Lipton’s Journal/Correspondence of Robert Lindner and Norman Mailer/December 20, 1954

From Project Mailer
NORMAN MAILER’s Letters
To Robert Lindner
December 20, 1954

Dear Bob,

More notes from the journal. I don’t intend to keep sending this stuff to you, having respect for your time among other things, but I do believe these notes clarify a hell of a lot I said before. On Note 56 you will find a blurb for The Fifty-Minute Hour. The corrections come for an interesting reason. I wrote the blurb before I reread the book in its published form. Reading it, I liked it considerably better than the first time, particularly Charles, Mac, and Anton—Kirk is about the same, but you know how enthusiastic I was about that.[1] I’d really be very excited about the book if it weren’t for two literary faults of yours, one overcome by discipline; the other perhaps psychically more serious. The first is just your style which at its worst gets down to pure cornball, Bob. But this is just wasteful. You should make the effort yourself, but after I go over the lectures, let us say. For if I give them a week, I think I can show you what I mean. My editorial principles are very close to Orwell’s, even though when I write I’m guilty of many lapses myself. And this you can learn. Charley Devlin[2] once went through a book for me (Naked) and I learned an awful lot from him.

Perhaps you don’t like the blurb. If you don’t, I’m willing to write something shorter, vaguer, and more complimentary cause I would like to help you sell books. But I do have this conviction that the evaluative blurb as opposed to the laudatory blurb actually interests people more. They’re given five new classics every week, and so a blurb which is not simply dithyrambic catches their eye more I think.

The other difficulty is something we must talk about carefully. In short what it comes down to is that your endings tend to be wandering and uneasy. I suspect, although I may be wrong, that it comes from being at the cross-roads of your ambition. On the one hand you want to be a great man; on the other you want to be a celebrity here and now. Your contempt for the thinking of celebrities keeps you from really serving the pablum which is requisite, but the tendency in all your thought which is to go out very far, very wide, with nothing but your speed and your sincerity to protect you is something you probably hesitate before. So, the equivocation which probably expresses itself in the ends and the endings.

My own affairs, alack, alay. As of today it looks like I can’t get together with Knopf. I really believe they want to do the book, but Blanche Knopf[3] seems almost irrationally terrified by the thought of the book being prosecuted. I cooperate with them to a point. I took out sentence after sentence which might be construed as sexually gratuitous. I went far because they were willing to leave the Teppis scene intact.[4] But finally it came down to cutting passages which involved the motivation of characters. And this I can’t do. It’s the heart of the book. The worst of it, is that gossip has made the book seem so pornographic that by the time it goes to six more publishers, somebody is going to have to believe it’s the best thing since Remembrance of Things Past before he’s willing to publish it. Bob, it looks like The Deer Park is in for a long haul. But of course I have the ace in the sleeve of finally publishing it myself, no matter the cost. What the hell did I sell Naked for, if not to have such options? Anyway, I’ll give you no more day by day communiqués until a contract is signed. For, frankly, it’s like being on an elevator. Yet, deep-down, a part of me is delighted. I must have done something to get people that upset.

Reading Fifty-Minute made me realize something again about you. You’re such a manipulator of people. I suspect my notes have not been answered because you’re worried about me, and you’re trying to think of the thing to say which will move me in the direction which is best (by your lights) for me. If it is true. . .oh, Bob! Just tell me what you think straight out. Don’t manipulate me. My mother is the great one of all time, and I have enormous sensory apparatus toward that.

How’s about getting some mescaline, kid?

Love,
Norm



notes

  1. ↑ Charles, Mac, and Anton—Kirk: Pseudonyms for Lindner’s patients discussed in The Fifty-Minute Hour.
  2. ↑ An impecunious leftist writer who lived in the rooming house at 20 Remsen Street in Brooklyn where Mailer had a studio and wrote the bulk of The Naked and the Dead (1948). Mailer was grateful for his help in editing Naked and said so in the novel’s acknowledgments. Their letters often contained insults, but their friendship persisted. Devlin was the physical model for McLeod in Barbary Shore (1951).
  3. ↑ Wife of Alfred C. Knopf, founder of the publishing house of the same name. Mailer was wrong about her dislike of the novel. She admired it, he later learned.
  4. ↑ Depiction in The Deer Park of Herman Teppis, a Hollywood producer, getting a blow job. It caused Rinehart to cancel publication of the novel.
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