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wondering what would happen if all the reviews were bad, as bad as for
Barbary Shore.
I would try to tell myself that could not happen, but I was not certain, and I knew that if the book received a unanimously bad press and still showed signs of selling well, it was likely to be brought up for prosecution as obscene. As a delayed convulsion from the McCarthy years, the fear of censorship was strong in publishing, in England it was critically bad, and so I also knew that the book could lose such a suit—there might be no one of reputation to say it was serious. If it were banned, it could sink from sight. With the reserves I was throwing into the work, I no longer knew if I was ready to take another beating—for the first time in my life I had worn down to the edge, I could see through to the other side of my fear, I knew a time could come when I would be no longer my own man, that I might lose what I had liked to think was the incorruptible center of my strength (which of course I had had money and freedom to cultivate). Already the signs were there—I was beginning to avoid new lines in the Putnam
Deer Park
which werelegally doubtful, and once in a while, like a gambler hedging a bet, I toned down individual sentences from the Rinehart
Deer Park
, nothing much, always a matter of the new O’Shaugnessy character, a change from “at last I was able to penetrate into the mysterious and magical belly of a movie star” to what was more in character for him: “I was led to discover the mysterious brain of a movie star.” Which “brain” in context was fun, for it was accurate, and “discover” was a word of more life than the legality of “penetrate,” but I could not be sure if I was chasing my new aesthetic or afraid of the cops. The problem was that
The Deer Park
had become more sexual in the new version, the characters had more force, the air had more heat, and I had gone through the kind of galloping self-analysis which makes one very sensitive to the sexual nuance of every gesture, word, and object—the book now seemed over-charged to me, even a terror of a novel, a cold chisel into all the dull mortar of our guilty society. In my mind it became a more dangerous book than it really was, and my drug-hipped paranoia saw long consequences in every easy line of dialogue. I kept the panic in its place, but by an effort of course, and once in a while I would weaken enough to take out a line because I could not see myself able to defend it happily in a court of law. But it was a mistake to nibble at the edges of censoring myself, for it gave no life to my old pride that I was the boldest writer to have come out of my flabby time, and I think it helped to kill the small chance of finding my way into what could have been a novel as important as
The Sun Also Rises.
    But let me spell it out a bit: Originally,
The Deer Park
had been about a movie director and a girl with whom he had a bad affair, and it was told by a sensitive but faceless young man. In changing the young man, I saved the book from being minor, but put a disproportion upon it because my narrator became too interesting, and not enough happened to him in the second half of the book, and so it was to be expected that readers would be disappointed by this part of the novel.
    Before I was finished, I saw a way to write another book altogether. In what I had so far done, Sergius O’Shaugnessy was given an opportunity by a movie studio to sell the rights to his life and get a contract as an actor. After more than one complication, he finally refused the offer, lost the love of his movie star, Lulu, and went wandering by himself, off to become a writer. This episode had never been an important part of the book, butI could see that the new Sergius was capable of accepting the offer, and if he went to Hollywood and became a movie star himself, the possibilities were good, for in O’Shaugnessy I had a character who was ambitious yet, in his own way, moral, and with