May 28, 2024

Lipton’s: A Short Introduction

The mid-1950s were a turbulent time for Norman Mailer. His 1948 novel The Naked and the Dead achieved significant success, receiving critical acclaim and maintaining bestseller status for over a year. His sophomore novel Barbary Shore (1951) was not as well received, and its negative critical reception left a lasting mark on Mailer, increasing the stakes for his third novel. Set against the backdrop of the Red Scare in Hollywood, The Deer Park was initially accepted for publication by Rinehart. However, it was later canceled by Stanley Rinehart due to Mailer’s refusal to remove a controversial scene. This rejection, which came just months before the planned publication date, was a significant blow to Mailer who saw this book as a chance to redeem his literary reputation and prove to himself that he was not an imposture.

Preorder Lipton’s from Amazon.

During this time, Mailer began a journal which he called “Lipton’s,” named after the slang for marijuana. The journal, which he started in December 1954, was a collection of musings that reflected his intellectual and creative processes, often recollected from his experiments with cannabis. The journal documents the effects of marijuana on his mental and physical states, in the vein of Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Mailer described the ideas in “Lipton’s” as coming rapidly, a testament to his intense and often restive psyche. The journal spanned thirteen weeks, concluding in March 1955, and accumulated over 104,000 words across 708 entries.

“Lipton’s” serves as an unflinching examination of Mailer’s intellectual capacities, literary ambitions, personal relationships, and psychological state in his early thirties. Mailer’s reflections in “Lipton’s” influenced many of his subsequent works, including his short fiction, his famous essay "The White Negro” (1957), and Advertisements for Myself (1959). The journal explores Mailer’s fascination with psychoanalysis, inspired by his readings of Freud and his circle, as well as the works of Wilhelm Reich, who linked sexual repression to societal norms. Mailer’s use of marijuana is portrayed as both a means of exploring his unconscious mind and a tool for enhancing various aspects of his life, from sexual performance to his appreciation of jazz. He believed the drug helped him marginalize his “despised image” of himself and embrace a more rebellious and authentic persona. However, the journal also reveals the darker side of his drug use, including moments of intense fear and visions of a divided, chaotic universe.

Mailer’s relationship with psychoanalysis is a dominant theme in “Lipton’s.” After focusing on social and political themes in his early novels, he turned inward, aiming to bridge the gap between Freud’s theories and Marx’s ideas. This shift reflected his desire to understand the deeper psychological and symbolic underpinnings of human behavior and societal structures. Mailer’s engagement with psychoanalysis was further enriched by his relationship with Robert Lindner, a prominent psychoanalyst. Lindner’s book, Prescription for Rebellion, which criticized the conformity wrought by popular psychoanalysis, resonated deeply with Mailer. Lindner argued that rebellion was a natural response to societal repression, a view that Mailer found compelling.

Mailer and Lindner developed a close friendship, exchanging ideas through letters and conversations. Mailer even sought Lindner’s professional analysis, which Lindner declined for fear it would harm their friendship. Their intellectual exchange profoundly influenced Mailer, who referred to their dialogue as “inter-fecundation.” Lindner’s insights and support helped Mailer navigate his creative and psychological challenges during this period, and their friendship lasted until Lindner’s untimely death from congenital heart disease in 1956.

Mailer’s relationship with his second wife, Adele Morales, also figures prominently in the journal. Their marriage, which began in April 1954, was marked by emotional intensity and creative stimulation. Morales, a dark, sensuous artist, contrasted sharply with Mailer’s first wife Beatrice Silverman and played a significant role in his exploration of freedom and living a more authentic life. Mailer’s love for Adele is evident throughout the journal, although their relationship later deteriorated, culminating in a violent altercation in 1960.

“Lipton’s” marks a critical point in Mailer’s development as a writer, showcasing his emerging literary style and his recognition of the importance of voice and public persona that he would later hone, particularly in AFM where he attempted to incite “a revolution in the consciousness of our time.” In his journal, he experimented with new forms of expression, which later culminated in his work for the Village Voice and his more mature writing. The journal is a rich, frenetic, contradictory, and complex mixture of ideas and reflections, documenting Mailer’s quest for personal and artistic authenticity amidst the broader cultural and intellectual currents of his time. It captures his intellectual curiosity, his experiments with psychoanalysis, philosophy, metaphysics, and marijuana, and his efforts to carve out a distinctive literary voice. The journal documents Mailer’s quest for personal and artistic authenticity amidst the complexities of mid-20th-century America.

                    

The following excerpts exemplify the deeply introspective and honest writing in “Lipton’s.” They address the duality of human nature, the conflicts between societal norms and personal authenticity, identity and existence—including sexuality, creativity, rebellion, and mortality.

46: What worries me today and other days is that I am playing an enormous deception on myself, and that I embark on these thoughts only to make myself more interesting, more complex to other people, more complex to myself. My vanity is so enormous. Perhaps I do all this to demonstrate to my audience that I too can create mystic spiritual characters. But on the other hand, these remarks can be merely my fear of what lies ahead. I love the world so much, I am so fascinated by it, that I dread the possibility that someday I may travel so far that I wish to relinquish it. What is important is that I think for the first time in years I’m growing quickly again.

63: The measurement of time is as necessary to society as the vision of space filled and space unfilled is to the soul. So Lipton’s which destroys the sense of time also destroys the sense of society and opens the soul.

69: “Vested interest” is enormously more powerful than we think. It is society’s substitute for the soul, and the abstract man who lives totally in society has no identity, no “I” other than his vested interest. Which in its extreme case is an explanation of the totalitarian personality. It is vested interest which allows us to dismiss other people, to say of them that they are Negroes, Jews, homosexuals, anal-compulsives, hysterics, hicks, city slickers, etc. In effect, by putting a label on a person we commit assassination, we cease to allow them existence in our minds. The echo of the word “liquidate” is “to petrifact,” and that is what the Stalinist does. He can kill by categories because the categories have become lifeless to him, no more than concepts.

85: What characterizes the psychology of the saint, the artist, the criminal, the mad perhaps, the athlete, the warrior, the revolutionary, the entertainer, the libertine, the drug addict, the gambler, the alcoholic, the demagogue, and all the other varieties of the adventurer, the explorer is that they have the boldness to believe that they are truly unique, and will not necessarily be punished like others. Also true of the victim who believes that he or she is unique and so will not be impoverished by the drunkard, raped by the sadist, murdered by the murderer. The victim is the passive complement to the adventurer. My mother as victim, my father as adventurer.[1] I, who have always been the adventurer (although enormously suppressed) have never been able to have love affairs with victims—they are too much like my mother. So I have searched out women who were adventurers—which is why virgins have never appealed to me.

102: The hipster is the adventurer beneath the surface of society, the murderer who moves among social animals, and he is also the saint, but he dreams of a heaven on earth. So; predictions: Hipsters are the proletariat of the future.

103: Given my intellectual verbal mind. Lipton’s was a great aid. To a poor bootblack, it probably can do no more than ease him from an intolerable existence into a cloudy nothingness. That is my great adventure with Lipton’s. I will journey into myself with the hope that I, the adventurer, can come out without being destroyed. But I am terrified. I don’t think I have ever been so frightened in my life.

138: My ambition remains my contact with the world, and perhaps it is not all bad—I would certainly prefer to be a genius than a saint. That is why Bob [Lindner] is right about the petty Hitler in me. I have to do it all, all by myself With the others, I am competitive. Every bit of evidence I see, as in television, of hipsterism makes me worry, “My God, somebody may do it before I do it.” No fear of me becoming a saint.

140: All churches say, “Be content.” They are always opposed to change for they are the bastardization of the soul in society. Freud went very far, and indeed he started on cocaine I suspect, got his first intimations of the caverns below. He was a very great man, but no great man can do it all, and Freud stopped short for which one can hardly blame him. (Look, what happened to Wilhelm Reich.) Freud stopped with the idea that society is good rather than that society is necessary until man conquers nature, but the society must in its turn be conquered or man will be destroyed.

155: Bob Lindner. As he reads this note, he is going to think I am sniping at him again, and he doesn’t understand my feelings here. I am not sniping at him—if I were, I would not send him these notes, for my competitive feelings would say, “He may take them a step beyond you, and he’ll get the credit.” But Bob is one of the few people I don’t feel competitive toward. I feel we could have a Marx and Engels relation, and leave the matter of who’s Marx aside until we both have grown.

158: The homo-erotic corollary. This is for Bob Lindner. I start with the premise that all men and women are bi-sexual. I believe this is natural. It is true for animals, and it makes sense, for love is best when it’s unified (at last I find some agreement with analyst, although what a difference) and when we love someone we would make love with them, if society did not prevent it or make it so painful. Given my premise, the pure heterosexual is a cripple—society has completely submerged one half of his nature. So, too, is the pure homosexual—and I suspect that pure homosexuals are invariably very unfleshly. People like [André] Gide have denied their bodies, and sex is invariably painful to them, although in recompense their minds have saintly qualities. (Gide and Gertrude Stein).

162: One of the curious effects of Lipton’s is that it seems to take away my neurosis and expose me to all that is saintly and psychopathic in my character. Just enough Lipton’s, and being alone with Adele, and the psychopathy is pleasantly expressed in fucking, and afterward I feel truly saintly and love everyone and am filled with compassion for mankind. But when I take Lipton’s after being pretty strenuously fucked-out, especially if people are around, then the amount of psychopathy in me is frightening.

. . .

704: 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 saidsists 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.

705. Tonight people are coming over and we’ll have a Lipton’s party. I half don’t want it. Last weekend with its Lipton’s carried me flying half-way through the week and dumped me in depression these last two days. Now I’m finally coming out of it and it’d be interesting to see how I would act next week. But on with the fuckanalysis.

---

notes