Lipton’s Journal/January 24, 1955/228

The movement of my writing. Naked is a saintly book, everything is understood and forgiven. Barbary is the attempt to do two things at once. The characters are psychopaths who think of themselves as saints and saints who have acted like psychopaths (McLeod). The Deer Park is a parade of psychopaths. I pretend to be condemning, but what repels most people from the book is that I am really saying Rejoice in these people—they are marvelous, they are helping us to destroy the world. The Deer Park is perhaps the first successful and almost-honest expression of myself as a saint writing about psychopaths and loving them. But the neurotic little boy clouded the issue and tried to make people think he was condemning.