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

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 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.
+We find Mailer, always the creator, coming up with recipes involving baby peas and green beans, often laced with teriyaki, or using his experience as an
+army cook to dictate just the right way to roast a chicken, or fabricating the supreme ''Berry Trio'', “a mixture of raspberries, blueberries and chopped
+strawberry mixed into a sauce of clover honey and the juice from half a lemon.” Other fun culinary facts: Mailer adored Dove bars, served guests
+high and low with meatloaf, and contemplated appearing on ''The Martha Stewart Show'' because the host sometimes featured cooking. Food, too,
+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.”
+The reader also learns a little bit about The Norman Mailer Society, its meetings in Provincetown during the author’s lifetime, and much about Provincetown itself, a small, diverse community welcoming artists, gays, and tourists alike. If you have visited Provincetown or, in fact, even watched ''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'', the movie of Mailer’s novel filmed there in 1987, you will recognize the Little Bar, the Provincetown Inn, Michael Shay’s, and The Lobster Pot, where Mailer drives to, solo, one final time in order to reassert his independence. As Raymond describes, Mailer immersed himself into the community as a regular guy, just one of the town’s citizens, never claiming superiority despite his distinguished accomplishments. “Norman was famous around town for being ‘normal’ in spite of [his] distinctions, and his laissez-fair attitude defined his true local legend. He never sequestered himself or thought himself superior because he was a celebrity.”
+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.”