Lipton’s Journal/January 24, 1955/220

Thoughts about The Deer Park. After the auto crash, Elena^[1] first weeps the Oh-Charlie-forgive speech, but that is not right—she cannot believe it entirely, and so to it, she adds, “Oh, Marion, why didn’t you love me more.”^[2]

notes

↑ Elena Esposito is the lover and later wife of Charles Eitel in The Deer Park. Their love affair is one of Mailer’s finest fictional creations. Mailer based her character on his wife Adele.
↑ 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] Elena Esposito is the lover and later wife of Charles Eitel in The Deer Park. Their love affair is one of Mailer’s finest fictional creations. Mailer based her character on his wife Adele.

[2] 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]

[2]