Lipton’s Journal/Correspondence of Robert Lindner and Norman Mailer/Introduction

Written by
Susan Mailer

“Lipton’s Journal” cannot be fully understood outside of Mailer’s friendship with Lindner. We are lucky to have the bulk of their correspondence and can thus get a glimpse of the texture of their relationship.

Robert Lindner came into Mailer’s life at a particularly difficult time—a period in which he was still reeling from a formidable blow to his ego after the failure of Barbary Shore, and was writing his new novel The Deer Park under a cloud of uncertainty. For many this would have been a good time to consider turning to a psychotherapist for help. So, perhaps it is not surprising that after reading Prescription for a Rebellion, Mailer felt compelled to write to the author. It seems that Mailer knew he had found a rare bird—a psychoanalyst who would not squelch his creativity and would help him remain a rebel with a cause. On November 18, 1952 Mailer sent his first letter to Lindner opening the gate for an intense and fertile friendship that lasted until Lindner’s untimely death in February, 1956.

The letters show us how the friendship develops; at first they talk about literature and discuss their work and their ideas. But as their affection for each other deepens, Mailer will turn to Lindner for advice and feedback, while Lindner will reach out to Mailer for help in the craft of writing or of maneuvering in the publishing world. They call each other “hermano” or “brother of mine” and frequently mention their desire to meet in person and nurture their friendship over a quart of whisky. They discuss politics, psychoanalysis, philosophy, their wives, and also their own psyches.

Lindner in 1952 (Photo credit: Udel Bros.)

The tenor of the letters varies through time but in the first two years, up to the rejection of The Deer Park by Rinehart, and the beginning of the journal, it is evident that Mailer trusts Lindner’s judgment and expresses himself openly in his letters. Lindner at times acts as an older brother, at others as a therapist. In many letters we see a devoted friend expressing his love and need for Mailer’s affection, and his admiration for the writer’s talent. Mailer, not one to easily open his most intimate thoughts to another, trusts Lindner and sends him the pages of the journal as he writes them.

At the time, Mailer is smoking marijuana seriously. He believes weed will take his psyche to places he might otherwise not discover. But marijuana not only opens his mind, it also excites him and produces a state of relentless insomnia. He regularly downs one or two Seconals to sleep. He wakes up in a barbiturate fog and pops a bennie to give him a lift; he drinks cup after cup of coffee to wake up, and usually smokes two packs of cigarettes to help him think. Marijuana comes later in the afternoon, especially on weekends, together with a good dose of alcohol. Lindner is concerned. He is convinced that the drugs have taken possession of his friend and are changing his personality, making him aggressive and paranoid. He disapproves of the marijuana experiment and thinks it is taking Mailer to dangerous places. Although Mailer agrees on this point, he sees it as something he must do to reach the untapped regions of himself—to get close to his genius, to become not only a better writer, but a great one.

By the time Mailer stops writing the journal, in March 1955, his relationship to Lindner has cooled. He is no longer comfortable about revealing his most intimate thoughts to his friend because it leaves him vulnerable and less of an equal. He resents Lindner’s criticism and is disappointed he has not understood the importance of his marijuana adventure. Mailer, protective of his intimacy asks for the pages—his friend returns the manuscript.

In an interview with J. Michael Lennon in 2007, shortly before his death Mailer says:

“ And then what happened is that I started smoking marijuana and then the marijuana took over. And then came a time when that marijuana became King Marijuana. It determined everything, including my friendships. If you wouldn’t smoke marijuana, if you wouldn’t go on a trip with me, you weren’t my friend. And he was aghast. He [Lindner] was aghast on several counts. One of them was selfish. As a rising analyst, he could hardly be caught having a friend who was not only a huge smoker, but had turned him into one. So he had to be self-protective. He had his family, after all, his reputation and everything. So he was not moving on that. And so he’d try to write me lectures. Those lectures used to drive me wild because I was not about to be lectured to. The wild side of me would come out. It was like, “If you don’t like my smoking, go fuck yourself.” I was wild. “This is my inkling if you’re not with me, you’re not my friend.” He was upset, I think, by seeing an ugly and ruthless side of myself that he was perhaps not wholly prepared for until then. In other words, I was not as nice a guy as I had seemed. And from my point of view, he was not as generous a guy as I had thought. And so this began to poison our relationship to a degree. ”

During the second half of 1955 their correspondence dwindles, the visits become less frequent, and by the end of the year Mailer is hardly present. Lindner’s ailing heart takes a turn for the worse.

Mailer says of Lindner’s death:

“ He was in his early forties and I talked to him on the phone one day and he said “There’s nothing they can do; I’m going to die.” And he burst into tears. And I was so cold and so full of anger at where we’d gotten and when I look back, it was one of the most unpleasant moments in my life. I didn’t feel a fucking thing for him. I felt contempt that he was weakened. You see, my feeling was: “We’re soldiers and if we die, we die.” I have that feeling now; it’s a lot easier now, I can assure you. But I remember not being sympathetic. Going through the dull motions of being sympathetic, the way one does when one’s not there with a friend, but not really giving him what he needed. And I didn’t believe he was going to die. And then, some weeks later, he died. And that was one of the great blows of my life because I couldn’t believe it. And then I felt woe, and then I felt contrition. ”

A week after his death, in March, 1956, Mailer writes in his Village Voice column:

“ One of my really good friends died last week at the age of 41. He was Robert Lindner, the psychoanalyst, and he had been suffering from a heart ailment for many years . . . Bob Lindner was so good a friend that I simply have no heart to write about him now. I should go on at length about his charm, his generosity his intellectual curiosity, his foibles, his weaknesses, his kindnesses, his ambitions, his achievements, his failures, and his great warmth (he was truly one of the warmest people I have known). ”

Angry at his friend’s weakness, Mailer was not present during the last months of Lindner’s life; he moved on leaving behind the powerful emotions the friendship had evoked in him. Mailer had let his hermano down when he most needed it, and sadly Lindner would not be around to be a voice of reason in the next few years, a time when Mailer fought with many of his close friends, and traveled to that dangerous territory, the land of madness, he had written about in the journal.

In the late 1970s my father invited me to have a discussion about Freud and psychoanalysis. I had just begun my psychoanalytic studies and we both thought something interesting might come of it. But it was close to a disaster. He was off and running with a plethora of ideas before I was able to sit down, and then took the discussion to a level for which I wasn’t prepared. During his two-hour monologue, I had the sensation he was after something that I could not provide. When I read “Lipton’s” and the Mailer-Lindner correspondence, I wondered if on that occasion with me Mailer was trying to resurrect his old friend, Robert Lindner, and experience once again those intense and stimulating conversations. It was, of course, a failed exercise, doomed from the start, because I was his daughter and not his trusted friend. And by that time he was no longer the young rebel he had been in the mid-1950s.