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

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{{start|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.

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 avant-garde 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

Office,” the downstairs bathroom where he considered {{" '}}highly significant statistics about football or the latest idiocy of the Red Sox.{{' "}} Among the

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.

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.”

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.”