It was shortly after his 84th, and last, birthday, in January, and he was having dinner in the Upper East Side apartment of author-activist-patron Jean Stein. Even hobbling around on two steel canes, wearing high black Uggs that his skinny crooked legs vanished into, Mailer radiated a sense of fullness. His famous Brooklyn-British baritone was richer than ever, the eyes bluer. He spoke of his former friend Norman Podhoretz, how much he had enjoyed him in the 70’s, and someone said, “You’re 84, why don’t you reach out to Podhoretz now and rediscover that affection in one another?”

It was the one unpleasant moment. “No. No. It would be no use. Because I would have to bring up the Iraq war. I can’t forgive him for it.” And then in turn he would have to talk about Podhoretz’s attachment to Israel. The overture wouldn’t help anyone. …

Mailer’s Jewishness was a doorway to the world. He gave his talents to mankind and felt no special obligation to the people from whom he came. He wasn’t a self-denier, he knew the marvels of being Jewish—“My Jewishness was a great asset in my work, because it gave me a certain sensitivity to the world. It is not easy to be a Jew without thinking about the world a great deal of the time, given the classic situation of Jews in history,” he said in an interview I did for The Observer. But he was a universalist, and saw all people as having special qualities. That dinner at Ms. Stein’s, we had talked about the cabala and its insights into the unconscious, but Mailer had waved it away. He was impatient with cabalist obscurities. The same spiritual wisdom was possessed by “Christians … and Muhammeddans.”

Mailer’s Jewish life upsets some Jews. On jewlicious.com, they are already attacking him for never having visited Israel, and for straying away from his spiritual roots. Maybe someone will count up the Christian wives and the Jewish ones, and give us a bottom line.

But Jewish history is filled with assimilation, especially by literary stars from Spinoza to Heine to Nathanael West. Assimilation is older than any other Jewish social dream, older than Zionism, communism, or, today, neoconservatism. Mailer said once that being a bookish Brooklyn kid felt like a limitation to him (in very much the way that V.S. Naipaul once told the 92nd Street Y that staying in Trinidad felt like a curb on his imagination), and certainly he rebelled against it. Mailer wanted—like the Zionists—to be a man of action, and for a while, the writing was dwarfed by the extravagant life: the marriages, offspring and fights (on the Town Hall stage with feminists, and on the Hamptons turf with Rip Torn).

There was a lot that was Jewishy about the book that made him a celebrity: The Naked and the Dead, published in 1948. Mailer did not experience much combat in the South Pacific; but in one World War II reminiscence (sorry, no citation; my books are packed for a move), I read that Mailer the young reporter used to pop into other guys’ tents and ask questions, listen to the stories. In the novel, Mailer’s ego is parceled out, like cabalist shards of the godhead. Goldstein the Jew from Brooklyn is a smaller character than the book’s hero, Lieutenant Hearn, a gentile who went to Harvard.

The mixing of Jewish and gentile American personae took place again in the book described as a sequel to The Naked and the Dead, An American Dream. You remember, the one that begins with the violent, exploitative sex (all right: the rape scene) with the maid on the balcony, where Rojack, a half-Jew, goes back and forth between two holes.

Mailer wasn’t apologetic about this half-Jewness. He was granted tremendous freedom by his early success to speak to Americans, and could channel American voices. In The Spooky Art, he wrote that it is necessary for a writer to put on airs, but also to take them off. His accent seemed more 02138 and SW10 than Brooklyn Heights. The obits say he once married English nobility. That is also an American experience: He tried things on and saw what fit. He was ambitious and enlarged himself. In his last novel, The Castle in the Forest, he enlarged himself so much that he wrote about Hitler from a Black-Forest-lithographic-metaphysical perspective, Hitler the handiwork of centuries of efforts by the devil.

Charles McGrath wrote in The Times that Mailer never wrote the great American novel, and this must be conceded, though he died trying. He told Charlie Rose earlier this year that he waited three years to write the sequel to The Castle in the Forest. But “I know enough about being 84 to know that if you’re a ping-pong ball you can roll off the table at any second.” Maybe he felt that he had wasted some of his literary juice in all the pugilistic-action-figure stuff. And he rolled off the table before he could finish the Hitler’s-rise book.

From the time he was in South Pacific tents, the journalism and novels bled into and out of one another, but my generation was more turned on by the journalism. When Mailer was tied down by fact and his own experience, it made the work more alive. We were electrified by the journalist insisting on his own experience in The Armies of the Night and Miami and the Siege of Chicago—trying to breathe the hot air in Miami and saying it was like making love to a 300-pound woman who decided to get on top. It was a lot harder to follow the thread in the long novels. Why Are We In Vietnam was short but a stunt. I tried to read Harlot’s Ghost but wondered how well-informed it actually was about the intelligence business. In one of his best books, The Spooky Art, Mailer himself dismissed The Naked and the Dead as being derivative and mimetic. Dos Passos and Faulkner were among his youthful influences as he struggled to birth the big book and become like Steinbeck and Hemingway. And even in The Castle in the Forest, which was dignified by Mailer’s old-man religion and packed with the smells of infancy and shit and mud, the story didn’t get past Hitler’s adolescence—the author couldn’t get his story to arc. Meantime, Podhoretz actually became a historical figure: He shaped the history of our time more than Mailer did.

Jewlicious.com is judgmental of Mailer for abandoning his Jewish identity; and there is a shadow of a truth there. He wrote his books by developing a persona outside himself. The devil in The Castle in the Forest. The American street/barracks/cot argot of The Naked and The Dead. “There are two kinds of ways for novelists who have some talent to go,” he said in my interview with him for The Observer. “One is to use their experience as their private gold mine, and they search more and more deeply into that gold mine. That is one way to be a serious novelist. Another way was to use your personal experience as a springboard to go quite a distance into the outside world. That was my preference. … But I have never wanted to write about the near things. My personal experiences are crystals to beam my imagination into far off places.” On Charlie Rose he said that personal writing is confusing because ego and all the personal craziness comes in.

I wish he had tried to integrate those experiences more, the personal life of being a rabbi’s grandson, then an American celebrity with all the women and children. He emulated Tolstoy, but Tolstoy seems to have injected more of himself and his life into his novels. He said he never went to Israel because he knew he’d have to write a book about it. So he turned away from vital material. Mailer wanted to wrestle more with history than with himself.

In that realm, no one can question Mailer’s brilliance. In an interview in The American Conservative, he explained what it meant to be a left-wing conservative: dubious of human nature, hateful toward totalitarianism, in America, too. “We are a Christian nation. The Judeo in Judeo-Christian is essentially a grace note. … And the idea, if you really are a Christian … was that you were not supposed to be all that rich. God didn’t want it. Jesus certainly didn’t. You were not supposed to pile up a lot of money. You were supposed to spend your life in reasonably altruistic acts. … If there is not a new seriousness in American affairs, the country is going to go down the drain.” Grand in his dismissal of masturbation—it limited engagement, grand in his dismissal of birth control—like a cabalist, he spoke of the astral body in sex, he was also grand in his dismissal of post-Holocaust Jewish consciousness. He told The Conservative that Israel should have been accepted by the Arabs, but after it wasn’t, Israel’s response had diminished Jewish character. He told Nextbook that the great Jewish tradition of thinking had been crunched down to one question, Is it good for the Jews:

“If the Jews brought anything to human nature, it’s that they developed the mind more than other people did. It was extremely important for them to develop that mind. And [now] to deaden it and stultify it, to flood it with cheap religious patriotism, I consider that part of the disaster that Hitler visited upon us.”

Mailer was more American than Jewish. He was granted a passport out of his Harvard/Brooklyn petri dish by two great democratic experiences, Army service in World War II and the celebrity that followed from that. He made his own choices in Jewish and American history, and he didn’t look back.

I recognize that I’m obsessed, recognize too that at 46, my obsession is somewhat unseemly. People say that obsession is not a good thing, that it is about dead feelings, or nostalgia, or hang-ups, that it is passion curled back on itself. So I’m trying to remember how this started.

Alanis Morissette was never my cup of tea. I can say honestly that I didn’t like her. Her early work (what I heard of it) struck me as mannered and self-conscious. Her regard for her own originality seemed egotistical; she could not murder her darlings, as the saying goes.

Then in January, I was driving around New Zealand’s north island (on the same Pacific project I’m at work on now) when her label released “Hands Clean,” the first single off the new album. I recognized her voice instantly, and with a wave of irritation. My finger shot out to flip the radio to another station—in fact, I was viciously excited to do so, to blank her out of the conscious universe again and forever—when something held me: The material was completely psychological, the mood was soulful.

The next time the song came on, I cranked it up.

“Hands Clean” is about an illicit relationship between a man and a young woman. It is told chiefly from the man’s point of view, as he offers his rationalizations: “I know that you sexualize me, as a young thing would, and I think I like it …. ”

But the refrain is from the girl’s perspective. At these times, Alanis’ voice surges powerfully:

And I have honored your request for silence

And you washed your hands clean of this.

It may seem like an angry song, but it isn’t. The girl’s anger feels historical. She seems to see the relationship in its entirety, to recognize her own hunger for experience. There are tender and thoughtful moments (“What part of our history’s reinvented and under rug swept?”), and her statement “I have honored your request for silence” is stately and even loving.

But it wasn’t just the words. Alanis’ voice had grown out of its youthful quaver into a strong, womanly instrument. She had emotional clarity and generosity, qualities that had me enthralled.

At that time my travels took me on to Australia and England, and notwithstanding my urgent business, I found myself driving around Fremantle or Hull waiting for them to play that song again.

Then the new CD came out at the end of February, and I bought it on lower Broadway, just before starting another trip. My first stop was Albuquerque, and I upgraded to a midsize car so that I could listen to her on the CD player. Very soon it was clear that the same spirit of ampleness and emotional clarity that animates “Hands Clean” pours off the album.

Alanis had become one of my guides. I was interested in anything she had to say.

Or in point of fact, I was stuck. I rented seven more oversized cars in California and down through the Pacific, just to have a CD player and be able to hear her. (Not only was she now costing me hundreds of dollars, but in a couple of cases it meant renting S.U.V.’s, which violates every principle I believe in.)

In Hilo I put only 11 miles on the car (my interviewee drove me around), but sat in the rain at 5 in the morning at the airport for 20 minutes because I’d finally gotten the hang of the album. Then later in Waikiki, I went into a kind of fugue on Ala Moana Boulevard and Kapuhulu Road, with the windows rolled up and the air conditioning on high, because by then I’d identified the master cuts and was playing them over and over.

Come Australia and New Zealand, I put on another 700 Alanis-ridden miles.

By then, I confess even I was getting sick of Alanis, and so I tried to break the spell by loading other CD’s: Dylan, John Lee Hooker, the O Brother soundtrack, Beth Orton and Mick Jagger’s new solo album.

I listened to them all, too, but the truth is that I only played these albums so as to give myself a break from Alanis, so that I could return to life with Alanis. They were a kind of palate cleanser. Or in the case of Dylan and Jagger, comfort food, the macaroni and cheese that they first began serving me in the high-school cafeteria. I would calm myself down and give myself a break, and then play Alanis again, driving through priggish sleepy New Zealand villages like Clarence and Warkworth with Alanis on way too loud, upsetting the sheep and the Kiwis in their walking shorts.

Because Alanis is never calming. Alanis is highly psychically disturbing. Alanis plunges me into a raw and almost bleedingly reflective mood.

If you say “What is the album about?,” it is about Alanis’ search for a genuine relationship, for engagement that is respectful and intense and alive, at this moment.

Right now my favorite song is Track 4. It is about obsession, about Alanis being hung up on a guy she went out with over 10 years ago. It has the feel of a Poe story, as Alanis tries to understand the dead hand of these old feelings. The writing is touched, very nearly mad:

What are you, my blood?

You touch me like you are my blood.

What are you, my dad?

You affect me like you are my dad.

(And when Alanis sings “affect,” it sounds like “fucked.”)

I find this song, called “Flinch,” almost too intense to listen to. It is really about consciousness. When a man at a party tells her that the object of her affection is in the next room, Alanis sings—clunkily and divinely:

This man knows not of how this information has affected me

But he knows the color of the car I just drove away in.

Recognizing the color of a car but not a powerful feeling is false consciousness. Alanis’ goal is to tear away those beliefs, to determine what she really wants, now. And she is always running down men who rely on their intelligence, defensively, when her only real aim in relationship is emotional readiness and fearlessness.

I try and think when I have been obsessed with an album before. Rubber Soul when I was a teen; the Wailers’ Catch a Fire when I was in college; Otis Redding Live when I moved to the Midwest; Joy Division when I met my wife. And in all those cases, the experience was eroticized—first crush, first love. The song was intertwined with passion that folded over on itself.

Now I would like to know what this middle-aged obsession is about. I suppose I’m vulnerable; I’ve been traveling on my own for most of the last year, and the historical material that I am exploring is often painful. It seems to me that I need Alanis’ innocence and exaltation in my life right now (there is not one clever, arch or coy statement on this record).

The album winds up with two visionary songs, Track 9, “You Owe Me Nothing in Return,” and Track 11, “Utopia.” “You Owe Me Nothing” is about Alanis’ ideal relationship, and it is naïve, romantic, stunning and confident:

You can ask for space for yourself and only yourself and I’ll grant it

You can ask for freedom as well or time to travel and you’ll have it

You can ask to live by yourself or love someone else and I’ll support it ….

You owe me nothing for giving the love that I give

You owe me nothing for caring the way that I have ….

Needing to hear it again, I borrowed a Toshiba computer with a CD player last night from a French anthropologist across the courtyard from me. (Who’s studying volcano-dwellers in Tonga.) She lent me her earphones, too. Still, I felt constrained. This guesthouse is crowded with Pacific islanders and others who might think I am crazy if they got a whiff of what I’m up to.

Tonight, I have a better plan. I will go to the men’s club that is cater-corner to the Royal Palace and find the D.J. Kitione (or Gideon) Mokofisi at his usual spot on the bar. Gideon has a CD player; we listened to it in his van at the beach in January. And Gideon understands musical obsession—he’s a D.J. I won’t let Gideon buy a drink, and then I’ll borrow his van and get lost.

Norman Mailer’s first novel in over 10 years has a couple of big surprises right off the bat. One is physical, the other spiritual. As to the first, the welterweight from Brooklyn turns 84 at the end of the month; you lift the cover wondering how many rounds he can still go with a pencil. Forget about it. This work has vigor, excitement, humor and vastness of spirit. There are a few signs of strain, but they hardly count against the power of the language and the ideas. Here’s Norman Mailer in Act V, and he has all the wit and magic of old Prospero.

That touches on the second surprise: The novel’s concerns are metaphysical. Going in, you know the book is a biography of Hitler. I imagined I was in for a Leni Riefenstahl–ian barnburner that would take me through the Reichstag fire, Kristallnacht, the bunker. Waiting for the book to come, I peeked at a bio of Eva Braun. I was all wrong: There’s little history here at all, and more about czarist Russia in the late 1800’s than about Hitler as a fascist leader.

Any thought you have that the book will take up Jews and the Jewish question—again, no.

Mr. Mailer finishes with Hitler in 1905, at age 16 or so, in Linz, Austria, at about the time when he’s figured out how to masturbate. The author has thus eschewed Vienna and Berlin’s journalists and courtiers, types he knows well, for gothic settings. His pages are filled with incest, beekeeping, horses, squalling infants and feces, lots of it! The dogs aren’t Tolstoyan hounds, they’re snarling curs. Darkness hovers over every page. Sixty miles away, Theodor Herzl has just called for all Jews to leave Europe and form a state in Argentina or Palestine—Mr. Mailer doesn’t care. He’s using his simple materials to get at fundamental issues: the struggle between good and evil in our lives.

“The world has an impoverished understanding of Adolf Hitler’s personality …. He is, after all, the most mysterious human being of the century. Nonetheless, I would say that I can comprehend his psyche.”

The first-person narrator is a “high devil” who’s looking back on the days when he was molding Hitler so as to bring off the Holocaust. Lately demoted by Satan, he’s now betraying “the Maestro” by telling how devilish agency works (somewhat in the way that Hubbard betrayed the C.I.A. in Harlot’s Ghost). Mr. Mailer’s demonology aims to restore the devil to his proper place in a secular age. “The modern tendency is to believe that such speculation is a medieval nonsense happily extirpated centuries ago by the Enlightenment …. One Mystery [God] might be allowed, but two, never!”

Mr. Mailer’s metaphysics give the book its soul. God and the Maestro have been at war over us for a long time. God seeks to bring people to strength, generosity, loyalty, fairness. The Maestro’s goal is “reducing human possibilities” and wrecking civilization. Their methods are changing all the time. God was first to use dreams as “visions” to inspire us. But the devil has gotten into dreamwork, too: “jagged, broken-backed narratives” that reinforce our vices.

Neither God nor Satan can possess us fully, and both are strapped for time; they can’t attend all of us around the clock. That gives us a lot of leeway. (Mr. Mailer’s book tour ought to include some pulpits.) “[W]e do not appropriate people by way of a lightning flash …. Rather, it is an ongoing tug-of-war.” Meantime, we have learned to disguise the markings God gives to the depraved—an odor of sulfur and feces—with indoor plumbing and soaps.

Best-selling books tend to help the devil. Their authors call on the devil, and use magic and sentimentality “to steep their readers in baths of misperception. The profit comes to us.”

(It’s true: When you finish a great book, you want to call the author on the phone. I did, and asked Mailer if he was including his own work among books that serve the devil. No, he said, he was talking about the modern best-seller. (Mailer: “Those of use who set out to become novelists when I was young were absolutely agog with the fact that novelists were major historical figures. Steinbeck, Hemingway …. Young writers can’t feel that way anymore.” Publishers once used profits from best-sellers to nurture talents that might take a place in history; now they are “major marketing combines.”)

The great misperceptions that will bedevil Europe in this tale are patriotism and racialism. But these bad ideas are not as interesting to Mr. Mailer—or to the devil—as the future Fuhrer’s genetics. Hitler must be the product of incest. The devils encourage Hitler’s father, Alois, to have sex first with his own stepsister, then with their progeny, Klara, in twists and turns that have the mood of a “maimed French farce,” to cite Ron Rosenbaum (whose book, Explaining Hitler, is in Mr. Mailer’s long bibliography at the end).

Sweet Klara loves baby Adolf. Wiping his behind is a “dalliance.” “She wiped him so carefully that his eyes gleamed. He discovered heaven.”

So much mother-love can hobble a child’s will. The devils make sure that Adolf doesn’t get too much, by “drenching the boy’s spirit with wretchedness.” His abusive father, the retired customs agent, blows smoke in Adolf’s face, then laughs as the baby cries.

(The relationship of father and son animates the book; I wondered if Mr. Mailer was drawing on his own experience. Mailer: “No. My father was essentially a gentle man, though he was complex …. He was a compulsive gambler. He was remote, but not a brute, no, no, no. If you look at my books, there’s almost always a father-son relationship I explore.”)

The boy develops in evil ways that the devil prepares for him. He sharpens his oratory by talking to trees. He studies racialist science—and gassing—with a wizardly beekeeper who belongs firmly to the devil. He practices war games at school and masturbates to nationalist fantasies. The devil shields him from his own wretchedness by pumping up his idea of his own worth. “A mediocre mind, once devoted entirely to one mystical idea, can obtain a mental confidence well beyond its normal potential.”

Arc is the only problem here. The book ends at age 16 because the devil’s work is done: Hitler’s character is formed. The rest is history, and we know that history. Besides, Hitler’s adult actions beggar the imagination, even Norman Mailer’s imagination. Better to stick with the childhood, about which few know anything. The literary problem is that some of Hitler’s boyhood in The Castle in the Forest has the quality of a case study.

But plot has never been the reason to read Mailer. Better to read him for his ideas and insights. Here, for instance, is his take on marriage:

“[M]ost husbands and wives use so much of their time together in excrementitious exchanges. Indeed, that is often why they married in the first place …. They needed to be able to exercise one or another petty cruelty at any moment to a dependable person who would be close at hand …. The fierce upbraidings one would have liked to present to the world (but did not dare) could now be delivered through critical judgments on one’s mate. All that spiritual excrement! … Ergo, marriage is a workable institution—especially for dreadful people.”

I READ THIS BLACKLY HILARIOUS, BEAUTIFULLY written book in a few sittings. But does it live up to its own moral standards? Does it inform us about history, or steep us in baths of misperception? Can its metaphysics help us?

(Weiss: “I say this is a moral work.” Mailer: “A serious writer is always offering a moral. Even the writer who can be a perfect scamp, and people laugh, laugh, laugh—there is a moral under that.

“Theology and law are highly circumscribed. In politics, morality is also circumscribed, and often skewed.

“But as a novelist, you can be a private moralist and explore at some lengths. Saying I’m a moral novelist? That implies a piety and self-righteousness I don’t want to be attached to. I like to say that if a novel is successful, it can change the nature of people’s thinking.”)

As to history, the answer is a qualified yes. Mr. Mailer seems a little bored by history—been there, done that. He’s not interested in the Jewish question. His Hitler is a figure born of 19th-century ideas of racial difference and mass hysteria that are pan-European, and not limited to anti-Semitism. After the Holocaust, his devil says (in a plague-on-both-their-houses spirit), the demons moved on to the Arab world and to Israel.

(I asked about his Jewishness. Mailer: “There are two kinds of ways for novelists who have some talent to go. One is to use their experience as their private goldmine, and they search more and more deeply into that goldmine. That is one way to be a serious novelist. Another way was to use your personal experience as a springboard to go quite a distance into the outside world. That was my preference. My Jewishness was a great asset in my work, because it gave me a certain sensitivity to the world. It is not easy to be a Jew without thinking about the world a great deal of the time, given the classic situation of Jews in history …. But I have never wanted to write about the near things. My personal experiences are crystals to beam my imagination into far-off places.”)

The philosophical question is easier: Mr. Mailer’s metaphysics might actually change the way you think. With one blue eye on his own grandchildren, to whom the book is dedicated, another on one of the greatest evils of history, Mr. Mailer is offering us every bit of wisdom he has in his cosmology, and his manner is so open and generous that I find that I am willing to accept instruction. God and the devil are with us at every moment. Denial and repression may make us feel pious, but we’re still going to do bad stuff. The growing of ourselves involves screwing up a lot and trying to make wiser choices.

Mr. Mailer would seem to condemn himself into the bargain. The open question in this book is not what will become of Hitler (we know that story), but what will become of our narrator, and by the end he is showing real misgivings. “I have never known Love …. I can delineate most of the reasons for its presence or disappearance, I can inspire jealousy, doubt, even periods of revulsion toward the beloved …. I cannot distinguish true Love from its artistic substitutes.”

And telling true love from its counterfeit is everything in life.

These ideas give the book a kabbalistic feel: Demonology is an ancient kabbalistic pursuit, one that goes back to the Middle Ages. The Faust myth was imagined by kabbalists in the 1400’s—centuries before Goethe and Mann. (Mailer: “Trace out for me, if you will, that demonology—I’m interested.”)

Here my knowledge comes from Rabbi Asher Crispe, a scholar with the Gal Einai Institute, who lectured on demonology at Chabad-Lubavitch of the Main Line in Philadelphia last summer. Rabbi Crispe says kabbalists believe that after the snake entered the garden, the quality of doubt separated Adam and Eve for 130 years. In that time, Adam had 300 nocturnal emissions. (Mailer: “Three hundred emissions in 130 years—kind of a stingy dick!”)

Those emissions formed demons in the lower atmosphere that the kabbalists say can appear to us as animals, men or angels. They trap us at night, when we are asleep and our souls “disengage from our bodies” and seek divinity in our dreams to reorder our lives. Rabbi Crispe says wise mystics also seek their “brainchildren” in the heavens; the great test is sorting out the fake inspirations from the real deal. Mr. Mailer’s narrator engages us in the same trials.

(Mailer, chuckling: “I didn’t realize you had to be a kabbalist to believe that. You know, I was interested in the kabbalah, but I found it very difficult. Most of the writing repelled me. It was closed. I found it tiresome, not open. I felt there was a certain tyranny in the closure that surrounds it, and I didn’t like that …. The idea of a marketplace of sleep, I’ve used often. The idea that in sleep we occupy a more serious realm, that dreams are an essential apparatus. You don’t have to be a kabbalist to believe that. Christians believe that, Mohammedans.”)

Norman Mailer has always been a universalist; rejecting the idea of any tradition being chosen, he has taken freely from any tradition that interests him and shared his gifts fully in return. Here he shares the Holocaust with all humanity. It isn’t only a Jewish experience of history, it’s a spectacular victory of the devil over a weakening God, achieved with the help of a very bad boy. Now Satan has decamped to America. For mystical, metaphysical, misanthropic Mailer, there’s plenty of mud, feces and sulfur here, too.

(Weiss: “Are the two references in the book to America hints about George W. Bush?” Mailer: “Yes.”)

Philip Weiss writes the Observer.com blog MondoWeiss.

It’s the only time. The rest of the book, the author is behind a curtain. He does not speak about his personal religious observance, or his path to it, at age 58. He’s a Reform Jew, he drives to synagogue, he has looked into Kabbalah—these points come out. But the book’s not about him; it’s a screed aimed at his nemesis, people like myself—lapsed Jews who criticize Israel, or as he puts it, “lost” Jews, “self-loathing” Jews, Jews who “think their people stink,” tattooed Jews, “wicked” and treasonous Jews, Jews who are going in for “Japanese drum beating” and “yoga.”

Fifty years ago, Joe McCarthy self-destructed when he said people were wicked and treasonous and did Japanese drumming; he self-destructed because he wouldn’t name names, just a bunch of numbers. Mr. Mamet has fallen into the same trap. He fails to cite any examples. If you’re going to accuse a large portion of American Jewry of treason and yoga, you’d better name names. But the few citations in this book are always vague: a man at a relative’s bar mitzvah who took off his clothes as a joke, “two wealthy Jews of my acquaintance,” a “disaffected Jew,” a Jew who walked out of a seder in dudgeon, an “independent ‘ex-Jew.’” The point of researching a book is that you don’t have to rely on anecdotes from a friend’s bar mitzvah.

We do get one name: Noam Chomsky. Mr. Chomsky continues to “debauch the young with his filth.” Mr. Chomsky says the state of Israel “is a crime.” Mr. Chomsky doesn’t object to Arabs’ “incitement to genocide.” Mr. Chomsky feels exempted “from the need of further investigation, explanation, or defense of his position.”

I asked Mr. Chomsky if he said these things. He wrote back, “I am sure no sources are given, because the statements are all pure lies, as Mr. Mamet knows. He’s not an imbecile.” Mr. Chomsky is right: No sources are given.

MR. MAMET HAS ONE MEANINGFUL IDEA HERE. It’s that religious tradition has formed us psychically, and when people abandon their rituals, they fall back into pagan emptiness, full of anomie. Sometimes he writes beautifully:

“Each human being has a certain amount of awe that must be discharged. It can be discharged only through ritual. If he does not engage in existing religious ritual, the individual will seek out or invent other avenues for his submission to powers greater than himself …. Instead of worshiping the wind and the water, fortune and fame, do you have the courage to stand in awe of that which gave rise to them, to you, and to your human urges?”

This idea is islanded by venom, so that it’s impossible to feel at all improved or educated by The Wicked Son. More like being vivisected by a crazy power-tripping author. “What if tattooing were viciously punished, or fatal?” It is “true” and “natural” to stay in the tribe; it’s “forbidden” to leave.

What about people for whom “belonging” is not everything? What about Jewish shape-shifters like Lewis Namier, the Zionist and historian who became Christian? Or Spinoza, who refused to drink the Kool-Aid that we are the chosen people? Or Mortimer Adler of the Aspen Institute, who needed to become an Episcopalian?

Mr. Mamet won’t bend: The apostate Jew is a “fraud.” “The world hates the Jews,” and so “his delusion of freedom to choose sentences him to a life of disappointment.” He “muddles toward community and calls it yoga, self-help, agnosticism, Buddhism.” Or he tries “sports,” and “college tutoring,” and will pay outrageous sums for “an inert white cream that has been suggested to reverse the aging process.” He is “deluded” to think he can integrate into “society at large.” He thinks the Holocaust “was not tragic.”

What a pity that Schocken, publisher of Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt and the Zohar of the Kabbalah, has provided a platform for such bizarre racial invective. And sloppy. Three times Mr. Mamet writes “impugnity” for “impunity.” I can see his editor missing it once. Three times?

More significant are the errors. I will fasten on three. No. 1 is Mr. Mamet’s claim that the lapsed Jew who criticizes Israel and desires to assimilate does so among Jews, for he’s more comfortable with Jews. Again, no names. Myself, I feel most comfortable criticizing Israel and playing Japanese drums with my liberal Protestant mother-in-law. She’s been to the West Bank too, and knows exactly what I saw when I went there. She smuggled sheets into a Bethlehem hospital. Also, if I’m wrong and American gentiles start murdering Jews, I know that she’ll hide me.

No. 2. Mr. Mamet states flatly that to describe Israel as “colonial” is to be a racist and anti-Semite committing the “blood libel.” He cannot be aware of the members of the Labor Government in Israel who, in 1967, when the first illegal settlements took place, argued that Israel was becoming colonial just as the rest of the world was leaving that era behind (per Gershom Gorenberg’s book, The Accidental Empire). Their fears came to pass. Are those Israelis guilty of the blood libel?

No. 3. Mr. Mamet says twice that Ariel Sharon’s walk around the Temple Mount in 2000 was not “provocative” to Muslims. It did not, “in any way, offend Moslem law or custom.” To say that it did is, again, “the blood libel” and anti-Semitic. Those who say as much “bear some responsibility for the deaths in the cafes of Tel Aviv.”

This is insane. At the time of the walk, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, was considering a compromise with the Palestinians over Jerusalem, and Mr. Sharon was indicating to the world that the right wing intended to maintain sovereignty over this holy shared site. “What happens at that one spot [the Temple Mount], more than anywhere else, quickens expectations of the End in three religions. And at that spot, the danger of provoking catastrophe is greatest,” Mr. Gorenberg wrote in The End of Days, published before Mr. Sharon’s walk. Even Alan Dershowitz, who blames the Palestinians for planning the Intifada, says of Mr. Sharon’s walk (in The Case for Israel), “[I]n my view it was a wrong-headed provocation that provided an excuse—even a trigger—for the violence.”

Mr. Mamet, it seems, was too lazy to read even one book. He accuses me and my ilk of abandoning our “intellectual heritage, the Jewish love of learning, and reverence for accomplishment.” What a lie. Those Jewish values have transformed Western society, yet Mr. Mamet fails to honor them in this work. You have to wonder how many of these crazy charges weren’t aimed at himself.

Philip Weiss writes MondoWeiss for The Observer’s Web edition.

It’s the only time. The rest of the book, the author is behind a curtain. He does not speak about his personal religious observance, or his path to it, at age 58. He’s a Reform Jew, he drives to synagogue, he has looked into Kabbalah—these points come out. But the book’s not about him; it’s a screed aimed at his nemesis, people like myself—lapsed Jews who criticize Israel, or as he puts it, “lost” Jews, “self-loathing” Jews, Jews who “think their people stink,” tattooed Jews, “wicked” and treasonous Jews, Jews who are going in for “Japanese drum beating” and “yoga.”

Fifty years ago, Joe McCarthy self-destructed when he said people were wicked and treasonous and did Japanese drumming; he self-destructed because he wouldn’t name names, just a bunch of numbers. Mr. Mamet has fallen into the same trap. He fails to cite any examples. If you’re going to accuse a large portion of American Jewry of treason and yoga, you’d better name names. But the few citations in this book are always vague: a man at a relative’s bar mitzvah who took off his clothes as a joke, “two wealthy Jews of my acquaintance,” a “disaffected Jew,” a Jew who walked out of a seder in dudgeon, an “independent ‘ex-Jew.’” The point of researching a book is that you don’t have to rely on anecdotes from a friend’s bar mitzvah.

We do get one name: Noam Chomsky. Mr. Chomsky continues to “debauch the young with his filth.” Mr. Chomsky says the state of Israel “is a crime.” Mr. Chomsky doesn’t object to Arabs’ “incitement to genocide.” Mr. Chomsky feels exempted “from the need of further investigation, explanation, or defense of his position.”

I asked Mr. Chomsky if he said these things. He wrote back, “I am sure no sources are given, because the statements are all pure lies, as Mr. Mamet knows. He’s not an imbecile.” Mr. Chomsky is right: No sources are given.

MR. MAMET HAS ONE MEANINGFUL IDEA HERE. It’s that religious tradition has formed us psychically, and when people abandon their rituals, they fall back into pagan emptiness, full of anomie. Sometimes he writes beautifully:

“Each human being has a certain amount of awe that must be discharged. It can be discharged only through ritual. If he does not engage in existing religious ritual, the individual will seek out or invent other avenues for his submission to powers greater than himself …. Instead of worshiping the wind and the water, fortune and fame, do you have the courage to stand in awe of that which gave rise to them, to you, and to your human urges?”

This idea is islanded by venom, so that it’s impossible to feel at all improved or educated by The Wicked Son. More like being vivisected by a crazy power-tripping author. “What if tattooing were viciously punished, or fatal?” It is “true” and “natural” to stay in the tribe; it’s “forbidden” to leave.

What about people for whom “belonging” is not everything? What about Jewish shape-shifters like Lewis Namier, the Zionist and historian who became Christian? Or Spinoza, who refused to drink the Kool-Aid that we are the chosen people? Or Mortimer Adler of the Aspen Institute, who needed to become an Episcopalian?

Mr. Mamet won’t bend: The apostate Jew is a “fraud.” “The world hates the Jews,” and so “his delusion of freedom to choose sentences him to a life of disappointment.” He “muddles toward community and calls it yoga, self-help, agnosticism, Buddhism.” Or he tries “sports,” and “college tutoring,” and will pay outrageous sums for “an inert white cream that has been suggested to reverse the aging process.” He is “deluded” to think he can integrate into “society at large.” He thinks the Holocaust “was not tragic.”

What a pity that Schocken, publisher of Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt and the Zohar of the Kabbalah, has provided a platform for such bizarre racial invective. And sloppy. Three times Mr. Mamet writes “impugnity” for “impunity.” I can see his editor missing it once. Three times?

More significant are the errors. I will fasten on three. No. 1 is Mr. Mamet’s claim that the lapsed Jew who criticizes Israel and desires to assimilate does so among Jews, for he’s more comfortable with Jews. Again, no names. Myself, I feel most comfortable criticizing Israel and playing Japanese drums with my liberal Protestant mother-in-law. She’s been to the West Bank too, and knows exactly what I saw when I went there. She smuggled sheets into a Bethlehem hospital. Also, if I’m wrong and American gentiles start murdering Jews, I know that she’ll hide me.

No. 2. Mr. Mamet states flatly that to describe Israel as “colonial” is to be a racist and anti-Semite committing the “blood libel.” He cannot be aware of the members of the Labor Government in Israel who, in 1967, when the first illegal settlements took place, argued that Israel was becoming colonial just as the rest of the world was leaving that era behind (per Gershom Gorenberg’s book, The Accidental Empire). Their fears came to pass. Are those Israelis guilty of the blood libel?

No. 3. Mr. Mamet says twice that Ariel Sharon’s walk around the Temple Mount in 2000 was not “provocative” to Muslims. It did not, “in any way, offend Moslem law or custom.” To say that it did is, again, “the blood libel” and anti-Semitic. Those who say as much “bear some responsibility for the deaths in the cafes of Tel Aviv.”

This is insane. At the time of the walk, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, was considering a compromise with the Palestinians over Jerusalem, and Mr. Sharon was indicating to the world that the right wing intended to maintain sovereignty over this holy shared site. “What happens at that one spot [the Temple Mount], more than anywhere else, quickens expectations of the End in three religions. And at that spot, the danger of provoking catastrophe is greatest,” Mr. Gorenberg wrote in The End of Days, published before Mr. Sharon’s walk. Even Alan Dershowitz, who blames the Palestinians for planning the Intifada, says of Mr. Sharon’s walk (in The Case for Israel), “[I]n my view it was a wrong-headed provocation that provided an excuse—even a trigger—for the violence.”

Mr. Mamet, it seems, was too lazy to read even one book. He accuses me and my ilk of abandoning our “intellectual heritage, the Jewish love of learning, and reverence for accomplishment.” What a lie. Those Jewish values have transformed Western society, yet Mr. Mamet fails to honor them in this work. You have to wonder how many of these crazy charges weren’t aimed at himself.

Philip Weiss writes MondoWeiss for The Observer’s Web edition.

The station and the street outside were filled with kids with automatic weapons dangling off their hips. Most had on uniforms. One reservist ran past me in pajama pants and a tie-dyed shirt, with an M-16 smacking against one shoulder and his boots bouncing at the end of their laces off the other. Another guy was saying goodbye to his girlfriend with a pistol shoved down into the waistband of his gym shorts. Nothing in life prepares you for a city teeming with Jews with guns. Well, actually one thing does: the Holocaust. It is invoked frequently: the idea that Jews went passively to their deaths, abandoned by gentiles, is offered as a justification for the militarization of Israeli society.

On my bus, gun barrels poked into the aisle or up in the air. The more careful soldiers removed their magazine clips and wedged them into the metal handhold on the back of the seat in front of them. A girl in uniform sat down beside me. She had tattoos on her arm, and nails with gold crescents at the tips. She plugged in an MP3 player the size of a lighter and kept tugging her M-16 back to her side of the seat, like a stray umbrella.

No one was reading. Cell phones went off, soldiers murmured. We made our way north past slow-moving trucks with the soldiers sprawled out in the back. At every station, reservists ran up carrying worn backpacks made for treks in India, not bunkers. After their service in the army, almost all Israeli kids go traveling, to decompress, to escape this world of guns. Now and then, as if to keep the picture real, a fatty in uniform would run up to the bus with his shirttails out and jump on too.

We stopped for a while in Afula. I talked to a guy who looked like a professor, in fatigues and purple Crocs, his gun worn shiny.

“All Israel is together now; there is no right or left,” he said. “The feeling is beyond patriotism. It is not nationalism, or something taken from the inventory of ideas in Europe—this is essential. There are a very few on the left who have a different idea, but no one pays attention to them. The Palestinians do not want us to be here.”

I quoted a former minister in The Jerusalem Post saying that the war had begun not because of the attacks on civilians but because of the capture of three soldiers, damage to “the Army’s ego.”

The man nodded. “An ego is important …. The army is our echo of reality. Not to be poetic.”

After the Sea of Galilee, we lost our soldiers one by one. Then the bus pulled into Kiryat Shmona and a couple of civilians got out and I found myself alone. The town was empty. The Golan Heights loomed in the east, and smoke rose from what I would learn was a Katyusha landing. You could hear the ordinance now. I walked one way, then another on the big avenue, wondering what to do. A group of soldiers who had taken over an apartment building looked at me as though I were an idiot.

Thankfully, there soon appeared in the frame that genie for all foreign correspondents, that provider of Middle Eastern quotations: a taxi driver in a Mercedes. The guy shot his window down. “Journalist?”

After a while—I have to be vague about this under the constraints of my newfound calling—we were in a pretty town by the Lebanese border. The driver took me on a tour of the high fence separating countries, then back up the hill about a hundred yards—or, as Christiane Amanpour would say, meters—and dropped me at a hotel I must also be vague about.

One thing about war—in my experience—is that it rapidly sorts people out. The only people in the town older than 50 looked to be this group of slovens running a hotel, sitting around in various lumpish poses on the patio showing utter indifference to anything except when a credit card was needing to be swiped. They were catering to CNN. Its cables snaked through their lobby and dining room. One of the slovens, a fat gray unshaven man wearing threadbare white linen pajama pants with blue bikini underpants under them—take my word—gave me the key to Room 436 across the way.

A TV crew was sitting outside in the sun, as though by the swimming pool, though there wasn’t a pool. Before them was an Israeli army spokesman, feet apart, explaining very directly in a perfect American accent what Phase 3 of the war would involve. I noticed signs for the bomb shelter and went upstairs.

My first flutter. My room was the most exposed in the hotel, the most northerly on the top floor. The window looked out on two Lebanese villages on a ridge. I had a mind to ask for another room, but the last thing I wanted was to seem chicken in front of the CNN guys, so I lay down and read Hannah Arendt. I tuned out the crump of shelling, took a nap.

At 6, I went down for a beer and hung out some with the Israeli spokesman. He is a type you see a lot of over here, more American-seeming than Israeli. Their families made aliyot when they were in their early teens, so their accent was fixed in the States. This fellow had the aggressive quality that I recognized in Israeli spokesmen on the PBS NewsHour. He was not without charm, even twinkle-eyed, but he was utterly focused as he spoke in incisive and logical terms. We had been talking for only a minute or two when, without any prompting on my part, he explained why more Arabs died in their houses than Jews (apparently referring to both Lebanese Arabs and Israeli Arabs). The Arabs had the same understanding about war that Israelis did; still they chose to defy the building codes and did not put in bomb shelters, which were expensive, while the Israelis did put in bomb shelters, and arranged for an orderly evacuation of the war zone, too.

I have to say that contempt for Arabs is a theme in Israeli conversation, though it does not seem that the Israelis have spent any real time with Arabs. Of course, there is plenty of contempt toward Jews when you talk to Arabs. That is the most obvious problem in the Israel/Palestine situation: The two sides don’t talk. And within five minutes of meeting you, a middle-class Israeli is saying that Arabs are animals and you Americans are lucky you don’t have to deal with them. And meantime, the Israelis are putting up a giant concrete wall so they don’t ever have to talk to one another again. There is a reason for the wall, as there is a reason for everything people do to one another here, but some part of it seems a vanity. Israelis are convinced that they are a Western country. They say this all the time: We are Westerners. But they live 500 miles east of Istanbul. I wonder if they aren’t embarrassed by the neighborhood.

There was a restaurant up the hill. I walked up the road, and Israeli boys came down wearing helmets and camouflage and moving at a military trot. The ground invasion. And what a pretty little town we were in. There were flagstone sidewalks and rock-walled gardens and a plaque outside a writer’s house. When I had confessed to the spokesman that I was new to wartime correspondence, he told me that he’d been a paratrooper in the first Lebanon war and this is how things went, sitting around a remote town, half in civilian life and half in military engagement, waiting. It was nice of him to say, and in the pretty hill town, I began to feel a little like Hemingway in Spain. Where was Martha Gellhorn?

At the top of the hill. Here was the real reporters’ hotel. My cabdriver had boned me. This place was crawling with people I recognized, daring and a little meshuggeneh, near the beginnings of their careers, working for several outlets at once, trying to catch a break. I followed a group of them down the road. We passed their cars and vans, all with duct tape plastered to roofs and windows, shouting out: TV.

I wish I could tell you the name of the steakhouse. It was good. They served stuffed grape leaves and kohlrabi spears as antipasto, then a rib steak and local beer. Israeli officers were at half the tables, foreign correspondents at the others. The press were in helpless little packs of people who would not get along under other circumstances, leather-tongued old misfits, young whip-smart Englishwomen, a tall nonverbal guy or two, a dyke, a womanizer and the counterpart of a womanizer, a ball-buster.

At this time, I began to feel alone. It was night; I had no pack. The rockets went off, boom, boom, every minute or so, and the restaurant dog, a big old yellow Lab, pushed under my table, afraid. I tried to make out the incoming from the outgoing, using the lesson the spokesman had given to me, about waiting for the reverb on the incoming. One of the correspondents said into her phone, “We haven’t had so many as this before,” and I had my second flutter.

I stuck at my table, reading Hannah Arendt, and grew irritated by her manner. She used irony once or twice a page. She began sentences with “Well,” signaling her judgments.

At last I made myself go back to Room 436.

For a while, I couldn’t get to sleep. I told myself they had to take a break now that it was dark, but of course they didn’t. A few minutes would pass and there would be another explosion. I went to the window. There was only the silhouette of a little windmill on a well pump across the alley and, in a yard on the border, a group of soldiers monitoring the ridge. I went back to bed and didn’t sleep. I calculated how many people were left in the north, say 200,000, and how few had died. Then I turned on the light and read some more Hannah Arendt and began underlining the parts where she was ironic. I wrote in the margin, “Stop, Hannah.” Or “Bloody Irony.” Notwithstanding her manner, Eichmann in Jerusalem is a great, rich book; and then I wondered if I was getting more out of her book than from the war, if I wasn’t more of an intellectual than a man of action; and I was angry at myself for not having resolved this conflict and maybe dying for my neurosis, before I turned off the light and still couldn’t sleep. I thought about girls. That helped. I fell asleep, I think.

The next thing I knew, I was out of the bed. There had been a huge crack against the hotel building, under the window, it seemed. My first thought was: We’ve been hit. I ran to the door, then it came again—the crack sound came right through the room and the suspended ceiling tiles jumped up and down. The door of the room next to me slammed. No, we hadn’t been hit; it just felt that way. I wasn’t sure what to do. The loud cracks came a third time, then a fourth. It was like being inside a toaster that someone was hitting with a baseball bat.

Out on the balcony, I saw a red explosion on the ridge, and then it came to me that it was outgoing, not incoming: The Israelis had moved to a bigger gun, or they had changed the angle of fire. It was going right past the fourth floor. It was only then that I realized how deadly and serious this really was. Movies hadn’t prepared me for this, and not Tolstoy or Vonnegut, either. A friend who came close to a shooting war once in South America told me he was so scared that his only thought was the desperate feeling, “There has got to be a better way to deal with whatever you are quarreling about than doing this to one another.” I was right there.

I dressed and went down to the bomb shelter. There was a stack of mattresses in a polar-white cube the size of the bedroom in which you were conceived (indeed, in which I imagine some of you were conceived), but there was no one there. Chicken.

Up the road, a couple of the slovens were at a table in the piazza, but up the hill the other hotel was dark. A kid came walking down the road nonchalantly. Soldiers went by in a Hummer.

I went back to my room, and the sharp cracks continued. You can get used to anything. I fell asleep.

In the morning, one of the CNN guys told me he had been terrified too. Their crew was getting ready for the day’s action. They looked wildly excited, loose, wide-eyed, with the sort of joyful anticipation that exceeds even the anticipation of fucking. One of the slovens was having an argument with a European journalist. It was the moral-equivalency argument, the idea that our violence is different from theirs, the argument that goes round and round like a pepper grinder. The European journalist said, “They are both forms of terrorism. Hezbollah practices terror against civilians. Israel’s is state-sponsored terrorism.” The sloven said something dismissive of the world’s opinion, and I bent into the conversation. “Of course I agree with you,” I said, “but I am curious. Does it ever upset you that world opinion is so often against you?” The sloven shrugged. “It used to bother me, not any more,” he said, then offered the obvious unfolding of the thought: “The United States is on our side.”

I forget what reason I had to get out of there. The spokesman said I needed to get credentials in Jerusalem. Or I needed to see the Hagana Museum in Tel Aviv, or the Begin Museum in Jerusalem, or another of the many museums to the military ego. By 12:30, I was back in the bus station in Kiryat Shmona. It was now full of soldiers, one in a SpongeBob SquarePants T-shirt, another lean, handsome one changing out of his fatigues into shorts and hiking boots right there on the platform, and a girl draped like a Versace waif against a railing, in flip-flops, her T-shirt cut off, an M-16 strap not covering a violet bra strap. A couple of hours later, we were in Afula, where Katyushas killed that day, and where you saw soldiers running up to one another and kissing each other—boys who hadn’t seen each other in years, I guess—and then after that we were out of Nasrallah’s range. Though it was not till that night, in Jerusalem, that a shop owner supplied that staple of war correspondence, the sober conclusion:

“The Palestinians live in misery. We do—we live in misery. And so do the Israelis.”

That seems like a no-brainer to me. The more interesting question is intermarriage. We live in times of enforced tolerance. George W. Bush was strung up for visiting Bob Jones University, which had a policy against interracial dating. So what about the dating policy in conservative Jewish organizations: the strict stance against intermarriage?

This is not something anyone is supposed to talk about. Non-Jews give these issues wide berth. And people like myself, who have intermarried, are sufficiently ashamed about their choice--hastening the destruction of the Jewish people, we’re told--that they rarely speak up to defend it, unless it’s in the Steve and Cokie Roberts mode of insisting (somewhat hollowly to my mind) in their book From This Day Forward that they’re preserving Jewish tradition by having big Seders.

And yet as the Bush visit to Bob Jones shows, politicians sometimes have to account for their associates’ beliefs. Michael Barone, one of the authors of the Almanac of American Politics, reminds me that John Kennedy gave his landmark speech in Houston 40 years ago, assuring people that he would not be bound by the dictates of the Vatican, because of public resistance to electing a Catholic President. Oaths of office include the words “without mental reservation,” Mr. Barone says, because of the long history of religious influence in politics. We want to know a President’s heart and mind.

On some levels, the Jewish opposition to intermarriage is perfectly understandable. Jewish population numbers have changed little while every other group’s has grown; the future of the Jews in America seems at stake. A regular contributor to the Forward wrote recently that intermarriage is so “terrifying” that she had developed sympathy for her parents’ posture of refusing to be friends with the intermarried.

And that’s the problem. The rhetoric and practices surrounding opposition to intermarriage are often so discriminatory they seem to border on racism.

The Jewish mistrust of gentile culture is deeply imbedded, and God knows Christians have again and again given Jews ample basis for these feelings. The Yiddish word goy is loaded with negative associations, and the word shiksa, which everyone still uses, comes from Hebrew for “blemish,” according to Leo Rosten.

In ancient times rabbis barred Jews from eating or drinking with non-Jews, lest they intermarry, and such attitudes prevailed widely in the American Jewish community just a generation ago. They treated you like you were dead if you intermarried, they sat shivah for you, they said that you were doing Hitler’s work. Movies like The Heartbreak Kid reminded Jews of what they were losing in marrying out, painting Christian culture as cold and heartless. A lot of the details in that portrait were deadly. But many others were foolish mayonnaise shtik? In fact, how many gentiles have felt excluded, caricatured, misunderstood by Jewish associates?

Xenophobia and disdain are alive and well in the Jewish community today. Lately my wife and I attended a Sabbath dinner at the home of a well-known professor of psychology in his 50’s, who, when his 10-year-old daughter said that she had a crush on a boy named Scott Murphy, said, “That’s not a Jewish name, is it?”

If my wife were not so inured to this attitude, if she were better schooled in identity politics, she might have taken offense, felt excluded, pronounced it racist. (As it was, she responded adroitly, “Isn’t it a little early to be sending that kind of message?”) But what’s revealing about the episode is that this is hardly an aberration. This man is a sophisticated intellectual--yet that comment came casually, unthinkingly to his lips.

The rhetoric in conservative and Orthodox communities is of a piece with that attitude. The Orthodox Union, of which Senator Lieberman is a member, repeatedly characterizes intermarriage in chilling terms in public statements. It is a “threat” even to “physical survival,” one official commentary on its Web site says. Mandell I. Ganchrow, the Union’s president, says that intermarriage is sweeping young Jews “out to sea.”

The (rather successful) Orthodox response to this threat has been a policy of prevention. Orthodox children are all but segregated from wider American society in day schools; even play is discouraged. It All Begins with a Date is the name of an anti-intermarriage book that is promoted on the Conservative movement’s Web site. There’s a hint (as in many religions) of indoctrination against outsiders: Children must be instructed that Christianity and Judaism are different and not the same (i.e., Christianity is not as good).

It’s odd to see a religion that has a history of not proselytizing forced to proselytize its own members. And while indoctrination may not be necessary for those who love being Jewish, surely the majority of Jews, yet at times the Conservatives must use a stick to keep people in line. They bar the intermarried from many leadership positions, including day-school teachers and youth workers, because they are not good “role models,” and exclude the children of Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers (who have not converted) from attendance at summer camps.

Of course many sectarian practices have an element of exclusiveness. “Every religion has wacky stuff,” says Steve Friedman, a lawyer active in Jewish organizations. “That’s why we don’t drag it into political debate.”

But that pass was not available to George Bush. John McCain scored points in Michigan by saying, feelingly, that Bob Jones’s policy against interracial dating (since abandoned) was “cruel” to young people. The same can be said about attitudes and policies in the Jewish community: One can find young people falling in love and being coerced to break up, others who don’t break up being shunned or held in disregard. (One reason I get to talk about this is I’ve experienced that scorn and shame and guilt myself.) The pressing issue for Jewish organizations is how to keep their numbers alive. The last generation depended on negative lessons to maintain the group: concern about anti-Semitism, the Holocaust. Then those phenomena became somewhat meaningless to a new generation, mine, and Jewish organizations had to come up with better reasons to be Jewish. Which they’ve done. They are emphasizing the religion’s great traditions and spiritual understanding, and creating much warmer feeling about being Jewish among Jews. Many liberal Jewish organizations have accepted intermarriage as inevitable and reached out in welcoming ways to the intermarried.

Still, everyone is now waiting on the edge of their seat for the next National Jewish Population Survey figures, which will say how many young Jews are intermarrying. In 1990, the survey’s 52 percent figure turned out to be a bombshell.

The problem with even thinking about the intermarried is that there isn’t much you can do about them, you wind up meddling with people’s love lives, and you keep the intermarried, who have very good reasons for doing what they’re doing, from piping up about their choice. For myself, I wanted more. I wanted everything in this society that was available to my peers, and my family encouraged those ambitions in me despite its feelings of being far outside the mainstream. Miraculously, American society responded, and before long I came to find some tribal ways suffocating and encountered many Christians whom I admired and loved.

The political implications of the intermarriage question stem from the fact that Jews are today not a threatened minority. They have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, they have wealth, status, influence. And it is profoundly anti-democratic for a group of prosperous people to sit around devising ways to keep their children from marrying Christians (marriage between classes being, after all, one of the most effective means of redistributing wealth in a society). Even the term “mixed marriage,” favored by some anti-intermarriage writers, seems oddly reminiscent of Southern whites’ concern with miscegenation.

Of course it’s a big country, it can stand some anti-Democrats, in South Carolina and Queens, too. There’s nothing illegal about these practices, and most people have strong tribal feelings. Joe Lieberman declined to respond to my fax on the issue, his spokesman saying he did not see the question as “pertinent” to his job. And both Steve Friedman and Michael Barone argue that Jewish policies on intermarriage should be off-limits in political debate. Indeed, Mr. Barone says that hanging Mr. Bush on the intolerant policies of a backwater institution (Bob Jones) struck him as a “stretch.”

Maybe that’s the answer, greater tolerance for intolerance.

Sitting in her bedroom before the Jan. 20 interview on NBC with Lisa Myers, Juanita Broaddrick could not believe that she was actually going to walk down the hallway into the living room and go through with it, that she, a very private and dignified woman, would say the word rape to a camera. “To this day, I don’t know how I did it,” she told me. In the living room, her son, Kevin Hickey, had a different concern. “When they were setting up, I said, ‘What’s the process after this interview is finished? How will you go about getting it on the air?’

“Lisa said she would have to speak to her higher-ups. I said, ‘Wait a minute--what are the chances that this won’t run?’ My stepfather was standing there. And she said, ‘None.’ I said, ‘O.K.’” Mr. Hickey paused. “And, you know, it ran. But how could she sit there and tell us that?”

The accusation by a mature businesswoman that she had been raped by Bill Clinton in 1978, when he was Arkansas’ Attorney General, aired on NBC on Feb. 24, opposite the Grammy Awards. The 35-day interval between tape and air is now one of the legends of the impeachment process. Why didn’t the American public get to hear Mrs. Broaddrick before the Senate voted to acquit Mr. Clinton on Feb. 12?

“This came out at a time when it had the absolute smallest impact it could have,” said Steve Friedman, a lawyer friend (who favored censure) said to me at lunch. “The thing was finally over. Everybody was sick of it, and the Republicans looked like a bunch of scoundrels when they said, You have to understand what we’re seeing and can’t talk about. It was certainly relevant to the question, his fitness to be President.”

My friend’s suspicion that NBC protected Mr. Clinton is widely shared. Recently, the National Press Club held a panel on the Broaddrick story, “Too Hot for a ‘Scandal-Weary’ New Media to Handle?”, where several speakers made that point. Conservative media watchdog Reed Irvine charged in the Washington Times that NBC delayed the story because executives are cozy with the President. And TV Guide has questioned why NBC’s “apparent hesitation” to run the interview cost it a scoop--to The Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Mrs. Broaddrick sat for an interview with The Journal because she believed NBC had killed a story it had promised to run. She had become “very good friends” with Ms. Myers, who kept her posted as one group of NBC higher-ups after another looked at the interview.

“I would hear, ‘These are the ones who are going to view it today.’ I can’t tell you how that felt,” she said to me. “There were all these people viewing this horrible incident of my life. Later she told me, ‘The good thing is, you’re credible. The bad thing is you’re very, very credible.’”

“Do you know whether anyone at the White House ‘got to’ NBC?” I asked Mrs. Broaddrick.

“No,” she said. “I think there are things we’ll never know. I do have an opinion.”

“What is that?”

“Yes.”

NBC denies this emphatically. “There was no pressure from the White House, period. Nor as some were claiming was there any pressure from NBC or G.E. corporate higher-ups to kill the story,” said NBC News vice president Bill Wheatley. He affirms the NBC line, that the 35-day interval reflected the traditional journalistic concern of nailing down a story. Many have bought that line. As TV Guide put it, “the story needed more facts.”

This strikes me as highly deceptive. The facts NBC offered viewers tending to corroborate the story were nailed down within 10 days or two weeks. The real process the interview underwent was vetting, scrutiny by executives, almost all male, to determine whether the accusation deserved to be aired at all. It did not matter that a seasoned reporter who had worked on the story for almost a year believed it to be true. It did not matter that the story was news. Vetting is a far cry from “Hey, sweetheart, get me rewrite” or Deep Throat. Vetting is a process by which executives not only ask “Is it responsible?” but also “Is it acceptable?” It’s not about news, it’s about whether it’s all right to say it. And accusing a President of rape may not pass that test. I don’t think the White House got to NBC. It didn’t have to.

Juanita Broaddrick and Lisa Myers met more than a year ago, when the 47-year-old reporter flew to Fort Smith, Ark., to dine with Kevin Hickey. The following morning, Mrs. Broaddrick came to her hotel.

Mrs. Broaddrick at first declined to be interviewed, but the two established a rapport. “She was the first person who called that I could confide in,” Mrs. Broaddrick said to me. “And the relationship just kind of evolved. Lisa tells me all the time, she believes me and understands what I went through.”

At that time, Mrs. Broaddrick was known to the public by her cognomen in the Paula Jones lawsuit, “Jane Doe No. 5.” Her name came to light on March 28, 1998, when Ms. Jones’ lawyers made a Saturday filing in federal court that included a 1992 letter from Phillip Yoakum. The Fayetteville man had urged Mrs. Broaddrick to go public, during the Presidential campaign, with a story she had told him of a violent sexual assault. “What a shock now to realize that he will possibly be the President of a free democratic country while carrying the guilt of such an assault on someone as undeserving as you,” Mr. Yoakum wrote, according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

The filing also contained a statement from Beverly Lambert, who with her husband, Rick, worked for the Jones legal team, conducting interviews about Bill Clinton’s sexual history. The Lamberts met with Mrs. Broaddrick on the porch of her house in Van Buren, Ark., in fall 1997. Mrs. Broaddrick acknowledged an encounter with Bill Clinton but refused to talk about it, saying it was too “horrible” to relive.

The Saturday drop outraged the Clinton legal team. Robert Bennett called it “reckless and irresponsible” and said the allegation was a “recycled rumor.” But Lisa Myers had reason to believe that it was more than rumor, and NBC was out front among the networks in reporting the story. On the Saturday NBC Nightly News, it named Mrs. Broaddrick and included a charge by Paula Jones’ lawyers that later proved false: that Mr. Clinton or his agents “bribed and/or intimidated her [Mrs. Broaddrick] and her family into remaining silent.”

At about the same time, independent counsel Kenneth Starr subpoenaed Ms. Jones’ lawyers for information about Mrs. Broaddrick. She had signed an affidavit in the case, denying any unwelcome advances from Mr. Clinton. Mr. Starr wanted to know whether her affidavit, like Monica Lewinsky’s, was false. He knew that Rick Lambert had taped the conversation on the porch with a recorder concealed in his coat. This was “very underhanded,” Mrs. Broaddrick told me, but she does not hold it against the Lamberts. “They were just doing their job.”

That tape was leaked to the press. “A select group of us were given an audiotape,” one reporter said. But those who wanted to report it “were thwarted by their editors.”

The mainstream press again ignored the story in the fall of 1998, when Mr. Starr’s referral to Congress reported that Jane Doe No. 5 had told an F.B.I. agent that her earlier affidavit was indeed false.

The press has never been comfortable with Mrs. Broaddrick’s story. “It smells because it comes out of the sewers in Arkansas,” one reporter said. Another said, “People hate rape stories.” Its means of exposure had an air of Clinton-hatred, or the culture war, or sexual McCarthyism--whatever paradigm you choose to taint those who see Mr. Clinton’s private life as having public relevance. And the story was associated with the venomous Clinton enemy Larry Nichols.

Even while the press ignored it, the curious name Juanita Broaddrick became a shibboleth on the Internet, talk radio and supermarket tabloids. That is why Mrs. Broaddrick, who owns nursing homes, said she changed her mind about talking to Ms. Myers. A tabloid said that her husband had been bribed, Lucianne Goldberg said that her lip had been bleeding. “My life is back to normal now,” Mrs. Broaddrick said. “I can go on line and see my name, hear my name on Rush Limbaugh or television. I’m still in disbelief that it’s my name, but the way I used to hear it is, ‘This woman can’t be believed.’”

I knew what she meant. I remember giving my assessment of the case to Representative Lindsey Graham, Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter and Lucianne Goldberg: A lot of us did weird stuff in bed in the 70’s, maybe Bill Clinton got a little rough, missed some signals. But the rules were different then. Suffice it to say that the Myers interview left me deeply ashamed.

The taping lasted all day. Two days later, Mrs. Broaddrick met for several hours with an associate producer to go over possible skeletons in the closet, for instance her attending a Clinton fund-raiser just a few weeks after the alleged assault. NBC was fearful. “They didn’t want what happened to poor Kathleen Willey, all those letters released by the White House,” Mrs. Broaddrick said. Those letters had seemed to undermine 60 Minutes’ interview of Ms. Willey last year.

The big hole in Mrs. Broaddrick’s story was the date of the incident, and, subsequently, any evidence that Mr. Clinton was in Little Rock when she said the two met.

“All of us here felt that we had to go the extra mile in our checking, given the nature of the charge and the fact that it involved a President,” Bill Wheatley said. “Our organization’s credibility was at stake. Can you imagine the reaction had we broadcast the charge and the next day the White House produced a document showing that Bill Clinton was in Chicago on the day of the alleged incident? I was shocked that some other news organizations were willing to go with the story without doing the type of checking we were doing.”

That took time, Mr. Wheatley said. Alex Constantinople, a spokesman for NBC, said, “Lisa did her reporting up to Tuesday night [Feb. 23]. We were just doing what journalists do with such a serious charge. Everyone here regards it as quite bizarre that we are being questioned for doing that.”

But Juanita Broaddrick and another source said that the crucial facts were unearthed within seven to 10 days of the interview, and all tended to confirm her memory. NBC assistant producer Chris Giglio was able to find state records dating the nursing home conference at which Mrs. Broaddrick says she was assaulted, and by examining the records of many Arkansas newspapers found two containing statements made by Mr. Clinton on the day in question. Mr. Wheatley recounts, “We actually found the reporters, in both incidents, and they said, ‘He must have been in Little Rock because if he had been out of town we would have said so.’”

Mr. Giglio disputed Mrs. Broaddrick’s memory of the timing. He said that it may have taken him two weeks to determine the date and Mr. Clinton’s whereabouts. He stayed in Little Rock almost until the story aired, trying to nail other elusive points. “And every day was full.”

But Mr. Giglio could stay in Little Rock until next year and there would still be holes. My point is that NBC had nailed the key point long before Feb. 24, and indeed the ultimate report contained numerous holes that newsmen decided they could live with. What story doesn’t? Journalism is usually an urgent, and sometimes self-righteous, calling. Journalists often find themselves in the position of airing disputed charges whose truthfulness they can’t fully assess. In the Broaddrick case, the reporter had worked on the story for a year, believed her source, and researchers had turned up uncanny confirmations of the source’s memory. Executives stood in the way.

“I think they [two producers and Ms. Myers] tried desperately to get this on the air,” Mrs. Broaddrick said. “There was too much against them from higher-ups. I was privy to a few things that were said. I know these three people were very frustrated, and they were also frustrated in the end by what was left out. They thought it would be the whole Dateline, or 40 minutes. It was 23.” (Mrs. Broaddrick declined to tell me what was left out.) Some higher-ups’ attitude toward the story, Mrs. Broaddrick said, was: “Up until that time, I think they thought there was maybe some fabrication--so let’s do this and rule it out.”

One source outside NBC with knowledge of the process described it in this way: “They go down and do the interview. They come back. It sits there. You hear that [Jeff] Zucker, the Today czar, David Doss, the czar of Nightly News, and [Tom] Brokaw don’t like this. It’s not going to air on their program, nor did it. Within the first week, three problems developed that were being touted against the piece for reasons to be suspicious. One, she didn’t remember the date. Two, her first husband didn’t know anything about her lip being hurt. Three, the [Norma] Rogers woman, the principal corroborating witness, had a grievance against Clinton.” (No. 1 was resolved; doubts 2 and 3 were set forth in the piece.)

Some resistance gathered at the network around the feeling that they might be used in the impeachment context. Why was Mrs. Broaddrick going forward now? Some felt that the Jones lawyers had successfully manipulated Nightly News the previous March into going on air--off Mr. Brokaw’s watch--with irresponsible charges. More importantly, the House impeachment managers had never named Juanita Broaddrick publicly, even while they were using the confidential F.B.I. report of her assault to push impeachment.

“The fact that neither Ken Starr nor the House managers had done much with the Broaddrick allegation was pointed to by some as a cautionary tale,” Mr. Wheatley said, speaking carefully about in-house discussions. “It was argued if these blood enemies of the President didn’t act on her story, perhaps there was a problem with it.”

And to be fair to NBC, one crucial piece of the story eluded them: a White House response. Mrs. Broaddrick said that Dateline had given a list of questions to the White House, and the White House did not respond. “In the end, the President’s lawyers refused to answer any of our questions, and they refused to give us access to Clinton’s records for the dates in question,” Mr. Wheatley said.

Of course, a response was essential. But the White House is notorious for stonewalling, and the issue, again, is whether NBC invoked absurdly lofty journalistic standards because it was dealing with the President. While NBC Washington bureau chief Tim Russert is said to have fought like a tiger for Ms. Myers, others were apparently prepared to kill a year of her work.

“It had to be one of the bluer moments in her career,” Mr. Hickey said. “She didn’t want to talk to me. It hurt her that my mother went through that whole ordeal and there was a chance that it wouldn’t be aired. She was afraid the story was going to get killed. I think she was embarrassed.”

Other mainstream reporters who come back from Arkansas will tell you that their East Coast editors sometimes find their stories too outlandish to be credited. In a sense, two information realities are in conflict, and one makes the decisions (and all teetering above the madmen of the Internet).

“We’re considered the crazy people,” one of these reporters said. “Or, ‘We’re in the Ken Starr cult.’ Sidney Blumenthal even went around saying we are ‘assets to the enemy.’” (Mr. Blumenthal did not return a call seeking his comment.) Lucianne Goldberg pointed out to me that reporters publicly denied that she had been the source of the stained-dress story, though she was happy to admit it. It used to be the sources who wanted anonymity, Mrs. Goldberg said; now you find reporters fighting to enforce anonymity on non-establishment sources, because they worry that their own credibility would fall if it was known they talk to such people.

The most critical factor working against Lisa Myers, though, was that NBC was alone on the story. Mrs. Broaddrick was talking to no one else.

Indeed, the most crucial development in the matter came on Day 23 after the interview, when Dorothy Rabinowitz of The Wall Street Journal took a chauffeured car to Mrs. Broaddrick’s gate and chatted with her husband for 45 minutes before he agreed to introduce her to his wife. Ms. Rabinowitz had the grace to ask Mrs. Broaddrick only about the status of the interview, not to ask any sexual questions. The next day, she watched Mrs. Broaddrick and her tennis team in action, which flattered Mrs. Broaddrick, before flying back to New York.

Mrs. Broaddrick was by then deeply angry at NBC. She told her son that the network’s treatment felt in ways like being raped again.

“I felt that way because they had been after me and after me for a year. And I finally give in and go through this, a day of baring my soul. A bunch of people are standing around in my house as I tell the most private things of my life. Then it was like what I told them wasn’t really worthy,” she said. How many rape victims go public? “It was very hard for me to say the word rape. It’s a difficult word to say.”

When Lisa Myers named higher-ups, it struck Mrs. Broaddrick that almost all the NBC executives were men (the only woman’s name among eight listed to me was Cheryl Gould).

Then Ms. Rabinowitz phoned Mrs. Broaddrick on Valentine’s Day, and Mrs. Broaddrick poured out her story. “I don’t like beating on people’s doors. But there are certain advantages to not being 20,” Ms. Rabinowitz said dryly. “The other rule of journalism is, The less you ask for, the more you get.”

Her stunning story Feb. 19 in The Journal drew the only comment the White House has offered in the matter: David Kendall’s statement that the assault allegation was “absolutely false.” (“He didn’t even say, ‘The President told me this,’” Mr. Hickey observed. “How do we know it’s not David Kendall’s opinion of what happened?”)

More important, her story provided NBC what it needed: company. The next day, The Washington Post ran an interview with Mrs. Broaddrick off the bottom of its front page. Finally, someone else had stuck their neck out. When TV Guide later asked, “Did NBC snooze and lose?” it got it backward. Being scooped allowed the network to feel comfortable about its reporter’s belief. It’s the herd, stupid.

NBC’s wrenching interview has had a quiet impact. It disturbed several columnists who have tended to see Ken Starr as the problem, including Richard Cohen of The Washington Post, The Nation’s Katha Pollitt and San Francisco Examiner columnist Stephanie Salter. The National Organization for Women (finally) urged the President to end his “nuts and sluts” defense, and leading newspapers have called on Mr. Clinton to respond substantively to the charges.

Those appeals have gone unheeded, and meantime news people who find Mrs. Broaddrick credible ask why the story doesn’t have “legs.” There is still great hostility to the story among reporters. It is so old and so unprovable that it only counts as gossip, some say. Or, like other staggering revelations that emerged from Mr. Starr’s politicized and intrusive investigation, it is fruit from a poisoned tree. Mr. Brokaw hasn’t touched the story on Nightly News.

When I asked Sam Donaldson whether there had been rancorous arguments at ABC over coverage of Mrs. Broaddrick, he stammered. “I am dodging your question,” he said. “I can tell you that people in charge of our coverage, at managing editor status, have not seen this as a story they wanted to spend a lot of time on. But I have not seen a memo, nor have I been given any orders not to do this story, and when I have, there have been no problems from above.” He went on: “The thing that astounded me from the get-go, and some day I may write about this, is that important aspects of the news business argued that we shouldn’t follow the [Lewinsky] story. I don’t mean just Mr. [Steve] Brill, Mr. [Anthony] Lewis, Mr. [Frank] Rich. But lots of people argued that it was unseemly.”

Julia Malone, a national correspondent for the Cox newspapers, grew so upset by the neglect of Mrs. Broaddrick’s story that she organized the March 30 panel at the National Press Club.

“It’s like we’re in Lotus Land,” she said. “It seems like everybody has been smoking something and the economy has been so good that this man has bamboozled the country. I mean, the irony of this man who’s very likely a rapist talking about human rights!”

Seventy-five people attended the panel. Ms. Myers declined to appear (as she declined to comment to me on the matter). Ms. Rabinowitz said that NBC had treated the story like a “dead fish.” Fox News anchor Brit Hume argued that neglect of the story reflected a deep bias in the media against material that might hurt someone they had voted for. Ms. Malone echoed that point. “My impression of Tom Brokaw is that he was not a newsman on this decision, he’s a Democrat.” (I sent Mr. Brokaw a letter, and he left me a message. “I have just a little bit for you, not much, because we have felt strongly from the beginning that our decisions in the Juanita Broaddrick story or any news decisions we make have to be kept within these walls, otherwise we’ll spend too much time explaining and too little time reporting.” He told me to call him back, then didn’t return my call.)

Ms. Malone said she hopes that reporters will get together before Mr. Clinton’s next press conference and try to force an answer about Mrs. Broaddrick. “But in this city that’s considered some kind of conspiracy.” Mr. Donaldson said he can remember occasions when reporters barraged a President, forcing a more forthright answer. “But that certainly wasn’t the case in the Broaddrick matter.”

No, Mr. Donaldson was alone when he boldly asked the President about the rape allegation at the President’s March 19 press conference. Mr. Clinton said he would have no more to say than his lawyer’s statement, and that was that.

Soon after that, Juanita Broaddrick’s cell phone rang. She was with her husband in Breckenridge, Colo., looking to rent a condo for “snow skiing” next winter. She got the phone from her pocket. It was her friend, Lisa Myers.

“She was really in shock that he would not answer it in a fair way,” Mrs. Broaddrick said. “And she said everyone was surprised.”

“Were you?” I asked.

“I’m sort of numb. What can he say? He’s going to have to lie. He knows it’s true. What’s really amazing to me is, Where do you go from here? I know where I go. I feel like a weight’s been lifted. I’m back where I want to be. I’m in my community, with the tremendous support of my friends, people who love me and have let me go on with my life.

“But what does the country do? That is the question. And I don’t know. I guess they just go on.”

The banner mocks the general's one turn on a battlefield. He did not see combat till age 55, at a crucial battle in New Guinea in the Second World War. A month into the action, Harding sat stymied in his tent in the rain forest, miles from the front, and MacArthur ordered him relieved of command. A buddy from West Point, Gen. Robert L. Eichelberger, flew in to take over. "You're licked," Eichelberger pronounced. General Harding threw his cigarette into the mud and a day later wept at MacArthur's headquarters before slinking off to Panama for the rest of the war. General Eichelberger went on to glory in the Philippines and Japan.

A general's collapse-it is an unspeakable thing. Harding was bitter and angry even years later, says a quartermaster who ran into him at the Pentagon. "Brokenhearted," another general reported. A neighbor says he was sour in his old age. To this day, historians step delicately around Harding's story.

And entangled in Harding's disgrace was a young writer for The New Yorker, who struggled to come to terms with it, and never did.

A couple of weeks before graduating from Harvard in 1937, E.J. "Jack" Kahn Jr. got the letter he'd been hoping for. The New Yorker had a job for him as a "Talk of the Town" reporter, for $25 a week. "You should bear in mind that the turnover here is fairly rapid and that while you will be given every opportunity to show us what you can do, you must not expect this job to be permanent unless after three or four months you have shown that you fit in here," wrote St. Clair McKelway, then the magazine's managing editor.

Fit in he did. When Kahn died 10 years ago, The New Yorker eulogized him as the most prolific writer in its history, a short, strongly built man who "loved to think of himself as a journeyman reporter-a 'Front Page' character," but who had a graceful style. Kahn was funny and he was game; he would go anywhere to do a story or book. He didn't seek immortality, his friend Jeremy Bernstein wrote in The American Scholar, it was enough for Kahn to bring "pleasure and enlightenment" to readers over more than half a century. He had a two-floor apartment on Park Avenue, he gave fun parties, Bernstein said.

And at the end of his career, Kahn had also become the symbol of the excesses of the William Shawn era; he was the author of a five-part series on grain ("The Staffs of Life … Corn: The Golden Thread … ") that was widely ridiculed and that made it easier for the magazine's new owners, the Newhouses, to replace Shawn as editor in 1987.

Kahn had been at The New Yorker four years-and Shawn had been managing editor for two-when in July 1941 Kahn was called up in the peacetime draft. Basic training in South Carolina came as a shock to this New York boy. He didn't care for guns or bayonet training, he did a lousy job of digging a foxhole. In letters to Shawn (held at the New York Public Library's New Yorker Archive), Kahn cracked that he had to associate with draftees who read Western Detective and take orders from an officer who was so stupid he couldn't even work for Time.

When the blue dye of his denims came off on his legs, the 24-year-old cried that he would do anything to be back in Manhattan, and so he reached out to Harold W. Ross, the editor of The New Yorker.

The Army had played a vital role in Harold Ross' education. In World War I, Ross had gone AWOL and hitched his way across France after he heard that the Army was starting a weekly newspaper in Paris. For the next year and a half he wrote for and then edited The Stars and Stripes, an experience that prepared him for launching The New Yorker five years after the war. By the time World War II rolled around, Ross still had Army connections, which he called to try and get Kahn a job with Army P.R. in New York. That fell through, but Ross was able through to an old Stars and Stripes friend to get Kahn accredited as a correspondent for a new magazine called Yank, writing "heartthrob humaners," as Kahn told Shawn.

Kahn would have to stay with his unit, but Ross told him it would all work out.

"You will look back and laugh at it all someday. You will say, 'Ha, ha, ha,'" Ross said.

Besides, the editor said, Army life gave a writer freedom. "You can't expect every organization to be run with the cool, masterful efficiency of The New Yorker magazine," he said. "It was my experience that eventually I got on an independent basis …. At home there are too damned many people with time on their hands and an interfering spirit."

Sure enough, Private Kahn adjusted. The Army permitted him to write articles for The New Yorker about life in uniform, and Kahn discovered what so many other newsmen did in the Second World War, that access to the press gave a youth influence among officers. At Fort Bragg, N.C., Kahn became a regular guest at officers' quarters, and formed what proved to be a lifelong friendship with his commanding general: E. Forrest Harding.

The two men had a natural affinity. Kahn and Harding were both short men from aristocratic backgrounds. Harding's father owned paper mills. Kahn's father, Ely Jacques Kahn Sr., was a prominent New York architect (Ayn Rand, a onetime employee, had used him as the model for an elegant and socially acceptable architect in the Fountainhead). Kahn had graduated from Horace Mann, Harding Phillips Exeter. And the general was a man of letters. He had edited The Infantry Journal and written poetry. He loved Shakespeare. He had taught many devoted protégés, who included Omar Bradley and Major General C.T. "Buck" Lanham, Hemingway's close friend, that they must study the history of war.

In the 10 months following Pearl Harbor, the 32nd Infantry Division shipped out to Australia and made its way to a jungle training camp in Queensland, and Kahn found a remarkable niche. He was secretary to Harding, writing the major general's letters home to Ohio, and he was contracted to Simon and Schuster to publish a collection of his New Yorker Army pieces. General Harding was writing the foreword for the book. Yes, it was highly unusual for a major general to perform such a service for a private, Kahn told his editor at Simon and Schuster; it was just that the two got along so very well.

In his letters to Shawn, Kahn was capable of a military fatalism. He was a soldier now-Pearl Harbor had come as less of a shock to him than to the editors in New York. "I fancy that I won't be home again for a long long time."

If that blithe and jaunty tone now seems mannered, Jack Kahn might be forgiven, for it was then the all but official tone of his magazine. As the late Gardner Botsford, a former New Yorker editor, wrote in his memoir, A Life of Privilege, Mostly, the culture of The New Yorker before the war was a "Hollywood version of journalism"-antic, sophisticated, unorthodox and entre-nous, with writers dueling one another to be more clever. Such a magazine was not made for the grim and serious events that were now unfolding. Harold Ross had already had his war, and now complained noisily that the new one was going to kill off his magazine.

As it turned out, the opposite was about to happen. The war made The New Yorker into a national publication. Its journalism took on depth and scope, thanks in part to the stunning work of A.J. Liebling and John Hersey. Its circulation doubled, thanks in part to a 24-page "pony" edition the magazine produced for distribution to the troops along with Time. After the war, Botsford wrote, "everybody in the office was grayer and more serious-especially Shawn." Who, as we all now know, became the high priest of literary journalism.

But Shawn was alive journalistically to Kahn's war experiences. When Kahn's best friend Dan Herr got shot to hell during a strafing, it required Shawn to tell Kahn-three months after the fact, when the story showed up in the Daily News, where Herr had worked as a copy boy-that he should write about how it felt to see your best friend on a stretcher. Kahn resisted. Your idea, not mine, he said. When Kahn mentioned to Shawn that Mickey Rooney had visited the troops, it was Shawn who saw the story.

"There is something typical, or significant, or very American, or grotesque about the personal appearance of Rooney at an army camp," he told Kahn. "I can't believe that that young man is married, even though I was married at his age."

Kahn got Ross' wisdom, too. When the young writer persisted in stating, over editors' objections, that a soldier from New York running into another New Yorker overseas cried out, "You wouldn't be from East 181st Street?", in the same tone that Stanley had greeted Livingstone, Ross weighed in. "Unhappy comparison. Stanley's extreme calmness and repression and formality being a worldwide byword. One of most casual remarks in history."

"Guess he is right," Shawn said. The line was cut.

Kahn could be the young budding writer with Shawn. He described to him the shock of arriving in New Guinea and, despite having seen endless pictures of this in magazines, actually seeing women walking down the path with their breasts flapping against their stomachs. He offered wise-ass names for the editor's firstborn-Chiang Kai Shawn or Sean Shawn. He teased him about all the moist-eyed young women he would have to hire, to fill out a staff reduced by war. And he chastised Shawn for not commenting expansively on his work: "Damn it, why don't you write me some time and let me know what you think …. "

The next piece Shawn received, in October 1942, brought his highest praise.

"PROFILE HAS ARRIVED AND IS MAGNIFICENT PERIOD CONGRATULATIONS PERIOD. REGARDS, WILLIAM SHAWN."

By today's journalistic standards, this piece would be strictly out of bounds.

It was a long, glowing portrait of General Harding that didn't report that it was written by his secretary. The general had read the piece several times with great care, Kahn told Shawn. He had even "smoothed" it over. Shawn told the writer it was his finest work, graceful and warmhearted.

But Shawn had a journalistic problem with the article. It said nothing about what General Harding was actually doing in the war, or where he was posted. The editor asked Kahn to fill in the gaps. Kahn responded that censors would only allow him to say that Harding was commanding a division "overseas."

He told Shawn to ask Washington for permission to say where Harding was, so Shawn asked Washington.

Though Shawn would never learn as much, the general was in a very important place indeed: Buna.

By mid-1942, the stunning advance of the Japanese across the Pacific had come to a bloody halt. They had suffered their first setbacks at the hands of the Australian Army and the American Navy, and had dug in on several islands north of Australia. In New Guinea, the Australians had chased the Japanese across a towering mountain range and hemmed them in at Buna, a village on the north coast. The Aussies formed a line on the south and west.

Now General Harding and the 32nd Infantry Division gathered on the south and east of Buna. The battle was to be the first engagement of the American Army on land in the Second World War. MacArthur's intelligence officer likened the battle in importance to Verdun in World War I.

History was on Harding's mind, too. In memos to Gen. Richard K. Sutherland, MacArthur's chief of staff, that Jack Kahn surely typed-and probably helped write, too, from the sound of them-Harding described the oncoming hostilities in blithe terms. "Les Terribles" would "polish off" Buna by Nov. 1, he predicted. Then they'd move on to "take Lae," nearly 200 miles further up the coast.

"Do I hear you remark, 'Why stop short of retaking Mindanao?' Give me time, Dick, give me time," Harding wrote. "Tell General MacArthur that what promised to be a long, dull plodding campaign against inhospitable nature, is beginning to look more like MARENGO"-a rout by Napoleon-"than Hannibal crossing the Alps."

These statements would soon look foolish and bizarre. It took the Allies a year to capture Lae, two years to get Mindanao.

Back in New York, William Shawn was getting desperate. Washington had shot him down.

"CANNOT GET PERMISSION WASHINGTON TO TELL WHERE GENERAL STATIONED IN ARTICLES PERIOD," Shawn cabled Kahn. "WASHINGTON SAYS PERMISSION MUST COME FROM COMMANDING GENERAL THEATRE OF OPERATIONS PERIOD WOULD YOU PLEASE DO WHAT YOU CAN PERIOD SOONER THE BETTER REGARDS WILLIAM SHAWN."

Kahn responded in December 1942 with two cables urging Shawn to run the piece regardless. Permission was unobtainable for a number of reasons, he said vaguely. The article should be run as soon as possible, he said in his first cable. The second cable restated this suggestion more emphatically.

And so the piece ran. In its last issue of 1942 and first issue of 1943, The New Yorker published a two-part profile of Forrest Harding, "Two-Star General," set off with handsome sketches of the general, a Peter Arno drawing of Navy men on one cover.

The article was 12,000 admiring words for a soft-spoken general who loved Hamlet and didn't believe in senseless discipline. Harding had never seen combat-he had spent World War I training soldiers stateside-but Kahn said that he was ready for anything.

"He has thoughtfully read most of the books ever written on battle …. He has never cried 'over the top!' except in maneuvers and dreams, but has spent years with troops and has acquired about all the military knowledge the Army can impart," Kahn wrote. "In years of training, and occasional communion with Hannibal and Napoleon, his favorite elder generals, General Harding has learned practically everything communicable about strategy and tactics."

A deeper divide between P.R. and fortune than the one now straddled by Forrest Harding cannot be imagined: A month before the articles came out, he'd been fired.

The general (and many others) had greatly underestimated the Japanese strength at Buna. The fight had dragged on all through November 1942. The Americans and Australians enveloped the Japanese, but Harding had held back, seeking reinforcements before trying to demolish the Japanese pillboxes and sniper positions.

At his forward headquarters in Port Moresby on the southern coast of New Guinea, Douglas MacArthur was seething. The daily casualty figures from Buna were low, showing little resolve. MacArthur needed a victory. He was anxious to publicize his first victory on the road back to the Philippines, where he had been humiliated a few months before, and his Australian partners were growing impatient, too. They had been fighting in North Africa for two years and openly questioned the green Americans' fighting abilities. When George Vasey, the leading Australian frontline general, was asked for an official situation report on the Yanks, he said only, "Hebrews 13, Verse 8" and declined to elaborate.

Aides finally located a Bible. "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever."

MacArthur dispatched several officers to Buna. All came back with similar reports. Harding's command lacked discipline and aggressive spirit. Some soldiers had run from the front and lolled against tree trunks. The general's command post was too far from the action; his colonels were unreliable.

At last, MacArthur summoned Lt. General Robert L. Eichelberger from Australia. Their conference on the veranda of headquarters in Port Moresby on Nov. 30, 1942, is famous. Pacing back and forth and addressing no one and everyone, as was his custom, MacArthur told Eichelberger to relieve Harding or he would himself be sacked. "Send Harding back, Bob. He has failed miserably." Then echoing an order his own commander had given to him in France in the First World War, MacArthur said, "I want you to take Buna, or not come back alive …. "

Eichelberger flew to the front on Dec. 1 and, having known Harding since their boyhood in Ohio, tried to save the situation. "I said at the start, Forrest, I have been ordered by General MacArthur to bust you, but stick by me and I'll try to keep you here … ," Eichelberger later wrote.

What he saw changed his mind. Harding expressed fear when Eichelberger declared that he wanted to visit the front line, and when Eichelberger challenged a regimental commander about his failure to advance, the colonel blew his top and then so did Harding.

Eichelberger felt that Harding was behaving in an entitled way, calling on their friendship rather than their professional relationship. He had had enough. "Over the mountains for you … Forrest," he said.

Harding made a last request: He wanted to take Jack Kahn and another aide with him. The trio left for Port Moresby on Dec. 3. MacArthur's former secretary describes the scene: "He stood by my desk while waiting to see the General, looking at me sadly, with tears in his eyes. 'I just couldn't stand to see my boys die.' I'm sure Harding meant it, and I felt for him. Since then, though, I have reconsidered …. Battle is not an exercise in compassionate saintliness." The history of war is littered with generals who were beloved by their men but showed little resolve to fight-most famously George McClellan, who so frustrated Lincoln that Lincoln asked to borrow his army for a while. The cerebral Harding was in that category.

Robert Eichelberger was a harder man. Over the next six weeks, he captured Buna at great cost of life. Though overshadowed by the Marines' fight in Guadalcanal, Buna was a crucial battle. Nearly 3,100 Americans and Australians lost their lives, as did many thousands of Japanese. MacArthur and his strategists took away an important lesson: never take the Japanese on frontally, but "island-hop"-bypass their bases and choke their supply lines.

Harding had commenced a new battle of his own, to save face. A relieved general was sometimes busted to colonel. On their Dec. 5 flight to Australia, Harding and Kahn prepared a written defense to MacArthur of the general's conduct at Buna. According to Gentle Knight, a biography of Harding by Leslie Anders, the two wrote that the division "had plenty of fight left but … no stomach for another go at a position which had beaten off four attacks …. " They mailed the defense to MacArthur in Brisbane, where, as Kahn later wrote in a memoir, he served as Harding's "aide, friend, and drowning-one's-sorrows drinking companion."

You have to stop and marvel at Jack Kahn's role. At 25, he was lobbying General MacArthur to preserve his general's reputation (and sending MacArthur an inscribed copy of his new book, The Army Life) and lobbying William Shawn to run a profile of that general full of assertions that events had rendered false, beginning with its first line, that Harding was overseas "commanding a body of United States troops," and going on to such stretchers as: "If he leads his troops successfully, he will probably be at least a permanent brigadier general and thus entitled, for instance, to be appointed Superintendent of West Point."

Kahn's letters to Shawn in the weeks after the profile ran hint at some discomfort over what he'd pulled off. He told his editor that he was greatly relieved that the Harding profile ran when it did. He spoke of his "mysterious references to possible mishaps" in connection with the piece. He said he wasn't able to say what he was up to or where he was.

In fairness to Kahn, saving a general's face was Army policy, and the press often went along. At the Army's first battle in North Africa, in February 1943, Gen. Lloyd Fredendall pulled a Harding-hiding away in a bunker while Rommel overran American troops. Eisenhower relieved Fredendall. This was reported in the newspapers, but downplayed. A few months later Eisenhower tried to cover up the fact that George Patton Jr. had slapped a shell-shocked soldier in a Sicily hospital whom he'd accused of cowardice. Many journalists took a vow of silence on the incident, before columnist Drew Pearson broke the story three months after the fact, creating a firestorm in the United States, and forcing Patton from command for several months.

MacArthur had promised to keep Harding's relief off the record, and nothing came out. The general maintained rank. A month after The New Yorker pieces ran, Harding was awarded the Silver Star (for gallantry during the skirmish in which Kahn's friend Herr had been injured) and flew home. He was then appointed commander of the Canal and Antilles Zone. Kahn went with him. A year after that Kahn made his way back to the States. First to New Orleans, then to Washington and New York, serving, as he had earlier hoped, in Army public relations.

By war's end, he had resumed his puppyish relationship to Harold Ross. When Ross, then 53, said something about the end of middle age, Kahn implored, When does youth end? Ross brushed him aside with wit. "Mr. Kahn," he said, "Infancy is the first year of life; I read that in a baby book and have stuck by it ever since. The rest is unclear."

Kahn also did what he could to soften his old general's feelings, by returning often to Buna in print. He dedicated his second book, G.I. Jungle, in 1943, to the troops of the 32nd Division "who took Buna and to Major General E.F. Harding Who Led Them To It"-a dubious statement indeed. He called Eichelberger "Bobby the Butcher" in a letter to Harding and wrote a piece about Buna for the Saturday Evening Post that mocked Eichelberger without naming him. The troops only became "disheartened," Kahn said, "when a newly arrived and well-fed general, on a brief tour of the front lines, suggested gratuitously that their physical condition would be greatly improved if they would only start taking vitamin pills. 'Been taking them for twenty years myself,' he added in an unsolicited testimonial …. " Later that general ordered the men to charge, "and a Jap knee mortar bracketed him and he got the hell out of there."

It is a measure of the influence that journalists have on generals that Kahn's comments enraged Eichelberger. This hero of the Pacific war saw Kahn as a "high-flying newsman" and several times mentioned him in letters to his wife. Kahn was a "little Jew," Eichelberger said, who had left Buna so early, Dec. 3, that he could not know what had happened in the month that followed.

Later Eichelberger, who died in 1961, went further: "That little Kike on Forrest Harding's staff named EJ Kahn has written a book about Buna …. I may have to take something from the newspaper men but I'll be darned if I feel I should take anything from a man in uniform." Eichelberger complained that Kahn had no firsthand knowledge of the battle. He had not gone to the front, even when Harding and Eichelberger had toured it, "and after that he was flying back to Port Moresby."

Eichelberger asked the Army command to investigate Kahn as an insubordinate in uniform. According to the general's biography, his aide wrote to Washington in 1944 urging censors to "tighten up" on Kahn. By another report, Kahn was reprimanded.

The true story didn't come out for years. Several generals mentioned Harding's relief in their memoirs, but not until 1957 was it openly discussed, when the Army's Center of Military History published a book called Victory in Papua. The author, Samuel Milner, interviewed Harding and questioned the decision to relieve him, but he also underlined the conclusion by Australian and American officers that Harding's command "seemed to lack aggressiveness."

Kahn seized on this history. He reviewed it for The New Yorker and said that it showed that Harding's "supersession was precipitate." He used plainer language in 1975, in his memoir, About the New Yorker and Me, a Sentimental Journal. Here, he wrote that MacArthur's decision to relieve Harding was "absurd."

Few military experts support that view. "The officers didn't know their jobs. The commanders were too far to the rear," General George C. Kenney wrote bluntly of Harding's command, while Robert Eichelberger's tactics at Buna, and his personal daring, were for years taught at the officers school at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

World War II made many writers, including Norman Mailer and James Michener in the Pacific. But if Buna had given Jack Kahn first-rate material, he never did get his arms around the story. He was too respectful, or maybe he was just too close. Roger Spiller, an editor of the Library of America's collection of World War II writing, and a professor of military history at the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, says that Kahn had put himself into a "highly equivocal situation, one no enlisted soldier should ever look for, and certainly one no general officer should ever permit. Essentially, Kahn is a mascot to Harding."

It must be said that '42 was a wrenching autumn for Jack Kahn. His best friend was shot up and barely survived. A role model, the widely admired New York Times reporter Byron Darnton, was killed by friendly fire (and in his effects the Army found cables from The New York Times to Darnton directing him to offer MacArthur $250,000 for his postwar memoir and $20,000 for his wife Jean's; Darnton had told The Times to go through MacArthur's aide; MacArthur ordered the cables destroyed as potentially embarrassing). Kahn himself became a casualty, when he was hospitalized-as countless others were-with dysentery. By getting him out of Buna, Kahn later wrote, Harding may have saved his life.

This is a bitter story. War is a bitter experience. It is not the study of Hannibal, or cries of Over the Top, it is not the Stars and Stripes or MARENGO-and it is not foolish intelligence reports or predictions of easy success. It is destruction and disease and depopulation and mass murder. Even heroes of the Second World War were left embittered by it. By 1945, MacArthur's right-hand man, General Richard Sutherland, was said to be destroyed by his service. Eichelberger hated MacArthur (calling him "Sarah," for Sarah Bernhardt) and shunned West Point. Forrest Harding had been crushed by Buna, of course, and never spoke to his friend Eichelberger again. And at Buna, Jack Kahn found a conflict between a man and the magazine he loved. No wonder he never wanted to look back.

There's just one bright spot here, shined down by Harold Ross. Before the war began, Ross gave Jack Kahn advice. He told him that a soldier could use his writing to give himself independence, and he said so beautifully.

"There were many, many officers around but none of them could keep track of what I was doing," Ross wrote. "I found that the army regards publication as a black art and beyond comprehension, and something they could only go so far with, like fire."

As E.J. Kahn and Forrest Harding and Robert Eichelberger soon found out, generals and reporters are on a kind of par with one another amid the horrors of battle. They angle for position, they use one another to enlarge their reputations. Still, some writers and editors hold on to their own black art. We need them now more than ever.

Sources for this article include: In the Caesar's Shadow: The Life of General Robert Eichelberger, by Paul Chwialkowski; pieces about Buna by Jay Luvaas and Kasserine Pass by Martin Blumenson in America's First Battles; Ben Yagoda's About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made; Genius in Disguise, a biography of Ross by Thomas Kunkel, Lida Mayo's Bloody Buna; and the late Paul P. Rogers' volumes about MacArthur and Sutherland, The Good Years and The Bitter Years. Quotations came from these archives: the MacArthur Archives and Library in Norfolk (MacArthur correspondence; memos on Darnton's effects), the United States Military History Institute in Carlisle, Penn.; the Australian War Memorial (for the Harding-Sutherland correspondence) and the AWM's Keith Murdoch Sound Archive; the Harding Memorial in Franklin, Ohio; and the New Yorker Archive at the New York Public Library. The letters of Harold Ross, William Shawn and St. Clair McKelway are used courtesy of The New Yorker and Condé Nast Publications Inc. www.newyorker.com.

There are two reasons why people should care about Paul Bowles, the writer and composer who died five years ago in Morocco. He wrote The Sheltering Sky , a masterpiece of alienation that tracks a threesome headed into the North African desert, and he led a highly original life, which included wide travels and-the source of notoriety in the literary gossip mills-marriage to the charming and tragic Jane Bowles, a novelist who, like himself, seems to have been chiefly homosexual.

In the last 10 years of Bowles' life, the scholar Virginia Spencer Carr formed a friendship with him that was marked by generosity and kindness. Ms. Carr made arrangements for his medical treatment in Atlanta, and for visitors to his adopted home. She visited many times herself, and Bowles wrote her letters containing tantalizing revelations on the understanding that they couldn't be published till he was gone. The result is this biography, a deeply affectionate tribute to a deeply detached life. As Bowles wrote to his lover and mentor, Aaron Copland: "I hate America because I feel attached to it, and I don't want to feel that way."

Bowles was born in Jamaica, Queens, in 1910, and had a hostile and at times violent relationship with his dentist father. When he was 14, an aunt told his cousin, "Paul has all the earmarks of a boy who has started on the downward path." When Bowles heard that he responded with his usual charm. "What does she think I'm doing, robbing banks!"

The established family gave him wealth and freedom, and his charm and good looks made him a skilled social climber. By 20 he had met everyone in the arts, from Gertrude Stein to Christopher Isherwood to Aaron Copland, though Virgil Thomson discounted him as a talented " poule de luxe ," or high-class prostitute. Sex and travel were interwoven for the youth. He lost his virginity in Paris, twice, first to a woman lying in nettles, then to a man, and, preferring the nettle-free version, soon embarked on sexual tourism.

"One is at a premium here among the collegians, and can pick and choose," he reported to Gore Vidal from Ceylon. Tangier was even more agreeable. Bowles didn't learn Arabic, seemed to like not knowing it. And as Tennessee Williams crowed to a couple of other gay friends, "A piece of ass is two bucks."

Gay life was not everything to Bowles. In his mid-20's, he met and formed a deep rapport with the talented, witty, charming, and desperately unhappy novelist Jane Auer, who was Jewish and whose right leg was stiff owing to a childhood fall from a horse. "It's not enough that we have a crippled kike in the White House, but you have to go and marry one," his father said.

Theirs was an artistic marriage. They nurtured one another's work and trusted one another at a creative level, if not at others. Their sexual life ended inside of two years, and they soon had separate but neighboring apartments in Tangier, from which Bowles would depart often with his lovers, while Jane fell in love with one woman after another. Paul surely had more fun than she did. He hit his wife twice, he tells Ms. Carr, and at times adopted a paternalistic tone with her. They "lived on people passing by," Jane was to observe, with savagely sad insight.

Intimacy was a difficult thing for him. He had "excised" his parents from his life and excised his country as well. "You don't want to move in rhythm with the outside world. You want to move only in your own rhythm," he explained. Living in America meant catching always on nails, like the nail of his decision to join the Communist Party. In Morocco, there were no nails to catch on, and while leading a presentable outward existence, he did whatever he wanted in the realms that gave him so much satisfaction, musical and literary invention and bohemian socializing.

His writings were punctuated by abrupt acts of violence, and so were his relationships ("Without a word, I strode the dozen paces that separated us and struck him solidly on the mouth," Bowles relates). After Jane suffered a stroke at 40, she declined torturously for the next six years and moldered in a hospital in Spain, and though Paul continued to travel, her death left him diminished. Loneliness was his willing sacrifice to art. To the end, he was a charming and deeply intelligent presence, having always protected his mind from the world's stodgy claims.

Detachment, North African geography, a marital triangle-these are the material of The Sheltering Sky . The book is as fresh now as it was in 1949, empty of philosophizing or clichés or salesmanship, a psychic and geographical tour de force about the inability of people to connect. His earnings from the work were "paltry at best," he confessed to Ms. Carr. His agent sold the movie rights for $5,000, which was only augmented by the fee Bowles was paid to act in Bernardo Bertolucci's treatment of the story.

He wrote a great deal of music, and several other books, but apart from a few compelling short stories, none of his prose approaches the majesty of that first novel. Careerism and ambition bored him; he said of his friend Leonard Bernstein that he would be "all right if one could kidnap him and hold him prisoner far from everything that could remind him of the concept of being successful." Bowles was determined to lead an artistic life in the fullest sense, engaged only by those ideas and people who interested him. If he's to be faulted, it's for not pushing his talent to other levels.

Ms. Carr's elegant biography is as much an act of love as scholarly investigation, and though at times too straightforward to capture its very tricky subject, it shows that Bowles' material was the natural stuff of his experience, wrested at considerable cost from the conventional life into which he was born. His life was itself an artistic creation, unfolding on a stage he built for himself, bigger than any closet and wide as the desert.

Philip Weiss is the author of American Taboo: A Murder in the Peace Corps (HarperCollins). He's a frequent contributor to The Observer .