'More Craft, Less Smoke'.(Norman Mailer)

"The Spooky Art," Norman Mailer's book about writing, appears on Jan. 31, his 80th birthday. Since his debut novel, "The Naked and the Dead" (1948), Mailer has written 31 more books. He has won the Pulitzer Prize twice. He has directed four films and written 10 screenplays. He has been married six times and has nine children. He was once arrested for stabbing his second wife. He ran for mayor of New York twice. He has arthritis in his knees and sometimes walks with two canes. With his wife, the artist and novelist Norris Church Mailer, he lives in a brick house beside the ocean in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he recently sat down for an interview with NEWSWEEK's Malcolm Jones. He does not like interviews. Excerpts:

JONES: Can you say a little about the novel you're working on?

MAILER: I'm not going to talk about that novel, because I'd talk it away. I won't even mention the subject. But I've got about 200 pages written on it, and it'll probably keep me busy for the rest of my writing years--at least. It's as ambitious as anything I've ever tackled. Writing novels is physically damaging. On the other hand, what I have is, you might say, more craft and less smoke.

Have there been books before that you knew better than to talk about?

No. People weren't that interested. When I was doing that book on Egypt ["Ancient Evenings"], they were saying, "Oh... how very... interesting." But this would be impossible to keep quiet about. I mean, if I were writing--which I'm obviously not--about George W. Bush's secret sex life, and I mentioned that, how could questions not follow?

The Bush amours might be a short book.

We don't know. I think it would be damned impressive if he has a secret sex life. A very intelligent woman was talking to me about Bill Clinton's troubles and said, "You know, he really was like a prisoner, 'cause every 15 seconds the Secret Service would be clocking him." If you're a convict--and he was in the finest minimum-security prison in the world--then your pride is to beat the system. So he had to do it, for his own manliness. After all, we do want a manly president, don't we? Yet look what happened, now we've got one.