Lipton’s Journal/Correspondence of Robert Lindner and Norman Mailer/December 31, 1954

From Project Mailer
NORMAN MAILER’s Letters
To Robert Lindner
December 31, 1954

Dear Bob, in fact, Dear Dear Bob,

Happy New Year. And what a year this new one is going to be.

I’ve decided to send you one-half of the journal, my carbon. Please keep it in some safe place. And as I add to it, I’ll send you more. The part you haven’t read starts on page 19. And I think it carries along much of what I had before, and expands it.

Incidentally, try not to read it critically. That is, don’t pick out such and such items as good, others as bad, etc. I’m putting it all down because I want the record. As I read it over, there is hardly a note which could not be improved, or indeed expanded into an essay. So, the thing is very crude. But I don’t want to stop to polish now. And I want the wild with what is less wild because some of the wild ones become less wild as I expand them subsequently. Viz the saint-psychopath thing. Essentially I started it by saying, Saints and psychopaths are brothers. But, by now, I feel I’m pushing it into a new view of personality.

If you don’t have much time, and want to read the homo-erotic corollary, it is in Note 139. If you have time, I suggest coming to it naturally.

Brother, one thing. You must suspend your caution or we’ll get nowhere. So much of your thought is now in mine. Truly I’m not competing with you. Don’t look at me that way in my relations with you—it’s beneath us. I send you these notes because deep in me I feel that you’re the only person who can understand me right now intellectually, just as Adele[1] is the only woman who can understand me intuitively. Which is why the two of you are so drawn to each other and so jealous of each other. (Don’t forget you called her the Peruvian Yenta.)

I’m mailing the blurb to Dudley Frasier.[2] I would have made it bigger, but truly, Bob, I couldn’t. You can go so very far that some day you’ll look back on Fifty-Minute Hour as one of your last stands or retreats before the big kickoff.

I’ll try to make the flight for the 13th.

Answer this at your leisure. Unless something goes wrong, we’ll be skiing from the Second of Jan. to the Fifth or Sixth or Seventh.

Much love,
Norm

P.S. Don’t forget your depression at reaching forty. That was you telling yourself that you haven’t gone far enough.




notes

  1. Adele Morales (1925 – 2015), who he married in April 1954, was Mailer’s second wife. The mother of his daughters Danielle (b. 1957), and Elizabeth Anne (b. 1959), she separated from Mailer in early 1961 a few months after he stabbed her with a penknife, just missing her heart. He pled guilty to felonious assault and was given a suspended sentence. They divorced in 1962.
  2. An editor at Rinehart. Mailer’s blurb was not used.