Lipton’s Journal/Correspondence of Robert Lindner and Norman Mailer/January 20, 1955

From Project Mailer
NORMAN MAILER’s Letters
To Robert Lindner
January 20, 1955

Dear Bob,

Some more of the journal. I think a few of the items you’ll find attractive.

Your reviews were excellent I heard, and I congratulate you warmly, old friend. Naturally, I’ve seen none of them, everybody somehow taking it for granted that I would see them in some mysterious fashion in Mexico, but when I see you in Baltimore, we’ll be able to go over more of them. I hope the book does well. Bob-bo.

I’ve had a turn of luck with The Deer Park. G. P. Putnam’s[1] is taking it, asking for no changes I do not consent to make, paying the full royalty (confidential) and have agreed to a first printing of 25,000 copies. But I’m such a pig and unregenerate egotist that the news which greeted me upon return from Mexico left me flat. I was so geared for a fight that I really felt a little disappointed. Which I guess proves what a saint-psychopath I am at bottom. Interestingly, Cy[2] was somehow left a little flat too. Anyway, the contract is to be signed in a few days, and the book is tentatively set for August publication. What excited me much more was your message about Ivan [Von Auw]. Does he really think it’s my best book? (I do.) Somehow, what with Ivan being so right and so quietly helpful in the shadows, I came to wait more and more anxiously for what he would finally feel when he read it. I think nothing would have upset me more than Ivan not liking it, and so I felt a real burst of joy when Adele[3] gave me your message. What a good bastard you are to know the pleasure such news would give me.

Mexico was rough on me, but I’ll tell you about that when I see you. One day I literally had to fight off weeping twice while I was with Susy[4] because of the pain of leaving her. And the weight she carried in her heart and the wisdom. She fell asleep the night before I left, the last time I would see her, and I think she knew that it was far better to be unconscious when I left than to go through the pain of the scene. I really think she loves me, and I want no one to love me more than I want Susy to. Unrequited love thing maybe.

Anyway, write soon, amigo, and I hope we get together soon. I am indeed looking forward to it very much.

Love,
Norm


notes

  1. ↑ Walter Minton, president of Putnam’s, paid Mailer a $10,000 advance for The Deer Park, a very high sum for that time.
  2. ↑ Mailer’s first cousin, Charles Rembar (1915-2000), was a prominent First Amendment lawyer, who successfully defended the publication of banned books such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer. He was Mailer’s lawyer for over three decades.
  3. ↑ 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.
  4. ↑ Susan Mailer, the only child of Mailer and his first wife Beatrice Silverman, and the oldest of his nine children, was born in Hollywood, August 28, 1949.
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