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The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018/Lipton’s Journal: Mailer’s Quest for Wholeness and Renewal: Difference between revisions
The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018/Lipton’s Journal: Mailer’s Quest for Wholeness and Renewal (view source)
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{{dc|dc=D|uring the thirteen weeks spent composing his private journal}} of self-analysis and personal growth between December of 1955 and March of 1956, Mailer, at age 32, recorded his discovery of various pathways to tap into his libidinous, instinctive, rebellious, and liberated self as an artist. I’ll examine here Mailer’s ''[[Lipton’s Journal]]'' from two complementary perspectives: 1) how Mailer used a Jungian self-analysis to change his life and work, and 2) how Mailer recorded his discovery of jazz as one of the most significant pathways to artistic renewal. | {{dc|dc=D|uring the thirteen weeks spent composing his private journal}} of self-analysis and personal growth between December of 1955 and March of 1956, Mailer, at age 32, recorded his discovery of various pathways to tap into his libidinous, instinctive, rebellious, and liberated self as an artist. I’ll examine here Mailer’s ''[[Lipton’s Journal]]'' from two complementary perspectives: 1) how Mailer used a Jungian self-analysis to change his life and work, and 2) how Mailer recorded his discovery of jazz as one of the most significant pathways to artistic renewal. | ||
==Part | ==Part I: Mailer and Jung== | ||
In the mid-1950s Mailer employed creative methods and goals that are significantly like those Carl Jung employed through his own journal of self-analysis earlier in the century. Both Mailer and Jung seek to discover neglected and undeveloped elements of their personalities; both are in search of wholeness and renewal; both are in search of their deepest selves. Both, by their own testimony, are in search of their souls. In short, Mailer initiated a Jungian analysis on himself, though it is unlikely he was fully aware he was doing so in 1955. | In the mid-1950s Mailer employed creative methods and goals that are significantly like those Carl Jung employed through his own journal of self-analysis earlier in the century. Both Mailer and Jung seek to discover neglected and undeveloped elements of their personalities; both are in search of wholeness and renewal; both are in search of their deepest selves. Both, by their own testimony, are in search of their souls. In short, Mailer initiated a Jungian analysis on himself, though it is unlikely he was fully aware he was doing so in 1955. | ||
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That public self-analysis was collected and launched in 1959 with the publication of ''Advertisements for Myself'', a first fleshing out of the ideas and the new consciousness Mailer was first approaching in ''Lipton’s'' in 1955. His introductions (“advertisements”) to each section of the book are his “muted autobiography,”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=335}} a continuation of self-analytical moments as he looks back on his earlier life and work, a sort of confessional analysis more fit, however, for public self-revelation than for the private meditations of his journal. He tells us in one advertisement that his journal of “self-analysis” with “marijuana, my private discovery,”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=219}} led him to evolve into “a psychic outlaw,”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=234}} a “changed writer”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=235}} even as he worked on the page proofs of ''The Deer Park'': “Finally, I was learning how to write.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=236}} His new outlaw voice and style began to emerge in his ''Village Voice'' column in 1956 as the opening salvo of his battle for a revolution in consciousness, “a seed ground for the opinions of America.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=278}} The new style was “a purgative to bad habit” and an expression of “rage against that national conformity which smothered creativity, for it delayed the self-creation of the race.” That new style became “the first lick of fire in a new American consciousness . . . I was gambling all I had.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=283}} We also see in ''Advertisements'' the emergence of the dialogue form that Jung had used so often in his self-analysis, but the real “seeds” of his future work, Mailer points out, are collected in the last half of the book—“The White Negro,” “The Time of Her Time,” and “Advertisements for Myself on the Way Out.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=335}} It becomes more obvious that ''Advertisements'', the first progeny of ''Lipton’s'', is the transitional book for Mailer, and that his 1959 book looks particularly toward ''An American Dream'', the first fictional development of the themes begun in ''Lipton’s Journal'' and given initial public airing in ''Advertisements for Myself''. | That public self-analysis was collected and launched in 1959 with the publication of ''Advertisements for Myself'', a first fleshing out of the ideas and the new consciousness Mailer was first approaching in ''Lipton’s'' in 1955. His introductions (“advertisements”) to each section of the book are his “muted autobiography,”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=335}} a continuation of self-analytical moments as he looks back on his earlier life and work, a sort of confessional analysis more fit, however, for public self-revelation than for the private meditations of his journal. He tells us in one advertisement that his journal of “self-analysis” with “marijuana, my private discovery,”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=219}} led him to evolve into “a psychic outlaw,”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=234}} a “changed writer”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=235}} even as he worked on the page proofs of ''The Deer Park'': “Finally, I was learning how to write.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=236}} His new outlaw voice and style began to emerge in his ''Village Voice'' column in 1956 as the opening salvo of his battle for a revolution in consciousness, “a seed ground for the opinions of America.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=278}} The new style was “a purgative to bad habit” and an expression of “rage against that national conformity which smothered creativity, for it delayed the self-creation of the race.” That new style became “the first lick of fire in a new American consciousness . . . I was gambling all I had.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=283}} We also see in ''Advertisements'' the emergence of the dialogue form that Jung had used so often in his self-analysis, but the real “seeds” of his future work, Mailer points out, are collected in the last half of the book—“The White Negro,” “The Time of Her Time,” and “Advertisements for Myself on the Way Out.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=335}} It becomes more obvious that ''Advertisements'', the first progeny of ''Lipton’s'', is the transitional book for Mailer, and that his 1959 book looks particularly toward ''An American Dream'', the first fictional development of the themes begun in ''Lipton’s Journal'' and given initial public airing in ''Advertisements for Myself''. | ||
''Cannibals and Christians'' (1966), a collection of diverse pieces, can be read as a sort of exegesis for ''An American Dream'' (1964, 1965). The two books function like artistic pendants, parallel texts. The extension of speculations and meditations begun in ''Lipton’s'' are developed much further in ''Cannibals'' for publication. And just as Mailer began to make use of the dialogue form in his published existential and psychological musings in ''The Presidential Papers'' (1963), in ''Cannibals'' the technique—echoing the many dialogues in Jung’s ''Red Book''—comes to full fruition. Two dialogues are of particular significance. “The Metaphysics of the Belly” posits intuition as messages from the unconscious that can transform perception, perception that is both physical and psychic, that is, integrated.{{sfn|Mailer|1966|pp=263–265}} It is such messages from the unconscious that continually urge themselves on the hero Rojack in ''An American Dream'', the potential source of his transformation: “I felt as if I had crossed a chasm of time and was some new breed of man.”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=81}} In the other major dialogue “The Political Economy of Time,” Mailer explicitly connects body and soul into a “being” and connects the soul with the unconscious.{{sfn|Mailer|1966|pp=287–373}} This dialogue particularly is in turn strikingly (if annoyingly as some of Mailer’s critics claimed) similar to the dialogue in Chapter 6 of ''American Dream'' between Rojack and his heroine Cherry, a dialogue that repeats much of what Mailer wrote in ''Lipton’s'' about the struggle between Soul and Society. | |||
During the writing of ''An American Dream'', Mailer was in a state of personal crisis once again, perhaps even worse than that during his writing of ''Lipton’s''. Looking back on that period in ''Existential Errands'' (1972), Mailer described it as one of the lowest, despairing points of his life. The tone of ''The Presidential Papers'' reflects that crisis, as ''Lipton’s'' reflects the earlier one, but his collections of poems ''Deaths for the Ladies (and other disasters)'' (1962) strikes the tone even more emphatically. His failing marriage to Adele ended with her stabbing in 1960 during a drunken fight, his 1962 marriage to Lady Jeanne Campbell had collapsed, and in late 1964 he had married Beverly Bentley. Although he had found his voice, he was still a man who had not yet come through. ''An American Dream'' can be read as a fictionalized extension of ''Lipton’s'', another public extension and development. But this time, in ''American Dream'', with all the archetypal figures and dialogues of mythopoetic art, the unconscious material is fully fleshed out in narrative. It does the novel no disservice to argue that it is a deeply if partially autobiographical plunge into powerful unconscious material and filled with figures who test, threaten, and help the hero in his extreme state of “emotional exhaustion and existential disorientation” during his quest for renewal. Mailer described the novel’s originality as his attempt to write “the dramatic history of a man’s soul over thirty-two hours . . . a time of intense despair.”{{Sfn|Mailer|2014|p=350}}{{efn|See letter to Eiichi Yamanishi, June3,1965, {{harvtxt|Mailer|2014|p=350}}. ''An American Dream'', especially, rewards archetypal analysis as a story of the classic hero’s journey (crisis-descent-return), a quest and battle for wholeness arising out of traumatic psychic disruption. At the same time, it represents the commonplace, almost banal, reading experience of the much-worked-over conventions of crime fiction and the familiar elements of the mythic heroic quest. But it is this very narrative mundanity that also makes the novel one of Mailer’s most mythopoetic. As Mailer put it in his April 23, 1965, letter to John Aldridge, “The narrative clichés were chosen precisely because I felt they had been despised so long that a novelistic magic had returned to them.”{{sfn|Mailer|2014|p=346}} }} | |||
Two years later, Mailer writes a novel of a very different kind that nonetheless carries forth the themes first arising out of ''Lipton’s Journal''. ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' (1967) is Mailer’s Swiftian-satirical, libidinous, Dionysian, darkly humorous rant, complete with mythic rituals, dialogues, and confrontations among archetypal figures. It is Mailer’s rant against the status quo of the military-industrial society that peaked in the 1960s. A spontaneous rant in the form of an inspired tour de force of youthful alienation from a murderous, hyper-technological society that desacralizes all elements of the ancient hunt ritual in a rapacious desire for complete domination over man and nature. It is the cry of Mailer’s soul-rage (embodied in the trickster-fool narrator D.J., “disk jockey to the world”). Mailer’s rage expresses his homeodynamic “er” (the vital force of his unconscious, as he describes the “er” in ''Lipton’s'') pitted against a corporate America that chose devastating technological warfare in a far-off Asian jungle. Warfare America would eventually lose. The satirical obscenity in the novel is nothing compared to the obscene lies and acts that enabled the war in Vietnam and took more than three million lives (half a Holocaust) and wasted millions of other lives of survivors and their families. Back in 1955 in ''Lipton’s'' Mailer also had been already trying out part of his narrative strategy in ''Vietnam''? That is, his theory of human beings as “receivers and senders of electric waves”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/January 3, 1955/174|#174]]}} and of the radio as providing “an ear” into one’s unconscious, “a vital experience longed for,” giving us “electric communication.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/344|#344]]}} Mailer went so far as to propose in ''Lipton’s'' that his wife Adele could be “a hipster-lady” if she could “m.c.” her own radio program.{{Sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/February 22, 1955/681|#681]]}} Adele, thereby, might be seen as an early prototype in Mailer’s mind for the narrator of ''Vietnam?'' as a D.J. who beams her/his “grassed out” hipster rant across the collective “magnetic-electro fief” to the American ear. | |||
Although after ''Vietnam?'' Mailer would give up fiction per se for a decade, ''The Armies of the Night'' (1968)—again with brio, élan, and outrageous humor—is more than a little filled with Mailer’s continuing self-analysis, with personal tests of courage and displays of incapacity, with analytical insights into various Mailerian personae, and with new rebellious energy in Mailer’s more intuitive, more Melvillian, post-1950s style. In short, the self-analysis begun in ''Lipton’s'' and carried forward into the autobiographical introductions in ''Advertisements'' continues here. He even takes up the question of obscenity so prevalent (and apparently so troublesome) in the literary satire of ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' The real obscenity in American life is done to humanity and nature by those politicians and corporation executives who are “perfectly capable of burning unseen women and children in the Vietnamese jungles, yet feel a large displeasure . . . at the generous use of obscenity in literature and in public.”{{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=47}} | |||
But ''Armies'', more than ''An American Dream'' or ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'', reads like the work of a man who has come through. Mailer discovers in an event filled with absurdity, compromise, and mass movements, hope for a renaissance of integrated consciousness. The book is a record of a war, a war between a dead world and a living one, during the “long dark night of the soul” in America. Mailer from the start realizes he had been dragging his own bad image around like a sarcophagus, that he has often been his own worst enemy, that he has been a man of self-defeating unintegrated polarities. In Book I, “History as Novel,” he plays both observer and actor, and it is as actor that his flawed personae emerge. But in Mailer’s flaws lie his strengths; he becomes a fool-hero, a persona not unlike D.J.’s outraged fool, full of comic flaws and disproportions, but nonetheless encouraging and participating in the symbolic rites and revels that, in ''Armies'', confront the center of military-industrial-technological power, the Pentagon. As a fool-figure, both absurd and prophetic, Mailer assumes the potentialities of that mythic character of universal dimensions, as Enid Welsford points out in ''The Fool'', based on a long history and mythology of fools as agents of human emancipation from stifling order, from leviathan states and their representatives. The fool’s wisdom is not of the intellect but of the spirit; he draws from mankind the self’s inner antagonism against the oppressive social order. In one incarnation, the holy fool, he represents a receding of the “logical soul” or consciousness and advances the inspired, irrational soul. Satire is one of his natural modes of expression.{{sfn|Welsford|1935|pp=315–319}} He is, then, a representative of what Mailer called back in 1955 homeostasis, the ranting, romping enemy of sociostasis. Especially as he observes the antagonistic battles, rites, and rituals of the demonstrators in Book II, Mailer realizes he is witnessing an historical moment when “the radiance of some greater heroic hours may have come nonetheless to shine along ''the inner space'' [Mailer’s emphasis] and caverns of the freaks . . . . some refrain from all the great American rites of passage. . . .” Despite their flaws the protesters, reinvigorating Dionysian symbolic warfare in a “crazy time” of history, have found the endurance and courage “in a painful spiritual test” where “some part of the man has been born again, and is better.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|pp=280–281}} Mailer too has been changed: “he felt one suspicion of a whole man closer to that freedom from dread which occupied the inner drama of his years . . . than when he had come to Washington four days ago.”{{sfn|Mailer|1967|pp=212–213}} | |||
Mailer seems to have discovered in his march on the Pentagon and in his writing about it new energy and a new faith in nonfiction, the genre that would consume his next decade. By his immersion in historical experience he discovered the primordial order of energizing archetypal ritual, he discovered wholeness and purpose in a world apparently without wholeness and purpose, and he discovered that through the unifying force of his art he could give meaning to the events of his time. Mailer discovered in writing ''Armies'', therefore, that imagination and reality can unite to produce a new foundation for narrative structure and theme and a new complication in his relationship to his characters and material. Enlightened by Mailer’s previously private journal, I’d like to propose that Mailer’s books of the seventies through the nineties might be read profitably anew with a full recognition of the extended experiments in individuation, private and published, in which Mailer engaged from 1955 through 1968. | |||
== Part II: Mailer and Jazz == | |||
{{quote|[Author’s note: This portion of the essay was delivered in an earlier draft at the 2017 Mailer Society Conference in Sarasota, Florida. As people filed into the room, I played [https://youtu.be/aygDDPHEJf4 Sonny Stitt’s “Autumn in New York,”] a Stitt tune Mailer loved and which played at the Mailer Memorial Tribute at Carnegie Hall in April of 2008. This rendition is available on Stitt’s CD ''Personal Appearance'', track 3. At the end of my presentation I played [https://youtu.be/n03T5y8aQok Dizzy Gillespie’s “We Love to Boogie,”] available on his CD entitled ''School Days'', track 10. Both are also available on YouTube.]}} | |||
During the thirteen weeks spent composing his private journal of self-analysis between December of 1955 and March of 1956, Mailer recorded his discovery of jazz as one of the most significant vehicles to tap into his libidinous, instinctive, and liberated self as an artist. Mailer considered and analyzed many topics that might open pathways into his deepest self: language and style, sexuality, Wilhelm Reich, gender and bisexuality (close to Jung on our inner gender duality), the Holocaust, humor, hip, courage, Marx, and the visual arts among them. Any of these topics will reward further analysis of Mailer’s journal, but jazz music will be my practical focus here as one of the most important topics as Mailer prepared himself to emerge from the 1950s a rebel writer whose language can now be as much or more concerned with rhythm and sound as it used to be concerned with literal sense. | |||
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* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1967 |title=Why Are We in Vietnam? |location=New York |publisher=Putnam |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1967 |title=Why Are We in Vietnam? |location=New York |publisher=Putnam |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Singer |first=June |date=1972 |title=The Boundaries of the Soul |url= |location=Garden City, NJ |publisher=Doubleday |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Singer |first=June |date=1972 |title=The Boundaries of the Soul |url= |location=Garden City, NJ |publisher=Doubleday |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last= | * {{cite book |last=Welsford |first=Enid |date=1935 |title=The Fool |url= |location=New York |publisher=Farrar and Rinehart |ref=harv }} | ||
{{Refend}} | {{Refend}} | ||