The Deer Park: A Play

by Norman Mailer

  So he continued to caress her shoulder and asked gentle questions and talked about their marriage, certain all the while that no matter what he felt toward her, they were mates, the wound of one’s flesh soothed by the wound of the other, and that was better than nothing. Perhaps in a year if she found somebody else, he could get a divorce.

  They were married a week later on the day she was discharged from the hospital, and I read about it in the newspapers. He took Elena to a town outside the limits of the capital and they had the ceremony there with Collie Munshin for the best man—which on reflection did not surprise me too greatly.

  In the following month a letter was forwarded from Eitel inviting me to the wedding, and I wrote back and sent a present and explained my absence. I had left Desert D’Or and was working on a book about the orphanage in the room of a cheap hotel in Mexico City two thousand miles away. Afterward, what little I heard followed me like the wavelets of a pebble which has already dropped to the bottom. There was a little scandal and a little charity in what I read about their marriage, and if certain newspapers featured photographs of Marion Faye, the gossip columnists were mild. What was said in the capital I never knew, but it was easy to guess. Then, months later, after his trial, I had a postcard forwarded from Marion, and it showed a picture of a clean, well-lit, sanitary cell block in his prison. “Re: our conversations,” the card read, “I have the feeling I’m just getting on to it. Your con friend, Marty.” And at the bottom of the card he added, “P. S. Are you still a cop?”

  When it opened a year and a half later, I paid a dollar and eighty cents and went to see Saints and Lovers in a first-run movie palace on Broadway. Its reviews were excellent and the theater was almost filled. On a sour whim, I bought some popcorn and chewed it through the film. It was not a bad picture as pictures go, and it was well made, and it did not have too many scenes which were embarrassing, but it was nothing magnificent either, at least not for me, and the teen-age girl in the next seat petted with her date and laughed at clever dialogue and yawned once or twice. I hate to admit it, but there was a part of the picture I did admire. For although Eitel had claimed that he knew nothing about the Church, he had a very neat sense of the Church in a small way, a neater sense than I did of the kind of picture to make if Catholics were to enjoy it. For years afterward I thought of writing Eitel a letter but I could not decide exactly what to say and the impulse passed. I felt that I had moved my distance, and it would have been self-righteous to tell him so. The years pass into the years and we count our time in lonely private rhythms which have little to do with number or judgment or the uncertain shifting memory of friends.

  Part Six

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  SO I HAD TAKEN the trip to Mexico, and after a great deal of delay and some suspicious red-tape which made me remember the guard and tackle from the Subversive Committee, my papers came through, and I lived on a Government allotment, and enrolled in an art school, and went around with some other Americans. There was a tall colored boy who had played college basketball and now wanted to be a poet and we would have arguments about literature in half the Mexican dives in Mexico City with the song of the Mariachis in our ear, and there was a motorcycle racer who had fractured his skull and he was sentimental and ready for a breakdown, and there were others. I drifted through some months, and I suppose I was like most of the Americans down there who pass the days, except that I was usually depressed. I would think too much about Lulu.

  Every Sunday I would go to the bullfights in the Plaza Mexico, and when I came to understand them, they had meaning for me. Through friends, I came to know a few bullfighters, and when my Spanish improved, I used to spend hours in the café with them. After a while I got into an affair with a Mexican girl who was the mistress of a young bullfighter, which in itself was unusual, for most young bullfighters were too poor to keep a girl, and in fact generally left women alone on the prizefighter’s undemanding theory that one doesn’t want to leave one’s fight in the bedroom. This bullfighter was considered very good by some, and he was well-managed and ready to become a matador in another season because he had money behind him and some friends. My friends all warned me that it was dangerous, and he might kill me, but it turned out somewhat differently because there is more than one thing to be said about bullfighters, and when he found out about the affair, he invited me to dinner and we had a long touchy Mexican evening where we skirted the edge of some deadly insults, and then went out dead drunk with our arms around each other’s shoulders, although that could not have been so easy for him because he was five feet four inches tall and did not weigh one hundred and ten pounds. And to be altogether fair, he was only nineteen, and all but illiterate, and he had the acne scars of a poor Indian adolescence on his face.

  Later he tried to take a Mexican revenge. He gave me a few lessons in the mystical private way that only a Mexican novillero would give bullfighting lessons, and with me hardly knowing how to hold a muleta, and clutching a cape like it was a Hungarian officer’s overcoat, he took me with all my Tom Thumb technique to a breeding ranch and allowed me to go in with one of the calves he was given for the day. And part of the point was that his girl was watching. They are not really dangerous, calves, it is almost impossible for them to kill a man, and when one gets hit four or five times in a row, as I was, it is not really much worse, if you are light on your feet, than being knocked down the same number of times by a bicycle, but I must have made a spectacle, and all the Mexicans sat on the stone barrera of the ranch, with the dust blowing, and they laughed and they laughed, and by the end of five minutes, I succeeded in passing the calf, and then passing her again, and a third time before she caught me a blow on the leg and started to step on me, and I remember lying there with the calf bellowing in my ear, and the peons giggling as they diverted her with their capes. But I had a passion. I knew what it was to pass a bull, or more precisely a future mother of bulls, and I wanted to be a bullfighter. What else? Isn’t one always more desperate than he thinks?

  So then began a very odd six months. I traveled around with the novillero and his girl, and I took lessons from him, and all the while he knew that his girl would spend her time with me, until finally he merely paid her expenses and usually did nothing else. The more he suffered at her taste for me, the more he would plead with me to stay every time I wanted to quit them. It was costing me too much of the money I had left, and it was unpleasant because the girl had had a bad life, she had started at fourteen in the Órgano of Mexico City, and there was no future in it for anybody. And not that much simple taste if the truth be told. Except that she reminded me a little of Elena.

  Every time he would convince me to stay, he would hate me a little more, and it was incredible how he would suffer the hours she spent with me, for like most Latins his imagination for such matters was a volcano of creativity. Grim the next day, if he were scheduled to appear he would go out and fight his fight. Relatively, he was a terrible coward, but a third of the good bullfighters in the world have a coward’s art, and they can become more exciting than the brave ones, at least to me. For I was always most intrigued by the bullfighters who projected the most intense fear, and then succeeded to put an imaginative fight together. The cowards know every way a man can fear the bull, and so on those rare days when they are able to dominate the movements of their bodies, they know more of the variations, and the moments, and the moments within the moments when something new can be done.

  That was the style of this Mexican novillero. He was awkward and terrible when he was afraid, and he was hopeless with a bad bull, but once in a while he would go out, pale and black as death, cold to his bones, for he was beyond fright, and death that particular day was probably as attractive as continuing to live, and he would fight if he caught even a half-decent animal, in ways and with innovations that I had never seen before, and no matter what had happened between us, I would find myself thinking of him as an artist. He had a rare pathos as a bullfighter; he made half the p
eople in the plaza feel as if they too were fighting the bull. And the other half of the public hated him, for he was very unorthodox. He was the only torero I ever saw who could take three turns of the ring holding ears and tail while members of the conservative afición were aiming cushions at his head. So I finally realized that he was a radical priest of his art, and in some half-comprehensible way, his mistress and I were the indispensable thorn of his vocation. But how he hated us. I tried for a long time to write that novel, and some day maybe I will.

  At any rate, I learned a little, and finally I quit them, which is too long a story to tell, and I went out on my own, and a lot of things happened to me, because to try to become an American bullfighter in the provinces of Mexico is not the most standard career, but for a long time it was more important to fight a bull than to do anything else, and I have to confess that when I had some sort of small good fight I would start to dream again that I was going to be the first great and recognized American matador. But I suppose I was too old to learn to be really good, because there was not only the question of how much courage did you have, but also the question of how much stamina when there were not only bulls to fight, but bad underbred undersold bulls, and crooked managers and impresarios who would have run a chain gang with a smile. I got hurt several times, and the last was a serious wound which left me sick, and then my working papers were renewed illegally as they always are in Mexico if you live there long enough, and something happened, some mix-up, some slip in passing a bribe, and so I was passed across the border, no matador, no novillero, no veteran with an allotment, but just a fancy scar on my leg, and a new set of trips to make, and new self-pity.

  With a stop or two on the way, I found my hole in New York, a cold-water flat outside the boundary of the Village, and I had a few girls who made for some very complicated romances, and I suppose I learned a little more—life is an education which should be put to use—and I tried to write my novel about bullfighting, but it was not very good. It was inevitably imitative of that excellently exiguous mathematician, Mr. Ernest Hemingway, and I was learning that it is not creatively satisfying to repeat the work of a good writer.

  All the while I was keeping myself alive by an unusual occupation. I had come down to my last few hundred dollars, and so I took a gamble and rented a loft in the slums of the lower East Side of New York, painted it white, put up a few bullfight posters, and opened a school for bullfighters. After the first few weeks word of the school passed through the Village, and the classes began to grow. I felt two ways about it. I was a little tired of bullfighting, at least I did not want to spend my life talking about it, and I knew I was far from good enough to be a teacher, but the classes were interesting to conduct, and probably interesting to watch, for I built a killing-machine out of an old wheelbarrow and had sets of horns all over the place. It must have looked like a ballet school, with pairs of students alternating at running the horns and practicing passes with the cape and the muleta. All up and down the loft while the classes were going, I would have the amusement of hearing from ten to twenty embryo voices clucking and chanting and cooing their “Hey, toro! Chuh-hay, toro! Mire-tu, toro,” while their T-shirts turned gray with sweat, and they were more or less happy, even if some of them had never even seen a cow. The thing which surprised me until I came to know the Village better, was that half of my students were girls. They included everything from a Jewish college girl from Brooklyn with a Master’s degree, to a young burlesque stripper who was born in a mining town and did non-objective painting. It would have been interesting enough if one wanted to make a career of it, but I resented the time I had to spend, because I was anxious for something else.

  Then one day I read in the newspapers that Dorothea O’Faye Pelley was in town, and for once a newspaper was telling a fact. On an impulse, I called several hotels and she was staying at the third one, and before I knew it we had a conversation which drew us together, for she had things to tell me about the people we knew in common. To our mutual surprise we spent the night together at her hotel, and for the next ten days Dorothea virtually lived at my cold-water flat, so that I had the chance to see another side of her character. Dorothea’s sables—acquired at wholesale from a furrier friend—would lie draped over one of my ten-dollar armchairs, while she would mop the dirty painted linoleum on my floor and give me lectures on how to handle the janitor, because Dorothea understood the first drama of poverty which is that there are no holds barred on getting rid of the garbage, since all the way from the top of the sanitation department down to the drunken hooligan on the ground floor, it is open war, and everybody runs his own garbage patrol.

  In less domestic moments, it was an interesting experience with Dorothea, not nice but electric. Dorothea was that many years older, and she was greedy—who can blame her?—so before it was over she offered to keep me while I wrote a book. But that was a little on the serious divide of the gigolo, and while I had nothing against gigolos on principle, having thought in more than one vain, energetic, and penniless mood that it was one of the lives I could have had, it is still very difficult to keep your dignity as a gigolo, and dignity means something when you are trying to move your way up in life, dignity is handy to have around if one wants to do some worth-while work.

  Finally, I convinced Dorothea that it was the West Coast for her, and the East for me, and after she was gone, I found that I had come to live with the conundrum of whether it is better to be the lover or the beloved, and I thought of Eitel and his Rumanian, and the bullfighter and his amour, and how Dorothea adored me, or claimed to, and I felt so little, ignoring the electricity of course. So I was back in the circle of old friends, and I could think of Lulu, and to my pleasure the pain was gone, at least most of it, because I could remember Lulu sitting at Dorothea’s feet. I had some ideas for my bullfighting novel, and tried to force work on it, and instead found myself beginning pieces of this novel, at last I understood a little, and as I wrote, I found that I was stronger, I had survived, I was finally able to keep in some permanent form those parts of myself which were better than me, and therefore I could have the comfort that I was beginning to belong to that privileged world of orphans where art is found.

  The education I had delayed and delayed again was pressing at me with all its attractions, and I was becoming more aware of all the things I did not know. So for most of that year when I was not working or writing, I would spend my days in the public library, often giving as much as twelve hours at a time if I had the opportunity, and I read everything which interested me, all the good novels I could find, and literary criticism too. And I read history, and some of the philosophers, and I read the books of psychoanalysts, those whose styles I could tolerate, for part of a man’s style is what he thinks of other people and whether he wants them to be in awe of him or to think of him as an equal. And I read a few anthropologists, and I studied languages, French and Italian, even a little German, because languages were natural for me, and two months I spent reading Das Kapital and might have thought of myself as a Socialist if Munshin had not been right and when I cut it all away, I was still an anarchist, and an anarchist I would always be. Or so it seemed. There were bad days when I thought I would go back to the Church. Anyway, my education went on, and although I do not think I can measure it, I had months where I thought about what I read in books with more excitement than I had ever done anything, and ever since that year, I don’t suppose I have met the expert who was altogether impressive to me. Which, after all, may seem a small boast to make, but in the years when I was in the orphanage, the kind of people who went to college were as mysterious as the titles who got together on a yacht to sail the Mediterranean.

  I found as I continued to study, that there was an order in what I sought, and I read each book as a curve in some unconscious spiral of intellectual pursuit until the most difficult text at the proper moment was open, and yet the more I learned the more confident I became, because no matter the reputation of the author and the dimension
s of his mind, I knew as I read that not one of them could begin to be a final authority for me, because finally the crystallization of their experience did not have a texture apposite to my experience, and I had the conceit, I had the intolerable conviction, that I could write about worlds I knew better than anyone alive. So I continued to write, and as I worked, I learned the taste of a failure over and over again, for the longest individual journey may well be the path from the first creative enthusiasm to the concluded artifact. There were nights in the library when I would look at the footnotes in some heroically constructed tome, and know that the spirit of the rigorous scholar who had written it must know its regret, for each footnote is a step onto deeper meaning which terrifies the order of progression of the scholar’s logic, until there is no point in experience, nor any word, from which one cannot set out to explore the totality of the All, if indeed there be an All and not an expanding mystery.

  It was not often so metaphysical as that, and I lived weeks of desperation when I would wish to fall in love, and would go through one girl after another, my local prestige as a bullfighter helping me no little, and there would be months when I conducted my classes and could do no work at all, but I had changed since I came to Desert D’Or, and so I could always think of Eitel, and I could see his life, and Elena’s life, and the life of the capital, until at times my imagination would take me to all the corners I would never visit again, and their life became more real to me than anything of my own, and I would see them on the round of their days.…