Read The Deer Park for Free Online Page A

one of his qualities was the ability to talk about himself with considerable masculinity of mind. He was the only son of an auto dealer in a big Eastern city, and his father was born of Austrian immigrant parents and started as a junk dealer. His mother was French. Eitel was the first of his family to go to college. It had been expected he would be a lawyer, but while he was at school he got interested in the theater and quarreled with his parents about his career. By the time he graduated, the argument was settled; his father had lost his money in the Depression. Eitel drifted around New York looking for work. He was not a good-looking young college graduate, and he was shy, and so he fell in love with the first girl who fell in love with him. She was studying to be a welfare worker, and she lived at home, and wanted to marry him to get out of her parents’ house. It was natural they should feel they were very much in love. She was political, his wife, and through her, through her friends, he studied radical literature, he talked politics. His wife worked in a bookstore to support him, and he wrote plays, he acted where he could, he got opportunities to direct plays in small theaters, and in the worst of the Depression his own career grew. He was hired to put on a play in a government-sponsored project, and it was a success. A lot of people heard his name for the first time. He was a playwright,a director, an actor; he was offered a career in the movies. So he had gone to the capital, and on a small contract to make cheap pictures, he had the good luck to be allowed an experiment. It was a cheap experiment, no more, and yet he wrote and directed one, then two, and finally three pictures which are considered powerful even today. I saw one of them reissued the year I got out of the orphanage, and although I suppose it was dated, I don’t remember a better picture made about the Depression.
    Eitel always remembered those pictures as the best eighteen months of his life. He had been an aggressive young man at the time, he told me, opinionated, dogmatic, and more than a little sure of himself, liking everybody a great deal on the flush of his success, but understanding them poorly. He was young, and there were people who told him he was a genius. Of course, it was not so simple. Those three pictures for all their history of being seen by college film societies and museums and cinema clubs, for their reputation to this day, even for their influence on the many directors who imitated his style, were still pictures which did not make money. Although he was given a better contract by another studio with larger budgets and bigger stars, the stories were no longer his own. He continued to make pictures which were better than most; they even showed a profit. Yet he was becoming dissatisfied. It was the period of the Spanish Civil War, and what he could not put into his work, he tried to find in the work there was to be done on committees. He was still full of enthusiasm, he argued about Spain, he spoke at public meetings, he helped to gather contributions, and all the while he was losing his first wife. She was unhappy, and she hated the capital. She felt he did not want her any longer, and it was true; he did not; he wanted a woman who was more attractive, more intelligent, more his equal; he wanted more than one woman. He saw so many in the capital that he could have, and it made him anxious to be free.
    However, he felt guilty about his wife. He had needed her at one time and they had been good friends, she had taught himso much, and it was not her fault that now he knew more. He would think at times that his work was spoiled not only by the studio, but by himself. That was the trouble with their marriage, he would tell himself; he was too comfortable and too bored, his talent was not growing. So he decided to go to Spain.
    He got to the front lines as a visitor. The year he spent there was wasted, and it was impossible to begin the