Lipton’s Journal/Correspondence of Robert Lindner and Norman Mailer/March 15, 1955

NORMAN MAILER’s Letters

To Norman Mailer

March 15, 1955

Norman:

Either you wrote those two notes in a paranoid fog created by the week—or you’re deliberately provoking a break—which I, for one, don’t want.

It could only be some kind of madness that would even let cross your mind the thought that I’d copy or have copied your Journal. No one has ever seen any of it. When the envelopes arrive, they are given to me sealed—and when I’ve read them, they’re put, by me, in a place where no one but myself can have access to them. But if you don’t trust me, boyo, say it straight out and you can have back, pronto, the whole works.

And about my talking about the Journal—I don’t know what you mean. Believe it or not, I haven’t said a word about it to anyone, except that once in a conversation with Wylie I said, in connection with a matter we were discussing (homosexuality, I think it was), that you had some intriguing ideas about it which I knew about because you showed me some notes you were making for a treatment of it in a book someday. I never—and if you don’t believe me, Norman, that’s your privilege—told a soul that you’re keeping a journal.

I have talked a lot about Deer Park—to Ted, Ivan [Von Aue], Paul, Phil—everyone. I’ve said that it contains insights and perceptions that startled me, originating as they have from someone so young and so essentially inexperienced as you are.

And now to the matter of cross-fertilization or inter-fecundation. If you’re so goddamn jealous of your ideas, keep them to yourself. I’m not so sure I’d miss them, anyhow. And observe, friend, I haven’t used them so far. As for my ideas, you’re welcome to them—whether we remain hermanos or not. I don’t regard my thoughts as particularly precious and certainly have no necessity in me to hoard them.

As for your ideas, the truth about them is that, at present, they’re really no more than interesting—worth talking over, considering, discussing. And where in hell do you get the megalomaniac notion that they’re anything more than, in most cases, tentative propositions? To my mind some of them are good—that is, worthy of more thought. Some of them stink—that is, they’re not worthy of development. Many of them are certainly not original—although you think they are, and many of them are screwed up.

I’ve refrained from commenting on every item in the journal purposely—and have discussed only a few of them with you purposely—because I’ve recognized the fact that you are concerned at present primarily with getting them down, getting them out of you, for later and calmer consideration. I’m astounded that now you seem to think of them as etched in granite, imperishable, monumental.

Finally, pal, I’m worried about you—and after these two letters, I think I have a reasonable cause for concern. There’s a nastiness about them, Norman—they’re like steeped in a stew of guilt and shame, a self-loathing. You’re begging for a swift kick in the ass, you want me (someone) to stop you. You would feel justified and fulfilled and righteous if I responded in the way you half-want me to—if I told you to stuff it. And you would feel just about the same if I took these mouse drippings of yours and covered my head with them. I’m not going to do either. If you have the guts and I hope and think you have, you’ll pull out of this and take whatever profit there may be in it. If you don’t nobody’s lost anything anyhow.

Sure, Norman, I’m a square and you’re the king of the hipsters, I’m a stumble-bum and you’re a genius, I’m a liver-lip, and a crook, a con-man, a gentleman, an old maid, a cliché artist—and you’re the hep-boyo, the kid with the always open fly, the ace dong-wielder of all time, the glorious gourmet of gage…

Wise up, cocker,

Love,

Bob

P.S. Let’s try to get together on a date for you to come down—if you want to, that is.

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