This is the full text of “Saint and Psychopath,” a selection from Norman Mailer’s unpublished “Lipton’s Journal” (1954–55), edited and introduced by J. Michael Lennon, Gerald R. Lucas, and Susan Mailer, first published in The Times Literary Supplement on 19 August 2022. Rights are reserved — see the frontmatter rights-note. See the Work page: Saint and Psychopath, and the full book edition: Lipton’s, A Marijuana Journal.
During the winter of 1954-5, Norman Mailer found himself at a crossroads. He was thirty-two and concerned that his career as the promising and precocious young author of The Naked and the Dead (1948) might already have burnt out, like a shooting star. His second novel, Barbary Shore (1952), had not been well received by critics and he was struggling to publish his third novel, The Deer Park (1955). He considered that the international success of Naked may have been a fluke and that he was just “an imposture”. Mailer turned inwards, towards self-analysis, and examined his relationship with the external world. He used cannabis (his “tea”, or “Lipton’s”) on the weekends and recorded his thoughts and experiences in over 700 journal entries, from December 1, 1954 to March 4, 1955. His journey plumbed the depths of his soul, skirting the borders of dread, insanity and despair, and helped him to perceive his own responsibility as an artist and develop his own self-reliance and practical existentialism. “Lipton’s” – which would become the foundation of his iconic essay “The White Negro” (1957) and the biographical passages in Advertisements for Myself (1959) – ends shortly after Walter Minton of Putnam’s agreed in February 1955 to publish The Deer Park.