Word: millette
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...WHAT Mailer finally considers Millett's fatal flaw is the way she butchers the literary material and the writers she criticizes. D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Jean Genet all fall under her carving knife. (So does Mailer, for that matter, but in the Harper's essay, he seems to be too, er, modest to reflect on Millett's criticism of his own work, except in passing.) He is, however, swift to show us how and where the good woman wrecks havoc...
Charging that Millett disrupts the chronology of Lawrence's work to prove that he is a "counterrevolutionary sexual politician," Mailer restores the chronology, plus several passages Millett has lacerated with ellipses and paraphrase. Then, he brings to the analysis such delicacy and compassion for Lawrence that the section often moves along with the surge of a hymn, and may perhaps be among the finest pieces of Lawrence criticism to date...
...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...
...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...