Lipton’s Journal/December 29, 1954/117

From Project Mailer

Marion Faye’s[1] note: Serigus[2] is a saint who has only seen Hell and only understands Hell. Someday, may he see Heaven.



notes

  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.
  2. The narrator of The Deer Park, Sergius O’Shaugnessey, is a veteran U.S. Air Force pilot who flew combat missions in Korea. After his discharge, he settles in Desert D’Or, where he has an affair with movie star Lulu Meyers.