Lipton’s Journal/Correspondence of Robert Lindner and Norman Mailer/March 29, 1955

From Project Mailer
NORMAN MAILER’s Letters
To Norman Mailer
March 29, 1955

Dear Norman,

Your manuscript is being mailed today and should reach you before the end of the week.

I am very glad that you are planning a visit to Baltimore, since I think that only face-to-face will we be able to straighten out the difficulties between us. Unfortunately, your visit here will have to be delayed until after the middle of May, since I am committed for every weekend between now and then and will very likely be in California between the 11th and 17th of May.

I think one of our main troubles is that I haven’t been completely honest with you. I have pretended to sympathy with the whole Lipton’s deal that I really don’t feel, and I think this pretense has blocked basic communication and placed our relations in a false light. Maybe this is what gives you the impression of “manipulating.” More than anything I want to be brothers and friends with you, and I’ve missed you these past weeks. I think I have had too little trust in your tolerance of my radically different concept of this whole matter of Lipton’s, and that I conceded initially there and, later, all over the place until I became enmeshed in my own contradictions. I hope I have underrated you, and that it’s now possible to eat off clean dishes.

Things here are in somewhat of a mess, and I don’t have an opportunity to write the long and more personal letter I hope to get around to within a few days.

Meanwhile, love,
Bob