February 15, 2022

Selections from Lipton’s Journal

During the winter of 1954–55, Norman Mailer found himself at a crossroads. He was 32-years-old and concerned that his career as the promising and precocious young author of The Naked and the Dead might have already burnt out like a shooting star. His second novel Barbary Shore (1952) had not been well received by critics, and he was struggling to publish his third novel The Deer Park. He considered that perhaps the international success of Naked had been a fluke, and that he was just “an imposture.” Later in Advertisements for Myself, Mailer would describe this winter as “deadest winter of the dead years 1951–52.” During this dead winter, Mailer turned inward toward self-analysis and considered his relationship with the external world. He used cannabis (his “tea,” or “Lipton’s”) on the weekends and recorded his thoughts and experiences in over-700 journal entries from December 1954 to March 1955. His journey plumbed the depths of his soul, skirting the borders of dread, insanity, and despair, but allowed him to see cleareyed his own responsibility as an artist and develop his own self-reliance, his genius, and his practical existentialism. The journal ends abruptly when Mailer secures a publisher for The Deer Park, but not before his personal breakthrough that would become the foundation of his more mature thought in his subsequent short fiction and later in Advertisements.

Mailer’s journal covers all manner of topics—like sex, jazz, the sounds of words, relationships, The Deer Park manuscript, existentialism, the nature of genius, social conformity, etc.—so entries are inconsistent and vary widely in scope and, approach, and mood. I have tried to select entries that show the breadth of this thought, but that follow his major concerns of the journal, especially his preoccupation with the individual artist/genius and his struggle with the oppressive forces of conformity. This struggle between the individual’s homeodynamism (which Mailer calls “H” and “er”) and the external sociostatis (the “S” of social conformity) becomes the primary concern of the journal. The following selections from Lipton’s Journal typify Mailer’s mindset during this transitional period in his life. These selections have been edited, but the original entries appear on Project Mailer.

. . .

January 26, 1955

277

Let me put it this way: One of the basic analytic concepts is that the id forces are repressed by the ego and super-ego because they are too horrible to bear. I think that is true only until the euphoric phase takes place. Thereafter, in a conventional analysis, a transfer occurs within the patient, it is the Id or what I prefer to call the H (being more healthy) which becomes the censor, the resistance. Deeply it knows that it is being tricked, being called forth in order to be converted from H to S. So H forces censor the H. Of a sudden the patient does not want to give up his neurosis. Of course not. Beneath the S, the H is very alive in a neurotic. Over and over again most analysts are haunted by the suspicion that their adjusted patients have lost something very vital. Indeed, that is why there is not to my knowledge a single example of a talented writer who did better work after his analysis. The rebel in him was quieted too much.

February 7, 1955

482

Any rationalist reading this would exclaim, “What a diseased mind. What a fantastic and unpleasant imagination. What monstrous and fantastic rationalizations this Mailer sets up to justify himself.” To which I would answer, “simply, dear old friend who is now an enemy, just tell me where the hell all this came from. Tell me why man is on earth, why there is life, why people are not rational when you know reason is most reasonable, why you want and even believe in a good society when you think people are insignificant, stupid, hopeless, cruel, and in need of order.”

In a sentence: I get these ideas from somewhere, something, be it myself or the universe, but these ideas have a psychological reality which one cannot ignore. For if one does, one enters philosophically into the most untenable position of all for the rational materialist, to wit, something (nonsense) has come out of nothing. And all rationalists believe in the conservation of matter, and the conservation of energy. One cannot be scientific if one does not believe this. So reason demands the mystical explanation. That in the one is found the other. That every Thing contains its Opposite.

506

But what remains an enigma to me is what I called earlier life-force or life-energy or basic energy. And whether people are born with this—that is born unequally, or whether they develop it—that is, potentially, even actually, all infants or at least all sperm-ovule connections contain the same energy is almost impossible to even guess at.

What I am afraid is true is that life-energy, shall we call it the lerve (libido I don’t like—Freud has id I-death running through everything) is already conditioned to a certain extent by the parents. It makes more sense to me. If the condition of the body is a reflection of the psyche which travels through a social arena, how can one assume that the sperm itself should be unaffected.

But here we’re even closer to the mystery and so more ignorant. What is undeniable is that the lerve seems to be the determining thing in keeping people alive and functioning despite the heavy psychic armor they carry. A person with low lerve reaches the end of his or her possibilities much sooner, and so must take the next step or perish. Like myself. Paradoxically enough I probably have low lerve (comparatively, that is). But there is so much more lerve in all of us than we are ever able to use, that once we make even a little more available our energy becomes incredible—as mine is at the moment.

February 14, 1955

606

Let me make as assumption. Every human is born with the same er, the same soul or self which is capable of understanding All. But the second nervous system, the sociostatic nervous system gives us our warp, our “identity,” and in the collaboration of the irreconcilables our capacity to enter the pool of knowledge which exists in all of us, is different for everyone.

So, everyone apprehends Reality in his own way, through the filter of his own S. And therefore no matter how deeply we dip into our er, our collective wisdom, the “particular” insights we return to the world with, are colored by our S. So, we can never know All, never that is until all men reach God which is the point of infinity.

Therefore, we cannot “know” the murderer driver around the corner, although we can come very close to knowing him, and so, total knowledge of the totality impossible for us—at least while we live—we can only guess and gamble, exercise our free-will. Free-will is the manly substitute-attribute of Man who has not reached God. So we have Choice which is indispensable if we are to reach God. To postulate a rational world is to postulate a totally determined world. To postulate God is to postulate free-will. This is one of the most fascinating of the philosophical opposites.

And I find that as I believe in free-will, so I am terrified. I was much more comfortable with determinism for it gave the solace that one could not make a mistake—that, so to speak, if one had not fucked-up the way one did, one would have fucked-up worse.

609

I lost weight all last summer and fall because I was generating the lerve necessary to change a good many old habits, habits which had grown to the point of strangling me. When I married Adele [Morales], I made the decision to change my habits. If I had remained as I was, I would have drowned in depression.

So, I am still capable of adapting, and the knowledge that I can adapt gives me optimism again as well as a sense of greater fear, but fear with dignity attached, for I recognize that my old neurotic fears were disgusting to me because I could not understand the validity of them. My new fears I take on as a gambler. Which is why I “romanticize” myself, ergo infuriating all my rationally-determined friends. Every gambler is a romantic, he knows that life and death ride on every ball on every wheel.

But how much harder this would have been without Lipton’s.

March 4, 1955

707

Also I have been going through terrifying inner experiences. Last Friday night when I took Lipton’s I was already in a state of super-excitation which means intense muscular tension for me. When the Lipton’s hit, and it hit with a great jolt, it was my first in a week, I felt as if every one of my nerves were jumping free. The amount of thought which was released was fantastic. I had nothing less than a vision of the universe which it would take me forever to explain. I also knew that I was smack on the edge of insanity, that I was wandering through all the mountain craters of schizophrenia. I knew I could come back, I was like an explorer who still had a life-line out of the caverns, but I understood also that it would not be all that difficult to cut the life line.

Insanity comes from obeying a hunch—it is a premature freezing of perceptions—one takes off into cloud even before one has properly prepared the ground, and one gives all to an “unrealistic” appreciation of one’s genius. So I knew and this is my health that it is as important to return, to give, to study, to be deprived of cloud seven as it is to stay on it. One advances forward into the unknown by going forward and then retreating back. Only the hunch player decides to cast all off and try to go all the way.

What I ended up with was a sort of existentialism I imagine although I know nothing of existentialism (Everybody accuses me these days of being an existentialist). Anyway, the communicable part of my vision was that everything is valid and that nothing is knowable—one simply cannot erect a value with the confidence that it is good for others—all one can do is know what is good, that is what is necessary for oneself, and one must act on that basis, for underlying the conception is the philosophical idea that for life to expand at its best, everybody must express themselves at their best, and the value of the rebel and the radical is that he seeks to expand that part of the expanding sphere (of totality) which is most retarded.

Deep in the vision action seemed trivial which is why I knew the cold graveyard of schizophrenia. Out of the vision I had a happier tolerance. I could deal with people like Catholics and sadists because I was not worried about who would win the way I used to be. And indeed I learned the way to handle sadists—there are only two ways: One must wither be capable of generating more force, of terrifying them or else one must dazzle and confuse them.

Works Cited

• Mailer, Norman (1959). Advertisements for Myself. New York: Putnam.
• — (2020). Lennon, J. Michael; Lucas, Gerald R.; Mailer, Susan, eds. "Lipton's Journal". Project Mailer. The Norman Mailer Society. Retrieved 2022-02-15.