Male, Mailer, Female

Extract

The Reviewer approached The Prisoner of Sex with a quickened heart-beat of keen expectation, but warily, unsure whether he hoped to find it a triumph or a failure. Norman Mailer was for his money one of the most interesting and entertaining of contemporary American writers, a man who had recovered from that direst of literary fates, the best-selling first novel followed by a string of failures, and by sheer effort and character remade himself as an artist in middle age. In particular the Reviewer admired semi-confessional, semi-documentary works, like The Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago in which Norman wrote about himself in the third person, as the Novelist, the Historian, the Journalist, thus achieving a delicious ironic detachment from his own ego without which indeed his matter and manner could become tiresomely pretentious and irresponsibly extreme.

Peeking into the opening pages of the new book, the Reviewer was glad to see that it was written in the ironic third-person mode, but he was well aware too of what polemical purpose it in this case served. The same cultural trade-winds that had brought across the Atlantic tidings of the growing strength of the movement for Women’s Liberation, and the growing fame of its chief prophet, Kate Millett, had also conveyed whiffs of the excitement greeting Norman’s counterblast, originally rushed to the public in a single issue of Harper’s magazine, to Women’s Lib in general and Kate

Millett in particular. For Kate, in her monumental study of man’s oppression of woman, Sexual Politics, had singled out Norman, along with D. H. Lawrence and Henry Miller, as prime examples of male chauvinism in modern literature.