The Mailer Review/Volume 14, 2020/Mailer and Emerson: Lipton’s Journal and the Dissident Soul: Difference between revisions

Retrieved from "https://projectmailer.net/pm/The_Mailer_Review/Volume_14,_2020/Mailer_and_Emerson:_Lipton’s_Journal_and_the_Dissident_Soul"

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
 {{DISPLAYTITLE:<span style="font-size:22px;">{{BASEPAGENAME}}/</span>Mailer and Emerson: ''Lipton’s Journal'' and the Dissident Soul}}
-{{Working}}
 {{MR14}}
 {{byline|last=Begiebing|first=Robert J.|abstract=Norman Mailer and Ralph Waldo Emerson both used their journals to think through the concepts that would inform their future work. The journals of both authors, in short, demonstrate the mind in action, the creative energy of thinking. Emerson’s journals reveal a dialogue with oneself, as does Mailer’s ''[[Lipton’s Journal]]''. It is as if both authors have a neo-Socratic faith that the seeds of truth are within us and are best elicited by interrogation (in this case ''self''-interrogation) and free association. Socratic self-knowledge then becomes the inner truth that is the source of a philosophy—an approach to life and literary work—in opposition to the society within which one lives. The rebellious path to such a journal is through solitude.|url=http://prmlr.us/mr14beg}}
@@ Line 44: / Line 43: @@
 For Mailer, Jesus (both man and symbol of the liberating power within) is similarly “the rebel, the anarchist, the saint, the compassionate, the life-giver . . . [who] was put on the cross and all his teachings were reversed. Christ became Christianity just as Reason became Rationalization.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/376|#376]]}} This early insight would inform Mailer’s later work on Jesus a half century later in ''The Gospel According to the Son'' (1997) and ''On God'' (2007).
-Although Gospel flummoxed some critics by the audacity of Mailer writing the novel in the first person, the first-person Jesus story goes back in the English tradition at least as far as “The Sacrifice” by George Herbert (one of Emerson’s favored poets), likely composed about the time the Pilgrims were settling in America. Other reviewers were more concerned with the execution of Mailer’s novel, a more legitimate concern. Be that as it may, Mailer’s Jesus is an Emersonian prophet, “Even mightier than the prophet Ezekiel.”{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=36}} Not unlike what Mailer recognized in himself during the 1950s, Jesus is filled with both Apollonian and Dionysian impulses: “If his [Satan’s] odor could leave me uneasy it also offered sympathy to desires I had not yet allowed myself to feel.” Jesus embodies the kind of “double life” Emerson thought open to us all: a man living the human, sensuous life but with divine energies (a dissident, transcendent soul) within. Jesus, Mailer asserts, is of the Gnostic Jewish Essene sect. Like Emerson’s Jesus in the “Divinity School Address,” Mailer’s Jesus is the foe of orthodoxy, law, and nominal piety as exemplified by the Pharisees and the Synagogues, and as opposed to the interior experience and love of God,{{efn|See {{harvnb|Mailer|1997|loc=48, 72, 80, all of chapter 35, and 239}}.}} and as opposed to the wealthy and powerful coopting for their own purposes desires in the human soul.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|pp=152–153}}
+Although Gospel flummoxed some critics by the audacity of Mailer writing the novel in the first person, the first-person Jesus story goes back in the English tradition at least as far as “The Sacrifice” by George Herbert (one of Emerson’s favored poets), likely composed about the time the Pilgrims were settling in America. Other reviewers were more concerned with the execution of Mailer’s novel, a more legitimate concern. Be that as it may, Mailer’s Jesus is an Emersonian prophet, “Even mightier than the prophet Ezekiel.”{{sfn|Mailer|1997|p=36}} Not unlike what Mailer recognized in himself during the 1950s, Jesus is filled with both Apollonian and Dionysian impulses: “If his [Satan’s] odor could leave me uneasy it also offered sympathy to desires I had not yet allowed myself to feel.” Jesus embodies the kind of “double life” Emerson thought open to us all: a man living the human, sensuous life but with divine energies (a dissident, transcendent soul) within. Jesus, Mailer asserts, is of the Gnostic Jewish Essene sect. Like Emerson’s Jesus in the “Divinity School Address,” Mailer’s Jesus is the foe of orthodoxy, law, and nominal piety as exemplified by the Pharisees and the Synagogues, and as opposed to the interior experience and love of God,{{efn|See {{harvtxt|Mailer|1997|loc=48, 72, 80, all of chapter 35, and 239}}.}} and as opposed to the wealthy and powerful coopting for their own purposes desires in the human soul.{{sfn|Mailer|1997|pp=152–153}}
-. . .
+In ''On God'', Mailer puts it this way: The “two elements now on the horizon that can destroy the world as we know it . . . [are] technology and . . . organized religion. The second drives people to stupidity,”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=119}} not to mention violence. It is not far off the mark to speak of Emerson’s and Mailer’s Jesus as a Gnostic—one who seeks enlightenment within the deepest self, but outside institutions and doctrines. For both Emerson and Mailer, the process of journaling is one road in. “I have proceeded to ponder these questions without being qualified,” Mailer says in dialogue with Michael Lennon in the chapter on Gnosticism in On God. “Yet my basic argument is that of course I am qualified all the same. We all are. That is why I can say yes, if you want to get down to it, I probably am a Gnostic in the sense that the inner feeling I have about these matters is so clear and so acute to me.”{{sfn|Mailer|Lennon|2007|p=195}} Indeed, while working on ''The Gospel'', Mailer read Elaine Pagels’ ''The Gnostic Gospels and The Origin of Satan''.{{efn|See {{harvtxt|Lennon|2013|p=696}}.}} In ''Why Religion?'' Pagels, Professor of Religion at Princeton, underscores that the Gnostic Gospels, those uncanonized gadflies of Christianity, and particularly the Gospel of Thomas, emphasize the Kingdom of God within you, not above or beyond you. It is also the Essenes who turned Satan, as Mailer did, into God’s cosmic Antagonist. It is Gnosis, or “knowledge of the heart” and Epinoia (creative intelligence), that turns the deeper psyche or soul into the source of wisdom within us, a source we must find a way to awaken.{{efn|See {{harvtxt|Pagels|2018|pp=44, 56–57, 146–149, 156–157, 176–178}}.}}
+It is worth emphasizing here that for Emerson and Mailer, writing their journals does more than generate ideas. Writing a journal is an approach, an awakening, to the deeper psychic territory of the soul, to whatever revelation may be found within; it is a private act of self-examination, an act of devotion to one’s vocation, the completion of one’s being or identity. It is not so much a “religious” act because it is outside any practice, doctrine, or sect; it is not an interlocutory psychoanalytical act so much as a private spiritual act, a return to that inner vitality that participates in the transcendent soul, an alternative for traditional prayer. Like Emily Dickinson’s poems, a journal can be a solitary practice of self-reliance against the vagaries and expectations of the social world. As British psychotherapist Anthony Storr describes it in ''Solitude: A Return to the Self'':
+{{quote|The creative person is constantly seeking to discover himself, to remodel his own identity, and to find meaning in the universe through what he creates. He finds this a valuable integrating process which, like meditation or prayer, has little to do with other people, but which has its own separate validity. His most significant moments are those in which he attains some new insight, or makes some new discovery; and those moments are chiefly, if not invariably, those in which he is alone.{{Sfn|Storr|1988|p=xiv}}}}
+The inner truths revealed in solitude, however, may result in social action—a distinction George Kateb makes in ''Emerson and Self-Reliance'' between Emerson’s “mental self-reliance” and his “active self-reliance” (or “democratic individuality”). Active self-reliance is ''based'' on the prior intellectual independence of mental self-reliance.{{sfn|Kateb|1995|pp=134–136}} Emerson was wary of being drawn into politics and social movements, but he did protest (in public to President Martin van Buren) the displacement of the Cherokees in 1838, was a vociferous abolitionist in the 1850s, and supported women’s rights as they were defined in his time, defined not least by his friend and editorial colleague Margaret Fuller.
+Neither Emerson’s nor Mailer’s journals were intended for publication, yet once published we come to see how they aid our understanding of the origins of both authors’ published work and the processes through which inner revelation and disciplined self-examination eventually become literary artifact.
+==A Philosophical Novelist==
+For all his “soul searching” for psychic integration in ''Lipton’s'', Mailer is not a nineteenth-century Transcendentalist. He is a twentieth-century philosophical novelist whose nonfiction often acts as exegesis to his fiction. The philosophical concepts he developed in ''Lipton’s'' inform much of his later work.{{efn|To see more examples of how ''Lipton’s'' influenced Mailer’s works after the 1950s, my essay, {{harvtxt|Begiebing|2018|}}, especially pages 61–71, offers a number of examples I won’t repeat here. That essay also traces in more detail Mailer’s evolving theories of the soul as discovered in the deepest reaches of the psyche, a Jungian evolution, so to speak, that led Mailer toward ever greater interest in Carl Jung from the late 1970s through the 1990s. See also {{harvtxt|Lennon|1999|pp=143–144}} where Mailer admits to spending a lot of time reading Jung in the last year of the decade.}} We have seen that he was coming to understand more fully his motivations as a writer in 1954 and ’55 in the process of composing his journal. ''Lipton’s'' became his philosopher’s stone, with for him that stone’s reputed transformative, invincible power.
+What Mailer saw in Hemingway—and sought for himself—is an exemplary self-reliance and self-definition (“the sacred integrity” of his own mind) against the soul crushing realities of the twentieth century: mechanized global warfare, economic depression, totalitarianism, genocide, gulags, and the ever-expanding commercialization or commodification of everything. The costs of developing from within a strength of ego to resist such forces and define oneself can, of course, be crippling. Only integration of ego and the deeper psyche can provide a basis for survival, but whether human beings can live up to such a challenge is an open question. Here and there, perhaps, an individual manages to live up to the challenge, but he or she is not likely to emerge unscathed.
+A further distinction seems necessary here. Seeking freedom from society’s domination of the individual, including the oppressions of society’s political and economic engines, is not merely an expression of egotism or selfishness. The “Emersonian” individualist—the intellectually and spiritually free person with a strong identity—seeks to redress an imbalance or, to use one of Mailer’s favored words, a disproportion. Mailer, like Emerson, is on a quest for the psychic balance and strength sufficient to resist the burdens of social and psychological conformity. Just as reason may become rationalization for the status quo, for the inflexibilities of society and for those who exercise power over, and benefit from, the status quo, so too might instinct and intuition (the counterpoise to rationalization) become so disproportionate that the benefits of reason are lost. But for Emerson, as for Mailer (trained at Harvard as an engineer) we are not in danger of disproportionate intuition or instinct; on the contrary, we suffer from disproportionate reason or rationalization at the expense of our intuitive powers and at the cost of our souls.
+We have no evidence that Mailer ever read Emerson’s journals, and that seems unlikely. On November 16, 1954, a month before he launched into his self-analysis, Mailer in a letter to one “Mr. Cole,” refers to F. O. Matthiessen’s ''American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman'' and the influence of that book’s themes regarding Melville on ''The Naked and the Dead'', but Mailer also gives one mention of Emerson as among Matthiessen’s important Romantics.{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=181}} We do not know how much Emerson Mailer read before ''Lipton’s'', but Michael Lennon tells me that Mailer read a few of Emerson’s essays at Harvard. Much later when Mailer read a collection of Emerson’s works, Lennon reports that Mailer was “startled by how much Emerson’s ideas seemed to mirror his own. I remember this vividly.”{{efn|Personal correspondence, December 2, 2019.}} We also know, as Lennon points out in ''Norman Mailer: A Double Life'', that Mailer was influenced by F. O. Matthiessen. Mailer was impressed by Matthiessen’s public lectures at Harvard; Mailer’s writing mentor, Robert Gorham Davis, was a member of Matthiessen’s Harvard faculty group; Mailer read Matthiessen’s seminal book; Mailer campaigned with Matthiessen for Henry Wallace in 1948; and Mailer in Paris in 1948 reconnected with Stanley Geist, a Harvard acquaintance and author of ''Herman Melville: The Tragic Vision and the Heroic Ideal'' (1939, Harvard thesis, 1966 Octagon Books) who worked as research assistant to F. O. Matthiessen on ''American Renaissance'' and commented on ''The Naked and the Dead'' in manuscript. Like Geist, Lieutenant Hearn in ''Naked'' is also a Harvard grad with a thesis on Melville. Obviously, the two friends would have discussed the making of ''The American Renaissance'' and its interpretations of American Romanticism.{{sfn|Lennon|2013|pp=35, 90, 99, 116}} What we do know, then, is that some degree of intellectual stimulation from American Romanticism was psychically embedded, so to speak, well before Mailer began ''Lipton’s''. Nonetheless, that journal is a true journey into self, not—for all its echoes of Emerson’s own truths arrived from his own inward-turning journals—a mere parroting of Emersonian pensées. I would go so far as to say that Mailer’s lack of substantial reading of Emerson prior to ''Lipton’s'' freed him from concern that he would be merely imitating Emerson. Still, it is reasonable to argue that when the American Academy of Arts and Sciences gave Mailer the Emerson-Thoreau Medal in 1989, the Academy was acknowledging Mailer’s “Emersonian” role in American literature a century after Emerson’s.
+Although Mailer’s journal and books are darker than Emerson’s works, we might do well to remember that Emerson’s own darker vision in the late essays and lectures ameliorates our temptation to view Emerson as a naïve idealist. Think, for example, of Emerson’s “Life,” “Fate,” “Skepticism,” and “Experience.” Think of Emerson’s own later journal entries:
+* Conservatism has in the present society every advantage. All are on its side . . . the voice of the intelligent and the honest, of the unconnected and independent, the voice of truth and equity, is suppressed (April, 1845).
+* The name of Washington City in the newspapers is every day of blacker shade. All news from that quarter being of a sadder type, more malignant (May, 1847).
+* The badness of the times is making death attractive (April, 1850).
+* The world is babyish, and the use of wealth is: it is made a toy (June, 1851).
+* A man [fugitive slave] who has taken the risk of being shot, or burned alive, or cast into the sea, or starved to death, or suffocated in a wooden box, to get away from his driver: and this man who has run the gauntlet of a thousand miles for his freedom, the statute says you men of Massachusetts shall hunt, and catch, and send back again to the dog-hutch he fled from . . . I will not obey it, by God (1851).
+* It will always be so. Every principle is a war-note. Whoever attempts to carry out the rule of right and love and freedom must take his life in his hand (October, 1859).
+Moreover, Emerson was as fully aware as Mailer of the dualities (the double life, the psychic dialectic) within each of us: “Man is not order of nature . . . but a stupendous antagonism, a dragging together of the poles of the Universe. . . . here they are, side by side, god and devil, mind and matter, king and conspirator, belt and spasm, riding peacefully together in the eye and brain of every man.”{{sfn|Emerson|1960|p=340}} Still, Emerson’s oeuvre accentuates the salutary, self-creative powers of Transcendentalism. “The American Scholar” is our rousing Declaration of Intellectual Independence.
+Mailer more often accentuates the violence of revolutionary consciousness and regenerative, libidinal force in his characters and protagonists. The powers discovered deep within can both destroy and create. Nonetheless, what Mailer discovers in ''Lipton’s'' and the work that follows is fundamentally part of an American literary tradition. Mailer’s opposition to the values of a dominant American culture during his lifetime places him in the company of a long lineage of writers who have sought to awaken (or revolutionize) the consciousness of their people, who have sought to attach words, through image and symbol, as Emerson said, to visible things, who have depicted the journey of the individual soul as connected to the journey of America. In the works of the Puritans, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Vonnegut the pilgrim soul confronts extremes of good and evil, at times divided as God and Devil. The pilgrim, like some Old Testament hero (“a stranger and pilgrim on the earth,” as Hebrews 11:13 has it), often undergoes an apocalyptic voyage in which the expansion of self and soul, and the integration of nature and God and self, are all part of the same process of growth and the same possibilities of defeat. It bespeaks a quest to define America’s most liberated, most creative self. Such heroes partake, as well, of mythic odysseys—violent, libidinal, liberating, archetypal, shocking, beneficial for the hero’s compatriots and culture—of the ancient heroes of Western literature. “The adventurer,” Mailer wrote early in ''Lipton’s'', is “he or she [who] always has a very strong urge from the soul.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 29, 1954/87|#87]]}} The “Emersonian” and mythic soul-lore Mailer worked out for himself in ''Lipton’s'' was an important stop along Mailer’s own way, his personal quest to fashion a self and a body of work that would reflect that self truly. ''Lipton’s'' is the seed ground for Mailer’s protagonists in his fiction and nonfiction after the 1950s and for their often rebarbative, unseemly, disturbing-yet-creative journeys.
 ===Notes===