The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018/Lipton’s Journal: Mailer’s Quest for Wholeness and Renewal: Difference between revisions

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 {{byline|last=Begiebing|first=Robert J.|abstract=Norman Mailer kept a journal of self-analysis for approximately four months in the mid-1950s. This record was called ''[[Lipton’s Journal]]''. It took a Jungian approach to analyze Mailer’s life and work and the ways in which they might be modified. Further, it records his discovery of jazz as an important pathway to artistic renewal. Mailer’s self-analysis through ''Lipton’s Journal'' was transformational and foundational and it would become the key to all his future work, beginning in the 1960s. Reading the journal, we witness both the ''how'' and the ''why'' of Mailer’s personal transformation.|note=The manuscript I am citing here is the manuscript edited by J. Michael Lennon and Susan Mailer, which they generously provided to me. My heartfelt thanks to Mike and Susan, especially to Michael Lennon who commented at length on this essay during its development. The journal-entry numbering system I follow is theirs, where each numbered entry Mailer made is re-numbered according to the editors’ system for a proposed, compressed edition of the journal to be published in the future and to include the Mailer-Lindner correspondence. [This system has been updated to correspond with this site’s project. —Ed.]|url=http://prmlr.us/mr12beg}}
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 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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+How did jazz become one of the most important vehicles for Mailer’s literary, psychological, and even spiritual transformation? Mailer was tone deaf and never played an instrument. Nonetheless, in the fifties he and his new wife Adele went on weekends with friends into such Village and Harlem jazz clubs as The Village Vanguard, Five Spot, and Jazz Gallery. Mailer met some of the musicians and ultimately became friends with saxophonists Sonny Stitt and Sonny Rollins. Mailer’s 1957 essay “The White Negro” (collected in ''Advertisements for Myself'') is but one product of Mailer’s jazz experiences. In “White Negro” Mailer writes that the “presence of Hip as a working philosophy in the sub-worlds of American life is probably due to jazz ... its subtle but so penetrating influence on an avant-garde generation.” Jazz, he continues, is the black man’s connection to survival through “the art of the primitive,” the voice of the all the highs and lows of his existence, the music of orgasm, good or bad, the communication of “instantaneous existential states.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=340–341}} The jazz musician “is the cultural mentor of a people.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=348}} ''Lipton’s Journal'' is the very seedbed of such ideas expressed in that notorious essay, as indeed Mailer’s journal reveals the processes of germination for one writer’s acts of self-creation and regeneration. Over the length of ''Lipton’s'', we see the direct influence jazz musicians had on Mailer himself, teaching him some things he was ready to learn, or relearn, about existential art, about taking risks whether you succeed or fail, about art as anti-totalitarian force, and about the sound and rhythms of improvisational language.
+He writes of his coming to understand that “jazz consists almost entirely of surprising one’s expectations” and that “the artistry lies in the degree to which each successive expectation is startled.” It is an art form that “has risen to the crisis of modern painting” by “changing the audience’s expectations nightly . . . . a self-accelerating process,” that is not without risk and is now blending all the arts.{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 1, 1954/8|#8]]}}
+The surprising risks jazz musicians take display the existential nature of their art, through the immediacy of improvisational creation. “Instead of trying to understand the beauty of jazz,” Mailer writes, “one should understand it as something which is constantly triumphing and failing.” Victory is simply the “effort to keep musically alive.” To flesh out these insights, he offers the example of Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond improvising together “entirely off on their own with nothing but their nervous systems to sustain them wandering through jungles of invention with society continually ambushing them.” Brubeck, Mailer adds, might “wander into a cliché, then investigate it, pull it apart . . . put it together into something new.” Sometimes Brubeck succeeds, sometimes he fails, but whether he fails or succeeds he accepts the risk and creates “a communication between the soul and the world.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/47|#47]]}} Caution is the “high priest of society,” Mailer continues, and “swing is a distillation of competitiveness in social life,” but “jazz is the soul.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/50|#50]]}} Here Mailer echoes a quip often attributed to Duke Ellington when asked about the difference between swing music of the 30s and 40s (the pop music of Mailer’s generation) and jazz: Swing is business, jazz is art.
+Mailer more than once compares playing jazz to bullfighting, another existential art, and posits that jazz, bullfighting, and cosmopolitanism are the three “culture bearers of the hipster,” culture bearers that “Stalinism [i.e., totalitarianism] will continue to war against.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/57|#57]]}} Mailer will follow up this thought later, writing, that Be-bop “is a hybrid art (like opera)” expressing a distrust of society, a sort of decadence that allows the soul of the musician to be expressed.{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/February 1, 1955/422|#422]]}} These thoughts lead Mailer into meditations on the language of jazz and the hipster, the language of anti-totalitarianism. Hipster speech contains “fucking rhythms . . . almost as powerful as music.” About the be-bop jazz chorus, he writes, “You get me bee-bopping too.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/January 3, 1955/186|#186]]}} It was the energized be-bop form of jazz in the early fifties that helped him feel his way beyond “the sweet clumsy anxious to please Middle-class Jewish boy.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/January 3, 1955/187|#187]]}}
+As he would later say in “The White Negro” about hip language, Mailer first says in his journal that there is a poetic diction in improvisational be-bop, especially, where the words, whether sung as jazz scat or played on a horn, “can mean two or three things at the same time,” and may bring us all to a point where we “speak in the style of ''Finnegan’s Wake''.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/January 24, 1955/242|#242]]}} Be-bop he later writes “is the first popular and tentative expression of Joycean language . . . Which is why I prefer it to cool, which while technically advanced is nonetheless a retreat from a more advanced state of perception.”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/February 22, 1955/667|#667]]}} If Rojack in ''An American Dream'' might well represent Mailer’s first fictional hero as hipster and psychopath seeking regeneration, it is D.J. in ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' who, to my mind best, represents the jazzman or hipster’s improvisational, instinctual, free-flowing font of language and sound. ''Vietnam?'' is his hipster novel, his rebel novel, his be-bop novel, his most improvisational novel, that novel he said on several occasions was the only book that came to him on a wave of inspiration without the hard and dreadful labors so many of his other books required.
+Dizzy Gillespie, the trumpeting prophet of the be-bop style with a dizzying range, Mailer much admired, calling him a genius, and noting that jazz is “more creative, the more responsive to genius than classical” even if “it [jazz] is a degraded expression,” the only kind of expression left to genius in our time.{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/December 31, 1954/134|#134]]}} One thing Dizzy seems to have taught him appears shortly after his notes on the Diz: “I suspect,” Mailer writes, “that the frequency of sound has some relation to the depth of one’s ''unconscious''. As frequency is stepped up so the notes rise [as in the upper registers and limits of the trumpet or saxophone] . . . . Low notes are progressively more ''conscious''”{{sfn|Mailer|n.d.|loc=[[Lipton’s Journal/February 22, 1955/688|#688]]}} (my emphasis). So be-bop, especially in the highest ranges of an instrument, becomes yet another source, a hip source, into the unconscious of the artist, and perhaps of the listener. Jazz, then, became for Mailer one avenue into the unconscious and instinctual life, into rebellion, into existential and risky artistry. Into what—finally by 1959 in ''Advertisements for Myself''—would become Mailer’s own, true voice. And Dizzy, I’m going to speculate, is the one whose brash be-bop trumpet playing gave Mailer the clue to his famous line near the end of ''The Deer Park''. For Mailer found his voice and his rebellion in ''Lipton’s Journal'', in large part through jazz, and like Sergius O’Shaugnessy at the end of ''The Deer Park'', emerged better prepared “to blow against the walls of every power that exists, the small trumpet of his defiance.”{{Sfn|Mailer|1955|p=374}}
 ===Notes===