Lipton’s Journal/December 29, 1954/111

Marion Faye^[1] Journal. It begins with following note: “I have finally started to make it on tea. Three cheers and over for the institutional life. Tea flows through this place like ice water in a first-rate hotel. And things are beginning to come clear to me. To really make it, I should put nothing into words, but I still want to try. I suppose what I suspect deep-down is that I’ll never make it, but I want people to respect me for how close I came. I, too, am a slob.”

Note

↑ Mailer’s anti-hero for a post-Hiroshima world in The Deer Park, Faye (son of Dorothea O’Faye, a former singer who presides over a drunken salon in Desert D’Or, Mailer’s name for Palm Springs, California), is the archetypal hipster. A bisexual pimp and drug dealer, he is the novel’s dark conscience, the polar opposite of Charles Eitel. Mailer planned to use Faye as a centripetal character in the seven novels that he planned and failed to write as sequels to The Deer Park.

[1] Mailer’s anti-hero for a post-Hiroshima world in The Deer Park, Faye (son of Dorothea O’Faye, a former singer who presides over a drunken salon in Desert D’Or, Mailer’s name for Palm Springs, California), is the archetypal hipster. A bisexual pimp and drug dealer, he is the novel’s dark conscience, the polar opposite of Charles Eitel. Mailer planned to use Faye as a centripetal character in the seven novels that he planned and failed to write as sequels to The Deer Park.

[1]