The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/The Blue Hour: Difference between revisions

served as a means of conjuring up Mailer’s memories of the places he had visited and the times before his comparative confinement. Raymond describes Mailer’s nearly fanatical sketch of a receipt for borscht, a dish he had prepared during his visit to Minsk while researching ''Oswald’s Tale''. Concerned about finding just the right type of beet for a proper stew, Mailer apparently was channeling his experience in Russia to enlarge his life in Provincetown. “I was beginning to understand that Norman thought about food as often as he contemplated man’s reason for existence,” Raymond notes, “—which was all the time.”

Raymond’s observation of Mailer’s habits and working routines, his earned understanding of the man’s thoughts and desires, eventually condenses into something very like a psychic union, and Raymond misses few opportunities to cite the spooky nature of their connection. The market trip leading to his employment with Mailer is represented as a causeless whim rather than a legitimate need for groceries, a propitious intuition rather than mundane event. Raymond at one point shouts at Mailer, “I’m not in your head!” as Mailer tries to explain, in sparse terms, the changes he wants made to ''Gifts''. But Raymond spends much of his memoir showing that, in fact, he was in Mailer’s head for many of the one-thousand mornings the two spent together. Mailer himself appears to have knowledge unfounded by experience: “he simply knew things. I don’t know how, but he did. ”Mailer was a bit superstitious about discussing their bond, somehow fearful that, verbalized, it would vanish. “I had never given much weight to the belief that two minds, clearly of different caliber, could rock along in comfortable tandem,” Raymond writes. “The odd communication that we shared, which Norman likened to telepathy, seemed more delicate now, more important, yet we still avoided discussion of the phenomenon as little as possible.”

The memoir ultimately tells the reader as much about Raymond as about Mailer, becoming the autobiography of an aspiring author tethered by one resoundingly-influential cultural personality. We learn about Raymond’s eventual disgust with serving meals to New England tourists, his agonizing relationship with his companion, Thomas, and his grandfather’s rural ways. We learn, along with Raymond, about his father’s suicide and his need to find a substitute father in Mailer, along with a replacement family in Mailer’s large clan. But we are left with remarkable gaps, too, as we piece together Raymond’s story: a frequent visitor of Provincetown’s Little Bar early in the narrative, Raymond later describes himself as alcohol-free for eighteen months, going off the wagon only to salute Mailer on his deathbed. We’re introduced to Christina Pabst as someone with the potential to impact Raymond’s life, only to find that she is mentioned just twice in the text. These oversights may be stylistic imperfections rather than intentional sidesteps, but the reader is left wondering about the reasons for Raymond’s sobriety and the motivation for presenting Christina in such an auspicious light.

Raymond’s narrative is most effective as he recounts the transformations experienced by the two most important men in his life. Thomas, separated from Raymond during much of the narrative, comes to recognize his true identity and commits to life as transsexual, leaving Raymond with feelings of “unimaginable ambiguity.” Raymond’s sense of abandonment leads him to question the nature of sexual identity: “Thomas was not a male in the precise sense of the word and never had been–he’d simply appeared to be a perfect example of one.” Mailer, Raymond’s mentor and, along with Hemingway, perhaps the quintessential literary spokesman for masculinity, slowly succumbs to the infirmities of age. Mailer eventually stops playing his morning games of solitaire, visits his attic workplace less frequently, and perhaps most poignantly, begins to suffer from aphasia, the momentary lapse in finding and speaking just the right word. Mailer forgets where he had placed revised manuscripts and fails to recognize an oatmeal dish he had added to Raymond’s menu. “His once splendid love of food,” Raymond laments, “had become like the fond memory of an object he’d put in a cabinet and now thought about only rarely.”

Raymond’s account of Mailer’s final years may suffer, as Raymond himself implies, from a distorted perspective due to his close relationship with the author and, perhaps, insufficient time to put relationships and events into proper context. “Like a young wine that hasn’t matured,” he confesses, “my years with [Mailer] have yet to find their smoothness. There is too much to flesh out, too much rendering yet to be done.” But readers are left with an engaging portrait of a literary lion testing the bars of his cage, still committed to assembling the big picture from life’s minor details, even in relative confinement.

Mailer’s devoted wife of more than thirty years, Norris, has special affection for the evening view of the bay from the lanai of 627 Commercial Street and for what she calls the Blue Hour, that “fleeting stretch of evening when the water and sky glowed sapphire and burgundy, just before the sun dipped down.” Raymond’s success is that he communicates, with warmth and detail, Mailer’s own Blue Hour and the power and creativity possible for every person, even in decline.