But in all fairness, Mailer transcends his sexist prejudices and does quite a job on Sister Kate, a beautiful and sensitive one perhaps, but nevertheless, a job. He hammers away at the "flatiron" of her mind, calls her to task for slight flaws and gross insensitives in her argument.

He opens his attack by uncovering Millett's sexual gaff in her treatment of the motivation for the central murder in Mailer's own, An American Dream. Millett maintains that the novel's hero Rojack kills his wife to punish her for committing sodomous adultery. But Mailer insists (and who after all, should know better than he?) that the crime was not in fact, sodomy, but analingus. Academic perhaps, but indicative to Mailer of a mind that hedges the niceties of distinction, a mind that abandons evidence in the pursuit of thesis.

He criticizes Millett for sins of omissions as well. He notices that in a chapter she calls "The Sexual Revolution, First Phase: 1830-1930," she actually neglects to discuss anything that happens between 1900 and 1930. Thus, she quietly skirts the first world war and the twenties-a decade, notes Mailer, "conceivably as interesting in the emancipation of women as any other ten years since the decline of Rome."

BUT 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.

But 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 heard of Kate Chopin. Considering his utter lack of knowledge about women writers, his declaration about Lawrence is more than arrogant; it is nonsense.

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.

But in the 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 who creates for posterity a character he can call "hunter-fighter-fucker" (in Why Are We In Vietnam? ), suddenly our ever belligerent hero has become a prince of peace, an advocate of accommodation.

And so, 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.

If the prison-as the writer tells us-is really sex, and its walls-from his viewpoint-are really built of the 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.

If a single belief may be said to terrorize Mailer more than any other, it is his weary conviction that the spirit of the twentieth century is to convert man to a machine. It is a fear allied to other tensions that preoccupyhim, a fear allied to his terror of Fascism, of totalitarianism in any form or degree of thoroughness.

This fear intrudes on much of Mailer's most serious work, filling it with a bloodcurdling immediacy-the mechanization of command in wartime, the mechanical sterility of men in politics, and of course, most recently, the near congruence of men and machines in space exploration.

But suddenly, Mailer wants to announce that the heavy artillery has hit the bedroom, that sex is no longer spared from the wires of automation, that, in fact, Women's Liberation has an "inbuilt tendency to technologize women." Even more specifically, that Sister Kate, "Good lab assistant Kate" is a stellar technologist, and Ti-Grace Atkinson is "the Chief Engineer of the Armies of Liberation."

So, at least for awhile, Mailer is run-in' scared. And as he runs, as he chases about "the fields of flesh and cunt," he picks up every nut and bolt he finds and throws it at us as a warning. Beware the metal fingers of the hand of technology, he insists. Then be conjures up ferocious pictures of abortions and extra-uterine gestation and operations that would give men vaginas. Beware he antiseptic, rubber-coated hand, he wails.

Finally, his rage fastens on a myth, lately more in the public eye than most others since Oedipus-the myth of the vaginal orgasm. A complicated myth-Mailer admits to that right off-as difficult to prove as to explode, but one which is surely a match for all the writer's resources, imagination, and wit.