Love Among the Love-Buckets

THE DEER PARK (375 pp.)--Norman Mailer--Putnam ($4).

"Please do not understand me too quickly," warns Author Mailer by way of a tag (from Andre Gide). There is not much to understand in this narrative about the life of the West Coast's film fauna: the prose and the sex are as thick as ever. This seemed forgivable in The Naked and the Dead; the boys in a jungle combat platoon ("Kinsey's Army," as one British reviewer called it) were not supposed to talk like lady members of a book club. But in The Deer Park (the title is taken from a huge private sex resort maintained by Louis XV of France), the ladies talk just like the boys in the jungle as well as act like the animals in it.

Peering like a wrestling referee among the writhing limbs of this melee, the reader can detect one hero: a blond, blue-eyed orphan with a medical discharge from the Air Force, named Sergius O'Shaugnessy. Dropping napalm on Korean villages has upset him deeply (he has, in fact, become temporarily impotent), so naturally he Wants to Write. His methods are interesting. He takes a $14,000 stake to a desert gambling resort called Desert D'Or, 200 miles from Hollywood--a suburb in the literary country of tough-guy nihilism mapped by James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. O'Shaugnessy does not get around to writing but he meets 1) a real lulu named Lulu who helps him over his embarrassing bedroom block; 2) a misunderstood film genius called Charles Francis Eitel (symbolically pronounced "eye-TELL"), who is trying to decide whether to tell all before a congressional committee. While skulking in Desert D'Or, Eitel dreams about the great film he hopes to make some day--a story about an M.C. of a This-Is-Your-Life-like TV program who decides to become a saint. That idea is a vulgarized Mailer version of a book called Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West--who also wrote a little satirical tale of Hollywood (The Day of the Locust), which in one page shows more style, wit and distinction than could be combed from all The Deer Park.

All The Deer Park's problems are solved in a predictable way, but not before the contents of a madame's memory for sexual oddities has spilled all over the book. (Incidental intelligence, which will cause lifted eyebrows in Europe: after an illicit night, it is the gentleman who makes breakfast.) There is some good recorded speech, and readers of Confidential magazine can brush up their vocabularies. Sample: "Don't panic, love-bucket . . . Get me a small martin."

One piece of Hollywood argot not to be found in The Deer Park is "subpoena envy," which may be defined as the state of mind of the Hollywood liberal who never got called before a committee investigating anything. Author Mailer seems to have a bad case of it. His account of the interrogation by a pair of foul-mouthed goons in the hire of the "Subversive Committee" is calculated to frighten little children. It is bad enough for Mailer to paw every bed on the coast without finding Senator McCarthy underneath it.

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