Lipton’s Journal/December 29, 1954/84

Don Beda.^[1] Perhaps a scene with him and Marion^[2] and Elena.^[3] Not explanation. Just some view into his character, some sense of how he thinks, and what his battle is. For Beda is not merely a social satyr, he is also an adventurer.

notes

↑ A minor character in The Deer Park, Don Beda is a wife swapper who, along with his wife, Zenelia, takes part in an orgy with Eitel and Lulu.
↑ 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.
↑ 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.

[1] A minor character in The Deer Park, Don Beda is a wife swapper who, along with his wife, Zenelia, takes part in an orgy with Eitel and Lulu.

[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.

[3] 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.

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