The Mellower Mailer : Books: After decades of staging public tirades, of blasting the CIA and feminists, the author of “Harlot’s Ghost” eases up on some old enemies.

On his 50th birthday, Norman Mailer threw himself a lavish party, hurled drunken insults at his guests and announced the formation of a “People’s CIA.” The new group, he said between shots of bourbon, would monitor an agency that threatened American democracy.

It was vintage Mailer, that wintry night in 1973. Celebrities at the posh Four Seasons restaurant began leaving in droves as the controversial author told one crude joke after another. He later admitted that the event was a fiasco and scrapped plans for the new political group. But there was no mistaking his passion--or his belief that the CIA was a threat.

Today the world has changed profoundly, and so has Mailer. The Cold War is over, the CIA is in disarray and the writer who once made macho his muse has become a white-haired eminence. No more head-butting contests at parties with Jimmy Breslin. No more chest-beating tirades on late-night television.

At 68, Mailer says, “I can’t look forward to going out and getting drunk on a given night anymore, which I used to love. That was the way to get back to oneself, and I can’t do it. Because I wake up in the morning and I can’t get out of bed.”

What he can do is write. In his sprawling new novel, “Harlot’s Ghost,” Mailer has produced a book about the CIA and its role in American life that may be the most challenging fiction ever written about the agency. Taking up 1,310 pages, it is a rich, sometimes spellbinding work about a young intelligence agent’s coming of age, played out against the backdrop of the Cold War from 1948 to 1964.

Mailer began the book seven years ago, long before the communist empire began collapsing, and he was amazed at how the ground shifted under his feet as he wrote. The award-winning author of “The Executioner’s Song” and “The Armies of the Night” immersed himself in a world of covert operations and dark crusades, only to see that world--and the very agency he was depicting--give way to a startling new political alignment.

Like other Americans, Mailer was caught off guard. But the ferment in his personal world has gone beyond international relations. As he struts briskly into his publisher’s office for an interview, Mailer suggests that everything is in flux these days--including his long-running feud with feminists, the fate of the American left and the future of the American novel.

“We live in crazy times,” he says. “And the role of fiction now is to make nonfiction believable. That’s what the novel has become . . . the only way to explain behavior and show that the bizarre world around us is real.”

For a man who once stabbed his second wife at a party, ran for mayor of New York and duked it out with Gore Vidal on the Dick Cavett show, Mailer seems surprisingly sedate. Younger readers might not remember that he captured the hip despair of the ‘50s and the cultural bacchanal of the ‘60s better than most authors. But his contemporaries have found it hard to ignore a man whom Sinclair Lewis called “the greatest writer to come out of his generation.”

Born in 1923, Mailer grew up in Brooklyn, went to Harvard and wrote his most acclaimed book, “The Naked and the Dead,” shortly after leaving the Army in 1946. Since then, he has won two Pulitzer Prizes, the National Book Award and more media attention--much of it negative--than most living authors.

Mailer has been married six times and is the father of eight. A stout, barrel-chested man with curly hair and intense blue eyes, he is a world champion talker, speaking in rapid, flowing sentences. During a 60-minute interview, he dishes out more than 16,000 words and leaves a listener with the impression that he’s just getting warmed up. Then he talks some more.

Despite his great energy, the author concedes that advancing age has taken a toll. “I might have a little less (talent) now, but on the other hand, I think I’m a much better judge of my own work,” Mailer says. “Which is perhaps even more important than talent.”

He’s betting that readers will find “Harlot’s Ghost” to be his most ambitious work. Weighing in at 4 pounds, the long-awaited book is an exhaustive look at the world of spooks and Cold War tensions as seen through the eyes of Harry Hubbard, a Yale-educated sharpie who joins the CIA as his father did years before. Early on, he comes under the influence of Hugh (Harlot) Montague, one of the agency’s most revered and mysterious figures.

Mailer ends his epic with the words to be continued and leaves key questions unanswered--including the agency’s role in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. A sequel, he says, is a distinct possibility.

The book’s troubling questions reflect the uncertainties now surrounding the CIA. Does America still need an agency that has devoted itself to the destruction of Communism? The author, a lifelong devotee of left-wing causes, offers a surprising answer: The CIA remains hugely important to American interests, but it must change.

“The key step for the CIA is, will they be able to vacate that old Cold War mansion? They have an immense amount of intellectual baggage which was built up during the Cold War, and a good deal of it was founded on what we now see historically was a false premise . . . that communism was a monolith.”

In the future, he says, the agency should focus on terrorism and delve into economic espionage to help America regain ground lost to Germany and Japan.

“Will they be able to think in new ways? A lot of the younger people will certainly be able to . . . but there may be a serious philosophical conflict in the CIA over the next 10 years between (them) and the old paranoids, who are highly structured and have great skills.”

That paranoia surfaces in “Harlot’s Ghost,” when CIA agent Montague theorizes that God created the world in seven days . . . but left a trail of disinformation suggesting millions of years of evolution to avoid criticism of his creation. If someone believes that , Mailer says, they’d believe anything.

The trick is to dismantle old assumptions. Americans have been hung up on the fight with communism for so long, they failed to realize that Soviets are humane, vulnerable people who are more obsessed with the moral consequences of their actions than the average U.S. citizen.

“Their lives are written on their faces,” he says. “Every wart on a Russian’s face speaks of some awful moment where he was morally inferior to the demands put upon him . . . and so he’s punished by this.”

If the American right has failed to understand a changing world, the author is even more critical of the left. There may be some readers, he explains, who are angered that Mailer’s book does not trash the CIA. How could a man who once blasted the agency for its sins become so evenhanded?

“We’d better start getting to know the enemy and get to know them intimately, because it’s one thing we haven’t done,” Mailer answers. “We (on the left) can’t go on philosophically on too narrow a base. The left simply has no comprehension of the capacities of the right.”

The author recalls a conversation he once had with playwright Arthur Miller, who wondered why conservatives were so tough on the poor.

“I said, no, don’t you see, they believe in the hereafter, so their feeling is that if they don’t live their life properly, they’re going to pay for it in the hereafter. They’re going to be judged as rich people more severely than the poor will be, and therefore it’s fair.

“That’s what I’m getting at . . . this fundamental ignorance of conservatism on the left. Conservatives will always be able to deal with the left because they occupy the center of the country.”

As the world changes, the CIA doesn’t seem to be as great a threat to democracy, says Mailer. Indeed, there are more insidious forces at work.

Given our culture of declining literacy and crass commercialism, he suggests, “a lot of us just aren’t certain how long the novel has to live. The serious novelist 20 years from now may be absolutely the spiritual and economic equal of a poet . . . which is, he’s doing something because he or she is absolutely determined to do it, but that’s the only reason to do it.”

The creative spirit has fallen victim to what the author calls a “grotesque duality” in our national life. On the one hand, America is driven by the pounding beat of MTV and pop culture. It’s an “exciting, wild, demonic and pointless” revolution, Mailer says, in which Ernest Hemingway’s lasting influence may boil down to macho men selling beer on television.

On the other hand, he says, “this is the most self-righteous country on Earth. It’s almost unendurable that way. It’s an empire that really just has no humor at the core. There’s a profound hypocrisy here, which I think has always been the American disease.”

A prime example, he says, is the heated reaction to revelations about John F. Kennedy’s marital infidelities. The author dwells at length on these liaisons but does not judge them critically in “Harlot’s Ghost.”

“I’m no better than Jack Kennedy and never have been,” he says. “And I think there’s a certain envy in people’s relations to him. People say, well, how dare he have all those mistresses, isn’t it enough that he was President?

“But I feel that . . . he probably felt that one was no good without the other. That if he was going to function well as President, he’d have to have a certain sense of intrigue in his life as well.”

It must have been hell on Kennedy’s wife, Mailer admits, but Kennedy was not the only world leader to have mistresses. And while he’s on the subject of women, the author suggests that his legendary feud with feminists has been tempered. In fact, he says he’s actually learned something from the women’s movement.

That may be hard to believe for those who recall Mailer’s nasty debate with feminist leaders in 1971 at New York’s Town Hall. As boos filled the room, Mailer defended a line he wrote in “The Prisoner of Sex” that has come to haunt him: “The prime responsibility of a woman is to be on Earth long enough to find the best mate for herself and conceive children who will improve the species.”

His novels are still filled with male-bonding fantasies and lascivious odes to the female form. But time marches on. In “Harlot’s Ghost,” Mailer depicts a brilliant woman, Kittredge Gardiner, whose promising CIA career is throttled by jealous, patronizing men. He credits the women’s movement for his evolution as a man and as a writer.

“I had to go through the experience of seeing, of being forced by the women to look at things from a woman’s point of view . . . so in that sense, yes, I think the women’s movement had an effect on my thinking.”

Unfortunately, Mailer says, the women have not met him halfway. “They still think there’s just one gender that’s human, not two. I’d like to find a feminist who really liked men.”

He smiles at the line, knowing that it’s likely to kindle a controversy somewhere. Asked how long he’ll keep writing, the author lapses into an uncharacteristic silence. Some critics wonder if a man pushing 70 can produce another epic novel in the time he has left. Or if he even has the will.

“Well, I’d like to be able to keep writing for as long as I live,” Mailer says, his eyes momentarily cloudy. “Whether I’ll be able to, I don’t know.”