Lipton’s Journal/February 14, 1955/613
My sore throat seems gone. Now, my chest aches. From cigarette inhaling? Sigh-of-regret inhaling? Is a cigarette cough the bark of anger which is the echo of the sigh of regret? Vance Bourjaily[1] once wrote that a penis was that “slippery bridge from which one of us tries to reach another.” It’s the best line he ever wrote. I wonder if a cigarette is not indeed the bridge of sighs which goes nowhere.
note
- ↑ He wrote to Mailer in the summer of 1951 with praise for Barbary Shore, and they immediately became friends. Bourjaily (1922-2010), whose novels include The Violated (1958), introduced Mailer to John W. Aldridge, who co-edited Discovery, a literary annual, with Bourjaily. Mailer’s short story, “The Dead Gook,” appeared in the first number in 1952, around the same time that Bourjaily introduced Mailer to James Jones.
