Letter to Noor Din
A short reply to a correspondent whose friend held that drugs shaped Mailer's work: the thesis is half correct. Mailer recalls years of smoking marijuana three or four times a week, says it changed the style of his mind and turned him in one year from socialist to existentialist, and adds that he could never write under it.
A reply to a Mr. Noor Din, whose friend had argued that Mailer wrote under the influence of hashish. The thesis, Mailer answers, is “partially correct”: it was marijuana, not hashish, and for some years he was “truly enamoured of that mild drug,” smoking it three or four times a week. It “changed the style of my mind,” and “in one year I went through the metamorphosis from socialist to existentialist.” (The marijuana years he describes are those of his 1954–55 journal, published as Lipton’s.) But the writing of the two decades since was done “far from its influence”: under the drug he had “something close to visions” yet could not write a word afterward, and lost much material to it. “So let us say your friend is half correct.”