The Mailer Review/Volume 12, 2018/Lipton’s Journal: Mailer’s Quest for Wholeness and Renewal
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| « | The Mailer Review • Volume 12 Number 1 • 2018 | » |
Robert J. Begiebing
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
| “ | 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.
Citations
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.
