Books: The Impish Iconoclast at 60

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He characteristically finds fault with the growing antinuclear movement, claiming it is dominated by pacifists: "It is one thing to stop nuclear war. It is another thing to stop war altogether. I think we don't have enough small wars. I was immensely impressed by the war in the Falklands." He suggests that countries stuck in irreconcilable disputes "rent the Falklands and fight their battles there." Mailer is asked about homosexuality, another subject on which he has been illiberally truculent: "My feeling is, and you're all going to boo at this, homosexuals want to become heterosexual... If you're homosexual, you might have to ask yourself what God thinks of you." Some of the students look pained or unhappy, but no one boos.

Back home in Brooklyn, Mailer seems bemused by such deference, somehow bruised by kid gloves. "He's liking being a celebrity less," says former Light-Heavyweight Boxing Champion Jose Torres, Mailer's friend and sparring partner. "I think he's tired of the image." And the author's legends do lag well behind substantial changes that he has made in his life.

His famous financial problems are pretty much behind him. Over the past decade, he indefatigably worked himself out of a deep hole. At one time he owed heavy back taxes and $250,000 to his agent; his extravagant personal life had produced skyrocketing bills for alimony and child support. He sold off parts of his Brooklyn Heights brownstone, gradually marooning himself on its spacious fourth floor. A house in Provincetown, Mass., was sold at an Internal Revenue Service auction. He interrupted his work on Ancient Evenings to write books for quick money. One paid an unexpected dividend: The Executioner's Song, his account of the life and death of Gary Gilmore, won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Press accounts have claimed that Mailer needs to make $325,000 a year just to break even. He says he requires "slightly more." He seems to be getting that and then some. At the beginning of each month he receives a check for $30,000 from his publisher, drawn against a $4 million advance for four books: Ancient Evenings, two sequels (the first set in the future, the second in the present) and a smaller novel about contemporary America that he has already begun. Whatever it may do for or to his literary reputation, the Egyptian book has already made Mailer's economic life easier. In addition to $1.4 million from the publisher, it has pulled in some $700,000 in foreign and subsidiary rights. Mailer's other books still earn royalties, and he commands up to $15,000 for a lecture. Yet he remains sensitive to the specter of debt. The Mailer household is economically run.