Lipton’s Journal/Correspondence of Robert Lindner and Norman Mailer/April 25, 1955

::::::::::::::::::::To Robert Lindner
::::::::::::::::::::April 25, 1955
Dear Bob,
I came over to my studio today to do some work and found a letter from you which must have crossed mine. So since I’m not in a working mood, I think I’ll write you a long one—there was so much I wanted to tell you the other day when we met in Philadelphia, and of course I was in bad shape—the cigarette withdrawal deal was hitting me in full force and I was just churning with anxiety. But one of the things that I believe has happened to me is that to a certain extent by the aid of Lipton’s and other things I can pick a given direction for a week or more, assuming of course that I am not compulsive about the Lipton’s, about which I’m not altogether convinced—the problem of course is that the internal world of L is so much more exciting, charged, and fabulous than the everyday world. However I suspect that I have certain built-in mechanisms which regulate the whole thing for when I push L too hard, I begin to lose its advantages. My weight goes down, my confidence goes down, my anxiety state takes away the pleasures of my sensitivity and I find in myself the desire to build up again. So for instance these days after a particularly active exhausting and debilitating (let it stand) week, I’ve been concerned the last couple of days to take care of myself and I’m building up, eating carefully, off L and off Seconal, and feeling relatively strong, calm, and with a desire to build weight and physical strength. Part of the problem over the last month was that I was working very hard on The Deer Park and in order to cut it up and go through it with a scalpel revealing what I had come to see was the core of the book under the surface moralizing, I needed the particular heightened sensitivity of L plus Seconal. But since it had to go on for too long a period of times, I wore myself down, and began to live too much on nerve and in anxiety. However, despite your skepticism I do believe in the self-analysis. What has happened to me is that I learned to get into my unconscious, to live there, to explore my conflicts, and what conflicts they are and when I come up for air, I find that over the long haul I do feel stronger, more confident, and more aware. One thing I think you have to realize about me is that I do contain a scientist in myself, a doctor if you will, and in a peculiar way the transference you speak of consists of a continuous internal dialogue between the doctor and the patient in me, and I’m far from sharing your idea that I’m merely entering my neurosis. In the act of entering it I discover all kinds of reasons and underpinnings to my neurotic habits of which I’ve been intellectually aware for years—but in seeing the restricting and compulsive character of them I realize the necessity to change. So I go out in the world in the following few days and as if I were a gambler I tackle little situations where I would have lost in the past and where I now feel I may be able to win. Sometimes I win and sometimes I lose—the victories are important, because the essence of changing a habit is to have a life-victory rather than a life-defeat. Defeats as I know you know merely send one running back to the habit. But I can take defeats better these days because the longer I go on with this self-analysis, the less I see it as a problem of will or pride, and more a business of patience, of digesting losses and trying to understand victories and what happens much more often—draws and partial victories. The bad part of it is that when I get too deep in L I feel at times an incredible anguish—I am not able to communicate, I feel burning desires to reach across to people, my paranoid urge to fuse is almost unlivable, and I have to wonder at times if I’m going mad. That scares me, and I pull up, and begin to build up again. But the process is fascinating.
One thing I’ve come to feel very strongly is that The Deer Park has to do well at least so far as I can affect its fortunes. I’ve learned about myself that I simply do not have the strength to do it all alone with the will and the pride of a Joyce. If I’m going to be able to express the very far removed but nonetheless potential genius in myself, I have to have certain victories along the way for victories nourish one, they allow new habits if one is ready to make new habits, they create a climate for one’s thought—at least all this is true for me—when I feel most strong and confident, so I also feel most ready to tackle more, be more outrageous, bold, and creative in my thinking. Defeats shake my grasp on confidence. Some time I have to show you the reviews on Barbary Shore. They were vicious, Bob, and I believe I was unconsciously petrified when I understood how much I was hated, and how little capacity I had to fight back. Now, I think I know how to fight, and I want The Deer Park to succeed, because if it does I think it’ll make a legend which will aid me greatly. You know—seven publishers turned it down and it turns out to be a small classic. The only thing I can see stopping it from success is a climate of unanimously bad reviews, and that I’m determined to prevent if I can. What I intend to do is to fuck all pride and stand-offishness and approach in the most canny way about twenty-five to fifty important writers—it I can get quotes from about four or five of them before the book comes out, I believe that people will wish to read it even with bad reviews, and moreover I suspect that a lot of reviewers in New York will not quite dare to attack the book as viciously as they did Barbary. So, Bobbo, I want to ask you for a favor in line with this. When you meet Huxley and Isherwood, I would like you to talk about the book a little, just enough to whet their curiosity, for they are two of the people I’m going to approach. Isherwood knows me slightly, and Huxley I met once, and I believe they’re both sympathetic to me as a writer. Any anyway give them my regards.
I think I ought to try to explain something to you about how I feel about mysticism. You see the irony is that I don’t like it, it’s uncongenial to me, and when I talk to other mystics I get a pain in the ass. Nonetheless I find myself drawn to it malgre moi—at some of the deepest states of sensitivity I’ve entered the psychological reality is so intense, so self-evident that it’s far easier to believe in a mystic entity or whole than to posit a totally imaginary and unreal construction. In other words what the realist calls imagination, I find myself believing is reality for I can hardly comprehend the experience as being one of artificial and baseless construction. One thing I have come to feel very definitely, and about this we would have to talk endlessly, is that there is such a thing as a death-instinct, that deep in our biology, perhaps in our cell-life itself, there is the knowledge that we do not die as such but instead enter the universe, and so when life becomes unendurable, or when our energy is worn out, death literally calls—we know it is not death but some new state of being. I know that I’ve found that this makes an enormous amount of sense in understanding things like suicides, murders, self-destructive activities, etc., provided of course that death itself is understood as a good or a partial good. To posit, as I believe Freud did, a death-instinct which leads merely to oblivion, makes far less sense in terms of human conduct. The life instinct as I see it depends of course upon [a] relatively powerful ego with its counterpart of relatively low sensitivity. For the state of high sensitivity with its almost telepathic awareness of other people’s unconsciousnesses is not easily endurable what with one’s awareness of danger, hostility, etc. etc. To me, mysticism is a call to death, and since I enjoy life much more these days, at least a good deal of the time, the liver in me, the novelist, the scientist, etc. is torn between leaving sensitivity and its quick concomitant of knowledge for the pleasure of just enjoying things. Anyway we have to talk about this.
A word about the Journal. I haven’t written anything on it that you haven’t seen. Looking back on it now I believe that much of its composition was a first outpouring and dissolution of my old intellectual baggage as if before I could enter my unconscious, I had like most intellectuals in analysis to go through an enormous sympathetic discharge of intellectual concepts—the doors to my unconscious always having been guarded by my intellectual barriers. These days I don’t think as a Journaleer—instead of being confident and manic in my intellectual notions I have been testing some of the general assumptions I came up with in quiet ways and that has been secondary to work on The Deer Park, general self-analysis, etc.
::::::::::::::::::::Norman