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

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