186
RICHARD POIRIER
himself up as the creator of the salvaging literary metaphor. He is
Guyon not as chivalrous knight but as existentialist boxer. But
there is a human cost to this kind of radicalism which far out–
weighs its value as literary rhetoric. People have suffered too much
from it in the progress of their daily lives. My own feelings were
brought into especially sharp focus in a letter from Anita Van
Vactor just after she had finished reading Mailer on Kate Millett.
"Although it goes against the grain," she wrote, "I might very well
when it comes down to biology, back Millett against Mailer. It
would, I know it, be as good as backing Lenin against Jefferson,
and as a woman, one would be as much betrayed in the end as the
proletariat was destroyed. But I see how, for one dizzy moment,
you can back your betrayer for the sake of a single insight. I be–
lieve--and as a committed if unambitious student of literature
am helpless before the belief--that an overwhelming literary
imagination has fucked up irrevocably, the truth about sexual bi–
ology_
If
the truth were known, if the truth could be known, the
womb is without privilege, the cock is without privilege; the mys–
terious power of the space within never existed, the ontological
power of the cock, the Unhappy Consciousness, never existed.
Sexuality is as empty as a Kate Millett could conceive: and if this
were known, if I could be delivered out of the lie of female mys–
tery, if Mailer could be delivered out of the lie of male mastery,
this world might seem humanized at last.... But such a world
would seem, for the transitional generation, the only generation
that ever counts, so bleak, so deserted of godhead, that one would
gladly return to the old cruelties of literature, purely for the sake
of its colors."
It might be asked why sexuality matters in a discussion of
radicalism. The answer is that the key to any writer's idea of the
self and of society, of an inner, more or less unarticulated being
and of an outer, overwhelmingly articulated system is probably
best located in what can be deduced about the writer's idea of
sexuality . Mailer's, very briefly, is inextricably tied to his idea of
creativity and this in tum to his idea of the novelist-- that is of
himself--as the embattled defender of Imagination in a techno–
logical age. He associates sex with awe, wonder, guilt-- every–
thing, especially the guilt, that Kate Millett would like to get rid
of, and that might well be construed as literary trapping. Long
