The Pajama Party From Hell : CAPITOL GAMES: Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill, and the Story of a Supreme Court Nomination, <i> By Timothy M. Phelps and Helen Winternitz (Hyperion: $24.95; 433 pp.)</i>

And now for a little summer-school history lesson:

Nearly six centuries ago, Joan of Arc said that celestial voices exhorted her to do battle for France. Ultimately, it didn’t matter whether the rest of the world believed she heard voices; something roused Joan, Joan roused France, and France ultimately walloped the English.

And we all know what happened to Joan.

“Capitol Games,” a hurry-up book about last fall’s Senate hearings on Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas and the sexual harassment charges leveled by law professor Anita Hill, appears as women in unprecedented numbers are winning primary elections and anticipating November. Many of them campaigned in part on the Thomas issue. Illinois Democrats chose an outsider, newcomer Carol Moseley Braun, a black woman, over longtime insider Alan Dixon, who voted yes on Thomas. California voters nominated 16 women for the U.S. Congress, and two for the U.S. Senate, where much of the mischief-making in the Thomas hearings was played out.

Thomas is clearly on George Bush’s mind, too; earlier this month, the President denied that his political fortunes may be entwined with the Hill-Thomas hearings: “(T)he fact that some candidates are out there trying to revise that part of history, I’m sorry. I don’t agree with that. There may be some. Now, I can’t say some people don’t agree, you know, that everyone agrees with what I’ve said.”

To those who believe Anita Hill and to those who think she was imagining the whole thing, there is an object lesson in Joan the Maid.

Newspaper, radio and TV coverage was wrenching enough as the hearings unfolded. Now, in cooler blood, comes this book, coherently reassembling the pieces and adding dimension and analysis. The news is no prettier than it was the first time--worse, in fact. But like a dose of brimstone-and-molasses, it stinks and tastes bad, and maybe we’ll be better for taking it.

If you happened to be in a sensory-deprivation tank during that televised pajama-party-from-hell weekend last October, the sight of 14 white men, one black man and one black woman thrashing through the pain of centuries of sexual and racial politics became a Harpers Ferry for women, igniting anger over the whiteness and maleness of power and the trivializing of women’s concerns.

Yet there are moments in this book when the titanic and exhausting battle over the nomination becomes almost peripheral to the ignoble spectacle of our civic machinery in motion. The authors’ disgust between the covers seems to equal what voters are showing behind the voting-booth curtain. The title, “Capitol Games,” signals to those who live mercifully outside the Beltway that, in case we’d forgotten, virtually anything--truth, fairness, humanity--can be tossed on the table as stakes in the great political game.

Co-author Phelps, who covers the Supreme Court for Newsday, had an early line on Hill’s accusations and was subpoenaed when the Senate went hunting for leaks instead of looking to the mote in its own very blackened eye. For this reader, the book’s Rosetta Stone was a sentence about the Senate’s outrage over the publicizing of Hill’s charges--”outrage that the charges had been made public, not that Thomas might have sexually harassed an employee or that the judiciary committee had all but ignored the charges.”

“Capitol Games” pulls the threads together into an allegorical tapestry that might be titled “The (Unsurprising) Triumph of Political Tactics over Truth.”

From the moment Thomas’ name first landed via Fax machine in the office of then-White House Chief of Staff John Sununu to the post-confirmation hoopla on the White House lawn (staged the day after the chief justice’s wife died), the book scrutinizes the White House and those 14 white men of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the satellite political groups, the staffs, motives, factions, fears--and Thomas and Hill themselves.

In a day-by-day and sometimes hour-by-hour deconstruction of the public and private jockeying, Phelps and Winternitz indict equally the White House and the Senate committee.

They take the Republicans to task for smarmy ruthlessness, for their willingness to use race to their advantage with Thomas, as they had with Willie Horton. The Democrats are pilloried for their fumbling hesitancy and personal vulnerabilities (there sat Teddy Kennedy, a potted plant on the panel, hamstrung by his personal scandals); for committee chair Joseph Biden’s nice-guy approach that turned fairness into failing; for squirming on the petard of their own civil-rights agenda, so afraid of criticizing a black man that they shied away from thoroughly addressing his qualifications.

The White House is shown as a lubed-up PR factory, sidestepping Thomas’ hard-right-wing support, cannily taking the American Bar Assn.’s lukewarm “qualified” rating--an unusually poor one for a Supreme Court nominee--and gushing all over it as if it constituted real praise. The Administration jerked chains on Capitol Hill as well--like giving Sen. Arlen Specter, a pro-choice Republican who had voted against earlier nominee Robert Bork, the chance to “redeem” himself as Anita Hill’s chief questioner.

And there is Thomas himself, who reportedly told a journalist 10 years ago that he wanted to be rich and sit on the Supreme Court. His fairly thin government and judicial career is laid out here, as are the questions it raised; this was a problematic nominee even before Anita Hill turned up.

Thomas is quoted as telling William Gates, who had his own difficulties getting confirmed as CIA chief: “My motto is, ‘Don’t get mad, don’t get even, get confirmed.’ ” To the disgust of some right-wing supporters, the authors say, Thomas publicly softpedaled his private beliefs--for example, contradicting his 1988 remarks to a conservative audience about Oliver Wendell Holmes (“No man who ever sat on the Supreme Court was less inclined and so poorly equipped to be a statesman”) with his confirmation-hearing praise of Holmes as “a great judge.”

The news media are not spared: for chasing rumors instead of analyzing the available material on Thomas’ spotty record; for swallowing manufactured news at face value.

Nor is the Angst of the nation’s black leadership overlooked, like the NAACP’s deep divisions over Thomas and the politics of race. The civil-rights groups “Thomas always railed against . . . at critical moments in his career stood aside and let him pass.”

The crowning paradox is that Thomas, a black conservative whose life and times were so changed by affirmative action, and who had understandably hated having anything to do with it lest he be thought to be getting by on race alone, was the White House’s affirmative-action candidate. Despite a President who promoted Thomas for his “up from poverty” character and his potential, rather than his actual limited legal experience, it becomes evident that had he not been black, he would likely not have been nominated.

As for Hill herself, the authors conclude that she was drawn reluctantly into giving testimony, and was not--as has been alleged--a plotter in a “get Clarence Thomas” movement. Liberal groups saw her charges as a wedge to defeat Thomas, but when it came to tactics, they floundered; even her own legal advisers split along race and gender lines, blunting their effectiveness.

In the end, as the prince of Verona intones over the final carnage in “Romeo and Juliet,” “Some shall be pardoned, and some punished.”

Thomas was confirmed, albeit under a cloud. And candidates are losing (and winning) elections in part because of the aftershocks from these hearings.

Much of the value in Phelps and Winternitz’s work lies in the already known information it re-plumbs and puts into perspective, but there are some new and unsettling bits as well:

* Thomas’ links to the far right. Sununu consulted ultraconservative lobbyists on their choice for the Supreme Court. In what the authors called “a major breach of judicial propriety,” Thomas met with one such group after he began serving on the court. Televangelist Pat Robertson put $1 million into tapping his religious-political network to generate letters, telegrams and phone calls in support of Thomas. And Thomas had known and worked with Jay Parker, “the original black conservative,” a president of Friends of the FBI and the first African-American on the national board of the Young Americans for Freedom. Parker lobbied for South Africa on behalf of the Transkei, a so-called black “homeland” set up under apartheid. He later founded the Lincoln Review, a black journal which took a pro-South African stance, and he put Clarence Thomas on its editorial advisory board.

* The staffs of liberal Democratic Senators Kennedy and Howard Metzenbaum learned of Hill’s allegations before the original confirmation hearings began, but did nothing.

* According to a classmate, Thomas frequented a hardcore porno movie house while attending Yale Law School, watching “double X, triple X, and quadruple X” films.

All these are complex and furtive threads to follow; this was a tough book to write fast. In places it is written with more authority than grace, and a number of passages seem labored, like one quoting Bush’s garbled syntax and then concluding he was “perhaps rendered inarticulate by the corner he was in.” The phrase that finally stopped me cold was a description of Hill’s Oklahoma home as a “demure house of pinkish brick.”

If the reason we read nonfiction is to learn more about unfamiliar subjects, I would completely understand if you might casually pick up this volume in a bookstore and tell yourself firmly, “Oh, no. Not a chance. There is nothing else to find out about Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas. And anyway, I can’t take any more.”

Don’t make that mistake. For a long time to come, there will be more and yet more to understand about this national cataclysm.

After all, 571 years later, we’re still talking about Joan of Arc, aren’t we?