The Mailer Review/Volume 3, 2009/The Blue Hour

Written by
Dwayne Raymond

Norman Mailer’s boundless curiosity and passionate intellect led him around the world as he researched material for his published work. He was an eminently social man, enjoying nothing more than good company and time well-spent with engaging friends. Dwayne Raymond’s memoir, Mornings with Mailer, presents the author during the final years of his life, primarily confined to Provincetown and to the routines of his home at 627 Commercial Street.

Raymond served as Mailer’s aide from April 2003 until the author’s death on November 10, 2007. During that time he organized Mailer’s research for The Castle in the Forest, helped out with the assembly of The Big Empty and On God: An Uncommon Conversation, and gave Mailer the notion for Modest Gifts, a small paperback collecting the author’s drawings and poetry. Raymond also ran errands, prepared meals, coordinated Mailer’s interview schedule, and otherwise made sure that Mailer’s active creative life was only marginally restricted by age and illness.

The prospect of managing a cooped-up Mailer might be daunting, but according to Raymond, Mailer accepted his situation with humor, grace, and perhaps uncharacteristic silence. “Norman understood that the bastard edge of age fostered limitations,” he writes, “and he knew I knew that—why discuss the obvious? It made for better days to let some topics fritter away unaddressed.” Deep in the process of writing Castle, titled after the inmates’ nickname for a Nazi concentration camp, Mailer himself was a prisoner of his infirmities, but his acceptance of his condition was fostered, perhaps, by a fascination both with freedom and restriction. He famously championed the release of Jack Henry Abbot in 1981, mapped the psychology of Gary Gilmore in The Executioner’s Song, was a Prisoner of Sex, and during the final months of his life, energetically planned to direct an adaptation of The Deer Park emphasizing confinement and routine. “He intended it to be an avantgarde work,” Raymond explains, “set in a theatre where the actors, in an unknowing hell, were doomed to repeat the play for eternity.” Indeed, throughout his earlier, active life Mailer was no stranger to confinement, and saw his role of celebrity-writer as much restricting as liberating. As Raymond notes, “[w}hat most do not realize is that a writer is working even when he or she is seemingly at rest. He once noted to me that being a writer was much like being a prisoner serving a life sentence. Norman was always, always working.”

Raymond’s account of Mailer’s working days is alone fascinating for the small details surrounding the habits and quirks of this singular personality. We learn that Mailer loathed broccoli and misquotations, folded pages in books and magazines lengthwise to mark them, exercised two hours each day to prevent his weakened legs from deteriorating further. He was a sucker for come-on ads shilling dubious products and luxuriated in his “Second Office,” the downstairs bathroom where he considered “‘highly significant statistics about football or the latest idiocy of the Red Sox.’ ” Among the many insights gained during his association with Mailer, Raymond mentions his realization that “ignored moments are often the most vital, the ones that should be banked. Most of us fail to pay respect to those tiny threads that are the fabric. I vowed to not make that mistake any longer.” And indeed, Raymond honors this pledge as he tracks the minutia surrounding Mailer’s hours and days.

Raymond’s command of the kitchen and Mailer’s gastronomic eccentricities, minor details perhaps ignored by other observers, emerge as unifying threads of the memoir. Raymond was hired following an encounter in a Provincetown market, with Raymond’s polite greeting and Mailer’s sly inspection of the contents of the younger man’s grocery basket. Their discussion may have been about writing, but Mailer’s implied intention was to engage someone to cook for the family, distinguished guests, and local cronies gathering at the Mailer household for the weekly game of poker.