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 »
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.

For a novelist who, by 1954, is wondering whether he might be a failed artist, who is fighting depression and felt suicidal, Mailer’s evolving theories of homeostasis/dynamism in conflict with sociostasis become of central importance to his whole project of psychic and artistic renewal. He now finds himself disappointed with the derivative Naked and the Dead (“an imposter”), the abortive Barbary Shore, and the “enormous lie” and “failure” of The Deer Park.[18] By “imposter” Mailer is referring to his recognition that he was imitating his literary heroes in his most successful novel so far, a literary procedure Emerson often warned against. Emerson’s broader argument throughout Nature is for the individual to create an original relation to the universe; in “Self-Reliance” he proclaimed that “imitation is suicide”[19] and “insist on yourself; never imitate”;[20] in “The American Scholar” Emerson warns, “in a degenerate state, when the victim of society, he [the scholar] tends to become a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking.”[21] Imitation, for Emerson as for Mailer by the 1950s, becomes a type of literary failure.

By questioning his previous work, Mailer is also questioning the success or failure of his rebellious soul. “A novel is the record of a sociostatic retreat if it is a great or good novel. A bad novel is the record of a sociostatic advance.”[22] This is an attitude toward the novel since 1954 that Mailer would carry for the rest of his life, variously rephrasing the journal entry he made a half-century earlier. In The Big Empty (2006), for example, he would say: “The good novel, the serious novel, is antipathetic to corporate capitalism. The best seller is one of the props of corporate capitalism precisely because it’s an entertainment. . . . Well, every time there’s a page turner to read for too little, someone’s mind is being dulled. Even page-turners can get into interesting questions, but dependably, they will always veer away from moral exploration.”[23] The essence of genius, for a novelist, is “to make a voyage which is opposed to society. . . . He is always attacking society because he is always carrying further our knowledge of the Self.” And courage is the virtue most in demand for such self-knowledge and self-reliance: “What makes a genius” Mailer continues, “is his incredible courage, for he is a man who lives always in fear, and yet he continues.”[24] Such Emersonian courage, based on self-trust, is what inspires Mailer’s hope for rebellious transformation—his twentieth-century heroic adventure.

Emerson specified the soul as our inner resource of rebellion, a theme best expressed in his “Divinity School Address.” “In the soul then let the redemption be sought. Whenever a man comes, there comes revolution.” Those who “love to be blind in public . . . think society wiser than their soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world.”[25] Emerson then exhorts his Harvard audience of graduating seniors and their faculty mentors: “Oh my friends, there are resources in us on which we have not drawn. . . . All attempts to contrive a system are as cold as the new worship introduced by the French to the goddess of Reason. . . . Rather let the breath of new life be breathed by you through the forms already existing. For once you are alive, you shall find they all become plastic and new. The remedy to their deformity is first, soul, and second, soul, and evermore, soul.”[26] For his efforts, Emerson then had to deal with reviews and reactions to his words as negative as those Mailer had faced in the wake of Barbary Shore and The Deer Park, including the well-known troubles Mailer had in getting The Deer Park published. Emerson withstood the onslaught better than Mailer, by the testimony of his journals, as in Emerson’s August 31, 1838, journal entry: “Steady, steady. . . . Who are these murmurers, these haters, these revilers? Men of no knowledge and therefore no stability.”[27] Still, the critical onslaught against Mailer sparked his “soul rage” and became the very catalyst for his self-reliant transformation through the analytical processes of Lipton’s.

“The Doors of Discovery”: The Power of Instinct and Intuition

Reflecting in his journal on a visit to his parents, Mailer notes with empathy that his sister Barbara feels betrayed because his advice and example had “made her a rationalist over the years—I took her sensitive delicate nature and hammered my harsh mind into hers. No wonder she’s furious at me now that I say Reason is bad, Instinct is good.”[28] Mailer then associates thinking with fucking as a species of intuitive leap, where “thought like fucking is dialectic but directed. The ultimate end of the fuck like the ultimate end of thought is to comprehend the universe as a whole.”[29] Mind and body collaborate in the processes of comprehension. “Indeed, no human can enrich himself without returning and dipping into the lore of mind-body. It is the source of all creativity available to us, outside of what we intuit from nature when we personify it. For indeed man is a part of nature and so can comprehend nature by understanding himself.”[30] Emerson phrased the point this way in his late essay “Fate”: “Let us build altars to the Blessed Unity which holds nature and souls in perfect solution.”[31] Mailer had prefaced the above journal entry seeking wholeness and unity by a speculation that “the closer man approaches to the infinity of God the more he will live in passivity.” That is, the war of soul against society begins to resolve itself as we more fully approach infinity, comprehend intuitively the divine in the particulars of the natural world and in ourselves.

We begin now to understand better Mailer’s earlier (Blakean/Thoreauvian) comment that “in the tiny is the profound. Those things which are too insignificant to notice are always the doors of discovery”[32] [my emphasis]. Or, as Emerson put it in Nature: “1. Words are signs of natural facts. 2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts. 3. Nature is the symbol of the spirit.”[33] The reason so many academicians are dull, Mailer argues, is that there is no pursuit of such intuitive unity (or psychic integration) in their professional lives: “they have given themselves over to a subject they are not close to spiritually—usually to hide some other deeper drive of their nature. They conceal the rampant murderer, lover, adventurer, etc. within themselves from themselves. . . . There is a war mounting between the academicians and the ones with true vocation.”[34] Mailer then provides a litany of specialists who understand nothing deeper (spiritual, loving, intuitive, hence truly “vocational”) about the subject of their life-work—from psychoanalysts, to editors, to sociologists, to anthropologists, to historians. Here we might be tempted to launch a Swiftian riff on certain ideological literary theorists as “Projectors” obsessed with their clever reductive grids, or a George Eliot riff on the Edward Casaubons of academic criticism, striving to hold “the Key to all Mythologies” or literatures, without any loving or spiritual attachment to literature. But to honor our reader’s patience so far, we will resist the temptation.

The preeminence of intuition and instinct over rationalist materialism that Mailer approaches in his journal is also fundamental to American transcendentalism. As early as “The American Scholar,” Emerson says: “I believe man has been wronged; he has wronged himself. He has almost lost the light that can lead him back to his prerogatives. . . . If a single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts and there abide, the huge world will come around to him.”[35] In “Self-Reliance,” Emerson asks, “What is the aboriginal Self, on which a universal reliance may be grounded?” Then he answers, “The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis can go, all things find their common origin.”[36] In “The Transcendentalist,” Emerson clarifies the point further: “Transcendental from the use of that term by Immanuel Kant . . . who replied to the skeptical philosophy of Locke, which insisted that there was nothing in the intellect which was not previously in the experience of the senses, by showing that there was a very important class of ideas or imperative forms, which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired; that these were intuitions of the mind itself.”[37] For Emerson, an ordained American divine who had despaired of organized religion, doctrine, and orthodoxy, who resigned his ministry in 1832, and who outraged many in his “Divinity School Address,” Jesus was an example of the highest “moral sentiment,” the “indwelling Supreme Spirit” that should “not be attributed to one or two persons, and denied to all the rest” because “the doctrine of inspiration is lost.” Rather:

It [inspiration] is an intuition. It cannot be received second hand. . . . Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Alone in history he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his World. . . . He felt respect for Moses and the prophets, but no unfit tenderness at postponing their initial revelations to the hour and the man that now is; to the eternal revelation in the heart.[38]

For Mailer, Jesus (both man and symbol of the liberating power within) is similarly “the rebel, the anarchist, the saint, the compassionate, the life-giver . . . [who] was put on the cross and all his teachings were reversed. Christ became Christianity just as Reason became Rationalization.”[39] This early insight would inform Mailer’s later work on Jesus a half century later in The Gospel According to the Son (1997) and On God (2007).

Although Gospel flummoxed some critics by the audacity of Mailer writing the novel in the first person, the first-person Jesus story goes back in the English tradition at least as far as “The Sacrifice” by George Herbert (one of Emerson’s favored poets), likely composed about the time the Pilgrims were settling in America. Other reviewers were more concerned with the execution of Mailer’s novel, a more legitimate concern. Be that as it may, Mailer’s Jesus is an Emersonian prophet, “Even mightier than the prophet Ezekiel.”[40] Not unlike what Mailer recognized in himself during the 1950s, Jesus is filled with both Apollonian and Dionysian impulses: “If his [Satan’s] odor could leave me uneasy it also offered sympathy to desires I had not yet allowed myself to feel.” Jesus embodies the kind of “double life” Emerson thought open to us all: a man living the human, sensuous life but with divine energies (a dissident, transcendent soul) within. Jesus, Mailer asserts, is of the Gnostic Jewish Essene sect. Like Emerson’s Jesus in the “Divinity School Address,” Mailer’s Jesus is the foe of orthodoxy, law, and nominal piety as exemplified by the Pharisees and the Synagogues, and as opposed to the interior experience and love of God,[c] and as opposed to the wealthy and powerful coopting for their own purposes desires in the human soul.[41]

. . .

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]
  3. ↑ See Mailer 1997, 48, 72, 80, all of chapter 35, and 239.

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.
  18. ↑ Mailer n.d., #460.
  19. ↑ Emerson 1960, p. 65.
  20. ↑ Emerson 1960, p. 148.
  21. ↑ Emerson 1960, p. 165.
  22. ↑ Mailer n.d., #243.
  23. ↑ Mailer & Mailer 2006, p. 129.
  24. ↑ Mailer n.d., #337.
  25. ↑ Emerson 1960, p. 112.
  26. ↑ Emerson 1960, pp. 114–115.
  27. ↑ Emerson 1960, p. 116.
  28. ↑ Mailer n.d., #400.
  29. ↑ Mailer n.d., #526.
  30. ↑ Mailer n.d., #645.
  31. ↑ Emerson 1960, p. 351.
  32. ↑ Mailer n.d., #352.
  33. ↑ Emerson 1960, p. 40.
  34. ↑ Mailer n.d., #213.
  35. ↑ Emerson 1960, pp. 75, 79.
  36. ↑ Emerson 1960, p. 156.
  37. ↑ Emerson 1960, p. 197.
  38. ↑ Emerson 1960, pp. 104–105.
  39. ↑ Mailer n.d., #376.
  40. ↑ Mailer 1997, p. 36.
  41. ↑ Mailer 1997, pp. 152–153.

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.
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