Lipton’s Journal/Correspondence of Robert Lindner and Norman Mailer/August 19, 1954

::::::::::::::::::::To Robert Lindner
::::::::::::::::::::August 19, 1954
Dear Bob,
I’ve been sort of saving up and looking forward to this letter, and in fact meaning to write to you for some time now, but I got side-tracked into doing an article for Dissent which began as a book review of Individualism Reconsidered by David Riesman, and ended up going to fourteen pages, and including The Lonely Crowd, and all in all getting ambitious. So three weeks were devoted pretty exclusively to that.
We’ve been having a quiet time here, Adele painting, and I studying Spanish a couple of hours a day, and readings novels with an occasional trip thrown in. I think normally a life so inactive would pall, but I’ve been getting a succession of ideas for a long novel and a short novel which have been exciting me—how exciting ideas always are before you have to start shaping them to words—and so a lot of these quiet days have passed with considerable internal excitement. However, I do miss the rhythms of New York at times—and the excitement of talking to good friends at my three hundred word a minute rate. The friends we have here are all nice enough, but on the home lot I’m afraid they’d belong to the second string.
In reading your letter I see you’ve been having etwases too. Eppis is an etwas. But truly there ought to be a better word than etwas for something so marvelous, and there are times when I think that outside of screwing at its happy best, there’s no kick like an etwas.
I was very pleased to read the news about “The Jet-Propelled Couch,” and I’m delighted for you. The sign of how good it is that Harper’s got off their fat ass of precedent to print it. And of course we salute the passing of the third floor labia. What’s the matter, Ginso, you wanta lose your practice scoring your patients?
Susy (my daughter) has been with us a fair amount of time, and I have the cockeyedest relation with her. I’m kind of nuts about her for she’s a subtle, charming troubled child with a little old lady’s face and a grave manner which when it cracks under laughter gives her glee a peculiarly poignant (at least for me) quality. And of course her Spanish accent slays me. But with it, she’s often remote and not often very affectionate, and do my damndest I can’t get as close to her as I’d like. The irony of my “seductive” personality is that children aren’t taken in by it. Not my own child anyway.
The other child is painting well, and our fights are occasionally heroic farce in their magnitude, but what saves it is that we always feel so bruised and tender when they’re over, like the kid knocking his head against the wall because it feels so good when he stops.
Also we’ve discovered the joys of “tea.” This I’ll expound to you when I see you, and if you read me a psychoanalytical lecture I’ll call you an old reactionary. But if you have any good doctor friends who are a little less inspirational and hortatory than Arthur M[andey], I am curious to know what the physiological action is, whether it’s harmful over extended periods, etc. My knowledge of it is that is does no harm at all, but I don’t know how reliable it is. One thing, I find it far less wearing on the system (no hangovers) than whisky. Anyway, old buddie, do subdue your panic reactions about my going straight to hell—why does everybody see my early doom? when I know that I’m just a simple middle-class Jewish boy and never to anything to excess, and when I see thee I will explain the pleasures of the pipe.
Cy phoned a couple of days ago, and mentioned that you were all going to phone me until he wisely dissuaded you via expense. Of which I approve. I would have been so horrified at the expensive connect between minutes and money that I would have been able to say nothing. Anyway, I’m glad you felt like calling.
It seems as if the deal on Naked is going to go through, and to Adele’s amazement, I feel absolutely flat about that. I suppose what depressed me is that at least half of me, hopes for the day when I’ll be poor, faced with the real realities of life, and therefore able to write better. Which is probably nonsense, but the ideas and passions of college, like art in a garret and traveling the wide world of adventure die very hard, don’t they amigo? 
Everything seems routine now at Rinehart on The Deer Park that just as it was hard to write, so will its publishing life be full of episodes and near-catastrophes. Now the bitch is in England, where they like it, but as I understand from Cy, Cape wrote Ted something to the effect that I sure was a novelist but that little old Deer Park might need “a fig-leaf or two.” Fig ’em. I mean it.
About my health—it’s fine. After a month of laying off completely, I’ve been drinking sparingly and feel no compulsion about having to have stuff. Of course we haven’t been meeting many strange people and that could be part of it too. Incidentally, it just occurs to me, I think it would be better, Bob, if you don’t mention the marijuana because you know how that kind of story will spread about me.
At the moment we plan to start back in slow stages somewhere around the middle of October, but that date is very elastic. I think though that the emphasis would be more on leaving earlier than later because we just aren’t that nuts about Mexico, and the altitude demands an average of nine hours of sleep which of course I resent.
We think often of you and Johnnie enjoying the sun and the water at Low House, and regret that we miss visiting you this summer. Maybe next. Anyway I hope this finds you and the blonde beauty in the best of health, and give our hellos to the kids.
Did friendship take with the Rembars? I’m sure it did.
Adele sends her love to which I add mine.
::::::::::::::::::::Norm