ''[[Lipton’s Journal]]'', a reflective, introspective journal focusing on Mailer’s marijuana experience, written in 1954–1955. Lennon is also writing a memoir, “Getting on the Bus: Mailer’s Last Years in Provincetown,” which chronicles his experiences with Norman Mailer.}}<br />
<br />
'''Phillip Sipiora''': I would like to begin by thanking you, Mike, for meeting<br />
with me and talking about the state of Mailer Studies, which is obviously a<br />
critical issue, and not just for Mailer, but of course for all authors, societies<br />
and significant writers. So, let me begin by starting with a small question.<br />
You knew Norman Mailer for nearly four decades and you served as founding president of the Norman Mailer Society. I’m not aware of anyone alive<br />
who knows more about Norman Mailer as friend, major literary figure, and<br />
public intellectual. What is your most powerful and lasting memory of him?<br />
<br />
'''J. Michael Lennon''': It’s not an easy question. I have so many memories of<br />
Norman. But one of the things that has always impressed me about him,<br />
right to the very end, is ''work ethic''. Norman was always devoted to the literary arts, which took a toll on other relationships. Yet it was it was something<br />
that drove him. For example, when he entered the hospital for his last round<br />
of operations and treatments, he brought with him a half dozen books on<br />
Adolf Hitler. I was just stunned by that! I thought, oh, my God, when is he<br />
going to give it a break? No, he just didn’t give up.<br />
<br />
As a writer, he was devoted to the notion that the novel was the art form<br />
that had the greatest capacity for understanding society and human psychology. He believed the novel made the world more understandable, made<br />
it a better place to live in.<br />
<br />
The other issue that comes to mind is his identity as an insider/outsider.<br />
Norman knew a lot of famous people, of course, including Muhammad Ali,<br />
Jack Kennedy, Bill Clinton, John Lennon, and practically every one of his<br />
major contemporaries in the United States: Bellow, Mary McCarthy, Robert<br />
Lowell, Dwight Macdonald, the Beats—Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs—<br />
Bill Styron, Henry Miller, Lillian Hellman, Bill Kennedy, George Plimpton,<br />
Diana Trilling, James Baldwin, Gay Talese, John Irving, Joyce Carol Oates,<br />
Philip Roth, and James Jones (his dearest friend), and Don DeLillo (with<br />
whom he had a special kinship), and Gore Vidal and Truman Capote, with<br />
whom he had off-and-on friendships with—I could name more. <br />
<br />
He also<br />
knew many major writers around the world, including Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, Romain Gary, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, and<br />
Günter Grass. But he never really wanted to be a conspicuous part of the literary establishment. He wanted to maintain a modicum of distance from it<br />
so that he could criticize it; he was resolute about not losing his independent perspective, and so he backed out of many activities. However, he was<br />
president of PEN for a couple of years, and yes, that is certainly the establishment. But he got out of there after only two years. He called it his “church<br />
work.” With Norman there was always the sense of “I want to be an outsider. I do not want to be trammeled by my affiliations with any literary, political<br />
or what-have-you establishment to the extent that it will dampen my independence, or constrict my perspective.” Norman felt that one must be there<br />
to speak to one’s time on the planet. He was also exceptionally devoted to his<br />
family and his friends; there had to be at least fifty people who thought of<br />
themselves as “Norman Mailer’s best friend.” He had a kind of openness, candor, and generosity of spirit with his friends and his family, a personal<br />
magnetism.<br />
<br />
'''PS''': Do you feel that this duality of insider and outsider hurt him at times?<br />
Did it accelerate tensions or create conflicts that perhaps someone with a<br />
more stable identity of either insider or outsider might not encounter?<br />
<br />
'''JML''': Oh, I think that there were definitely losses that came from him jumping back and forth across that fence. But, overall, I think that it was a plus.<br />
It enabled him to maintain his singular critical perspective. For example,<br />
giving up two years of his life leading PEN meant he wasn’t writing much<br />
during that time, and he had regrets about that. But once he was in it, he<br />
stuck to his commitment, including organizing and hosting the International PEN conference, and rewriting the bylaws of the organization. Gay<br />
Talese told me that Norman came in and organized numerous committees,<br />
and this required rewriting the bylaws. They were needed, so Norman just<br />
sat down and personally re-wrote them. Gay Talese could not believe it. Well,<br />
that was Norman; he threw himself right into things.<br />
<br />
He lost a lot of time, however, doing things like that. Another example<br />
was running for mayor of New York with Jimmy Breslin. He gave away a big<br />
chunk of time in 1969 on that campaign He said that, if elected, he would<br />
give up writing. I think he must have had his fingers crossed when he said<br />
that. All of these forays, including filmmaking, cost him a great deal of lost<br />
time and he had regrets. But, on the other hand, there was a part of him that<br />
rebelled against the grind of writing six hours a day, six days a week, and felt<br />
the need to get out in the world and get roughed up. Right to the end he was<br />
seeking new experience, which he once called “the church of one’s acquired<br />
knowledge.”<br />
<br />
As a novelist, he was an ethnographer, and studied the ethos of a society,<br />
the main currents and obscure corners of its identity. That was something<br />
that he never stopped doing. He felt the need to out there, get immersed,<br />
and get roughed up, and then he’d jump over the fence, hide away and write.<br />
If you look at all the places where he lived, you see that New York City was<br />
always his primary residence. But he also had Provincetown, Vermont, New<br />
Hampshire, Stockbridge, and Bucks County, country places to which he<br />
could retreat when New York was driving him crazy with all the demands for<br />
him to appear on talk shows and go to social events. At a certain point he would get sick of that scene, and had to get away to get some work done. The insider-outsider identity was something that he cultivated. When he<br />
was living in Stockbridge, in western Massachusetts, with his fifth wife, Carol<br />
Stevens, he would get bored and say, “I have to go to New York City. I need<br />
some action.” Consequently, he moved fairly regularly between New York<br />
City and quieter, bucolic places, where he could write in peace. For a writer<br />
of his sensibilities and ambition, this alternation was a wise strategy.<br />
<br />
'''PS''': The past few years have surely been pivotal for Mailer Studies. After the<br />
publication of ''A Double Life'', you and your wife, Donna Pedro, returned to<br />
''Works and Days'', a groundbreaking resource that not only chronicled what<br />
Mailer said and did from the beginning of his creative life, but also cataloged commentary on him and his work, as well as his numerous appearances. You published the first edition in 2000 (Sligo Press) and then, in 2018,<br />
you, Donna and Jerry Lucas brought out an expanded, revised edition. But<br />
let me go back in time. How did you become acquainted with Norman?<br />
<br />
'''JML''': At first, it was an epistolary relationship. In December 1970, I wrote to<br />
him after he appeared on ''The Dick Cavett Show'' where he had his infamous<br />
encounter with Gore Vidal and also interacted with Janet Flanner (and<br />
Cavett, of course). I wrote him a long letter about the show, and about the<br />
ideas in the dissertation that I was then writing, and right away I received a<br />
long letter back. I was very surprised that he answered me so quickly. That<br />
led to a series of letters with him before I actually met him in the flesh in October 1972 (parenthetically, the same month he first met Larry Schiller), when he was on a speaking tour during the McGovern-Nixon campaign. He<br />
was speaking at Western Illinois University, and I was teaching at the University of Illinois, Springfield, about 100 miles away, so I took my Mailer seminar up there to hear him speak. I met him, and he remembered our correspondence. After he spoke, we spent the whole evening at a bar talking and closed the bar down about 1:30 in the morning. That meeting established our relationship. In the summers after that, when my wife and my family would go back to New England, we would visit him either in Maine<br />
or in Provincetown. This went on for many years until finally in 1997 we<br />
bought a condo in Provincetown So, our relationship began in a scholarly<br />
way, with my writing about Vidal and Cavett, and about my ideas about the shift in his writing to what we now call creative nonfiction. Over time, it<br />
grew into a personal relationship, a friendship.<br />
<br />
'''PS''': How did your scholarly interest and then your personal relationship<br />
with Norman evolve into archival work, which you have been known for<br />
over many decades?<br />
<br />
'''JML''': Well, I’d never thought of myself as an archivist. I never knew much<br />
about what it entailed. But I found myself, even before I met Norman, collecting virtually every reference to him that I ran across. At first, I bought all<br />
the scholarly books and essays in journals that I could find. But then, it dawned on me that a lot of the most interesting things he was saying were spoken in public forums, and in interviews and profiles, a lot of it spontaneous, candid, and playful. His 1963 ''Paris Review'' interview with Steve Marcus is still crucial for understanding how he became the kind of writer he was. He said much in that interview that still resonates, his comments about E.M. Forster and the architecture of the novel, for example.<br />
<br />
I began to realize that these public utterances were just as important to<br />
understanding Norman’s work as the analyses of his work in professional<br />
journals. I realized that if you wanted to understand Mailer, you had to hear<br />
him, see him up close, and observe his public speaking off the cuff, where he<br />
revealed himself in a way that was quite profound. And so I began collecting all those resources, which came at the same time I developed a friendship with his then-authorized biographer, Robert Lucid, a University of<br />
Pennsylvania professor. I began helping Bob collect manuscripts and materials that were piling up in Mailer’s study, his basement, and in his mother’s<br />
house.<br />
<br />
Donna and I would go down to New York with our station wagon, fill it<br />
up with manuscripts, and take them over to the storage vault in New York<br />
City. We did that for a long time, beginning in the late 1970s. That storage facility, a big steel locker, was about four feet high and ten feet long, and it was<br />
completely packed. When we didn’t know what to do with all those manuscripts, galleys, letters, research materials, I suggested that we leave the primary resources in storage, and I’d take all of the secondary materials, the<br />
reviews and interviews and magazines containing pieces on him, quite a pile.<br />
The primary materials were obviously the most important, including manuscripts that had not been published, marked up galleys, and things like that. And Norman’s letters! Boxes of them containing every incoming letter of<br />
any consequence he’d received from the time he was at Harvard, and carbons<br />
of all his outgoing letters. We left the correspondence and all of primary<br />
manuscripts and I took everything else, which was a substantial trove. For<br />
example, Mailer regularly spoke at colleges and universities, and many other<br />
symposia and conferences. He would speak on a campus and then the college newspaper would write a story on it, usually with pertinent quotations.<br />
They would mail a copy to him and he would throw it in a pile and it would<br />
wind up the archive. Initially, I took all of those materials in order to make<br />
room, but, really, I wanted to examine, preserve, and mine this material as<br />
well. In effect, we solved two problems. We began to collect records of the<br />
public presence of Norman Mailer from local magazines and newspapers<br />
around the country, and we also created new space for his ever-burgeoning<br />
primary collection. So, little by little, I became an archivist.<br />
<br />
As I collected, I began to categorize things and organize them chronologically and thematically, putting documents into archival boxes. I was basically<br />
feeling my way and creating my own referential system. But I didn’t know<br />
what I was doing. As an aside, I would note that most Ph.D. programs in that<br />
era offered little in the way of archival instruction. All I knew is that I didn’t<br />
want to discard these resources, and I wanted to use them in my writing. The<br />
first journal article on Mailer I published, back in 1977, in ''Modern Fiction Studies'', was a survey and analysis of his presence in popular media. Along the<br />
way I learned, by hook or by crook about archival and bibliographic methods. The first book that I did with Mailer grew out of his archive, a 1982 book called<br />
''Pieces and Pontifications'', which I first suggested to Norman in 1977. It took<br />
five years to put it together, and my part was selecting and editing 20 interviews with him, which was a great experience. Perhaps, I thought, we should<br />
also include, in addition to the 20, excerpts from a number of minor interviews in a kind of montage. I argued for doing that for a while, and Norman<br />
gave it some thought. We finally threw it out the window.<br />
<br />
But then Norman decided to add a dozen essays that he had written over<br />
the previous decade. He came up with a number of titles, one of which I remember: “After the White Negro.” But after he read the entire manuscript he<br />
supplied the final title, which I’ve always thought to be wickedly clever. In1982, ''Pieces and Pontifications'' became my first book, and that propelled me<br />
into me collecting materials of all sorts: invitations to publication parties,<br />
sample dust jackets for his books (Mailer designed many of these), audio interviews, and videos of television appearances, reprints of various essays<br />
and stories in obscure publications, promo materials from his publishers,<br />
etc., etc. This was really the beginning of ''Works and Days'', which grew as a<br />
manuscript through the 1980s and 1990s. Donna and I completed it during<br />
my sabbatical in 1998, and it was published in 2000. Norman liked it, having forgotten so much, and contributed a short preface.<br />
<br />
I’m an archivist, but not because when I was a young man I said, “I’m going to grow up to be an archivist.” I just fell into it, and then I found that it was a suit of clothes that fit me pretty well.<br />
<br />
'''PS''': Well understood. Speaking of archival evolution, the entire world seems<br />
to be becoming become digitized. And the electronic reconfiguration of<br />
Mailer resources has surely become a central part of contemporary Mailer<br />
Studies. Can you comment in general about this evolving and complex configuration of scholarly and popular access, digital access, and how it relates<br />
to making Mailer’s life and work more accessible, not only for scholars, but<br />
also for interested readers?<br />
<br />
'''JML''': Yes, we are clearly part of the revolution. I think that Jerry Lucas has<br />
proved to be a superb digital humanist, steering the ship with the work he’s<br />
done for ''Project Mailer'', which is one of the main activities of the Mailer Society. Jerry knows much more about digital technology than anyone I know, and it has been a pleasure collaborating with him. A critical aspect of digitized Mailer is access, which is easy as the software is programmed to remember your previous searches. In earlier times we all had to go to libraries, locate microfilm copies, and read them on blurry screens. I well remember, when writing my master’s thesis, reading old microfilms of the ''New Republic'', ''Dial'', ''Vanity Fair'', and the ''New Yorker'', dating back to the 1920s. <br />
<br />
It was very laborious and difficult, but now digitization has made the process much easier. ''Works and Days'' is now available in a digital as well as a print format and<br />
I like the fact that there are both. Having the book right next to me on the<br />
shelf, I can find what I need much more quickly than I can by going online,<br />
but if I’m doing deep searches, for example, word searches, I can’t use the<br />
book. But it is going to be a long time before the digital world catches up<br />
with all of Mailer’s public appearances. Jerry and I have discussed putting all<br />
my archive online, about 1500 items.<br />
<br />
Much has been lost because many college magazines and newspapers have never been digitized. There is always going to be a print component<br />
until, sometime in the distant future, ''everything'' is formatted digitally. People contact me all the time for copies of obscure profiles and interviews with<br />
Mailer. Hardly a week goes by without someone asking me where Mailer<br />
said this or that, or where did something appear. I often respond by saying,<br />
“Have you looked at ''Works and Days''? Have you looked at Jerry Lucas’s index<br />
to ''Works and Days''? Have you looked at the date that your item appeared, and<br />
then checked contemporaneous items in Works and Days to see if they are<br />
pertinent?” <br />
<br />
Mailer would often hold a press conference and there would be<br />
a half dozen newspaper and wire service reporters there, and they would all<br />
write a different story. So if you read one of these stories, you ought to read<br />
the other ones because if you put them all together you’ll get a much richer<br />
sense of what he really said. For example, his news conference when ''Harlot’s<br />
Ghost'' came out. And the one for ''Ancient Evenings''. You can’t get it all just by<br />
reading the New York Times story. You need to read the ''St. Louis Post-Dispatch'', and the ''Minneapolis Star'' and all the pieces by the other reporters who<br />
were in the room. I’m regularly steering people to ''Project Mailer'', where they<br />
can access these things. In the old days, I would copy and email articles to<br />
people. I still do that.<br />
<br />
Jerry Lucas is doing magnificent things in ''Project Mailer'', which he<br />
founded, that I couldn’t even dream of, especially digitizing all of Works and<br />
Days, and posting other resources like all of the Prefaces, Forwards, and Introductions that Mailer wrote for about twenty-five books by other writers.<br />
Many of them appeared in obscure books, in some cases going back to the<br />
1960s, and were out of print. Justin Bozung has been posting podcasts related<br />
to Mailer, another valuable resource.<br />
<br />
The Walt Whitman Archive at the University of Nebraska is another exemplary website. I grew up in American Renaissance studies and taught<br />
Whitman for years. The Whitman Archive is magnificent; you can access,<br />
for example, the contemporary reviews of ''Leaves of Grass''. Whitman’s different editions came out over a forty-year period. Every new edition was reviewed and now you can read the reviews. The same thing is being done<br />
with Emerson at the New York Public Library. I don’t know if they’re doing<br />
the same thing with Hemingway.<br />
<br />
'''PS''': Yes, Hemingway Studies are digitized. You bring back some wonderful<br />
archival memories. When I was a young graduate student, I recall spending days looking at microfiche records. I referred to those days as my “fishing<br />
time.” What you say, Mike, about the digitizing of Mailer Studies is striking.<br />
As you know, I have worked with Jerry Lucas for a long time.<br />
<br />
'''JML''': I know, you were his mentor. Jerry is exemplary and his knowledge of<br />
the digital world is phenomenal. And he continues to evolve unabated. He’s<br />
constantly working on things that are new.<br />
<br />
'''PS''': I certainly join you on that and I continue to turn to Jerry for technical<br />
advice related to all kinds of research activities and electronic teaching strategies. Some things never change.<br />
My next question relates to the importance of the establishment of the<br />
Mailer Library at Wilkes. When was it chartered, why is it particularly important, and what will it hold?<br />
<br />
'''JML''': In about 2005, Norman became affiliated with Wilkes University in a<br />
formal way. He became chairperson of the advisory committee for the new<br />
MFA program in Creative Writing. In the decade before that, I began donating first editions of his books and various magazines and memorabilia to<br />
Wilkes. In 2005, Norman said that we could display all of his major awards,<br />
including his Pulitzer Prize, his National Book Award, the Emerson Medal<br />
from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as all of his other<br />
medals, awards, and honorary degrees. Everything was enshrined in a room<br />
called the Mailer Room, which is in the E. S. Farley Library at Wilkes University. The centerpiece of the room is his former dining room table, a huge,<br />
beveled glass and wrought iron table.<br />
<br />
'''PS''': A very impressive, eclectic donation.<br />
<br />
'''JML''': When Norris and Norman donated the table, and his awards and<br />
memorabilia, we arranged for a truck to pick it up. There are now photos<br />
on the wall, glass cases with all his awards, and bookcases that contain virtually every major critical book about him and every one of his works.<br />
And most of them are signed and inscribed to the library. That was the<br />
start.<br />
<br />
When Mailer died, Norris donated all of his library to the Norman Mailer<br />
Center, which had been established by Larry Schiller. Larry’s hope was to establish Norman’s library, of approximately 7,000 volumes, at a university where they would take good care of it. For years Larry tried to find a good home and he struck out. Harvard didn’t want it. The Ransom Center at University of Texas, where Mailer’s papers are located, didn’t want it. Finally, Bonnie Culver, the director of the Maslow MFA Program, and I worked with the Farley library at Wilkes, where we already had a foothold, and they were<br />
very interested. All of Mailer’s library will eventually be there; three quarters of it is already there. About four or five thousand volumes have been transported, waiting to be catalogued. Larry also packed up Norman’s study in Provincetown, including his desk, chair, lamp, pencils, pens, and various paraphernalia, as well as all the books, dictionaries, and thesauruses that surrounded him in his third-floor study in Provincetown. Bonnie organized the moving of these items from where they were stored in Massachusetts, got them trucked to Wilkes. Donna and I were there for a day helping. His study has now been re-established in a room in the Farley, one approximately the same size as Norman’s study in Provincetown. When you walk in you see the bookcases, the books, the desk, and photos on the wall, including the green Bellevue sign, which was Norman’s reminder of the 17 days that he spent in Bellevue Hospital in 1960 after stabbing Adele, his second wife. The Wilkes collection is a great adjunct to what is archived at the Harry Ransom Center, but it can never exceed it, because Texas has all the manuscripts. Wilkes, however, has the complete Mailer library, which one might say represents the contents of his mind.<br />
<br />
The Texas archive does includes Mailer’s research volumes and papers for<br />
several of his books, a few hundred books. Mailer also had about 1500 books<br />
in a writing room he had in another building in Brooklyn, all of which will<br />
eventually be located at Wilkes. The only life portrait ever been painted of<br />
Norman is now also in the Farley collection. It was painted by a fine Cape<br />
Cod artist, Nancy Ellen Craig, when Norman sat for her in the late 1960s. It<br />
is very large, four feet by four feet, approximately. Mailer’s daughter Danielle<br />
and her husband Peter McEachern bought and then donated the painting.<br />
I recently received papers associated with Mailer’s house in Brooklyn, ownership papers, remodeling papers, permission forms from the zoning boards,<br />
and documentation to allow them to sell the house. These also came from<br />
Danielle and Peter, and are going to Wilkes. So not only will we have his<br />
study from Provincetown, but we will also have documents related to his<br />
Brooklyn residence, which accumulated over the half-century he lived at 142<br />
Columbia Heights.<br />
<br />
'''PS''': That is quite a chunk of authorial history. In relation to the archival work that you have already mentioned, there is the forthcoming publication of his ''Lipton’s Journal'', written in 1954–55 and edited by you and Jerry Lucas, and Susan Mailer. What can you tell us about the gravity of ''Lipton’s Journal''?<br />
<br />
'''JML''': The manuscript is in the Ransom Center. I have the carbon copy, which<br />
Mailer gave me years ago. Lipton’s is a 110,000-word marijuana journal. He wrote it over a four-month period from the end of 1954 to the beginning of 1955. It is a pivotal piece of work, yet it was never edited or published. He just<br />
wrote it and put it away. It became the clearinghouse for his mind in that period, and a stalking horse for ''The White Negro''. It also anticipates many of<br />
the ideas in his columns in The ''Village Voice'', the newspaper that he cofounded in 1955. Most important, it is the last remaining major piece of<br />
Mailer writing that has not been published (there are two very brief excerpts<br />
from it that appeared in small magazines back in the 1970s and 1980s). Susan<br />
Mailer, Norman’s eldest child, a practicing psychoanalyst, became very interested in it, because it is, among other things, Norman’s self-analysis. Once<br />
she read it, she recognized its importance. She and I then began editing it,<br />
eliminating considerable repetition, adding clarifying notes, to turn it into<br />
a readable document. As written, it is quite difficult to read. The repetitions<br />
and abbreviations are maddening. There are about 600 numbered entries,<br />
but they are mis-numbered and disordered. Susan and I did a preliminary<br />
edit and cut it down by approximately forty percent.<br />
<br />
Jerry Lucas is now going through the manuscript, editing it as needed.<br />
He will be a co-editor with Susan and me when it is ready for publication.<br />
Accompanying it will be Mailer’s contemporaneous correspondence with<br />
psychoanalyst Robert Lindner, who Mailer sent copies of many of the journal’s entries for comment. Some of Mailer’s letters to Linder, who was a close<br />
friend, have been published in my edition of Mailer’s letters, but not all.<br />
Donna located Lindner’s daughter, who also happens to be a psychoanalyst,<br />
and Susan got in touch with her and obtained permission to publish her father’s letters to Norman. They will be in an appendix to the journal manuscript.<br />
<br />
'''PS''': It’s great to hear that you are winding up the ''Lipton’s Journal''. When do you anticipate publication?<br />
<br />
'''JML''': I’m not sure. Much of that will be up to Jerry and his editing, after<br />
which Susan and I will go over it one more time. It has been held up a little<br />
because Susan was immersed in completing her memoir, ''In Another Place: My Life with and without My Father, Norman Mailer''. We would like to publish Lipton’s in Mailer’s centenary year, 2023.<br />
<br />
'''PS''': After a long, long time, the Library of America finally began publishing Norman Mailer. Why is this development so important for his stature in the future?<br />
<br />
'''JML''': It is recognition that Mailer is a canonical author. It is a recognition<br />
that his work is going to be kept in print and available in scholarly editions<br />
for the foreseeable future. The Library of America, which was founded in<br />
the 1970s, publishes only a small number of books. In fact, only about three<br />
hundred and twenty-five books, all told. Early on, they published only long deceased authors. However, over the past ten years or so, they changed that<br />
policy. Now, Updike, Roth, Sontag, and Didion volumes have come out, all<br />
Mailer contemporaries. The first two Mailer volumes, published in 2018,<br />
contain four of his books from the 1960s, and about 35 of his essays from<br />
that decade. The question now is whether to go forward into the 1970s or go<br />
back to his earlier work, like ''The Naked and the Dead''. We are having discussions on the schedule, although no conclusions have yet been reached.<br />
<br />
I think that there is merit in publishing a volume in 2023, and ''The Naked<br />
and the Dead'' strikes me as perhaps the best choice, especially if we can include supplementary materials by Mailer that bear on the novel. By that I<br />
mean two prefaces that he wrote for later editions of the novel, and some of<br />
the unpublished letters that he wrote during the war. When he was in the<br />
Philippines, he wrote numerous letters home to his first wife, Beatrice. I included about ten of them in ''Selected Letters of Norman Mailer'', but there are<br />
many more. They are important because they were essentially planning documents for ''The Naked and the Dead''.<br />
<br />
Mailer wrote about four hundred letters during this time and it will not<br />
be difficult to find twenty good ones that could accompany a new edition of<br />
''The Naked and the Dead''. My wife and I are going through all those old letters right now, reading copies of the original letters, which have to be transcribed. I had not looked at them for over ten years, and was astounded at<br />
how good they are. Norman had some wonderful insights about his wartime experiences, his reading, his plans for ''The Naked and the Dead'', and his time<br />
in occupied Japan. He also talks about his family, reading ''The Razor’s Edge''<br />
by Somerset Maugham, ''The Decline of the West'' by Oswald Spengler, Thomas<br />
Mann and others. Norman was a voracious reader, as you know.<br />
<br />
'''PS''': Yes indeed. It is surely so critical to keep Mailer’s work and memory alive<br />
as authors, even major writers, seem to come and go. Melville, as I recall,<br />
was not resurrected until the 1920s and F. Scott Fitzgerald was brought back<br />
to life by Malcolm Cowley as a result of his work on ''Tender is the Night''.<br />
There was also resurrection for Kate Chopin a half-century ago.<br />
<br />
'''JML''': Yes. It was a slow, slow process for Melville. The Library of America<br />
does a fabulous job. They have a wonderful format and they meticulously<br />
check to make sure that their editions are carefully researched. Textual errors<br />
are noted, Library of America and the volumes include a life chronology.<br />
Lately, they started including introductions, which they did not in earlier<br />
years. It is possible that there would be a new introduction to ''The Naked<br />
and the Dead''. Furthermore, they include notes. They do a beautiful textual<br />
job, and they have this wonderful Smythe binding, a sewn binding. The Norman Mailer Society made a contribution to underwrite the first two volumes, for which I am very grateful.<br />
<br />
'''PS''': Serving the primary mission of the Society<br />
<br />
'''JML''': Yes, certainly<br />
<br />
'''PS''': Let me ask you about Maggie McKinley’s forthcoming Cambridge University Press volume on Mailer. Can you tell us a little about your contribution?<br />
<br />
'''JML''': Sure. Maggie’s volume will be an important reconsideration of Mailer.<br />
I believe she has over contributors. I know that you’ve done the chapter<br />
on Mailer as a literary and film critic. She asked me if I would write on Norman Mailer and John F. Kennedy and I was happy to agree. I was surprised<br />
at how many places Kennedy shows up that I had forgotten. In my essay, I<br />
try to survey all of the major depictions of Kennedy in Mailer’s writing, approximately a dozen.<br />
<br />
I looked for the pattern of how his view of Kennedy evolved. His admiration for Kennedy went up and down a little at the beginning, but in the early 1960s, it was always strong. He had a rich, complex view of JFK, and was intrigued by the question of how his Hollywood leading-man appearance affected his political chances. I don’t think that there is any other historical figure that Mailer wrote about as often, and with greater penetration, than Kennedy. He wrote about him, beginning in 1960, and continuing right up<br />
through ''Harlot’s Ghost'' (1991), and even later. Oliver Stone made a movie,<br />
''JFK'', which Mailer reviewed in a long essay in which he revisited all his earlier ideas about Kennedy. And then, of course, he is a key figure in ''Oswald’s<br />
Tale''. Another key text is ''An American Dream'', where he has an off-stage role.<br />
Kennedy is also in ''Cannibals and Christians''. In fact, he is in all of Mailer’s political books, and two of his novels. Mailer identified with Kennedy to a certain extent; they also had much in common. They were both of the same<br />
generation—World War Two vets—and they were both fascinated with<br />
American politics. Mailer is also the first major writer who wrote about JFK,<br />
back in 1960, in a major essay, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket.”<br />
<br />
'''PS''': I find Norman’s review of ''JFK'' to be quite interesting and Mailer only<br />
wrote two film reviews, the other one examining, in full unexpurgated rigor,<br />
Bernardo Bertolucci’s ''Last Tango in Paris''. So, reviewing ''JFK'' is obviously of<br />
paramount significance, which I discuss in my Cambridge essay that examines Mailer’s criticism. You also mentioned Susan Mailer’s recent memoir<br />
''In Another Place'', in which she addresses her relationship with her father.<br />
Can you talk about the significance of her book?<br />
<br />
'''JML''': Yes, it is a very important book because it is the first memoir by one of<br />
Norman’s children. Susan, the oldest, knew him longer than any of the other<br />
eight. She was born in Hollywood in 1949 when he was living there with Jean<br />
Malaquais, writing scripts for Sam Goldwyn. Susan’s memories go way back.<br />
She saw her father in a range of contexts because he visited her often in Mexico, and he visited her later in Chile, where she eventually married and lived.<br />
I should add that it is not just a story of Norman Mailer—it is also a story of<br />
her own life, which has been bifurcated. Half of Susan’s life was and is spent<br />
in South America, and half of it in New York City. She lived with her father<br />
when she was a student at Barnard in the 1960s, and took part in his mayoral<br />
campaign. Susan worked on the memoir for a long time, over four or five<br />
years. Its genesis began with her memorial tribute delivered at Carnegie Hall,<br />
published in 2008 in ''The Mailer Review''. Susan continued to write a piece here, a piece there, and she finally decided that she wanted to write a book about her life. She had never written a memoir before, so, it was quite a learning experience for her. She recently gave the keynote address at Wilkes University’s MFA graduation ceremony in January 2020, and talked about what she had to learn in order to become a memoirist. She has done a superb job and her book has received excellent reviews. There was a recent profile article about her in ''The London Times'' and her book has been written about in ''The Wall Street Journal''. I am very happy to have had a finger in Susan’s book, encouraging her, and helping with some factual references.<br />
<br />
Susan’s book now joins all of the other important family memoirs about<br />
Norman, including Adele Mailer’s memoir, ''The Last Party'', which came out<br />
in 1997. Norris Mailer’s memoir, ''A Ticket to the Circus'', came out just before<br />
she died in 2010. John Buffalo Mailer has written about his father in various<br />
essays, and he also co-edited a book with his father, a book of interviews<br />
titled ''The Big Empty'', which was published in 2006.<br />
<br />
'''PS''': I found In Another Place to be an impressive, exceptionally insightful<br />
memoir and I enjoyed reading it very much. Bonnie Culver (Wilkes University) has written a play, ''NORRIS'', which portrays Norris Church Mailer,<br />
Norman’s sixth wife to whom he was married for over three decades, as I<br />
recall. What does this play tell us—and not just about Norman, but also<br />
Norris?<br />
<br />
'''JML''': After Norman died in 2007, Norris Mailer took his place on the advisory board of the Wilkes Maslow Family graduate program in creative writing. She funded a scholarship and became close with people at the university.<br />
Bonnie developed a strong friendship with Norris. After reading Norris’s<br />
memoir, Bonnie was very taken with it. Bonnie came up with the idea of a<br />
one woman play, using ''A Ticket to the Circus'' as the underlying structure.<br />
Norris thought that this was a great idea and then, sadly, she died, but Bonnie stayed with the project. Two versions of it have been presented at the annual conferences of the Mailer Society. The script has gone through many<br />
revisions, and Bonnie has received considerable feedback from members of<br />
the Society, from the Mailer family. ''Norris'' is going to be performed at a playhouses in Santa Monica and Anne Archer will play Norris. Anne is the right<br />
age, a tall redhead, and likes the script very much. So everything looks very<br />
promising and it appears that the opening of the play will take place in Santa Monica. Bonnie is a professional playwright, as you know, and her work has<br />
appeared off-Broadway as well in other venues around the country. I believe<br />
that Bonnie recently wrote a review of Susan Mailer’s book, right?<br />
<br />
'''PS''': Yes, a quite detailed, probing treatment.<br />
<br />
'''JML''': I should add something else that is clearly germane to Mailer Studies.<br />
''The Mailer Review'' has become the hub of the wheel for all Mailer activities<br />
and studies. Thanks to you and your team for reviewing every book with<br />
any bearing on Mailer’s life and work, and also publishing such a range of<br />
fine essays on virtually every aspect of his work, and unpublished Mailer<br />
stories and essays, interviews and much more. Each issue you publish contains a detailed annual bibliography on works by and about Mailer that keeps<br />
readers in touch with what is going on within and beyond the scholarly<br />
world. Shannon Zinck, the bibliographer for the ''Review'', does a superb job<br />
locating all kinds of materials, stuff I never knew existed. She is an exemplary<br />
bibliographer. There is no question that ''The Mailer Review'' has become an<br />
indispensable journal for anyone interested in Mailer Studies. I have all volumes right next to me on my desk and hardly a day goes that I am not looking up something in the journal. Congratulations, Mr. Editor, for your<br />
perseverance over more than a decade of work. It has really born a lot of<br />
fruit.<br />
<br />
'''PS''': Thank you, Mike, for your kind words. The ''Review'' would not exist if<br />
not for your indefatigable support from the very beginning. We have not<br />
published an issue that has not been energized—and improved—by your<br />
critical eye and your excellent suggestions for topics, articles, historical projects, contributors, and so forth. The current volume is number 13, (bringing us to roughly 6,000 pages over 13 years), and we strive to do our best. As you know, we have faced many challenges over time, like all scholarly journals. We are an all-volunteer staff and we certainly make mistakes, mostly my<br />
errata, but we try to devote ourselves to produce an eclectic periodical that<br />
is an ongoing record of relevant developments in all things Mailer. We also<br />
include a range of other kinds of writing, including a section each issue of<br />
high qualitive, creative writing We are very fortunate to have been able to<br />
publish work from well-established poets and fiction writers, who contribute<br />
significantly, we believe, to the overall quality and character of our journal.<br />
I would like to wind up our conversation with two questions. One more general, one more narrow. If you would gaze into your crystal ball, what do you see as the future of Mailer Studies? Are there things that jump out at you as being part of strategic evolving trends or new areas of focus?<br />
<br />
'''JML''': Yes, there are a few things. First, I think that there are strategic resources<br />
in the archives that have not yet been sufficiently explored. We have talked<br />
about ''Lipton’s Journal'', but there are other items that have not been examined<br />
in detail. There are also many letters in the archive that no one has ever read.<br />
There are approximately 50,000letters in the archives, but only 700 letters<br />
were published in my edition. These letters reveal Mailer’s thinking on his art<br />
and his personal relationships. Further, the archives contain all of the hard<br />
drives and floppy disks that belonged to his longtime assistant, Judith<br />
McNally, who worked for Norman for thirty years. These resources require<br />
advanced technical skills and equipment in order to retrieve a range of texts<br />
from long ago. My understanding is that these resources are now available.<br />
We can finally access the information that Judith had stored. Everything that<br />
Mailer ever wrote was on paper from the late 70s on passed through her<br />
hands—and she had copies of everything. Judith was a real pack rat.<br />
<br />
If I had the energy, I would go to Austin right now and start reading as<br />
much of it as I could. I know that Nicole DePolo is very interested in researching these areas. Nicole is a member of the Mailer Board and she is<br />
quite interested because she wants to follow up her earlier work on Mailer’s<br />
''Ancient Evenings'', which was the topic of her dissertation. Judith, by the way,<br />
was one of Norman’s researchers for ''Ancient Evenings''.<br />
<br />
'''PS''': Nicole wrote her dissertation working with Christopher Ricks, as I recall.<br />
<br />
'''JML''': Yes, Christopher Ricks at Boston University. Nicole and John Buffalo<br />
have expressed interest in creating a kind of a graphic novel on parts of ''Ancient Evenings'' and the work that Judith did on ''Ancient Evenings'' would surely<br />
be very important. I should also note again that the Farley Library at Wilkes<br />
has Mailer’s library for scholars to review and attempt to derive a sense of the<br />
contents of his mind. The Farley’s archivist, Suzanna Calev, is doing a terrific<br />
job organizing the library and other materials.<br />
<br />
There are some other projects that are in the works as well. Ron Fried has<br />
written a play based on John Mailer’s ''The Big Empty'', The name of the play<br />
is ''The Two Mailers''. ''The Big Empty'' is comprised of a series of conversations<br />
between Norman and John in 2003 and 2004, when Mailer was in his early eighties. I have been told that the play is projected to open on Broadway<br />
with F. Murray Abraham playing Norman Mailer. Julian Schlossberg, a film<br />
and theatre producer, will launch the production.<br />
<br />
John Buffalo is also working on a TV script based on ''A Double Life'', which<br />
he hopes to turn into a multi-season bio-pic series. He has been writing<br />
scripts based on the biography. So there are several spinoff projects that are<br />
out there, manifestations of Mailer’s life, his work, and how he has touched<br />
so many people during the course of his life. Now we are starting to see the<br />
fruits of these interactions. There is an analogue in what happened in Hemingway studies after he died. Hemingway’s children, siblings, and friends<br />
began generating out books, movies, and memoirs about Hemingway and<br />
his family. And that process continues with books coming out, including<br />
one written by his grandson.<br />
<br />
'''PS''': Yes, John Hemingway’s, ''A Strange Tribe'', which I was honored to review<br />
for the ''St. Petersburg Times''. It is a superb memoir, recounting the trials and<br />
tribulations of a very complex multigenerational “tribe.” John has spoken<br />
to our graduate students at USF and he is a particularly engaging person,<br />
infectious with his knowledge, wit, and acute sense of perspective.<br />
<br />
'''JML''': I think that the same thing is happening with Mailer. I should also<br />
mention how valuable your omnibus collection of Mailer’s essays is becoming for scholars and critics (Mind of an Outlaw, Random House, 2013).<br />
It is a great resource.<br />
<br />
'''PS''': Thanks, Mike. Yes, Outlaw came out concurrently with your biography.<br />
<br />
'''JML''': Random House is publishing more of his books in paperback. Mailer’s<br />
presence is clearly not diminishing. It is expanding—both in the scholarly<br />
world, in popular culture, and in the creative world of memoirs and profiles. So much is going on, including the forthcoming Cambridge collection,<br />
which is especially timely because it includes thirty-five different perspectives<br />
on Mailer’s work and Mailer the man. I should also mention your project,<br />
in the ''Review'', of launching a series focused on Mailer and other significant<br />
writers which, I believe, includes Bob Begiebing’s essay on Mailer and Jung.<br />
<br />
'''PS''':Yes, the current issue launches this series and includes Begiebing’s work on<br />
Mailer and Ellis, as well as Ray Vince’s fulsome, comparative article on Mailer,<br />
Fitzgerald, and Hemingway. Future pairings may include Mailer and Conrad, and we are thinking about Mailer and Roth, Mailer and Didion, Mailer and<br />
Science Fiction, and so on. We will not run out of topics, to be sure, and we are<br />
looking into reaching back in time, perhaps before the Nineteenth Century if<br />
Mailer scholars find topics and connections worth exploring.<br />
<br />
'''JML''': Yes, and there is Mailer and Whitman, Mailer and Melville, Mailer and<br />
Henry Miller, and Mailer, and Mary McCarthy. I’ve been reading her lately<br />
and the similarities in their outlooks, their passions, are quite remarkable. I<br />
read an early draft of Begiebing’s essay and it is a wonderful patch of writing.<br />
<br />
'''PS''': Thank you, Mike. I have saved my best question for last.<br />
<br />
'''JML''': Good.<br />
<br />
'''PS''': What does the future hold for you?<br />
<br />
'''JML''': Well, I guess that as far as Mailer studies are concerned, the first thing<br />
will be to get back to work on Lipton’s with Susan and Jerry, and continue to<br />
collaborate with him on ''Project Mailer''. Another project is my memoir about<br />
Mailer’s last days, which will examine some of the things that I have mentioned in this interview: how I first became involved with Mailer, how I became connected to Bob Lucid, and how I served as a kind of apprentice<br />
archivist. And, of course, how I finally took over the job of becoming Mailer’s<br />
biographer. My memoir will be based in part on the notes that I made during his last years in Provincetown, his “table talk.” I have about twenty-five<br />
thousand words written, but I have only just started to work on developing<br />
them. It is going to be a long project, but it is something I have wanted to do<br />
for a long time.<br />
<br />
'''PS''': Thank you, Mike, for an inspiring and deep reaching conversation. You<br />
have always been a most accessible, collegial encyclopedia of all things Mailer.<br />
And I’m so pleased that nothing has changed.<br />
<br />
'''JML''': Thanks, Phil. I appreciate it. It is always good to talk to you about Norman. I really appreciate the chance to address your pertinent questions.<br />
<br />
'''PS''': All fine, Mike. You discussed many things that our readers were not<br />
aware of but have a natural interest in and it is important for them to come<br />
out. I am very pleased by that.<br />
<br />
{{Review}}<br />
{{DEFAULTSORT:On the State of Mailer Studies: A Conversation with J. Michael Lennon}}<br />
[[Category:Interviews (MR)]]</div>Klcrawfordhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/The_Last_Night:_A_Story&diff=13024The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/The Last Night: A Story2021-03-01T16:50:12Z<p>Klcrawford: Fixed minor spelling and punctuation errors.</p>
<hr />
<div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}<br />
{{MR13}}<br />
{{byline|last=Mailer|first=Norman|note=Mailer’s only science fiction story (with the exception of “The Martian Invasion,” which he wrote when he was 10) was written in late 1962, and appeared in ''Esquire''’s December 1963 issue. It is the last short story that he wrote. The impetus for the story was the [[w:Cuban Missile Crisis|Cuban Missile Crisis]] of October 1962, which is borne out by his statement preceding its 1966 reprinting in ''[[Cannibals and Christians]]''. It is further reinforced by a plot of “prophetic fiction,” as he describes it, which imagines what might have occurred if [[w:Nikita Khrushchev|Premier Khrushchev]] had not backed down and removed Russia’s nuclear-tipped warheads from Cuba: an environmental cataclysm that makes Earth inhabitable. Before the showdown between Premier Khrushchev and [[w:John F. Kennedy|President Kennedy]], Mailer’s early enthusiasm for JFK had been diminished by the President’s disastrous indecisiveness during another crisis a year earlier, the CIA-sponsored, failed [[w:Bay of Pigs Invasion|invasion of Cuba]] (The Bay of Pigs). But the “iron nerve” displayed by JFK in the nuclear poker game with Khrushchev reestablished Mailer’s profound admiration for the risk-taking President, and gave him the opportunity to explore the psychology of a hero ready to die in a nuclear war. Mailer's unnamed President in the short story displays the same cool determination as JFK. In the mid-1990s, Mailer and his wife, [[Norris Church]], reworked “The Last Night” into a screenplay which he at first planned to re-title “1999,” but decided against it feeling that comparisons with [[w:George Orwell|George Orwell]]’s ''[[w:Nineteen Eighty-Four|Nineteen Eighty-Four]]'' would be inevitable and invidious. The screenplay remains unpublished. Mailer’s incisive comments in his prefatory note before the original story on the nature of successful film treatments would be a worthy addition to the reading lists for film-writing courses. —[[J. Michael Lennon]]|url=https://prmlr.us/mr19mail }}<br />
<br />
{{hatnote|<br />
Maybe, it is appropriate to conclude with a piece of prophetic fiction. Assume then that the errors in reasoning and/or judgement you have detected for yourself in these pages are equaled only by the numerous errors you failed to detect. That, scientist and friends, is bound to be the measure of the error in the next prophecy.<br />
<br />
The story was written in 1962, therefore was written with the idea of a President not altogether different from John F. Kennedy. L.B.J., needless to say, is altogether different. Go back, if you would go forward in time.<br />
<br />
The original prefactory note is also reprinted. It may help to elucidate the style.<br />
{{* * *}}<br />
'''''{{Start|Note to the Reader}}''''': Obviously a movie must be based on a novel, a<br />
story, a play, or an original idea. I suppose it could even derive from a poem.<br />
“''Let’s'' do ''The Wasteland'',” said a character of mine named Collie Munshin.<br />
The novel may be as much as a thousand pages long, the play a hundred, the<br />
story ten, the original idea might be stated in a paragraph. Yet each in its turn<br />
must be converted into an art form (a low art form) called a Treatment. The<br />
Treatment usually runs anywhere from twenty to a hundred pages in length. It<br />
is a bed of Procrustes. Long stories have their limbs lopped off. Too-brief tales are<br />
stretched. The idea is to present for the attention of a producer, a director, or a<br />
script reader, in readable but modest form, the line of story, the gallery of characters,<br />
the pith and gist of your tale.<br />
<br />
But one’s duty is to do this without much attempt at style and no attempt at<br />
high style. The language must be functional, even cliché, and since one’s writing<br />
prepares the ground for a movie script, too much introspection in the characters<br />
is not encouraged. “Joey was thinking for the first time that Alice was<br />
maybe in love with him,” is barely acceptable. An actor on contract could probably<br />
manage to register that emotion in a closeup. Whereas,<br />
<blockquote>. . . the little phrase, as soon as it struck his ear, had the power to liberate in him the room that was needed to contain it; the proportions of Swann’s soul were altered; a margin was left for a form of enjoyment which corresponded no more than his love for Odette to any external object, and yet was not, like his enjoyment of that love, purely individual, but assumed for him an objective reality superior to that of other concrete things,</blockquote><br />
would bake the clay of a producer’s face a little closer to stone. A producer is interested<br />
in the meat and bone of a story. His question as he reads a treatment<br />
is whether he should go on to assign a writer to do a screenplay of this story<br />
with specific dialogue and most specific situations added, or whether he should<br />
ask for another treatment with new characters and plot, or whether indeed he<br />
should write off the loss and quit right now. So a treatment bears the same relation<br />
to a finished screenplay as the model for a wind tunnel does to the airplane.<br />
Since a treatment is functional, any excellence must be unobtrusive. In<br />
fact, a good director (George Stevens) once told me that good writing in a treatment<br />
was a form of cheating because it introduced emotional effects through<br />
language which he might not as a director be able to repeat on film.<br />
<br />
So, thus modestly, I present here a treatment of a movie. It is based on an<br />
original idea. It is a short treatment. Only a few of the scenes are indicated. As<br />
an example of the art of the treatment, it is not characteristic, for it is written<br />
in somewhat formal prose, but it may have the virtue of suggesting a motion picture<br />
to your imagination.<br />
<br />
Best wishes. See you in the morning after this last night. —N.M.}}<br />
{{* * *}}<br />
{{dc|dc=W|e’re going to describe}} a movie which will take place twenty years from<br />
now, forty years from now, or is it one hundred years from now? One cannot<br />
locate the date to a certainty. The world has gone on just about the way<br />
we all expected it would go on. It has had large and dramatic confrontations<br />
by heads of state, cold wars galore, economic crises resolved and unresolved,<br />
good investment, bad investment, decent management and a witch’s bag full<br />
of other complexities much too numerous ever to bring into a movie. The<br />
result has been a catastrophe which all of us have dreaded, all of us expected,<br />
and none of us has been able to forestall. The world in twenty or forty<br />
years—let us say it is thirty-six—has come to the point where without an<br />
atomic war, without even a hard or furious shooting war, has given birth<br />
nonetheless to a fearful condition. The world has succeeded in poisoning itself.<br />
It is no longer fit to inhabit. The prevalent condition is fallout radiation,<br />
anomalous crops, monstrous babies who grow eyes in their navels and die<br />
screaming with hatred at the age of six weeks, plastics which emit cancerous<br />
fumes, buildings which collapse like camphor flakes, weather which is excruciatingly<br />
psychological because it is always too hot or too cold. Governments<br />
fall with the regularity of pendulums. The earth is doomed. The<br />
number of atom bombs detonated by the Americans, Russians, English,<br />
French, the Algerians, Africans, the Israelis and the Chinese, not to mention<br />
the Turks, Hindus and Yugoslavians, have so poisoned existence that even the<br />
apples on the trees turn malignant in the stomach. Life is being burned out<br />
by a bleak fire within, a plague upon the secrets of our existence which stultifies<br />
the air. People who govern the nations have come to a modest and simple<br />
conclusion. The mistakes of the past have condemned the future. There<br />
is no time left to discuss mankind's guilt. No one is innocent of the charge<br />
that all have blighted the rose. In fact, the last President to be elected in the<br />
United States has come to office precisely by making this the center of his<br />
plank: that no one is innocent. The political reactions have been exceptional.<br />
Earlier in the century the most fundamental political notion was that guilt<br />
could be laid always at the door of one nation and one nation only. Now a<br />
man had been elected to one of the two most powerful offices in the world<br />
on the premise that the profound illness of mankind was the fault of all, and<br />
this victory had prepared the world for cooperative action.<br />
<br />
Shortly after the election of this last of the American Presidents, the cold war was finally ended. Russia and America were ready to collaborate, as were Algeria and France, China, England, Western Europe, India and Africa. The fact had finally been faced. Man had succeeded in so polluting the atmosphere that he was doomed to expire himself. Not one in fifty of the most responsible government scientists would now admit that there were more than twenty years left to life. It was calculated that three-quarters of the living population would be gone in five years from the various diseases of fallout. It was further calculated that of the one-quarter remaining women and men, another three-quarters would be dead in the two following years. What a perspective—three-quarters of the people dead in five years, another three-quarters lost in two, one in sixteen left after seven years to watch the slow extinction of the rest. In the face of this fact, led by a President who was exceptional, who was not only the last but perhaps the greatest of America’s leaders, the people of the world had come together to stare into the grim alternatives of their fate. All men and women who continued to live on earth would expire. Five hundred thousand at least could survive if they were moved to Mars, perhaps even as many as one million people could be saved, together with various animals, vegetables, minerals, and transportable plants. For the rocketeers had made fine advances. Their arts and sciences had developed enormously. They had managed to establish a company of astronauts on Mars. Nearly one thousand had perished earlier on the Moon, but on Mars over a hundred had managed to live; they had succeeded in building a camp out of native vegetation found on the surface. Dwellings had been fabricated from it and, in triumph, a vehicle constructed entirely from materials found on Mars had been sent back to earth, where men and women received it with extravagant hope.<br />
<br />
No space here, or for that matter in the movie, to talk of the endless and difficult negotiations which had gone on. The movie could begin perhaps with the ratification of the most astounding piece of legislation ever to be passed in any country. In this case the piece of legislation had been passed by every nation in the world. It was a covenant which declared that every citizen in each nation was going to devote himself to sending a fleet of rocket ships to Mars. This effort would be Herculean. It would demand that the heart of each nation’s economy be turned over completely to building and equipping ships, selecting the people, training them, and having the moral fortitude to bid them goodbye. In a sense, this universal operation would be equivalent to the evacuation of Dunkirk but with one exception: three-quarters of the British Expeditionary Force was removed safely from the beach. In this case, the world could hope to send up to Mars no more than one million of its people, conceivably less.<br />
<br />
It was calculated that the operation must be accomplished in eighteen months—the spread of plague dictated this haste, for half of the remaining members of mankind might be dead in this time and it was felt that to wait too long would be tantamount to populating the ships with human beings too sick, too weak, too plague-ridden to meet the rigors of life on Mars.<br />
<br />
It was indeed a heroic piece of legislation, for the people on earth had had the vision to see that all of them were doomed, and so the majority had consented to accept a minority from within themselves to go out further across space and continue the species. Of course, those who were left would make some further effort to build new rocket ships and follow the wave of the first million pioneers, but the chances of this were unlikely. Not only would the resources of the world be used at an unprecedented rate to build a fleet of ten thousand rocket ships capable of carrying one hundred persons each out so far as Mars, but, in fact, as everyone knew, the earth would be stripped of its most exceptional people, its most brilliant technicians, artists, scientists, athletes and executives, plus their families. Those who were left could hardly hope to form a nucleus or a new cadre brilliant enough to repeat the effort. Besides, it was calculated that the ravages of the plague would already be extreme by the time the fleet departed. The heroism of this legislation resided therefore in the fact that man was capable of regarding his fate and determining to do something exceptional about it.<br />
<br />
Now the President of the United States, as indicated earlier, was an unusual man. It was a situation right for a dictator, but he was perhaps not only the most brilliant but the most democratic of American Presidents. And one of the reasons the separate nations of the world had been able to agree on this legislation, and the Americans in particular had voted for it, was that the President had succeeded in engaging the imagination of the world’s citizens with his project, much as Churchill had brought an incandescence to the morale of the English by the famous speech where he told them he could offer them nothing but blood, sweat, toil and tears. So this President had spared no detail in bringing the citizens of America face to face with the doom of their condition. There were still one hundred million people alive in America. Of that number, one hundred thousand would voyage to Mars. One person in a thousand then could hope to go. Yet there were no riots in the streets. The reason was curious but simple. The President had promised to stay behind and make every effort to train and rally new technicians for the construction of a second fleet. This decision to remain behind had come from many motives: he had recognized the political impossibility of leaving himself—there was moreover sufficient selflessness in the man to make such a course tasteless to him—and, what was also to the point, his wife, whom he loved, was now incurably sick. It had been agreed that the first of the criteria for selection to the fleet was good physical condition, or at least some reasonable suggestion of health, since everyone on earth was now ill in varying degree.<br />
<br />
In the first six months after the worldwide ratification of what had already become known as the Legislation For A Fleet, an atmosphere of cooperation, indeed almost of Christian sanctity and goodwill, came over the earth. Never before in the memory of anyone living had so many people seemed in so good a mood. There was physical suffering everywhere—as has been mentioned nearly everyone was ill, usually of distressing internal diseases—but the pain now possessed a certain logic, for at least one-half the working force of the world was engaged directly or indirectly in the construction of The Fleet or the preparations surrounding it. Those who were to travel to Mars had a profound sense of mission, of duty and humility. Those who knew they would be left behind felt for the first time in years a sensation of moral weightlessness which was recognized finally as the absence of guilt. Man was at peace with himself. He could even feel hope, because it was, after all, not known to a certainty that those who were left behind must inevitably perish. Some still believed in the possibility of new medical discoveries which could save them. Others devoted themselves to their President’s vow that the construction of the second fleet would begin upon the departure of the first. And, with it all, there was in nearly everyone a sense of personal abnegation, of cooperation, of identification with the community.<br />
<br />
It was part of the President’s political wisdom that the people who were chosen for the American Fleet had also been selected geographically. Every town of ten thousand inhabitants had ten heroes to make the trip. Not a county of five thousand people scattered over ten thousand square miles of ranches was without its five men, women, and children, all ready. And, of course, for each person chosen there were another ten ready to back them up, in case the first man turned ill, or the second, or the third. Behind these ten were one hundred, directly involved in the development, training, and morale of each voyager and his ten substitutes. So participation in the flight reached into all the corners of the country, and rare was the family which had nothing to do with it. Historians, writing wistfully about the end of history, had come to the conclusion that man was never so close to finding his soul as in this period when it was generally agreed he was soon to lose his body.<br />
<br />
Now, calculate what a blow it was to morality, to courage, and the heart of mankind when it was discovered that life on Mars was not supportable, that the company of a hundred who had been camping on its surface had begun to die, and that their disease was similar to the plague which had begun to visit everyone on earth, but was more virulent in its symptoms and more rapid in its results. The scientific news was overwhelming. Fallout and radiation had poisoned not only the earth but the entire solar system. There was no escape for man to any of the planets. The first solar voyagers to have journeyed so far away as Jupiter had sent back the same tragic news. Belts of radiation incalculably fierce in their intensity now surrounded all the planets.<br />
<br />
The President was, of course, the first to receive this news and, in coordination with agreements already arrived at, communicated it to the Premier of the Soviet Union. The two men were already firm friends. They had succeeded, two and a half years before, in forming an alliance to end the Cold War, and by thus acting in concert had encouraged the world to pass the Legislation For A Fleet. Now the Premier informed the President that he had heard the bad news himself: ten of the one hundred men on Mars were, after all, Russians. The two leaders met immediately in Paris for a conference which was brief and critical in its effect. The President was for declaring the news immediately. He had an intimation that to conceal such an apocalyptic fact might invite an unnamable disaster. The Premier of Russia begged him to wait a week at least before announcing this fact. His most cogent argument was that the scientists were entitled to a week to explore the remote possibility of some other solution.<br />
<br />
“What other could there possibly be?” asked the President.<br />
<br />
“How can I know?” answered the Premier. “Perhaps we shall find a way to drive a tunnel into the center of the earth in order to burn all impurities out of ourselves.”<br />
<br />
The President was adamant. The tragic condition of the world today was precisely the product, he declared, of ten thousand little abuses of power, ten thousand moments in history when the leaders had decided that the news they held was too unpleasant or too paralyzing for the masses to bear. A new era in history, a heroic if tragic era, had begun precisely because the political leaders of the world now invited the citizens into their confidence. The President and the Premier were at an impasse. The only possible compromise was to wait another twenty-four hours and invite the leaders of Europe, Asia, South America and Africa to an overnight conference which would determine the fate of the news.<br />
<br />
The second conference affected the history of everything which was to follow, because all the nations were determined to keep the new and disastrous news a secret. The President’s most trusted technical advisor, Anderson Stevens, argued that the general despair would be too great and would paralyze the best efforts of his own men to find another solution. The President and Stevens were old friends. They had come to power together. It was Stevens who had been responsible for some of the most critical scientific discoveries and advances in the rocketry of the last ten years. The Legislation For A Fleet had come, to a great extent, out of his work. He was known as the President’s greatest single friend, his most trusted advisor. If he now disagreed with the President at this international conference, the President was obliged to listen to him. Anderson Stevens argued that while the solar system was now poisoned and uninhabitable, it might still be possible to travel to some other part of our galaxy and transfer human life to a more hospitable star. For several days, scientists discussed the possibilities. It was admitted that no fuel or system of booster propulsion was sufficiently powerful to take a rocket ship beyond the solar system. Not even by connecting to booster rockets already in orbit. But then it was also argued that no supreme attempt had yet been made and if the best scientific minds on earth applied themselves to this problem the intellectual results were unforeseeable. In the meantime, absolute silence was to be observed. The program to construct the Martian Fleet was to continue as if nothing had happened. The President acceded to this majority decision of the other leaders but informed them that he would hold the silence for no more than another week.<br />
<br />
By the end of the week, Anderson Stevens returned with an exceptional suggestion: a tunnel ten miles long was to be constructed in all haste in Siberia or the American desert. Pitched at an angle, so that its entrance was on the surface and its base a mile below the earth, the tunnel would act like the muzzle of a rifle and fire the rocket as if it were a shell. Calculated properly, taking advantage of the earth’s rotation about its own axis and the greater speed of its rotation about the sun, it was estimated that the rocket ship might then possess sufficient escape velocity to quit the gravitational pull of the sun and so move out to the stars. Since some of the rocket ships were already close to completion and could be adapted quickly to the new scheme, the decision was taken to fire a trial shot in three months, with a picked crew of international experts. If the ship succeeded in escaping the pull of the sun, its crew could then explore out to the nearest stars and send back the essential information necessary for the others who would follow.<br />
<br />
Again, the question of secrecy was debated. Now Stevens argued that it would be equally irresponsible to give people hope if none would later exist. So, suffering his deepest misgivings, the President consented to a period of silence for three months while the tunnel was completed. In this period, the character of his administration began to change. Hundreds and then thousands of men were keeping two great secrets: the impossibility of life on Mars, and the construction of the giant cannon which would fire an exploratory ship to the stars. So an atmosphere of secrecy and evasion began to circle about the capital, and the mood of the nation was effected. There were rumors everywhere; few of them were accurate. People whispered that the President was dying. Others stated that the Russians were no longer in cooperation with us, but engaged in a contest to see who could get first to Mars. It was said that the climate of Mars had driven the colonists mad, that the spaceships being built would not hold together because the parts were weakened by atomic radiation. It was even rumored—for the existence of the tunnel could not be hidden altogether—that the government was planning to construct an entire state beneath the surface of the earth, in which people could live free of radiation and fallout. For the first time in three or four years, the rates of the sociological diseases—crime, delinquency, divorce and addiction—began again to increase.<br />
<br />
The day for the secret test arrived. The rocket was fired. It left the earth’s atmosphere at a rate greater than any projectile had yet traveled, a rate so great that the first fear of the scientists was substantiated. The metal out of which the rocket was made, the finest, most heat-resistant alloy yet devised by metallurgists, was still insufficient to withstand the heat of its velocity. As it rose through the air, with the dignitaries of fifty countries gathered to watch its departure, it burst out of the earth, its metal skin glowing with the incandescence of a welding torch, traced a path of incredible velocity across the night sky, so fast that it looked like a bolt of lightning reversed, leaping lividly from the earth into the melancholy night, and burned itself out thirty miles up in the air, burned itself out as completely as a dead meteor. No metal existed which could withstand the heat of the excessive friction created by the extreme velocity necessary to blast a ship through the atmosphere and out beyond the gravitational attractions of the sun and its planets. On the other hand, a rocket ship which rose slowly through the earth’s atmosphere and so did not overheat could not then generate enough power to overcome the pull of the sun. It seemed now conclusive that man was trapped within his solar system.<br />
<br />
The President declared that the people must finally be informed, and in an historic address he did so inform them of the futility of going to Mars and of the impossibility of escape in any other way. There was nothing left for man, he declared, but to prepare himself for his end, to recognize that his soul might have a life beyond his death and so might communicate the best of himself to the stars. There was thus the opportunity to die well, in dignity, with grace, and the hope that the spirit might prove more miraculous and mighty than the wonders man had extracted from matter. It was a great speech. Commentators declared it was perhaps the greatest speech ever delivered by a political leader. It suffered from one irrevocable flaw: it had been delivered three months too late. The ultimate reaction was cynical. “If all that is left to us is our spirit,” commented a German newspaper, “why then did the President deny us three useful months in which to begin to develop it?”<br />
<br />
Like the leaden-green airless evening before an electrical storm, an atmosphere of depression, bitterness, wildness, violence and madness rose from the echoes of this speech. Productivity began to founder. People refused to work. Teachers taught in classrooms which were empty and left the schools themselves. Windows began to be broken everywhere, a most minor activity, but it took on accelerated proportions, as if many found a huge satisfaction in throwing rocks through windows much as though they would proclaim that this was what the city would look like when they were gone. Funerals began to take on a bizarre attraction. Since ten to twenty times as many people were dying each day as had died even five years before, funeral processions took up much of the traffic, and many of the people who were idle enjoyed marching through the streets in front of and behind the limousines. The effect was sometimes medieval, for impromptu carnivals began to set themselves up on the road to the cemetery. There were speeches in Congress to impeach the President and, as might conventionally be expected, some of the particular advisers who had counseled him to keep silence were now most forward in their condemnation of his act.<br />
<br />
The President himself seemed to be going through an exceptional experience. That speech in which he had suggested to mankind that its best hope was to cultivate its spirit before it died seemed to have had the most profound effect upon him. His appearance had begun to alter: his hair was subtly longer, his face more gaunt, his eyes feverish. He had always been unorthodox as a President, but now his clothing was often rumpled and he would appear unexpectedly to address meetings or to say a few words on television. His resemblance to Lincoln, which had in the beginning been slight, now became more pronounced. The wits were quick to suggest that he spent hours each day with a makeup expert. In the midst of this, the President’s wife died, and in great pain. They had been close for twenty years. Over the last month, he had encouraged her not to take any drugs to dull the pain. The pain was meaningful, he informed her. The choice might be one of suffering now in the present or later in eternity. In anguish she expired. On her deathbed she seared him with a cruel confession. It was that no matter how she had loved him for twenty years, she had always felt there was a part of him never to be trusted, a part which was implacable, inhuman and ruthless. “You would destroy the world for a principle,” she told him as she died. “There is something diabolical about you.”<br />
<br />
On the return from her funeral, people came out to stand silently in tribute. It was the first spontaneous sign of respect paid to him in some months, and riding alone in the rear of an open limousine, he wept. Yet, before the ride was over, someone in the crowd threw a stone through the windshield. In his mind, as he rode, was the face of his wife, saying to him some months before, “I tell you, people cannot bear suffering. I know that I cannot. You will force me to destroy a part of your heart if you do not let me have the drugs.”<br />
<br />
That night the chief of America’s Intelligence Service came to see the President. The Russians were engaged in a curious act. They were building a tunnel in Siberia, a tunnel even larger than the American one, and at an impossible angle; it went almost directly into the earth, and then took a jog at right angles to itself. The President put through a call to Moscow to speak to the Premier. The Premier told the President that he had already made preparations to see him. There was a matter of the most extreme importance to be discussed: the Russians had found a way to get a rocket ship out of the solar system.<br />
<br />
So, the two men met in London in a secret conference. Alone in a room, the Premier explained the new project and his peculiar position. Slowly, insidiously, he had been losing control in his country, just as the President had become progressively more powerless in America. Against the Premier’s wishes, some atomic and rocket scientists had come together on a fearsome scheme which the Army was now supporting. It had been calculated that if an ordinary rocket ship, of the sort which belonged to the Martian fleet, were fired out from the earth, it would be possible to blast it into the furthest reaches of our own galaxy, provided—and this was most important—a planet were exploded at the proper moment. It would be like the impetus a breaking wave could give to a surfboard rider. With proper timing the force released by blowing up the planet would more than counteract the gravitational pull of the sun. Moreover, the rocket ship could be a great distance away from the planet at the moment it was exploded, and so the metal of its skin would not have to undergo any excessive heat.<br />
<br />
“But which planet could we use?” asked the President.<br />
<br />
The two men looked at one another. The communication passed silently from one’s mind to the other. It was obvious. With the techniques available to them there was only one planet: the earth.<br />
<br />
That was what the Russian tunnel was for. A tunnel going deep into the earth, loaded with fissionable material, and exploded by a radio wave sent out from a rocket ship already one million miles away. The detonation of the earth would hurl the rocket ship like a pebble across a chasm of space.<br />
<br />
“Well,” says the President, after a long pause, “it may be possible for the Fleet to take a trip after all.”<br />
<br />
“No,” the Premier assures him, “not the Fleet.” For the earth would be detonated by an atomic chain reaction which would spew radioactive material across one hundred million miles of the heavens. The alloy vuranel was the only alloy which could protect a rocket ship against the electronic hurricane which would follow the explosion. There was on earth enough vuranel to create a satisfactory shield for only one ship. “Not a million men, women, and children, but a hundred, a hundred people and a few animals will take the trip to a star.”<br />
<br />
“Who will go?” asks the President.<br />
<br />
“Some of your people,” answers the Premier, “some of mine. You and me.”<br />
<br />
“I won’t go,” says the President.<br />
<br />
“Of course you will,” says the Premier. “Because if you don’t go, I don’t go, and we’ve been through too much already. You see, my dear friend, you’re the only equal I have on earth. It would be much too depressing to move through those idiotic stars without you.”<br />
<br />
But the President is overcome by the proportions of the adventure. “You mean we will blow up the entire world in order that a hundred people have some small chance—one chance in five, one chance in ten, one chance in a hundred, or less—to reach some star and live upon it. The odds are too brutal. The cost is incalculable.”<br />
<br />
“We lose nothing but a few years,” says the Premier. “We’ll all be dead anyway.”<br />
<br />
“No,” says the President, “it’s not the same. We don’t know what we destroy. It may be that after life ceases on the earth, life will generate itself again, if only we leave the earth alone. To destroy it is monstrous. We may destroy the spirit of something far larger than ourselves.”<br />
<br />
The Premier taps him on the shoulder. “Look, my friend, do you believe that God is found in a cockroach? I don’t. God is found inside you, and inside me. When all of us are gone, God is also gone.”<br />
<br />
“I don’t know if I believe that,” answers the President.<br />
<br />
Well, the Premier tells him, religious discussion has always fascinated him, but politics are more pressing. The question is whether they are at liberty to discuss this matter on its moral merits alone. The tunnel in Siberia had been built without his permission. It might interest the President to know that a tunnel equally secret is being constructed near the site of the old Arizona tunnel. There were Russian technicians working on that, just as American technicians had been working in Siberia. The sad political fact is that the technicians had acquired enormous political force, and if it were a question of a showdown tomorrow, it is quite likely they could seize power in the Soviet Union and in America as well.<br />
<br />
“You, sir,” says the Premier, “have been searching your soul for the last year in order to discover reasons for still governing. I have been studying Machiavelli because I have found, to my amusement, that when all else is gone, when life is gone, when the promise of future life is gone, and the meaning of power, then what remains for one is the game. I want the game to go on. I do not want to lose power in my country. I do not want you to lose it in yours. I want, if necessary, to take the game clear up into the stars. You deserve to be on that rocket ship, and I deserve to be on it. It is possible we have given as much as anyone alive to brooding over the problems of mankind in these last few years. It is your right and my right to look for a continuation of the species. Perhaps it is even our duty.”<br />
<br />
“No,” says the President. “They’re holding a gun to our heads. One cannot speak of the pleasures of the game or of honor or of duty when there is no choice.”<br />
<br />
He will not consent to destroying the earth unless the people of earth choose that course, with a full knowledge of the consequences. What is he going to do, asks the Premier. He is going to tell the world, says the President. There must be a general worldwide election to determine the decision.<br />
<br />
“Your own people will arrest you first,” says the Premier. He then discloses that the concept of exploding the earth to boost the power of the rocket had been Anderson Stevens’ idea.<br />
<br />
The President picks up the phone and makes a call to his press chief. He tells him to prepare the television networks for an address he will deliver that night. The press chief asks him the subject. The President tells him he will discuss it upon his return. The press chief says that the network cannot be cleared unless the President informs him now of the subject. It will be a religious address, says the President.<br />
<br />
“The networks may not give us the time,” says the press chief. “Frankly, sir, they are not certain which audiences share your spiritual fire.”<br />
<br />
The President hangs up. “You are right,” he tells the Premier. “They will not let me make the speech. I have to make it here in London. Will you stand beside me?”<br />
<br />
“No, my friend,” says the Russian, “I will not. They will put you in jail for making that speech, and you will have need of me on the outside to liberate your skin.”<br />
<br />
The President makes the address in London to the citizens of the world. He explains the alternatives, outlines his doubts, discusses the fact that there are technicians ready to seize power, determined to commit themselves to the terrestrial explosion. No one but the people of the earth, by democratic procedure, have the right to make this decision, he declares, and recommends that as a first step the people march on the tunnel sites and hold them. He concludes his address by saying he is flying immediately back to Washington and will be there within two hours.<br />
<br />
The message has been delivered on the network devoted to international television. It reaches a modest percentage of all listeners in the world. But in America, from the President’s point of view the program took place at an unfortunate time, for it was the early hours of the morning. When he lands in Washington at dawn, he is met by his Cabinet and a platoon of M.P.’s who arrest him. Television in America is devoted that morning to the announcement that the President has had a psychotic breakdown and is at present under observation by psychiatrists.<br />
<br />
For a week, the atmosphere is unendurable. A small percentage of the people in America have listened to the President’s speech. Many more have heard him in other countries. Political tensions are acute, and increase when the Premier of the Soviet Union announces in reply to a question from a reporter that in his opinion the President of the United States is perfectly sane. Committees of citizens form everywhere to demand an open investigation of the charges against the President. It becomes a rallying cry that the President be shown to the public. A condition close to civil war exists in America.<br />
<br />
At this point, the President is paid a visit by Anderson Stevens, the scientist in charge of the rocket program, the man who has lately done more than any other to lead the Cabinet against the President. Now they have a conversation behind the barred windows of the hospital room where the President is imprisoned. Anderson Stevens tells the President that the first tunnel which had been built for the star shot was, from his point of view, a ruse. He had never expected that rocket ship, which was fired like a bullet, to escape from the earth’s atmosphere without burning to a cinder. All of his experience had told him it would be destroyed. But he had advanced the program for that shot because he wished to test something else—the tunnel. It had been essential to discover how deeply one could dig into the crust of the earth before the heat became insupportable for an atomic bomb. In effect, the tunnel had been dug as a test to determine the feasibility of detonating the earth. And so that shot which had burned up a rocket ship had been, from Stevens’ point of view, a success, because he had learned that the tunnel could be dug deep enough to enable a superior hydrogen bomb to set off a chain reaction in the fiery core of the earth. The fact that one hundred rocketeers and astronauts, men who had been his friends for decades, had died in an experiment he had known to be all but hopeless was an indication of how serious he was about the earth bomb shot. The President must not think for a moment that Stevens would hesitate to keep him in captivity, man the ship himself, and blow up the earth.<br />
<br />
Why, then, asks the President, does Stevens bother to speak to him? Because, answers Stevens, he wants the President to command the ship. Why? Because in some way the fate of the ship might be affected by the emotions of everybody on earth at the moment the earth was exploded. This sounded like madness to some of his scientific colleagues, but to him it was feasible that if life had a spirit and all life ceased to exist at the same moment, then that spirit, at the instant of death, might have a force of liberation or deterrence which could be felt as a physical force across the heavens.<br />
<br />
“You mean,” said the President, “that even in the ruthless circuits of your heart there is terror, a moral terror, at the consequence of your act. And it is me you wish to bear the moral consequence of that act, and not you.”<br />
<br />
“You are the only man great enough, sir,” says Anderson Stevens, bowing his head.<br />
<br />
“But I think the act is wrong,” says the President.<br />
<br />
“I know it is right,” says Stevens. “I spent a thousand days and a thousand nights living with the terror that I might be wrong, and still I believe I am right. There is something in me which knows that two things are true—that we have destroyed this earth not only because we were not worthy of it, but because it may have been too cruel for us. I tell you, we do not know. Man may have been mismatched with earth. In some fantastic way, perhaps we voyaged here some millions of years ago and fell into a stupidity equal to the apes. That I don’t know. But I do know, if I know anything at all, because my mind imprisoned in each and every one of my cells tells me so, that we must go on, that we as men are different from the earth, we are visitors upon it. We cannot suffer ourselves to sit here and be extinguished, not when the beauty which first gave speech to our tongues commands us to go out and find another world, another earth, where we may strive, where we may win, where we may find the right to live again. For that dream I would kill everyone on earth. I would kill my children. In fact I must, for they will not accompany me on the trip. And you,” he says to the President, “you must accompany us. You must help to make this trip. For we as men may finally achieve greatness if we survive this, the most profound of our perils.”<br />
<br />
“I do not trust myself,” says the President. “I do not know if my motive is good. Too many men go to their death with a hatred deep beyond words, wishing with their last breath that they could find the power to destroy God. I do not know—I may be one of those men.”<br />
<br />
“You have no choice,” says Anderson Stevens. “There are people trying to liberate you now. I shall be here to shoot you myself before they succeed. Unless you agree to command the ship.”<br />
<br />
“Why should I agree?” says the President. “Shoot me now.”<br />
<br />
“No,’’ says Stevens, “you will agree, because I will make one critical concession to you. I do it not from choice, but from desperation. My dreams tell me we are doomed unless you command us. So I will let you give the people their one last opportunity. I will let you speak to them. I will put my power behind you, so that they may vote.”<br />
<br />
“No,” says the President, “not yet. Because if such an election were lost, if the people said, ‘Let us stay here and die together, and leave the earth to mend itself, without the sound of human speech or our machines,’ then you would betray me. I know it. You would betray everyone. Some night, in some desert, a rocket ship would be fired up into the sky, and twenty hours later, deep in some secret tunnel, all of us would be awakened by the last explosion of them all. No. I will wait for the people to free me first. Of necessity, my first act then will be to imprison you.”<br />
<br />
After this interview between Stevens and the President, the ruling coalition of Cabinet officers and technicians refused, of course, to let the people see the President. The response was a virtually spontaneous trek of Americans by airplane, helicopter, automobile, by animal, by motorcycle, and on foot, toward the tunnel site the President had named. The Army was quickly deployed to prevent them, but the soldiers refused to protect the approaches to the tunnel. They also asked for the right to see the President. The Cabinet capitulated. The President was presented on television. He announced that the only justification for the star ship was a worldwide general election.<br />
<br />
The most brilliant, anguished, closely debated election in the history of the world now took place. For two months, argument licked like flame at the problem. In a last crucial speech the night before the election, the President declared that it was the words of a man now in prison, Anderson Stevens, which convinced him how he would vote. For he, the President, had indeed come to believe that man rising out of the fiery grave of earth, out of the loss of his past, his history, and his roots, might finally achieve the greatness and the goodness expected of him precisely because he had survived this, the last and the most excruciating of his trials. “If even a few of us manage to live, our seed will be changed forever by the self-sacrifice and nobility, the courage and the loss engraved on our memory of that earth-doomed man who was our ancestor and who offered us life. Man may become human at last.” The President concluded his speech by announcing that if the people considered him deserving of the honor, he would be the first to enter the ship, he would take upon himself the act of pressing that button which would blow up the earth.<br />
<br />
The answer to this speech was a solemn vote taken in favor of destroying the world, and giving the spaceship its opportunity to reach the stars.<br />
<br />
The beginning of the last sequence in the movie might show the President and the Premier saying goodbye. The Premier has discovered he is now hopelessly ill, and so will stay behind.<br />
<br />
The Premier smiles as he says good-bye. “You see, I am really too fat for a brand-new game. It is you fanatics who always take the longest trips.”<br />
<br />
One hundred men and women file into the ship behind the President. The rocket is fired and rises slowly, monumentally. Soon it is out of sight. In the navigation tower within the rocket the President stares back at earth. It is seen on a color television screen, magnified enormously. The hours go by and the time is approaching for the explosion. The radio which will send out the wave of detonation is warmed up. Over it the President speaks to the people who are left behind on earth. All work has of course ceased, and people waiting through the last few hours collect, many of them, in public places, listening to the President’s voice on loudspeakers. Others hear it in radios in their rooms, or sprawled on the grass in city parks. People listen in cars on country crossroads, at the beach, watching the surf break. Quietly, a few still buy tickets for their children on the pony rides. One or two old scholars sit by themselves at desks in the public library, reading books. Some drink in bars. Others sit quietly on the edge of pavements, their feet in the street. One man takes his shoes off. The mood is not too different from the mood of a big city late at night when the weather is warm. There is the same air of expectation, of quiet, brooding concentration.<br />
<br />
“Pray for us,” says the President to them, speaking into his microphone on that rocket ship one million miles away. “Pray for us. Pray that our purpose is good and not evil. Pray that we are true and not false. Pray that it is part of our mission to bring the life we know to other stars.” And in his ears he hears the voice of his wife, saying through her pain, “You will end by destroying everything.”<br />
<br />
“Forgive me, all of you,” says the President. “May I be an honest man and not first deluded physician to the devil.” Then he presses the button.<br />
<br />
The earth detonates into the dark spaces. A flame leaps across the solar system. A scream of anguish, jubilation, desperation, terror, ecstasy, vaults across the heavens. The tortured heart of the earth has finally found its voice. We have a glimpse of the spaceship, a silver minnow of light, streaming into the oceans of mystery, and the darkness beyond.<br />
<br />
{{Review|state=expanded}}<br />
{{DEFAULTSORT:Last Night, The}}<br />
[[Category:Creative Works (MR)]]<br />
[[Category:Short Stories (MR)]]</div>Klcrawfordhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=User:Klcrawford&diff=13023User:Klcrawford2021-03-01T16:45:11Z<p>Klcrawford: </p>
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<div>Hello friends, my name is Kari ('''Klcrawford''') and I'm from [[Chicago]]. I am currently finishing my IDS degree at MGA. ''I love cooking, language learning (Hindi & Odia), and spending time with my fiancé and our two dachshunds: Dexter & Bella.'' I am excited to learn how to better edit here on [[Wikipedia]].</div>Klcrawfordhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=User:Klcrawford&diff=13022User:Klcrawford2021-03-01T16:44:29Z<p>Klcrawford: Created page with "Hello friends, my name is Kari ('''Klcrawford''') and I'm from Chicago. I am currently finishing my IDS degree at MGA. ''I love cooking, language learning, and spending ti..."</p>
<hr />
<div>Hello friends, my name is Kari ('''Klcrawford''') and I'm from [[Chicago]]. I am currently finishing my IDS degree at MGA. ''I love cooking, language learning, and spending time with my fiancé and our two dachshunds: Dexter & Bella.'' I am excited to learn how to better edit here on [[Wikipedia]].</div>Klcrawfordhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=User_talk:Grlucas&diff=12745User talk:Grlucas2021-02-23T23:24:22Z<p>Klcrawford: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{Talk header}}<br />
<br />
== Article Errors ==<br />
<br />
I've added the body of the article to my sandbox page. What errors do I need to specifically change in order to make it correct?[[User:CDucharme|CDucharme]] ([[User talk:CDucharme|talk]]) 17:04, 14 September 2020 (EDT)<br />
:{{Reply to|CDucharme}} Mostly you need to add the notes, citation, and read for typos. It’s meticulous, but that’s the job. (Thanks for signing.) —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:08, 14 September 2020 (EDT)<br />
<br />
== Final edits ==<br />
<br />
Hello, Dr. Lucas, I finished editing my article. May I have the banner removed?[[User:KJordan|KJordan]] ([[User talk:KJordan|talk]]) 20:13, 22 September 2020 (EDT)KJordan<br />
:{{Reply to|KJordan}} Maybe. You should always link to something you want me to have a look at, please. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 20:14, 22 September 2020 (EDT)<br />
<br />
Dr. Lucas, I have finished editing my article. Can you please review it? Thank You. Here is a link to it: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/The_Heart_of_the_Nation:_Jewish_Values_in_the_Fiction_of_Norman_Mailer --[[User:AMurray|AMurray]] ([[User talk:AMurray|talk]]) 21:56, 23 September 2020 (EDT)<br />
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:{{Reply to|AMurray}} Looking good! However, I still see quote a few typos. There should be no space before a footnote or citation.<ref>Like this.</ref> And all parenthetical citations need to be converted. I also see a lot of missing punctuation, especially around citations. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 24 September 2020 (EDT)<br />
<br />
{{Reflist}}<br />
<br />
Dr. Lucas, I finished editing my article. Will you please review? <br />
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/The_Unknown_and_the_General --[[User:Jrdavisjr|Jrdavisjr]] ([[User talk:Jrdavisjr|talk]]) 09:00, 25 September 2020 (EDT)<br />
:{{Reply to| Jrdavisjr}} It looks good. Let's go through editing week and see if anything else comes up. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:15, 25 September 2020 (EDT)<br />
<br />
Dr. Lucas, I have finished editing my article. Can you please review it? Thank You<br />
https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:JSheppard/sandbox [[User:JSheppard|JSheppard]] ([[User talk:JSheppard|talk]])<br />
:{{Reply to| JSheppard}} You have a '''lot''' of work left to do. I see [[User:Jules Carry]] is helping, but you’re missing references and there are typos throughout. Keep working. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:19, 25 September 2020 (EDT)<br />
<br />
Dr. Lucas, I finished my article. <br />
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/More_Than_The_Dead_Know<br />
[[User:RWalsh|RWalsh]] ([[User talk:RWalsh|talk]]) 15:15, 8 February 2021 (EST)<br />
:{{reply to|RWalsh}} Not quite, but it's looking good. Clean it up and begin helping others. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:11, 9 February 2021 (EST)<br />
<br />
Dr. Lucas, I believe I have finished editing my article. Will you please review?<br />
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/%E2%80%9CHer_Problems_Were_Everyone%E2%80%99s_Problems%E2%80%9D:_Self_and_Gender_in_The_Deer_Park [[User:Klcrawford|Klcrawford]] ([[User talk:Klcrawford|talk]]) 09:06, 15 February 2021 (EST)<br />
:{{Reply to|Klcrawford}} Great work. I have removed the working banner. I would appreciate it if you began to assist some of the other editors. Thanks. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:04, 15 February 2021 (EST)<br />
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Hello Dr. Lucas, I have been making some edits, I am still looking to see if there is more, can you look through and give any feedback?https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/Angst,_Authorship,_Critics:_“The_Snows_of_Kilimanjaro,”_“The_Crack-Up,”_Advertisements_for_Myself [[User:JFordyce|JFordyce]] ([[User talk:JFordyce|talk]]) 18:27, 20 February 2021 (EST)JFordyce<br />
<br />
Hello Dr. Lucas, I believe I have finished my article. Can you please review it? https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/Request [[User:EKrauskopf|EKrauskopf]] ([[User talk:EKrauskopf|talk]]) 13:06, 22 Februrary 2021 (EST)<br />
:{{Reply to|EKrauskopf}} OK, looks good. Well done. Now please begin assisting others on getting volume 9 finished. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 06:41, 23 February 2021 (EST)<br />
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Dr. Lucas, I have finished and cleaned up my article. Could you please review it?<br />
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/More_Than_The_Dead_Know [[User:RWalsh|RWalsh]] ([[User talk:RWalsh|talk]]) 12:35, 23 February 2021 (EST)<br />
:{{Reply to|RWalsh}} OK, nice job. Now please begin assisting others on getting volume 9 finished. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 13:47, 23 February 2021 (EST)<br />
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Dr. Lucas. I have started working on another article. Would you be able to send me the PDF of "The Savage Poet-- Unlocking the Universe With Metaphor" so that I can help add to the article? [[User:Klcrawford|Klcrawford]] ([[User talk:Klcrawford|talk]]) 18:24, 23 February 2021 (EST)<br />
<br />
== When we Were Kings 1st remediation ==<br />
<br />
[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/When_We_Were_Kings:_Review_and_Commentary|https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/When_We_Were_Kings:_Review_and_Commentary]]<br />
<br />
Here is the link for the remediation I did for this weeks assignment. I did not now where to place the link.<br />
<br />
Thank you,<br />
Trevor Ryals<br />
:{{Reply to|TRyals}} Thank you, but this is unnecessary. Just do the work; I promise I will see it. (And be sure to sign your talk page posts.) —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 18:16, 2 February 2021 (EST)</div>Klcrawfordhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/The_Savage_Poet%E2%80%94Unlocking_the_Universe_with_Metaphor&diff=12744The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/The Savage Poet—Unlocking the Universe with Metaphor2021-02-23T23:19:13Z<p>Klcrawford: Removed the Review/ default sort from the top of the page. Fixed minor spelling errors. Reformatted the top of the page with bold lettering.~~~~</p>
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<div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}<br />
{{Working}}<br />
{{MR13}}<br />
{{byline|last=Stewart|first=Mark|url=http://prmlr.us/mr13ste}}<br />
<br />
<blockquote>This article first appeared in the March 2020 issue of ''Spaceflight'' magazine and is reproduced with kind permission of the<br />
editor and author [https://www.bis-space.com/what-we-do/publications].</blockquote><br />
<br />
<blockquote>“''But he reached a place at last he had been in months before, the room with the plate-glass window across its middle where the magazine writers had hounded Armstrong until Armstrong confessed that Man explored out as salmon swim upstream. . . .''”</blockquote><br />
<br />
{{dc|dc=T|he number of books published since the first printing press}} clattered<br />
into life must by now be unguessable. Collectively their contents comprise<br />
a river of knowledge and enlightenment, but also one suspects a vast reservoir of the trivial and banal. If the voice of an individual writer is to be heard<br />
amongst the endless torrent of words he or she must develop a unique and<br />
distinctive voice. Few voices were more original or engaging than Norman<br />
Mailer’s, especially when that voice spoke about the momentous events<br />
which took place on the Florida peninsula in the closing years of the 1960s<br />
(and the opening years of the decade that followed), as the men and women<br />
working for NASA responded to the fire on the Moon. To the beacon lit by<br />
John F. Kennedy when he challenged his nation to reach that distant goal.<br />
<br />
Pugnacious and controversial, both as an individual and as a writer,<br />
Mailer never shied away from being unorthodox. And without question, ''A Fire on the Moon'' is strikingly different from any other book, its author referring to himself by his Aquarius star-sign throughout the unusual, provocative, and often metaphysical narrative. The book reads like a novel, at turns rhythmic and lyrical and challenging. The way Mailer describes the<br />
launch of Apollo 11 is one example of his aphoristic and quirky turn of mind:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>''For the flames were enormous. No one could be prepared for that. Flames flew in cataract against the cusp of the flame shield, and then sluiced along the paved ground down two opposite channels in the concrete, two underground rivers of flame which poured into the air on either side a hundred feet away, then flew a hundred feet further. Two mighty torches of flame like the wings of a yellow bird of fire flew over a field, covered a field with brilliant yellow bloomings of flame, and in the midst of it, white as a ghost, white as the white of Melville’s Moby Dick, white as the shrine of the Madonna in half the churches of the world, this slim angelic mysterious ship of stages rose without sound out of its incarnation of flame and began to ascend slowly into the sky, slow as Melville’s Leviathan might swim, slowly as we might swim upward in a dream looking for the air. And still no sound . . .''</blockquote><br />
<br />
No writer or artist has yet to venture into space, which may help to explain why a large section of the public still views space exploration as something ''apart'', as an activity removed from anything they can participate in. Yes, Al Bean (Apollo 12, Skylab 3) and Alexei Leonov (Voskhod 2, Soyuz-Apollo) took up oils and canvass on coming back from space but first and foremost<br />
they were both astronauts. Space travel was their original abiding vocation;<br />
all else flowed from that. No space agency has yet to recruit a potential space<br />
traveler on the basis of how good their use of imagery is. As Mailer says towards the end of his book: “''. . . certainly the hour of happiness would be here when men who spoke like Shakespeare rode the ships; how many eons was that away!''” The goal of sending a poet into space seems as distant now as it was then.<br />
<br />
The question arises as to whether Mailer’s superluminal fire has now been<br />
extinguished, and where and when and if it might ever be rekindled. Will humanity by-pass the Moon in favor of Mars perhaps? Will the tracks laid<br />
down by remote controlled rovers on the Red Planet prove too tempting a<br />
trail to overlook? Mechanical footsteps that will demand in due course the<br />
accompanying imprint of a human heel? ''A Fire on Mars'' is possibly the inevitable sequel to Mailer’s intellectual voyage, but it will take a different writer<br />
from a new generation to describe what happens next. The Age of Aquarius<br />
may be over (the arc of Mailer’s life having expired in 2007) but thanks to his<br />
unique voice the Age of Apollo will never die.<br />
<br />
Written when the program still had six more missions left to run, the<br />
book now seems like an epitaph for the whole venture, a brooding reflection<br />
on the manner and nature of the men who were willing to ride a rocket the<br />
“''size of Coventry Cathedral''” all the way to another world. And to do so without hope (beyond that provided by their own resourcefulness) of rescue or<br />
retrieval in the event of calamity or disaster. Oddly, the thought persists on<br />
reading Mailer’s account that the whole era can be captured in its entirety in<br />
just this and two other books: Andrew Chaikin’s ''A Man on the Moon'', and<br />
Tom Wolfe’s ''The Right Stuff''. Polar opposites in style they yet combine to<br />
make a comprehensive whole.<br />
<br />
Tucked away in my own copy of ''A Fire on the Moon'' (salvaged from a second hand bookshop) is a clipping from the January 1971 edition of ''Time'' magazine, a review of Mailer’s book entitled ''Reflections on a Star-Cross Aquarius''. Rescued from its time capsule it provides not just the context for the book’s publication, but a literary fragment of the early 1970s. From a<br />
time when the fire of Apollo was still burning brightly enough for the exploits of its sons to be witnessed by a global audience, gazing both literally<br />
and metaphorically at the furthest of horizons.<br />
<br />
These celestial knights (who belong to American folklore as much as any<br />
frontiersman) stand comparison with the armored crusaders who once<br />
met where the ruins of a stone fortress now stands, perched on the cliffs at<br />
Tintagel, and whose erstwhile king now resides in Avalon. But perhaps in<br />
the context of Mailer’s book a more apt analogy might be with the beacons<br />
of Gondor, lit to summon aid for the besieged city of Minas Tirith in the<br />
epic lands of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. The great mountain-top pyres signaling across vast distances, kindling hope in desperate times. For<br />
metaphorical fires are surely still burning at the six Apollo landing sites and<br />
are yet visible with the naked eye if you know roughly where to look, and<br />
have enough imagination to conceive of what might have been. Mailer’s single fire is perhaps more accurately described as six individual markers. Like<br />
the cosmic perspectives offered in the stories of H.G. Wells, they can still<br />
capture the eye, drawing it out into the depths of space. And it is out there,<br />
in the realm of the stargazer, that the human imagination is always at its<br />
most speculative and creative.<br />
<br />
It is still to be hoped, and remains a cherished dream of many, that looking up at the Moon on a clear night is tantamount to gazing at a once and<br />
future home for humanity. That the two world system so vividly described<br />
in Arthur C. Clarke’s ''Earthlight'' (1955) can yet became a reality. And perhaps,<br />
as Mailer said, we will only ever do that and “''go out into space''” when we can<br />
“''comprehend the world once again as poets, comprehend it as savages who knew that if the universe was a lock, its key was a metaphor.''”<br />
<br />
=== Notes ===<br />
{{notelist}}<br />
<br />
===Works Cited===<br />
{{Refbegin}}<br />
*{{cite book|last=Clarke|first=Arthur C.|date=1955|title=''Earthlight''|ref=harv}}<br />
{{Refend}}<br />
<br />
{{Review}}<br />
{{DEFAULTSORT:Savage Poet - Unlocking the Universe with Metaphor, The}}<br />
[[Category:V.13 2019]]</div>Klcrawfordhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=User_talk:Grlucas&diff=12533User talk:Grlucas2021-02-15T14:07:18Z<p>Klcrawford: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{Talk header}}<br />
<br />
== Article Errors ==<br />
<br />
I've added the body of the article to my sandbox page. What errors do I need to specifically change in order to make it correct?[[User:CDucharme|CDucharme]] ([[User talk:CDucharme|talk]]) 17:04, 14 September 2020 (EDT)<br />
:{{Reply to|CDucharme}} Mostly you need to add the notes, citation, and read for typos. It’s meticulous, but that’s the job. (Thanks for signing.) —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:08, 14 September 2020 (EDT)<br />
<br />
== Final edits ==<br />
<br />
Hello, Dr. Lucas, I finished editing my article. May I have the banner removed?[[User:KJordan|KJordan]] ([[User talk:KJordan|talk]]) 20:13, 22 September 2020 (EDT)KJordan<br />
:{{Reply to|KJordan}} Maybe. You should always link to something you want me to have a look at, please. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 20:14, 22 September 2020 (EDT)<br />
<br />
Dr. Lucas, I have finished editing my article. Can you please review it? Thank You. Here is a link to it: https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/The_Heart_of_the_Nation:_Jewish_Values_in_the_Fiction_of_Norman_Mailer --[[User:AMurray|AMurray]] ([[User talk:AMurray|talk]]) 21:56, 23 September 2020 (EDT)<br />
<br />
:{{Reply to|AMurray}} Looking good! However, I still see quote a few typos. There should be no space before a footnote or citation.<ref>Like this.</ref> And all parenthetical citations need to be converted. I also see a lot of missing punctuation, especially around citations. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:24, 24 September 2020 (EDT)<br />
<br />
{{Reflist}}<br />
<br />
Dr. Lucas, I finished editing my article. Will you please review? <br />
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_2,_2008/The_Unknown_and_the_General --[[User:Jrdavisjr|Jrdavisjr]] ([[User talk:Jrdavisjr|talk]]) 09:00, 25 September 2020 (EDT)<br />
:{{Reply to| Jrdavisjr}} It looks good. Let's go through editing week and see if anything else comes up. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 10:15, 25 September 2020 (EDT)<br />
<br />
Dr. Lucas, I have finished editing my article. Can you please review it? Thank You<br />
https://projectmailer.net/pm/User:JSheppard/sandbox [[User:JSheppard|JSheppard]] ([[User talk:JSheppard|talk]])<br />
:{{Reply to| JSheppard}} You have a '''lot''' of work left to do. I see [[User:Jules Carry]] is helping, but you’re missing references and there are typos throughout. Keep working. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 17:19, 25 September 2020 (EDT)<br />
<br />
Dr. Lucas, I finished my article. <br />
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/More_Than_The_Dead_Know<br />
[[User:RWalsh|RWalsh]] ([[User talk:RWalsh|talk]]) 15:15, 8 February 2021 (EST)<br />
:{{reply to|RWalsh}} Not quite, but it's looking good. Clean it up and begin helping others. —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 07:11, 9 February 2021 (EST)<br />
<br />
Dr. Lucas, I believe I have finished editing my article. Will you please review?<br />
https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/%E2%80%9CHer_Problems_Were_Everyone%E2%80%99s_Problems%E2%80%9D:_Self_and_Gender_in_The_Deer_Park [[User:Klcrawford|Klcrawford]] ([[User talk:Klcrawford|talk]]) 09:06, 15 February 2021 (EST)<br />
<br />
== When we Were Kings 1st remediation ==<br />
<br />
[[The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/When_We_Were_Kings:_Review_and_Commentary|https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/When_We_Were_Kings:_Review_and_Commentary]]<br />
<br />
Here is the link for the remediation I did for this weeks assignment. I did not now where to place the link.<br />
<br />
Thank you,<br />
Trevor Ryals<br />
:{{Reply to|TRyals}} Thank you, but this is unnecessary. Just do the work; I promise I will see it. (And be sure to sign your talk page posts.) —[[User:Grlucas|Grlucas]] ([[User talk:Grlucas|talk]]) 18:16, 2 February 2021 (EST)</div>Klcrawfordhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=User_talk:Klcrawford&diff=12528User talk:Klcrawford2021-02-13T15:55:03Z<p>Klcrawford: </p>
<hr />
<div>==Article Edits==<br />
Great work on your article. I made a few changes and less obvious tweaks to help out. Let me know if you have any questions and keep up the good work! —[[User:Jules Carry|Jules Carry]] ([[User talk:Jules Carry|talk]]) 11:23, 12 February 2021 (EST)<br />
:Thank You {{Reply to|Jules Carry}}. I have a question. It seems while I was creating more edits, you were editing at the same time. I had gotten about 2/3 of the way through my article and when I published, I lost my content. Is there anything I can do? I just spent hours on that. [[User:Klcrawford|Klcrawford]] ([[User talk:Klcrawford|talk]]) 12:13, 12 February 2021 (EST)<br />
::{{Reply to|Klcrawford}} Sure, everything that has been saved is still in the "view history" tab. I saw that we were editing together, but I did not see that anything you contributed had been erased. I sincerely apologize if I missed something. Judging by the recent edits you made, it appears you figured it out anyway. You're doing a great job, but check the placement of your punctuation: they should '''never''' go after citations; always before. See the way I did it in the first couple of paragraphs. —[[User:Jules Carry|Jules Carry]] ([[User talk:Jules Carry|talk]]) 10:30, 13 February 2021 (EST)<br />
:::{{Reply to|Jules Carry}} I just ended up redoing it- I couldn't find what I was looking for. No idea what happened but thank you for the info. No fault of yours, I'm new to this so I probably goofed. I believe I fixed the punctuations errors, but please do let me know if you see anything else I should edit. I just want to go ahead and finish it up. Thank you again for the help.[[User:Klcrawford|Klcrawford]] ([[User talk:Klcrawford|talk]]) 10:54, 13 February 2021 (EST)</div>Klcrawfordhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/%E2%80%9CHer_Problems_Were_Everyone%E2%80%99s_Problems%E2%80%9D:_Self_and_Gender_in_The_Deer_Park&diff=12527The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/“Her Problems Were Everyone’s Problems”: Self and Gender in The Deer Park2021-02-13T15:51:10Z<p>Klcrawford: Edited sourcing punctuation throughout</p>
<hr />
<div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>“Her Problems Were Everyone’s Problems”: Self and Gender in ''The Deer Park''}}<br />
{{Working}}<br />
{{MR13}}<br />
{{byline|last=Ren|first=Hujun|abstract= An examination of "Her Problems Were Everyone's Problems": Self and Gender in ''The Deer Park'' to the work of [[Norman Mailer]].|url=https://prmlr.us/mr16gord}} <br />
<br />
{{dc|dc=B|efore its publication in 1955,}} ''The Deer Park'' had been refused by seven publishers in ten weeks for no reason than its “six not very explicit lines about the sex of an old producer and a call girl.”{{sfn|Mailer|1981|p=330}} After its publication, it received more criticism than praise, and “the most common objection to the book was its sexual explicitness”{{sfn|Lennon|1986|p=6}} because “in the early 1950s no description of sexuality, however evasive, was readily accepted.”{{sfn|Mills|1982|p=145}} In spite of responses from publishers and critics, Mailer refused to make any change of the original lines about “the sex of an old producer and a call girl” and the novel came out as it is now, with the sexuality of his characters to play “the more significant role” in the story.{{sfn|Mills|1982|p=143}} The issue of sexuality in ''The Deer Park'' has drawn much attention from critics. Nigel Leigh argues that “in ''The Deer Park'' sexuality is both foregrounded and incorporated into Mailer’s political epistemology”{{sfn|Leigh|1990|p=77}} and “Mailer investigates closely the sex lives of Sergius, Eitel, Elena, Faye and Lulu Meyers in a search of a discourse of pleasure.”{{sfn|Leigh|1990|p=78}} Robert Merrill holds that the novel is “only incidentally a satire on Hollywood or an outlet for Mailer’s philosophical predilections; at heart it is the story of a rather tragic love affair.”{{sfn|Merrill|1978|p=45}} Norman Podhoretz points out that “it is on the sexual affairs of his characters that Mr. Mailer concentrates in ''The Deer Park''.”{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=78}}<br />
<br />
Why does Mailer concentrate on the sexuality of the characters in ''The Deer Park''? Many critics have noticed that in ''The Deer Park'', Mailer’s major concern moves from “the problem of the world” to “the problem of the self, or, from ideology to the individual or self.{{efn|See {{harvtxt|Lucid|1971|p=82-83}}, {{harvtxt|Leeds|1969|p=110}}, {{harvtxt|Leigh|1990|pp=55-56, 62-63}}, and {{harvtxt|Glenday|1995|pp=79-81}}.}} As a result, he is highly concerned with the rebellious imperatives of the self, among which “none is more exigent than sex”.{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=123}} A number of critics have directed their attention towards and made close investigations of the nature and meaning of the sexuality of the characters in ''The Deer Park'', and, consequently, a variety of conclusions have been drawn. To Jennifer Bailey, the sexuality of the characters in ''The Deer Park'' is of great importance to themselves because it is “potentially redemptive.”{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=28}} Nigel Leigh also believes that the sexuality of the characters in ''The Deer Park'' is of great significance because their sexual activities can decide whether they will be able to grow or decline.{{sfn|Leigh|1990|p=78}} Norman Podhoretz notes the relationship between the sexuality of the characters and themselves in ''The Deer Park'', arguing that the world in the novel is populated with those “who have no true interest in anything but self” and for whom “sex has become a testing ground of the self.”{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=78}} Like Podhoretz, Diana Trilling also considers the relationship between sex and self. She observes that in ''The Deer Park'' Mailer distinguishes two different kinds of sexuality, one “appears to be free but is really an enslavement,” as displayed by the movie colony in Desert D’Or, and the other “expresses a new, radical principle of selfhood,” as valued by Hipsterism.{{sfn|Lucid|1971|pp=125-126}} Unlike the critics above mentioned, Jean Radford argues that in ''The Deer Park'' the sexuality of the characters functions as “an index of other things” and “at the more general level it is used to symbolize the moral state of the nation.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=133}}<br />
<br />
When investigating the nature and meaning of the sexuality of the characters in ''The Deer Park'', many critics direct their attention towards the love affairs between Eitel and Elena and Sergius and Lulu. To many critics, the relationship between Eitel and Elena is absolutely productive and constructive. For example, Gabriel Miller argues that, due to his relationship with Elena, Eitel can manage to recover “his sense of self” and “his sexual potency” and therefore is able to return to “work on an ambitious script,” thereby, to “reclaim his integrity as an artist.”{{sfn|Bloom|2003|p=175}} However, unlike the relationship between Eitel and Elena, the relationship between Sergius and Lulu is not so productive and constructive because one sees the other as nothing but a sexual object and their sexuality is very much like “sport” and “war” in which the man tries every means to test and prove his “manhood” and the woman becomes his “opponent” and “enemy” he “must fight and conquer.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=135}}<br />
<br />
Not only have many critics noticed the difference between the nature and meaning of the sexuality of Eitel and Elena and that of Sergius and Lulu, they have also observed the difference between Elena and Lulu. To Philip Bufithis, although Elena is “a discarded mistress” and “an unimpressive actress with an ungainly social manners,” she “is yet heroic in her embattled desire to be self-reliant and take her own measure free of men’s estimation of her” and therefore she always “clings to the hope of self-knowledge” and “retains her individualism.”{{sfn|Bufithis|1978|p=46}} Jean Radford believes that Elena is the most important of Mailer’s women characters because she exists “not merely as a secondary human being who is an index of others’ moral possibilities, but who has herself a moral nature with distinctive ideas and possibilities for self-development and growth.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=136}} Howard Harper makes a comparison between Elena and Lulu, arguing that “Elena is more generous, more perceptive, more honest, more sensitive than Lulu” because Lulu values “career” more than “any human considerations.”{{sfn|Harper|1967|p=111}} Likewise, Jessica Gerson takes a positive attitude towards Elena, ranking her among those “benign, redemptive and creative women” who “repeatedly offer their men redemptive love.”{{sfn|Bloom|1986|p=172}}<br />
<br />
Although many critics have commented upon the relationship between sex and self and the difference between Elena and Lulu when talking about the sexuality of the characters in ''The Deer Park'', few critics have seen the love affairs and marriages of the characters in the novel as part of their pursuit of selfhood and happiness, nor have they noticed the puzzlements that Elena and Lulu confront after marriage. In fact, the sexuality of the characters in their love affairs and marriages is always linked with their pursuit of selfhood and happiness. It is always indicative of whether the partners involved are content with their lives or not, and whether they can satisfactorily do with their own lives or not. It is both a preserver and destroyer of happy love and marriage. It is an index both of love and hate. It involves not only warmness and tenderness but also coldness and indifference and it is founded on the ground of honesty and loyalty but, sometimes, it also grows out of deception and betrayal. Further, it is both redemptive and hurting and it makes one partner gain and the other partner lose. It is supposed to be love-bound and marriage-bound but sometimes it has little to do with love and marriage. It seems to facilitate selfhood outside love and marriage but it also seems to imprison selfhood inside love and marriage. So, it cannot be read as merely a sexual activity; instead, it should be read and understood in association with its performers’ pursuit of selfhood and happiness and should not be read without taking gender into consideration. Only in this way can we really understand the nature and meaning of the sexuality of the characters in the novel and the puzzlements of Elena and Lulu after marriage.<br />
<br />
In ''The Deer Park'', Mailer seems to concern himself more with the relationship between self and gender than with the love affairs or sexuality of one character or another; in other words, what he is deeply concerned with in the novel are the problems closely related to self and gender, such as: Whether living alone or together with someone else, married or single, what should one do with his/her life? Should one be honest with himself/herself or deceptive of himself/herself? Should one be obedient to another to lose his/her pride and dignity or defiant of another to keep his/her pride and dignity? Should one live for himself/herself or for others? What does happiness mean to men and women? Does the life of a wife mean that she should maintain a house, love her husband and children, be on good terms with family members, and learn to grow so as to make herself match well with her husband or people around her? Are love and marriage enough to make a woman really happy? What does life mean to a woman? Does it mean to find a good husband, have children, be a good wife and mother and on good terms with family members? To be herself or serve others? Can being a lady make a woman a really happy wife? Can being a gentleman make a man a really happy husband? What can make a man a happy husband and a woman a happy wife? In the novel, Mailer tries to give answers to these questions by closely investigating the love affairs and marriages of his characters. It should be noticed that Mailer’s investigation of the love affairs and marriages of the characters in the novel reflect his concern not only with the problem of selfhood but also with the gender issues of his time. In ''The Deer Park'', gender differences in male and female pursuits of selfhood and happiness is explicitly manifested in the affairs and marriages of the characters, but it has not drawn much attention from critics. Many critics have directed their attention towards Charley Eitel, Sergius O’Shaugnessy and Marion O’Faye as the major characters in the novel, as clearly shown in Norman Podhoretz’s remark that “Sergius and Marion are the natural heroes of the world of The Deer Park” {{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=80}} or Jean Radford’s argument that “there are in fact three heroes in the novel: Eitel the ‘potential artist’ and professional film director, Marion Faye the nihilistic pimp and pusher to the film world, and Sergius O’Shaugnessy, the would-be writer and narrator of the novel.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=20}} No critic has paid much attention to Elena or Lulu or Dorothea as major characters in the novel. Further, many critics tend to read and understand the significance of the love affair between Eitel and Elena from a male perspective. Although Jean Radford claims that Elena “has herself a moral nature with distinctive ideas and possibilities for self-development and growth”, {{sfn|Radford|1975|p=136}} she fails to see that Elena’s possibilities for self development and growth are not the same as or equal to Charley Eitel’s, Sergius O’Shaugnessy’s, or Marion O’Faye’s. Although Elena can pursue her selfhood in her love affairs, she cannot transcend her marriage life to pursue her true self as can Eitel. Further, we can say that Lulu cannot have a happy life so long as she does not know what a woman should do with her own life after marriage.<br />
<br />
Now, it seems in order to make a close investigation of the major characters and their self-pursuit in terms of love affair and marriage. Unlike earlier critics who see Eitel, Sergius and Marion as major characters in the novel, I would add Elena, Lulu, and Dorothea to the group of major characters, and unlike those critics who focus their attention mainly on the major male characters, such as Eitel, Sergius and Marion, I would like to direct my attention towards the major female characters in the novel, such as Dorothea, Elena and Lulu, whose life experiences demonstrate different alternatives of women in their pursuit of selfhood and happiness.<br />
<br />
Dorothea is a showgirl, a night-club singer, a call girl, a gossip columnist, a celebrity, and a failure. Her father is a drunkard, dies that way, and her mother remarries. She begins to work when she is twelve, collecting rent from tenants and taking care of household duties. She is seventeen when she has her first love affair with a man named O’Faye, who makes her considerably unhappy because “she was crazy about him,” but “he liked a different girl every night” and never wants to meet her desire “to settle down, to have children” and, therefore, when she gets pregnant, he does not hesitate to choose to leave her. {{sfn|Radford|1975|p=10,11}} She does not gain much from this affair; instead, she suffers a lot from it. We do not know how much pain she experiences, but we can be sure that she does suffer to no small extent. However, her fate always seems to be connected with that man. When she turns nineteen, she becomes pregnant by a passing European prince and, after he leaves, she is left to take care of everything on her own. With no one to help her, she seems to have no choice but to turn to O’Faye to help her out of trouble because “three months went by, four months went by, it was too much late” {{sfn|Radford|1975|p=11}} to do anything about her forthcoming child. Fortunately, O’Faye is willing to save her because he “sympathized with her predicament.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=11}} Although “he would never marry a girl who carried his own child,” he “considered it right to help a friend out of her trouble.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=11}} So, to her great expectation and satisfaction, “they quickly married, and as quickly divorced, and her child had a name”.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=11}} Clearly, Dorothea’s quick marriage with O’Faye is not grounded on the love of one for the other; it is essentially a loveless one. It seems to help Dorothea gain, but this gain, if it really is one, is founded on her miserable experience with the irresponsible European prince who gets her into trouble. She later marries a man, of whom she says, “I can’t remember him as well as guys I’ve had for a one-night stand.” {{sfn|Radford|1975|p=6}} She then has a romance with an Air Force pilot who, unfortunately, is killed in a flight and she is, in a sense, a tragic woman. She has more than one affair and, more than once, she loses more than gains. The only affair from which she seems to have gained something is the one that she has with Martin Pelley when she settles down in Desert D’Or and “their romance began on the sure ground of his incapacity.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=11}} That is to say, instead of being at the mercy of others, as she used to be, now Dorothea is able to decide her own life, but her ability to make decisions of her own is grounded on the incapacity of the man she chooses as her partner. Although she begins her life as a victim of men, she grows as a woman who can make men yield to her; as the narrator remarks of her, “Dorothea had lasted. If her night-club days were finished, if her big affairs were part of the past, she was still in fine shape. She had her house, she had her court, she had money in the bank; men still sent airplanes for her.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=7}} If we take a backward look at Dorothea’s life experience with men, we find that she loses her selfhood, but she manages to regain it by becoming a woman who seems to be able to dominate men rather than be dominated by them.<br />
<br />
If Dorothea’s life is one of misery and happiness, loss and gain, Elena shares much with her, but is quite different from her, as well. She was born into an unhappy family. Her father is “a bully” and so is her mother. Neither of them treats her really well. The mother coddles Elena but scolds her as<br />
well, “made much of her and ignored her, given her ambitions and chased them away.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=104}} The father does not like Elena because “she was the youngest and she had come much too late .”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=104}} Although she has a big family consisting of brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, cousins, and grandparents, she does not feel that it is a happy one because “fist fights started” whenever there is a family party. In addition, the father is “a dandy” and “could not be alone with a woman without trying to make love to her,” and the mother is “a flirt,” always greedy and jealous.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=104}} Born into such a family, Elena suffers significantly and experiences more misery than any other girl her age. When she is a child, more often than not, she “would cry silently while the mother and father yelled insults at one another” and therefore she has to spend her childhood “listening to their jealous quarrels.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=104,105}} She has her first love affair when she is in her teens, with Collie Munshin. She lives with him for three years but fails to develop her relationship with him into marriage. She loves him but receives no love in return. In her eyes, Collie is “a hypocrite” because he claims himself to be “a good liberal” who does not believe in a double standard but rather in the equality between man and woman, white and black, and the rich and the poor, but he looks down upon Elena for no other reason than that “she’s obviously from a poor background.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=49}} Unlike what he claims himself to be, Collie has “always been full of prejudices about women” and “wanted girls with some class and distinction to them.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=49}} It is no wonder that three years of living with Elena is not long enough for him to develop a bit of love for her. Although he believes that “Elena is a person who hates everything that is small in herself” and is “consumed by the passion to become a bigger person than she is” and therefore is “the sort of girl who would love a husband and kids”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=50}}, he sees her as just “a beautiful, warm, simple child”;{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=48}} that is to say, he never sees her as his equal. Being innocent, Elena spends three years being cheated on by Collie. Although she is Collie’s mistress, she has never been treated as such by him. To Collie, Elena is not a “beautiful, warm, simple” young woman who has given herself wholly to him but a possession he can exchange with others when he becomes fatigued with the relationship, which is the reason why Collie transfers Elena to Charley Eitel. Leaving Collie and coming to Eitel, Elena seems to have freed herself from imprisonment, just as the narrator says, “she reminded me of an animal, ready for flight.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=71}}<br />
<br />
Indeed, living with Eitel, Elena feels quite different than when she is with Collie. Eitel is a man of over forty. He has “a big reputation as a film director” but is “better known in other ways” because he experiences more than one marriage and is believed to be “the cause of more than one divorce.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=24}} He has had three failed marriages and more than one love affair before he meets Elena. His first wife “worked in a bookstore to support him”,{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=26}} but as his own career grows, he begins to forget what she has done and sacrificed for him because “he wanted a woman who was more attractive, more intelligent, more his equal” and even “wanted more than one woman.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=27}} Quarrels between them become more and more routine and, as a result, they end up divorced. His second wife is an actress from the social register. From her, he “picked up what he wanted and paid for it of course.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=28}} Like his first wife, his second wife ends her relationship with him in a divorce. After divorce, Eitel is commissioned into the Army in Europe and, when he comes back from the war, he becomes extremely notorious because “there was a year or two when he was supposed to have slept with half the good-looking women in the capital, and it was a rare week which did not have his name in one gossip column or another.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=28}} His third wife is a woman named Lulu Meyers. She is beautiful and young and therefore “he hardly believed she needed him.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=29}} Knowing that his marriage with her “could never last”,{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=31}} he soon falls into an affair with a Romanian actress, which lasts just one year. Although he has never been faithful to any woman that he has ever been with, he believes that he is truly loyal to his Romanian woman, as he states:<br />
<br />
{{quote|I’ve never been the kind of man who can be faithful with my regularity. I’ve always been the sort of decent chappie who hops from one woman to another in the run of an evening because that’s the only prescription which allows me to be fond of both ladies, but I was faithful in my own way to the Rumanian. She would have liked to see me every night for she hated to be alone and I would have liked never to see her again, and so we settled for two nights a week. It didn’t matter if I were in the middle of a romance or between girls, whether I had a date that night or not—on Thursday night and Friday night I went to her apartment to sleep.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=30}} }}<br />
<br />
Although Eitel believes that he has been loyal to his Romanian woman in his own way, his very loyalty suggests that he is by no means loyal at all. If Collie claims himself to be a man who does not believe in double standard, Eitel is obviously one who does believe in double standard, as Sergius the narrator remarks of him, “One of his qualities was the ability to talk about himself with considerable masculinity of mind.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=26}} Living with such a man “with considerable masculinity of mind,” Elena, however, does not subordinate herself as a woman to Eitel. She always attempts to pursue her selfhood, protect her pride, gain respect from Eitel, and maintain her individuality.<br />
<br />
Although Eitel is a man “with considerable masculinity of mind,” his masculine mindset seems to be powerless in front of Elena. He begins to change with his love affair with Elena. To him, Elena has something that other women always lack, just as he believes, “not too many women really knew how to make love, and very few indeed loved to make love”,{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=89}} but “Elena was doubly and indubitably a find.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=90}} He learns something about Elena from the way she makes love, for he “always felt that the way a woman made love was as good a guide to understanding her character as any other way.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=90}} Believing that “to be a good lover, one should be incapable of falling in love”,{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=90}} Eitel “usually wanted nothing more than to quit a woman once they were done.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=91}} However, when it comes to Elena, he no longer believes what he used to believe because “he not only wished to sleep the night with Elena but to hold her in his arms.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=91}} Elena makes Eitel realize that “he had never been with anyone who understood him so well”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=96}} and therefore he believes that Elena is “the best woman” he has ever had.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=97}} Consequently, he believes that his affair with Elena “could return his energy, flesh his courage, and make him the man he had once believed himself to be.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=96}} He also believes that he and Elena each “could make something of the other.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=96}} After the affair, “he felt full of tenderness for Elena” and “through the day he toyed with the thought that she should come to live with him.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=96}} But unlike what Eitel expects, Elena does not want to live with him because she does not want to lose her freedom and selfhood she has just achieved, as she tells him, “You can do what you want, and I’ll do what I want.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=98}} When Eitel becomes furious with her for her affair with Marion Faye, Elena refuses to surrender to his criticism; instead, she is very defiant, saying that “I’ll go if you want me to go” and that “I think we’d better quit now, you and me.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=101}} Feeling that Eitel has treated her as “a game,” Elena says defiantly to him, “When a woman’s unfaithful, she’s more attractive to a man.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=101}} Elena does not believe that Eitel loves her, but when she finds that he really does love her, she says with final abandon, “Nobody ever treated me the way you do. I love you more than I ever loved anyone.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=102}} However, when living with Eitel, Elena seems to have lost her selfhood completely once again, as the narrator states, “in the first few weeks of living together, Elena’s eyes never left Eitel’s face; her mood was the clue to his temper; if she was gay it meant he was happy; if Eitel was moody, it left her morose. No one else existed for her.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=104}} That, however, does not mean that she is quite sure of Eitel’s feeling towards her. On the contrary, she is always doubtful. Once she says to Eitel, “You think I’m not good enough for you. . . You tell me I don’t love you because you don’t love me. It’s all right. I’ll leave.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=108}} After Eitel confirms his love for her, she becomes calm and says, “Oh, Charley, when you make love to me, everything is all right again. Is it really the same with you?”.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=147}} Another time, she says to him calmly, “I could be happy with somebody else . . . I’m going to leave you some day, Charley, I mean it.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=152}} Still another time, she even says to Eitel, much like an order, “Love me, really love me, and maybe I can do what you want.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=160}} Eitel comes to feel somewhat fed up with Elena and appears to be pleased when she tells him that Marion wants her to live with him because he knows if someone else cares for her, “his own responsibility was less.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=163}} Although he believes that Elena is “the most honest woman I’ve ever known”,{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=163}} Eitel finds that “the time had come to decide how he would break up with her.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=178}}<br />
Eitel wants to break up with Elena because he does not see her as his equal. He sees himself as a second-rate man and Elena as a fifth-rate woman and he does not believe it is logical for a second-rate man to seek out a fifth-rate woman because a second-rate man should seek out a second-rate woman.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=179}} And yet, he is not able to make himself desert his principle of caste. Although “he had come to resent the attraction of their love-making,” he never really wants to separate himself from Elena, and therefore, rather than resent her, more often than not, “he enjoyed her as much as ever, and in his sleep, he would sometimes be aware that he was holding her and whispering love-words to her ear.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=179}} On the other hand, he seems to be troubled by a dilemma because his love for Elena seems to have prevented him from pursuing the freedom of his own. He knows that “the unspoken purpose of freedom was to find love, yet when love was found one could only desire freedom again.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=180}} Now that he has found love in Elena, it is natural that he has a strong desire for “an affair with a woman for whom he cared nothing, an affair simply exciting, exciting as the pages of a pornographic text where one could read in safety and not grudge every emotion the woman felt for another man,” but his desire can never be satisfied because “he was locked in Elena’s love”,{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=180}} and it seems that he will never be able to unlock that lock because the longer they live together, the more doubtful Elena will become of Eitel’s love for her. Her very doubtfulness suggests that she loves and values him so much that she is very fearful of losing him because she is very fearful of being alone and lonely, but then, she does not want to lose herself completely to him, as she once says to Eitel, “You’re a good-time Charley. You only like me when I’m in a good mood [. . .] When I say nice things, then you love me. . . You’re so superior. But you don’t know what goes on in my mind.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=210}} Obviously, Eitel does not know what goes on in Elena’s mind, so, sometime later, she tells him that she wants to leave him to become a nun because “a nun is never alone” and “nuns always have company.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=210}} Eitel takes it as his fault that Elena should have such an idea because she chooses to live with him and fully loves him, but he gives her “nothing but loneliness” and therefore it is he who “ruined everything he touched.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=210}}<br />
<br />
Despite Eitel’s confession that “he ruined everything he touched,” Elena does not believe that he is really honest. When he tells her, “You must know that I care about you. I can’t stand the thought of hurting you. I mean, I want you always to be happy”,{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=225}}she does not believe what he says. When Eitel seriously says to her, “I want us to be married,” Elena just simply replies, “What I thought is that we could go on like this.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=225}} When he once again says to her, “You have to marry me,” she tells him once again, “When you don’t want me, I’ll go. But I don’t want to talk about it any more.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=226}} Elena’s uncompromising refusal to cooperate and comply with Eitel suggests that she minds not only his love for her but also his respect for her. She wants to love and be loved deeply by Eitel, but she does not want to be controlled and manipulated fully by him. On the other hand, Eitel does not want to be controlled and directed by Elena. Although “he loved her as he had never loved anyone,” Eitel is afraid of his love for her because “if he stayed with her, he would be obliged to travel in ''her'' directions.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=226}} Although “he loved her as he had never loved anyone,” Eitel does not want himself to be locked by his love for Elena. He needs love, but he desires<br />
freedom even more. His love for Elena seems to be quite abnormal because “it was only after quarrels and crises that he could feel love for Elena the way he desired.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=259}} However much he loves her, “he hated her” because “it was impossible not to remember how she had given herself to others.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=259}} Although he says love words to her more than once, he does not truly love her, just as the narrator says, “they had been tender to each other, they had forgiven one another, and yet he did not love her, she did not love him, no<br />
one ever love anyone.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=260}} Caught between to love and love not, and between love and hate, Eitel wants to finish his affair with Elena because he<br />
feels that “neither he nor she had been able to make the happiness they<br />
should have made.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=262}} When he decides to tell Elena his decision to end<br />
their relationship, he finds that she has already been prepared for it, as she<br />
says, “You want me to go away. All right, I will.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=262}} She even tells Eitel,<br />
“Maybe I’ll become a prostitute. Don’t worry. I’m not trying to make you feel<br />
sorry. You think I’m a prostitute anyway, so how could you feel sorry? In fact<br />
you always thought of me as a prostitute, but you don’t know what I think<br />
of you. You think I can’t live without you. Maybe I know better.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=264}} Elena’s<br />
words clearly show that she sees herself as an independent woman rather<br />
than a woman who would like to depend on men for a living. That is the<br />
reason why she does not hesitate to choose to leave Eitel after she quarrels<br />
with him. It might never occur to Eitel that Elena can really leave him. After<br />
Elena leaves, Eitel “sat down and began to wait for her telephone call” because he believes that “she would phone,” but no telephone call came to him<br />
after “an hour went by, and then the afternoon, and much of the night,” and<br />
he can do nothing but “sighed to himself, not knowing if he were relieved<br />
that he was free, or if he were more miserable than he had ever been.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=264}}<br />
<br />
After leaving Eitel, Elena comes to Marion O’Faye, but her life with him<br />
turns out not to be so happy as she has expected. So, not long afterwards, she<br />
begins to regret for her leaving Eitel for Marion, and due to that, she writes<br />
Eitel a long letter, in which she confides to him:<br />
<br />
{{quote|I hate the kind of thing that happens to women where they go out with a man maybe two or three times and immediately, they’re forced to start thinking about marriage. That’s how my mother got married and a lot of my sisters and what a drudgery sort of life they have, everybody’s so afraid to live. I am, too, and it’s silly. Once I remember I had a girlfriend, and she had a steady boyfriend and I used to fall into a thing with the two of them on a Saturday night [. . .] the three of us liked each other like good friends and I almost never felt lowdown about it [. . .] the girl liked me so much and nobody was asking anybody else to solve their whole life for them. But that’s what you were asking me and what I was asking you and ''I resented it as much as you did''.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=275}} }}<br />
<br />
Elena’s letter to Eitel, from which the above quotation comes, is intended to<br />
express her introspective guilt for Eitel. Covering more than seven and a half<br />
pages, it is really a long letter, but what this long letter actually represents is<br />
by no means a pure confession of Elena’s guilt for Eitel but a clear demonstration of her view of love and marriage and of how a woman should live<br />
her life as well. From the above quotation, we can clearly see that Elena is a<br />
woman who is deeply concerned with issues highly relevant to her life in<br />
particular and the lives of men and women in general, such as love and marriage. To her, love and marriage should not lay restraints upon those who<br />
are in love or marriage. She obviously believes that love and marriage are<br />
something that should be taken seriously before one falls in love with somebody or gets married and, therefore, it is wrong for a woman to fall in love<br />
with some man hastily and even hurry to get married to him. She pities her<br />
mother and sisters for the way they get married, but, unfortunately, she<br />
comes to follow their suit, hastily giving herself to Marion, a notorious pimp.<br />
Although she quarrels and fights with Eitel, Elena knows that Eitel has never<br />
seen her as a prostitute, as Marion always does. In Marion’s eyes, Elena is<br />
“the kind of girl you could wipe your hands on.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=163}} In the letter she writes<br />
to Eitel after she has left him, Elena remarks of Marion, “I keep asking him<br />
to make me a call-girl and he says no, he says he wants to marry me and<br />
then I can become a call-girl. I suppose he wants to be a champion pimp.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=277}} This shows that, unlike Eitel, who asks Elena to marry him because he<br />
really loves her and wants to have her as his wife, Marion asks Elena to marry<br />
him for no other reason than turning her into a prostitute because he has<br />
never really loved her. He has never been free from nightmares since Elena<br />
comes to live with him because he is not able to rid himself of “the idea that<br />
she was his nun and he would transmute her into a witch.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=288}} Accordingly,<br />
in the few weeks they live together, Elena “passed from gaiety to high excitement to illness to depression and back to the liquor again.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=290}} Although “she felt free with him”,{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=290}} Elena is not able to develop “a decent<br />
healthy mature relationship”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=50}} with Marion. Unlike Eitel who might appreciate Elena’s dependence on his promise, Marion “could even grieve for<br />
her since she did not realize how much she depended on his promise.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=292}} When she swears that she will leave him “in a day or two”,{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=298}} Marion has<br />
no objection because that’s exactly what he really expects her to do. We might<br />
feel sorry for Elena because she never knows why Marion does not love her<br />
and she never understands the way he treats her. Even at the last moment of<br />
her being with him, she does not forget to ask him, “Why didn’t you like me<br />
a little? Why didn’t you know you could have loved me?” {{sfn|Radford|1975|p=300}}<br />
<br />
It might be wrong to blame Marion for the car accident that happens<br />
when he drives Elena to the airport, but it is good in that the accident puts<br />
him under the police guard and Elena back to Eitel. Her meeting with Eitel<br />
at the hospital after the car accident is really a very moving one because it<br />
causes both of them to change fundamentally. Eitel makes up his mind to<br />
take care of Elena and Elena decides to marry Eitel. Not only does she decide<br />
to marry Eitel, she decides to change herself as well, as she tells him, “Marry<br />
me, oh, Charley, please marry me. This time I’ll learn. I promise I will.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=303}}<br />
After Elena leaves the hospital, Eitel meets her desire to marry him because<br />
he believes “if he did not marry her he could never forget that he had once<br />
made her happy and now she had nothing but her hospital bed.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=303}} It<br />
seems that Eitel marries Elena out of compassion and responsibility, but the<br />
marriage changes Elena to no small extent. She comes to learn to love her<br />
husband and children and can manage to be on good terms with her family servants. It seems that she gets herself out of trouble and has a happy life<br />
because she has successfully developed “a decent healthy mature relationship”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=50}} with Eitel, but the fact is that she does not feel really happy, for she<br />
gradually finds that she still has some problems she does not know how to<br />
solve because she finds that whatever she does, she always ends up doing<br />
what Eitel wants her to do or expects her to do, as she tells him:<br />
<br />
{{quote|We have the baby, and we’ll probably have another baby, and I have good relations with the servants and I do love the dancing lessons, and Charley, I love you, I can tell because I still get sacred at the thought of losing you, but Charley, listen to me, I don’t know if you understand how much I love Vickie, I keep worrying that I won’t be a good enough mother to him, but is that enough? Is Vickie enough? I mean where do I go? I don’t want to complain, but what am I going to do with my life?{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=324}} }}<br />
<br />
To Elena’s problem, Eitel does respond, but his response is just a few comforting words because he does not really know how to solve it. He tries his<br />
best to comfort her by saying that she has grown so much that there will be<br />
no need for him to worry about her anymore, and whatever she does, she<br />
is surely going to be better and better. But Eitel knows that however he tries<br />
to comfort Elena, he is not able to satisfy her because “she had come now<br />
into that domain where her problems were everybody’s problems.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=325}}<br />
Eitel is not able to solve Elena’s problems because he does not really know<br />
what one should ever do with his/her own life. If a husband can go to the<br />
comfort of his family that always does what he wants after a day of business<br />
outside home and go outside to do what he wants after a night of comfort<br />
at home, where can a wife go after a busy day of doing housework and taking care of her husband and children inside home? Eitel does not really know<br />
how to solve Elena’s problems because he realizes that her problems are<br />
somewhat, and indeed to a large extent, also his problems. He knows that<br />
unless she knows what she can do with her own life, she “would grow away<br />
from him”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=325}} because she will not “be forced to stay out of kindness and<br />
loyalty and boredom.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=325}} Elena’s problems suggest that although she can<br />
manage to have “a decent healthy mature relationship”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=50}} with her husband after marriage, she is not able to have her selfhood when she is a wife<br />
and mother. It seems impossible for her to have both at the same time, and,<br />
therefore, she has to choose one and abandon the other; that is to say, to<br />
have her selfhood, as she does when she lives with Eitel and then with Marion as lovers, she can only choose not to have a “happy” marriage and family. That is a contradiction she is not able to solve. She does not like the kind<br />
of relationship between her and Eitel and then between her and Marion as<br />
lovers, nor is she satisfied with her relationship with Eitel as wife and husband. She is puzzled, and her puzzlement is, to some extent, the puzzlement<br />
of every woman because Lulu Meyers is also puzzled with a similar puzzlement.<br />
<br />
Lulu is an actress. She first gets married to Eitel. Their marriage is, as Eitel<br />
describes, “the meeting on zero and zero”,{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=31}} and therefore, it soon comes<br />
to an end. She then meets Sergius and falls in love with him. To Sergius, Lulu<br />
is quite different from any girl he has known, just as he remarks, “I had never<br />
known a girl like Lulu, nor had I ever been in such a romance”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=113}} because<br />
she appears incomprehensibly mysterious and always changes so quickly<br />
that he is not sure whether they are “in love or about to break up,” whether they will “make love or fight, do both or do nothing at all.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=113}} Besides, she<br />
is too much self-centered. Sometimes, she wants Sergius to leave her alone,<br />
and other times, she will not let him quit her for a moment. He has no choice<br />
but “to follow every impulse” of hers.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=114}} However different and self-centered Lulu is, Sergius does not feel unhappy when being together with her,<br />
just as he says, “We were great lovers . . . I was superb. She was superb . . .We<br />
played our games. I was the photographer, and she was the model; she was<br />
the movie star and I was the bellhop; she did the queen, I was slave. We even<br />
met even to even.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=120}} It seems that they are in a fully harmonious relationship, but beneath it lies great disharmony. When Lulu suggests that they<br />
get married, the thought of marriage makes Sergius “badly depressed”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=124}}<br />
because he believes that Lulu’s self-centeredness will turn him into “Mr. Meyers, a sort of fancy longshoreman scared of his wife, always busy mixing<br />
drinks for Lulu and the guests.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=124}} He wants to be Mr. Sergius rather than<br />
Mr. Meyers. He dislikes talking about marriage because it means “death of<br />
enjoyment” for him. He does not want to marry Lulu because they are having more and more quarrels than harmony between them, just as he says,<br />
“Lulu and I had come to the point where we fought more often than not, and<br />
the fights had taken on some bitterness. There were times when I was sure<br />
we had to break up, and I would look forward with a sort of self-satisfied<br />
melancholy to the time when I would be free.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=124}} Each of them “looked<br />
forward to the separation”,{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=125}} but, when separated, they have a strong desire to be together and an equally strong desire for love from each other, just<br />
as Sergius says, “Once she was gone, I could not get myself together . . .While<br />
she was gone, we were always on the phone. I called her up to tell her I loved<br />
her, she called me back half an hour later and we had the same conversation<br />
again. So, like the old gypsies who make a sign a hundred times a day, we<br />
swore we loved each other.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=125}}<br />
<br />
The separation, however, has very much changed Sergius. He begins to realize that there will be no love without weakness and that he should have<br />
loved Lulu and married her. However, somewhat to his surprise, when he<br />
proposes marriage with her, she refuses his proposal. Although their lovemaking makes Lulu “feel like a woman for the first time”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=203}} and makes<br />
them really love each other, just as Sergius says, “I loved her and I think she<br />
loved me”,{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=203}} Lulu does not let herself turn into Mrs. Sergius; instead,<br />
she leaves Sergius and gets married to Tony Tanner to continue her pursuit<br />
of selfhood and happiness.<br />
<br />
In a sense, Lulu’s marriage with Tanner is the result of her rebellion<br />
against Herman Teppis, her superior, under whose leadership she works as<br />
an actress, because he wants and even demands her to marry Teddy Pope, a<br />
homosexual she does not love at all. Getting married to Tanner is Lulu’s own<br />
choice. It is an indication of her pursuit of selfhood and happiness, but it<br />
turns out to be a wrong choice. Although she says her marriage with Tanner<br />
is based on her understanding of him, it turns out that she does not really<br />
understand him. Although she believes she will be happy in her defiance of<br />
Herman Teppis’ will, Lulu’s marriage to Tanner does not go according to<br />
plan. She comes to realize her error, because she feels that Tanner is not the<br />
proper man to be her husband. She regrets that she has been married to him.<br />
Probably due to her regret, during her marriage with Tanner, Lulu has a love<br />
affair with Eitel, who, she believes, is her “big love.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=321}} It seems that Lulu<br />
is capable of choosing her own love and marriage and retaining her selfhood; she, however, does not really know why she is not able to be really<br />
happy after she is married, and, therefore, is not what she really wants to be.<br />
<br />
Looking back at the love and marriage experiences of Dorothea, Elena<br />
and Lulu, three major female characters in ''The Deer Park'', we find that they<br />
illustrate three alternatives of women in their pursuit of selfhood and happiness in love and marriage, but none of them seems to be an ideal persona.<br />
Dorothea chooses to cohabit with Martin Pelly, a man who is much inferior<br />
to her, and thereby keeps her selfhood in the end; she loses her selfhood but<br />
comes to regain it. Elena chooses to get married to the man she really loves,<br />
bears children and lives as a good wife and mother; she keeps her selfhood<br />
but then loses it. Lulu chooses to get married to the man she does not really<br />
love in defiance of the authority imposed upon her and lives an unhappy<br />
life in a childless marriage; she keeps seeking her selfhood but fails to achieve<br />
it. Their experiences lead us to wonder: What should a woman do if she<br />
wants to have both her selfhood and happiness and “a decent healthy mature<br />
relationship”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=50}} with a man, whether lover or husband, at the same time?<br />
What could make an ideal relationship between a man and a woman? Should<br />
they live, when they live together, like soul mates, or brother and sister, or<br />
husband and wife, or lovers? These are the problems, that the novel suggests,<br />
and they are the very problems that Elena confronts and does not know how<br />
to solve. Elena’s problems are “everybody’s problems.”<br />
<br />
===Notes===<br />
{{Notelist}}<br />
<br />
===Citations===<br />
{{Reflist|15em}}<br />
<br />
===Works Cited===<br />
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Bailey |first=Jennifer |date=1979 |title=Norman Mailer: Quick-Change Artist |url= |location= |publisher=The Macmillan Press Ltd. |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Bloom |first=Harold, ed |date=1986 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=Chelsea House Publishers |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Bloom |first=Harold, ed |date=2003 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=Chelsea House Publishers |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Bufithis |first=Philip H |date=1978 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=Frederick Ungar Publishing Co. |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=1995 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=St. Martin's Press |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Harper |first=Howard M. |date=1967 |title=Desperate Faith: A Study of Bellow, Salinger, Mailer, Baldwin, and Updike |url= |location= |publisher=University of North Carolina P |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Leeds |first=Barry H. |date=1969 |title=The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=U of London P Limited |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Leigh |first=Nigel |date=1990 |title=Radical Fictions and the Novels of Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=Macmillan |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=1986 |title=Critical Essays on Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=G. K. Hall & Co. |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |editor-last=Lucid |editor-first=Robert |date=1971 |title=Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work |url= |location= |publisher=Little, Brown and Company |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1955 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location= |publisher=G. P. Putnam’s Sons |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1981 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location= |publisher=Perigee Books |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Merrill |first=Robert |date=1978 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=Twayne |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mills |first=Hilary |date=1982 |title=Mailer: A Biography |url= |location= |publisher=McGraw Hill |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Radford |first=Jean |date=1975 |title=Norman Mailer: A Critical Study |url= |location= |publisher=The Macmillan Press |ref=harv }}<br />
{{Refend}}<br />
<br />
{{Review}}<br />
{{DEFAULTSORT:Her Problems Were Everyone’s Problems: Self and Gender in The Deer Park}}<br />
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]</div>Klcrawfordhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/%E2%80%9CHer_Problems_Were_Everyone%E2%80%99s_Problems%E2%80%9D:_Self_and_Gender_in_The_Deer_Park&diff=12525The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/“Her Problems Were Everyone’s Problems”: Self and Gender in The Deer Park2021-02-12T19:14:35Z<p>Klcrawford: Finished adding body and sources.</p>
<hr />
<div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>“Her Problems Were Everyone’s Problems”: Self and Gender in ''The Deer Park''}}<br />
{{Working}}<br />
{{MR13}}<br />
{{byline|last=Ren|first=Hujun|abstract= An examination of "Her Problems Were Everyone's Problems": Self and Gender in ''The Deer Park'' to the work of [[Norman Mailer]].|url=https://prmlr.us/mr16gord}} <br />
<br />
{{dc|dc=B|efore its publication in 1955,}} ''The Deer Park'' had been refused by seven publishers in ten weeks for no reason than its “six not very explicit lines about the sex of an old producer and a call girl.”{{sfn|Mailer|1981|p=330}} After its publication, it received more criticism than praise, and “the most common objection to the book was its sexual explicitness”{{sfn|Lennon|1986|p=6}} because “in the early 1950s no description of sexuality, however evasive, was readily accepted.”{{sfn|Mills|1982|p=145}} In spite of responses from publishers and critics, Mailer refused to make any change of the original lines about “the sex of an old producer and a call girl” and the novel came out as it is now, with the sexuality of his characters to play “the more significant role” in the story.{{sfn|Mills|1982|p=143}} The issue of sexuality in ''The Deer Park'' has drawn much attention from critics. Nigel Leigh argues that “in ''The Deer Park'' sexuality is both foregrounded and incorporated into Mailer’s political epistemology”{{sfn|Leigh|1990|p=77}} and “Mailer investigates closely the sex lives of Sergius, Eitel, Elena, Faye and Lulu Meyers in a search of a discourse of pleasure.”{{sfn|Leigh|1990|p=78}} Robert Merrill holds that the novel is “only incidentally a satire on Hollywood or an outlet for Mailer’s philosophical predilections; at heart it is the story of a rather tragic love affair.”{{sfn|Merrill|1978|p=45}} Norman Podhoretz points out that “it is on the sexual affairs of his characters that Mr. Mailer concentrates in ''The Deer Park''.”{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=78}}<br />
<br />
Why does Mailer concentrate on the sexuality of the characters in ''The Deer Park''? Many critics have noticed that in ''The Deer Park'', Mailer’s major concern moves from “the problem of the world” to “the problem of the self, or, from ideology to the individual or self.{{efn|See {{harvtxt|Lucid|1971|p=82-83}}, {{harvtxt|Leeds|1969|p=110}}, {{harvtxt|Leigh|1990|pp=55-56, 62-63}}, and {{harvtxt|Glenday|1995|pp=79-81}}.}} As a result, he is highly concerned with the rebellious imperatives of the self, among which “none is more exigent than sex”.{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=123}} A number of critics have directed their attention towards and made close investigations of the nature and meaning of the sexuality of the characters in ''The Deer Park'', and, consequently, a variety of conclusions have been drawn. To Jennifer Bailey, the sexuality of the characters in ''The Deer Park'' is of great importance to themselves because it is “potentially redemptive.”{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=28}} Nigel Leigh also believes that the sexuality of the characters in ''The Deer Park'' is of great significance because their sexual activities can decide whether they will be able to grow or decline.{{sfn|Leigh|1990|p=78}} Norman Podhoretz notes the relationship between the sexuality of the characters and themselves in ''The Deer Park'', arguing that the world in the novel is populated with those “who have no true interest in anything but self” and for whom “sex has become a testing ground of the self.”{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=78}} Like Podhoretz, Diana Trilling also considers the relationship between sex and self. She observes that in ''The Deer Park'' Mailer distinguishes two different kinds of sexuality, one “appears to be free but is really an enslavement,” as displayed by the movie colony in Desert D’Or, and the other “expresses a new, radical principle of selfhood,” as valued by Hipsterism.{{sfn|Lucid|1971|pp=125-126}} Unlike the critics above mentioned, Jean Radford argues that in ''The Deer Park'' the sexuality of the characters functions as “an index of other things” and “at the more general level it is used to symbolize the moral state of the nation.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=133}}<br />
<br />
When investigating the nature and meaning of the sexuality of the characters in ''The Deer Park'', many critics direct their attention towards the love affairs between Eitel and Elena and Sergius and Lulu. To many critics, the relationship between Eitel and Elena is absolutely productive and constructive. For example, Gabriel Miller argues that, due to his relationship with Elena, Eitel can manage to recover “his sense of self” and “his sexual potency” and therefore is able to return to “work on an ambitious script,” thereby, to “reclaim his integrity as an artist.”{{sfn|Bloom|2003|p=175}} However, unlike the relationship between Eitel and Elena, the relationship between Sergius and Lulu is not so productive and constructive because one sees the other as nothing but a sexual object and their sexuality is very much like “sport” and “war” in which the man tries every means to test and prove his “manhood” and the woman becomes his “opponent” and “enemy” he “must fight and conquer.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=135}}<br />
<br />
Not only have many critics noticed the difference between the nature and meaning of the sexuality of Eitel and Elena and that of Sergius and Lulu, they have also observed the difference between Elena and Lulu. To Philip Bufithis, although Elena is “a discarded mistress” and “an unimpressive actress with an ungainly social manners,” she “is yet heroic in her embattled desire to be self-reliant and take her own measure free of men’s estimation of her” and therefore she always “clings to the hope of self-knowledge” and “retains her individualism.”{{sfn|Bufithis|1978|p=46}} Jean Radford believes that Elena is the most important of Mailer’s women characters because she exists “not merely as a secondary human being who is an index of others’ moral possibilities, but who has herself a moral nature with distinctive ideas and possibilities for self-development and growth.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=136}} Howard Harper makes a comparison between Elena and Lulu, arguing that “Elena is more generous, more perceptive, more honest, more sensitive than Lulu” because Lulu values “career” more than “any human considerations.”{{sfn|Harper|1967|p=111}} Likewise, Jessica Gerson takes a positive attitude towards Elena, ranking her among those “benign, redemptive and creative women” who “repeatedly offer their men redemptive love.”{{sfn|Bloom|1986|p=172}}<br />
<br />
Although many critics have commented upon the relationship between sex and self and the difference between Elena and Lulu when talking about the sexuality of the characters in ''The Deer Park'', few critics have seen the love affairs and marriages of the characters in the novel as part of their pursuit of selfhood and happiness, nor have they noticed the puzzlements that Elena and Lulu confront after marriage. In fact, the sexuality of the characters in their love affairs and marriages is always linked with their pursuit of selfhood and happiness. It is always indicative of whether the partners involved are content with their lives or not, and whether they can satisfactorily do with their own lives or not. It is both a preserver and destroyer of happy love and marriage. It is an index both of love and hate. It involves not only warmness and tenderness but also coldness and indifference and it is founded on the ground of honesty and loyalty but, sometimes, it also grows out of deception and betrayal. Further, it is both redemptive and hurting and it makes one partner gain and the other partner lose. It is supposed to be love-bound and marriage-bound but sometimes it has little to do with love and marriage. It seems to facilitate selfhood outside love and marriage but it also seems to imprison selfhood inside love and marriage. So, it cannot be read as merely a sexual activity; instead, it should be read and understood in association with its performers’ pursuit of selfhood and happiness and should not be read without taking gender into consideration. Only in this way can we really understand the nature and meaning of the sexuality of the characters in the novel and the puzzlements of Elena and Lulu after marriage.<br />
<br />
In ''The Deer Park'', Mailer seems to concern himself more with the relationship between self and gender than with the love affairs or sexuality of one character or another; in other words, what he is deeply concerned with in the novel are the problems closely related to self and gender, such as: Whether living alone or together with someone else, married or single, what should one do with his/her life? Should one be honest with himself/herself or deceptive of himself/herself? Should one be obedient to another to lose his/her pride and dignity or defiant of another to keep his/her pride and dignity? Should one live for himself/herself or for others? What does happiness mean to men and women? Does the life of a wife mean that she should maintain a house, love her husband and children, be on good terms with family members, and learn to grow so as to make herself match well with her husband or people around her? Are love and marriage enough to make a woman really happy? What does life mean to a woman? Does it mean to find a good husband, have children, be a good wife and mother and on good terms with family members? To be herself or serve others? Can being a lady make a woman a really happy wife? Can being a gentleman make a man a really happy husband? What can make a man a happy husband and a woman a happy wife? In the novel, Mailer tries to give answers to these questions by closely investigating the love affairs and marriages of his characters. It should be noticed that Mailer’s investigation of the love affairs and marriages of the characters in the novel reflect his concern not only with the problem of selfhood but also with the gender issues of his time. In ''The Deer Park'', gender differences in male and female pursuits of selfhood and happiness is explicitly manifested in the affairs and marriages of the characters, but it has not drawn much attention from critics. Many critics have directed their attention towards Charley Eitel, Sergius O’Shaugnessy and Marion O’Faye as the major characters in the novel, as clearly shown in Norman Podhoretz’s remark that “Sergius and Marion are the natural heroes of the world of The Deer Park” {{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=80}} or Jean Radford’s argument that “there are in fact three heroes in the novel: Eitel the ‘potential artist’ and professional film director, Marion Faye the nihilistic pimp and pusher to the film world, and Sergius O’Shaugnessy, the would-be writer and narrator of the novel.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=20}} No critic has paid much attention to Elena or Lulu or Dorothea as major characters in the novel. Further, many critics tend to read and understand the significance of the love affair between Eitel and Elena from a male perspective. Although Jean Radford claims that Elena “has herself a moral nature with distinctive ideas and possibilities for self-development and growth” {{sfn|Radford|1975|p=136}}, she fails to see that Elena’s possibilities for self development and growth are not the same as or equal to Charley Eitel’s, Sergius O’Shaugnessy’s, or Marion O’Faye’s. Although Elena can pursue her selfhood in her love affairs, she cannot transcend her marriage life to pursue her true self as can Eitel. Further, we can say that Lulu cannot have a happy life so long as she does not know what a woman should do with her own life after marriage.<br />
<br />
Now, it seems in order to make a close investigation of the major characters and their self-pursuit in terms of love affair and marriage. Unlike earlier critics who see Eitel, Sergius and Marion as major characters in the novel, I would add Elena, Lulu, and Dorothea to the group of major characters, and unlike those critics who focus their attention mainly on the major male characters, such as Eitel, Sergius and Marion, I would like to direct my attention towards the major female characters in the novel, such as Dorothea, Elena and Lulu, whose life experiences demonstrate different alternatives of women in their pursuit of selfhood and happiness.<br />
<br />
Dorothea is a showgirl, a night-club singer, a call girl, a gossip columnist, a celebrity, and a failure. Her father is a drunkard, dies that way, and her mother remarries. She begins to work when she is twelve, collecting rent from tenants and taking care of household duties. She is seventeen when she has her first love affair with a man named O’Faye, who makes her considerably unhappy because “she was crazy about him,” but “he liked a different girl every night” and never wants to meet her desire “to settle down, to have children” and, therefore, when she gets pregnant, he does not hesitate to choose to leave her {{sfn|Radford|1975|p=10,11}}. She does not gain much from this affair; instead, she suffers a lot from it. We do not know how much pain she experiences, but we can be sure that she does suffer to no small extent. However, her fate always seems to be connected with that man. When she turns nineteen, she becomes pregnant by a passing European prince and, after he leaves, she is left to take care of everything on her own. With no one to help her, she seems to have no choice but to turn to O’Faye to help her out of trouble because “three months went by, four months went by, it was too much late” {{sfn|Radford|1975|p=11}} to do anything about her forthcoming child. Fortunately, O’Faye is willing to save her because he “sympathized with her predicament.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=11}} Although “he would never marry a girl who carried his own child,” he “considered it right to help a friend out of her trouble.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=11}} So, to her great expectation and satisfaction, “they quickly married, and as quickly divorced, and her child had a name.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=11}}”Clearly, Dorothea’s quick marriage with O’Faye is not grounded on the love of one for the other; it is essentially a loveless one. It seems to help Dorothea gain, but this gain, if it really is one, is founded on her miserable experience with the irresponsible European prince who gets her into trouble. She later marries a man, of whom she says, “I can’t remember him as well as guys I’ve had for a one-night stand.” {{sfn|Radford|1975|p=6}} She then has a romance with an Air Force pilot who, unfortunately, is killed in a flight and she is, in a sense, a tragic woman. She has more than one affair and, more than once, she loses more than gains. The only affair from which she seems to have gained something is the one that she has with Martin Pelley when she settles down in Desert D’Or and “their romance began on the sure ground of his incapacity.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=11}} That is to say, instead of being at the mercy of others, as she used to be, now Dorothea is able to decide her own life, but her ability to make decisions of her own is grounded on the incapacity of the man she chooses as her partner. Although she begins her life as a victim of men, she grows as a woman who can make men yield to her; as the narrator remarks of her, “Dorothea had lasted. If her night-club days were finished, if her big affairs were part of the past, she was still in fine shape. She had her house, she had her court, she had money in the bank; men still sent airplanes for her.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=7}} If we take a backward look at Dorothea’s life experience with men, we find that she loses her selfhood, but she manages to regain it by becoming a woman who seems to be able to dominate men rather than be dominated by them.<br />
<br />
If Dorothea’s life is one of misery and happiness, loss and gain, Elena shares much with her, but is quite different from her, as well. She was born into an unhappy family. Her father is “a bully” and so is her mother. Neither of them treats her really well. The mother coddles Elena but scolds her as<br />
well, “made much of her and ignored her, given her ambitions and chased them away.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=104}} The father does not like Elena because “she was the youngest and she had come much too late .”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=104}} Although she has a big family consisting of brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, cousins, and grandparents, she does not feel that it is a happy one because “fist fights started” whenever there is a family party. In addition, the father is “a dandy” and “could not be alone with a woman without trying to make love to her,” and the mother is “a flirt,” always greedy and jealous.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=104}} Born into such a family, Elena suffers significantly and experiences more misery than any other girl her age. When she is a child, more often than not, she “would cry silently while the mother and father yelled insults at one another” and therefore she has to spend her childhood “listening to their jealous quarrels.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=104,105}} She has her first love affair when she is in her teens, with Collie Munshin. She lives with him for three years but fails to develop her relationship with him into marriage. She loves him but receives no love in return. In her eyes, Collie is “a hypocrite” because he claims himself to be “a good liberal” who does not believe in a double standard but rather in the equality between man and woman, white and black, and the rich and the poor, but he looks down upon Elena for no other reason than that “she’s obviously from a poor background.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=49}} Unlike what he claims himself to be, Collie has “always been full of prejudices about women” and “wanted girls with some class and distinction to them.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=49}} It is no wonder that three years of living with Elena is not long enough for him to develop a bit of love for her. Although he believes that “Elena is a person who hates everything that is small in herself” and is “consumed by the passion to become a bigger person than she is” and therefore is “the sort of girl who would love a husband and kids”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=50}}, he sees her as just “a beautiful, warm, simple child”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=48}}; that is to say, he never sees her as his equal. Being innocent, Elena spends three years being cheated on by Collie. Although she is Collie’s mistress, she has never been treated as such by him. To Collie, Elena is not a “beautiful, warm, simple” young woman who has given herself wholly to him but a possession he can exchange with others when he becomes fatigued with the relationship, which is the reason why Collie transfers Elena to Charley Eitel. Leaving Collie and coming to Eitel, Elena seems to have freed herself from imprisonment, just as the narrator says, “she reminded me of an animal, ready for flight.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=71}}<br />
<br />
Indeed, living with Eitel, Elena feels quite different than when she is with Collie. Eitel is a man of over forty. He has “a big reputation as a film director” but is “better known in other ways” because he experiences more than one marriage and is believed to be “the cause of more than one divorce.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=24}} He has had three failed marriages and more than one love affair before he meets Elena. His first wife “worked in a bookstore to support him”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=26}}, but as his own career grows, he begins to forget what she has done and sacrificed for him because “he wanted a woman who was more attractive, more intelligent, more his equal” and even “wanted more than one woman”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=27}}. Quarrels between them become more and more routine and, as a result, they end up divorced. His second wife is an actress from the social register. From her, he “picked up what he wanted and paid for it of course”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=28}}. Like his first wife, his second wife ends her relationship with him in a divorce. After divorce, Eitel is commissioned into the Army in Europe and, when he comes back from the war, he becomes extremely notorious because “there was a year or two when he was supposed to have slept with half the good-looking women in the capital, and it was a rare week which did not have his name in one gossip column or another.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=28}} His third wife is a woman named Lulu Meyers. She is beautiful and young and therefore “he hardly believed she needed him.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=29}} Knowing that his marriage with her “could never last”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=31}}, he soon falls into an affair with a Romanian actress, which lasts just one year. Although he has never been faithful to any woman that he has ever been with, he believes that he is truly loyal to his Romanian woman, as he states:<br />
<br />
{{quote|I’ve never been the kind of man who can be faithful with my regularity. I’ve always been the sort of decent chappie who hops from one woman to another in the run of an evening because that’s the only prescription which allows me to be fond of both ladies, but I was faithful in my own way to the Rumanian. She would have liked to see me every night for she hated to be alone and I would have liked never to see her again, and so we settled for two nights a week. It didn’t matter if I were in the middle of a romance or between girls, whether I had a date that night or not—on Thursday night and Friday night I went to her apartment to sleep.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=30}} }}<br />
<br />
Although Eitel believes that he has been loyal to his Romanian woman in his own way, his very loyalty suggests that he is by no means loyal at all. If Collie claims himself to be a man who does not believe in double standard, Eitel is obviously one who does believe in double standard, as Sergius the narrator remarks of him, “One of his qualities was the ability to talk about himself with considerable masculinity of mind.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=26}} Living with such a man “with considerable masculinity of mind,” Elena, however, does not subordinate herself as a woman to Eitel. She always attempts to pursue her selfhood, protect her pride, gain respect from Eitel, and maintain her individuality.<br />
<br />
Although Eitel is a man “with considerable masculinity of mind,” his masculine mindset seems to be powerless in front of Elena. He begins to change with his love affair with Elena. To him, Elena has something that other women always lack, just as he believes, “not too many women really knew how to make love, and very few indeed loved to make love”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=89}}, but “Elena was doubly and indubitably a find.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=90}} He learns something about Elena from the way she makes love, for he “always felt that the way a woman made love was as good a guide to understanding her character as any other way.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=90}} Believing that “to be a good lover, one should be incapable of falling in love”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=90}}, Eitel “usually wanted nothing more than to quit a woman once they were done.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=91}} However, when it comes to Elena, he no longer believes what he used to believe because “he not only wished to sleep the night with Elena but to hold her in his arms.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=91}} Elena makes Eitel realize that “he had never been with anyone who understood him so well”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=96}} and therefore he believes that Elena is “the best woman” he has ever had.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=97}} Consequently, he believes that his affair with Elena “could return his energy, flesh his courage, and make him the man he had once believed himself to be.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=96}} He also believes that he and Elena each “could make something of the other.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=96}} After the affair, “he felt full of tenderness for Elena” and “through the day he toyed with the thought that she should come to live with him.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=96}} But unlike what Eitel expects, Elena does not want to live with him because she does not want to lose her freedom and selfhood she has just achieved, as she tells him, “You can do what you want, and I’ll do what I want.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=98}} When Eitel becomes furious with her for her affair with Marion Faye, Elena refuses to surrender to his criticism; instead, she is very defiant, saying that “I’ll go if you want me to go” and that “I think we’d better quit now, you and me.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=101}} Feeling that Eitel has treated her as “a game,” Elena says defiantly to him, “When a woman’s unfaithful, she’s more attractive to a man.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=101}} Elena does not believe that Eitel loves her, but when she finds that he really does love her, she says with final abandon, “Nobody ever treated me the way you do. I love you more than I ever loved anyone.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=102}} However, when living with Eitel, Elena seems to have lost her selfhood completely once again, as the narrator states, “in the first few weeks of living together, Elena’s eyes never left Eitel’s face; her mood was the clue to his temper; if she was gay it meant he was happy; if Eitel was moody, it left her morose. No one else existed for her.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=104}} That, however, does not mean that she is quite sure of Eitel’s feeling towards her. On the contrary, she is always doubtful. Once she says to Eitel, “You think I’m not good enough for you. . . You tell me I don’t love you because you don’t love me. It’s all right. I’ll leave.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=108}} After Eitel confirms his love for her, she becomes calm and says, “Oh, Charley, when you make love to me, everything is all right again. Is it really the same with you?”.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=147}} Another time, she says to him calmly, “I could be happy with somebody else . . . I’m going to leave you some day, Charley, I mean it.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=152}} Still another time, she even says to Eitel, much like an order, “Love me, really love me, and maybe I can do what you want.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=160}} Eitel comes to feel somewhat fed up with Elena and appears to be pleased when she tells him that Marion wants her to live with him because he knows if someone else cares for her, “his own responsibility was less.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=163}} Although he believes that Elena is “the most honest woman I’ve ever known”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=163}}, Eitel finds that “the time had come to decide how he would break up with her.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=178}}<br />
Eitel wants to break up with Elena because he does not see her as his equal. He sees himself as a second-rate man and Elena as a fifth-rate woman and he does not believe it is logical for a second-rate man to seek out a fifth-rate woman because a second-rate man should seek out a second-rate woman.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=179}} And yet, he is not able to make himself desert his principle of caste. Although “he had come to resent the attraction of their love-making,” he never really wants to separate himself from Elena, and therefore, rather than resent her, more often than not, “he enjoyed her as much as ever, and in his sleep, he would sometimes be aware that he was holding her and whispering love-words to her ear.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=179}} On the other hand, he seems to be troubled by a dilemma because his love for Elena seems to have prevented him from pursuing the freedom of his own. He knows that “the unspoken purpose of freedom was to find love, yet when love was found one could only desire freedom again.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=180}} Now that he has found love in Elena, it is natural that he has a strong desire for “an affair with a woman for whom he cared nothing, an affair simply exciting, exciting as the pages of a pornographic text where one could read in safety and not grudge every emotion the woman felt for another man,” but his desire can never be satisfied because “he was locked in Elena’s love”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=180}}, and it seems that he will never be able to unlock that lock because the longer they live together, the more doubtful Elena will become of Eitel’s love for her. Her very doubtfulness suggests that she loves and values him so much that she is very fearful of losing him because she is very fearful of being alone and lonely, but then, she does not want to lose herself completely to him, as she once says to Eitel, “You’re a good-time Charley. You only like me when I’m in a good mood [. . .] When I say nice things, then you love me. . . You’re so superior. But you don’t know what goes on in my mind.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=210}} Obviously, Eitel does not know what goes on in Elena’s mind, so, sometime later, she tells him that she wants to leave him to become a nun because “a nun is never alone” and “nuns always have company.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=210}} Eitel takes it as his fault that Elena should have such an idea because she chooses to live with him and fully loves him, but he gives her “nothing but loneliness” and therefore it is he who “ruined everything he touched.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=210}}<br />
<br />
Despite Eitel’s confession that “he ruined everything he touched,” Elena does not believe that he is really honest. When he tells her, “You must know that I care about you. I can’t stand the thought of hurting you. I mean, I want you always to be happy”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=225}},she does not believe what he says. When Eitel seriously says to her, “I want us to be married,” Elena just simply replies, “What I thought is that we could go on like this.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=225}} When he once again says to her, “You have to marry me,” she tells him once again, “When you don’t want me, I’ll go. But I don’t want to talk about it any more.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=226}} Elena’s uncompromising refusal to cooperate and comply with Eitel suggests that she minds not only his love for her but also his respect for her. She wants to love and be loved deeply by Eitel, but she does not want to be controlled and manipulated fully by him. On the other hand, Eitel does not want to be controlled and directed by Elena. Although “he loved her as he had never loved anyone,” Eitel is afraid of his love for her because “if he stayed with her, he would be obliged to travel in ''her'' directions.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=226}} Although “he loved her as he had never loved anyone,” Eitel does not want himself to be locked by his love for Elena. He needs love, but he desires<br />
freedom even more. His love for Elena seems to be quite abnormal because “it was only after quarrels and crises that he could feel love for Elena the way he desired.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=259}} However much he loves her, “he hated her” because “it was impossible not to remember how she had given herself to others.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=259}} Although he says love words to her more than once, he does not truly love her, just as the narrator says, “they had been tender to each other, they had forgiven one another, and yet he did not love her, she did not love him, no<br />
one ever love anyone.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=260}} Caught between to love and love not, and between love and hate, Eitel wants to finish his affair with Elena because he<br />
feels that “neither he nor she had been able to make the happiness they<br />
should have made.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=262}} When he decides to tell Elena his decision to end<br />
their relationship, he finds that she has already been prepared for it, as she<br />
says, “You want me to go away. All right, I will.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=262}} She even tells Eitel,<br />
“Maybe I’ll become a prostitute. Don’t worry. I’m not trying to make you feel<br />
sorry. You think I’m a prostitute anyway, so how could you feel sorry? In fact<br />
you always thought of me as a prostitute, but you don’t know what I think<br />
of you. You think I can’t live without you. Maybe I know better.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=264}} Elena’s<br />
words clearly show that she sees herself as an independent woman rather<br />
than a woman who would like to depend on men for a living. That is the<br />
reason why she does not hesitate to choose to leave Eitel after she quarrels<br />
with him. It might never occur to Eitel that Elena can really leave him. After<br />
Elena leaves, Eitel “sat down and began to wait for her telephone call” because he believes that “she would phone,” but no telephone call came to him<br />
after “an hour went by, and then the afternoon, and much of the night,” and<br />
he can do nothing but “sighed to himself, not knowing if he were relieved<br />
that he was free, or if he were more miserable than he had ever been.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=264}}<br />
<br />
After leaving Eitel, Elena comes to Marion O’Faye, but her life with him<br />
turns out not to be so happy as she has expected. So, not long afterwards, she<br />
begins to regret for her leaving Eitel for Marion, and due to that, she writes<br />
Eitel a long letter, in which she confides to him:<br />
<br />
{{quote|I hate the kind of thing that happens to women where they go out with a man maybe two or three times and immediately they’re forced to start thinking about marriage. That’s how my mother got married and a lot of my sisters and what a drudgery sort of life they have, everybody’s so afraid to live. I am, too, and it’s silly. Once I remember I had a girl friend and she had a steady boy friend and I used to fall into a thing with the two of them on a Saturday night [. . .] the three of us liked each other like good friends and I almost never felt lowdown about it [. . .] the girl liked me so much and nobody was asking anybody else to solve their whole life for them. But that’s what you were asking me and what I was asking you and ''I resented it as much as you did''.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=275}} }}<br />
<br />
Elena’s letter to Eitel, from which the above quotation comes, is intended to<br />
express her introspective guilt for Eitel. Covering more than seven and a half<br />
pages, it is really a long letter, but what this long letter actually represents is<br />
by no means a pure confession of Elena’s guilt for Eitel but a clear demonstration of her view of love and marriage and of how a woman should live<br />
her life as well. From the above quotation, we can clearly see that Elena is a<br />
woman who is deeply concerned with issues highly relevant to her life in<br />
particular and the lives of men and women in general, such as love and marriage. To her, love and marriage should not lays restraints upon those who<br />
are in love or marriage. She obviously believes that love and marriage are<br />
something that should be taken seriously before one falls in love with somebody or gets married and, therefore, it is wrong for a woman to fall in love<br />
with some man hastily and even hurry to get married to him. She pities her<br />
mother and sisters for the way they get married, but, unfortunately, she<br />
comes to follow their suit, hastily giving herself to Marion, a notorious pimp.<br />
Although she quarrels and fights with Eitel, Elena knows that Eitel has never<br />
seen her as a prostitute, as Marion always does. In Marion’s eyes, Elena is<br />
“the kind of girl you could wipe your hands on.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=163}} In the letter she writes<br />
to Eitel after she has left him, Elena remarks of Marion, “I keep asking him<br />
to make me a call-girl and he says no, he says he wants to marry me and<br />
then I can become a call-girl. I suppose he wants to be a champion pimp.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=277}} This shows that, unlike Eitel, who asks Elena to marry him because he<br />
really loves her and wants to have her as his wife, Marion asks Elena to marry<br />
him for no other reason than turning her into a prostitute because he has<br />
never really loved her. He has never been free from nightmares since Elena<br />
comes to live with him because he is not able to rid himself of “the idea that<br />
she was his nun and he would transmute her into a witch.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=288}} Accordingly,<br />
in the few weeks they live together, Elena “passed from gaiety to high excitement to illness to depression and back to the liquor again.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=290}} Although “she felt free with him”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=290}}, Elena is not able to develop “a decent<br />
healthy mature relationship”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=50}} with Marion. Unlike Eitel who might appreciate Elena’s dependence on his promise, Marion “could even grieve for<br />
her since she did not realize how much she depended on his promise.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=292}} When she swears that she will leave him “in a day or two”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=298}}, Marion has<br />
no objection because that’s exactly what he really expects her to do. We might<br />
feel sorry for Elena because she never knows why Marion does not love her<br />
and she never understands the way he treats her. Even at the last moment of<br />
her being with him, she does not forget to ask him, “Why didn’t you like me<br />
a little? Why didn’t you know you could have loved me?” {{sfn|Radford|1975|p=300}}<br />
<br />
It might be wrong to blame Marion for the car accident that happens<br />
when he drives Elena to the airport, but it is good in that the accident puts<br />
him under the police guard and Elena back to Eitel. Her meeting with Eitel<br />
at the hospital after the car accident is really a very moving one because it<br />
causes both of them to change fundamentally. Eitel makes up his mind to<br />
take care of Elena and Elena decides to marry Eitel. Not only does she decide<br />
to marry Eitel, she decides to change herself as well, as she tells him, “Marry<br />
me, oh, Charley, please marry me. This time I’ll learn. I promise I will.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=303}}<br />
After Elena leaves the hospital, Eitel meets her desire to marry him because<br />
he believes “if he did not marry her he could never forget that he had once<br />
made her happy and now she had nothing but her hospital bed.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=303}} It<br />
seems that Eitel marries Elena out of compassion and responsibility, but the<br />
marriage changes Elena to no small extent. She comes to learn to love her<br />
husband and children and can manage to be on good terms with her family servants. It seems that she gets herself out of trouble and has a happy life<br />
because she has successfully developed “a decent healthy mature relationship”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=50}} with Eitel, but the fact is that she does not feel really happy, for she<br />
gradually finds that she still has some problems she does not know how to<br />
solve because she finds that, whatever she does, she always ends up doing<br />
what Eitel wants her to do or expects her to do, as she tells him:<br />
<br />
{{quote|We have the baby, and we’ll probably have another baby, and I have good relations with the servants and I do love the dancing lessons, and Charley, I love you, I can tell because I still get sacred at the thought of losing you, but Charley, listen to me, I don’t know if you understand how much I love Vickie, I keep worrying that I won’t be a good enough mother to him, but is that enough? Is Vickie enough? I mean where do I go? I don’t want to complain, but what am I going to do with my life?{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=324}} }}<br />
<br />
To Elena’s problem, Eitel does respond, but his response is just a few comforting words because he does not really know how to solve it. He tries his<br />
best to comfort her by saying that she has grown so much that there will be<br />
no need for him to worry about her anymore, and whatever she does, she<br />
is surely going to be better and better. But Eitel knows that however he tries<br />
to comfort Elena, he is not able to satisfy her because “she had come now<br />
into that domain where her problems were everybody’s problems.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=325}}<br />
Eitel is not able to solve Elena’s problems because he does not really know<br />
what one should ever do with his/her own life. If a husband can go to the<br />
comfort of his family that always does what he wants after a day of business<br />
outside home and go outside to do what he wants after a night of comfort<br />
at home, where can a wife go after a busy day of doing housework and taking care of her husband and children inside home? Eitel does not really know<br />
how to solve Elena’s problems because he realizes that her problems are<br />
somewhat, and indeed to a large extent, also his problems. He knows that<br />
unless she knows what she can do with her own life, she “would grow away<br />
from him”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=325}} because she will not “be forced to stay out of kindness and<br />
loyalty and boredom.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=325}} Elena’s problems suggest that although she can<br />
manage to have “a decent healthy mature relationship”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=50}} with her husband after marriage, she is not able to have her selfhood when she is a wife<br />
and mother. It seems impossible for her to have both at the same time, and,<br />
therefore, she has to choose one and abandon the other; that is to say, to<br />
have her selfhood, as she does when she lives with Eitel and then with Marion as lovers, she can only choose not to have a “happy” marriage and family. That is a contradiction she is not able to solve. She does not like the kind<br />
of relationship between her and Eitel and then between her and Marion as<br />
lovers, nor is she satisfied with her relationship with Eitel as wife and husband. She is puzzled, and her puzzlement is, to some extent, the puzzlement<br />
of every woman because Lulu Meyers is also puzzled with a similar puzzle-ment.<br />
<br />
Lulu is an actress. She first gets married to Eitel. Their marriage is, as Eitel<br />
describes, “the meeting on zero and zero”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=31}}, and therefore, it soon comes<br />
to an end. She then meets Sergius and falls in love with him. To Sergius, Lulu<br />
is quite different from any girl he has known, just as he remarks, “I had never<br />
known a girl like Lulu, nor had I ever been in such a romance”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=113}} because<br />
she appears incomprehensibly mysterious and always changes so quickly<br />
that he is not sure whether they are “in love or about to break up,” whether they will “make love or fight, do both or do nothing at all.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=113}} Besides, she<br />
is too much self-centered. Sometimes, she wants Sergius to leave her alone,<br />
and other times, she will not let him quit her for a moment. He has no choice<br />
but “to follow every impulse” of hers.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=114}} However different and self-centered Lulu is, Sergius does not feel unhappy when being together with her,<br />
just as he says, “We were great lovers . . . I was superb. She was superb . . .We<br />
played our games. I was the photographer, and she was the model; she was<br />
the movie star and I was the bellhop; she did the queen, I was slave. We even<br />
met even to even.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=120}} It seems that they are in a fully harmonious relationship, but beneath it lies great disharmony. When Lulu suggests that they<br />
get married, the thought of marriage makes Sergius “badly depressed”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=124}}<br />
because he believes that Lulu’s self-centeredness will turn him into “Mr. Meyers, a sort of fancy longshoreman scared of his wife, always busy mixing<br />
drinks for Lulu and the guests.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=124}} He wants to be Mr. Sergius rather than<br />
Mr. Meyers. He dislikes talking about marriage because it means “death of<br />
enjoyment” for him. He does not want to marry Lulu because they are having more and more quarrels than harmony between them, just as he says,<br />
“Lulu and I had come to the point where we fought more often than not, and<br />
the fights had taken on some bitterness. There were times when I was sure<br />
we had to break up, and I would look forward with a sort of self-satisfied<br />
melancholy to the time when I would be free.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=124}} Each of them “looked<br />
forward to the separation”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=125}}, but, when separated, they have a strong desire to be together and an equally strong desire for love from each other, just<br />
as Sergius says, “Once she was gone, I could not get myself together . . .While<br />
she was gone, we were always on the phone. I called her up to tell her I loved<br />
her, she called me back half an hour later and we had the same conversation<br />
again. So, like the old gypsies who make a sign a hundred times a day, we<br />
swore we loved each other.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=125}}<br />
<br />
The separation, however, has very much changed Sergius. He begins to realize that there will be no love without weakness and that he should have<br />
loved Lulu and married her. However, somewhat to his surprise, when he<br />
proposes marriage with her, she refuses his proposal. Although their lovemaking makes Lulu “feel like a woman for the first time”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=203}} and makes<br />
them really love each other, just as Sergius says, “I loved her and I think she<br />
loved me”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=203}}, Lulu does not let herself turn into Mrs. Sergius; instead,<br />
she leaves Sergius and gets married to Tony Tanner to continue her pursuit<br />
of selfhood and happiness.<br />
<br />
In a sense, Lulu’s marriage with Tanner is the result of her rebellion<br />
against Herman Teppis, her superior, under whose leadership she works as<br />
an actress, because he wants and even demands her to marry Teddy Pope, a<br />
homosexual she does not love at all. Getting married to Tanner is Lulu’s own<br />
choice. It is an indication of her pursuit of selfhood and happiness, but it<br />
turns out to be a wrong choice. Although she says her marriage with Tanner<br />
is based on her understanding of him, it turns out that she does not really<br />
understand him. Although she believes she will be happy in her defiance of<br />
Herman Teppis’ will, Lulu’s marriage to Tanner does not go according to<br />
plan. She comes to realize her error, because she feels that Tanner is not the<br />
proper man to be her husband. She regrets that she has been married to him.<br />
Probably due to her regret, during her marriage with Tanner, Lulu has a love<br />
affair with Eitel, who, she believes, is her “big love.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=321}} It seems that Lulu<br />
is capable of choosing her own love and marriage and retaining her selfhood; she, however, does not really know why she is not able to be really<br />
happy after she is married, and, therefore, is not what she really wants to be.<br />
<br />
Looking back at the love and marriage experiences of Dorothea, Elena<br />
and Lulu, three major female characters in ''The Deer Park'', we find that they<br />
illustrate three alternatives of women in their pursuit of selfhood and happiness in love and marriage, but none of them seems to be an ideal persona.<br />
Dorothea chooses to cohabit with Martin Pelly, a man who is much inferior<br />
to her, and thereby keeps her selfhood in the end; she loses her selfhood but<br />
comes to regain it. Elena chooses to get married to the man she really loves,<br />
bears children and lives as a good wife and mother; she keeps her selfhood<br />
but then loses it. Lulu chooses to get married to the man she does not really<br />
love in defiance of the authority imposed upon her and lives an unhappy<br />
life in a childless marriage; she keeps seeking her selfhood but fails to achieve<br />
it. Their experiences lead us to wonder: What should a woman do if she<br />
wants to have both her selfhood and happiness and “a decent healthy mature<br />
relationship”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=50}} with a man, whether lover or husband, at the same time?<br />
What could make an ideal relationship between a man and a woman? Should<br />
they live, when they live together, like soul mates, or brother and sister, or<br />
husband and wife, or lovers? These are the problems, that the novel suggests,<br />
and they are the very problems that Elena confronts and does not know how<br />
to solve. Elena’s problems are “everybody’s problems.”<br />
<br />
===Notes===<br />
{{Notelist}}<br />
<br />
===Citations===<br />
{{Reflist|15em}}<br />
<br />
===Works Cited===<br />
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Bailey |first=Jennifer |date=1979 |title=Norman Mailer: Quick-Change Artist |url= |location= |publisher=The Macmillan Press Ltd. |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Bloom |first=Harold, ed |date=1986 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=Chelsea House Publishers |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Bloom |first=Harold, ed |date=2003 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=Chelsea House Publishers |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Bufithis |first=Philip H |date=1978 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=Frederick Ungar Publishing Co. |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=1995 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=St. Martin's Press |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Harper |first=Howard M. |date=1967 |title=Desperate Faith: A Study of Bellow, Salinger, Mailer, Baldwin, and Updike |url= |location= |publisher=University of North Carolina P |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Leeds |first=Barry H. |date=1969 |title=The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=U of London P Limited |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Leigh |first=Nigel |date=1990 |title=Radical Fictions and the Novels of Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=Macmillan |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=1986 |title=Critical Essays on Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=G. K. Hall & Co. |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |editor-last=Lucid |editor-first=Robert |date=1971 |title=Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work |url= |location= |publisher=Little, Brown and Company |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1955 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location= |publisher=G. P. Putnam’s Sons |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1981 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location= |publisher=Perigee Books |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Merrill |first=Robert |date=1978 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=Twayne |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mills |first=Hilary |date=1982 |title=Mailer: A Biography |url= |location= |publisher=McGraw Hill |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Radford |first=Jean |date=1975 |title=Norman Mailer: A Critical Study |url= |location= |publisher=The Macmillan Press |ref=harv }}<br />
{{Refend}}<br />
<br />
{{Review}}<br />
{{DEFAULTSORT:Her Problems Were Everyone’s Problems: Self and Gender in The Deer Park}}<br />
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]</div>Klcrawfordhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/%E2%80%9CHer_Problems_Were_Everyone%E2%80%99s_Problems%E2%80%9D:_Self_and_Gender_in_The_Deer_Park&diff=12524The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/“Her Problems Were Everyone’s Problems”: Self and Gender in The Deer Park2021-02-12T18:36:02Z<p>Klcrawford: Added more body and sources</p>
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<div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>“Her Problems Were Everyone’s Problems”: Self and Gender in ''The Deer Park''}}<br />
{{Working}}<br />
{{MR13}}<br />
{{byline|last=Ren|first=Hujun|abstract= An examination of "Her Problems Were Everyone's Problems": Self and Gender in ''The Deer Park'' to the work of [[Norman Mailer]].|url=https://prmlr.us/mr16gord}} <br />
<br />
{{dc|dc=B|efore its publication in 1955,}} ''The Deer Park'' had been refused by seven publishers in ten weeks for no reason than its “six not very explicit lines about the sex of an old producer and a call girl.”{{sfn|Mailer|1981|p=330}} After its publication, it received more criticism than praise, and “the most common objection to the book was its sexual explicitness”{{sfn|Lennon|1986|p=6}} because “in the early 1950s no description of sexuality, however evasive, was readily accepted.”{{sfn|Mills|1982|p=145}} In spite of responses from publishers and critics, Mailer refused to make any change of the original lines about “the sex of an old producer and a call girl” and the novel came out as it is now, with the sexuality of his characters to play “the more significant role” in the story.{{sfn|Mills|1982|p=143}} The issue of sexuality in ''The Deer Park'' has drawn much attention from critics. Nigel Leigh argues that “in ''The Deer Park'' sexuality is both foregrounded and incorporated into Mailer’s political epistemology”{{sfn|Leigh|1990|p=77}} and “Mailer investigates closely the sex lives of Sergius, Eitel, Elena, Faye and Lulu Meyers in a search of a discourse of pleasure.”{{sfn|Leigh|1990|p=78}} Robert Merrill holds that the novel is “only incidentally a satire on Hollywood or an outlet for Mailer’s philosophical predilections; at heart it is the story of a rather tragic love affair.”{{sfn|Merrill|1978|p=45}} Norman Podhoretz points out that “it is on the sexual affairs of his characters that Mr. Mailer concentrates in ''The Deer Park''.”{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=78}}<br />
<br />
Why does Mailer concentrate on the sexuality of the characters in ''The Deer Park''? Many critics have noticed that in ''The Deer Park'', Mailer’s major concern moves from “the problem of the world” to “the problem of the self, or, from ideology to the individual or self.{{efn|See {{harvtxt|Lucid|1971|p=82-83}}, {{harvtxt|Leeds|1969|p=110}}, {{harvtxt|Leigh|1990|pp=55-56, 62-63}}, and {{harvtxt|Glenday|1995|pp=79-81}}.}} As a result, he is highly concerned with the rebellious imperatives of the self, among which “none is more exigent than sex”.{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=123}} A number of critics have directed their attention towards and made close investigations of the nature and meaning of the sexuality of the characters in ''The Deer Park'', and, consequently, a variety of conclusions have been drawn. To Jennifer Bailey, the sexuality of the characters in ''The Deer Park'' is of great importance to themselves because it is “potentially redemptive.”{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=28}} Nigel Leigh also believes that the sexuality of the characters in ''The Deer Park'' is of great significance because their sexual activities can decide whether they will be able to grow or decline.{{sfn|Leigh|1990|p=78}} Norman Podhoretz notes the relationship between the sexuality of the characters and themselves in ''The Deer Park'', arguing that the world in the novel is populated with those “who have no true interest in anything but self” and for whom “sex has become a testing ground of the self.”{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=78}} Like Podhoretz, Diana Trilling also considers the relationship between sex and self. She observes that in ''The Deer Park'' Mailer distinguishes two different kinds of sexuality, one “appears to be free but is really an enslavement,” as displayed by the movie colony in Desert D’Or, and the other “expresses a new, radical principle of selfhood,” as valued by Hipsterism.{{sfn|Lucid|1971|pp=125-126}} Unlike the critics above mentioned, Jean Radford argues that in ''The Deer Park'' the sexuality of the characters functions as “an index of other things” and “at the more general level it is used to symbolize the moral state of the nation.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=133}}<br />
<br />
When investigating the nature and meaning of the sexuality of the characters in ''The Deer Park'', many critics direct their attention towards the love affairs between Eitel and Elena and Sergius and Lulu. To many critics, the relationship between Eitel and Elena is absolutely productive and constructive. For example, Gabriel Miller argues that, due to his relationship with Elena, Eitel can manage to recover “his sense of self” and “his sexual potency” and therefore is able to return to “work on an ambitious script,” thereby, to “reclaim his integrity as an artist.”{{sfn|Bloom|2003|p=175}} However, unlike the relationship between Eitel and Elena, the relationship between Sergius and Lulu is not so productive and constructive because one sees the other as nothing but a sexual object and their sexuality is very much like “sport” and “war” in which the man tries every means to test and prove his “manhood” and the woman becomes his “opponent” and “enemy” he “must fight and conquer.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=135}}<br />
<br />
Not only have many critics noticed the difference between the nature and meaning of the sexuality of Eitel and Elena and that of Sergius and Lulu, they have also observed the difference between Elena and Lulu. To Philip Bufithis, although Elena is “a discarded mistress” and “an unimpressive actress with an ungainly social manners,” she “is yet heroic in her embattled desire to be self-reliant and take her own measure free of men’s estimation of her” and therefore she always “clings to the hope of self-knowledge” and “retains her individualism.”{{sfn|Bufithis|1978|p=46}} Jean Radford believes that Elena is the most important of Mailer’s women characters because she exists “not merely as a secondary human being who is an index of others’ moral possibilities, but who has herself a moral nature with distinctive ideas and possibilities for self-development and growth.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=136}} Howard Harper makes a comparison between Elena and Lulu, arguing that “Elena is more generous, more perceptive, more honest, more sensitive than Lulu” because Lulu values “career” more than “any human considerations.”{{sfn|Harper|1967|p=111}} Likewise, Jessica Gerson takes a positive attitude towards Elena, ranking her among those “benign, redemptive and creative women” who “repeatedly offer their men redemptive love.”{{sfn|Bloom|1986|p=172}}<br />
<br />
Although many critics have commented upon the relationship between sex and self and the difference between Elena and Lulu when talking about the sexuality of the characters in ''The Deer Park'', few critics have seen the love affairs and marriages of the characters in the novel as part of their pursuit of selfhood and happiness, nor have they noticed the puzzlements that Elena and Lulu confront after marriage. In fact, the sexuality of the characters in their love affairs and marriages is always linked with their pursuit of selfhood and happiness. It is always indicative of whether the partners involved are content with their lives or not, and whether they can satisfactorily do with their own lives or not. It is both a preserver and destroyer of happy love and marriage. It is an index both of love and hate. It involves not only warmness and tenderness but also coldness and indifference and it is founded on the ground of honesty and loyalty but, sometimes, it also grows out of deception and betrayal. Further, it is both redemptive and hurting and it makes one partner gain and the other partner lose. It is supposed to be love-bound and marriage-bound but sometimes it has little to do with love and marriage. It seems to facilitate selfhood outside love and marriage but it also seems to imprison selfhood inside love and marriage. So, it cannot be read as merely a sexual activity; instead, it should be read and understood in association with its performers’ pursuit of selfhood and happiness and should not be read without taking gender into consideration. Only in this way can we really understand the nature and meaning of the sexuality of the characters in the novel and the puzzlements of Elena and Lulu after marriage.<br />
<br />
In ''The Deer Park'', Mailer seems to concern himself more with the relationship between self and gender than with the love affairs or sexuality of one character or another; in other words, what he is deeply concerned with in the novel are the problems closely related to self and gender, such as: Whether living alone or together with someone else, married or single, what should one do with his/her life? Should one be honest with himself/herself or deceptive of himself/herself? Should one be obedient to another to lose his/her pride and dignity or defiant of another to keep his/her pride and dignity? Should one live for himself/herself or for others? What does happiness mean to men and women? Does the life of a wife mean that she should maintain a house, love her husband and children, be on good terms with family members, and learn to grow so as to make herself match well with her husband or people around her? Are love and marriage enough to make a woman really happy? What does life mean to a woman? Does it mean to find a good husband, have children, be a good wife and mother and on good terms with family members? To be herself or serve others? Can being a lady make a woman a really happy wife? Can being a gentleman make a man a really happy husband? What can make a man a happy husband and a woman a happy wife? In the novel, Mailer tries to give answers to these questions by closely investigating the love affairs and marriages of his characters. It should be noticed that Mailer’s investigation of the love affairs and marriages of the characters in the novel reflect his concern not only with the problem of selfhood but also with the gender issues of his time. In ''The Deer Park'', gender differences in male and female pursuits of selfhood and happiness is explicitly manifested in the affairs and marriages of the characters, but it has not drawn much attention from critics. Many critics have directed their attention towards Charley Eitel, Sergius O’Shaugnessy and Marion O’Faye as the major characters in the novel, as clearly shown in Norman Podhoretz’s remark that “Sergius and Marion are the natural heroes of the world of The Deer Park” {{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=80}} or Jean Radford’s argument that “there are in fact three heroes in the novel: Eitel the ‘potential artist’ and professional film director, Marion Faye the nihilistic pimp and pusher to the film world, and Sergius O’Shaugnessy, the would-be writer and narrator of the novel.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=20}} No critic has paid much attention to Elena or Lulu or Dorothea as major characters in the novel. Further, many critics tend to read and understand the significance of the love affair between Eitel and Elena from a male perspective. Although Jean Radford claims that Elena “has herself a moral nature with distinctive ideas and possibilities for self-development and growth” {{sfn|Radford|1975|p=136}}, she fails to see that Elena’s possibilities for self development and growth are not the same as or equal to Charley Eitel’s, Sergius O’Shaugnessy’s, or Marion O’Faye’s. Although Elena can pursue her selfhood in her love affairs, she cannot transcend her marriage life to pursue her true self as can Eitel. Further, we can say that Lulu cannot have a happy life so long as she does not know what a woman should do with her own life after marriage.<br />
<br />
Now, it seems in order to make a close investigation of the major characters and their self-pursuit in terms of love affair and marriage. Unlike earlier critics who see Eitel, Sergius and Marion as major characters in the novel, I would add Elena, Lulu, and Dorothea to the group of major characters, and unlike those critics who focus their attention mainly on the major male characters, such as Eitel, Sergius and Marion, I would like to direct my attention towards the major female characters in the novel, such as Dorothea, Elena and Lulu, whose life experiences demonstrate different alternatives of women in their pursuit of selfhood and happiness.<br />
<br />
Dorothea is a showgirl, a night-club singer, a call girl, a gossip columnist, a celebrity, and a failure. Her father is a drunkard, dies that way, and her mother remarries. She begins to work when she is twelve, collecting rent from tenants and taking care of household duties. She is seventeen when she has her first love affair with a man named O’Faye, who makes her considerably unhappy because “she was crazy about him,” but “he liked a different girl every night” and never wants to meet her desire “to settle down, to have children” and, therefore, when she gets pregnant, he does not hesitate to choose to leave her {{sfn|Radford|1975|p=10,11}}. She does not gain much from this affair; instead, she suffers a lot from it. We do not know how much pain she experiences, but we can be sure that she does suffer to no small extent. However, her fate always seems to be connected with that man. When she turns nineteen, she becomes pregnant by a passing European prince and, after he leaves, she is left to take care of everything on her own. With no one to help her, she seems to have no choice but to turn to O’Faye to help her out of trouble because “three months went by, four months went by, it was too much late” {{sfn|Radford|1975|p=11}} to do anything about her forthcoming child. Fortunately, O’Faye is willing to save her because he “sympathized with her predicament.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=11}} Although “he would never marry a girl who carried his own child,” he “considered it right to help a friend out of her trouble.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=11}} So, to her great expectation and satisfaction, “they quickly married, and as quickly divorced, and her child had a name.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=11}}”Clearly, Dorothea’s quick marriage with O’Faye is not grounded on the love of one for the other; it is essentially a loveless one. It seems to help Dorothea gain, but this gain, if it really is one, is founded on her miserable experience with the irresponsible European prince who gets her into trouble. She later marries a man, of whom she says, “I can’t remember him as well as guys I’ve had for a one-night stand.” {{sfn|Radford|1975|p=6}} She then has a romance with an Air Force pilot who, unfortunately, is killed in a flight and she is, in a sense, a tragic woman. She has more than one affair and, more than once, she loses more than gains. The only affair from which she seems to have gained something is the one that she has with Martin Pelley when she settles down in Desert D’Or and “their romance began on the sure ground of his incapacity.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=11}} That is to say, instead of being at the mercy of others, as she used to be, now Dorothea is able to decide her own life, but her ability to make decisions of her own is grounded on the incapacity of the man she chooses as her partner. Although she begins her life as a victim of men, she grows as a woman who can make men yield to her; as the narrator remarks of her, “Dorothea had lasted. If her night-club days were finished, if her big affairs were part of the past, she was still in fine shape. She had her house, she had her court, she had money in the bank; men still sent airplanes for her.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=7}} If we take a backward look at Dorothea’s life experience with men, we find that she loses her selfhood, but she manages to regain it by becoming a woman who seems to be able to dominate men rather than be dominated by them.<br />
<br />
If Dorothea’s life is one of misery and happiness, loss and gain, Elena shares much with her, but is quite different from her, as well. She was born into an unhappy family. Her father is “a bully” and so is her mother. Neither of them treats her really well. The mother coddles Elena but scolds her as<br />
well, “made much of her and ignored her, given her ambitions and chased them away.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=104}} The father does not like Elena because “she was the youngest and she had come much too late .”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=104}} Although she has a big family consisting of brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, cousins, and grandparents, she does not feel that it is a happy one because “fist fights started” whenever there is a family party. In addition, the father is “a dandy” and “could not be alone with a woman without trying to make love to her,” and the mother is “a flirt,” always greedy and jealous.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=104}} Born into such a family, Elena suffers significantly and experiences more misery than any other girl her age. When she is a child, more often than not, she “would cry silently while the mother and father yelled insults at one another” and therefore she has to spend her childhood “listening to their jealous quarrels.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=104,105}} She has her first love affair when she is in her teens, with Collie Munshin. She lives with him for three years but fails to develop her relationship with him into marriage. She loves him but receives no love in return. In her eyes, Collie is “a hypocrite” because he claims himself to be “a good liberal” who does not believe in a double standard but rather in the equality between man and woman, white and black, and the rich and the poor, but he looks down upon Elena for no other reason than that “she’s obviously from a poor background.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=49}} Unlike what he claims himself to be, Collie has “always been full of prejudices about women” and “wanted girls with some class and distinction to them.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=49}} It is no wonder that three years of living with Elena is not long enough for him to develop a bit of love for her. Although he believes that “Elena is a person who hates everything that is small in herself” and is “consumed by the passion to become a bigger person than she is” and therefore is “the sort of girl who would love a husband and kids”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=50}}, he sees her as just “a beautiful, warm, simple child”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=48}}; that is to say, he never sees her as his equal. Being innocent, Elena spends three years being cheated on by Collie. Although she is Collie’s mistress, she has never been treated as such by him. To Collie, Elena is not a “beautiful, warm, simple” young woman who has given herself wholly to him but a possession he can exchange with others when he becomes fatigued with the relationship, which is the reason why Collie transfers Elena to Charley Eitel. Leaving Collie and coming to Eitel, Elena seems to have freed herself from imprisonment, just as the narrator says, “she reminded me of an animal, ready for flight.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=71}}<br />
<br />
Indeed, living with Eitel, Elena feels quite different than when she is with Collie. Eitel is a man of over forty. He has “a big reputation as a film director” but is “better known in other ways” because he experiences more than one marriage and is believed to be “the cause of more than one divorce.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=24}} He has had three failed marriages and more than one love affair before he meets Elena. His first wife “worked in a bookstore to support him”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=26}}, but as his own career grows, he begins to forget what she has done and sacrificed for him because “he wanted a woman who was more attractive, more intelligent, more his equal” and even “wanted more than one woman”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=27}}. Quarrels between them become more and more routine and, as a result, they end up divorced. His second wife is an actress from the social register. From her, he “picked up what he wanted and paid for it of course”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=28}}. Like his first wife, his second wife ends her relationship with him in a divorce. After divorce, Eitel is commissioned into the Army in Europe and, when he comes back from the war, he becomes extremely notorious because “there was a year or two when he was supposed to have slept with half the good-looking women in the capital, and it was a rare week which did not have his name in one gossip column or another.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=28}} His third wife is a woman named Lulu Meyers. She is beautiful and young and therefore “he hardly believed she needed him.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=29}} Knowing that his marriage with her “could never last”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=31}}, he soon falls into an affair with a Romanian actress, which lasts just one year. Although he has never been faithful to any woman that he has ever been with, he believes that he is truly loyal to his Romanian woman, as he states:<br />
<br />
{{quote|I’ve never been the kind of man who can be faithful with my regularity. I’ve always been the sort of decent chappie who hops from one woman to another in the run of an evening because that’s the only prescription which allows me to be fond of both ladies, but I was faithful in my own way to the Rumanian. She would have liked to see me every night for she hated to be alone and I would have liked never to see her again, and so we settled for two nights a week. It didn’t matter if I were in the middle of a romance or between girls, whether I had a date that night or not—on Thursday night and Friday night I went to her apartment to sleep.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=30}} }}<br />
<br />
Although Eitel believes that he has been loyal to his Romanian woman in his own way, his very loyalty suggests that he is by no means loyal at all. If Collie claims himself to be a man who does not believe in double standard, Eitel is obviously one who does believe in double standard, as Sergius the narrator remarks of him, “One of his qualities was the ability to talk about himself with considerable masculinity of mind.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=26}} Living with such a man “with considerable masculinity of mind,” Elena, however, does not subordinate herself as a woman to Eitel. She always attempts to pursue her selfhood, protect her pride, gain respect from Eitel, and maintain her individuality.<br />
<br />
Although Eitel is a man “with considerable masculinity of mind,” his masculine mindset seems to be powerless in front of Elena. He begins to change with his love affair with Elena. To him, Elena has something that other women always lack, just as he believes, “not too many women really knew how to make love, and very few indeed loved to make love”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=89}}, but “Elena was doubly and indubitably a find.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=90}} He learns something about Elena from the way she makes love, for he “always felt that the way a woman made love was as good a guide to understanding her character as any other way.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=90}} Believing that “to be a good lover, one should be incapable of falling in love”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=90}}, Eitel “usually wanted nothing more than to quit a woman once they were done.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=91}} However, when it comes to Elena, he no longer believes what he used to believe because “he not only wished to sleep the night with Elena but to hold her in his arms.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=91}} Elena makes Eitel realize that “he had never been with anyone who understood him so well”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=96}} and therefore he believes that Elena is “the best woman” he has ever had.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=97}} Consequently, he believes that his affair with Elena “could return his energy, flesh his courage, and make him the man he had once believed himself to be.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=96}} He also believes that he and Elena each “could make something of the other.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=96}} After the affair, “he felt full of tenderness for Elena” and “through the day he toyed with the thought that she should come to live with him.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=96}} But unlike what Eitel expects, Elena does not want to live with him because she does not want to lose her freedom and selfhood she has just achieved, as she tells him, “You can do what you want, and I’ll do what I want.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=98}} When Eitel becomes furious with her for her affair with Marion Faye, Elena refuses to surrender to his criticism; instead, she is very defiant, saying that “I’ll go if you want me to go” and that “I think we’d better quit now, you and me.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=101}} Feeling that Eitel has treated her as “a game,” Elena says defiantly to him, “When a woman’s unfaithful, she’s more attractive to a man.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=101}} Elena does not believe that Eitel loves her, but when she finds that he really does love her, she says with final abandon, “Nobody ever treated me the way you do. I love you more than I ever loved anyone.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=102}} However, when living with Eitel, Elena seems to have lost her selfhood completely once again, as the narrator states, “in the first few weeks of living together, Elena’s eyes never left Eitel’s face; her mood was the clue to his temper; if she was gay it meant he was happy; if Eitel was moody, it left her morose. No one else existed for her.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=104}} That, however, does not mean that she is quite sure of Eitel’s feeling towards her. On the contrary, she is always doubtful. Once she says to Eitel, “You think I’m not good enough for you. . . You tell me I don’t love you because you don’t love me. It’s all right. I’ll leave.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=108}} After Eitel confirms his love for her, she becomes calm and says, “Oh, Charley, when you make love to me, everything is all right again. Is it really the same with you?”.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=147}} Another time, she says to him calmly, “I could be happy with somebody else . . . I’m going to leave you some day, Charley, I mean it.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=152}} Still another time, she even says to Eitel, much like an order, “Love me, really love me, and maybe I can do what you want.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=160}} Eitel comes to feel somewhat fed up with Elena and appears to be pleased when she tells him that Marion wants her to live with him because he knows if someone else cares for her, “his own responsibility was less.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=163}} Although he believes that Elena is “the most honest woman I’ve ever known”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=163}}, Eitel finds that “the time had come to decide how he would break up with her.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=178}}<br />
<br />
. . .<br />
<br />
===Notes===<br />
{{Notelist}}<br />
<br />
===Citations===<br />
{{Reflist|15em}}<br />
<br />
===Works Cited===<br />
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Bailey |first=Jennifer |date=1979 |title=Norman Mailer: Quick-Change Artist |url= |location= |publisher=The Macmillan Press Ltd. |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Bloom |first=Harold, ed |date=1986 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=Chelsea House Publishers |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Bloom |first=Harold, ed |date=2003 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=Chelsea House Publishers |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Bufithis |first=Philip H |date=1978 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=Frederick Ungar Publishing Co. |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=1995 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=St. Martin's Press |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Harper |first=Howard M. |date=1967 |title=Desperate Faith: A Study of Bellow, Salinger, Mailer, Baldwin, and Updike |url= |location= |publisher=University of North Carolina P |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Leeds |first=Barry H. |date=1969 |title=The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=U of London P Limited |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Leigh |first=Nigel |date=1990 |title=Radical Fictions and the Novels of Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=Macmillan |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=1986 |title=Critical Essays on Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=G. K. Hall & Co. |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |editor-last=Lucid |editor-first=Robert |date=1971 |title=Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work |url= |location= |publisher=Little, Brown and Company |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1955 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location= |publisher=G. P. Putnam’s Sons |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1981 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location= |publisher=Perigee Books |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Merrill |first=Robert |date=1978 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=Twayne |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mills |first=Hilary |date=1982 |title=Mailer: A Biography |url= |location= |publisher=McGraw Hill |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Radford |first=Jean |date=1975 |title=Norman Mailer: A Critical Study |url= |location= |publisher=The Macmillan Press |ref=harv }}<br />
{{Refend}}<br />
<br />
{{Review}}<br />
{{DEFAULTSORT:Her Problems Were Everyone’s Problems: Self and Gender in The Deer Park}}<br />
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]</div>Klcrawfordhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/%E2%80%9CHer_Problems_Were_Everyone%E2%80%99s_Problems%E2%80%9D:_Self_and_Gender_in_The_Deer_Park&diff=12523The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/“Her Problems Were Everyone’s Problems”: Self and Gender in The Deer Park2021-02-12T18:18:31Z<p>Klcrawford: Added source.</p>
<hr />
<div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>“Her Problems Were Everyone’s Problems”: Self and Gender in ''The Deer Park''}}<br />
{{Working}}<br />
{{MR13}}<br />
{{byline|last=Ren|first=Hujun|abstract= An examination of "Her Problems Were Everyone's Problems": Self and Gender in ''The Deer Park'' to the work of [[Norman Mailer]].|url=https://prmlr.us/mr16gord}} <br />
<br />
{{dc|dc=B|efore its publication in 1955,}} ''The Deer Park'' had been refused by seven publishers in ten weeks for no reason than its “six not very explicit lines about the sex of an old producer and a call girl.”{{sfn|Mailer|1981|p=330}} After its publication, it received more criticism than praise, and “the most common objection to the book was its sexual explicitness”{{sfn|Lennon|1986|p=6}} because “in the early 1950s no description of sexuality, however evasive, was readily accepted.”{{sfn|Mills|1982|p=145}} In spite of responses from publishers and critics, Mailer refused to make any change of the original lines about “the sex of an old producer and a call girl” and the novel came out as it is now, with the sexuality of his characters to play “the more significant role” in the story.{{sfn|Mills|1982|p=143}} The issue of sexuality in ''The Deer Park'' has drawn much attention from critics. Nigel Leigh argues that “in ''The Deer Park'' sexuality is both foregrounded and incorporated into Mailer’s political epistemology”{{sfn|Leigh|1990|p=77}} and “Mailer investigates closely the sex lives of Sergius, Eitel, Elena, Faye and Lulu Meyers in a search of a discourse of pleasure.”{{sfn|Leigh|1990|p=78}} Robert Merrill holds that the novel is “only incidentally a satire on Hollywood or an outlet for Mailer’s philosophical predilections; at heart it is the story of a rather tragic love affair.”{{sfn|Merrill|1978|p=45}} Norman Podhoretz points out that “it is on the sexual affairs of his characters that Mr. Mailer concentrates in ''The Deer Park''.”{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=78}}<br />
<br />
Why does Mailer concentrate on the sexuality of the characters in ''The Deer Park''? Many critics have noticed that in ''The Deer Park'', Mailer’s major concern moves from “the problem of the world” to “the problem of the self, or, from ideology to the individual or self.{{efn|See {{harvtxt|Lucid|1971|p=82-83}}, {{harvtxt|Leeds|1969|p=110}}, {{harvtxt|Leigh|1990|pp=55-56, 62-63}}, and {{harvtxt|Glenday|1995|pp=79-81}}.}} As a result, he is highly concerned with the rebellious imperatives of the self, among which “none is more exigent than sex”.{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=123}} A number of critics have directed their attention towards and made close investigations of the nature and meaning of the sexuality of the characters in ''The Deer Park'', and, consequently, a variety of conclusions have been drawn. To Jennifer Bailey, the sexuality of the characters in ''The Deer Park'' is of great importance to themselves because it is “potentially redemptive.”{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=28}} Nigel Leigh also believes that the sexuality of the characters in ''The Deer Park'' is of great significance because their sexual activities can decide whether they will be able to grow or decline.{{sfn|Leigh|1990|p=78}} Norman Podhoretz notes the relationship between the sexuality of the characters and themselves in ''The Deer Park'', arguing that the world in the novel is populated with those “who have no true interest in anything but self” and for whom “sex has become a testing ground of the self.”{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=78}} Like Podhoretz, Diana Trilling also considers the relationship between sex and self. She observes that in ''The Deer Park'' Mailer distinguishes two different kinds of sexuality, one “appears to be free but is really an enslavement,” as displayed by the movie colony in Desert D’Or, and the other “expresses a new, radical principle of selfhood,” as valued by Hipsterism.{{sfn|Lucid|1971|pp=125-126}} Unlike the critics above mentioned, Jean Radford argues that in ''The Deer Park'' the sexuality of the characters functions as “an index of other things” and “at the more general level it is used to symbolize the moral state of the nation.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=133}}<br />
<br />
When investigating the nature and meaning of the sexuality of the characters in ''The Deer Park'', many critics direct their attention towards the love affairs between Eitel and Elena and Sergius and Lulu. To many critics, the relationship between Eitel and Elena is absolutely productive and constructive. For example, Gabriel Miller argues that, due to his relationship with Elena, Eitel can manage to recover “his sense of self” and “his sexual potency” and therefore is able to return to “work on an ambitious script,” thereby, to “reclaim his integrity as an artist.”{{sfn|Bloom|2003|p=175}} However, unlike the relationship between Eitel and Elena, the relationship between Sergius and Lulu is not so productive and constructive because one sees the other as nothing but a sexual object and their sexuality is very much like “sport” and “war” in which the man tries every means to test and prove his “manhood” and the woman becomes his “opponent” and “enemy” he “must fight and conquer.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=135}}<br />
<br />
Not only have many critics noticed the difference between the nature and meaning of the sexuality of Eitel and Elena and that of Sergius and Lulu, they have also observed the difference between Elena and Lulu. To Philip Bufithis, although Elena is “a discarded mistress” and “an unimpressive actress with an ungainly social manners,” she “is yet heroic in her embattled desire to be self-reliant and take her own measure free of men’s estimation of her” and therefore she always “clings to the hope of self-knowledge” and “retains her individualism.”{{sfn|Bufithis|1978|p=46}} Jean Radford believes that Elena is the most important of Mailer’s women characters because she exists “not merely as a secondary human being who is an index of others’ moral possibilities, but who has herself a moral nature with distinctive ideas and possibilities for self-development and growth.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=136}} Howard Harper makes a comparison between Elena and Lulu, arguing that “Elena is more generous, more perceptive, more honest, more sensitive than Lulu” because Lulu values “career” more than “any human considerations.”{{sfn|Harper|1967|p=111}} Likewise, Jessica Gerson takes a positive attitude towards Elena, ranking her among those “benign, redemptive and creative women” who “repeatedly offer their men redemptive love.”{{sfn|Bloom|1986|p=172}}<br />
<br />
Although many critics have commented upon the relationship between sex and self and the difference between Elena and Lulu when talking about the sexuality of the characters in ''The Deer Park'', few critics have seen the love affairs and marriages of the characters in the novel as part of their pursuit of selfhood and happiness, nor have they noticed the puzzlements that Elena and Lulu confront after marriage. In fact, the sexuality of the characters in their love affairs and marriages is always linked with their pursuit of selfhood and happiness. It is always indicative of whether the partners involved are content with their lives or not, and whether they can satisfactorily do with their own lives or not. It is both a preserver and destroyer of happy love and marriage. It is an index both of love and hate. It involves not only warmness and tenderness but also coldness and indifference and it is founded on the ground of honesty and loyalty but, sometimes, it also grows out of deception and betrayal. Further, it is both redemptive and hurting and it makes one partner gain and the other partner lose. It is supposed to be love-bound and marriage-bound but sometimes it has little to do with love and marriage. It seems to facilitate selfhood outside love and marriage but it also seems to imprison selfhood inside love and marriage. So, it cannot be read as merely a sexual activity; instead, it should be read and understood in association with its performers’ pursuit of selfhood and happiness and should not be read without taking gender into consideration. Only in this way can we really understand the nature and meaning of the sexuality of the characters in the novel and the puzzlements of Elena and Lulu after marriage.<br />
<br />
In ''The Deer Park'', Mailer seems to concern himself more with the relationship between self and gender than with the love affairs or sexuality of one character or another; in other words, what he is deeply concerned with in the novel are the problems closely related to self and gender, such as: Whether living alone or together with someone else, married or single, what should one do with his/her life? Should one be honest with himself/herself or deceptive of himself/herself? Should one be obedient to another to lose his/her pride and dignity or defiant of another to keep his/her pride and dignity? Should one live for himself/herself or for others? What does happiness mean to men and women? Does the life of a wife mean that she should maintain a house, love her husband and children, be on good terms with family members, and learn to grow so as to make herself match well with her husband or people around her? Are love and marriage enough to make a woman really happy? What does life mean to a woman? Does it mean to find a good husband, have children, be a good wife and mother and on good terms with family members? To be herself or serve others? Can being a lady make a woman a really happy wife? Can being a gentleman make a man a really happy husband? What can make a man a happy husband and a woman a happy wife? In the novel, Mailer tries to give answers to these questions by closely investigating the love affairs and marriages of his characters. It should be noticed that Mailer’s investigation of the love affairs and marriages of the characters in the novel reflect his concern not only with the problem of selfhood but also with the gender issues of his time. In ''The Deer Park'', gender differences in male and female pursuits of selfhood and happiness is explicitly manifested in the affairs and marriages of the characters, but it has not drawn much attention from critics. Many critics have directed their attention towards Charley Eitel, Sergius O’Shaugnessy and Marion O’Faye as the major characters in the novel, as clearly shown in Norman Podhoretz’s remark that “Sergius and Marion are the natural heroes of the world of The Deer Park” {{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=80}} or Jean Radford’s argument that “there are in fact three heroes in the novel: Eitel the ‘potential artist’ and professional film director, Marion Faye the nihilistic pimp and pusher to the film world, and Sergius O’Shaugnessy, the would-be writer and narrator of the novel.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=20}} No critic has paid much attention to Elena or Lulu or Dorothea as major characters in the novel. Further, many critics tend to read and understand the significance of the love affair between Eitel and Elena from a male perspective. Although Jean Radford claims that Elena “has herself a moral nature with distinctive ideas and possibilities for self-development and growth” {{sfn|Radford|1975|p=136}}, she fails to see that Elena’s possibilities for self development and growth are not the same as or equal to Charley Eitel’s, Sergius O’Shaugnessy’s, or Marion O’Faye’s. Although Elena can pursue her selfhood in her love affairs, she cannot transcend her marriage life to pursue her true self as can Eitel. Further, we can say that Lulu cannot have a happy life so long as she does not know what a woman should do with her own life after marriage.<br />
<br />
Now, it seems in order to make a close investigation of the major characters and their self-pursuit in terms of love affair and marriage. Unlike earlier critics who see Eitel, Sergius and Marion as major characters in the novel, I would add Elena, Lulu, and Dorothea to the group of major characters, and unlike those critics who focus their attention mainly on the major male characters, such as Eitel, Sergius and Marion, I would like to direct my attention towards the major female characters in the novel, such as Dorothea, Elena and Lulu, whose life experiences demonstrate different alternatives of women in their pursuit of selfhood and happiness.<br />
<br />
Dorothea is a showgirl, a night-club singer, a call girl, a gossip columnist, a celebrity, and a failure. Her father is a drunkard, dies that way, and her mother remarries. She begins to work when she is twelve, collecting rent from tenants and taking care of household duties. She is seventeen when she has her first love affair with a man named O’Faye, who makes her considerably unhappy because “she was crazy about him,” but “he liked a different girl every night” and never wants to meet her desire “to settle down, to have children” and, therefore, when she gets pregnant, he does not hesitate to choose to leave her {{sfn|Radford|1975|p=10,11}}. She does not gain much from this affair; instead, she suffers a lot from it. We do not know how much pain she experiences, but we can be sure that she does suffer to no small extent. However, her fate always seems to be connected with that man. When she turns nineteen, she becomes pregnant by a passing European prince and, after he leaves, she is left to take care of everything on her own. With no one to help her, she seems to have no choice but to turn to O’Faye to help her out of trouble because “three months went by, four months went by, it was too much late” {{sfn|Radford|1975|p=11}} to do anything about her forthcoming child. Fortunately, O’Faye is willing to save her because he “sympathized with her predicament.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=11}} Although “he would never marry a girl who carried his own child,” he “considered it right to help a friend out of her trouble.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=11}} So, to her great expectation and satisfaction, “they quickly married, and as quickly divorced, and her child had a name.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=11}}”Clearly, Dorothea’s quick marriage with O’Faye is not grounded on the love of one for the other; it is essentially a loveless one. It seems to help Dorothea gain, but this gain, if it really is one, is founded on her miserable experience with the irresponsible European prince who gets her into trouble. She later marries a man, of whom she says, “I can’t remember him as well as guys I’ve had for a one-night stand.” {{sfn|Radford|1975|p=6}} She then has a romance with an Air Force pilot who, unfortunately, is killed in a flight and she is, in a sense, a tragic woman. She has more than one affair and, more than once, she loses more than gains. The only affair from which she seems to have gained something is the one that she has with Martin Pelley when she settles down in Desert D’Or and “their romance began on the sure ground of his incapacity.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=11}} That is to say, instead of being at the mercy of others, as she used to be, now Dorothea is able to decide her own life, but her ability to make decisions of her own is grounded on the incapacity of the man she chooses as her partner. Although she begins her life as a victim of men, she grows as a woman who can make men yield to her; as the narrator remarks of her, “Dorothea had lasted. If her night-club days were finished, if her big affairs were part of the past, she was still in fine shape. She had her house, she had her court, she had money in the bank; men still sent airplanes for her.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=7}} If we take a backward look at Dorothea’s life experience with men, we find that she loses her selfhood, but she manages to regain it by becoming a woman who seems to be able to dominate men rather than be dominated by them.<br />
<br />
If Dorothea’s life is one of misery and happiness, loss and gain, Elena shares much with her, but is quite different from her, as well. She was born into an unhappy family. Her father is “a bully” and so is her mother. Neither of them treats her really well. The mother coddles Elena but scolds her as<br />
well, “made much of her and ignored her, given her ambitions and chased them away.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=104}} The father does not like Elena because “she was the youngest and she had come much too late .”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=104}} Although she has a big family consisting of brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, cousins, and grandparents, she does not feel that it is a happy one because “fist fights started” whenever there is a family party. In addition, the father is “a dandy” and “could not be alone with a woman without trying to make love to her,” and the mother is “a flirt,” always greedy and jealous.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=104}} Born into such a family, Elena suffers significantly and experiences more misery than any other girl her age. When she is a child, more often than not, she “would cry silently while the mother and father yelled insults at one another” and therefore she has to spend her childhood “listening to their jealous quarrels.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=104,105}} She has her first love affair when she is in her teens, with Collie Munshin. She lives with him for three years but fails to develop her relationship with him into marriage. She loves him but receives no love in return. In her eyes, Collie is “a hypocrite” because he claims himself to be “a good liberal” who does not believe in a double standard but rather in the equality between man and woman, white and black, and the rich and the poor, but he looks down upon Elena for no other reason than that “she’s obviously from a poor background.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=49}} Unlike what he claims himself to be, Collie has “always been full of prejudices about women” and “wanted girls with some class and distinction to them.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=49}} It is no wonder that three years of living with Elena is not long enough for him to develop a bit of love for her. Although he believes that “Elena is a person who hates everything that is small in herself” and is “consumed by the passion to become a bigger person than she is” and therefore is “the sort of girl who would love a husband and kids”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=50}}, he sees her as just “a beautiful, warm, simple child”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=48}}; that is to say, he never sees her as his equal. Being innocent, Elena spends three years being cheated on by Collie. Although she is Collie’s mistress, she has never been treated as such by him. To Collie, Elena is not a “beautiful, warm, simple” young woman who has given herself wholly to him but a possession he can exchange with others when he becomes fatigued with the relationship, which is the reason why Collie transfers Elena to Charley Eitel. Leaving Collie and coming to Eitel, Elena seems to have freed herself from imprisonment, just as the narrator says, “she reminded me of an animal, ready for flight.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=71}}<br />
<br />
Indeed, living with Eitel, Elena feels quite different than when she is with Collie. Eitel is a man of over forty. He has “a big reputation as a film director” but is “better known in other ways” because he experiences more than one marriage and is believed to be “the cause of more than one divorce.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=24}} He has had three failed marriages and more than one love affair before he meets Elena. His first wife “worked in a bookstore to support him”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=26}}, but as his own career grows, he begins to forget what she has done and sacrificed for him because “he wanted a woman who was more attractive, more intelligent, more his equal” and even “wanted more than one woman”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=27}}. Quarrels between them become more and more routine and, as a result, they end up divorced. His second wife is an actress from the social register. From her, he “picked up what he wanted and paid for it of course”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=28}}. Like his first wife, his second wife ends her relationship with him in a divorce. After divorce, Eitel is commissioned into the Army in Europe and, when he comes back from the war, he becomes extremely notorious because “there was a year or two when he was supposed to have slept with half the good-looking women in the capital, and it was a rare week which did not have his name in one gossip column or another.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=28}} His third wife is a woman named Lulu Meyers. She is beautiful and young and therefore “he hardly believed she needed him.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=29}} Knowing that his marriage with her “could never last”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=31}}, he soon falls into an affair with a Romanian actress, which lasts just one year. Although he has never been faithful to any woman that he has ever been with, he believes that he is truly loyal to his Romanian woman, as he states:<br />
<br />
{{quote|I’ve never been the kind of man who can be faithful with my regularity. I’ve always been the sort of decent chappie who hops from one woman to another in the run of an evening because that’s the only prescription which allows me to be fond of both ladies, but I was faithful in my own way to the Rumanian. She would have liked to see me every night for she hated to be alone and I would have liked never to see her again, and so we settled for two nights a week. It didn’t matter if I were in the middle of a romance or between girls, whether I had a date that night or not—on Thursday night and Friday night I went to her apartment to sleep.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=30}} }}<br />
<br />
. . .<br />
<br />
===Notes===<br />
{{Notelist}}<br />
<br />
===Citations===<br />
{{Reflist|15em}}<br />
<br />
===Works Cited===<br />
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Bailey |first=Jennifer |date=1979 |title=Norman Mailer: Quick-Change Artist |url= |location= |publisher=The Macmillan Press Ltd. |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Bloom |first=Harold, ed |date=1986 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=Chelsea House Publishers |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Bloom |first=Harold, ed |date=2003 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=Chelsea House Publishers |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Bufithis |first=Philip H |date=1978 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=Frederick Ungar Publishing Co. |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=1995 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=St. Martin's Press |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Harper |first=Howard M. |date=1967 |title=Desperate Faith: A Study of Bellow, Salinger, Mailer, Baldwin, and Updike |url= |location= |publisher=University of North Carolina P |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Leeds |first=Barry H. |date=1969 |title=The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=U of London P Limited |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Leigh |first=Nigel |date=1990 |title=Radical Fictions and the Novels of Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=Macmillan |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=1986 |title=Critical Essays on Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=G. K. Hall & Co. |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |editor-last=Lucid |editor-first=Robert |date=1971 |title=Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work |url= |location= |publisher=Little, Brown and Company |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1955 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location= |publisher=G. P. Putnam’s Sons |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1981 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location= |publisher=Perigee Books |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Merrill |first=Robert |date=1978 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=Twayne |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mills |first=Hilary |date=1982 |title=Mailer: A Biography |url= |location= |publisher=McGraw Hill |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Radford |first=Jean |date=1975 |title=Norman Mailer: A Critical Study |url= |location= |publisher=The Macmillan Press |ref=harv }}<br />
{{Refend}}<br />
<br />
{{Review}}<br />
{{DEFAULTSORT:Her Problems Were Everyone’s Problems: Self and Gender in The Deer Park}}<br />
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]</div>Klcrawfordhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/%E2%80%9CHer_Problems_Were_Everyone%E2%80%99s_Problems%E2%80%9D:_Self_and_Gender_in_The_Deer_Park&diff=12522The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/“Her Problems Were Everyone’s Problems”: Self and Gender in The Deer Park2021-02-12T18:16:39Z<p>Klcrawford: Added more body and sources</p>
<hr />
<div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>“Her Problems Were Everyone’s Problems”: Self and Gender in ''The Deer Park''}}<br />
{{Working}}<br />
{{MR13}}<br />
{{byline|last=Ren|first=Hujun|abstract= An examination of "Her Problems Were Everyone's Problems": Self and Gender in ''The Deer Park'' to the work of [[Norman Mailer]].|url=https://prmlr.us/mr16gord}} <br />
<br />
{{dc|dc=B|efore its publication in 1955,}} ''The Deer Park'' had been refused by seven publishers in ten weeks for no reason than its “six not very explicit lines about the sex of an old producer and a call girl.”{{sfn|Mailer|1981|p=330}} After its publication, it received more criticism than praise, and “the most common objection to the book was its sexual explicitness”{{sfn|Lennon|1986|p=6}} because “in the early 1950s no description of sexuality, however evasive, was readily accepted.”{{sfn|Mills|1982|p=145}} In spite of responses from publishers and critics, Mailer refused to make any change of the original lines about “the sex of an old producer and a call girl” and the novel came out as it is now, with the sexuality of his characters to play “the more significant role” in the story.{{sfn|Mills|1982|p=143}} The issue of sexuality in ''The Deer Park'' has drawn much attention from critics. Nigel Leigh argues that “in ''The Deer Park'' sexuality is both foregrounded and incorporated into Mailer’s political epistemology”{{sfn|Leigh|1990|p=77}} and “Mailer investigates closely the sex lives of Sergius, Eitel, Elena, Faye and Lulu Meyers in a search of a discourse of pleasure.”{{sfn|Leigh|1990|p=78}} Robert Merrill holds that the novel is “only incidentally a satire on Hollywood or an outlet for Mailer’s philosophical predilections; at heart it is the story of a rather tragic love affair.”{{sfn|Merrill|1978|p=45}} Norman Podhoretz points out that “it is on the sexual affairs of his characters that Mr. Mailer concentrates in ''The Deer Park''.”{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=78}}<br />
<br />
Why does Mailer concentrate on the sexuality of the characters in ''The Deer Park''? Many critics have noticed that in ''The Deer Park'', Mailer’s major concern moves from “the problem of the world” to “the problem of the self, or, from ideology to the individual or self.{{efn|See {{harvtxt|Lucid|1971|p=82-83}}, {{harvtxt|Leeds|1969|p=110}}, {{harvtxt|Leigh|1990|pp=55-56, 62-63}}, and {{harvtxt|Glenday|1995|pp=79-81}}.}} As a result, he is highly concerned with the rebellious imperatives of the self, among which “none is more exigent than sex”.{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=123}} A number of critics have directed their attention towards and made close investigations of the nature and meaning of the sexuality of the characters in ''The Deer Park'', and, consequently, a variety of conclusions have been drawn. To Jennifer Bailey, the sexuality of the characters in ''The Deer Park'' is of great importance to themselves because it is “potentially redemptive.”{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=28}} Nigel Leigh also believes that the sexuality of the characters in ''The Deer Park'' is of great significance because their sexual activities can decide whether they will be able to grow or decline.{{sfn|Leigh|1990|p=78}} Norman Podhoretz notes the relationship between the sexuality of the characters and themselves in ''The Deer Park'', arguing that the world in the novel is populated with those “who have no true interest in anything but self” and for whom “sex has become a testing ground of the self.”{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=78}} Like Podhoretz, Diana Trilling also considers the relationship between sex and self. She observes that in ''The Deer Park'' Mailer distinguishes two different kinds of sexuality, one “appears to be free but is really an enslavement,” as displayed by the movie colony in Desert D’Or, and the other “expresses a new, radical principle of selfhood,” as valued by Hipsterism.{{sfn|Lucid|1971|pp=125-126}} Unlike the critics above mentioned, Jean Radford argues that in ''The Deer Park'' the sexuality of the characters functions as “an index of other things” and “at the more general level it is used to symbolize the moral state of the nation.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=133}}<br />
<br />
When investigating the nature and meaning of the sexuality of the characters in ''The Deer Park'', many critics direct their attention towards the love affairs between Eitel and Elena and Sergius and Lulu. To many critics, the relationship between Eitel and Elena is absolutely productive and constructive. For example, Gabriel Miller argues that, due to his relationship with Elena, Eitel can manage to recover “his sense of self” and “his sexual potency” and therefore is able to return to “work on an ambitious script,” thereby, to “reclaim his integrity as an artist.”{{sfn|Bloom|2003|p=175}} However, unlike the relationship between Eitel and Elena, the relationship between Sergius and Lulu is not so productive and constructive because one sees the other as nothing but a sexual object and their sexuality is very much like “sport” and “war” in which the man tries every means to test and prove his “manhood” and the woman becomes his “opponent” and “enemy” he “must fight and conquer.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=135}}<br />
<br />
Not only have many critics noticed the difference between the nature and meaning of the sexuality of Eitel and Elena and that of Sergius and Lulu, they have also observed the difference between Elena and Lulu. To Philip Bufithis, although Elena is “a discarded mistress” and “an unimpressive actress with an ungainly social manners,” she “is yet heroic in her embattled desire to be self-reliant and take her own measure free of men’s estimation of her” and therefore she always “clings to the hope of self-knowledge” and “retains her individualism.”{{sfn|Bufithis|1978|p=46}} Jean Radford believes that Elena is the most important of Mailer’s women characters because she exists “not merely as a secondary human being who is an index of others’ moral possibilities, but who has herself a moral nature with distinctive ideas and possibilities for self-development and growth.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=136}} Howard Harper makes a comparison between Elena and Lulu, arguing that “Elena is more generous, more perceptive, more honest, more sensitive than Lulu” because Lulu values “career” more than “any human considerations.”{{sfn|Harper|1967|p=111}} Likewise, Jessica Gerson takes a positive attitude towards Elena, ranking her among those “benign, redemptive and creative women” who “repeatedly offer their men redemptive love.”{{sfn|Bloom|1986|p=172}}<br />
<br />
Although many critics have commented upon the relationship between sex and self and the difference between Elena and Lulu when talking about the sexuality of the characters in ''The Deer Park'', few critics have seen the love affairs and marriages of the characters in the novel as part of their pursuit of selfhood and happiness, nor have they noticed the puzzlements that Elena and Lulu confront after marriage. In fact, the sexuality of the characters in their love affairs and marriages is always linked with their pursuit of selfhood and happiness. It is always indicative of whether the partners involved are content with their lives or not, and whether they can satisfactorily do with their own lives or not. It is both a preserver and destroyer of happy love and marriage. It is an index both of love and hate. It involves not only warmness and tenderness but also coldness and indifference and it is founded on the ground of honesty and loyalty but, sometimes, it also grows out of deception and betrayal. Further, it is both redemptive and hurting and it makes one partner gain and the other partner lose. It is supposed to be love-bound and marriage-bound but sometimes it has little to do with love and marriage. It seems to facilitate selfhood outside love and marriage but it also seems to imprison selfhood inside love and marriage. So, it cannot be read as merely a sexual activity; instead, it should be read and understood in association with its performers’ pursuit of selfhood and happiness and should not be read without taking gender into consideration. Only in this way can we really understand the nature and meaning of the sexuality of the characters in the novel and the puzzlements of Elena and Lulu after marriage.<br />
<br />
In ''The Deer Park'', Mailer seems to concern himself more with the relationship between self and gender than with the love affairs or sexuality of one character or another; in other words, what he is deeply concerned with in the novel are the problems closely related to self and gender, such as: Whether living alone or together with someone else, married or single, what should one do with his/her life? Should one be honest with himself/herself or deceptive of himself/herself? Should one be obedient to another to lose his/her pride and dignity or defiant of another to keep his/her pride and dignity? Should one live for himself/herself or for others? What does happiness mean to men and women? Does the life of a wife mean that she should maintain a house, love her husband and children, be on good terms with family members, and learn to grow so as to make herself match well with her husband or people around her? Are love and marriage enough to make a woman really happy? What does life mean to a woman? Does it mean to find a good husband, have children, be a good wife and mother and on good terms with family members? To be herself or serve others? Can being a lady make a woman a really happy wife? Can being a gentleman make a man a really happy husband? What can make a man a happy husband and a woman a happy wife? In the novel, Mailer tries to give answers to these questions by closely investigating the love affairs and marriages of his characters. It should be noticed that Mailer’s investigation of the love affairs and marriages of the characters in the novel reflect his concern not only with the problem of selfhood but also with the gender issues of his time. In ''The Deer Park'', gender differences in male and female pursuits of selfhood and happiness is explicitly manifested in the affairs and marriages of the characters, but it has not drawn much attention from critics. Many critics have directed their attention towards Charley Eitel, Sergius O’Shaugnessy and Marion O’Faye as the major characters in the novel, as clearly shown in Norman Podhoretz’s remark that “Sergius and Marion are the natural heroes of the world of The Deer Park” {{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=80}} or Jean Radford’s argument that “there are in fact three heroes in the novel: Eitel the ‘potential artist’ and professional film director, Marion Faye the nihilistic pimp and pusher to the film world, and Sergius O’Shaugnessy, the would-be writer and narrator of the novel.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=20}} No critic has paid much attention to Elena or Lulu or Dorothea as major characters in the novel. Further, many critics tend to read and understand the significance of the love affair between Eitel and Elena from a male perspective. Although Jean Radford claims that Elena “has herself a moral nature with distinctive ideas and possibilities for self-development and growth” {{sfn|Radford|1975|p=136}}, she fails to see that Elena’s possibilities for self development and growth are not the same as or equal to Charley Eitel’s, Sergius O’Shaugnessy’s, or Marion O’Faye’s. Although Elena can pursue her selfhood in her love affairs, she cannot transcend her marriage life to pursue her true self as can Eitel. Further, we can say that Lulu cannot have a happy life so long as she does not know what a woman should do with her own life after marriage.<br />
<br />
Now, it seems in order to make a close investigation of the major characters and their self-pursuit in terms of love affair and marriage. Unlike earlier critics who see Eitel, Sergius and Marion as major characters in the novel, I would add Elena, Lulu, and Dorothea to the group of major characters, and unlike those critics who focus their attention mainly on the major male characters, such as Eitel, Sergius and Marion, I would like to direct my attention towards the major female characters in the novel, such as Dorothea, Elena and Lulu, whose life experiences demonstrate different alternatives of women in their pursuit of selfhood and happiness.<br />
<br />
Dorothea is a showgirl, a night-club singer, a call girl, a gossip columnist, a celebrity, and a failure. Her father is a drunkard, dies that way, and her mother remarries. She begins to work when she is twelve, collecting rent from tenants and taking care of household duties. She is seventeen when she has her first love affair with a man named O’Faye, who makes her considerably unhappy because “she was crazy about him,” but “he liked a different girl every night” and never wants to meet her desire “to settle down, to have children” and, therefore, when she gets pregnant, he does not hesitate to choose to leave her {{sfn|Radford|1975|p=10,11}}. She does not gain much from this affair; instead, she suffers a lot from it. We do not know how much pain she experiences, but we can be sure that she does suffer to no small extent. However, her fate always seems to be connected with that man. When she turns nineteen, she becomes pregnant by a passing European prince and, after he leaves, she is left to take care of everything on her own. With no one to help her, she seems to have no choice but to turn to O’Faye to help her out of trouble because “three months went by, four months went by, it was too much late” {{sfn|Radford|1975|p=11}} to do anything about her forthcoming child. Fortunately, O’Faye is willing to save her because he “sympathized with her predicament.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=11}} Although “he would never marry a girl who carried his own child,” he “considered it right to help a friend out of her trouble.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=11}} So, to her great expectation and satisfaction, “they quickly married, and as quickly divorced, and her child had a name.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=11}}”Clearly, Dorothea’s quick marriage with O’Faye is not grounded on the love of one for the other; it is essentially a loveless one. It seems to help Dorothea gain, but this gain, if it really is one, is founded on her miserable experience with the irresponsible European prince who gets her into trouble. She later marries a man, of whom she says, “I can’t remember him as well as guys I’ve had for a one-night stand.” {{sfn|Radford|1975|p=6}} She then has a romance with an Air Force pilot who, unfortunately, is killed in a flight and she is, in a sense, a tragic woman. She has more than one affair and, more than once, she loses more than gains. The only affair from which she seems to have gained something is the one that she has with Martin Pelley when she settles down in Desert D’Or and “their romance began on the sure ground of his incapacity.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=11}} That is to say, instead of being at the mercy of others, as she used to be, now Dorothea is able to decide her own life, but her ability to make decisions of her own is grounded on the incapacity of the man she chooses as her partner. Although she begins her life as a victim of men, she grows as a woman who can make men yield to her; as the narrator remarks of her, “Dorothea had lasted. If her night-club days were finished, if her big affairs were part of the past, she was still in fine shape. She had her house, she had her court, she had money in the bank; men still sent airplanes for her.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=7}} If we take a backward look at Dorothea’s life experience with men, we find that she loses her selfhood, but she manages to regain it by becoming a woman who seems to be able to dominate men rather than be dominated by them.<br />
<br />
If Dorothea’s life is one of misery and happiness, loss and gain, Elena shares much with her, but is quite different from her, as well. She was born into an unhappy family. Her father is “a bully” and so is her mother. Neither of them treats her really well. The mother coddles Elena but scolds her as<br />
well, “made much of her and ignored her, given her ambitions and chased them away.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=104}} The father does not like Elena because “she was the youngest and she had come much too late .”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=104}} Although she has a big family consisting of brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, cousins, and grandparents, she does not feel that it is a happy one because “fist fights started” whenever there is a family party. In addition, the father is “a dandy” and “could not be alone with a woman without trying to make love to her,” and the mother is “a flirt,” always greedy and jealous (). Born into such a family, Elena suffers significantly and experiences more misery than any other girl her age. When she is a child, more often than not, she “would cry silently while the mother and father yelled insults at one another” and therefore she has to spend her childhood “listening to their jealous quarrels.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=104,105}} She has her first love affair when she is in her teens, with Collie Munshin. She lives with him for three years but fails to develop her relationship with him into marriage. She loves him but receives no love in return. In her eyes, Collie is “a hypocrite” because he claims himself to be “a good liberal” who does not believe in a double standard but rather in the equality between man and woman, white and black, and the rich and the poor, but he looks down upon Elena for no other reason than that “she’s obviously from a poor background.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=49}} Unlike what he claims himself to be, Collie has “always been full of prejudices about women” and “wanted girls with some class and distinction to them.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=49}} It is no wonder that three years of living with Elena is not long enough for him to develop a bit of love for her. Although he believes that “Elena is a person who hates everything that is small in herself” and is “consumed by the passion to become a bigger person than she is” and therefore is “the sort of girl who would love a husband and kids”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=50}}, he sees her as just “a beautiful, warm, simple child”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=48}}; that is to say, he never sees her as his equal. Being innocent, Elena spends three years being cheated on by Collie. Although she is Collie’s mistress, she has never been treated as such by him. To Collie, Elena is not a “beautiful, warm, simple” young woman who has given herself wholly to him but a possession he can exchange with others when he becomes fatigued with the relationship, which is the reason why Collie transfers Elena to Charley Eitel. Leaving Collie and coming to Eitel, Elena seems to have freed herself from imprisonment, just as the narrator says, “she reminded me of an animal, ready for flight.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=71}}<br />
<br />
Indeed, living with Eitel, Elena feels quite different than when she is with Collie. Eitel is a man of over forty. He has “a big reputation as a film director” but is “better known in other ways” because he experiences more than one marriage and is believed to be “the cause of more than one divorce.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=24}} He has had three failed marriages and more than one love affair before he meets Elena. His first wife “worked in a bookstore to support him”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=26}}, but as his own career grows, he begins to forget what she has done and sacrificed for him because “he wanted a woman who was more attractive, more intelligent, more his equal” and even “wanted more than one woman”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=27}}. Quarrels between them become more and more routine and, as a result, they end up divorced. His second wife is an actress from the social register. From her, he “picked up what he wanted and paid for it of course”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=28}}. Like his first wife, his second wife ends her relationship with him in a divorce. After divorce, Eitel is commissioned into the Army in Europe and, when he comes back from the war, he becomes extremely notorious because “there was a year or two when he was supposed to have slept with half the good-looking women in the capital, and it was a rare week which did not have his name in one gossip column or another.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=28}} His third wife is a woman named Lulu Meyers. She is beautiful and young and therefore “he hardly believed she needed him.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=29}} Knowing that his marriage with her “could never last”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=31}}, he soon falls into an affair with a Romanian actress, which lasts just one year. Although he has never been faithful to any woman that he has ever been with, he believes that he is truly loyal to his Romanian woman, as he states:<br />
<br />
{{quote|I’ve never been the kind of man who can be faithful with my regularity. I’ve always been the sort of decent chappie who hops from one woman to another in the run of an evening because that’s the only prescription which allows me to be fond of both ladies, but I was faithful in my own way to the Rumanian. She would have liked to see me every night for she hated to be alone and I would have liked never to see her again, and so we settled for two nights a week. It didn’t matter if I were in the middle of a romance or between girls, whether I had a date that night or not—on Thursday night and Friday night I went to her apartment to sleep.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=30}} }}<br />
<br />
. . .<br />
<br />
===Notes===<br />
{{Notelist}}<br />
<br />
===Citations===<br />
{{Reflist|15em}}<br />
<br />
===Works Cited===<br />
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Bailey |first=Jennifer |date=1979 |title=Norman Mailer: Quick-Change Artist |url= |location= |publisher=The Macmillan Press Ltd. |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Bloom |first=Harold, ed |date=1986 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=Chelsea House Publishers |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Bloom |first=Harold, ed |date=2003 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=Chelsea House Publishers |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Bufithis |first=Philip H |date=1978 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=Frederick Ungar Publishing Co. |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=1995 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=St. Martin's Press |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Harper |first=Howard M. |date=1967 |title=Desperate Faith: A Study of Bellow, Salinger, Mailer, Baldwin, and Updike |url= |location= |publisher=University of North Carolina P |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Leeds |first=Barry H. |date=1969 |title=The Structured Vision of Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=U of London P Limited |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Leigh |first=Nigel |date=1990 |title=Radical Fictions and the Novels of Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=Macmillan |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=1986 |title=Critical Essays on Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=G. K. Hall & Co. |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |editor-last=Lucid |editor-first=Robert |date=1971 |title=Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work |url= |location= |publisher=Little, Brown and Company |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1955 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location= |publisher=G. P. Putnam’s Sons |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1981 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location= |publisher=Perigee Books |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Merrill |first=Robert |date=1978 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=Twayne |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mills |first=Hilary |date=1982 |title=Mailer: A Biography |url= |location= |publisher=McGraw Hill |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Radford |first=Jean |date=1975 |title=Norman Mailer: A Critical Study |url= |location= |publisher=The Macmillan Press |ref=harv }}<br />
{{Refend}}<br />
<br />
{{Review}}<br />
{{DEFAULTSORT:Her Problems Were Everyone’s Problems: Self and Gender in The Deer Park}}<br />
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]</div>Klcrawfordhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=User_talk:Klcrawford&diff=12521User talk:Klcrawford2021-02-12T17:14:18Z<p>Klcrawford: </p>
<hr />
<div>==Article Edits==<br />
Great work on your article. I made a few changes and less obvious tweaks to help out. Let me know if you have any questions and keep up the good work! —[[User:Jules Carry|Jules Carry]] ([[User talk:Jules Carry|talk]]) 11:23, 12 February 2021 (EST)<br />
:Thank You {{Reply to|Jules Carry}}. I have a question. It seems while I was creating more edits, you were editing at the same time. I had gotten about 2/3 of the way through my article and when I published, I lost my content. Is there anything I can do? I just spent hours on that. [[User:Klcrawford|Klcrawford]] ([[User talk:Klcrawford|talk]]) 12:13, 12 February 2021 (EST)</div>Klcrawfordhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/%E2%80%9CHer_Problems_Were_Everyone%E2%80%99s_Problems%E2%80%9D:_Self_and_Gender_in_The_Deer_Park&diff=12517The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/“Her Problems Were Everyone’s Problems”: Self and Gender in The Deer Park2021-02-12T16:14:21Z<p>Klcrawford: Fixed period punctuation next to quotes.</p>
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<div>{{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>{{SUBPAGENAME}}}}<br />
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{{byline|last=Ren|first=Hujun|abstract= An examination of "Her Problems Were Everyone's Problems": Self and Gender in ''The Deer Park'' to the work of [[Norman Mailer]].|url=https://prmlr.us/mr16gord}} <br />
<br />
{{dc|dc=B|efore its publication in 1955,}} ''The Deer Park'' had been refused by seven publishers in ten weeks for no reason than its “six not very explicit lines about the sex of an old producer and a call girl.”{{sfn|Mailer|1981|p=330}} After its publication, it received more criticism than praise, and “the most common objection to the book was its sexual explicitness”{{sfn|Lennon|1986|p=6}} because “in the early 1950s no description of sexuality, however evasive, was readily accepted.”{{sfn|Mills|1982|p=145}} In spite of responses from publishers and critics, Mailer refused to make any change of the original lines about “the sex of an old producer and a call girl” and the novel came out as it is now, with the sexuality of his characters to play “the more significant role” in the story.{{sfn|Mills|1982|p=143}} The issue of sexuality in ''The Deer Park'' has drawn much attention from critics. Nigel Leigh argues that “in ''The Deer Park'' sexuality is both foregrounded and incorporated into Mailer’s political epistemology”{{sfn|Leigh|1990|p=77}} and “Mailer investigates closely the sex lives of Sergius, Eitel, Elena, Faye and Lulu Meyers in a search of a discourse of pleasure.”{{sfn|Leigh|1990|p=78}} Robert Merrill holds that the novel is “only incidentally a satire on Hollywood or an outlet for Mailer’s philosophical predilections; at heart it is the story of a rather tragic love affair.”{{sfn|Merrill|1978|p=45}} Norman Podhoretz points out that “it is on the sexual affairs of his characters that Mr. Mailer concentrates in ''The Deer Park''.”{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=78}}<br />
<br />
Why does Mailer concentrate on the sexuality of the characters in The Deer Park? Many critics have noticed that in The Deer Park, Mailer’s major concern moves from “the problem of the world” to “the problem of the self, or, from ideology to the individual or self.{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=82-83}}{{sfn|Leeds|1969|p=110}} {{sfn|Leigh|1990|p=55-56,62-63}}{{sfn|Glenday|1995|p=79-81}} As a result, he is highly concerned with the rebellious imperatives of the self, among which “none is more exigent than sex.”{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=123}} A number of critics have directed their attention towards and made close investigations of the nature and meaning of the sexuality of the characters in The Deer Park, and, consequently, a variety of conclusions have been drawn. To Jennifer Bailey, the sexuality of the characters in The Deer Park is of great importance to themselves because it is “potentially redemptive.”{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=28}} Nigel Leigh also believes that the sexuality of the characters in The Deer Park is of great significance because their sexual activities can decide whether they will be able to grow or decline.{{sfn|Leigh|1990|p=78}} Norman Podhoretz notes the relationship between the sexuality of the characters and themselves in The Deer Park, arguing that the world in the novel is populated with those “who have no true interest in anything but self “and for whom “sex has become a testing ground of the self.”{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=78}} Like Podhoretz, Diana Trilling also considers the relationship between sex and self. She observes that in The Deer Park Mailer distinguishes two different kinds of sexuality, one “appears to be free but is really an enslavement,” as displayed by the movie colony in Desert D’Or, and the other “expresses a new, radical principle of selfhood,” as valued by Hipsterism.{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=125-126}} Unlike the critics above mentioned, Jean Radford argues that in The Deer Park the sexuality of the characters functions as “an index of other things” and “at the more general level it is used to symbolize the moral state of the nation.”{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=133}}<br />
. . .<br />
<br />
===Citations===<br />
{{Reflist|15em}}<br />
<br />
===Works Cited===<br />
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=1995 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=St. Martin's Press |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Leeds |first=Barry H. |date=1969 |title=The Structured Viseion of Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=U of London P Limited |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Leigh |first=Nigel |date=1990 |title=Radical Fictions and the Novels of Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=Macmillan |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=1986 |title=Critical Essays on Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=G. K. Hall & Co. |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |editor-last=Lucid |editor-first=Robert |date=1971 |title=Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work |url= |location= |publisher=Little, Brown and Company |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1955 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location= |publisher=G. P. Putnam’s Sons |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1981 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location= |publisher=Perigee Books |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Merrill |first=Robert |date=1978 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=Twayne |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mills |first=Hilary |date=1982 |title=Mailer: A Biography |url= |location= |publisher=McGraw Hill |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Radford |first=Jean |date=1975 |title=Norman Mailer: A Critical Study |url= |location= |publisher=The Macmillan Press |ref=harv }}<br />
{{Refend}}<br />
<br />
{{Review}}<br />
{{DEFAULTSORT:Her Problems Were Everyone’s Problems: Self and Gender in The Deer Park}}<br />
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]</div>Klcrawfordhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/%E2%80%9CHer_Problems_Were_Everyone%E2%80%99s_Problems%E2%80%9D:_Self_and_Gender_in_The_Deer_Park&diff=12516The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/“Her Problems Were Everyone’s Problems”: Self and Gender in The Deer Park2021-02-12T16:09:23Z<p>Klcrawford: Added more body with sources.</p>
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{{Working}}<br />
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{{byline|last=Ren|first=Hujun|abstract= An examination of "Her Problems Were Everyone's Problems": Self and Gender in ''The Deer Park'' to the work of [[Norman Mailer]].|url=https://prmlr.us/mr16gord}} <br />
<br />
{{dc|dc=B|efore its publication in 1955,}} ''The Deer Park'' had been refused by seven publishers in ten weeks for no reason than its “six not very explicit lines about the sex of an old producer and a call girl.”{{sfn|Mailer|1981|p=330}} After its publication, it received more criticism than praise, and “the most common objection to the book was its sexual explicitness”{{sfn|Lennon|1986|p=6}} because “in the early 1950s no description of sexuality, however evasive, was readily accepted.”{{sfn|Mills|1982|p=145}} In spite of responses from publishers and critics, Mailer refused to make any change of the original lines about “the sex of an old producer and a call girl” and the novel came out as it is now, with the sexuality of his characters to play “the more significant role” in the story.{{sfn|Mills|1982|p=143}} The issue of sexuality in ''The Deer Park'' has drawn much attention from critics. Nigel Leigh argues that “in ''The Deer Park'' sexuality is both foregrounded and incorporated into Mailer’s political epistemology”{{sfn|Leigh|1990|p=77}} and “Mailer investigates closely the sex lives of Sergius, Eitel, Elena, Faye and Lulu Meyers in a search of a discourse of pleasure.”{{sfn|Leigh|1990|p=78}} Robert Merrill holds that the novel is “only incidentally a satire on Hollywood or an outlet for Mailer’s philosophical predilections; at heart it is the story of a rather tragic love affair.”{{sfn|Merrill|1978|p=45}} Norman Podhoretz points out that “it is on the sexual affairs of his characters that Mr. Mailer concentrates in ''The Deer Park''.”{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=78}}<br />
<br />
Why does Mailer concentrate on the sexuality of the characters in The Deer Park? Many critics have noticed that in The Deer Park, Mailer’s major concern moves from “the problem of the world” to “the problem of the self, or, from ideology to the individual or self.{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=82-83}}{{sfn|Leeds|1969|p=110}} {{sfn|Leigh|1990|p=55-56,62-63}}{{sfn|Glenday|1995|p=79-81}} As a result, he is highly concerned with the rebellious imperatives of the self, among which “none is more exigent than sex”.{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=123}} A number of critics have directed their attention towards and made close investigations of the nature and meaning of the sexuality of the characters in The Deer Park, and, consequently, a variety of conclusions have been drawn. To Jennifer Bailey, the sexuality of the characters in The Deer Park is of great importance to themselves because it is “potentially redemptive”.{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=28}} Nigel Leigh also believes that the sexuality of the characters in The Deer Park is of great significance because their sexual activities can decide whether they will be able to grow or decline.{{sfn|Leigh|1990|p=78}} Norman Podhoretz notes the relationship between the sexuality of the characters and themselves in The Deer Park, arguing that the world in the novel is populated with those “who have no true interest in anything but self “and for whom “sex has become a testing ground of the self”.{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=78}} Like Podhoretz, Diana Trilling also considers the relationship between sex and self. She observes that in The Deer Park Mailer distinguishes two different kinds of sexuality, one “appears to be free but is really an enslavement,” as displayed by the movie colony in Desert D’Or, and the other “expresses a new, radical principle of selfhood,” as valued by Hipsterism.{{sfn|Lucid|1971|p=125-126}} Unlike the critics above mentioned, Jean Radford argues that in The Deer Park the sexuality of the characters functions as “an index of other things” and “at the more general level it is used to symbolize the moral state of the nation”.{{sfn|Radford|1975|p=133}}<br />
. . .<br />
<br />
===Citations===<br />
{{Reflist|15em}}<br />
<br />
===Works Cited===<br />
{{Refbegin|indent=yes|30em}}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Glenday |first=Michael K. |date=1995 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=St. Martin's Press |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Leeds |first=Barry H. |date=1969 |title=The Structured Viseion of Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=U of London P Limited |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Leigh |first=Nigel |date=1990 |title=Radical Fictions and the Novels of Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=Macmillan |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=1986 |title=Critical Essays on Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=G. K. Hall & Co. |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |editor-last=Lucid |editor-first=Robert |date=1971 |title=Norman Mailer: The Man and His Work |url= |location= |publisher=Little, Brown and Company |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1955 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location= |publisher=G. P. Putnam’s Sons |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1981 |title=The Deer Park |url= |location= |publisher=Perigee Books |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Merrill |first=Robert |date=1978 |title=Norman Mailer |url= |location= |publisher=Twayne |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Mills |first=Hilary |date=1982 |title=Mailer: A Biography |url= |location= |publisher=McGraw Hill |ref=harv }}<br />
* {{cite book |last=Radford |first=Jean |date=1975 |title=Norman Mailer: A Critical Study |url= |location= |publisher=The Macmillan Press |ref=harv }}<br />
{{Refend}}<br />
<br />
{{Review}}<br />
{{DEFAULTSORT:Her Problems Were Everyone’s Problems: Self and Gender in The Deer Park}}<br />
[[Category:Articles (MR)]]</div>Klcrawfordhttps://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_13,_2019/%E2%80%9CHer_Problems_Were_Everyone%E2%80%99s_Problems%E2%80%9D:_Self_and_Gender_in_The_Deer_Park&diff=12236The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/“Her Problems Were Everyone’s Problems”: Self and Gender in The Deer Park2021-02-03T15:43:38Z<p>Klcrawford: First edit of page. Just beginning introduction. Sources to be added.</p>
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{{byline|last=Ren|first=Hujun|abstract= An examination of "Her Problems Were Everyone's Problems": Self and Gender in ''The Deer Park'' to the work of [[Norman Mailer]].|url=https://prmlr.us/mr16gord}} <br />
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{{dc|dc=B|efore its publication in 1955,}} ''The Deer Park'' had been refused by seven publishers in ten weeks for no reason than its “six not very explicit lines about the sex of an old producer and a call girl.”{{sfn|Mailer|1991|p=330}}</div>Klcrawford