Harold Ramis, director of the movies you know cold, has a comedy problem. No, it isn’t quite enough for him that he has directed or written most of the top-grossing comedies of his generation--from the hellacious Animal House (1978), which he wrote with National Lampoon founder Doug Kenney and Lampoon writer Chris Miller; to the loose and loopy Caddyshack (1980), which he directed and wrote with Brian Doyle-Murray and Kenney; to Stripes (1981), the first countercultural service comedy, which he rewrote for director Ivan Reitman; to the darkly cheerful PG blockbuster Ghostbusters (1984), which he wrote with Dan Aykroyd; then on through a rough patch (drugs, sequels, Club Paradise, divorce, a second marriage) to the sublime Groundhog Day (1993), which he co-wrote and directed. Mr. Ramis needs to believe that each of his mainstream comedies has a moral reason for being. And that kind of thinking can drive you a little crazy, if you’re someone who had anything to do with that “Baby Ruth in the pool scene” in Caddyshack.

“My ex-wife used to call me ‘the rabbi,’” said Mr. Ramis during a lunch break on the Montclair, N.J., set of his latest movie--Analyze This, starring Robert De Niro (hit man who goes into therapy) and Billy Crystal (psychiatrist who helps hit man work through rage issues). “I can really go overboard on the morality.”

Like Sullivan, the fictional director in the 1941 Preston Sturges classic Sullivan’s Travels who was embarrassed to have made such romps as Hey, Hey in the Hayloft and Ants in Your Plants of 1939, Mr. Ramis sometimes wonders if the end of comedy (i.e., big laughs) always justifies the means (e.g., the cry of “Doody!” at the sight of the floating Baby Ruth bar during “caddie day” at the club pool). The first thing that needs a little moral justification is Animal House, a picture that Entertainment Weekly recently dubbed one of the original “gross-out movies” from those golden days long before there was There’s Something About Mary.

“I was in college from ’62 to ’66,” said Mr. Ramis, who is 53 years old. “I entered college just when people were in the post–Korean War fraternity wildness. You know, no cares, everything looked great, Kennedy, Camelot, our generation taking over the world--and suddenly, my second year of college begins with Kennedy killed, and everything goes to hell. Civil-rights demonstrations and cities burning and the Vietnam War and by the time I finished college, they were burning down the R.O.T.C. building.

“So I had been raised in Chicago, and for some reason, I think I identified with the beatniks even before there were freaks and hippies, and I always felt countercultural. When they warned us, in high school, to look out for someone hanging around the schoolyard selling reefer, I went out there--Where’s the guy? You know--Where’s the guy? He’s not here! My beliefs were not mainstream. I sang folk songs when everyone else was singing rock ’n’ roll and I could be outraged about union problems in the railroads and coal mines in the late 19th century. So I had that kind of healthy righteous indignation and I had this big sense that history was a series of great injustices against the poor, the dispossessed and the disenfranchised, and part of that is being Jewish and growing up in Chicago, which had a great radical history.”

He paused. He was wearing olive green pants. His feet looked huge--size 14--and he has a big belly now. He looks like a prosperous M.D., maybe an internist. That must be what James L. Brooks saw in him when he cast him as the saintly doc who saves the sickly kid in As Good as It Gets.

“I say all this leading up to the idea that Animal House was not just a movie about how great college was in the early 60’s,” said Mr. Ramis. “In our minds, that homecoming parade at the end of Animal House was probably like November ’63. Literally a week after the movie ends, the world changed. So I thought the anarchy of Animal House was really a precursor to the political anarchy that swept my generation in the later 60’s. So, in other words, even in those early, dumb comedies, for me, I invested them with meaning. Whether the audience ever saw it or got it, to me they were statement movies …. Even though, like, Stripes was not my conception--but even then I tried to follow an old Second City dictum, which was Always work from the top of your intelligence. It is kind of self-justifying, but we’d always said to ourselves, Broad comedy is not necessarily dumb comedy, and I think we set out to prove that.

“When we were working on Caddyshack, Doug Kenney said he always wanted to do a kind of really smart adult Disney movie--as American as Disney films, but really embodying all our values.” He laughed a little bit. “And Caddyshack clearly had a big social message--you know, the outsiders and the wackos are the good guys.

“It’s funny. When Animal House was being shopped to the studios, the biggest reaction, even at Universal, which eventually bought the picture, was, ‘These guys are the heroes?’”

Mr. Ramis is no tyrant on the set. His liberal ideals (collaborating is good) match up nicely with the rules of big-time Hollywood movie making: Collaborating is good--especially when the studio executives, the producers and the stars of the film, not to mention their personal screenwriters, all must approve practically every line of the script. So on the set of the De Niro–Crystal comedy, he ran down the long process of how the script came about with no complaints: He was writer No. 5 on the project, he said, and then he turned his draft over to Mr. De Niro’s screenwriter, and then Billy Crystal took a long look at it, and then Mr. Ramis got it back for yet another draft, and he didn’t start shooting until he had “numerous line-by-line readings” with the two stars to make sure that everyone saw eye to eye. And now, he said, Warner Brothers is on his back a little bit about the budget.

“My whole style is in one way a weakness and in one way a strength,” he said. “I try to please everybody under the assumption that if everyone agrees and is happy, then you’ve done something right …. I don’t have the kind of confidence that says I’m right and they’re all wrong. It’s fun being the director, but all that really means is you get to cast the deciding vote. It doesn’t mean you’re the only voter. Not in my world, anyway.”

The suburban set of Analyze This--which was also filmed in New York City and Florida--was lazy and calm. Crewmembers were sleeping on the grass in the front yard. The people who were standing around all day with headsets were drinking coffee and complaining about lower back pain. The main task of the day was to get a good shot of the huge, tackily ornate fountain that Mr. De Niro’s mobster had left in Mr. Crystal’s therapist’s backyard as an overly generous token of gratitude.

Mr. Ramis looked up at the big prop. “It’s a little broad,” he said.

The director of photography’s composition was nice, with the fountain standing out in all its gaudiness against the nice old yellow house. But Mr. Ramis took a look and suggested that the camera start up high--focusing on the cherub on top--and pan down little by little to the house so that the audience wouldn’t realize for a moment that the big ugly thing was in Mr. Crystal’s backyard. The fountain was a $100,000 prop, and Mr. Ramis needed to get a laugh. Then the camera operators set their sights on Mr. Crystal, the actor playing his son, and Lisa Kudrow, who was playing his fiancée, all standing in the driveway, doing a comedy reaction take. Eleven takes later, everybody was satisfied and it was time for the break.

“I went to Caddyshack with very little set experience, virtually none,” said Mr. Ramis, who worked as a feature writer for the Chicago Daily News and as an editor at Playboy while moonlighting with the Second City comedy troupe in the late 60’s. “I realized on the first day, there was no sense pretending I knew anything about the mechanics of filmmaking. I thought, Instead of telling, I will ask. People, you know, respected my ignorance and were eager to help. I ended up calling it the $8 million scholarship to film school …. I think I’m a good comedy editor, because editing is so close to writing in a certain way. I already know the rhythms of how I want to hear things and exactly what the timing of every line or scene is. I think the writer has already done 80 percent of the director’s work.”

Caddyshack is a strange movie in that almost every scene is pleasurable to watch. There’s no boring exposition. Mention the word Caddyshack to about 50 percent of the adult population, and you’ll see some dumb and happy grins. It’s just the big comedy revue of its moment, and this year, 18 years after its release, ABC paid $3 million to return it to prime time, recutting it to restore the Baby Ruth–in-the-pool scene, long absent from the TV version.

After the huge success of Animal House--the No. 1 box-office comedy of all time until Ghostbusters knocked it off the top of the list--Mr. Ramis and his collaborator Doug Kenney were hot in Hollywood. Someone representing the producer Jon Peters snagged the two screenwriters as they came out of the Animal House screening room.

“We had actually conceived it,” Mr. Ramis said of their impromptu Caddyshack pitch meeting. “Doug always talked about it as a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story of a young guy. But when we got Chevy [Chase], you realize he’s the million-dollar player. You’ve got to service that from the studio’s point of view. And then we were thinking [Don] Rickles or [Rodney] Dangerfield, and Rodney was really just raging at the time--he was doing The Tonight Show frequently, never better, never better. We hired Rodney and then, of course, Ted [Knight] came in, and he was an icon from television, and Bill Murray agreed to do this little part--he had one scripted piece. So the whole time I’m making it, I accepted that it was really about these four adult role models. That the kid [played by Michael O’Keefe] sees these different kinds of adult solutions to life and, you know, will go one way or the other.”

Despite those lofty themes, the Baby Ruth sequence and Bill Murray’s twisted Carl the Greenskeeper character were definite precursors to the 90’s school of rambunctious comedy that gave us the talking buttocks in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, the long pee of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery and the extended bathroom sequence in Dumb and Dumber, but that kind of thing doesn’t hold much interest for Mr. Ramis. Asked about Bob and Peter Farrelly, the Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin and There’s Something About Mary auteurs, the director went right into rabbi mode.

“Well, I always thought, in terms of style, where people said incredibly funny things, did incredibly funny things and where the story actually made sense and had moral value”--he chuckled--“in a way it’s not just ambitious, it’s a different kind of commitment. A lot of movies are made without moral concern. Our whole industry exists without a moral compass, it seems to me, but I have a strong one, and I always feel the need to serve that side of myself.”

Still, Carl the Greenskeeper would be right at home in a Farrelly brothers movie. He uses a masturbatory motion to clean golf balls in one of those red golf-ball washers (Doug Kenney’s visual gag) as he refers, out of the side of his mouth, to a golfer as a “monkey woman.” But this is Ramis, so even Carl the Greenskeeper has a kind of demented spiritual life. Pressing the sharp points of a pitchfork against a caddie’s neck (Mr. Ramis’ visual gag), he says in one speech, “So I jump ship in Hong Kong and I make my way over to Tibet and I get on as a looper on a little course over there in the Himalayas …. A looper, you know, a caddie, a looper, a jock. So I tell ’em I’m a pro jock, and guess who they give me. The Dalai Lama himself, the 12th son of the lama. The flowing robes, the grace, bald, striking! So I’m on the first tee with him and I give him the driver. He hauls off and whacks one--big hitter, the lama, long--into a 10,000-foot crevasse right at the base of this glacier, and you know what the lama says? ‘Goonga aloonga. Goonga goonga aloonga.’ So we finish 18 and he’s gonna stiff me. So I say, ‘Hey! Lama! How ’bout a little something, you know, for the effort?’ And he says, ‘Oh, uh, there won’t be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.’ So I got that going for me, which is nice.”

Practically the first thing you see in Caddyshack is a giant gopher puppet on a golf course. This puppet was a comedy prop the producer insisted on having. So here it is, the opening moment of Mr. Ramis’ first movie as director, and the audience is looking at a concession made to a producer. Mr. Ramis also added a few underground gopher scenes to the picture in post-production.

“I was reluctant, but Jon Peters insisted on it,” he said. “He just thought it would be cute to have this underground life--because Bill Murray was alone in the movie. It gave reality to his enemy.”

While Mr. Ramis was willing to compromise, the bemused wise-asses who were the heroes of his early movies were not. What they have in common is the baby boom’s ferocious need to overturn the World War II generation, a need that came under the heading of defying convention or shocking the bourgeoisie or, simply, rebellion. Again and again, Mr. Ramis set up straitlaced institutions (the Omega Theta Pi fraternity in Animal House; the country club in Caddyshack; the U.S. Army in Stripes; the American family in National Lampoon’s Vacation; bureaucrats and librarians in Ghostbusters ) and then put Bill Murray or Chevy Chase or John Belushi into Establishment-trampling mode. They spoke in a jivey, irony-laden language that the audience understood, but the old-guard villains didn’t. For the most part, it was a sure-fire comedy strategy. In Caddyshack, Chevy Chase, a drunken, weed-smoking Zen master, snorts margarita salt off of his girlfriend’s belly and doesn’t keep score on the golf course; in Stripes, Bill Murray introduces himself to the guys in the platoon by saying “Chicks dig me” and ends up in a fistfight with the drill sergeant before saving the world about an hour after the bikini-babe mud-wrestling sequence. In Vacation, Chevy Chase shares a can of beer with his young son during a heart-to-heart chat. In Ghostbusters, the heroes crack wise even in face of apocalyptic doom.

But when middle age strikes and you kick your addiction to what Mr. Ramis called “numerous substances” and go through a divorce and find yourself involved in a few bombs (Armed and Dangerous, Caddyshack II, Club Paradise), maybe you no longer feel like the old wise guy. Especially when there’s no longer an old guard to overturn and a representative of your own generation is in the White House, behaving a little bit like Bill Murray’s Peter Venkman character in Ghostbusters.

Groundhog Day was a breakthrough for Mr. Ramis (and Mr. Murray) not only because the script had an idea that spoke to his generation, now a weary, near-middle-aged, middle-class audience, but because the movie villains that had once been embodied in the one-note foils to the protagonists could now be found in the character of Mr. Murray himself. Mr. Murray, playing TV weatherman Phil Connors, is a monster at the start of the movie--but a believable monster.

“I don’t suppose there’s any possibility of an espresso or a cappuccino, is there?” he says to the humble innkeeper. And instead of portraying a wise guy who’s fighting an unfair system, Mr. Murray is in this movie charged with the task of doing battle with himself. And, interestingly, the wise-ass-ism, the quick, cutting remarks, that were always so charming in the heroes of previous Ramis movies, are now considered poison. In real life, Mr. Ramis couldn’t bring himself to work on the screenplay with Mr. Murray. He sent the neophyte Danny Rubin, who wrote the first draft of the movie, to work with the star instead.

“The downside of sitting with Bill is getting him in a chair. ‘I’ll meet you at 2’--5 o’clock he walks in the door. I’m too old for that, but Danny wasn’t,” said Mr. Ramis. Early on in the movie, Bill Murray’s weatherman tells his producer, played by Andie MacDowell, “I think this is one of the traits of a really good producer: keep the talent happy.”

“Anything I can do,” she replies.

“Could you help me with my pelvis tilt?” he says.

That kind of a line would have been used in Ghostbusters or Stripes, not only to get a laugh, but to steer the audience to Bill Murray’s side. Everybody loved it, in Stripes, when he used a spatula to “flip burgers” with that lovely female M.P.’s butt. In this case, the raunchy pickup attempt gets a laugh--but its real purpose is to reveal the inner creep.

The brutal repetition of the same day eventually strips Mr. Murray’s character of his wise-ass layers, and his irony. The movie breaks him down little by little, until he doesn’t have a quick answer for everything and must react to other people authentically and with real kindness. Which makes for a strange system of values in a comedy. Most comedies are on the anarchists’ side. It’s as if Mr. Ramis’ script--written with Danny Rubin (who came up with the idea) and with considerable input from Mr. Murray himself--means to strip Bill Murray of all his Bill Murray–ness. The very things that were considered part of the solution in Stripes, Animal House and Caddyshack become, in Groundhog Day, part of the problem. Us became Them.

Maybe the movie is Mr. Ramis’ and Mr. Murray’s way of paying for the sins or smugness that went with their generation’s inevitable victory over the Bob Dole–George Bush axis. A beautiful montage sequence shows Bill Murray killing himself again and again. He drives a pickup truck over a cliff, with the groundhog (yes--it’s certainly a visual allusion to the gopher varmint of Caddyshack!) at the wheel. Completely deadpan, he takes a toaster, plugs it into the wall and drops it into the bathtub after he gets in the water. And the look on his face is thrillingly resigned to death when he steps in front of a truck. Next, triumphantly, he leaps off a church tower. Mr. Ramis shows us his gray body, dead, in the morgue--the corpse of Saturday Night Live!--and Chris Elliot’s character says sarcastically: “I really liked him. He was a really, really good guy.” Needless to say, there’s no Baby Ruth scene in Groundhog Day, and Mr. Ramis didn’t really have to push himself to rationalize making the movie; affirming letters from Buddhists, Hasids, Catholics and other religious groups did that work for him.

After trying to achieve similar effects with two box-office bombs, Stuart Saves His Family (1995) and Multiplicity (1996), Mr. Ramis will be trying to make another virtuous comedy in Analyze This. But instead of a comedic gangster like Bill Murray finding redemption through self-examination, an actual gangster (Mr. De Niro’s character) thinks he’s in need of psychiatric help because he’s not doing his job (killing people) very well.

Mr. Ramis became the rabbi once more: “It’s meant to be popular entertainment, but there’s something to serve here. For me, a moral premise, which is, John Gotti comes to you for help. If you’re the therapist, what does success mean? Billy has a line: ‘What is my goal? To make you a happier, well-adjusted gangster?’ So when I came in here, I wanted to define what the movie was really about--this guy getting in touch with his rage, his fear and his grief, in order to break the cycle of violence in his life. For me, it’s a big metaphor for gang violence in America. Fatherless young men full of unexpressed rage and grief and fear, taking it out on everyone else. Billy successfully breaks it by leading Bob’s character to a big cathartic moment. That’s something worth saying. I didn’t just want to do a gangster spoof. I’m not into spoofs.”

Harold Ramis at 53 is trying to pull off one of the hardest acts in show business--getting big laughs in the ratty game of comedy while trying to stay on the side of the angels.

It's hard to say just what kind of music Seely plays. They have that groovy swinging feeling you get from European bands like Cornershop, Stereolab and Portishead, and there are also definite touches of 1970's art rock (a little Pink Floyd, some early Steely Dan), yet the band has a definite indie vibe, meaning the music sounds homemade, like it's played by actual human beings in the same room with one another.

But aside from getting across what this band sounds like, the influences don't really matter. The members of Seely-two women and two men, on the basic rock-and-roll instruments of electric guitars, bass, drums, keyboards and synthesizers-have managed to come up with their own thing.

A highlight of Winter Birds comes at the end of the song called "Planes Circle, Do," with the band just chugging along in support of a distorted, repetitive synthesizer riff. It's a mystery why this passage works so well. There's nothing particularly amazing about the performance here, except that it sounds just right and makes your body hairs stand up and puts strange thoughts into your head.

The album's closing song, "Sandy," provides another kind of musical thrill. This song, an expertly made torch ballad sung in the breathy voice of its writer, Joy Waters, could be part of Rosemary Clooney's repertoire tomorrow. And yet there's nothing that feels retro about it.

Any complaints? Well, the lyrics are vague here and there, and not in a good way. Seely, an unusually dignified band, is a welcome antidote to the pop cultural vulgarity that's out there, but that's not really an excuse for having a song with the words "a decade of angels" repeated over and over again. "Decade" is a word best left to critics or the writers of VH1 specials, and angels have been done to death by now. Elsewhere, the word "stability"-not something you like to hear in a song lyric-oh so briefly undermines a melodic song called "Altamaha."

One great thing: Lead guitarist Lori Scacco found an old Fender Rhodes keyboard in the band's rehearsal space and decided to use it in the recording of Winter Birds . That instrument-a staple on such 70's fare as Peter Frampton's Frampton Comes Alive , the Atlanta Rhythm Section's "So Into You" and countless bad fusion albums-brings a warmth to the album and undercuts the fussy, controlled quality that could be Seely's only weakness. There's something a little cheap about a Fender Rhodes, a little tacky, so it's nice to have it here on Winter Birds , which is almost tasteful to a fault.

The band was formed in 1993 by two Georgia Tech architecture school graduates-Steven Satterfield, a guitarist-singer-songwriter, and Ms. Scacco. On drums is Eric Taylor, who plays beautifully in a matter-of-fact way. Ms. Waters joined on bass and vocals in 1995. Soon Seely found itself the only American act on the British Too Pure record label (home to Stereolab). Now that deal is dead and they're on the independent New York label Koch Records.

Winter Birds is Seely's fourth album. It is loaded with cool sounds, catchy melodies and expert playing. Best of all, there's a freshness and vitality to it. In a time when so much of pop music is looking backward, this is something new.

Ms. Mann scored her biggest hit in the mid-80's, as frontwoman for the band 'Til Tuesday, with "Voices Carry," an angry anthem against a controlling male. In the 90's Ms. Mann went solo, releasing the critically acclaimed albums Whatever (Imago, 1993) and I'm With Stupid (Geffen, 1996).

Another Mann record, Bachelor No. 2 , was scheduled for release from Interscope Records, but executives at the company "didn't hear a single," as they say in the business, and asked Ms. Mann to come up with more stuff. Rather than give in, she bought the masters back from the company as they were. You can buy the unreleased album at her sold-out run at Joe's Pub, where Ms. Mann is playing nightly on a bill with her husband, Michael Penn, through Feb. 19. Bachelor No. 2 will be in record stores in a month or two; Ms. Mann is working on a deal with a distributor.

Back to the Magnolia songs. You might think that, with all the record-company woes, Ms. Mann might make music that was willfully odd or "artistic." But no. The nine Aimee Mann songs here are beautiful and perfectly crafted. For these songs, too, Ms. Mann has pared down her lyrics, which, on Whatever and I'm With Stupid , were often more digressive and obscure.

Ms. Mann, originally from Boston, is now part of a mini-scene in Los Angeles. Along with her producer Jon Brion, she's one of the regulars who play a club called Largo. Mr. Brion, who is also Fiona Apple's producer, has had record company troubles of his own; his album, Meaningless , a mix of insanely catchy pop-rock songs and John Lennon-ish balladry, was shelved by Atlantic last year.

So Ms. Mann and Mr. Brion find themselves in the strange position of being pop music rebels. All they want to do is make lovely, melancholy ballads and peppy, intelligent rock songs, but the market isn't buying. It seems that their brand of pop music-its ancestors range from Carole King to Burt Bacharach to the Raspberries to Gilbert O'Sullivan to Harry Nilsson to John Lennon to Squeeze and Elvis Costello-doesn't sell anymore. But my ears cannot detect why songs like "Save Me," "Wise Up" or "Build That Wall" from Magnolia would not be hits in a market that rewards Sarah McLachlan.

Magnolia is something of a reprieve for Ms. Mann and her industry troubles. The director of Magnolia , Paul Thomas Anderson, approached her about doing the songs for his latest movie. And, voilà , Ms. Mann has nine songs on the marketplace on the Warner Brothers label. Magnolia , the movie, was released by one of Time Warner's corporate children, New Line Cinema.

The lyrics here deal mainly with the sturdy pop music themes of heartbreak, regret and loss. The new thing here might be Ms. Mann's focusing in on how victims of love may revel masochistically in their own despair. The melodies serve to lift her characters out of their self-induced miseries.

Ms. Mann's singing is conversational, recorded close to the microphone. It sounds real. She has learned a lot about music since she was that spiky-haired frontwoman of 'Til Tuesday and, unlike many pop music veterans, she's still inspired.

It was a clean kill. Issued from Mr. Updike's New Yorker pulpit, the review of the big Tom Wolfe novel seemed mild, gentle and fair: " A Man in Full still amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form. Like a movie desperate to recoup its bankers' investment, the novel tries too hard to please us." Soon after, in The New York Review of Books , Norman Mailer aggravated Mr. Wolfe further by calling him "the most gifted best-seller writer to come along since Margaret Mitchell." Mr. Mailer hit upon that zinger only after a long review that seriously took into account Mr. Wolfe's strengths. "Extraordinarily good writing forces one to contemplate the uncomfortable possibility that Tom Wolfe might yet be seen as our best writer," Mr. Mailer wrote midway through. "How grateful one can feel then for his failures and his final inability to be great-his absence of truly large compass."

Mr. Updike, 67, and Mr. Mailer, 77, smelled blood. Both reviews moved in on Mr. Wolfe's greatest weakness: his quivering need to be perceived as a great author. For all his bluster and devil-may-care attacks on literary establishments from The New Yorker to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Mr. Wolfe, at age 68, is desperate to be accepted into the literary pantheon. He longs for, lusts for, posterity.

Sensing his ambition, Mr. Updike, in his quietly devastating way, and Mr. Mailer, in his best barroom-brawler style, used their reviews to deliver the bad news, leaving Mr. Wolfe as wounded as the high school valedictorian who receives in the mail a thin envelope from Harvard.

Over a year later, Mr. Wolfe is still stung by their words. "There are these two old piles of bones, Norman Mailer and John Updike," he said in a November 1999 interview with The Charlotte Observer . "Updike took nine pages in The New Yorker , Mailer took 11 or 12 pages in The New York Review of Books , to try to say this is not literature."

He went on to argue that Mr. Updike and Mr. Mailer won't take any best-selling book seriously-a pretty shaky line of attack, given that both Mr. Updike and Mr. Mailer have had their No. 1 hits.

Enter John Irving, on behalf of the "two old piles of bones." Asked, on a Canadian TV talk show, Hot Type , to comment on the "war" Mr. Wolfe was having with Mr. Mailer and Mr. Updike, Mr. Irving said, "I don't think it's a war, because you can't have a war between a pawn and a king, can you?"

Then the 57-year-old author of The World According to Garp and Trying to Save Piggy Sneed called Mr. Wolfe's novels "yak" and "journalistic hyperbole described as fiction." Asked if he disliked Mr. Wolfe because of his popularity, Mr. Irving said, "I'm not using that argument against him. I'm using the argument against him that he can't write … It's like reading a bad newspaper or a bad piece in a magazine. It makes you wince." He added that on any page of any Tom Wolfe book, he could "read a sentence that would make me gag."

Mr. Wolfe soon visited the set of Hot Type , for a retaliatory interview. "Let's take Irving," he said. "He's our prime subject today. His last, A Widow for One Year , is about some neurotic people in the Hamptons. They never get to town. They're in the house. They're neurotic … Irving is a great admirer of Dickens. But what writer does he see now the last year constantly compared to Dickens? Not John Irving, but Tom Wolfe … It must gnaw at him terribly." (Nice stuff. Never mind that, even in reviewing Mr. Irving's Long Island novel, critics continued, knee-jerk, to compare him to Dickens.) Mr. Wolfe also lumped Mr. Irving in with Mr. Updike and Mr. Mailer. "I think of the three of them now-because there are now three, as Larry, Curly and Moe-it must gall them a bit that everyone, even them, is talking about me."

BEFORE GIVING THAT INTERVIEW, Mr. Wolfe took on Mr. Irving in a statement from his publisher: "Why does he sputter and foam so?" The same rhetorical question could certainly be asked of Mr. Wolfe himself. And Mr. Wolfe has been foaming and sputtering, a full year after those reviews were published, because of his need to convince everyone-himself and the world-that he is no mere journalist or social satirist but a real artist, and one for the ages.

Alongside his main writings, Mr. Wolfe has made a kind of shadow career as a polemicist. The underlying purpose of this shadow career has been to teach people-critics and readers-how to appreciate Tom Wolfe. Through lectures and essays, the author provides his audience with an easy step-by-step system for seeing Tom Wolfe's writing as art.

Mr. Wolfe's shadow campaign started with "The New Journalism," the essay that kicked off the anthology he edited of the same title. Those magazine articles you've been enjoying? Well, went the essay's argument, they're not just enjoyable magazine pieces. They're part of a new form of journalism, and this New Journalism, of which Mr. Wolfe was the chief practitioner, it went without saying, had real artistic merit. Just like the novel.

"The early days of this New Journalism," Mr. Wolfe wrote, "were beginning to look like an absolute rerun of the early days of the realistic novel in England. A slice of literary history was repeating itself … The very same objections that greeted the novel in the 18th and 19th centuries were starting to greet the New Journalism. In each case the new form is seen as 'superficial,' 'ephemeral,' 'mere entertainment,' 'morally irresponsible.'"

Mr. Wolfe also argued that novelists-now self-absorbed or alienated and unwilling or unable to describe the world outside their garrets-had left "for our boys quite a nice little body of material: the whole of American society, in effect. It only remained to be seen if magazine writers could master the techniques, in nonfiction, that had given the novel of social realism such power. And here we come to a fine piece of irony. In abandoning social realism, novelists also abandoned certain vital matters of technique. As a result, by 1969 it was obvious that these magazine writers-the very lumpenproles themselves!-had also gained a technical edge on novelists. It was marvelous."

This was exciting political speechwriting, a nice piece of cheerleading for the nonfiction team from a man who, early in his career, assumed he would start off as a reporter before going on to writing the novel. At the point of writing "The New Journalism," Mr. Wolfe is deep in the reporters' camp, claiming that in the 60's, New Journalism had managed to "wipe out the novel as literature's main event"; by 1989, after the success of his reported novel The Bonfire of the Vanities , Mr. Wolfe recycled much of the same material for a new essay in Harper's Magazine ("Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast") that taught people how to read Wolfe the novelist, just as the 1973 essay had taught them to read (and admire) Wolfe the journalist. In the Harper's essay, he talked up Dickens, Dostoevsky, Balzac and Zola (who did considerable reporting in the field), implicitly making himself their heir: "At this weak, pale, tabescent moment in the history of American literature, we need a battalion, a brigade, of Zolas to head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, hog-stomping Baroque country of ours and reclaim its literary property.… The answer is not to leave the rude beast, the material, also known as the life around us, to the journalists, but to do what journalists do, or are supposed to do, which is to wrestle the beast and bring it to terms."

Continuing the course (Wolfe Appreciation 101) during an interview conducted by George Plimpton for a 1991 issue of The Paris Review , Mr. Wolfe again made the case for the role of research in the novel, describing just how he figured out the plight of his protagonist Sherman McCoy, a Park Avenue man sent to jail: "I had met a number of lawyers. They put me in touch with a few middle-class professional defendants-white defendants who had been through something like McCoy. I eventually met four men, one of whom was tremendously helpful. He told me that the most humiliating part of this experience for him came when he was marched through a metal detector which he kept setting off. They kept taking more of his clothes away from him. He still kept setting off the metal detector. Finally, the policeman in charge of the metal detector had a hunch. He told him to lean over and just put his head in the metal detector. This set the thing off. Then he said, 'Open your mouth,' and he said, 'Oh, look at that! You've got a mouth like a coin-changer!' It was the fillings in his teeth. He began calling the other policemen over. He'd say, 'Look at this guy. Hey, do it again.' He wasn't abusive in language. He didn't lay a hand on him. Suddenly the fact that these police … were now, not in any perverse or bad way, treating him like an object, an object of sport. It was crushing. It crushed what last defenses he had in this situation. Now this is something I could not have gotten except through interviewing. I don't think the unaided imagination of the writer-and I don't care who the writer is-can come up with what is obtainable through research and reporting."

Even when seeming to discuss matters apart from literature, Mr. Wolfe was again arguing his own case. In the art-world book The Painted Word and the architecture book From Bauhaus to Our House , he describes how consumers found themselves tricked, against their better esthetic judgment, into believing they should own or commission difficult, modernist paintings and buildings. The patrons, he argued, insecure about whether they were "cultured" or not, fell like rubes for the wiles of the fashionably alienated intelligentsia-just as fans of the novel, it's not much of a leap to say, would convince themselves (after being schooled by wily critics to do so) that they preferred, say, The Lime Twig , a hazy and lovely and elliptical psychological novel by John Hawkes, to a good old piece of social realist narrative fiction about redblooded characters who suffer and change, like, say, The Grapes of Wrath , by John Steinbeck.

Again and again, instructor Wolfe tells the class that the 20th century's examination of the self in the arts is mere fashion, while full-blooded realism, in paintings or in the novel, is timeless. To return, briefly, to the Harper's essay: "The introduction of realism into literature in the 18th century by Richardson, Fielding and Smollett was like the introduction of electricity into engineering. It was not just another device."

On and off for the last two decades, Mr. Wolfe has gone after modernism's poster boy, Pablo Picasso. While he struts his stuff in his amusing art history lectures, his argument for elevating the Tom Wolfe novel over those of his psychologically oriented rivals bubbles just beneath the surface.

In a talk downtown in '97, he raised the notion that, in the year 2020, Picasso could be dismissed from the art canon, and that art history professors would instead convey to their students the virtues of Adolphe-William Bouguereau, a technically adept 19th-century French painter who liked to paint cherubs and dazzling historic scenes.

"Just about 100 years ago," Mr. Wolfe said, "there was a survey taken by a French newspaper in which they asked leading French art dealers, critics, curators, what have you, who would be the French artist of the 19th century to be among the giants of art in the year 1997. And the results were, No. 1, Bouguereau, second, Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier, third was Jean Gérôme." Mr. Wolfe went on about how popular, rich and esteemed these artists were in their own day. Then he said: "By 1920-1920!-all these people were forgotten. They had become grand zeros in art history overnight."

Throw this argument into our Novel-o-matic, and we can see that those writers now considered geniuses could be absolutely forgotten in a mere 25 years. Again, the thing on Mr. Wolfe's mind is posterity. He continued by suggesting that a shift in art fashion will catch up with Picasso: "All the Picasso books, all of them had the same premise: The greatest artist of the 20th century, was he a good man, or a bad man? Arianna Huffington said he was very bad. John Richardson, in the first book of his projected four-volume biography, says for a man who was the greatest artist of the 20th century, he wasn't such a bad man. That was the starting point of every discussion of Picasso up until, really, Dec. 16, 1996, when there was what was, to me, an absolutely fascinating review in The New Yorker by Adam Gopnik on the second volume of Richardson's work, in which Gopnik says, 'Who cares whether he's a good man or a bad man-he's such a bad artist!' He made the statement very baldly: What are these images famous for, these harlequins, these minotaurs, these bullfighters? All these images were stale when he used them! And look at this blue period-why are these people blue? Because they're sad! Talk about originality! Now what made this interesting-people can write anything they want-Adam Gopnik's beat is Paris … He's there to keep New Yorkers informed of the word in Paris, and the word in Paris among young artists is that Picasso is a fraud as confining as these academic artists-Bouguereau, Meissonier-with all their technique. So something is started among young artists in Paris … I can sense it here."

After laying out the case that Picasso was a lousy draftsman, Mr. Wolfe said: "There's a great line from the Tom Stoppard play Artist Descending a Staircase : 'Contemporary art is imagination without skill.' A wonderful line. Skill is the perfect word. Talent would not be the right word-talent is more spirituelle . Skill refers to the ability to make your hand do what your eye wants it to do … In a way, the great achievement of Picasso is to create a permission slip for you to be a genius without skill-and in our time, if I may fast-forward here, we have very quickly reached the point where skill is regarded not only as not necessary for genius, but skill is regarded as a stumbling block, a snag, something that holds artists back! There's something meretricious about it, kind of a cheap trick."

MR. WOLFE ARGUED THAT ARTISTS-like the novelists-were turning away from the rich material that lies before them, all because of the intelligentsia's preference for intellectual game-playing over realism. "Go to Madison Square Garden sometime," he said, "to a basketball game, but always go early, though, when the two teams come out on the floor, and they wear these leggings. Wait till the Philadelphia 76ers come to town, because they have red leggings. Just visually, why isn't there some artist doing this? Here are these gigantic figures, and these leggings make them all look eight or nine feet high, and most of them are these fabulous black athletes, and here is this sea of 97 percent white faces in the background. These are moments in the life of the city that should engage every artist, excite every artist."

In making the case for such art, he is, in effect, restating the case for A Man in Full and The Bonfire of the Vanities , for their importance, for their worthiness in the year 2020 and beyond.

Mr. Updike and Mr. Mailer wounded him so, because neither one of them can be called fabulists; neither one is in the camp of Samuel Beckett or the late-period James Joyce. They are realists. Mr. Updike excels in domestic fiction, that's true, but his work, centered on the private lives of his characters, has often intersected with public concerns. Those five horny married couples in Couples made it seem like he was a spy in the American suburban bedroom; it won him the cover of Time in 1968. And who has captured domestic sadness the way he has?

If you want to see a multimillionaire undergo a loan workout down at the bank, Mr. Wolfe is, indeed, your man; but in the closeness and quiet of the bedroom at night, no question: Updike.

Mr. Wolfe has something even more difficult to contend with in Mr. Mailer's disapproval. They're in the same league, making elements of public life into the stuff of fiction-setting out to capture the times, and then capturing them. In his recent sputterings, Mr. Wolfe tried to undercut the reputation of Mr. Mailer's nonfiction masterpiece The Executioner's Song by correctly pointing out that Lawrence Schiller provided most of the research-but writers need not show their work; the end result is all that matters, and The Executioner's Song , aside from being a page-turner, is crystal clear and melancholy and tense and descriptive of an America that hadn't been described before (and marred only, perhaps, by Mr. Schiller's emergence as a major character in the final chapters). And, as recently as 1991, Mr. Mailer was in the social realist magnum opus game himself, with the underrated Harlot's Ghost , a 1,305-page (1,305 to A Man in Full 's puny-by-comparison 742!) rendering of the C.I.A. through the Cold War years, all of them, completely realistic, fully researched and touched with that magic Mailer dementia that makes his fiction lift off the ground and, at the same time, fills the reader with uneasiness for runs of 100 pages at a time.

As for John Irving, well, he did have four writers as main characters in his last novel, so let's leave him to Mr. Wolfe.

Mr. Wolfe has lately been reporting at Stanford University, trying to come up with at least one more novel. While Mr. Updike and Mr. Mailer are content to add postscripts to their illustrious careers- Bech at Bay , anyone? how about The Gospel According to the Son (for the opinion juste on this interesting and neglected book, see Mr. Updike's review of it in the giant tome More Matter , which begins, so perfectly that your knees ache: "The Bible is like a once-fearsome lion that, now toothless and declawed, can be petted and teased")-Mr. Wolfe, a late bloomer in fiction, is still trying to sweat out his prime, and he's already had a heart attack, he's nearing 70, he knows he's running out of time, and he's just not sure if he's going to make posterity's cut.

Mr. Updike got in the death blow, in his review, by saying that Mr. Wolfe, like his namesake, Thomas Wolfe, is a writer who has "failed to be exquisite. Such failure would not seem to be major, but in the long run it is." The long run. Posterity. Mr. Updike knows how Mr. Wolfe thinks. That's why Mr. Wolfe continues, more than a year after the verdicts came down, to sputter and foam so.

This isn't good-time music. It comes from Mali, a landlocked, drought-stricken country in West Africa. Played with acoustic instruments and gentle percussion, Alkibar has a modest sound, with no flashiness from the band members. All 10 musicians work together as a team, as in funk. Mr. Bocoum's singing is temperate and sure of itself, without gimmicks or show business tricks.

It's fitting that a singer with such a humble style would wait until he was 43 to make his first solo recording. For 30 years, since he was 13, Mr. Bocoum played and sang in the backing band for Ali Farka Toure, the first Malian singer to make a name for himself outside Africa.

Mali occupies an area where the music that grew into the blues probably originated. Traditional melodies from this place sound something like a cross between early blues and Mideastern strains.

Mr. Bocoum's Alkibar has a stern, meditative quality. The blues it brings to mind is not the showy B.B. King variety, nor the gruff, gritty brand played by Howlin' Wolf and Charley Patton before him; Mr. Bocoum's songs share something with pensive songs like John Lee Hooker's "The Flood," a chronicle of the Mississippi River overflowing its banks in 1927, and Lightnin' Hopkins' "Bud Russell Blues," a song about a sharecropper working under a merciless boss.

While we in a certain segment of Manhattan concern ourselves with such matters as career satisfaction, improving our sex lives and whether or not we are "happy," Mr. Bocoum sings of the necessity of planting trees to keep the desert from advancing on the farmland. In another song, he calls for respect for elders. Clearly, we are in another world.

Mr. Bocoum lives in Niafunké, a desert town along the Niger River. The album was recorded there, on state-of-the-art portable equipment. The musicians play acoustic (Western) guitars, African percussion instruments like the calabash and djembe , a one-string njarka violin and a two-string njurkle guitar. Three backing vocalists, two women and one man, bring a feeling of community. The songs are in three languages, Sonrai, Tamashek and Fula.

There's also a new album from Mr. Bocoum's teacher (and fellow farmer), Ali Farka Toure- Radio Mali , a collection of 16 songs recorded between 1970 and 1978, long before his Grammy Award, back when his work was known only in Africa and France. This music is calm on the surface, but secretly charged.

Everything here is great, especially the two songs called "Gambari." These have a swinging, rolling rhythm, and there's an Eastern quality to their repetitive melodies. For the second "Gambari," Mr. Toure uses his njarka violin. Whenever he gets this instrument out, he loses a bit of his usual restraint and gives in to the spirits that, he claims, first attacked him when he was 13 years old.

The song "Radio Mali" is also hypnotic and deep. The melody goes so far to the East that it feels almost Chinese. "Njarka," a showcase for Mr. Toure's wild njarka violin playing, is too short. Nick Gold, the producer who put this album together, has faded it out prematurely, perhaps thinking Western ears can't take its intensity and repetitiveness-but once your ears have it, everything else sounds so bland in comparison. With a bow and one string, Mr. Toure can make a hell of a great racket. Mainly, though, he's known for his guitar playing, songwriting and singing-and this album is made up of songs he describes as being from the time when he was "a fool for the guitar."

Mr. Toure, who sings in seven languages, is now 60 years old.

Hank Williams … The Next Generations

Hank Williams III, the grandson of Hank Williams and son of Hank Wil-liams Jr., is off to a terrific start with his first album, Risin' Outlaw . With a hard honky-tonk sound and his grandfather's vocal mannerisms, Mr. Williams romanticizes a world that was gone before he was born.

Risin'Outlaw is comparabletothose neotraditional country debuts from the 80's, albumslikeDwight Yoakam's Guitars, Cad- illacs, Etc., Etc. , Steve Earle's Guitar Town ,MichelleShocked's Short Sharp Shocked and, to a lesser degree, Randy Travis' Storms ofLife .Likethose re-cords, Risin' Outlaw is played mostly in 60's Nashville style, with nods to rockabilly and rock-and-roll. With the album's closing number, "Blue Devil," Mr. Williams goes all the way back to the 1930's, with an acoustic-guitar blues that has him communing with Jimmie Rodgers. His voice crackles and yodels and yelps.

In a Rolling Stone article earlier this year, Mr. Williams was blunt about the fact that he smokes pot. Next thing he knew, according to the Chicago Reader , he was "summoned to the offices of his Nashville record label, Curb" and was greeted there "by his parents (who are divorced), producer and A&R man Chuck Howard, and an ex-girlfriend, who teamed up to persuade him that he needed to enter drug rehab." His bass player, Jason Brown, later said he believed the intervention was partly an effort "to do damage control for the article." Curb Records, apparently, wants to make him palatabletofansof Garth Brooks.

On many tracks, Mr. Williamsmimicshis grandfather's vocal mannerismsexactly-but this is more than mimicry, since the texture of his voiceissomuchlike his grandfather's.

The first three tracks are the weakest. They find Mr. Williams in a musical territory somewhere between his own roadhouse sound and the glop of contemporary country radio.

"Why Don't You Leave Me Alone" is probably the best thing here, the song that captures the sound Mr. Williams is after. It's recorded live "somewhere on the road," according to the brief liner notes, and it has the raw feeling of a roadhouse band in a small room on a hot night, miles away from the smooth sounds of contemporary country music.

Mr. Williams' father, Hank Williams Jr., also has a new record this year, Stormy . It's hard to argue with. With brand new, cocksure anthems like "I'd Love to Knock the Hell Out of You," "Naked Women and Beer" and "Sometimes I Feel Like Joe Montana," Stormy isn't always pretty, but it's damn sure effective.

At the age of 50, the bearded, barrel-chested Hank Williams Jr. is worldly and strong. If he were in an old western, he'd be the wealthy, powerful rancher who was secretly corrupt. His songs are well crafted and sensible, seemingly without a touch of unconscious inspiration-they're like public pronouncements. In comparison, his 26-year-old son is a dreamer, a skinny punk artiste with a terminally broken heart. The son has a much lighter musical touch. His best songs (all of which, on Risin' Outlaw , are written by others) are dreamy and private.

Back to the father: In the sarcastic "Where Would We Be Without Yankees," Hank Williams Jr. thanks Northerners for giving the South "Spanky and Alfalfa," The Honeymooners and record executives who drive him crazy. He's at his most tender on "All Jokes Aside," a love song written to his wife in which he confesses that his rowdy image masks what's in his heart-a sentiment that's undercut by his admission, on "They All Want to Go Wild (And I Want to Go Home)," that he doesn't want to get caught fooling around because he can't afford another divorce.

Elvis Costello, the Beacon Boy

Elvis Costello was the hardest-working man in show business at the Beacon Theater on Oct. 25. He played 35 songs in two and a half hours, including four new (unrecorded) ones and a cover of Van Morrison's "Jackie Wilson Said."

Mr. Costello's thick, rough baritone was in great shape all night, from when he started, with the scorching, rhythmic "Alibi Factory" (a new one), to the end, when he stood at the lip of the stage, without microphone, and belted out "Couldn't Call It Unexpected No. 4," his most hopeful ballad.

Last year, Mr. Costello played Radio City Music Hall with Burt Bacharach and an orchestra in support of the Bacharach-Costello album Painted From Memory . This time, it was just Mr. Costello and his longtime pianist Steve Nieve, with Greg Cohen joining in on standup bass for crisp versions of "Almost Blue," "Painted From Memory" and a new rocker, "45," which told the story of Mr. Costello's 45 years in roughly three minutes.

Mr. Costello brought his special brand of emotional intensity to "I Want You," his grand, disturbing ballad of erotic attachment, and to "New Lace Sleeves," a gorgeously detailed song about a newly adulterous couple.

The unrecorded songs were straight and true. Along with "Alibi Factory" and "45," there was "When I Was Cruel," a sad ballad with a big melody, and "Lesson in Cruelty," a song with words by Mr. Cos-tello and music by Mr. Nieve-this one was part jazz torch song, part chanson .

The show sagged during flyaway numbers like "Pads, Paws and Claws," "Shallow Grave" and the sickly sweet Burt Bacharach-Hal David number, "I'll Never Fall in Love Again." Also, "Alison," "Watching the Detectives" and "God's Comic" seemed a bit "sung out," to borrow a phrase from Mr. Costello's "God Give Me Strength" (which knocked out the house late in the show).

It was a sign of the singer's vibrancy that over a dozen songs came from the last three years-and yet the show had the feeling of a big crowd-pleaser, with nary a hit (including "Accidents Will Happen," "Veronica" and "Everyday I Write the Book") left unsung.

Part Life , part Sunday newspaper silky, part Disney-Miramax house organ, part Stern , the first issue of Talk is sometimes dull, sometimes even laughable, but it has a pulse. With it, Tina Brown, who rescued Vanity Fair and razed The New Yorker , is making one last great argument for the general interest magazine. Here's hoping her bosses at Miramax Films and their bosses at the Walt Disney Company don't stomp all over her creation, flawed as it is.

Talk has Ms. Brown's usual mix of highbrow material (former United Nations Special Commission head Richard Butler on his thwarted attempt to disarm Iraq), amusing trash (the centerfold of Miramax starlet Gwyneth Paltrow in skimpy black leather, with a whip), and the tasteless (photos of John F. Kennedy Jr. as a child, especially the blurry one in the helicopter). But there's something new here, too–a certain informality, an underproduced, casual feel, a warmth, even, that you don't usually associate with other products turned out by that cold, calculating, control freak, er, I mean, Ms. Brown.

The magazine's texture–those thin, thin pages, like the ones in The New York Times Magazine , maybe even a wisp thinner, and its staple-bound floppiness–accentuates Ms. Brown's new mussed quality. Could be an economic move, but it works esthetically. So does the dashed-off Eric Palma cartoon illustration of the editor on the back page–a nice contrast to the self-serious black-and-white portrait of Ms. Brown in pearls that ran above her editor's note back in her Vanity Fair days.

The articles, too, seem to find their own lengths, rather than being hacked down to fit into a slot; there's a lot of continued on page 239 in Talk , if you know what I mean. The magazine's look, overseen by its art director Lesley Vinson, is heavy with type and headlines–fonts straight out of Clay Felker's New York magazine. It's a rough look, a not-so-pretty look–and that's good. It makes Vanity Fair seem like a beautiful drag queen in comparison.

But while Ms. Brown seems to sense that she must publish a magazine that is the opposite of slick, she can't quite overcome her proper, career girl impulses. The much-ballyhooed cover article on Hillary Clinton, for instance, is stiffer and more compromised than its subject.

Mrs. Clinton knew to expect friendly treatment from Talk . Miramax co-chairman Harvey Weinstein, the heavy behind Talk who has long had a case of editor envy, is a big Clinton contributor. The piece's writer, ex- New York Times woman Lucinda Franks, is a Martha's Vineyard friend of Hillary's. And Ms. Brown herself once wrote a schoolgirl's love letter to Bill Clinton in the form of a Talk of the Town item toward the end of her New Yorker run. Even with all the good will toward the First Lady, the Talk team wanted something out of her–namely, a confession of how she has survived living with that lout, with some tears, please, too, if you don't mind. And a confession they got … but just barely. At least it was enough to satisfy the New York Post and Daily News , which ran with the Talk interview on their front pages the day before the magazine's debut.

This seems to be the Talk setup. They're going to need a big-time celebrity each month–and that celebrity will get preferential treatment, lavished with gobs of sloppy prose, but in return, the celebrity must cough up a confession. It's like a Barbara Walters special. The lighting is luscious, the soft-focus is on, but you better bleed a little, missy.

"You just don't walk away if you love someone–you help the person," hiccoughed Mrs. Clinton. Talk paid dearly for that. To show its readers that she's a viable politician, the magazine claimed that Mrs. Clinton–who was traveling through northern Africa at the time the story was reported–had improved the lives of women in Tunis with the "new 'microcredit' loans she has championed." Wow! And to prop up the Clinton marriage, Talk quotes one Mohamed Benaissa, identified as the Moroccan minister of foreign affairs. He says, perhaps at gunpoint, "I think she fell in love with him again when she came here." To use a Moroccan minister's quote as evidence that love has returned to the White House … man, we are pretty far from the land of journalism.

The magazine was originally going to have the phrase "The American Conversation" as its slogan, but Talk is the least American magazine Ms. Brown has edited since Tatler , with a news sense as international as that of the BBC. In Talk , Virginia is treated as an exotic land and Africa and Iraq are just a hop over the backyard fence.

Now a quick run-through: Gerald Posner's story of Mohamed al-Fayed's theories on the deaths of his son and Diana, Princess of Wales is a tangled and ultimately pointless read. Tucker Carlson's on-the-road look at George W. Bush is a breeze, a very nice piece that brought the candidate to life. The highly descriptive article on the trailer park in Virginia, written by Eddie Dean in traditional Esquire style, seems too good to be true, with its one-armed man named Rocky who was struck by lightning and has a dog named Prozac; this article really, really made me wonder why there were no photographs of the colorful characters Mr. Dean so delightfully brought to life. The Patrick Demarchelier photo of much-hyped-by-magazine-editors vixen Angeline Jolie is a phony, since she's doing that clichéd hand-covering-the-face thing. The article on divorce activist Lorna Wendt was old hat–I seen that one on the TV.

That thing by "Vox Talkuli"? Not funny. The supposedly self-mocking letters to the editor by professional humorist Christopher Buckley? Also not funny. Save that stuff for the staff party. That small piece on ESPN anchors' home-run calls? Good. James Atlas' number on how his social inferiors are busier and more fabulous than he is? Not bad, but Tom Wolfe has been doing a similar riff in his lectures for about 20 years.

The showpiece by the African safari guide who was taken hostage by the Ugandan terrorists has a lovely beginning and ending. The story on the murders of up to 200 women in Juarez, Mexico, by Charles Bowden–who has written a book on Juarez–is larded up with too much sociology and too much Mexican "atmosphere" and could have used more straight narrative; that can happen with a piece written by an expert.

But that's not important. Talk flops around and flaps in your hand. It's a staple-bound pixie of a general interest magazine that just might work, if it survives. Right now, it takes itself oh so seriously, but it longs to be naughty. Kind of like Gwyneth. Maybe she could be the Talk logo.

E-Mail Indignities

"There's certainly nothing wrong with having an e-mail address on a business card," said Peggy Post, great-granddaughter-in-law of Emily and guardian of the family's etiquette franchise. "If someone wants to put it on there, I say it's fine."

But is it, really, so fine? What if someone doesn't want to put it on there? Let's face it–there's no dignity to e-mail, with its silly little squiggles and shorthands, its unwieldy punctuation, its overly casual lower-caseness, its runaway replicability.

"I can't stand it," said Joseph Singer, 35, an associate at the downtown architecture firm Ferguson, Shamamian & Rattner who ordered his cards printed sans e-mail address. "It clutters up the computer, you know? It's just more shit you can't get rid of."

"Maybe some people don't think it looks as clean-cut on a card to have so much information," suggested Ms. Post, who vows her next batch of cards will bear her e-mail handle, which she declined to hand over. "But cards are functional as well, and e-mail is here to stay."

E-mail is cheap and easy. Maybe too cheap, too easy. Most people get to play some part in choosing their e-mail address, which can involve an embarrassing little display of personality. It's as if the whole world suddenly decided to use vanity plates. "Like the AOL people," said Mr. Singer, and sighed. "It's tacky. When AOL first started like a gazillion years ago or whatever, it was cute when everyone had like a funny little name, but now we've, I think, escalated past that!"

There's no fancy ZIP code in cyberspace to which the tasteful may flee. There is, however, a gutter: If your employer is too cheap to give you an e-mail account, you must resort to Yahoo or Hotmail. Yahoo sounds unnecessarily ebullient. Hotmail just sounds like a porno Web site.

"Euuuuch," said Mr. Singer.

–Alexandra Jacobs

Hemingway has been called a lot of things over the years–vain, anti-Semitic, sexist–and now this.

This ultimate insult comes as an aside in an article on the supposed resurgence of American short fiction in the 90's. Making a case for the work of Lorrie Moore, David Foster Wallace, Denis Johnson, Rick Moody and others, the critic Vince Passaro writes: "Today's short fiction tends to be smart, and wit is an aspect of the literary art form that Hemingway couldn't master and that his followers, consciously or unconsciously, put aside. (His anti-intellectualism, perfectly American and perfectly tuned to the needs of an ever-less-educated reading public, meshed well with his own marked lack of intelligence.)"

It goes on like that for a while. Now all Harper's readers, a half-million or so quietly angry men and women with college educations, have been supplied with some heavy artillery–" marked lack of intelligence "–to fire at the greatest and whitest of the great dead white male authors.

The year 1999 could have been such a damned good time for Hemingway. In Oak Park, Ill., where he was born July 21, 1899, there was the Hemingway Fiesta, with flamenco dancing and tours of Hemingway family graves. In Ketchum, Idaho, where he killed himself July 2, 1961, the Idaho Humanities Council sponsored a Hemingway workshop for 25 high school teachers as Hemingway pilgrims visited his grave and scholars gave lectures.

But amid the centennial hoopla, Papa has taken a beating. The publication of True at First Light , probably the least of the posthumously published Hemingway books, has shot some more holes in his shaky literary reputation. And the introduction of an Ernest Hemingway collection of furniture from Thomasville furniture makers–now available at Huffman Koos and other outlets where fine furnishings are sold–hasn't helped much, either. Both True at First Light and the furniture line ("Kilimanjaro" bedside chest, anyone? or could we interest you in a "Catherine" slipcover love seat?) depend on Hemingway's rugged public image for whatever success they might have in the marketplace and have very little to do with the writer of the perfect first paragraph of A Farewell to Arms and a number of indestructible short stories.

Asked to explain why he thinks Hemingway was stupid, Mr. Passaro said: "There's a very appealing quality to the Hemingway milieu–the places and people, a very dashing and appealing sense about them. He romanticizes at a perfect pitch, but I just began to sense that he was not a very intelligent or pleasant person. After reading a lot more and a lot better people, my opinion of him just ratcheted down, down, down, down. Technically, he worked very hard. He figured out how to put sentences on the page. But he's shockingly unintelligent for a writer treated as so canonically important."

While calling Hemingway stupid may be a cheap shot, it's hard to imagine a critic taking that same cheap shot at, say, James Joyce or Henry James. At its best, Hemingway's writing was lean and brisk. He buried profundities of thought and emotion under a smooth surface of dialogue and description. James and Joyce and other writers of that more obviously intellectual ilk gave readers more to grab onto. They enjoyed showing off their erudition and the meanderings of their minds, and so they were willing to err on the side of messiness and wordiness.

"My old college professor used to say that Henry James wrote his stories on the surface of the mind," said Hemingway biographer Michael Reynolds, on the phone at the Ketchum festival. "Hemingway writes his stories on the surface of the cafe table."

But with so much important stuff buried, Hemingway leaves some critics wondering if there is really anything beneath the polish. "What is it that you learn about the world from Hemingway?" said Mr. Passaro. "Pretty girls, he can't get them–and when he does get them, they bust his balls."

The charge made by Mr. Passaro is not quite new. In a 1934 essay, a Hemingway friend and rival, Wyndham Lewis, implied that his fictional heroes, dumb in both senses of the word, reflected their creator: "Hemingway invariably invokes a dull-witted, bovine, monosyllabic simpleton, a lethargic and stuttering dummy … a village-idiot of few words and fewer ideas." Gertrude Stein, in her 1933 book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas , made a similar charge, comparing her friend Hemingway to a student "who does it without understanding it, in other words who takes training." (Both criticisms made him furious.)

Hemingway himself distrusted big ideas, grandly stated. In the work of Leo Tolstoy, he loved the storytelling, hated the philosophy: "I have never believed in the great Count's thinking," he wrote in the introduction to Men at War , a 1942 anthology. "He could invent more with more insight and truth than anyone who ever lived. But his ponderous and Messianic thinking was no better than many another evangelical professor of history and I learned from him to distrust my own Thinking with a capital T and to try to write as truly, as straightly, as objectively and as humbly as possible."

He often played the part of pugilist and sensualist to the hilt–he hit on other women even in front of his first wife, Hadley Richardson Hemingway; he beat up the poet Wallace Stevens in 1936–which must have helped bring about the idea that he was a brute. But there's no doubt he educated himself well, after joining the Red Cross ambulance corps at the Italian front instead of going to college following a high school career during which he had a 90 average.

"He was probably the best-read American writer of his generation," said Mr. Reynolds, who spent much of the last 25 years on his five-volume Hemingway biography. "His Cuban library had almost 8,000 volumes and he didn't start assembling that until 1940. He only had a high school education and he was making up for it, but he sort of overcompensated."

If Hemingway felt intellectual insecurity, or felt himself to be less talented than his literary rivals, he apparently took pride in having made up for what he lacked. In an October 1929 letter from Paris to F. Scott Fitzgerald, before his falling out with Stein, he brought up the touchy topic of who had more talent: "Gertrude Stein has never last night or any other time said anything to me about you but the highest praise.… As for the comparison of our writings she was … only saying that you had a hell of a roaring furnace of talent and I had a small one–implying I had to work a damn sight harder for results obtained.… Gertrude wanted to organize a hare and tortoise race and picked me to tortoise and you to hare and naturally, like a modest man and a classicist, you wanted to be the tortoise."

Years later, when Lillian Ross interviewed him for her 1950 New Yorker profile–just issued, as Portrait of Hemingway , in a Modern Library paperback edition–Hemingway described the virtues of not being too smart, in the form of a boxing parable: "One time, I asked Jack [Britton], speaking of a fight with Benny Leonard, 'How did you handle Benny so easy, Jack?' 'Ernie,' he said, 'Benny is an awfully smart boxer. All the time he's boxing, he's thinking. All the time he was thinking, I was hitting him.'"

Ms. Ross duly scribbled down such talk, but never bought the idea that Hemingway was a dummy. "He was sharp," she said. "He knew people, he knew writing, he knew fakers." She said she wasn't surprised that a critic is making the Hemingway-was-stupid argument. "I learned about critics when I was a kid," said Ms. Ross. "What they did to Keats–I never forgot that!"

Ms. Ross' profile of the author–while written with affection and published only after he himself had read it over in full–did much to knock down the myth of Hemingway as literary superman in its day. Nonetheless, Ms. Ross and Hemingway stayed in touch over the years and he showed his intellectual mettle to Ms. Ross' satisfaction in roughly 80 letters he wrote her.

In this year of Hemingway weirdness, a new book, Hemingway's Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood , spills more of his secrets, particularly those having to do with his intense feelings about hair, androgyny and "his lifelong fascination with lesbian eroticism." Drawing from parts of A Farewell to Arms , For Whom the Bell Tolls , To Have and Have Not , his ménage à trois (posthumous) novel The Garden of Eden and the short story "The Sea Change," the author Carl P. Eby deflates the notion of Hemingway as a pig who wanted to control women, replacing it with a Hemingway who feared women and, sometimes, wanted to be a woman. Mr. Eby has found, in an unpublished letter to his fourth wife, Mary Welsh Hemingway, that Hemingway wrote, in closing, "Your girl Katherine sends her love." Yes, Hemingway was referring to himself with this phrase. He also called Mary "Pete."

Hemingway buffs know about the time he "accidentally" dyed his hair red in Cuba. Well, guess what? In another letter to Mary, Hemingway wrote that he "remembered how you used to talk about Catherine in the night and how her hair was and so decided would make red– … So now I am just as red headed as you would like your girl Catherine to be and don't give a damn about it at all."

In an unpublished bit of the Garden of Eden manuscript unearthed by Mr. Eby, the protagonist David Bourne, in bed with his wife, Catherine, says: "You're Catherine." And she replies: "No. I'm Peter. You're my wonderful Catherine. You're my beautiful lovely Catherine. You were so good to change."

Far from playing the role of great white hunter on the 1953-1954 safari that gave rise to the 800-page manuscript that got whipped into shape as True at First Light , Hemingway wanted to go native–not as a Masai warrior, but as a Masai girl. On that trip he shaved his head–which is something Masai women do. Mr. Eby calls this "inherently transvestic." He also wanted to pierce his ears. Mary said No.

So Hemingway is more psychologically complex than the feminists imagined. But does psychological complexity equal intelligence? Isn't it possible that he was a simpleton who had a knack for writing distinctive prose? Mr. Passaro compared Hemingway's mind to those of nonliterary artists: "We don't ask painters to be intelligent, or photographers, or musicians," he said, "but I, for one, do ask writers to be intelligent."

It's a view that Harold Bloom, the Falstaffian professor at Yale and New York University and author of The Anxiety of Influence and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human , disputes: "Don't underrate his intellect," Mr. Bloom warned. "His is a very sharp, discursive intelligence. There is a real limitation in his powers of imagination when he works on a large-scale book–in For Whom the Bell Tolls , he fails in his attempt to write a Tolstoyan novel–but he did not lack intellect. In the end, he wanted to be a greater writer than he was."

The Hemingway style was tough and tight–and hard to maintain over the long haul of years that ended with him shooting himself in the head with his 12-gauge Boss shotgun. The critic Leslie Fiedler paid a visit to him in Ketchum in those very last days and he was shocked, according to Jeffrey Meyers' Hemingway , to see "his doubt and torment, his fear that he had done nothing of lasting worth."

Hemingway's best work shows the impossibility of always living by the code of grace under pressure, a mode of behavior he learned from the British soldier's cheerful stoicism in the works of his beloved Rudyard Kipling. Hemingway and his most honestly rendered characters wanted to live by that code, but couldn't. In the chasm between that romantic ideal and daily life he found his true subject. Hemingway himself wanted to be a fine, masculine sportsman and writer … but then again, he wanted to be a Masai girl.

What Hemingway may not have known was that he was at his best when he showed his familiarity with the territory of weakness and doubt. True at First Light and Green Hills of Africa are rotten books because they cast the author as a macho hunter as they extol the virtues of courage and honor in the hunt. The story "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is great, on the other hand, partly because it deals with cowardice and hesitation; in it, Hemingway questions everything he held dear in his daylight hours.

Whatever the thing is behind a story that good–if you can't call it intelligence, call it imagination or talent or inspiration–Hemingway had it. He eroded it or even destroyed it, probably just by drinking huge amounts of alcohol, but he had it at some point.

He had roughly 20 good years of apprenticeship and early success, followed by a 20-year decline during which he won the Nobel Prize but couldn't pull off what he might have been able to do had he guarded that original quality of mind that allowed him to write "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "Ten Indians" and "Hills Like White Elephants" and "The Killers." Those stories are so clear and so beautiful that, unlike the works of Tolstoy or James, they can indeed seem like pieces of writing produced by a simpleton. That's how good they are.

So hail, Hemingway, our literary idiot. Maybe it's true that he wasn't exactly a genius–and maybe that was his secret strength.

Needless to say, Hillary Rodham Clinton was a hit.

Even before midday on Wednesday, March 3, when the incredible beatifying First Lady was due to dazzle the sisters who lunch at the Women's Leadership Forum, a component of the Democratic National Committee, she had earned her adulation. After all, the media were salivating. The money was flowing: Seating at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan had been sold out for weeks, to the tune of 900 women contributing more than half a million dollars in increments of $150 to $10,000. And best of all, Juanita Broaddrick was a definite no-show. Only days had passed since the Arkansas matron had darkly gifted Dateline NBC with her ragged memory, or conjuring, of then-Attorney General Bill Clinton visiting her, violating her and then advising her to ice her injuries, but already, it seemed, the Democratic coast was clear of her.

"Other reporters are only asking about the Senate," said Laura Ross, New York chair of the Women's Leadership Forum, when asked whether the Broaddrick episode, and the extreme circumspection with which the President, or rather his lawyer David Kendall, had met it, had served at all to dampen the luncheon, or any of the draft-Hillary buzz that pervaded its approach. "The buzz is whether she's running," said Ms. Ross. Queried as to how a fair-minded feminist, with natural inclinations toward both the innocence of the accused and the credibility of the accuser, should react to this disquieting development, State Democratic Party chairman Judith Hope said: "I don't think we should react at all. It's just too old and too stale and too questionable, and can never be proven or disproven."

Too true. But while the nation can never clarify the story, the story has already done its part to clarify the nation. According to a Fox News poll taken on Feb. 26, 54 percent of the American people believe the President to be guilty of Ms. Broaddrick's explosive charge–the same 54 percent, perhaps, who desired to let the matter lie. Thus, even allowing for significant shortcomings in such numbers, it was clear that a very considerable proportion of the American people believe that the Chief Executive who signed the Violence Against Women Act committed a serious act of violence against a woman, but do not believe that anything much can, or should, be done about it. Somehow the image of a man famously married to, elected by, and solicitous of, powerful women had slowly transformed from that of a playboy to that of a predator, to nothing like fatal effect.

"There is a surreal quality to it," mused Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation , about life on the left–or any place, really, except deep in the heart of the right–as the country registered a veritably Novocain quality of numb in the freshly unmasked face of Jane Doe No. 5. "We have a President who is accused of being a rapist, and yet people go about their business."

And that, of course, includes feminist people, many of whom seem to be going about their business as if a Presidential rape charge were the flick of an ash. Who among New York feminists might be moved to speak out about this? Good question. Writers? Gloria Steinem, whose much-remarked Op-Ed last March in The New York Times , lauded, among other things, Mr. Clinton's way of taking No for an answer, had not a nanosecond to comment on the Broaddrick matter, not even through her assistant. Author Naomi Wolf declined to comment due to the connection of her husband David Shipley to the Clinton Administration.

Members of Congress? "If Ms. Broaddrick's story is true, I wish that she had come forward 21 years ago," Representative Louise Slaughter of Rochester, one of those who literally stormed the Senate on behalf of Anita Hill in 1991, stated via a three-sentence press release. "But since she did not … we can now do little more than wonder." Likewise, "The charges are very serious," Representative Nita Lowey of Westchester said through a spokesman. "But the White House has denied them. It is likely that we will never know the truth." As for Representative Carolyn Maloney of Manhattan, "It's hard to know what should happen now," she said, "since the accusation is based on something that allegedly happened so long ago." (Hey, anybody instinctively, deep down, believe the President? Just kidding.)

Leading female fund-raisers? "I really don't have a comment for you," said Friend of Bill Susan Patricoff, a host of the March 3 luncheon. "I wouldn't presume to speak on that. No comment." Ditto for Patricia Duff.

Of course, feminists are entitled to have, respectively, busy schedules, conflicts of interest, misgivings as to old and problematic charges taking wing at the tail end of a scandal-scarred year, and instincts against enraging the White House. But all that said, it seems only fair to ask: Isn't it weird that such a depth of caution should mingle with such a dearth of curiosity, among such a number of women about a charge of such gravity?

And weirder still that the only Democrats in Congress who have called, even faintly, for Mr. Clinton to answer the charges more fully seem to be men? (Senator Paul Wellstone, Democrat of Minnesota, on Fox News to Tony Snow: "How could anybody discount this And I think the President should speak to it.")

"As in this entire scandal, we have witnessed the total breakdown of the feminist establishment," said Katie Roiphe, the 30-year-old author who is making quite a career out of kicking the stuffing out of the feminist establishment, such as it is. "The same people who were hysterical about Bob Packwood and hysterical about Anita Hill have completely changed their mind about this." This, of course, is the theme that many an anti-, non- and neo-feminist has been gleefully sounding since Monica Lewinsky was a gleam in MSNBC's eye: that, in its self-enslavement to the woman-scamming President and his (white-collar) woman-championing Administration, institutionalized feminism is doing nothing so much as finishing off its long, wheezing transition from political movement to partisan mouthpiece.

In part, that is a valid point, but one that is by now so obvious and so worn with repetition as to waste the words of those who make it. Yes, yes, feminists who once pilloried their Republican foes for being pigs are now excusing their Democratic friend, despite his increasingly appearing to be a far more troubling brand of brute. All this means is that, for now, the left seems to have abandoned the practice of recruiting women as poster-children in the personal waging of political wars, and the right seems to have taken it up. Big deal. It's only when one considers the feminist positions that are not hypocritical, but at least attempting rationality and proportion and sense, that one gets a glimpse of what our President has done to our politics.

"My feeling always is, justice should be done, assuming it can take its course," said Ms . magazine founder Letty Cottin Pogrebin, who, having called last summer for the President's resignation on the opinion that the Lewinsky matter constituted sexual harassment, can hardly be counted a Clinton cultist. "In this case it can't, because of the statute of limitations, so I wish it would just go away; it just gives the right wing grist for its endless mill." Now, as right-wingers would retort–well, do keep retorting–neither Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas nor Senator Robert Packwood was ever accused of rape, and neither was spared a public crucifixion because theirs were not matters for the court. But the Thomas-Hill, he-said, she-said occurred in the context of a process in motion–his Supreme Court confirmation–which protest, fairly or unfairly, was being marshaled to derail. Fresh in his survival of the ultimate political death threat, Mr. Clinton can be no more derailed than levitated.

"Forget Teflon," said Ms. vanden Heuvel. "He's the iridium President. He's like someone from another planet."

And if that resilience is due, in part, to the complicity of his constituencies, it is also due to the clumsiness, vitriol and, post-impeachment, unshyness of his adversaries. And, as for so many other groups, this is actually a shame for women: The President is so fortunate in his political enemies that he need not do very much to keep his political friends. Remember how Mr. Clinton survived and thrived in the dark days of 1994? He made himself look good by making members of Congress look bad. By vilifying them rhetorically and pre-empting them thematically, he reamed them politically–and this without remarkable achievement on behalf of women, or anybody else.

The President, too, managed to turn the tables on the media, whose proclivity for half-truths had the effect of dulling the blade of the whole truth about Bill Clinton as ultimately revealed. So, in the short term, the Republican-led Congress and the press may have tormented Mr. Clinton, but in the end they served him very well.

Then, too, there is the pesky matter of proof. Mr. Packwood may have been no more of a sexual predator than Mr. Clinton, but he was definitely more of a diarist. For feminists to take Ms. Broaddrick at her word would not just be shrill, it would be irresponsible (as irresponsible, some might think, as prematurely donning an "I Believe Anita Hill" button).

"I'm torn between the two poles of my total feminist commitment to any woman who's been sexually assaulted [and the feeling that] I may have gotten on a bandwagon to indict someone who may be innocent," said author Susan Faludi. "Short of stoning him, what is it that people want to do?"

Not much, it appears. Not much at all.

-Tish Durkin

Rift Inside The Times Puts Broaddrick's Cry of Rape Right Where the White House Wanted It–on Page A16

A-16.

The New York Times didn't know how to handle Juanita Broaddrick's inconvenient charge that Bill Clinton raped her 21 years ago. So the story of the allegation that ran in its Feb. 24 edition lurched all over the place. It was The Times performing journalism by committee–and it was a botched operation.

A rape charge against a President would seem to be very big front-page news anywhere, even at The Times . But in the strange universe of 229 West 43rd Street, Ms. Broaddrick's corroborated charge against a congenital liar was only good for page A-16. Figure out that paradox and you will understand The Times .

Publication of the story came after weeks of internal meetings, formal and informal, and debates among editors. Ms. Broaddrick's rape charge caused sharp disagreement at The Times , sources at the paper said, and the sore feelings brought on by the story have not yet gone away.

The Times ran the story on the same day Dateline NBC finally went with its half-hour segment on Ms. Broaddrick's charge, and days after The Washington Post ran its take on the matter in a front-page story and The Wall Street Journal published Dorothy Rabinowitz's interview with Ms. Broaddrick in its editorial pages.

The story on page A-16 was cast partly as an explanation of why The Times had not investigated the matter earlier and partly as a defense of why The Times was going into the sordid mess at all. It did not include the word "rape." And it gave Times managing editor Bill Keller more words of direct quote (106; "Congress isn't going to impeach him again. And frankly, we've all got a bit of scandal fatigue") than it gave Ms. Broaddrick (61 words; "I was so totally surprised, totally shocked").

"There was a very difficult debate," said Times national editor Dean Baquet, who worked on the piece. "Over on the one hand, how do you handle a story that is really difficult to prove, and you could question whether, because of that, you shouldn't report it; but on the other hand, it involves a very serious allegation against the President of the United States, and you have to sort of weigh what to tell our readers and what not to tell our readers. I think in this case, what we did was, we decided we needed to try to explain it to our readers."

Dave Smith, another editor who worked on the story, said there was nothing too unusual about the newsroom discussions leading up to the publication of this one. "It was very low-key, Socratic," he said. "We had a couple of meetings with some very good dialogue, very open, and, like just about any other time you're dealing with a difficult situation, you try to come to some sort of synthesis. I've been through this a thousand times at The Times ."

In editorial meetings, at least one editor argued that The Times should remain silent on the issue, reasoning that Times readers would understand and appreciate The Times ' silence. Others argued that the story was right for page 1.

In the end, the Times team compromised, running its story deep inside the front section, on the bottom half of a page, with a flat headline and no photo or illustration; they might as well have slapped a "don't read this article" sticker on the page. To those who opposed the story, its placement on A-16 was a clear sign that the newspaper of record had real doubts about the story. To others, the placement was just fine, especially since the A-16 story was promoted under the heading "An Allegation Resurfaces," in the small table-of-contents box on page 1.

"You're basically saying this is in the top 10 stories of the day in The New York Times ," said Mr. Smith, the newspaper's media editor. "That's a signal that you hold it with some degree of gravity. I hardly think that was burying it."

The reporters who shared the byline were Felicity Barringer, a media writer, and David Firestone, a national correspondent based in Atlanta who interviewed Ms. Broaddrick.

Taking part in editorial meetings, along with Mr. Smith, Mr. Baquet and Mr. Keller, were Washington bureau chief Michael Oreskes and deputy Washington editor Jill Abramson, via speakerphone. Associate managing editor Martin Baron, the night editor in New York, also put in his two cents.

Times executive editor Joseph Lelyveld was on vacation while all of this was going down. A few people involved with putting the story together said he had little or no involvement. "He really went on vacation to get away," said one Times veteran. "He was getting away after a year of this stuff [covering Clinton scandals], and he delegated to Keller. He completely trusts Keller. They're very close."

When he returned from his vacation, Times sources said, Mr. Lelyveld had a nice suntan–and a low opinion of the big A-16 story that had run in his absence.

It is true that New York Times people are mild and conventional. They love the middle course. For every Jeff Gerth, who led the charge on Whitewater in the pre-Monica days, there are dozens upon dozens of Times men and Times women who are content to be mild-mannered ciphers.

And so, accordingly, the range of opinion in the discussions on the topic of Juanita Broaddrick and what to do with her rape allegation was not really all that wide. It went from those who argued that The Times should not publish her allegation in any form, to those who believed that The Times should run with her allegation– in the proper context .

There were no hawks who argued that the rape charge stood on its own as an unadorned front-page news story, Times editors said.

In fact, before the Times team of reporters and editors got to what Ms. Broaddrick had to say, they had already likened her allegation to "toxic waste."

In the second paragraph, even before providing any details of her account, the writers charted the beginnings of the Broaddrick story from its days as a "rumor" that "persisted in the shadowlands of the Internet"; and they went on to note that Ms. Broaddrick herself gave a "sworn denial" and "reversed herself last spring." Next, The Times implied that Ms. Broaddrick was a publicity seeker ("… during the impeachment process, she decided to make the assault charges public in an interview with NBC News") who was perhaps a little too eager for her media close-up ("… she chafed because the interview was not broadcast").

Bam, bam, bam. In just two quick opening paragraphs, The Times skillfully sketched Ms. Broaddrick as a publicity-seeking liar who was peddling a poisonous rumor.

Managing editor Bill Keller's most resonant quote in The Times ' A-16 article–"And frankly," he said, "we've all got a bit of scandal fatigue"–did not sit well with some of his colleagues. By suggesting that The Times ignored a story based on weariness with the topic is antithetical to what reporting is all about, after all. It's tantamount to a police reporter getting beat because of crime fatigue, or a City Hall reporter missing a story because of Rudy fatigue. (Mr. Keller was on a European vacation and did not return calls seeking comment.)

The "scandal fatigue" quote, while rankling some people at The Times , belies a bedrock assumption at the newspaper–that the scandals that have dogged the President should be over. A newspaper loaded with high-achieving princes and princesses of the Eastern establishment, rather than with the rogues who often land the memorable stories, The Times wants Bill Clinton to be something he is not.

The New York Times wants to pretend he's a regular meritocratic guy who won the highest office in the land not because he is possibly a criminal who has run roughshod over other people, but because he is in the Presidential-legend mold: charming, hard-working, a little unknowable–and, O.K, he's sexy. And if he must be corrupt, The Times worldview would prefer that he be corrupt in the way that politicians are traditionally corrupt–as a white-collar criminal. The Times refuses to consider that he might really be closer to the guys who are wearing orange jumpsuits in state penitentiaries than to a naughty Casanova.

In assembling the A-16 story, Ms. Barringer fielded dispatches from Mr. Firestone and other Times reporters. She was the first one to take a crack at placing the material on Ms. Broaddrick in the context of a larger media story; when her turn was up, Mr. Baquet and Mr. Smith went at it, followed by the copy editors.

"There are always a lot of ways to tell a story," Ms. Barringer said. "This one posed a set of dilemmas that were extremely knotty." Asked if the story treated Ms. Broaddrick badly, Ms. Barringer said, "I don't think it was loaded. I do think there's a kind of Talmudic quality to figuring out how things are placed and what weight they're given."

David Firestone interviewed Ms. Broaddrick on Feb. 22. He used to be the Times City Hall bureau chief. His writing always had style and some wit just under the surface. He once wrote a funny piece on Mayor Giuliani's habit of boasting about himself and New York City. Now Mr. Firestone mans the Atlanta bureau. On the phone, he sounded like some weary character out of a Graham Greene novel, stuck in some distant outpost. He said he flew from Atlanta to Tulsa, Okla., near Ms. Broaddrick's ranch in Van Buren, Ark., to get the story.

"I went to her home hoping to knock on her door," Mr. Firestone said, "but she lives on a big 40-acre ranch surrounded by an electric gate at the end of a long driveway. I called her the night before and she told me not to come, but I went, anyway, hoping that just going there would convince her to talk to me. When I got to her house, I called her on the cell phone and she said she still wouldn't talk to me and we made a few other attempts on the phone from Tulsa, and she finally agreed to talk on the phone."

The interview lasted "an hour or two," Mr. Firestone said, with a few quick follow-up calls. "It was just a classic piece of reporting," he said. "Write down exactly what she says in as much detail as possible, try and pin her down on exactly what happened leading up to it, what happened afterward, get the names of witnesses that she talked to, call the witnesses, write down what they say, and turn it in. You know, that's just what reporting is all about … This was a story that simply required a very straightforward retelling of her story."

The correspondent was asked if he knew The Times would take his reporting and shove it in the context of a large, interpretive media story.

"That was strictly the editors," Mr. Firestone said. "They basically took what I gave them, a long, 3,000-word memo, and they decided what they wanted to do with it. That's how The Times works. When you're in the field, it's a little hard to know exactly what they're thinking up there."

The Times team did an interesting little dance with Ms. Broaddrick throughout the A-16 article. First, they played up her desire to go public on NBC. Then they implied that her reluctance to come forward was problematic. After assuring the readers that her story (even if "toxic") was relevant because "it hardened opinion against the President among some of the dozen or so Representatives who were led to materials on the case" (note the unseemly connotation of "led to"), The Times began to engage in its favorite pastime: explaining the Internet. When not hyping Internet I.P.O.'s on Wall Street, The Times seems to find the Internet distasteful. Lumping it in with cable TV, The Times reported that Ms. Broaddrick's story followed a "shadowy, subterranean path"–an allusion, perhaps, to the cables buried under the ground that make cable and the Internet possible. Cable TV and the Internet often come off as literally dirty, in The Times ' view, while newspapers like The Times show up above ground, in the light. The writers of the A-16 story explained that "the national press is divided in ever-smaller slivers, with smaller outlets on the Internet and cable television sometimes overwhelming the slower and more sober judgments of mainstream news organizations."

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times on Feb. 25, Mr. Keller contributed to the impression given by the A-16 article that The Times was getting pushed into stories by the cyber-rabble: "There's a sense of being manipulated by this strange new dynamic that exists in the media," he said, "where stories that are in the process of being reported somewhere get picked up by a Web site and by cable TV talk shows, and eventually they pick up centrifugal force and knock the story into the mainstream. And you feel a loss of control."

That quote steamed his colleagues, according to Times sources.

"I don't buy that our coverage of this story and other stories gets dictated by people like Matt Drudge," said Mr. Baquet.

Washington bureau chief Michael Oreskes agreed. "I think it is vital that The New York Times and every other newspaper decide what its standards are and stick to them," he said, "regardless of what Matt Drudge or anyone else puts on the Internet.… We should never feel like we are being pushed into running something, or that our decisions are under the control of others' judgments."

Mr. Keller's quote ignored the fact that some Web sites–even Matt Drudge's Drudge Report (www.drudgereport.com)–do more than report on what others are reporting. A recent investigative report posted on a Web site called Capitol Hill Blue (www.capitolhillblue.com), for example, says that there are other women who claim that Mr. Clinton would not take No for an answer. The story purports to include accounts of at least four women who, in interviews with Capitol Hill Blue reporters, said Mr. Clinton had forced himself on them.

One Times editor, speaking not for attribution, said The Times was aware of the report posted on Capitol Hill Blue , but would not say whether or not The Times had decided to do its own reporting on the alleged incidents.

On Feb. 26, The Times followed Bill Clinton in Arizona, where he visited the Arizona Diamondback training camp. Here's how The Times began its story on a President who had been charged, credibly, with rape on NBC News two nights prior: "President Clinton may not have been gloating today, but he sure was celebrating." The article briefly mentioned a "few dozen protesters" and quoted Clinton supporter Carolyn Killian, identified as a 31-year-old homemaker. Concerning Ms. Broaddrick, Ms. Killian told The Times , "She must be a liar, too." Then reporter James Bennet quoted Debbie Van Sant, a 42-year-old pharmacist: "'After all of this fiasco,' she said, 'I have a lot of respect for the man for standing up for what he believes in. It shows character in a person.'"

The next day, a Saturday, Howell Raines' editorial page weighed in with a corrective: "… it would be nice to hear Mr. Clinton himself address the matter and provide his version of what transpired, if in fact the two did meet in a Little Rock hotel room in 1978." The Times editorial also noted "a set of allegations stretching across two decades that depict him as a serial masher or worse." (Did Mr. Raines get this from the Capitol Hill Blue Web site? He would not comment for this article.)

On Feb. 28, it was the Week in Review's turn. There was one of those "thoughtful" articles by Francis X. Clines, headlined "The End Was a Mirage. The Scandal Lives On." It came complete with a quote from official White House jester Al Franken, but the illustration said it all: It showed a wussy-looking guy in a bow tie and round-frame glasses, doing the dishes at the kitchen sink–this was The Times ' idea of an everyman, apparently–and the faces of the Clinton scandal women appeared in the steam and the bubbles; there, Ms. Broaddrick was depicted as an equal to Linda Tripp and Monica Lewinsky–another of Bill's daffy dames.

The Times got used to the Clinton-Lewinsky story, and disgorged it as part of the impeachment saga. It was able to write off the saga as distasteful, disruptive and occasionally comic, at worst. But Ms. Broaddrick threw a monkey wrench into the whole operation. When the story became less like something out of Molière and more like sunbelt Sophocles or Robert Penn Warren, it was hello, A-16.

Mr. Baquet, the national editor, was asked if, 25 or 30 years from now, people might think not of Ms. Lewinsky when they think of Bill Clinton, but of Juanita Broaddrick. "Some would say history might not even notice this," Mr. Baquet said. "Some would say it will be a footnote on page 427 on the age of Clinton, and there are some people who would say otherwise. But based on what we know, I don't see how that would be the case. Monica Lewinsky's case led to the impeachment of the President for only the second time in history. I can't imagine that in a case in which everybody doesn't know what happened, I can't imagine that you could say those were equal stories."

-Jim Windolf

Ever since the Presidential sex scandal became an unavoidable fact of life, some people have wondered if it has had a corrupting influence on children. To find out, the New York World interviewed kids in Central Park, Stuyvesant Square and Battery Park City, all with the permission of their parents. Judging by the interviews, the scandal seems not to have added anything to their knowledge of sex, but it has had the unsettling effect of making young children sound like junior commentators for CNBC.

The question we asked all of them was simple: Do you know why President Clinton is in trouble? "Because he had improper sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky," answered a 10-year-old boy from Queens named Aditya. His mother was quick to help out: "No," she said, "not at all! You know that's perfectly legal." The boy was quick to revise his answer: "Oh! He lied under oath!" he said, before adding some analysis: "If he did answer them legally, then I don't think he should be in trouble. But if he did lie under oath, then it's grounds for impeachment." Tim Russert doesn't do it any better. All interviews were tape-recorded. More answers follow:

· "I think he's in trouble because, first of all, he should have told us in the first place whether or not he did have the sex scandal. The sex scandal is basically between Monica Lewinsky and President Clinton. Now, Hillary Clinton, as far as I know, is really teed off. I understand that he's trying to patch things up with his family, but that hole that might be in his whole family's heart might not ever be healed."–Sean, 11, Queens

· "I know why! Uh, because … he was … stealing … money?"–Georgie, 5, Brooklyn

· "He was cheating to have an affair on his wife. Monica and Hillary should dump him."–Alonzo, 12, Brooklyn

· "I heard about him on the news, but really I don't know much because all I ever do is play with my toys and things like that."–Joseph, 9, Manhattan

· "'Cause he lied about Monica Lewinsky. I don't really, um, ah, 'cause he lied about not kissing with the girl. He lied that he was not friends with the girl."–Sanna, 6, Manhattan

· "It should be sexual harassment on him, but that's no one else's business. Only he should know that … She should be in trouble. She should have told them the same day. There's a lot of people in the building like security that she could have told. She probably wanted it and let him, and now she's trying to get him arrested. I think she wants money. Somebody's probably paying her." Who? "The Democrats. He did a lot for this country. He's the best President. He traveled all the way to Africa. I've never seen the President travel all the way to Africa for no reason. They always stay in Washington, D.C."–Nelson, 13, the Bronx

· "Well, because he had a relationship with Monica Lewinsky and he denied it in court and then he admitted it again, and everyone is forgiving them, but I don't think they should. I think that he should be arrested for, like, rape and stuff because she said that he forced her to do it. I think that Bill Clinton should be put in jail."–Christopher, 9, Brewster, N.Y.

–Deirdre Dolan

Journalism 101

"Ms. Lewinsky, these people said, told the panel that he intimately caressed her breasts and touched her genitals during several encounters inside the White House."

– The New York Times , front page, Aug. 21

Former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky spoke at length about her sexual encounters with President Clinton in her second day of grand jury testimony, on Aug. 20. Details of any physical contact between the two are crucial to independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr's investigation of whether the President lied under oath during the Paula Corbin Jones sexual misconduct suit.

Wearing a skirt that came halfway down her thigh and frosty lipstick, Ms. Lewinsky, her hair slightly mussed, testified in a forthright manner for three and a half hours, according to people close to the case. These people said Ms. Lewinsky told the panel that Mr. Clinton intimately caressed her breasts and touched her genitals during several encounters.

The couple would meet most often in the Oval Office of the White House, said those with knowledge of the case. Slowly, slowly, the sources added, Ms. Lewinsky would unzip the President's pants to reveal his penis early in the encounters.

"We've got to stop meeting like this," the President said on at least one occasion, according to one person with knowledge of Ms. Lewinsky's account. "Hush," Ms. Lewinsky replied on at least one occasion, according to another source close to the case. Beyond the exact nature of Mr. Clinton's relationship with Ms. Lewinsky, Mr. Starr has been investigating whether the President tried to obstruct justice and suborn perjury.

A lawyer who spoke not for attribution noted that the President had a "soft touch" at times. Apparently, he would slip his hand beneath Ms. Lewinsky's blouse and make a swirling motion with his fingertips on her back before swiftly unhooking the strap of her brassiere, said the lawyer. Then, said one person who was present for the grand jury testimonies, the President would intimately caress the then-intern's breasts while whispering various terms of endearment, such as "You're adorable." The two would allegedly engage in French kissing, one lawyer said, their hearts beating rapidly.

Long, full embraces accompanied the kissing, said more than one person connected to the investigation, with the President's strong arms encircling Ms. Lewinsky's sensuous form. In a speech delivered Aug. 17, Mr. Clinton admitted he had conducted a relationship with Ms. Lewinsky that he called "not appropriate" and "wrong." The Oval Office sessions were never strictly private, said well-placed sources. A naval guard stationed in the anteroom, more than one source noted, would sometimes peek in at the adulterous lovers.

Although prior reports have characterized the President as an inconsiderate sexual partner, lawyers close to the case said testimonies and interviews gathered by the independent counsel suggest he was tender but firm. The Presidential hands would sometimes behave almost rudely, said someone close to Ms. Lewinsky. However, it was a charming rudeness, one Government official said, the rudeness not of a callous lover but that of a "Spanish rogue who knows the tricks," to use the official's phrase.

Reaching under her skirt and devilishly slipping his fingers past the binding of her panties, the President, sources said, would ask in a plaintive voice, "Is this O.K.?" Ms. Lewinsky would answer, according to lawyers with knowledge of the testimonies, either "Yes! Yes!" or "Stop teasing!" The President would end the verbal outbursts by stopping up her mouth with more French kisses, sources said.

At this juncture, one source noted, Ms. Lewinsky would step backward, as if suddenly alarmed by something. In fact, she wasn't alarmed at all, said another source, who added that Ms. Lewinsky was merely trying to tantalize the President. Playfully, the uninhibited Ms. Lewinsky would remove her blouse and let her unlatched brassiere fall to the Oval Office floor, one high-ranking official said, to reveal a heaving bosom. With a seductive wiggle, the official added, she would ease out of her skirt, letting it, too, fall to the Oval Office floor like so much trash.

Craftily neglecting to remove her high-heeled shoes, Ms. Lewinsky would gambol before the President, sources said. It was then, said a lawyer close to the case, that Mr. Clinton would touch her genitals. Ms. Lewinsky's testimony came on a day when dozens of powerful American cruise missiles, launched at the President's directive, destroyed terrorist targets in Afghanistan and the Sudan in retaliation for recent bombings of American embassies in East Africa.

Quickly kneeling down, Ms. Lewinsky would place the President's penis in her mouth, said dozens of people with ties to the case. One source said the President would react by tugging the then-intern's dark locks and moaning. Ms. Lewinsky, one Government official said, would now and then trace the outlines of his penis with the edges of her teeth. With what one official described as "a grim sexual determination," Ms. Lewinsky would continue to perform the sex act, moving up and down, up and down, until the President would thrust his chin into the air while issuing spasmodic cries that apparently punctuated orgasm, those close to the case said. A Government source said the encounters would typically end with Ms. Lewinsky gazing upward, her lipstick smeared, as the President thanked her profusely.

Ms. Lewinsky is not expected to testify again in the case, said a source close to Mr. Starr's office. This same source added that Mr. Clinton could be called back to give investigators "a more complete picture" of the events in question.

–Jim Windolf

Mr. Ramis needs to believe that each of his mainstream comedies has a moral reason for being. And that kind of thinking can drive you a little crazy, if you're someone who had anything to do with that "Baby Ruth in the pool scene" in Caddyshack .

"My ex-wife used to call me 'the rabbi,'" said Mr. Ramis during a lunch break on the Montclair, N.J., set of his latest movie– Analyze This , starring Robert De Niro (hit man who goes into therapy) and Billy Crystal (psychiatrist who helps hit man work through rage issues). "I can really go overboard on the morality."

Like Sullivan, the fictional director in the 1941 Preston Sturges classic Sullivan's Travels who was embarrassed to have made such romps as Hey, Hey in the Hayloft and Ants in Your Plants of 1939 , Mr. Ramis sometimes wonders if the end of comedy (i.e., big laughs) always justifies the means (e.g., the cry of "Doody!" at the sight of the floating Baby Ruth bar during "caddie day" at the club pool). The first thing that needs a little moral justification is Animal House , a picture that Entertainment Weekly recently dubbed one of the original "gross-out movies" from those golden days long before there was There's Something About Mary .

"I was in college from '62 to '66," said Mr. Ramis, who is 53 years old. "I entered college just when people were in the post-Korean-War fraternity wildness. You know, no cares, everything looked great, Kennedy, Camelot, our generation taking over the world–and suddenly, my second year of college begins with Kennedy killed, and everything goes to hell. Civil rights demonstrations and cities burning and the Vietnam War and by the time I finished college, they were burning down the R.O.T.C. building.

"So I had been raised in Chicago, and for some reason, I think I identified with the beatniks even before there were freaks and hippies, and I always felt countercultural. When they warned us, in high school, to look out for someone hanging around the schoolyard selling reefer, I went out there– Where's the guy? You know– Where's the guy? He's not here! My beliefs were not mainstream. I sang folk songs when everyone else was singing rock-and-roll and I could be outraged about union problems in the railroads and coal mines in the late 19th century. So I had that kind of healthy righteous indignation and I had this big sense that history was a series of great injustices against the poor, the dispossessed and the disenfranchised, and part of that is being Jewish and growing up in Chicago, which had a great radical history."

He paused. He was wearing olive green pants. His feet looked huge–size 14–and he has a big belly now. He looks like a prosperous M.D., maybe an internist. That must be what James L. Brooks saw in him when he cast him as the saintly doc who saves the sickly kid in As Good as It Gets .

"I say all this leading up to the idea that Animal House was not just a movie about how great college was in the early 60's," said Mr. Ramis. "In our minds, that homecoming parade at the end of Animal House was probably like November '63. Literally a week after the movie ends, the world changed. So I thought the anarchy of Animal House was really a precursor to the political anarchy that swept my generation in the later 60's. So, in other words, even in those early, dumb comedies, for me, I invested them with meaning. Whether the audience ever saw it or got it, to me they were statement movies … Even though, like, Stripes was not my conception–but even then I tried to follow an old Second City dictum, which was Always work from the top of your intelligence . It is kind of self-justifying, but we'd always said to ourselves, Broad comedy is not necessarily dumb comedy, and I think we set out to prove that.

"When we were working on Caddyshack , Doug Kenney said he always wanted to do a kind of really smart adult Disney movie–as American as Disney films, but really embodying all our values." He laughed a little bit. "And Caddyshack clearly had a big social message–you know, the outsiders and the wackos are the good guys.

"It's funny. When Animal House was being shopped to the studios, the biggest reaction, even at Universal, which eventually bought the picture, was, These guys are the heroes? "

Mr. Ramis is no tyrant on the set. His liberal ideals (Collaborating is good) match up nicely with the rules of big-time Hollywood movie making: Collaborating is good–especially when the studio executives, the producers and the stars of the film, not to mention their personal screenwriters, all must approve practically every line of the script. So on the set of the De Niro-Crystal comedy, he ran down the long process of how the script came about with no complaints: He was writer No. 5 on the project, he said, and then he turned his draft over to Mr. De Niro's screenwriter, and then Billy Crystal took a long look at it, and then Mr. Ramis got it back for yet another draft, and he didn't start shooting until he had "numerous line-by-line readings" with the two stars to make sure that everyone saw eye to eye. And now, he said, Warner Brothers is on his back a little bit about the budget.

"My whole style is in one way a weakness and in one way a strength," he said. "I try to please everybody under the assumption that if everyone agrees and is happy, then you've done something right.… I don't have the kind of confidence that says I'm right and they're all wrong. It's fun being the director, but all that really means is you get to cast the deciding vote. It doesn't mean you're the only voter. Not in my world, anyway."

The suburban set of Analyze This –which was also filmed in New York City and Florida–was lazy and calm. Crew members were sleeping on the grass in the front yard. The people who were standing around all day with headsets were drinking coffee and complaining about lower back pain. The main task of the day was to get a good shot of the huge, tackily ornate fountain that Mr. De Niro's mobster had left in Mr. Crystal's therapist's backyard as an overly generous token of gratitude.

Mr. Ramis looked up at the big prop. "It's a little broad," he said.

The director of photography's composition was nice, with the fountain standing out in all its gaudiness against the nice old yellow house. But Mr. Ramis took a look and suggested that the camera start up high–focusing on the cherub on top–and pan down little by little to the house so that the audience wouldn't realize for a moment that the big ugly thing was in Mr. Crystal's backyard. The fountain was a $100,000 prop, and Mr. Ramis needed to get a laugh. Then the camera operators set their sights on Mr. Crystal, the actor playing his son, and Lisa Kudrow, who was playing his fiancée, all standing in the driveway, doing a comedy reaction take. Eleven takes later, everybody was satisfied and it was time for the break.

"I went to Caddyshack with very little set experience, virtually none," said Mr. Ramis, who worked as a feature writer for the Chicago Daily News and as an editor at Playboy while moonlighting with the Second City comedy troupe in the late 60's. "I realized on the first day, there was no sense pretending I knew anything about the mechanics of filmmaking. I thought, Instead of telling, I will ask. People, you know, respected my ignorance and were eager to help. I ended up calling it the $8 million scholarship to film school … I think I'm a good comedy editor, because editing is so close to writing in a certain way. I already know the rhythms of how I want to hear things and exactly what the timing of every line or scene is … I think the writer has already done 80 percent of the director's work."

Caddyshack is a strange movie in that almost every scene is pleasurable to watch. There's no boring exposition. Mention the word Caddyshack to about 50 percent of the adult population, and you'll see some dumb and happy grins. It's just the big comedy revue of its moment, and this year, 18 years after its release, ABC paid $3 million to return it to prime time, recutting it to restore the Baby-Ruth-in-the-pool scene, long absent from the TV version.

After the huge success of Animal House –the No. 1 box-office comedy of all time until Ghostbusters knocked it off the top of the list–Mr. Ramis and his collaborator Doug Kenney were hot in Hollywood. Someone representing the producer Jon Peters snagged the two screenwriters as they came out of the Animal House screening room.

"We had actually conceived it," Mr. Ramis said of their impromptu Caddyshack pitch meeting. "Doug always talked about it as a Bildungsroman , a coming-of-age story of a young guy. But when we got Chevy [Chase], you realize he's the million-dollar player. You've got to service that from the studio's point of view. And then we were thinking [Don] Rickles or [Rodney] Dangerfield, and Rodney was really just raging at the time–he was doing The Tonight Show frequently, never better, never better. We hired Rodney and then, of course, Ted [Knight] came in, and he was an icon from television, and Bill Murray agreed to do this little part–he had one scripted piece. So the whole time I'm making it, I accepted that it was really about these four adult role models. That the kid [played by Michael O'Keefe] sees these different kinds of adult solutions to life and, you know, will go one way or the other."

Despite those lofty themes, the Baby Ruth sequence and Bill Murray's twisted Carl the Greenskeeper character were definite precursors to the 90's school of rambunctious comedy that gave us the talking buttocks in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective , the long pee of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery and the extended bathroom sequence in Dumb and Dumber , but that kind of thing doesn't hold much interest for Mr. Ramis. Asked about Bob and Peter Farrelly, the Dumb and Dumber , Kingpin and There's Something About Mary auteurs, the director went right into rabbi mode.

"Well, I always thought, in terms of style, where people said incredibly funny things, did incredibly funny things and where the story actually made sense and had moral value"–he chuckled–"in a way it's not just ambitious, it's a different kind of commitment. A lot of movies are made without moral concern. Our whole industry exists without a moral compass, it seems to me, but I have a strong one, and I always feel the need to serve that side of myself."

Still, Carl the Greenskeeper would be right at home in a Farrelly brothers movie. He uses a masturbatory motion to clean golf balls in one of those red golf-ball washers (Doug Kenney's visual gag) as he refers, out of the side of his mouth, to a golfer as a "monkey woman." But this is Ramis, so even Carl the Greenskeeper has a kind of demented spiritual life. Pressing the sharp points of a pitchfork against a caddie's neck (Mr. Ramis' visual gag), he says in one speech, "So I jump ship in Hong Kong and I make my way over to Tibet and I get on as a looper on a little course over there in the Himalayas … A looper, you know, a caddie, a looper, a jock. So I tell 'em I'm a pro jock, and guess who they give me. The dalai lama himself, the 12th son of the lama. The flowing robes, the grace, bald, striking! So I'm on the first tee with him and I give him the driver. He hauls off and whacks one–big hitter, the lama, long–into a 10,000-foot crevasse right at the base of this glacier, and you know what the lama says? Goonga aloonga. Goonga goonga aloonga. So we finish 18 and he's gonna stiff me. So I say, Hey! Lama! How 'bout a little something, you know, for the effort? And he says, Oh, uh, there won't be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness. So I got that going for me, which is nice."

Practically the first thing you see in Caddyshack is a giant gopher puppet on a golf course. This puppet was a comedy prop the producer insisted on having. So here it is, the opening moment of Mr. Ramis' first movie as director, and the audience is looking at a concession made to a producer. Mr. Ramis also added a few underground gopher scenes to the picture in post-production.

"I was reluctant, but Jon Peters insisted on it," he said. "He just thought it would be cute to have this underground life–because Bill Murray was alone in the movie. It gave reality to his enemy."

While Mr. Ramis was willing to compromise, the bemused wise-asses who were the heroes of his early movies were not. What they have in common is the baby boom's ferocious need to overturn the World War II generation, a need that came under the heading of defying convention or shocking the bourgeoisie or, simply, rebellion. Again and again, Mr. Ramis set up straitlaced institutions (the Omega Theta Pi fraternity in Animal House ; the country club in Caddyshack ; the U.S. Army in Stripes ; the American family in National Lampoon's Vacation ; bureaucrats and librarians in Ghostbusters ) and then put Bill Murray or Chevy Chase or John Belushi into Establishment-trampling mode. They spoke in a jivey, irony-laden language that the audience understood, but the old-guard villains didn't. For the most part, it was a sure-fire comedy strategy. In Caddyshack , Chevy Chase, a drunken, weed-smoking Zen master, snorts margarita salt off of his girlfriend's belly and doesn't keep score on the golf course; in Stripes , Bill Murray introduces himself to the guys in the platoon by saying, "Chicks dig me" and ends up in a fistfight with the drill sergeant before saving the world about an hour after the bikini-babe mud-wrestling sequence. In Vacation , Chevy Chase shares a can of beer with his young son during a heart-to-heart chat. In Ghostbusters , the heroes crack wise even in face of apocalyptic doom.

But when middle age strikes and you kick your addiction to what Mr. Ramis called "numerous substances" and go through a divorce and find yourself involved in a few bombs ( Armed and Dangerous , Caddyshack II , Club Paradise ), maybe you no longer feel like the old wise guy. Especially when there's no longer an old guard to overturn and a representative of your own generation is in the White House, behaving a little bit like Bill Murray's Peter Venkman character in Ghostbusters .

Groundhog Day was a breakthrough for Mr. Ramis (and Mr. Murray) not only because the script had an idea that spoke to his generation, now a weary, near-middle-aged, middle-class audience, but because the movie villains that had once been embodied in the one-note foils to the protagonists could now be found in the character of Mr. Murray himself. Mr. Murray, playing TV weatherman Phil Connors, is a monster at the start of the movie–but a believable monster.

"I don't suppose there's any possibility of an espresso or a cappuccino, is there?" he says to the humble innkeeper. And instead of portraying a wise guy who's fighting an unfair system, Mr. Murray is in this movie charged with the task of doing battle with himself. And, interestingly, the wise-ass-ism, the quick, cutting remarks, that were always so charming in the heroes of previous Ramis movies are now considered poison. In real life, Mr. Ramis couldn't bring himself to work on the screenplay with Mr. Murray. He sent the neophyte Danny Rubin, who wrote the first draft of the movie, to work with the star instead.

"The downside of sitting with Bill is getting him in a chair. 'I'll meet you at 2'–5 o'clock he walks in the door. I'm too old for that, but Danny wasn't," said Mr. Ramis. Early on in the movie, Bill Murray's weatherman tells his producer, played by Andie MacDowell, "I think this is one of the traits of a really good producer: keep the talent happy."

"Anything I can do," she replies.

"Could you help me with my pelvis tilt?" he says.

That kind of a line would have been used in Ghostbusters or Stripes , not only to get a laugh, but to steer the audience to Bill Murray's side. Everybody loved it, in Stripes , when he used a spatula to "flip burgers" with that lovely female M.P.'s butt. In this case, the raunchy pickup attempt gets a laugh–but its real purpose is to reveal the inner creep.

The brutal repetition of the same day eventually strips Mr. Murray's character of his wise-ass layers, and his irony. The movie breaks him down little by little, until he doesn't have a quick answer for everything and must react to other people authentically and with real kindness. Which makes for a strange system of values in a comedy. Most comedies are on the anarchists' side. It's as if Mr. Ramis' script–written with Danny Rubin (who came up with the idea) and with considerable input from Mr. Murray himself–means to strip Bill Murray of all his Bill Murray-ness, the very things that were considered part of the solution in Stripes , Animal House and Caddyshack become, in Groundhog Day , part of the problem. Us became Them.

Maybe the movie is Mr. Ramis' and Mr. Murray's way of paying for the sins or smugness that went with their generation's inevitable victory over the Bob Dole-George Bush axis. A beautiful montage sequence shows Bill Murray killing himself again and again. He drives a pickup truck over a cliff, with the groundhog (yes–it's certainly a visual allusion to the gopher varmint of Caddyshack !) at the wheel. Completely deadpan, he takes a toaster, plugs it into the wall and drops it into the bathtub after he gets in the water. And the look on his face is thrillingly resigned to death when he steps in front of a truck. Next, triumphantly, he leaps off a church tower. Mr. Ramis shows us his gray body, dead, in the morgue–the corpse of Saturday Night Live !–and Chris Elliot's character says sarcastically: "I really liked him. He was a really, really good guy." Needless to say, there's no Baby Ruth scene in Groundhog Day , and Mr. Ramis didn't really have to push himself to rationalize making the movie; affirming letters from Buddhists, Hasids, Catholics and other religious groups did that work for him.

After trying to achieve similar effects with two box-office bombs, Stuart Saves His Family (1995) and Multiplicity (1996), Mr. Ramis will be trying to make another virtuous comedy in Analyze This . But instead of a comedic gangster like Bill Murray finding redemption through self-examination, an actual gangster (Mr. De Niro's character) thinks he's in need of psychiatric help because he's not doing his job (killing people) very well.

Mr. Ramis became the rabbi once more: "It's meant to be popular entertainment, but there's something to serve here. For me, a moral premise, which is, John Gotti comes to you for help. If you're the therapist, what does success mean? Billy has a line–What is my goal? To make you a happier, well-adjusted gangster? So when I came in here, I wanted to define what the movie was really about–this guy getting in touch with his rage, his fear and his grief, in order to break the cycle of violence in his life. For me, it's a big metaphor for gang violence in America. Fatherless young men full of unexpressed rage and grief and fear, taking it out on everyone else. Billy successfully breaks it by leading Bob's character to a big cathartic moment. That's something worth saying. I didn't just want to do a gangster spoof. I'm not into spoofs."

Harold Ramis at 53 is trying to pull off one of the hardest acts in show business–getting big laughs in the ratty game of comedy while trying to stay on the side of the angels.