Lipton’s Journal/January 26, 1955/280

In this sense, we are all part of a total soul, and even as we seem to be hurting each other, we are helping each other, instructing, aiding. Adele’s[1] mother loved life, was frustrated by early marriage, and in her own way she loved Adele. Deeply she loved Adele so much that she made life unbearable at home for Adele so that Adele would go out into the world and not have the bitch of a life Consuela had known. And this is true for Adele’s father too.

Society has so perverted us with its notions that we are always brooding about the damages other people have done to us. But everything is a double, and as we feel something one way in ourselves so its opposite echoes in another part of our being (H vs. S). Love contains the echo of the trap and of death; hatred offers a ticket to romantic places, a trip into life. That is why today at a time when society is changing and adapting every day, becoming almost as sensitive as life itself since human needs are so great, the majority of people consciously feel hate, and love is a sticky word. How true. Love sticks. Hatred flies. The human wisdom buried in the cliché.

For the intuitive sensual life wisdom of the H can express itself in society only in degraded forms. So the wisest things are said in jokes, in obscenities, in clichés, in faulty art-works, in parables and paradoxes. Great art-works are enormous sociostatic defenses against H-forces. No matter how radical or revolutionary the writer may be, or the artist, his work is less radical than his H. Art is a homeostatic excretion, and in the faults of an art work, the shoddy passages, the scenes which did not come off, or the overblown prose, is concealed the soul of the artist.



note

  1. Adele Morales (1925 – 2015), who he married in April 1954, was Mailer’s second wife. The mother of his daughters Danielle (b. 1957), and Elizabeth Anne (b. 1959), she separated from Mailer in early 1961 a few months after he stabbed her with a penknife, just missing her heart. He pled guilty to felonious assault and was given a suspended sentence. They divorced in 1962.