Lipton’s Journal/December 31, 1954/141

What I learn about The Deer Park these days. I wrote it in such depression because the whole book is a lie. I put my ideas, my real ideas in the most degraded characters. I made Beda a monster, and Marion Faye. Ah. Look. Marion, practically reads as Norman if one spells it backwards. All the letters of Norman are present with the addition of I. I really was saying I, Norman, and I kept wondering where Marion came from. The Deer Park is an attempt to deal with and to conceal from myself that my great enemy, my all-out enemy is the Catholic Church who has stolen the sexual soul of man. And [Francis] Eitel—I tell. [Herman] Teppis—The eppis, the skin, the man who is all society. The piss.