nyuuzyou/wikis huggingface dataset:
Lipton’s Journal/Correspondence of Robert Lindner and Norman Mailer/January 27, 1955

::::::::::::::::::::To Norman Mailer
::::::::::::::::::::January 27, 1955
Normano mio:
I tried to call you last night but you were out—or perhaps (I can see you) reclining with your feet up in that wonderful chair while that gadget of yours poured out the music. Wish I’d been with you.
What I wanted to tell you was that I’m glad about the Putnam thing. I want to see The Deer Park behind you. As you so correctly saw—long ago—it was a phase, a necessary step in your development. It now needs to be solidified in print—(which is really the way an artist buries, successively, each of his selves), then mourned (the critical and public reception), finally forgotten by being absorbed. Now that this is well on its way, you’re free to grow a new self.
Which leads to the Journal.
Norman, buck-o-boy—I can’t tell you how excited I am about it. I wait from day to day to get the next installment, and find myself almost totally absorbed in following its development. Some of the ideas I hate—most I love—but all of them fascinate me. Occasionally, reading it, I find myself leaping ahead in my mind—or arguing fiercely as if you were present. Our next meeting should detonate an explosion that will probably tear up 53rd Street and route out some of the whores in the St. Regis.
As for me, I’m kind of in a fallow period now, intellectually; but emotionally I’m sizzling on some griddle of curious design. Things I can’t write about have been happening to me, and the shape of that griddle is burning hieroglyphs on my soul.
The success of the book—or what looks like a success—and the fuss my lectures have been kicking up all over the place, have made me excited and tense—But the yin of this yang is a new level of consciousness—almost a new birth, with a fermentation being prepared in another recess of my mind. I’m getting ideas again, hermano—and, as you predicted, dangerous ideas.
How perceptive you are! What genius (I mean it) lies in your intuition of my growth (?) from psychopathy to sainthood, badness to goodness, dishonesty to truth! The whole story, which I must now resolve to tell you some day, will confirm you down to the very misspellings of the words you used. I’m going to try to call you again tonight, comrade—because I’m tired of writing letters these days and because I need the more direct contact. Also, I have to come up to New York for a few hours next week to talk to the moguls who are planning to do an Omnibus dramatization of the J. P. Couch—which means a few hours we can tear up together. Meanwhile, pal, go go, Go…
::::::::::::::::::::Yours,			
:::::::::::::::::::::Bob
Lipton’s Journal/Correspondence of Robert Lindner and Norman Mailer/July 20, 1954

::::::::::::::::::::To Norman Mailer
::::::::::::::::::::July 20, 1954
Normancito:
Don’t tell me we’re not simpatico! I had hardly finished a letter to you when yours arrived. We were overjoyed to hear from you, but are now distressed to learn about your health. Have you considered returning for treatment? Or can you get what you need where you are? Please, man, take care—it’s important for everyone that you remain well—or at least well enough to get done what’s yours to do, including having a good time.
As for me, mysteriously, I have had little or no further trouble, lip-wise or hive-y. Whether the blasted thing has run its course, or my psyche has undergone some occult kind of reorganization, I don’t know. In any case, I’m eating almost everything (although I remain leery of—and avoid—tomatoes, berries and cheese) without ill effect. Physically, then, I’m in pretty good shape. Except for heart trouble, cancer, leukemia, and tuberculosis I have fewer complains these days than I had when I last wrote. Mentally, I continue dull. Although I’ve read a lot—much. An occasional idea, yes—but nothing that sticks. Nevertheless—and I think only you can understand this—I feel yeasty. Stuff is moiling and brewing deep down. Occasionally, with what reminds me of a bubble’s burst in a cauldron of some thick liquid, an etwas (sentence, thought, vagrant phrase) rises to the surface, breaks, then settles—So maybe there’s a thing happening that will start me soon on the book.
Your news about Deer Park is warming and exciting both. When I got the catalogue two weeks ago, I observed there was no announcement of your book, I worried about what had happened. Your letter calms—apparently all has ended well. As for the orgy scene, I agree its elimination is artistically necessary and that the book will profit from the deletion.
Parenthetically, the “Jet-Propelled Couch” will be in Harper’s in abbreviation in December and January. Ivan [Von Auw] concluded the arrangements last week. We think they’ve done a fine editorial job and its appearance there will help The Fifty-Minute Hour.
We leave for Long Island on July 31st. Please copy this address and phone number and put it where you’ll be reminded of me (us) constantly. May I suggest Adele’s beautiful butt? [ . . . ]
To both of you from all here, much love,
::::::::::::::::::::Your 
:::::::::::::::::::::Lippy
:::::::::::::::::::::the labile lover of labia
Lipton’s Journal/Correspondence of Robert Lindner and Norman Mailer/June 3, 1955

::::::::::::::::::::To Robert Lindner
::::::::::::::::::::June 3, 1955
Dear Bob,
That was a good talk we had on the phone and I wish we could get together soon. Everything is in a jam here. I’m working overtime on The Deer Park, trying to do the impossible, alternate critical detachment with creative immediacy—very close to the psychopathic, you know—and somehow pull off a small miracle which, between us, I doubt if I will do. Still, the book will be a little better and I’ll have learned something in the process, I hope.
You sounded very tired on the phone and while I know your amazing capacity to recuperate quickly, I hope that you will take your simple bodily needs into account and take off a few days now and again over the summer, whether your patients get p.o.’ed or not. I’ve been living for a good many months now pushed past the normal output of my energy, and it can set up a vicious circle.
Let me hear from you when you get a chance. I know you’re very busy and your correspondence must be heavy, but if you have an odd moment drop a note.
::::::::::::::::::::Love, 
:::::::::::::::::::::Norm
Lipton’s Journal/Correspondence of Robert Lindner and Norman Mailer/March 29, 1955

::::::::::::::::::::To Norman Mailer
::::::::::::::::::::March 29, 1955
Dear Norman,
Your manuscript is being mailed today and should reach you before the end of the week.
I am very glad that you are planning a visit to Baltimore, since I think that only face-to-face will we be able to straighten out the difficulties between us. Unfortunately, your visit here will have to be delayed until after the middle of May, since I am committed for every weekend between now and then and will very likely be in California between the 11th and 17th of May.
I think one of our main troubles is that I haven’t been completely honest with you. I have pretended to sympathy with the whole Lipton’s deal that I really don’t feel, and I think this pretense has blocked basic communication and placed our relations in a false light. Maybe this is what gives you the impression of “manipulating.” More than anything I want to be brothers and friends with you, and I’ve missed you these past weeks. I think I have had too little trust in your tolerance of my radically different concept of this whole matter of Lipton’s, and that I conceded initially there and, later, all over the place until I became enmeshed in my own contradictions. I hope I have underrated you, and that it’s now possible to eat off clean dishes.
Things here are in somewhat of a mess, and I don’t have an opportunity to write the long and more personal letter I hope to get around to within a few days.
::::::::::::::::::::Meanwhile, love,
:::::::::::::::::::::Bob
Lipton’s Journal/Correspondence of Robert Lindner and Norman Mailer/November 29, 1954

::::::::::::::::::::To Robert Lindner
::::::::::::::::::::November 29, 1954
Dear Bob,
Just a shortie to tell you what a good time we had, and to let you know that there’s no news on the big thing yet. I’ve submitted it simultaneously to Knopf and Random House (please don’t mention Knopf, nor for that matter that I’m in the act of changing publishers) and in a funny way I’m hoping that both houses don’t want the book with equal enthusiasm, mainly because I had to use such pressure to make them both agree to the simultaneous business that it’s going to leave me with an enemy when I turn one down. I’ll let you know as soon as there is news. Maybe by next Monday.
My inner life continues with much stimulation. I’ve gotten on to something in advertising which I believe is pretty big. It’s the old thing I discovered from Lipton’s that tremendous truth is to be found in the cliché if you crack open the shell. As a matter of fact I feel a little bit these days as if I’m a man from Mars. I walk around (even when I’m not taking Lipton’s) really listening and concentrating on what I hear. On exactly what is said. It’s amazing what one discovers if one only listens. And of course my great mental weakness in the past has been one of not concentrating. Now I feel as if everything I see, do, feel, and hear, is in italics.
By the way, I’m a little pissed off at you for your attitude on Lipton’s. Mainly at the element of condescension, the feeling that you know me. Like Gide I scream! Please do not understand me too quickly. If our activities were reversed, I would be extremely interested in what you had to say, and what you thought about it. And, by the by, I don’t ascribe magic powers to Lipton’s. For anyone to get a radically new insight, some sort of magic or catalyst—if you will—is necessary, be it love, liquor, psychoanalysis, religion, or what have you, and this happens to be mine. You can of course be right, and I think no better, hear no better, etc., but why be sure ahead of time? Do you know everything? Am I that simple? There exists the danger in you, Bob, and I say this to a beloved friend, that you can end up as some sort of avant-garde paterfamilias. One is either truly radical or merely a liberal with muscles.
Anyway, when next I see you, I have three large subjects to expound on—1) The artist and psychopathy, 2) Advertising and the modern state, 3) The illusion of psychoanalysis. Where and when did the German lecturer come to birth in me. But do remind me because I really have so much to discuss.
[. . . .]
::::::::::::::::::::Con amor,
:::::::::::::::::::::Norman
Lipton’s Journal/Correspondence of Robert Lindner and Norman Mailer/September 15, 1954

::::::::::::::::::::To Norman Mailer
::::::::::::::::::::September 15, 1954
Hermano mio,
Now, at last, I take my pen in hand (I’d take my secretary, but she’s otherwise engaged) to write to you. Why I haven’t done so before—there are many reasons, but most of it has been sheer laziness. Anyhow, I don’t like to write letters to you, Chico—I’d rather speak direct—man talk. Letters embarrass me. And who knows? They’re even saying Freud and Fleiss had a mad affair!
We returned to Baltimore last week, worn out from violent vacationing. Now I’m back at work, slaving over a hot couch and chasing a buck here and there. Actually, I’ve hardly dug in, and don’t expect to—really—until next week, when I return from a quick trip to New York. I have to go there to meet and talk with the people who are arranging a lecture tour for me in California beginning November 1st. You did not know this, Ginso, so I’m telling you now. On November 1st, we go West for about two weeks. Anyhow, previous to seeing these birds about the arrangements and details, I have to talk with Ivan [Von Auw]. Always (you know) with an eye to the main chance, I’d like to see if there’s a possibility to have the articles (lectures) commissioned by someone, or gather them into a fast small book. So when I get back (from N.Y.), I’ll have to hustle to put the stuff down on paper.
So much to tell you—and so much I want to know about you, Cholo. I think the state of our souls needs examination and discussion over a quart of whiskey. Hurry back, Pal.
Which brings me to what you are doing. I like the fact that you are having etwases, that you are thinking about two novels, that your liver is lively, your gonads sizzling, and your asshole is tight—But, amigo querido, this flirtation of yours with the gage—this I do not like. Not because it may mean early doom or residence in some Yiddish purgatory—that would be okay since then we’d share hellroom together—but because the winding of the self should take place from the inside. A theory I’ll discuss with you one night soon.
By the way, I don’t know if you know yet about the love affair between the Rembars and the Lindners. It’s a fact, anyhow. On Friday, when I get to New York, I’ll be calling Cy—and getting what news he has of you. Perhaps he’ll tell me then about the Naked deal. And when you get rich, Chazar, I’ll take the Jaguar on the left.
Christ! I miss you.
The jacket came from Rinehart for the 50 minute job. I don’t what to make of it—or how to think of it. Everyone says it’s “striking, vivid, attention-getting.”—Me? I think it looks like something that’s been cooking too long.
How’s my Peruvian Yenta? If I thought you knew where to do it, I’d ask you to kiss her for me.
All of us enjoy good health. Maybe that’s why I feel so bad.
	
Adios, marica,
::::::::::::::::::::Robert———el toro dé Latrobe
Lipton’s Journal/December 1, 1954/1

Perhaps the artist is less sensitive than his audience. That is, he reacts with less emotion, less intensity, to experience than people who are not at all creative. His creativity (his need to synthesize) is merely the expression of less emotion, it being quite conceivable that emotion and language are antithetical. Thus the writer, seeing coldly, but able to see, touches upon matters which move him very little, and move his audience much. It is perfectly conceivable that the stupid man feels worlds of experience he can never communicate; he is actually far more sensitive than the intelligent “sensitive” man.
Category:December 1, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 1, 1954/10

I upset Herbert by saying that possibly psychoanalysis is witchcraft. But it can so well be true. Scientifically, they have not even taken the second step of physics, the first being the concept of mass, or in psychoanalysis, the unconscious. But the one next step, that of measuring intensity of movement has never been approached, unlike physics. And a reason may well be that it suffers from the incapacity to see, to understand, of knowledge itself. Any scientist knows that an experiment to be truly controlled should be administered by people who not only are disinterested, but indeed do not know the purpose of the experiment. The more hypothetical, the less measurable by the objective test of nature, the more this is true. We may take it for granted that the wish to prove a theory alters a fact. But what of the facts, previous facts, which suddenly form in our mind to suggest a theory? What I’ve noticed in writing is how often my unconscious is ahead of me, creating characters who seem alien to me at the time, only for me to discover later that indeed they are part of myself. So it may be with theories. They can exist in the unconscious, prepared to answer tangible needs of one’s social life, such as prestige, personality, position, etc., and while they exist there, previous to their appearance in consciousness, they may be altering the facts one sees, forming them to give credence to the theory when it will appear. This way, the “scientist” feels conviction; he has the illusion that the facts which support his theory are independent of himself.
Category:December 1, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 1, 1954/2

Lipton’s seems to open one to one’s unconscious. Perhaps its brothers do too. Last night, for an experiment, I tried an overhead press with the 45 lb. barbell. I did it seventeen times, double what I normally do, and while I could probably do as much without Lipton’s, I felt very little strain, and no stiffness this morning. Undoubtedly, our latent strength is far greater than our actual, and we become tired or drained because of anxiety. This would account for the super-human strength people exhibit in time of necessity. It is always there, but it takes the threat of death or something which is its psychological equivalent to quiet the anxiety and allow the full strength to appear. Perhaps this is why animals are always so strong for their size—their latent strength is always present.
Category:December 1, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 1, 1954/4

In relation to (1). The reason “insensitive” people very often react negatively to sex or shocking matters in books is because it is actually much more real to them. They are actually more “sensitive” to it. So, Stanley Rinehart. He must excise the presence of The Deer Park because he reacts to it more than I do.
Category:December 1, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 1, 1954/5

The concentration camp novel. A Lipton’s insight I had last night. The German doctor has heretofore been too thin, too structural. Merely an unsympathetic character who comes to appear as sympathetic here and again until he is finally shown as more or less evil or at least utterly weak. But suppose I make the attempt to show him as genuinely sympathetic, suppose I let him get out of hand, let him convince the reader as well as the doctor. So that finally, even when he kills the children, he is merely thinking, “Sweet lovely children, this is how they pass from the world of insubstantialities into the world of the universe.” Originally, he might merely feel numb; but as he is obliged to continue killing them, the mysticism arises.
Category:December 1, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 1, 1954/6

One should always listen attentively to what children say. Because they are never burdened with the baggage we assume to be knowledge. That is why their questions are so difficult to answer. If there is a total unity, a sea from which we emerge and to which we return, then children are closer to it, it is less far behind them. That is why you cannot deceive a child about the state of your emotions. Language has not yet succeeded in severing it from the universe. It is also why children from nine to thirteen let us say are invariably so dull. They have learned language, they have lost their early instinctual apprehension of the universe, and so the child of ten is a caricature of the adult, all projects, all plans, all concerted emptiness. Particularly boys. Last night Susy said to me, “What is a scientist?” and indeed it is not a question one can answer easily.
Category:December 1, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 1, 1954/8

In modern jazz, one feels a key to aesthetics. Because modern jazz consists almost entirely of surprising one’s expectation, and it is in the degree, small or great, with which each successive expectation is startled, that the artistry lies. But modern jazz has risen to share the crisis of modern painting. It is a self-accelerating process for the audience’s expectations are changed almost nightly (that is, the tight critical yeast of the true aficionados) and so questions of “beauty” disappear before the dilemma—last night’s innovation is tomorrow’s banality. What is suggested is a movement across the arts, each of them engaging the other in order to find new startlings of old expectations until the arts blend, possibly in mathematics, the only art where the expectations of expectations of expectations, etc. can approach infinity.
Category:December 1, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/44

The saint and the churchman are polar in character. The churchman (by which I include most clerics and most churchgoers) has a most definite idea of what God is. Whether he conceives Him as a superior person, a force, as love or justice or whatever, the conception is not something he worries about. He believes in God, knows what and who He is, and then proceeds, usually quite practically to do the business of society. 
The saint is his opposite. The saint is consumed with the idea that God exists. Through all of his soul are the intimations of that. But what God is, he can but barely glimpse. And so his life, his way, his road are a search—he is the adventurer who never moves from a room. And that is where he is kin to the psychopath. For the psychopath is consumed with the desire to explore himself to the end, just as the saint is, but the psychopath his search in the world. Indeed, that is the reason we find the psychopath so fascinating, and why the villain of a story carries out interest. 
Confronted with the collective soul of man (or whatever one wishes to call it) society can exorcise the Soul only be dividing it. So it says that saints are good, but of course we are all indifferent to saints. Then it brands the psychopath as evil, as the thing-to-be-destroyed, and allows us our fascination and terror of him. So society wins. The saint is ignored, the psychopath is shunned, and the purity of the human soul is concealed. We are returned to a world where we must be practical, mature, pluralistic, and confirmed in abysmal and false humilities—in return for agreeing to admit that we know nothing, we are offered the comforts, the securities, and the prestige of society.
Category:December 17, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/45

There is no death-instinct, there is only anger, and we are not born with anger, not unless the mother is capable of communicating her anger to the embryo. What we think of as the death-instinct, which is applied almost always to the act which seems completely irrational and purposeless, is actually the anger of the soul at being forced to travel the tortured contradictory roads of the social world. The meaningless act is never meaningless—its meaning goes too deep. It is the cry of the soul against society, and it has a purpose—only the most irrational cries can appeal to the soul Only the soul can understand their meaning which is why we flee the impulse in ourselves and others, and call it the death-instinct. All words have their echoes, their deep contraries, and what we call the death-instinct is actually the life of the soul, its anger. But to admit it, to face up to it, is the most terrible revolution a human can undergo, for he loses not only all the vanities of his previous thought, his snobberies, his deceptions, but he is likely to lose his friends, his mate, his reputation, and even most probably his ambition.
Category:December 17, 1954
Lipton’s Journal/December 17, 1954/46

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.
Category:December 17, 1954