cigarette withdrawal: NM had great difficulty quitting smoking and did not succeed until he was 40.

seconal: NM was a heavy user of the barbiturate Seconal, a sleeping pill, in the mid-50s. See his 1956 poem, “A Wandering in Prose: For Hemingway” where he describes trying to kick the habit (PP 309–310; reprinted in DFL and MG).

get into my unconscious: NM conducted his own self-analysis during this period. He comments on Lindner and psychoanalysis in AFM 301–309, and comments on the unconscious in SA 138–144.

Joyce: Near the end of the opening essay of CAC, “Introducing Our Argument,” NM says,

The wish to go back to that long novel, announced six years ago, and changed in the mind by all of seven years, may be here again, and if that is so, I will have to submit to the prescription laid down by the great physician, Dr. James Joyce — ‘silence, exile, and cunning,’ he said. Well, one hopes not; the patient is too gregarious for the prescription.” (CAC 5)

twenty–five to fifty important writers: “I sent off inscribed copies to Graham Greene, Cyril Connolly, Philip Rahv, and a dozen others whom I no longer remember, probably from shame” (AFM 267).

[Aldous] Huxley and [Christopher] Isherwood: It is unknown if Lindner fulfilled this request.

some new state of being: This passage presages NM’s belief in reincarnation, hinted at in “The Metaphysics of the Belly” and “The Political Economy of Time” in CAC (262–299, 312–375), and then confirmed in his 1975 interview with Laura Adams (CNM 217–218).