The Mailer Review/Volume 14, 2020/Mailer and Emerson: Lipton’s Journal and the Dissident Soul

From Project Mailer
< The Mailer Review‎ | Volume 14, 2020
Revision as of 18:14, 28 May 2021 by Grlucas (talk | contribs) (Added more. More to do.)
« The Mailer Review • Volume 14 Number 1 • 2020 »
Written by
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

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?

“I have always been the romantic masquerading as the realist,” Mailer writes in Lipton’s, as if in preparation for his future role seven years before Hemingway’s suicide. “That is what has given the peculiar tension . . . to my work. Now as I become aware that I am really an enormous romantic my work may suffer tremendously for some time.”[2][a] Later, Mailer adds: “I was the romantic sent out to discover realism—which is Naked. But once a realist, I had to become the realist going out to understand the romantic, which is my present state.”[3] Mailer might well have donned Hemingway’s mantle of Romantic rebellion to face the modern world and to face, near the end of the century, the post-modern pall descending like some dark night of the soul. Mailer’s prose, however, takes an alternative tack from his literary hero’s, reflecting instead (with a nod to Thomas Wolfe) the elaboration and orotundity of Melville, Coleridge, De Quincey, Ruskin, and Carlyle. These authors also believed in “God’s Broadsword” of “Almighty prose,” as Mailer put it in his introduction to the second edition of Death for the Ladies (and Other Disasters).[4] Mailer’s romanticism, moreover, echoes the British Romantic tradition not only in prose style but in theme as well. Like Emerson, Mailer sips from that font of British Romanticism William Blake. We only have to think, for example, of Mailer’s Blakean view of orthodoxy and fundamentalism as repression of creative libidinal energy; of Mailer’s development, like Blake’s, of an antinomian, personal cosmology in his investigations into good and evil (energy and entropy); of Mailer’s “rage” and “anger of the soul at being forced to travel the tortured contradictory roads of the social world,” as Mailer put it in Lipton’s;[5] of Mailer’s view that the nineteenth century ushered in the revolution against overweening Reason that led to his “hope that the future lies with the monsters and the mystics” whose “seemingly irrational” rebellion “only can fuck up the progress of the state”;[6] of Mailer’s metaphysics that, like Blake’s, does not dismiss the world as illusion but as shot through with eternity, with infinity in the present; and of Mailer’s vocation for creating art as an alternative for religious duty. In fact, the German and British Romantic movements deeply informed the American. Nonetheless, it is “in the American grain” that I want to focus my discussion of Mailer’s Emersonian Romanticism, as developed, largely, through the formative process of writing his self-analytical journal.[b]

The Dissident Soul

Both Mailer and Emerson 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, as Stephen Whicher described Emerson’s. I would like to recommend the old Riverside edition of Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson (1960) whose editor, Stephen Whicher, placed Emerson’s relevant journal entries (and some excerpts from relevant correspondence) before and after the famous essays and lectures Emerson eventually delivered to the public. My focus here will be on the published product of Emerson’s journals, rather than the journals themselves, as those well-known published artifacts are what entered the American literary consciousness, including Mailer’s.

Emerson’s journals do, of course, reveal a dialogue with oneself, as does Mailer’s Lipton’s. 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, as Emerson argued in “Experience”: “[I]n the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelation which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat; up again, old heart!”[8] In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson announces this theme of inner, rebellious self-reliance and revelation with greatest clarity.

Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue most in request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs . . . Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.[9]

That quotation might well serve as the epigraph to a published version of Lipton’s Journal. Here is the beating heart (and the heart’s renunciations) of Emersonian Romanticism, as it would be for Thoreau, Whitman, and Dickinson. And for Mailer.

The central theme running through Lipton’s is the conflict between the energies of the creative psyche or soul and repressive “caution . . . the high priest of society.”[10] For people “to live with their soul . . . means to war against society.”[11] Mailer returns again and again to his developing theories in Lipton’s about the conflict between what he terms “Homeostasis”—or later in entry #223, “Homeodynamism” (“the personal healthy rebellious and soul-ful expression of man,” or individual creative energy) and “Sociostasis” (the repressions of society, the “element in man placed there by society”). Mailer adds, “The tendency of society is to make all of mankind neurotic-conformist—the tendency of man, as viz. his modern heroes and celebrities, is to liberate the saint-psychopath present to some degree in everyone.”[12] Other Emersonian themes surface in Lipton’s (such as the hermaphroditic potential of the human psyche, the necessity of exaggerated expression to break through to one’s audience, and the law of life that one must grow and change, to suggest three examples). But what gives this rambling—often frustrating—document a degree of coherence is Mailer’s quest for the means to liberate the socially repressed psyche, above all his own.

Among his earliest journal entries Mailer sets the stage for his liberation theme: “So far as we act to fulfill the needs of society, we are actually no more than a part of the net with which society keeps men from developing. We have the illusion of action, of motion; in truth we are merely lines of cord in the net.”[13] When “society wins,” he continues, “the saint is ignored, the psychopath is shunned, and the purity of the human soul is concealed. We are returned to a world where we must be practical, mature, pluralistic, and confirmed in abysmal and false humilities—in return for agreeing to admit that we know nothing, we are offered the comforts, the securities, and the prestige of society.”[14] Society is “opposed to the soul . . . attempts to destroy the soul in order to maintain its stability”; society is “the concretion of the collective surrender of man’s will.” But “the soul fights back.” Unfortunately, the revolution of the soul “never took place. . . . those who had souls retreated, or gave themselves up to being the machines of society,” and “the polarity” of this soul-revolution is “totalitarianism.”[15] That totalitarian polarity of the soul is the force, the dark angel, Mailer would wrestle with for the rest of his life.

Mailer entitled his journal “Lipton’s” (tea, marijuana) because cannabis, “which destroys the sense of time also destroys the sense of society and opens the soul,” was his aid to deeper self-explorations and growth.[16] He is speaking here not of intimate personal relations, which cannabis can of course enhance, but of the oppressive Collective Society and its “war upon each individual.” He then gives the example of modern advertising as one means by which society “reaches deep into each man’s soul and converts a piece of it to society.” Advertising coopts the soul’s longing for “love and power, the two things the soul seeks for in life, legitimately, finely,” by attaching that longing to commodities, which tempt the soul to “enter its contract with society.”[17] Modern advertising becomes, for Mailer, but one soul-trapping tool of Emerson’s 20th-century joint-stock company.

. . .

Notes

  1. ↑ At the time of writing, I am using the edited manuscript version of Lipton’s Journal that J. Michael Lennon and Susan Mailer created, before a printed or electronic version was generally available. All parenthetical references beginning with the symbol # are from the numbering system Mailer used and that the editors revised in the edited manuscript version. [This system has been updated to correspond to the digital version of the journal found on this site. —Ed.]
  2. ↑ Other scholars have noted Emersonian attributes in Mailer’s works. But earlier scholars didn’t have access to Lipton’s Journal at the time of their writing. To take a few examples: Werge (1972) compares Mailer in Fire to an American tradition of pilgrimage and quest, including Winthrop, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Whitman; Edmundson (1990) looks at Mailer in that novel as exemplifying Romantic, Emersonian self-invention through ruin and regeneration (a version, after all, of the old Christian theme of disintegration and redemption); Middlebrook (1976) calls Mailer a “fully serious romantic” who has heeded Emerson’s admonition to avoid “the suicide” of imitation, and who embraced Emerson’s “ethic of courage and extreme expression,” or “heroic expression.” And Michael Cowen in “The Quest for Empowering Roots: Mailer and the American Literary Tradition,” connects Mailer to the American Renaissance, largely Herman Melville. But Cowen also points out that like Emerson and Whitman, Mailer in The Armies of the Night argues that “the key to democratic dreams is a religious dream—the citizenry’s often unconscious vision of its individual and collective bonds with transcendent powers—and that it takes an artist to turn that key. . . .” Moreover, in Cowen’s view Mailer’s explorations of karma and reincarnation “ride comfortably with Emerson’s celebration in ‘The Poet’ of the ‘cunning Proteus’ [who is] the essence of nature and art . . . . ‘[A]n American genius . . . with tyrannous eye . . . [who] saw in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods . . . in Homer.’ Even Gary Gilmore knows some Emerson.”[7]

Citations

  1. ↑ Mailer 1971, pp. 3–4.
  2. ↑ Mailer n.d., #229.
  3. ↑ Mailer n.d., #345.
  4. ↑ Mailer 1971a.
  5. ↑ Mailer n.d., #45.
  6. ↑ Mailer n.d., #332.
  7. ↑ Cowen 1986, pp. 157–159.
  8. ↑ Emerson 1960, p. 273.
  9. ↑ Emerson 1960, p. 149.
  10. ↑ Mailer n.d., #50.
  11. ↑ Mailer n.d., #155.
  12. ↑ Mailer n.d., #425.
  13. ↑ Mailer n.d., #25.
  14. ↑ Mailer n.d., #44.
  15. ↑ Mailer n.d., #59.
  16. ↑ Mailer n.d., #63.
  17. ↑ Mailer n.d., #64.

Works Cited

  • Begiebing, Robert J. (2018). "Lipton's Journal: Mailer's Quest for Wholeness and Renewal". The Mailer Review. 12 (1): 51–71. Retrieved 2021-05-25.
  • Cowen, Michael (1986). "The Quest for Empowering Roots: Mailer and the American Literary Tradition". In Lennon, J. Michael. Critical Essays on Norman Mailer. G. K. Hall. pp. 156–174.
  • Edmundson, Mark (1990). "Romantic Self-Creations: Mailer and Gilmore in The Executioner's Song". Contemporary Literature. 4: 434–447.
  • Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1960) [1957]. Whicher, Stephen E., ed. Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Riverside Press.
  • Geist, Stanley (1939). Herman Melville: The Tragic Vision and the Heroic Ideal. Octagon Books.
  • Kateb, George (1995). Emerson and Self-Reliance. Sage.
  • Lennon, J. Michael (2013). Norman Mailer: A Double Life. New York: Simon & Schuster.
  • — (1999). "A Conversation with Norman Mailer". New England Review. 20 (3): 138–148.
  • Mailer, Norman; Mailer, John Buffalo (2006). The Big Empty. New York: Nation Books.
  • Mailer, Norman; Lennon, J. Michael (2007). On God: An Uncommon Conversation. New York: Random House.
  • Mailer, Norman (1971a). Deaths for the Ladies (And Other Disaters) (2nd ed.). New American Library.
  • — (1997). The Gospel According to the Son. New York: Random House.
  • — (n.d.). Lennon, J. Michael; Mailer, Susan, eds. Lipton’s Journal. Manuscript.
  • — (1971). Of a Fire on the Moon. New York: Random House.
  • — (2014). Lennon, J. Michael, ed. Selected Letters of Norman Mailer. New York: Random House.
  • Matthiessen, F. O. (1941). The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. Oxford UP.
  • Middlebrook, Jonathan (1976). Mailer and the Times of His Time. Bay Books.
  • Pagels, Elaine (2018). Why Religion?. Harper Collins.
  • Storr, Anthony (1988). Solitude: A Return to the Self. The Free Press.
  • Werge, Thomas (October 1972). "An Apocalyptic Voyage: God and Satan, and the American Tradition of Norman Mailer's Of a Fire on the Moon". Review of Politics. 34: 108–128.
Retrieved from "https://projectmailer.net/index.php?title=The_Mailer_Review/Volume_14,_2020/Mailer_and_Emerson:_Lipton’s_Journal_and_the_Dissident_Soul&oldid=14708"