The People We Meet in Stories by Robert McParland

Author:Robert McParland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Sergius O’Shaughnessy in The Deer Park (1955) by Norman Mailer

Sergius O’Shaughnessy has escaped to Desert D’Or, which appears to be a cross between Palm Springs–Palm Desert and Las Vegas. The environment is sunlit, surrounded by desert, golf courses, the natural and the unnatural, and the artful and the artificial. It is through the consciousness of Sergius O’Shaughnessy that we look at this scene. He casts a moral gaze over Desert D’Or: a seedy bar, and the image of “a fat old man in a Palm Beach leisure suit talking to a young girl with orange lipstick.” It is a world of gangsters, actors, showgirls, the “theatrical darkness of afternoon” fading into “illuminated night.”[43]

Shaughnessy grew up in an orphanage. Sergius tells us that he got his “princely name” from his father.[44] After his mother died, his father raised him until he was five. Then he was placed in the orphanage. He ran away five times from the home that was run by the religious sisters. He read a lot, especially adventure stories about brave men like Robin Hood. (“I read constantly when I was a boy.”) He declines to tell us much about it. “It’s a trap to spend time writing too much about it,” he says. “Self-pity comes into the voice.”[45] He tells us about his time in the air force, his surrogate family, and where he saved pilots and they saved him. He recalls his time at an airfield near Tokyo in postwar Japan.[46] Sergius recalls war: “I realized that I had been busy setting fire to a dozen people or two dozen, or had it been a hundred?” He says that he did not like bombing villages but focused on technique: “from the air a city in flames is not a bad sight.”[47] Yet, he suffered a “small breakdown,” spent time in a hospital, and gave up flying. He tells us that, while in the orphanage and in the air force, he “had such a desire to be like everyone else, at least like everyone else that had made it.”[48] To escape it all, he went to Desert D’Or.

Sergius is living on gambling winnings and overcoming his breakdown. Seeking freedom, he makes a journey through memories, temptation, shadows, and bright lights. “I was understood to be an Air Force pilot whose family was wealthy and lived in the East.”[49] We meet Dorothea O’Faye, a former actress and nightclub singer, who is at the center of a club called the Hangover where hangers-on gather. When drunk, she becomes violent and throws things.[50] She dislikes film director Charles Francis Eitel, who is befriended by O’Shaughnessy.[51] Dorothea hooks up with Martin Pelley, an oil-rich man with “a pear-shaped head, a dark jowl, and sad eyes.”[52] Her son has “an arrogance which was made up of staring at you.”[53] We meet Marion Faye, who is doing dope deals. Charles Eitel has an affair with Elena Esposito that is falling apart, like his film career.

Sergius O’Shaughnessy wonders why he ever became friends with Charles Eitel in Desert D’Or.

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