Lipton’s Journal/Correspondence of Robert Lindner and Norman Mailer/June-July, 1954

::::::::::::::::::::To Norman Mailer
::::::::::::::::::::32 Macajium 4159
Brother of Mine:
It is to be hoped greatly that this my letter finds you and your liver happily well. O Normano mio, we are indeed hermanos now, I having, but minutes past come from the consultation of the professor of skins, wherefrom emerged I with the list of a diet excluding all the pleasures and delights of the gut—including the press of the grape and the vine’s fruit.
The affair began with the lip of mine, as I have informed you by an earlier post, and am itching of the skin in various places, and, sadly, the manifestation of that upon the skin said by all to be of the nature of “hives.” Following the initial seizure of me by these portents and symptoms, there passed some days, when in this fashion once more I was taken.
There was I, then, on the day of Saturn of the last week, in repose following my labors, at rest (I repeat) in the house of me, sampling slowly of a brew much in repute and admired by the natives of this region, compounded of substances to the number of two, hyght “gin” et “vermouth,” in a formula of mathematic relations “six-to-one.” Of a sudden there overcame me, your brother, in the region of the mouth of mine, especially the underpart, a curious perception of heat and vibration, after which there did appear a swell, or fullness, thereof, which, to my distress, persisted through the long night. Accompanying this occult untowardness, even more unbelievable, a furor of the insides of me came to pass, with nauseation and mild vertigo attending. Thereafter misery companioned me until bedding hour, the which was on that occasion delayed far into birthtime of the day subsequent by wasteful converse and further draughts of the self-same empoisoned brew, at intervals of a certainty prescribed, I know not how, yet assuredly be the (incomprehensible) rituals of the region, and upon the invitation, graciously rendered, of natives, oddly comparisoned (I tell you for your instruction) and outdecked with fabrics suited to the sultry climate of that night, assembled in a conclave composed of various tribes to fashion a thing called (by these the natives) a “party,” the which was not in any place to be seen, although my search for it occupied, when the lip of mine allowed, the whole of the night. Sleep arrived, then, and upon the morrow, such is the bounty of the saints, a properly proportioned visage was returned to me in the glass.
Of a minor degree, since, has this distress pursued me, your brother, until this moment of writing. I have, as written, attended the professor of skins following matins of this day. He, the professor, advised, first, a purging of the bowel, and thereafter also, the regime of the monk, happily confined to that which passes into the body by the mouth of me, for a period of weeks, reasoning thusly: that unfriendly spirits have in me lodged and made me to be of a sensitivity profound, and a responsiveness, to an irritant which, in time, through a famous method known abroad as “progressive elimination,” may be apprehended and indicted.
In resignation the, I surrender to the saints and the professor of the skins.
Given this dat, hyght above, by the hand of the signatee below. Nihil obstat. Imprimatur. Nertz!
::::::::::::::::::::Roberto el labio 
Dear Norman:
I have separated the above report on the state of my physical body from the rest of this, chiefly to confound our biographers—whose existences I do not ever for a moment doubt. If they can dig the styles involved and their sources (I date such biographers about a hundred years hence, a few decades after an Orwellian debacle during which all traces of previous cultures will have vanished ((except our works, of course)) and the language will have degenerated into a series of melodious grunts (((except in the case of a handful of scientists who will by then have uncovered a Rosetta stone enabling such masterworks as Naked and Prescription to be read)))—if they can, I say, they’ll deserve the right to write about us.
To continue. Apart from all these horrors there is little to report from the Baltimore front. The thing that may amuse you is that Ivan [Von Auw] enclosed a letter from Gollancz in which the dear old boy reports that he turned down the stories in The Fifty-Minute Hour originally because he “came to the conclusion that there was something wrong with the book. I can’t clearly explain my feeling: I think I might perhaps put it, in a Jewish phrase which Lindner will understand, that it was not quite Kosher. Or, to put it in another way, I had the feeling that the investigations had been “done up” a bit—that there were points at which the science merged into fiction.” “But” the dear old boy continues, “I may have been quite wrong—in any event the thing was of fascinating interest—and I should certainly like to get another opinion. So please send the typescript over to me…”
Apparently the Lerner preface whetted old pip-pip Victor’s appetite again, and we are going to comply with his request for another look-see. In responding to Ivan about this I took the occasion to point out that everything about the stories is true and factual, but that, of course, they have been “fictionalized” to give the necessary dramatic tension. I rather expect that V.G. will decide to buy—but if he doesn’t Ivan assures me that almost anyone else in England will.
So far as the business with Harper’s is concerned, apparently they have not yet completed their mind-making up, and I anticipate that it will be another couple of weeks before we hear from them.
Some further small bit of news is that we went last night to hear Freddie Weisgal play at a local beer joint, to which I will have to take you when you come down again. Before deciding to do this, Freddie came to my office for an off-the-cuff opinion on whether or not his practice would suffer—or his reputation as a lawyer be hurt—but doing this I neglected to point out to Freddie that little damage to his legal reputation would be possible under the most extreme circumstances. However, I did feel he had somewhat of a point. I related the story of the man who complained he had been a tailor 40 years, and no one ever called him Schneider on the streets, yet for “zaging” one little “bein,” the whole world thereafter called him “cocksucker.” Fred got the point.
Soon after you receive this letter I expect that you will be off for Mexico, and I confess to envying you greatly this time of leisure. Me, I will be sweating out a living over a hot couch for another 6 or 7 weeks—and probably nursing my hives—until the first of August. [ . . . ]	
::::::::::::::::::::Bob