Lipton’s Journal/January 25, 1955/272

So, modestly, I see my mission. It is to put Freud into Marx, and Marx into Freud. Put Tolstoy into Dostoyevsky and Dostoyevsky in Tolstoy.^[1] Open anarchism with its soul-sense to the understanding of complexity, and infuse complex gloom with the radiance of anarchism. As Jenny Silverman^[2] said of me once, “The little pisherke with the big ideas.” Pint-sized Hitler. Yes.

notes

↑ Mailer hoped to build a bridge between the social and natural worlds depicted in Tolstoy’s novels, and the deep penetrations into psychic space in Dostoyevsky’s. He wrote that all of the latter’s novels could take place in “ten closed rooms.” He saw the need for a parallel span between the external world of economics and politics in Marx and the inner world of dreams and the unconscious in Freud.
↑ Mother of Mailer’s first wife Bea.

[1] Mailer hoped to build a bridge between the social and natural worlds depicted in Tolstoy’s novels, and the deep penetrations into psychic space in Dostoyevsky’s. He wrote that all of the latter’s novels could take place in “ten closed rooms.” He saw the need for a parallel span between the external world of economics and politics in Marx and the inner world of dreams and the unconscious in Freud.

[2] Mother of Mailer’s first wife Bea.

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