Lipton’s Journal/Correspondence of Robert Lindner and Norman Mailer/November 29, 1954

NORMAN MAILER’s Letters

To Robert Lindner

November 29, 1954

Dear Bob,

Just a shortie to tell you what a good time we had, and to let you know that there’s no news on the big thing yet. I’ve submitted it simultaneously to Knopf and Random House (please don’t mention Knopf, nor for that matter that I’m in the act of changing publishers) and in a funny way I’m hoping that both houses don’t want the book with equal enthusiasm, mainly because I had to use such pressure to make them both agree to the simultaneous business that it’s going to leave me with an enemy when I turn one down. I’ll let you know as soon as there is news. Maybe by next Monday.

My inner life continues with much stimulation. I’ve gotten on to something in advertising which I believe is pretty big. It’s the old thing I discovered from Lipton’s that tremendous truth is to be found in the cliché if you crack open the shell. As a matter of fact I feel a little bit these days as if I’m a man from Mars. I walk around (even when I’m not taking Lipton’s) really listening and concentrating on what I hear. On exactly what is said. It’s amazing what one discovers if one only listens. And of course my great mental weakness in the past has been one of not concentrating. Now I feel as if everything I see, do, feel, and hear, is in italics.

By the way, I’m a little pissed off at you for your attitude on Lipton’s. Mainly at the element of condescension, the feeling that you know me. Like Gide I scream! Please do not understand me too quickly. If our activities were reversed, I would be extremely interested in what you had to say, and what you thought about it. And, by the by, I don’t ascribe magic powers to Lipton’s. For anyone to get a radically new insight, some sort of magic or catalyst—if you will—is necessary, be it love, liquor, psychoanalysis, religion, or what have you, and this happens to be mine. You can of course be right, and I think no better, hear no better, etc., but why be sure ahead of time? Do you know everything? Am I that simple? There exists the danger in you, Bob, and I say this to a beloved friend, that you can end up as some sort of avant-garde paterfamilias. One is either truly radical or merely a liberal with muscles.

Anyway, when next I see you, I have three large subjects to expound on—1) The artist and psychopathy, 2) Advertising and the modern state, 3) The illusion of psychoanalysis. Where and when did the German lecturer come to birth in me. But do remind me because I really have so much to discuss.

[. . . .]

Con amor,

Norman

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