View source for Lipton’s Journal/Correspondence of Robert Lindner and Norman Mailer/September 8, 2007

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[Lindner died of congestive heart disease on February 27, 1956. Mailer recalled his death in an interview with Lennon, the last he gave, on September 8, 2007.]

And then what happened is that I started smoking marijuana and then the marijuana took over. And there 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 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. 

And then as time went, we drifted apart a bit because of it. And then he began to get ill. He had a problem; he often said to me “I’m going to die young.” What it was is he had high blood pressure, which was hard to reduce because the medicines used to reduce it widened the hole in one of the heart valves. This was at a point when they couldn’t operate on heart valves. Today I’m sure he’d be alive. But in those days, he had this problem. One medicine he needed was there to kill him on the other side. So at a certain point it got hopeless. 

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. And then I remember at his funeral, his memorial service, I remember speaking and talking about him and creating a sensation at the memorial service because I was talking about all his many wonderful qualities and I said, “And on top of all that, he was a rogue.” Whohooohoo went through the audience at the memorial service. There’s his wife, his widow and all. But it was true; he’d have fucked anything with legs that really wanted him. His children were affected terribly by the death. They adored their father. 

I didn’t know them well enough to know if they adored him more than they adored her, but it would be easy to make such a statement because she was more forbidding. She had a strong disposition; she had a very strong sense of what’s was right and what’s wrong, whereas he was more adaptable. I’m sure she got into more intense set-tos with the children than he did, whereas he was their Papa and they adored him. So they may never have recovered altogether. It was really tough. 

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