Word: mailer
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...Mailer's panegyric goes just a little too far. In the fever of retaliation against Millett, Mailer exclaims, "It is not only that no other man [besides Lawrence] writes so well about women, but indeed is there a woman who can?" Now mind you, Norman Mailer once admitted quite frankly that he had never read Virginia Woolf. Not only that, he would presumably prefer Jayne to Katherine Mansfield ("I doubt if there will be a really exciting woman writer," he once said, "until the first whore becomes a call girl and tells her tale"), and he has probably never even...
...Mailer on Millett on Miller, as on Lawrence, is astonishing in the sureness of his under-standing, astonishingly good, that is, until the final twist of his logic. Mailer accuses Millett of missing the quintessential point in Miller, "that lust when it fails is a machine." Then, at his cockiest and most ecstatically ribald, Mailer treats us to his own passage on lust, on lust and love and Priapus the ram, a passage no less provocative, in its way, than the tirades of Falstaff or Rabelais or all the thighs in the canvases of Rubens...
...heat of his own enjoyment of Miller's literary fields ("the fields of flesh and cunt"), Mailer loses some of his perspective and self-knowledge. He seems certain he can distinguish himself from Miller, certain that he and his age are looking for "an accommodation of the sexes," whereas Miller "calls out for an antagonism." In the heat of his own argument, Mailer seems to have forgotten the battles between the sexes whose corpses litter the fields of his own novels. Suddenly, the novelist who sees himself as a "general who sends his troops across fields of paper," the writer...
...among the accolades that Kate Millett really does deserve (a point or two for being among the first to synthesize a theory of patriarchy and polities, a few more points for braving the trek across new grounds of literary criticism), not the least of her triumphs is meeting Mailer head on and sending him into a couple of tailspins...
...differences between the sexes and the complexities of sexuality, then Kate Millett actually challenges him with two fiats clenched. One, as we have just seen, defies his static notions of sex roles, his rigid mindset for masculinity and femininity. But Millett's other fist is more threatening to Mailer by far. For with her other fist, he thinks she wants to knock out all the mysteries of the womb, knock them out, scatter them into the stratosphere, and in the meantime, replace them with technology...