Lipton’s Journal/Correspondence of Robert Lindner and Norman Mailer/January 27, 1955

NORMAN MAILER’s Letters

To Norman Mailer

January 27, 1955

Normano mio:

I tried to call you last night but you were out—or perhaps (I can see you) reclining with your feet up in that wonderful chair while that gadget of yours poured out the music. Wish I’d been with you.

What I wanted to tell you was that I’m glad about the Putnam thing. I want to see The Deer Park behind you. As you so correctly saw—long ago—it was a phase, a necessary step in your development. It now needs to be solidified in print—(which is really the way an artist buries, successively, each of his selves), then mourned (the critical and public reception), finally forgotten by being absorbed. Now that this is well on its way, you’re free to grow a new self.

Which leads to the Journal.

Norman, buck-o-boy—I can’t tell you how excited I am about it. I wait from day to day to get the next installment, and find myself almost totally absorbed in following its development. Some of the ideas I hate—most I love—but all of them fascinate me. Occasionally, reading it, I find myself leaping ahead in my mind—or arguing fiercely as if you were present. Our next meeting should detonate an explosion that will probably tear up 53rd Street and route out some of the whores in the St. Regis.

As for me, I’m kind of in a fallow period now, intellectually; but emotionally I’m sizzling on some griddle of curious design. Things I can’t write about have been happening to me, and the shape of that griddle is burning hieroglyphs on my soul.

The success of the book—or what looks like a success—and the fuss my lectures have been kicking up all over the place, have made me excited and tense—But the yin of this yang is a new level of consciousness—almost a new birth, with a fermentation being prepared in another recess of my mind. I’m getting ideas again, hermano—and, as you predicted, dangerous ideas.

How perceptive you are! What genius (I mean it) lies in your intuition of my growth (?) from psychopathy to sainthood, badness to goodness, dishonesty to truth! The whole story, which I must now resolve to tell you some day, will confirm you down to the very misspellings of the words you used. I’m going to try to call you again tonight, comrade—because I’m tired of writing letters these days and because I need the more direct contact. Also, I have to come up to New York for a few hours next week to talk to the moguls who are planning to do an Omnibus dramatization of the J. P. Couch—which means a few hours we can tear up together. Meanwhile, pal, go go, Go…

Yours,

Bob

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