I, whose sexual nature is to cling to one woman like a child embracing the universe, am driven by my destiny to be the
orgiast ..." These contradictions were later resolved, I believe, by the disarming announcement of a new modesty in The Armies of the Night (1968) when Mailer recognizes that he would, at 45, no longer be capable of being an armed revolutionary, because he was too old, fat, and well-known; and again in The Fight (1975) when, after a riff on how the lion he hears on returning alone from late night roadwork with Muhammad Ali must be "Hemingway's own lion" waiting for a suitable surrogate, he realizes that the animal is a caged one in the local zoo, but puts the self-deprecating story into the book nonetheless.