Lipton’s Journal/February 21, 1955/621
Here we go again. A very good weekend, a very happy emotional exhausting and refreshing weekend, and what was good about it was that I allowed myself to go where I was carried instead of trying to force every single moment into what I thought it should be.
Saturday night on Lipton’s with Dan[1] and Rhoda,[2] and of course Adele[3]—I think of her these days as part of me, we are so close—we had a Lipton’s radio broadcast on the tape recorder, an hour of it, and while it’s garbled and boring to a stranger undoubtedly, I found it fascinating. There are mountains of material in it, tons of laughter, oceans of piss, thunder ranges of shit, lustility and hoffection, and in a way I learned more about Dan and Rhoda in one night than I’ve learned about them in years.
Interestingly enough, as a psychoanalytical session I believe it was truly valuable—elements of psychodrama, test situations, orgiastic connotations, working out of latent homosexuality—at one point I squeezed Dan’s cock and taunted him to do the same to me—to my amazement, he did—which for Dan is an explosion. Anyway, I’m going to try to get a transcript of the hour. We acted out people we know, we sang (even me), we quarreled and bickered, we agreed—it was really incredible from the inside although to an analyst it might seem no more than release of tension.
notes
- ↑ A close friend of Mailer’s in the 1950s, Daniel Wolf (1915 – 1996), the co-founder of the Village Voice, introduced Mailer to his second wife, Adele Morales.
- ↑ Lifelong friend of Mailer’s sister Barbara, Rhoda Lazare (b. 1926) was introduced to her husband, Daniel Wolf, by Mailer.
- ↑ Adele Morales (1925 – 2015), who he married in April 1954, was Mailer’s second wife. The mother of his daughters Danielle (b. 1957), and Elizabeth Anne (b. 1959), she separated from Mailer in early 1961 a few months after he stabbed her with a penknife, just missing her heart. He pled guilty to felonious assault and was given a suspended sentence. They divorced in 1962.