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

Written by
Robert J. Begiebing

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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.

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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.]

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URL: http://prmlr.us/mr12beg

“ The modern mind has forgotten those old truths that speak of the death of the old man and the making of a new one, of spiritual rebirth and similar old-fashioned “mystical absurdities.” My patient, being a scientist of today, was more than once seized by panic when he realized how much he was gripped by such thoughts. He was afraid of becoming insane, whereas the man of two thousand years ago would have welcomed such dreams and rejoiced in the hope of a magical rebirth and renewal of life. But our modern attitude looks back proudly upon the mists of superstition and of medieval or primitive credulity and entirely forgets that it carries the whole living past in its lower stories of the skyscraper of rational consciousness. Without the lower stories our mind is suspended in mid air. No wonder it gets nervous. The true history of the mind is not preserved in learned volumes but in the living mental organism of everyone. ” — Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion

During 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 1: 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.

Mailer’s self-analysis through Lipton’s Journal was transformational and foundational; it would become the key to all his future work, beginning in the 1960s. Reading it, we witness both the how and the why of Mailer’s personal transformation. Mailer began Lipton’s Journal during a turbulent and disappointing time in his life—after the collapse of his first marriage and the bleak reception of Barbary Shore, and in the midst of his anguished attempt to find a publisher for his third novel, The Deer Park. “For the first time in my life,” Mailer writes in journal entry #157, “I have come to realize that I, too, could go mad or commit suicide.” He recognizes that Barbary Shore and The Deer Park had expressed his few ideas, “only through great pain, and the most stubborn depression . . . .” That The Deer Park “is an enormous lie,” and that he must break free of such dishonesty and such worrying over “bad receptions for my books” because such worries tend to make him “go on and try to be more dishonest at an even higher level,” rather than becoming a rebel artist connected to an independent, whole self. “I am analyzing myself in order to become a real rebel, not just an adjusted rebel.”

Mailer found his journal to be “a refuge. . . giving him a clean feeling.” He began to see that, “Only through understanding myself can I come to create . . . . As I understand myself . . . so I can waste less time.” He was on a quest through self-analysis for potential sources of rebellion against the claustrophobia he was feeling about his life as a rejected, perhaps even failed, artist. “The Deer Park is a failure, but I have discovered myself,” he writes, and adds that he will no longer need “to protect myself against quitting the values of the world.” His self-analytical journey in Lipton’s would be his turning point, the source of his personal transformation. He sees himself as “shoving off into a total re-evaluation of everything . . . . I must trust what my instincts tell me is good rather than what the world says is good.” In the same entry, Mailer notes that he considers The Naked and the Dead to be an “imposture” he tried to hide behind, but he now is committed to going forward. He wants his work now to become less derivative, more rebellious and outrageous, more instinctual and deeper, foretelling not only Advertisements for Myself, but An American Dream, Why Are We in Vietnam? and The Armies of the Night in the coming decade. Mailer also believes such “self-analysis will make me a happier more effective rebel . . .because I will be less afraid.” “I believe I’m going to come out of this bigger than I went in.”

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Works Cited

• Begiebing, Robert J. (1980). Acts of Regeneration: Allegory and Archetype in the Work of Norman Mailer. Columbia: U of Missouri Press.
• Jung, C. G. (1963). Jaffee, Aniela, ed. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Pantheon Books.
• — (2009). Shamdasani, ed. The Red Book: Liber Novus, A Readers’ Edition. New York: W. W. Norton.
• — (1966). The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature. Bollingen Series XX. Translated by Hull, R. F. C. Princeton: Princeton UP.
• — (1966a). Two Essays on Analytical Psychology. Bollingen Series XX. Translated by Hull, R. F. C. Princeton: Princeton UP.
• Lee, Michael (January 2007). "Norman Mailer Invokes the Devil, to Take on Hitler". Cape Cod’s Literary Voice. 6 (18): 4–5, 19–20.
• Mailer, Norman (1959). Advertisements for Myself. New York: Putnam.
• — (1965). An American Dream. New York: Dial.
• — (1968). The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History. New York: The New American library.
• — (1966). Cannibals and Christians. New York: Dial.
• — (1955). The Deer Park. New York: Putnam.
• — (n.d.). Lennon, J. Michael; Mailer, Susan, eds. Lipton’s Journal. Manuscript.
• — (2014). Lennon, J. Michael, ed. Selected Letters of Norman Mailer. New York: Random House.
• — (1967). Why Are We in Vietnam?. New York: Putnam.
• Singer, June (1972). The Boundaries of the Soul. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday.
• Wellsford, Enid (1935). The Fool. New York: Farrar and Rinehart.