Lipton’s Journal/Correspondence of Robert Lindner and Norman Mailer/July 16, 1954

From Project Mailer
NORMAN MAILER’s Letters
To Robert Lindner
July 16, 1954

Dear Bob,

I really enjoyed your masterpiece, and think that the grievous affliction of the lower lip had its one compensation in those pages of incomparable (shall we say Gregorian?) rhetoric. Anyway, Old Lippy, I hope this finds you in good health for I write in bad health. To begin with I developed the cruelest case of the piles driving down here, especially on those days through the Middle West and Texas where the temperature went above 100 and I did my seven hundred miles without stopping. And what a curious drive is that. Up at midnight and drive through the dawn (the best part) and then through the morning and the hot noon and the burning afternoon until we stop at four or five and collapse on a bed. Then, in Mexico where we arrived two weeks ago (after a week at my friend’s[1] in Arkansas) I had to desert that liver diet until we found a house, and of course came down with one of my bitchy sore throats which has lasted a full week now and won’t go away until I get more of this home cooking—boiled beef and proteins etc.

But the house we’ve found is really extraordinary. It’s an old Spanish colonial which is like a fortress, indeed looks like a jail from outside, and inside has the most beautiful garden, an enormous living room, with a ceiling over twenty feet high and old timbers exposed, and all kinds of rooms and balconies and a fabulous dining room which looks like something out of a Dutch painting—honey-colored woods, with green ceiling and massive but cheerful, and wonderful furnishings with Spanish antiques—a fine line of furniture in its time, and one great added charm which is all kinds of child’s surprises, so that you turn on a faucet here, and there in the garden a little fountain begins to flow, and orchids grow on the trees, and there’s a cobblestone patio in the back, and internal windows in rooms which look down on other rooms, and a solarium where you can sun bare-ass of which there is no greater aphrodisiac—it’s cool, doc. And all for 1500 pesos a month or $120. But of course we had to look and look to find this place.

Things at Rinehart turned out beautifully. Ted[2] gave the book to the other young editors in the place and they all turned in enthusiastic reports and so Stan[3] would have had to buck his editorial department and instead retired into sulky silence, not even seeing me the last day I was there. And Ted plans to push the book in February—its new publication date. They accepted the book as it stood, and I in delight offered to take out the page on the orgy at which point Ted looked at me somberly, soberly, and said, “I sure wish you would, Norman.” So it’s out. And frankly I’m glad because it was bad writing as it stood, and the orgy will be larger now since people will imagine it. But the big surprise for me was Ted who stayed strong as a rock all through it as I believe I wrote to you.

Right now I sit and read novels and study Spanish and think a little. I’m very tired and drained intellectually, exactly as you felt last June, but the consolation is that a book may be on the horizon—at least I feel ideas coming together and so enthusiasm, and the vague glimmering of a theme. But I’m not going to rush it at all. The prison work still appeals—just how easy is it Bob to get a job as some sort of counselor or whatever in a men’s prison? Is it the kind of thing you can get by just applying? Also, did I write to you about Break Down the Walls?[4] I thought it quite disappointing, and you’re quite right about his borrowing from Stone Walls only I wish he’d borrowed more. I then read another book by Martin, Why Did They Kill? [1953] and thought that was first-rate.

Adele[5] is painting, and Susy[6] stays with us overnight every now and again, and I feel love and pain always in my relation with her, for Susy is so gaminish and delicate and odd and fey, and I can feel neurosis building in her from day to day yet feel not only incapable of halting it, but often think I can contribute greatly to it myself. But at her best, Susy is a bright spot. I feel good that soon you’ll have your long-awaited and much-deserved vacation, and we’ll be thinking of all of you on Long Island. Give our love to Johnnie[7] and to the kids, and my best to Jeanne,[8] and let me hear from you. Do you feel closer to starting a novel? The novel, [I] should say. We miss you, old Lippy.

Till October,
Norman


notes

  1. ↑ An Arkansas native and novelist, Gwaltney (1921-1981) served in the army with Mailer, and introduced him to his sixth wife, Norris Church Mailer.
  2. ↑ An editor at Rinehart and Co. for both Mailer and Lindner, Theodore Amussen (1915-1988) was instrumental in Mailer signing a contract for The Naked and the Dead.
  3. ↑ President of the firm of Rinehart and Co., Stanley Rinehart Jr. (1897 – 1969) wrote a letter comparing The Naked and the Dead to the work of Hemingway and Dos Passos that was printed on the dust jacket of the first edition. But in late November 1954, with an ad for The Deer Park already published, Rinehart cancelled the novel’s publication after Mailer refused to cut a sexually explicit scene. Later, Mailer sued and received the remainder of his advance for the novel.
  4. ↑ John Bartlow Martin’s (1915–1987) 1954 book about the riots in the State Prison of Southern Michigan at Jackson.
  5. ↑ 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.
  6. ↑ 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.
  7. ↑ Johnnie Lindner, Robert Lidner’s wife, who Mailer described as "a sort of pepper pot blonde, pepper pot fire . . . full of strong feelings, full of love, full of lust, full of fire, full of the inability to pardon.”
  8. ↑ Lindner’s secretary.
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