The Mailer Review/Volume 14, 2020/Mailer and Emerson: Lipton’s Journal and the Dissident Soul
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| « | The Mailer Review • Volume 14 Number 1 • 2020 | » |
Robert J. Begiebing
Abstract: Norman Mailer and Ralph Waldo Emerson both used their journals to think through the concepts that would inform their future work. The journals of both authors, in short, demonstrate the mind in action, the creative energy of thinking. Emerson’s journals reveal a dialogue with oneself, as does Mailer’s Lipton’s Journal. It is as if both authors have a neo-Socratic faith that the seeds of truth are within us and are best elicited by interrogation (in this case self-interrogation) and free association. Socratic self-knowledge then becomes the inner truth that is the source of a philosophy—an approach to life and literary work—in opposition to the society within which one lives. The rebellious path to such a journal is through solitude.
URL: http://prmlr.us/mr14beg
| “ | The great day in the man is the birth of perception, which instantly throws him on the party of the Eternal. | ” |
| — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, May, 1859 | ||
Mailer opens Of a Fire on the Moon (1969) recalling his reaction of “horror” and “dread” at the news of Hemingway’s suicide. “Hemingway constituted the walls of the fort: Hemingway had given the power to believe you could still shout down the corridor of the hospital, live next to the breath of the beast, accept your portion of dread each day. Now the greatest living romantic was dead.”[1] The Romantic mantle Hemingway dropped at the moment of his suicide is something Mailer coveted at least as early as 1954–55 when he began his self-analysis through Lipton’s Journal, his effort to regenerate and transform himself after the failure of his work subsequent to The Naked and the Dead and the dissolution of his first marriage. Might not he, Mailer, after Hemingway’s death in 1961 become the greatest living Ro- mantic?
Citations
- ↑ Mailer 1971, pp. 3–4.
Works Cited
- Mailer, Norman (1971). Of a Fire on the Moon. New York: Random House.
