Lipton’s Journal/February 21, 1955/643

From Project Mailer

Psychoanalyzing names. I do believe that a large part of a man’s psyche forms around his name as an armature, and that people respond to his name, first name personally, last name socially, respectively er and sup responses. For example: Dwight D. Ike Eisenhower. I’s in our. I’s in hour. I’s in power. Which would account for the affection so many people have for him. The Dwight D. and the Ike I don’t feel yet.

Also Churchill—the church on the hill. How English. Nature and authority combined.

Truman: Honest Harry True Man.

Nixon: Nix on dirty old Communist sex. Richard the dick.

Adlai Stevenson. Adlai—the addled lay.

Stalin—the Russian for Steel.

Adele Morales.[1] A dell, a death-hell. Morales: More or less? Morals? And indeed it was the enigma of whether Adele was morally good or morally bad which rendered her so fascinating to the moralist in me. For Adele, Morales also means More a Les(bian). Which of course is not true of her. She is deeply bisexual. Dikes are unisexuals.



note

  1. 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.