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

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« The Mailer ReviewVolume 12 Number 1 • 2018 »
Written by
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

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,”[1] 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.[2] “I am analyzing myself in order to become a real rebel, not just an adjusted rebel.”[3]

Mailer found his journal to be “a refuge. . . giving him a clean feeling.”[4] He began to see that, “Only through understanding myself can I come to create . . . . As I understand myself . . . so I can waste less time.”[5] 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.”[6] His self-analytical journey in Lipton’s would be his turning point, the source of his personal transformation.[7] 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.”[8] 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.”[9] “I believe I’m going to come out of this bigger than I went in.”[10]

Mailer was opening himself to—was indeed ardently seeking—a means of integrating, of better balancing, the powers of his conscious and unconscious life. He was seeking rapprochement between the two. He was seeking, therefore, an integration or “individuation” of psyche. In “The Relations between Ego and the Unconscious,” in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, Jung defines individuation as “embracing our innermost . . . . becoming one’s own self . . . . coming into selfhood or self-realization.”[11] “The unconscious is a process,” Jung writes in his autobiography (Memories, Dreams, Reflections), “and . . . the psyche is transformed or developed by the relation of the ego to the contents of the unconscious,” which contents in humanity’s “collective life . . . has left its deposit principally in the various religious systems and their changing symbols.”[12] Jungian therapist and scholar June Singer, in The Boundaries of the Soul, emphasizes the psychological dynamic of growth and change nicely: “The starting point of understanding the analytic process is the concept of the psyche as a self-regulating system in which consciousness and the unconscious are related in a compensatory way.” Singer, as we’ll soon see, could have been describing Mailer and his journal when she adds that as the “resources of the unconscious” integrate with consciousness, the conscious psyche can release theattitudes, modes of behavior, that are no longer necessary or desirable,” realizing the individual potential “which has somehow gotten lost.”[13] (My emphasis.)

In his own journal of self-analysis, Jung demonstrates his motivations and processes in search of a more integrated self,[a] a quest not unlike Mailer’s own forty years later. Jung’s more extensive journal, first composed in a series of six small “Black Books,” began at the end of 1913, on the eve of the first world war and after he had parted ways with his mentor Freud, a stressful time when Jung, much like Mailer, feared he was susceptible to a nervous breakdown. In his autobiography Jung describes his feelings as he embarked on his journal as “uncertainty” and “disorientation,” as if he were living “under constant pressure” and in a “state of tension” and “psychic disturbance.” He experienced “a feeling of panic” and became “afraid of losing command of myself.” He then started his journal as “a voluntary confrontation with the unconscious as a scientific experiment” on himself. “I was in effect writing letters to the anima” or “the soul, in a primitive sense,” to “she who communicates the images of the unconscious to conscious mind.”[16] Jung’s journal itself demonstrates his non-linear process, continued off and on with greatest intensity until June of 1917, when he began to understand the material arising out of his experiment. In his earliest journal entries, Jung describes his “unbearable inner longing” for something more than his professional accomplishments, some potential enrichment of his soul, an enrichment he has “long discarded.” He felt as if he were “half a man” stuck in his own time.[17] The inexplicable brooding darkness he felt eventually manifests in the reality of world war, and by 1914 he comes to believe that wars, as with any human conflict, are an external projection of the unbalanced duality within human beings. That inner struggle, that imbalance, is “the wellspring of the great war.”[18]

For many years thereafter, Jung revised, added commentary and graphic images, extended the journal, and eventually produced a single text of his entire, decades-long journal in a folio calligraphic version, bound in red leather, but unpublished until the twenty first century as The Red Book: Liber Novus, A Reader’s Edition. Jung’s experiment in self-analysis was for him a frightening confrontation with his unconscious, that potent and creative layer of the psyche. In one of his dialogues with his soul, Jung was clear about his fear of such a journey into the depths: “You dread the depths; I [the Soul] should horrify you, since the way of what is to come leads through it.” Opening to the deepest layers of your psyche allows “the dark flood of chaos to flow into your order and meaning.”[19] But through several dialogues, Jung decides to trust his soul “even if you lead me through madness.” If you enter the world of the soul, you are “like a madman.”[20] Later, he describes the process of opening himself to his psychic depths as “a civil war in me.”[21] Part of the fear is also a lack of easy understanding as the inner material first reveals itself, “the meaning is dark to me.”[22] Once he has the opportunity to reflect on the journal, he comes to see the need for integrating conscious and unconscious psyche—the process of individuation. Similarly, Mailer writes in his journal that “I will journey into myself with the hope that I, the adventurer, can come out without being destroyed. But I am terrified. I don’t think I have ever been so frightened in my life.”[23]

To aid his journey into deepest self, Mailer used cannabis (hence the title “Lipton’s” or “tea,” as well as the moniker—General Marijuana—he soon gave himself in his The Village Voice column, later collected in Advertisements for Myself. “Lipton’s seems to open up one to one’s unconscious,”[24] he writes. Cannabis “destroys the sense . . . of society and opens the soul.”[25] He continues, “Lipton’s is a great aid given my intellectual and verbal mind” to “my great adventure.”[23] Mailer compares smoking tea to hypnosis because it “opens man to his soul, immediately, powerfully, and perhaps irrevocably.”[7] “Administered properly,” he goes on, “Lipton’s has excellent therapeutic qualities,” allowing him to “ideate so profusely” because it releases his “normal state of muscular tension.”[26]

One can’t help being struck by the way Mailer discovers what Jung called “the collective unconscious,” that layer of psyche deeper and broader than Freud’s version of the personal unconscious. Freud’s unconscious is, essentially, a layer beneath consciousness developed through the experiences and environments of one’s life, whereas Jung’s unconscious includes a layer below the personal that taps into the larger, archaic history of humanity as evinced in world mythologies through archetypes—those similar mythic forms (characters, quests, images, and tropes) appearing in the record across many cultures, traditions, and epochs. Jung’s sense of the collective unconscious, then, taps into myth-forming structural elements of the unconscious. In 1909 Jung began to shift his research to what he believed to be that larger phylogenetic layer of psyche consisting of mythological images that he analyzed, over decades and voluminous works, though comparative anthropology. He used his studies—stimulated by his journal—to transform not only his own life but psychotherapy, especially his treatment of his own patients, through the creative use of those primordial images that arise not only in art, literature, and religion, but in our fantasies and dreams, as well. June Singer gives a proper emphasis to the images and figures from the unconscious as actors in “the archetypal drama” that move us from psychic “separation and loss of integrity and despair” and lead ultimately to “the drama of transformation . . .and regeneration.”[27]

Near the start of his own journal Mailer also writes of his belief in a “stratum of the collective unconscious” that connects us all “independent of [one’s] will.”[28] His earliest theories suggest many layers of the unconscious, each one buried deeper in the psyche and closer to what he was at the time calling “homeostasis” (the deeper layer of illogical, intuitive, and irrational power in the psyche),[29] which opposes “sociostasis” (the layer of psyche where reason becomes rationalization and serves as “one of the bulwarks of society”).[30] Mailer suggests that sociostasis and homeostasis are engaged in “trench warfare” as the “condition of the soul,” and it is “the deep collective truths of the soul” that will provide the “clue” to the time to come.[31]

Indeed, the conflict between the soul and society, which echoes Emerson as much as it does Jung, is the central theme and insight of Lipton’s Journal. Mailer writes of “the cry of the soul against society” and “the anger of the soul” forced to “travel the roads of the social world.”[32] Soul and society comprise but one dualism Mailer examines throughout his journal, the extreme opposition to the soul is totalitarianism, the greatest state of imbalance. He places “the soul’s insights against the world’s insights.”[33] The individual’s soul is “part of the collective soul” that society opposes.[34] Mailer goes so far as to declare that a writer’s “style gives the clue . . . to what happened to the soul.”[1] Mailer also concluded, as Jung did, that although the underlying symbolic structures of the archetypes endure, the symbolic forms are colored by, shaped by, the society in which one lives: “No matter how deeply we dip into . . . our collective wisdom,” Mailer writes, “the particular insights we return with to the world are colored by our S,” our dominant society.[35] Most people probably know of the symbols and archetypes that unfold across millennia through the work of Joseph Campbell, but Campbell based much of his own work on his predecessor Jung, even if he carried Jung’s work further.

Like Mailer’s journal, Jung’s is full of raw material that can be difficult to judge or comprehend, but the editor for the published version of The Red Book, Sonu Shamdasani (Professor of Jung History at the Center for the History of Psychological Disciplines at University College of London) is an excellent guide to Jung’s. In his nearly 100-page introduction, Shamdasani points out that The Red Book depicts the rebirth of God in the soul, a “hermeneutic experiment” not unlike Yeats’ automatic writing experiments that published as A Vision reveal the creation of an individual cosmology.[36] Although Yeats’ cosmology was fully formed once published, as was William Blake’s in his illuminated works, Mailer reveals in Lipton’s merely the seeds of his own cosmology, seeds that will begin to bear fruit in “The White Negro” (1957), “Hip, Hell, and the Navigator” (1958, 1959), and his work of the 1960s. (In “Navigator,” published in Advertisements, we encounter Mailer’s emerging cosmology, which posits a God in danger of dying and in existential battle with a Devil—as two “warring element[s] of the universe” that place mankind in a “staggering moral” position, to be navigated by unconscious messages to consciousness.[37] Like Blake, but unlike Mailer’s mere doodling, Jung adds extensive drawings and paintings in the process of developing his integration of soul and consciousness, individuality and society. “The overall theme of the book,” Shamdasani writes of Jung’s Red Book, “is how Jung regains his soul and overcomes the contemporary malaise of spiritual alienation . . . . a new worldview in the form of psychological and theological cosmology . . . . a prototype of Jung’s conception of the individuation process. . . .”[38]

Jung would have his patients follow a journaling process similar to his own, complete with drawings, to illuminate dreams and images arising out of their confrontations with the collective unconscious. As therapist, Jung helped his patients toward self-transformation by enabling them to interpret and integrate into the self the unconscious materials (fantasies and dreams, often in dialogue form) called forth by the creative journaling process he called “active imagination.”[39] The creative goal, as Shamdasani puts it, is to use the mythopoeic imagination (a “higher wisdom”) that has been lost to the modern age in order to “reconcile the spirit of the time with the spirit of depth.”[40][b] The fusion effected by individuation, then, inspires a break with social conformity, bound by time.[43] Individuation is, therefore, a transcendent function for the individual, a function Mailer was obviously seeking throughout Lipton’s.

Mailer’s desire, as he later said in Advertisements for Myself, to find “the courage to pay the high price of full consciousness . . . . and to make a revolution in the consciousness of our time”[44] was necessarily based first on making a revolution in his own consciousness through Lipton’s in the mid-1950s.[c] His work in the sixties represents not only a significant change in style, but the breaking through of a new self, a self that includes qualities his former self lacked and that now give “rise to images assumed worthless from the rational perspective,” as Shamdasini describes the phenomenon. Shamdasini then adds, “The first possibility of making use of them is artistic.”[46] The archetypal imagery in Mailer’s fiction, as in any archetypal art, is imagery that can educate the spirit of an age, off-setting its one-sidedness. It is art that can synthesize dualities by resetting the balance against imbalance and disproportion. “If society is allowed total reason, it will destroy itself,” Mailer writes. “I am a revolutionary because only by revolution, and probably not political revolution, can the S [Society/ Sociostasis] be set back . . . and put into serious retreat, thus opening larger H [Homeostasis or later in the journal “Homeodynamism”] gambits for future generations.”[47] Mailer argues that without the counterpoise of homeodynamic psychic force, Reason becomes Society’s Rationalization, “so H turns to the illogical, the intuitive, the irrational.”[30] The dialectic he was drawn to he found in himself: “I am the rationalist who is drawn to mystery.”[48] For Mailer it is “the extraordinary contradiction of my personality . . . that gave me strength as a writer.”[49]

In early 1955 while waiting for the galley proofs of The Deer Park, Mailer comes to understand that Lipton’s Journal is showing him the way forward as a rebel artist. “Doing my analysis in the way proper for me . . . is through creativity—taking into self, synthesizing.”[50] He comes to see that in our psychic duality (“the polarity, the double”) the conscious and the unconscious reflect one another in the manner of “a dialectic.” Mailer puts it this way: “What I believe is true of psyche and of dialectic” is that “as we plumb . . . the unconscious, states of consciousness appear.”[51] As a psychotherapist, June Singer describes the therapeutic process, likewise, as the “dialectic between ego and the unconscious” that has the potential to “result in a transformation of the personality.”[52] Jung called this nourishing and rebalancing of consciousness “mysterium coniunctionis”—wholeness of self through the synthesis of opposites. “My mind is deeply dialectical,” Mailer later writes. “The whole journal has been a dialectical illumination.”[53] Right to the end, this duality/dialectical theme reappears in Mailer’s journal. “We dip into our er, our collective wisdom,” Mailer says, and return to the world “with insights . . . colored by our S.”[35] (“Er” becomes one of Mailer’s words for vital force in the unconscious, just as S becomes his shorthand for Society/Sociostasis). This vital duality within us, this “lore of the mind-body . . . is the source of all creativity to us.”[54] The exploratory processes, his adventures, in Lipton’s will become ever more the processes of his later books, just as archetypal imagery will reflect that creative narrative process. “The novel goes from writer’s-thought to reader’s-thought by the use of an oblique (obliging) symbol, expression, or montage,” Mailer writes. The creative process must be authentic (that is, autonomously archetypal), fed by the unconscious, not constructed by the rational mind alone. And that is why Mailer says he can’t write a fully outlined novel knowing “what I want to say,” because “it comes out too thin, too ideated. My best scenes are the ones where I didn’t know what I was doing.”[55] Those interested in pursuing a detailed analysis of how archetypes function and cohere throughout Mailer’s writings (up to 1980) may refer to Begiebing (1980), Acts of Regeneration: Allegory and Archetype in the Work of Norman Mailer.

. . .

Notes

  1. The “self” in Jung’s psychology “is produced through the synthesis of conscious and unconscious elements of the personality,” as Jung explained in “On the Psychology of the Child Archetype.”[14] The self is therefore a potential for and a result of the individuation process. Self is the wholeness of psyche or “the subject of my totality”; whereas the “I” is “the subject of my consciousness.” The “persona” is the “conscious attitude,” essentially the mask we wear as social beings.[15]
  2. The spirit of the time (more commonly the Zeitgeist) is the general spirit in which we act and think as we live in our era; the spirit of depth, Jung writes, “evokes everything that man cannot” and speaks “in riddles,” often in dreams, “the guiding words of the soul.”[41] The spirit of depth is thereby the gateway to the soul, the nourishing unconscious. But out of balance, the unconscious is less nourishing than dangerous: “The spirit of this time is ungodly, the spirit of the depths is ungodly, balance is godly.” Understanding this, Jung adds, “is how I overcame madness.”[42]
  3. Speaking of the collapse of former civilizations and the old order in World War I, Jung too understood that no social revolution is possible without internal revolution first in individuals’ consciousness. He put it this way: “Too many still look outwards . . . . But still too few look inwards, to their own selves, and still fewer ask themselves whether the ends of human society might not best be served if each man tried to abolish the old order in himself, and to practice in his own person and in his own state those precepts . . . which he preaches at every street corner, instead of always expecting these things of his fellow men.”[45]

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, Sonu, 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.