David Widgery, ‘Comment Norman Mailer’s Prisoner of Sex’, Oz, Issue 36, July 1971, p. 23.

Widgery on Mailer:

‘But now he seemed to have caught weightlessness, the ideas he had been juggling for 15 years were floating out of his reach, his moralism had turned sanctimonious, his paradoxes anaesthetic, his toying with a pop-Marxism and a mock— Existentialism simply a whim. His break with James Baldwin was the first clear sign. Mailer was prepared to offer the blacks an abstract right to liberate themselves. Baldwin understood that one of the first things it was necessary to be liberated from was people like Mailer projecting their own unrealised desire for animality onto them. Mailer loved the Revolution as long as it remained an enigma, Baldwin could no longer afford to make a mystery of politics, ‘If they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night’ he wrote to Angela Davis. Now Mailer, who has always led with his prick, was finding women, too, less grateful for being sexually exploited to fit his fantasies.’