Lipton’s Journal/Introduction: Difference between revisions

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-{{dc|dc=T|he late-1950s was a difficult time for Norman Mailer.}} {{NM}}, who had been a literary phenomenon at the age of 25 with his first novel ''The Naked and the Dead'', was now at thirty-two the author of an unsuccessful second novel which had been brutally dismissed by the critics. There was much at stake with his third novel, ''[[The Deer Park]]'' (1955), about to be published by Rinehart. Mailer felt it was his chance to redeem himself, to believe once again that he was not an impostor but a true novelist. Mailer recalls this time in his 1959 essay, “The Mind of an Outlaw,” Mailer’s ego-bruised, comic-caustic account of how he peddled ''The Deer Park'' accumulating rejections like barnacles, he mentions a journal that he kept during that unhappy time. Titled “Lipton’s” (tea = marijuana), the journal was “a wild set of thoughts and outlines for huge projects.” The ideas “came so fast,” he wrote, “that sometimes I think my mind was dulled by the heat.” He began “Lipton’s” on December 1, 1954 and made entries sporadically, usually on Mondays and Tuesdays after a weekend of smoking pot and going to Harlem jazz clubs with his new wife, [[w:Adele Morales|Adele Morales]]. After 13 weeks, he put the journal aside in order to begin a final revision of ''The Deer Park'', which Putnam’s—the seventh publisher to consider it—accepted for fall publication. When he made the final entry on March 4, 1955, the journal topped 104,000 words divided into 707 numbered entries.
+{{dc|dc=T|he late-1950s was a difficult time for Norman Mailer.}} {{NM}}, who had been a literary phenomenon at the age of 25 with his first novel ''[[The Naked and the Dead]]'' (1948), was now at thirty-two the author of an unsuccessful second novel which had been brutally dismissed by the critics. There was much at stake with his third novel, ''[[The Deer Park]]'' (1955), about to be published by Rinehart. Mailer felt it was his chance to redeem himself, to believe once again that he was not an impostor but a true novelist. Mailer recalls this time in his 1959 essay, “The Mind of an Outlaw,” Mailer’s ego-bruised, comic-caustic account of how he peddled ''The Deer Park'' accumulating rejections like barnacles, he mentions a journal that he kept during that unhappy time. Titled “Lipton’s” (tea = marijuana), the journal was “a wild set of thoughts and outlines for huge projects.” The ideas “came so fast,” he wrote, “that sometimes I think my mind was dulled by the heat.” He began “Lipton’s” on December 1, 1954 and made entries sporadically, usually on Mondays and Tuesdays after a weekend of smoking pot and going to Harlem jazz clubs with his new wife, [[w:Adele Morales|Adele Morales]]. After 13 weeks, he put the journal aside in order to begin a final revision of ''The Deer Park'', which Putnam’s—the seventh publisher to consider it—accepted for fall publication.
 “Lipton’s” is Mailer’s unsparing assessment of his intellectual resources, literary abilities, personal relationships, and psycho-sexual well-being at age 32. It is also a record of the effects of marijuana, one similar to [[w:Thomas De Quincey|Thomas De Quincey]]’s ''[[w:Confessions of an English Opium-Eater|Confessions of an English Opium-Eater]]'' (1822) in its celebration of the salubrious effects of a drug, and the drawbacks. Mailer drew on the cavalcade of ideas in “Lipton’s,” some of them only partially birthed, and many delivered via the cumbersome jargon of psychology and sociology, for the remainder of his writing career. “[[The White Negro]],” his most celebrated and debated essay, published in 1957, was the first and perhaps most important outgrowth of “Lipton’s,” but its influence can be seen in subsequent books as disparate as ''[[Cannibals and Christians]]'' (1966), ''[[The Armies of the Night]]'' (1968), ''[[Ancient Evenings]]'' (1983), and ''[[Harlot’s Ghost]]'' (1991).
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 The new style ripened in January 1956, three months after ''The Deer Park'' was published, when Mailer began a column for the weekly newspaper he co-founded (and named), the ''Village Voice''. He called the column “Quickly” (he planned to write each one in less than an hour), and took a nom de plume: “General Marijuana.” “Quickly,” and the equally irritable, irritating cartoons of [[w:Jules Feiffer|Jules Feiffer]] were the tent poles of the ''Voice'', which became the progenitor of the counter-culture press, and the proving ground for a generation of new journalists. The new style was mercurial, generally sardonic, sometimes wounding, open to polyglot American parlance, or as Poirier notes, not limited to modes “sanctioned by literary decorums.” What modes did Mailer employ? Obscenity, sarcasm, fulmination, pontification, and ventriloquism are the first that come to mind, but also self-revelation and mordant wit. The new style is very much in evidence the following year when “The White Negro,” an attempt to consolidate much of what was essayed in “Lipton’s,” came out in the summer 1957 issue of ''Dissent'', and quickly became the most controversial essay ever to appear in this reserved leftist journal. Two years later in ''Advertisements for Myself'' the style attained its full vigor. As he noted in a 1976 preface, this collection of essays, reviews, interviews and excerpts from previous work, stitched together by “advertisements” which directly address the reader, “was the first work that I wrote with a style I could call my own.” Mailer was also designing, by fits and starts, the template for a new kind of public intellectual, an independent, rambunctious, and unpredictable left-conservative (his term) who was interested, as he said in the fall of 1955, “less in politics as politics . . . than politics as a part of everything else in life.”
-Mailer comments in “Lipton’s” that “to use the conceptual words of others is to maroon myself in pseudo-rational processes rather than to depend on my intuition.” A new language, a “private jargon” was needed, and the journal is loaded with spontaneous coinages, some memorable, others not. The meanings of most the following can be construed: “startlings,” “crankery,” “lustility,” “wombivity,” “schlumperness,” “hardonolgy,” “limberology,” “thingification, “smally,” “viator,” “mindish,” “Liptoning up,” “loverness.” He refers to the entire journal, more than once, as a “fuckanalyis,” and suggests that in the course of human progress, eventually, “history” will become “hissoul.” Some of the more Germanic neologisms are central to the running argument in the journal that humanity is locked in a centuries-old struggle in every arena of existence between two forces, homeostasis and sociostatis. The former refers to life-giving acts and forces; the latter to society’s efforts to maintain itself, arrest change by violence (which homeostasis also employs) and coercion, but also more subtle measures such as advertising and patriotism. Mailer quickly realized that homeostasis had a contradictory suffix and changed it to homeodynamism. Soon, however, he tired of typing these long words, and shortens them to H and S, which works for a time. Then he opts, inexplicably, for “sup” and “er,” deriving from “superego.” The homeodynamism substitute, “er,” is related closely to “lerve,” which Mailer prefers to libido. Writing “Lipton’s” forced Mailer to become more alert to the shape and beat of his sentences. Before marijuana, he said, “I’d been someone who wrote for the sense of what I was saying, and now I began to write for the sound of what I was writing.”
+Mailer comments in “Lipton’s” that “to use the conceptual words of others is to maroon myself in pseudo-rational processes rather than to depend on my intuition.” He experimented with the sound of words in a way that is reminiscent of the concepts of metaphor and metonymy developed by French psychoanalysis. A new language, a “private jargon” was needed, and the journal is loaded with spontaneous coinages, some memorable, others not. The meanings of most the following can be construed: “startlings,” “crankery,” “lustility,” “wombivity,” “schlumperness,” “hardonolgy,” “limberology,” “thingification, “smally,” “viator,” “mindish,” “Liptoning up,” “loverness.” He refers to the entire journal, more than once, as a “fuckanalyis,” and suggests that in the course of human progress, eventually, “history” will become “hissoul.” Some of the more Germanic neologisms are central to the running argument in the journal that humanity is locked in a centuries-old struggle in every arena of existence between two forces, homeostasis and sociostatis. The former refers to life-giving acts and forces; the latter to society’s efforts to maintain itself, arrest change by violence (which homeostasis also employs) and coercion, but also more subtle measures such as advertising and patriotism. Mailer quickly realized that homeostasis had a contradictory suffix and changed it to homeodynamism. Soon, however, he tired of typing these long words, and shortens them to H and S, which works for a time. Then he opts, inexplicably, for “sup” and “er,” deriving from “superego.” The homeodynamism substitute, “er,” is related closely to “lerve,” which Mailer prefers to libido. Writing “Lipton’s” forced Mailer to become more alert to the shape and beat of his sentences. Before marijuana, he said, “I’d been someone who wrote for the sense of what I was saying, and now I began to write for the sound of what I was writing.”
 “Lipton’s” is a hodge-podge, a lumber room of intellectual feints and fancies, arguments and insights, yet it hangs together. One reason is that it is a psychoanalytic act. Another is that it is a dictionary of dualisms. The indubitable doubleness of all phenomena is the centrifugal belief that supports every exploration in the journal. All the antinomies that Mailer had pondered since his youth come tumbling out. He works through a range of commonplace oppositions such as sun-moon, conscious-unconscious, heaven-hell, as well as bodily functions—orgasms and vomiting, weeping and laughter, intercourse as giving and taking—and dozens of others: choice-habit, antacid-analgesic (which he proposes as the title of his one thousand-page “fuck novel”), expertise-intuition, revolutionary-mystic, romantic-realist, and energetic repetitions of the saint-psychopath opposition. He considers his sexuality, his addictions, his aspirations and his deepest fears, and like Rev. Dimmesdale in Hawthorne’s ''Scarlet Letter'', practices vigils of self-examination.
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 Adele Morales, with whom he began living in mid-1951, and married in April 1954. She was much different than his first wife Bea, less independent and more involved in Mailer’s roller coaster emotional life. Mailer’s first biographer, Hilary Mills, draws the contrast well:
-<blockquote>Beatrice had in many ways been like Mailer’s mother—strong, bright, Jewish, and intolerant of Norman’s macho antics. But Adele was quite different: a dark, sensuous Latin, who at least initially, was a strong woman without a sense of her own strength. She had gone only to Washington Irving High School, and her limited education gave her a certain insecurity which permitted her to passively follow Norman’s intellectual lead. Yet as an artist Adele had her own unconventional imagination and she would learn to play Mailer’s psychic games with innovation. Although these games would eventually get out of hand as Mailer’s vision of the “orgiastic and violent” intensified, in the beginning Adele offered Mailer an exciting and mysterious departure from the dominant women he had known. “Adele’s an Indian,” Mailer has said, “primitive and elemental.” Adele’s responsive sensuality stimulated Mailer’s evolving sense of freedom and his growing desire for the forbidden. “That early period with Adele was probably his happiest time,” [Mailer’s close friend Daniel] Wolf later said. “She opened him up.” </blockquote>
+<blockquote>Beatrice had in many ways been like Mailer’s mother—strong, bright, Jewish, and intolerant of Norman’s macho antics. But Adele was quite different: a dark, sensuous Latin, who at least initially, was a strong woman without a sense of her own strength. She had gone only to Washington Irving High School, and her limited education gave her a certain insecurity which permitted her to passively follow Norman’s intellectual lead. Yet as an artist Adele had her own unconventional imagination and she would learn to play Mailer’s psychic games with innovation. Although these games would eventually get out of hand as Mailer’s vision of the “orgiastic and violent” intensified, in the beginning Adele offered Mailer an exciting and mysterious departure from the dominant women he had known. “Adele’s an Indian,” Mailer has said, “primitive and elemental.” Adele’s responsive sensuality stimulated Mailer’s evolving sense of freedom and his growing desire for the forbidden. “That early period with Adele was probably his happiest time,” [Mailer’s close friend Daniel] Wolf later said. “She opened him up.”</blockquote>
-Mailer’s love for Adele is stated emphatically in “Lipton’s”. Until November 1960, when he stabbed her with a penknife during a drunken argument, they were inseparable, although their relationship had begun to deteriorate at least a year earlier.
+He also analyzed his relationship to his parents, and as a result his relationship to his father improved. He also discussed his own bisexuality and how it played out in his relationships to Bea. Mailer’s love for Adele is stated emphatically in “Lipton’s”. Until November 1960, when he stabbed her with a penknife during a drunken argument, they were inseparable, although their relationship had begun to deteriorate at least a year earlier.
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 The man who came out of that experience wrote a few years later in ''Advertisements for Myself'': “I was finally open to my anger, I turned within my psyche, I can almost believe, for I felt something shift to murder in me . . . All I felt was that I was an outlaw, a psychic outlaw and I liked it, I liked it a good night better than trying to be a gentleman.” Mailer saw “Lipton’s” as the prelude to a thousand-page “fuck novel” that would take years to write, a preparation for his attempt to become a daring Dostoyevskian novelist who would “make a revolution in the consciousness of our time,” as he put it in ''Advertisements''.
+{{* * *}}
+When Mailer made the final entry to “Lipton’s” on March 4, 1955, the journal topped 104,000 words divided into 707 numbered entries.
+. . .
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