Lipton’s Journal/December 31, 1954/135
I used to be outwardly a mild psychopath, inwardly enormously moral and severe on myself. Now, outwardly I’m moral (almost saintly I love my friends so much) and inwardly my mind races far, wild, and furiously like the psychopath stalking the present, letting nothing pass my ken. The tiniest most insignificant gesture or remark opens a world to me. (This could be a note for Marion Faye,[1] too, who realizes that Lipton’s left him unaffected before because he was afraid of the intellectual consequence—he would have to set out to be a genius or a saint.)
Note
- ↑ Mailer’s anti-hero for a post-Hiroshima world in The Deer Park, Faye (son of Dorothea O’Faye, a former singer who presides over a drunken salon in Desert D’Or, Mailer’s name for Palm Springs, California), is the archetypal hipster. A bisexual pimp and drug dealer, he is the novel’s dark conscience, the polar opposite of Charles Eitel. Mailer planned to use Faye as a centripetal character in the seven novels that he planned and failed to write as sequels to The Deer Park.
